On a recent rainy Wednesday

Meg Sparling, author of The Nijinsky Poems, writes about an exhibition of Nijinsky's drawings in New York.

2006 titles

Fiction

Line Jester and Other Stories
by Michael Duncan

Michael Duncan's debut chapbook takes the reader through surreal landscapes, where art is both necessary and impossible. Throughout his writing, the force of Duncan's ideas is matched with an exacting attention to language and detail. Line Jester and Other Stories offers a bracing reminder of the power of beauty, and a singular, expressionist aesthetic. (more)

Poetry

The Nijinsky Poems
by Meg Sparling

In The Nijinsky Poems, Meg Sparling has crafted a sensitive and insightful revisiting of the life of one of the 20th Century's greatest artists. Combining the biographical with the lyrical, Sparling's writing embodies the power and contingency of the dancer. The Nijinsky Poems is a haunting tribute to a delicate and beautiful man, and a nimble, unerring performance of its own. (more)

Drama

Between the Water and the Air
by Andrew Hungerford

By turns wistful and compelling, Between the Water and the Air is the story of a father and a son, a brother and a sister, a girl, and a mechanic. Ken, a former scholarship student with a habit of running away from responsibility, is forced by his father's declining health and increasingly insistent family to confront his sense of displacement within his own life. (more)

The Nijinsky Poems

The Nijinsky Poems by Meg Sparling

In The Nijinsky Poems, Meg Sparling has crafted a sensitive and insightful revisiting of the life of one of the 20th Century's greatest artists. Combining the biographical with the lyrical, Sparling's writing embodies the power and contingency of the dancer. The Nijinsky Poems is a haunting tribute to a delicate and beautiful man, and a nimble, unerring performance of its own.

The artist in light

Nijinsky stands in a room of glass—
the laughter of light around him.
Color is absent here,
but makes its absence known.
(In this room his mind is crazed with color.)
Three chairs line the far wall—
the middle facing opposite the others.
His daughter sits in this chair,
swatting playfully at nothing.
"Papa, a bee, Papa," she shrieks.
Her sound is a fragile surface here.
Silent Nijinsky stands in the light,
clothed in gravity’s love.

Poetry, 19 pp. Click here to download PDF in new window.

Meg Sparling grew up in a small town in northern Michigan. She attended Michigan State University, where she was general editor of Red Cedar Review. She has been writing stories since the first grade; in third grade she plagarized a story about dragons from her teacher, but she promises that everything written since has been completely original. She lives in New York City.

Also by Meg Sparling: "On a recent rainy Wednesday"

Between the Water and the Air

Between the Water and the Air by Andrew Hungerford

By turns wistful and compelling, Andrew Hungerford's one-act drama Between the Water and the Air is the story of a father and a son, a brother and a sister, a girl, and a mechanic. Ken, a former scholarship student with a habit of running away from responsibility, is forced by his father's declining health and increasingly insistent family to confront his sense of displacement within his own life.

"Andrew Hungerford is a writer with a voice you can use to reckon. His play is full of quiet little images calculated to remind you who you were when you were you."
—Michael Burnham, University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music

Between the Water and the Air debuted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2005, and was performed at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival the following year.

Drama, 65 pp. Click here to download PDF in new window.

Andrew J. Hungerford is originally from the suburbs of Detroit. He earned degrees in Theatre and Astrophysics from Michigan State University and holds a Master's of Fine Arts in Lighting Design from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He is currently an itinerant freelance lighting designer.