Mo Daviau’s Epic and Lovely is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a faded Vegas crooner and his much-younger Texas bride. Facing the cruel timeline of A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects children of much-older fathers, Nina returns to Los Angeles after her divorce to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for those who share her condition. What follows is a deathbed confession written to her physician: a story of love and rivalry with Cole, the magnetic fellow patient who both heals and wounds her, an uneasy alliance with a tech billionaire, and the sudden reappearance of her estranged mother. At once luminous and devastating, Daviau’s novel explores mortality, inheritance, and desire.

The following is an excerpt from the now-available book.

CHAPTER ONE

Dr. Tabitha Chen, MD, PhD, Clinical Director of the UCLA Medical Center’s Rare Disorders Clinic:

I was eleven when you told me to my little lopsided face that I wouldn’t live past the age of forty. My mother, standing beside me in a too-tight miniskirt and platform sandals that made her wobble like a stack of plates, screamed at you, and tried to get you fired for saying such a horrible thing to a little girl. In twenty-nine years, though, I’ve never told you how happy you made me that day. How relieved. How special, even. The news that my life would be short set me free.

I was eighteen, on a routine visit to your office, when you sighed heavily and took my 1 hand—that hand—and advised me to never have a child. That a full-term pregnancy would break my already-broken body. You told me, with love, that I should do pretty much anything else with the two decades and change I had in front of me. So, I did. I listened to you. I’ve always listened to you,

Dr. Chen. You were like another mother to me. And now, you are the mother of the five-pound, four-ounce baby you cut from my uterus hours ago, leaving me to bleed, to grieve, to wonder how it could have been different. These last hours of my life, all joy and warmth and wonder from holding the beautiful rump roast who I claimed as my daughter for mere minutes before I handed her over to you for a lifetime. As you have sequestered me into this plush room in the Steven K. Elwood Wing at Stanford Hospital, with the pink blankets and the view of the campus and the family of stuffed elephants you had sent over, because you remembered me saying once that I loved elephants, I have approximately seven hours left to write you this letter, to tell you what I need you to know about the last few months my life, so that you understand me. This letter is my last shot at being understood.

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Marc Harshman, West Virginia Poet Laureate, shares insights into his poetic roots, his deep connection to the natural world, and the unexpected path  to becoming a celebrated writer, teacher, and advocate for the arts. With warmth and humility, he discusses the stories that shaped him, the value of regional identity, and his commitment to keeping his work fresh and true to the rhythms of lived experience.

Your early volume Turning Out the Stones (1983) appears to set the tone for other books in terms of a longing to be one with nature and the mystery of the natural world. Can you talk about your sense and value of the physical world in your poetry?

Curiously, I’ve never set out to write about the physical world, by which I think is meant the out-of-doors, nature writ green and, to varying degrees, wild. However, I can’t deny its presence in a large number of my poems. I was raised first on a farm and, when the farm was lost, we remained in the countryside where summer work continued to include farm labor of all sorts, like baling hay, shoveling manure, setting fence posts, etc. From the moment I left the house, whether as a boy or later as a teenager, most of this work I did with an open sky and fields all around me

The out-of-doors has always been a familiar place to me, and so perhaps I can count it a gift that I can be comfortable there, unafraid, and yet can at the same time recognize the sheer power of all that is so much more than my single, small, and mortal self. As I’ve said countless times, including in at least one children’s book, I loved those times when I’d sit with my father on the back porch and watch a thunderstorm roll up, watch its spidery lightning shake the darkness into light.

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Spring has finally arrived, bringing cherry blossoms, peaking tulips, and the warming sun. While Morgantown defrosts and returns to its vibrant nature, our authors have been busy bees!

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In Enraptured Space, Kathryn Kirkpatrick draws on her own lived experience as a practicing poet to explore how scholarship is grounded in an imaginative exchange between the words on the page and the material conditions of the scholar who works to inhabit them. Kirkpatrick explores this realm in the first book-length study of Paula Meehan, one of Ireland’s leading contemporary poets, and showcases Meehan as an original voice whose perspectives on gender, class, and ecology are transforming the Irish literary landscape and beyond.

Here we discuss the inspiration behind Enraptured Space and what drew Kirkpatrick to Meehan’s work.

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Even after several semesters of master’s-level workshops, rigorous literary theory courses, and hours of listening to authors and artists talk about their creative processes, actually beginning a novel felt so daunting that I was initially running away from the form altogether to work on short stories featuring some version of the characters that ended up in Blue Futures, Break Open. I don’t at all intend to suggest that the short story is a less expansive form, but the characters knew as well as I did that their story had to be told in a very particular way, in spite of my anxieties. I knew that I wanted to create a world that would fit into the universe of Black femme collective creativity, one that was mutually intelligible with Vodou cosmology without carelessly co-opting its sacred parts. Reading anything I could find in these realms felt like the best way to approach the ambitious task in front of me, even if after a year of reading it became a mode of procrastination. [I learned you can never really know “enough” to get started.] I was reading—and watching, the men in this book would not be three-dimensional characters were it not for countless re-watches of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight—for historical and aesthetic grounding, but also for a feeling. In the books below, there was a certain feeling I encountered that I wanted to recreate for the reader. I’m not sure whether or not I was successful, but the attempt has been an ecstatic experience. 

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William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City imagines the destruction of London as a result of human-induced environmental devastation, the threat of which is becoming increasingly visible today. This first critical edition of Hay’s novella makes available his account of one man’s tale of survival amidst a toxic fog—a survival that includes his relocation to Maoriland in New Zealand. The editors foreground the relevance of the story to present and future pandemics, the persistence of environmental disasters, and the global population’s ongoing migration to cities. They place the narrative in dialogue with nineteenth-century concerns about climate change, pollution, natural resources, health care, empire, and (sub)urbanization that have remained significant challenges as we come to terms with the lasting impacts of the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century.

We asked editors Michael Kramp and Sarita Jayanty-Mizin to reflect on their aims, processes, and discoveries in the development of this important critical resource by interviewing one another this past January.

Sarita: I’d like to start by sharing that it was Michael who first invited me to join him on this project, as he was the person who initially identified The Doom of the Great City as a text in need of a critical edition. This text has not received much attention since its initial publication in 1880, so I’d like to invite him to say a little more about how he first located this story and what he found compelling enough to consider proposing the first critical edition of the text.

Michael: I was researching materials for a different project (Patriarchy’s Creative Resilience, 2024) in the British Library, and I was trying to locate late-Victorian examples of speculative fiction that included compelling examples of patriarchal masculinity. I was taken aback by the pathetic performance of the male narrator of The Doom of the Great City, especially how his sentimentality and pronouncements of nostalgic remorse allow him to garner sympathy from his family and readers.Read More »