Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 2

Amy Sherald

If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, 2019

Harry Gruyaert

Waterpark, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 1981

“Julienne” at Wigleaf

I have a very short piece up at Wigleaf. There’s also a 2 ½ question interview as a post-reading palate cleanser.

AG: What’s mysterious to you? (I’m thinking of your Kenyon Review essay, “The Great Unknown,” where you muse about how mystery in our daily lives is “in dangerously short supply.”)


RM: The question of why we haven’t been colonized by an advanced alien civilization. (Bear with me here…) Statistical models suggest a high likelihood of intelligent life outside our quaint corner of the cosmos. Why haven’t we been contacted? There’s the eerily possible possibility that our present predicament is a simulation (making our fictions simulations of simulations). My favorite theory, however, is that once civilizations reach a certain threshold of intelligence, they bring about their own destruction. So, in other words, intelligence and self-destruction are inextricably linked. (Kind of grim, huh?)

Lomelda - Hannah

“Reading, Writing, and Activism” in (585) Magazine

Honored to be profiled in the May issue of (585) Magazine.

“Reading, Writing, and Activism”

“Rations” at Quarterly West

I have a short essay (”Rations”) up at Quarterly West:

“Victor Feguer, the last prisoner executed in the state of Iowa, requested for his final meal a single olive with the pit enclosed, in the slender hope that a tree might spring from his remains.”

2017 Link Roundup

Quiet year on the writing front. Expect more words in 2018!

Fiction:

Wigleaf - “Memento Mori” (January)

Nonfiction:

LitMag - “Seven Months” (April)

Renee Gladman

Prose Architectures 210, 2017

Maggie Nelson

“I’m not afraid of meaning per se, but nor am I in search of it. Good, precise writing contains its own interpretative possibilities; if the sentences are right, you don’t have to chase meaning down. Any sense that one has found a meaning is usually just a pit stop, anyway.”

- Maggie Nelson

“Seven Months” at LitMag

I have an essay up at the newly launched LitMag.

“In a courtroom that doubles as a mobile office for the DMV, my parents marry for a second time. Under different circumstances this would be cause for celebration, a collective victory for all those kids who saw their childhoods undone by divorce. Under different circumstances I might have bought them a blender or breadmaker (or, more conveniently, a custom license plate). Yet we have only the attending circumstances, which cast the proceedings in an altogether different light. My niece sits on my lap as we watch them recite vows and exchange rings: plain, unadorned bands. Once the ceremony has finished and the papers have been signed, we commemorate the occasion with a breakfast at Denny’s.”

- “Seven Months” at LitMag