WRB Presents | September 2024
with readings from Helen Chandler, K. T. Mills, Samuel Kimbriel, and Kayla Jean
The WRB Presents the next in a regular series of readings attracting and spotlighting literary talent in Washington, D.C., hosted by Michael Barron, Lauren Cerand, and
. On the evening of September 17, these four writers will read from their work:Helen Chandler, an Irish writer based in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia and currently teaches creative writing. Helen’s stories and essays have appeared in The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Literary Hub and other outlets. She is at work on a novel as well as a nonfiction book about aunts and a long-ago murder;
K. T. Mills, who lives in Washington, D.C., and whose work has appeared in The Rialto, The Meadow, and Poetry Archive Now;
Samuel Kimbriel, who currently directs the Philosophy and Society Initiative at the Aspen Institute and serves as editor-at-large for
. Sam is the author of Friendship as Sacred Knowing. He lives in Washington, D.C., and holds MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge; andKayla Jean, a writer from South Central Pennsylvania. Cheap Seats, her debut chapbook, was published by Blue Arrangements in 2023. Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, Blue Arrangements, New World Writing, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Virginia Tech.
Work from our guests:
Helen Chandler
from “A Surge” (Dublin Review, Spring 2024)
“I knew I’d never meet anyone as fun as him again,” she repeated, but in a slightly different cadence this time, which I understood to mean that in all the years that followed and to this day she never had. She never had met anyone as fun as him again.
My face, minimized in a thumbnail at the bottom right of the screen, was fashioned into an expression that I hoped conveyed the sincere sadness I felt at hearing her speak in this way, as well as sympathy for what she had been through and, more importantly, recognition. I was able, with very little effort, to summon the particular loneliness of having been left in London by someone important to the narrative, without whom life felt shapeless and dull.
K. T. Mills
“The Archetype” (The Rialto, Issue 98)
And my predictions come true—
suddenly you’re as familiar to me as the contours of my back teeth.This engagement is an acquisitive experiment,
textured like the American aesthetic;ghost mouth; the smell of the river bed;
to hear the only beautiful story. Here is the only
beautiful story:my best friend’s cousin overdosed on Fentanyl
the week before I arrived. He survived.We were the same height for too long,
in the context of puerile competition between a boy and a girl.As a child, he could fling himself from the treehouse,
never raising an arm,absorbing the half-storey in his chest.
Samuel Kimbriel
from “Remember to Live” (The Point, 2022)
The original memento mori tradition was aimed at reminding the proud of the fleeting nature of life. The ancient sculptors and mosaicists sought to take the heat of youth and channel it into the kind of sobriety needed to build a good life in the face of finitude.
Perhaps today we need something like the inverse of that tradition. We have plenty of sobriety—class and power are obviously hollow; not only human beings but the whole world can die. If having security and consumer goods to hand has ended up being enough to build a lifestyle, it has never quite been enough to build a life.
What we lack is a sense of what it means to be alive when the stakes truly are existential. How can it be possible to have force and vitality and innocence when the whole world has become not just finite but fragile? How is it possible to be young in this ongoing age of existential stakes?
Kayla Jean
from “Diner” (R&R)
Once I came home from work and thought the dog had eaten Steve. The dog sat beneath the weeping cherry tree, chewing. It was a long body with brown gray fur. I called my mom, crying. She sent my father over to the house. I stood at the back window, having searched the whole house for Steve, who was nowhere.
My father shooed the dog back, pinched the groundhog by a spot of still-dry fur.
Steve was tucked behind the dryer, my mom discovered when she went looking. His body was warm from the machine’s running. I pressed my face to his purring belly.
I cried still, for the senselessness of so many things and how I couldn’t get a handle on a single corner of the world.
In the community college cafeteria I couldn’t stomach anything except grilled cheese. My astronomy professor wore Hawaiian shirts all through the winter. My plant identification notebooks slanted at a steep angle, broken bits of cypress spilled into my backpack.