Published Work

• Hoard, Into Sanity: Essays About Mental Health, Illness, and Living in Between, 2019
• Curriculum Vitae, Nano Fiction, Volume 10, #1, 2016
• Student Stress Solutions through Mindfulness, East Bay Tutors, 2016 (co-authored with Carrie Schlicht)
• Avocado, Plunge Magazine, August 2013
• Miner Dad, CellStories, 2012
• Lesbian Movie Night, Windy City Queer, University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
• Hurricane Season, CellStories, 2011
• The Green Scene, Hypertext magazine, November  2011
• Iowa Wedding, Hypertext magazine, April  2011
• An American Couple in Italy, EG magazine, November 2011
• Seed Starting, EG magazine, April 2011
• Once Upon a Uterus, Hair Trigger magazine, 2010
• Where the Wild Voices Are, Fictionary, 2010
• Our Urban Garden, Mindful Metropolis, 2010
• Diagnosing Father, Hair Trigger magazine, 2009
• The Bedroom, The Iowa Review, 2008
• The Day Your Cat Died, Swell, 2008
• On First Dates, Antimuse, 2008

Excerpts

Curriculum Vitae

April Newman, MFA

My name feels like never enough.

I always thought the extra letters after it would make a difference in this feeling.

They do not.

 

Address:

The orange walk-up apartment,

with

a perpetually leaking ceiling.

The place I ended up:

married,

happy,

growing vegetables in a garden.

But still under-employed.

Avocado

The first girl I loved was Lauren.  We had second grade together at the Nativity Catholic School and grew an avocado from the pit with water and toothpicks in the storage closet. When the avocado erupted into roots and grew big, we showed the class with toothless grins.

Behind us, Tina Williams sharpened her pencils, and Nate Saunders picked a booger and wiped it on Tiffany Owens’ sweater.  Adam Black and Neil Norris thought the avocado was so weird looking, shaped like an alien, something strange about its tentacles.  But Jennifer Severs noticed its roots stretching to the glass and talked about the fruit, if our avocado ever made it into a tree.

I felt funny and good for no reason standing next to Lauren in the closet where we kept the bottles of paint that smelled like clay and the pieces of construction paper.  So good in fact, that when I looked around the room it was transformed; the checkered tiles on the floor a life-size chessboard. Feeling something breezy in my palms, in my feet—a wild exhilaration like a garden hose that’s gotten loose and flails around the yard in sweeping arcs.

The Bedroom

The bedroom had dark plank floors with one rug poking out in the center. The walls were yellow behind a painting of wild mustangs galloping through a mountain range, their muscles statuesque. Grandma kept quarters in turquoise beaded purses from South Dakota on her dresser, the brown-edged photos of her children jammed into the sides of her mirror. In the corner was a black rolltop writing desk. She placed a photo of her father, Donald, there.
Read more at The Iowa Review.