Photograph of Bethel College’s 2013 Concert Choir
1. For Unto Us a Child is Born
(1991) From Handel’s Messiah- Concert Choir, double brass choir
2.O Tannenbaum
(1990) German Carol/ arr. Parker-Shaw- Concert Choir Men
3. I Saw Three Ships
(1996) Arr. Wilberg- Concert Choir, bells, percussion, 4-hand piano
*These three Christmas songs are samples from the double CD collection: “Nights of Wonder” (2012), available for purchase at the Thresher Bookstore or the Kauffman Museum on the Bethel campus.
By Tiana Renae Williams
By Andrew Unruh
I.
A southern Kansas wind…
My favorite friend,
I wonder where she lives now?
II.
Bare sycamore branch—
Laughter pervades the air,
Leaves fly
III.
Deep spring’s blue hour
Movement through an alleyway
One dog’s lone bark
IV.
Early morning’s lavender mist
The ever-recoiling shore
A baying hound
By Jenae Janzen
39 and since the beginning there have been memos
pictures,
the occasional solar autograph-signing
cosmic drafts,
universe-sized, half-sketched, half-created.
then crumpled and discarded
in a blueprint wasteland larger than heaven
the angels thrown out,
humans next
2 and since the first day, copy-editors and
assignments.
trans-material architects:
scheming deities
and the critics of their works.
3 whose Great Voice is that?
the sky is creasing, crinkling,
the bare first sign of a different timeline.
By Ami Regier
***
The new entrepreneurial president was desperate. What small colleges do that no other form of higher education can do, he thought, is create a world. It is a very special, intense world, characterized by full-body, full-mind, live time scenarios 24-7, involving arduous journeys through the rugged terrains of, among others, liberal arts, technology, music, undergraduate research, and athletics. With much creativity, small colleges create their own educational structures and intercollegiate competitions. While musing about this, the president was multitasking along with the first-year students, having occasional google hangouts while reading the community-wide text Reamde, by Neal Stephenson. Reamde imagines that videogame realities are starting to intersect with real-world economies and power-brokers. In Reamde, students in China hack into Russian mafia financial data in order to make college tuition money. The data sets get imported into the game and held for ransom. Students problem-solve how to win access to the data sets in gaming logic (by winning in the game construct) but end up resolving real-world conflicts. When the president read the line about how people were tracing each other’s locations in two realities, the president turned to the webcam and shouted “Brilliant—that’s it!” Before long, the college had shifted the location of classroom learning into narrative worlds. A new major combining gaming, programming, international business, and writing was developed. Students developed problem-solving methods in the narrative context of multiplayer games, writing the next plot event after each problem was solved. As in Reamde, tuition money could be sited in the game, with portals for payment and collection based on student research, labs, logic proofs, performances, and creative activities built into the game. Soon, students world-wide were enrolling in the narrative world of Liba College. Residential inhabitation was optional, but students tended to choose it, because they could live as their game avatars and written selves during the duration of each class segment. Invented lives of mathematicians, economists, scientists, computer programmers, musicians, innovators, and super-athletes became real lives.
By Jenae Janzen
I work on a hunch. I’m always working on hunches. I have a hunch that if I follow a man in a green jacket into a corner store I’ll find a solution. I used the colors only in order. I colored only on the right-hand pages.
Today I realize I don’t love you. Today I realize love is only an illusion, and that I only wished to love you. Today I realize that you are only an illusion and I only wished to love you. I wanted to tell you this in person, but I had forgotten. I was too in love with the idea of love to admit this.
We’re taking the interstate. You’re driving. I’m sitting in the passenger seat, reclining, I’m holding a magazine and the directions that we printed off have slid onto the floor and gotten lost amongst the fast food wrappers and discarded clothes. I flip a page and read you advice on pleasing girls. You ask me to read you the exit you need to take instead. I put my sunglasses on.
You miss the exit. I just shrug because I don’t really care where we’re going. You yell at me to find the GPS and I hand you your backpack. You don’t like this. I don’t care.
I read you another article, and this one’s on “sex cravings,” whatever that means.
You turn on the radio, so I start talking louder. You turn up the radio. I start talking even louder. This goes on for several minutes before you nearly run off the road and that shuts us up. After too long of a silence, you see a sign for a hotel and we pull off into the parking lot.
By Rebecca Epp
Sitting by my dear old friend;
Her feet planted firm, toes reaching out
For water, burying themselves in the
Creekbed slate, crumbling beneath
Her gentle weight. She’s so strong
My friend, strong and still;
An ancient relic upon the hill.
Surrounded by others who look
At her with curious eyes; their heads
Tilted with the wind as if saying
How long has she been here?
So long she’s become one with the
Earth, one with the sky, one with
Me. Lucky I am to sit in the shade
Of her attentive gaze; like a shepherdess
Lovingly watching her sheep graze.
A rod in hand and a clear eye;
She walks with grace and purpose
In the low sunlight. Always rooted
In the same spot on the hill, yet
Travelling where her heart would will
Her to go; roaming free among
The mossy puddles, all that remain
Of the flood. I nestle into her bark
So soft and wait for her to speak
Her wisdom. But, she only sits
Basking in the sun, soaking up the
Last of the heat waves; for the frost
Will soon be on its way home.
By Ben Preheim
Not many alive today know how to listen, but for the few who do, they would know that even the trees were nervous. The shaggy bushes and neatly trimmed hedges stood on edge; their leaves were silent. The air was still, the animals quiet. A figure in a flowing black cloak strode like a ghost down a narrow rubbish-strewn street. He had been overwhelmed by the noise and chaos of the main streets. These people were insane in their love of bright lights that burned without wood or oil, and their noisy vehicles. He chuckled, they called this progress, but they were barbaric than they had been hundreds years before. The air was so laced with pollutants that it nearly made him choke.
He made his way to what the locals called Seraphim Abbey. He could see it now, plainly visible in the pallid light of the possessed lamps that illuminated it. The abbey was a large gothic church with a majestic rose window at the front, flanked by two square stone towers. One tower held the bells, sweet bronze bells that rang on festival days. The other tower had an enormous clock face on the front side; its hands read five minutes from midnight.
Tension started to build in his chest, and he shivered with excitement. Oh, how long he had waited for this moment. After years of preparation, plots, and counterplots, he had come to this moment. He could barely contain himself. Finally, after so many years, he’d be able to complete his mission.
bclines.bethelks.edu 