Murder Your Darlings

Miscellany

2012-01-26T04:06:00.000-08:00

A couple years ago, a journal (I forget which one) put out a call for entries for an Ambrose Bierce-like 'Devil's Dictionary.'I sent a couple in and never actually heard back from them, so I'm assuming they didn't want them. I tried to emulate Bierce's style, which perhaps came off as verbose...so here's what I wrote:

Hope, n. A system of emotional credit in which the fruits of feeling are spent before the currency of accomplishment has been earned.

Truth, n. A very appealing lie often employed in discourse as a substitute for a sound and compelling argument. Spelled with a capital “T” to distinguish it from the more common lies.

* * *

Here are a couple poems I wrote about encounters with uber-religious types. Neither really seems to work. Too preachy, maybe. I'm still tinkering with them.

You Push I Push Back

The ex-priest spoke of women in the third person
to their faces, took us on a tour of churches of New
York, where the squirrels are segregated and rudeness
is considered style. He finished eating before we’d
even sat down. He was an old teacher of my wife’s father
and adored the man. When we walked in the door after a five
hour drive, he stood us in front of the piano to sing; “Start
again,” he’d say. “I don’t see how you could like anyone
who doesn’t like me,” my mother in law said to her husband,
who lost the smile he’d worn since we’d arrived.
___

The Other

It was the fat preacher who made us afraid
with his stories of shameful creatures
who shared our names. It was his dirty smile,
his greasy hair, the stains on his lapel
that made us uneasy when he talked about clean
souls. It was his belligerent children with torture
in their eyes who made us doubt his understanding
of the role of a father, in heaven or otherwise.

He told us to doubt ourselves, to trust the absurd
notion that life is anything other than joy and pain
and random collisions of matter. They’re coming
for us, he said. I’d be afraid to think, if I was like you,
he said; I might think something wrong.

* * *

Last one for today: another poem I might be giving up on.

Your Cousin is Lying

I never went cow-tipping, though once, Stephen
wasn't looking and backed into a sleeping one,
which got up, moved away, and sat back down—
because cows sleep bellies to the ground,
that's horses you're thinking of that sleep standing.

I never made moonshine, though I admit,
my father did, but that was at least a decade
before I was born. We smoked meth. Or pot
or drank stuff we filched from our parents' liquor
cabinets or coolers. We made things from eye drops
and allergy meds. We huffed glue. We sucked
aerosol cans. Why grow it, process it, hide
it when you can buy it? We're not farmers
anymore. We work at Wal Mart. We get discounts.

I never lynched anybody, but we shot each other
same as you do over the color of our
clothes and the contents of our
wallets. I dated black girls—well, I would've
if they'd have had me.

I'm just as educated as you: I've seen the same TV shows, sat
through the same droning lectures
based on the Prussian model.
If you were from here. you'd know;
it's just like there. Only not the same.

The Wretched

2012-01-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

...and then I happened to look around, and see that paper. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll go to hell."—and tore it up.
-Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

It was School Spirit Day and the junior high school gymnasium echoed with forced celebration. I found a seat on the second row next to some older kids I didn't know and planted my feet on top of the seat in front of me to save it for a friend.

I didn't notice Rhonda Washington until she plopped down on top of my feet. I knew her name because we'd shared classes since kindergarten, though we’d never shared more than two words. There was still room further down the bench, but she refused to lift her weight even enough to let me slip my feet out.

"Look at that," I said, so she'd hear, "that nigger stole the seat I was saving."

I thought for a half second that she hadn't heard me, until she turned, her hand already flying, and slapped me hard in the face. Then she turned back around, never having said a word.

As the cacophony of school spirit washed over us, my cheeks went red. Even though no one would look at me, I still felt them staring. Near the end of the assembly, Rhonda got up and walked away before the band was even finished playing. I watched her angry steps leave the gymnasium, relieved when the door closed behind her and she hadn't approached a teacher.

When I was growing up, my family threw around racial slurs like Santas tossing out candy at a parade. It wasn't completely indiscriminate; there was a methodology, which my brother explained to me:

"There are black people and there are niggers," he said. "And white people can be niggers, too, if they dress like them or act that way."

"But what's the difference?" I asked.

"Niggers are lazy," he said. "A black man has pride. A nigger has no pride."

The word was used in white company constantly, but whenever a black person was around, we affected a sort of forced politeness, as though it would've been rude to tell them what we really thought of them.

I thought every black person was on welfare, all the black women were unwed but had dozens of children. Who knows what the men did.

People talked about gangs as though there were heavily armed groups of teenagers who only came out at night to prowl the streets of big cities (and they were getting closer). This is why we never went to cities.

It was as though once black people reached a certain age, their childhood toys were taken away and replaced with semi-automatic weapons. None of them had jobs, and they were all drug addicts. Anyone who listened to rap music would instantly become addicted to drugs and start shooting people. This is what they'd done with the freedom we'd given them.

My brother's best friend was a sociology professor at a local community college. He also taught high school history. He considered his black students incapable of learning and blamed the Arkansas' school system's rank of forty-ninth in the country on integration.

He wore thick glasses and collected guns like squirrels collect acorns. I once went to a gun show with him where he bought an AK 47.

"Stick it under water and it'll fire seven rounds before it locks up," he said.

"What's it for?" I asked. He didn't hunt; I hadn't known him to ever fire the guns he already owned.

"Protection," he said. "If some nigger tries to break into my house..."

He lived in a run-down house that looked exactly like every other house in the all-white neighborhood directly across from the high school at which he taught. He kept a pistol beneath the cushions of his couch, another one under the couch. He kept guns on the walls; guns leaned in the corners. They were, by far, the most valuable things in the house.

"I wish one would break in," he said. "There'd be one less nigger in the world."

My home town was segregated–split down the middle by railroad tracks. Almost all the blacks lived on one side, the whites on the other. Sometimes, a poor white family might move to the outskirts of the black side, but they were considered trash. And black families never moved to the white side of town.

This was in the Mississippi River Delta, in eastern Arkansas, where many of the blacks were descended from slaves. They were in the minority, there, but not much further south, closer to Louisiana, they became the majority. Many white families and black families shared last names, because the blacks were descended from slaves who'd taken their owners' names. This was something that wasn't spoken of, though the days of slavery were often referenced.

"A lot of folks were good to their slaves," the sociology professor said once; "why else would slaves have fought for the Confederacy? Cause they liked being slaves. They didn't have to think or do anything on their own. It's just like welfare, except now they don't do anything."

I couldn't argue: he was the history teacher, how could he be wrong?

The majority of businesses and schools were on the white side of town. The junior high where Rhonda slapped me was on the black side. It was a run down old building that had been the black school before integration. My sixth grade year was the last year we used it.

It was frightening going there, crossing the tracks into a world I didn't really know. I heard stories from my older sister of gangs, race riots on the playground, murder.

"They won't fight you unless there's more of them than there are of you," she told me.

Some kids I knew formed a group to protect themselves from blacks. They adopted KKK symbology, but avoided the Klan proper, which was a dinosaur of old men who met for fish fries at the state park every so often. There were one-on-one fights, occasionally, as there always were at school, but nothing more. They settled into a kind of cold war, each side watching the other, waiting for an opportunity. All of this was unprovoked; none of us were ever attacked by a gang of blacks or ever saw anyone attacked. The whites chalked it up to cowardice; they were organized, superior, they never allowed the gangs a chance to catch them off-guard.

As I grew older, black families started to cross the tracks. Towards the end of
high school, a black family moved just down the hill from my father's house. The family kept to themselves and were quiet and kept their lawn meticulously clean. They smiled and waved whenever they encountered even a white child. They dressed better than anyone else in the neighborhood.

I remember wondering why they would move there; why raise your children in a place where no one wanted you? The Little Rock Nine and the idea of forced integration seemed like ancient history. We learned about it in school, but we also learned about evolution and Reconstruction, and nobody believed those things had happened the way the books said. Besides, this was the 80's. That was all over and they should just be grateful for what they'd won, instead of expecting more. They were forgetting their place.

No one said anything to them, openly; that would have been rude. But we watched them to make sure they weren't running a crack house or selling guns to gang members.

My family ran a farm and also raised catfish and buffalo fish, among other things, and sold them during the winter months.

My earliest friends were children of our mostly black customers. My father would joke with the customers and tell stories, and I played with the kids out back. I had to remember that it wasn't their fault they were the way they were. They were the descendants of Ham, after all, cursed to servitude. If one of them didn't want to share and take turns on the tire swing, well, I couldn't be mad at him any more than I could a dog for farting. Besides, if I called one a name, he might want to fight, and you couldn't trust them to fight fair.

These were by and large poor people. They drove old, beat-up cars the same as we did, and the fish we sold them was one of the few luxuries they could afford. Sometimes they were sullen or bored, the way any child can be, but mostly they treated me with a quiet, awkward politeness.

I saw some of the boys frequently and even became close to a couple of them and played with them at school. But I never seriously thought of inviting them home, and they, likewise. Though once or twice one of us brought the idea up, we quickly abandoned it. It would've been too uncomfortable.

When they left with their freshly filleted fish, my father sometimes ribbed me about my friendships with them. I smiled, I laughed with him. I called them names.

* * *

My childhood was littered with bitter veterans, old men who spent their days drinking cheap beer and whiskey and hanging around my father's farm bullshitting. Some of them worked on the farm off and on. Many of them were on disability and worked under the table for unreported wages.

They wore cowboy boots, listened to music on the radio that praised God and America, and most of what I knew about life I learned from them. I learned how to cuss, how to drink, how to tell a joke. These men had fought in wars ranging from WWII to Vietnam. They'd seen the world and lived lives I couldn't imagine.

They talked about the Civil War as an old slur. The same with integration, civil rights. These were things that had been stolen from the South; injustices committed upon our land. We had been kicked around from day one by the Northern colonies, and finally they'd come into our homes and tried to tell us how to live, how to treat each other.

It was a commonly accepted belief of the old men that blacks got breaks that white people didn't get. Equal opportunity laws meant that blacks got jobs more qualified whites should have gotten. The ones that wanted to work, anyway—most of them were content to lie around on welfare eating steak all day. Whenever blacks accomplished anything, it was generally felt to be through cheating.

My father told stories about seeing some black woman in line at the grocery store in front of him with ten kids, her cart full of Twinkies and filet mignon, her wallet full of food stamps. He'd follow her out to a brand new car in the parking lot.

When they weren't ranting, they played practical jokes on anyone dumb enough to fall for them. They rigged trucks so that when one was started, it would shock the driver. They took out fake ads in the local paper offering things to sell with each other's phone numbers. They'd turn on each other in a heartbeat. They had terrifically fueled senses of humor; it was best not to be in front of them when they went off.

Their rage was addictive. When they ranted, their wrath swept through me, filling me with righteous indignation. The blacks were a good target, but we were pissed off at everybody: politicians, foreigners, anything different. It was better than feeling poor and worthless and afraid of a world that wouldn’t stay put.

__________________

My father raised me on pragmatism. He was ever the contrarian, teaching me not to take anything at face value, be it religion or hearsay, or any accepted truth. His friends would rant for hours, and then, on the way home, he'd mutter a few choice epithets that shattered their complaints in seconds. When I talked to him about things I'd learned at school, he shot holes all though my poorly remembered lessons.

"'I have never let my schooling interfere with my education,'" he would say, quoting Mark Twain.

One of my father's favorite pastimes was to yell at the television.

"Look at that," he'd say about some cop drama, "they've always got to put the nigger in charge. Ought to string him up for talking to a white man like that."

Since we all lived about a mile from the Trail of Tears, many families in the area claimed to have Cherokee blood, and we were no different. We'd watch cowboy movies and root for John Wayne, and then chalk our cheekbones and black hair up to a proud lineage from the civilized tribe who'd fought on the side of the Confederacy.

"You know Dad," I said once, "they used to hang Indians for talking to white women. Remember the Trail of Tears?"

"Did they?" he said, sarcastically. He was quiet and didn't yell at the TV any more that night, choosing instead to yell at me.

This pragmatism was the fatal flaw in my father's education of me. I had been raised to believe that blacks were subhuman. Though a distinction was made between blacks and niggers, this idea only really existed to save face in case a white man found himself in the situation where he was forced to interact with a black man on equal terms. And it was a rare individual who achieved this lofty stature, regardless. It took years of hard work for a black man to be accepted by whites, and even then, it was grudging. Really, the blacks were all thought of as niggers, but some knew their place. This meant that they took the abuse and didn't argue.

Rhonda wasn't exceptional. Actually, the way she acted fit my brother's definition, and yet she clearly had pride. How could she be both? I was capable of writing off the contradiction. After all, every day I was faced with a world that had been created in a week, seven thousand years ago, and yet science spoke in terms of billions of years, natural selection versus the Flood. Even the first page of Genesis contained two contradicting stories. More troubling than that, Rhonda had made me feel like something I'd never felt before: a bully, worse, a coward.

It took me years to come to terms with these events, or even to begin to understand them, but my experience with Rhonda threw me down a different path. Maybe it was as simple as the idea that I started to think before I spoke, instead of just repeating the rhetoric around me. I didn't use racial slurs anymore and didn't want to hear them. The old men noticed and made fun of me, but I ignored them.

The more those old men complained about their lot in life, the more I realized that this was all they did; they were mired in misery. And that was what bothered me the most—their misery. It began to feel like a disease I was afraid to catch. They acted as though they were oppressed in every way. The black people I knew were by and large struggling, just like everybody. So where were the ones getting all those breaks? To me, they seemed to be stuck in the same misery, just coming at it from a different direction.

* * *

I go back to my home town occasionally to visit my family. The lone black family who moved down the hill from my father's house is gone and hasn't been replaced. The junior high school across the tracks, which, for many of us, was the only time we ever ventured into the black part of town, is closed and a new one has been built on the white side of town. The borders are blurred; I see white families in what was once the black part of town, and vice versa, though the centers of each remain the same.

I see interracial couples from time to time, something I couldn't have imagined growing up. Their faces are strangers to me, and as the town grows, it, too, becomes strange, not exactly different, just messier, which may be better. I have no idea where Rhonda is, or any of my old tire-swing acquaintances. I wonder if she is married, has kids; I wonder if she's stuck in that town subsisting, like a lot of people I grew up with. Or did she get out? I wonder if slapping me was as pivotal an event for her as it was for me. Or was I just another yokel?

The white friends I grew up with who formed the junior Klan are now married with kids and mortgages. If I see any of them in a gas station or a restaurant, they don't recognize me.

Every year or two, I hear of one of the old men dying off. People repeat stories about them, remembering the practical jokes they played, the stories they told. With each one, I feel a little bit of my history dwindling away. It's sad and comforting at the same time, the way the ending of any life is; whether it was mostly good or bad, it's nice to have someone recognize the loss and the potential that remains.

2012-01-19T04:00:00.000-08:00

It was 2 a.m. and maybe two below zero on a Christmas morning as I stood outside of a trailer in a small town in eastern Arkansas getting dumped again.

"I was fifteen when I met you," Jenny was saying. "Can you believe that? That's five years we've been doing this."

"It was a nice party," was all I could think of to say.

She stared at me. The anger drained from her face. "Go home," she said. "I'm done. I'm out. I'm too old for this. Just go home."

"Don't you want your Christmas present?"

She laughed. "Well that wouldn't be very fair, would it?"

She stalked up the steps and slammed the trailer door closed, and I thought about that real nice girl I'd dumped a couple months ago to get back with this one. She had been safe, that was the problem. Going to school to be a nurse. Funny. Smart. Nice. But this one who was probably hopping into couch (couldn't afford a bed) with that reject from the Cure guy inside the trailer while I stood outside shaking; we had history. We'd taken turns dumping each other for five years. Every time Halloween rolled around, I'd start getting phone calls late at night, letters. Things would pick up by Thanksgiving. Then, some time in January when the holidays were over, we'd stop seeing each other. Sort of like family. But you always knew you'd see them again next year.

Halloween, that said it all. Every time Halloween came around, here she came, out of the clouds, riding across the moon and we took turns riding each other around town, and sweeping up the year with each other.

So I got in my car and shivered back to my father's house and waited for dawn. The road was white and smooth with ice. It had been raining for about a week, and then the temperature dropped below zero, burying everything in a crust of ice. The town was like an old shoe covered in white dust. It didn't fit anymore. So, when the family started showing up, I said my hellos and my goodbyes, and headed back to the other side of the state where I went to college, under the pretense of beating the storm which was heading for the same place I was.

I was muttering along with "Wish You Were Here," flying down the road, about an hour from school. I lit a cigarette and was waiting for the next verse when I hit the ice and was suddenly going backwards. My car slid off the interstate, along the side of a gulley for twenty feet, crossed the gulley and slammed into a tree on the other side. The impact of the tree caved in my driver’s side door. My car bounced off and finally stopped, the radio still playing. I forced my door open, climbed out and inspected the damage.. It seemed okay, except for the door. The engine hadn’t even died. I got back in. Everything was crazy inside. All of my tapes had been scattered; trash and things I’d forgotten were even in the car were all over. I couldn't find my cigarette, but I didn't really care.

A man in a truck pulled up on the shoulder above me.

"Storm's coming," he said. "You alright?"

"Yeah. I'll limp along to the next town."

He eyed the car. "I don't think you'll get far in that. I can give you a ride."

"Nah, I'm alright."

He took off and I got back to it.

I edged the car back up the muddy incline to the road. No one was in sight. It was starting to snow, then. I noticed for the first time a thin white layer of ice on the road. Hind sight: that's when you can look back and see that you've shown your ass.

I nudged the car onto the icy road, and as soon as the rear tires left the rocky mud of the shoulder, the rear end swerved around completely to the other side of the road. I tried again from the opposite side of the road, edging the car slowly onto the pavement, and again, my rear end slapped around like a rubber chicken. I decided to stay on the shoulder of the passing lane, where the bumpy, frozen mud clods afforded me a sort of control; they barely allowed my car to move, therefore it couldn’t go crazy.

A couple yards later I noticed a police car pacing me in the slow lane. I stopped the car, and she waved me over so I hopped out, and trotted across the interstate.

“Don’t ever do that again,” she said.

I stared at her.

“Someone might’ve hit you. Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m just trying to make it to the nearest town,” I said. “Atkins.” It was more of a question than a statement.

“Road’s closed,” she said.

“I’ll just find a truck stop or something,” I said.

She looked at me real hard for a second, then pointed at my car. “You’re not going anywhere like that, you’re just grinding your rear tire. Axle’s probably broke.”

I looked at my car. The rear passenger side tire stood out a good thirty degrees away from the car. I was reminded of my sister‘s front teeth, when we were kids. They had a gap she could stick her finger between.

“I can make it to the next exit,” I said. "Long as I stay on the shoulder, where it's slow."

“Get in the back,” she said.

I opened the door to the back seat and got in.

“And don’t close it, just pull it to, or you won’t be able to get back out unless someone lets you out,” she said a second after I closed it.

She called a tow truck, and I watched the back of her head as she stared into space with a sullen, calm look on her face, a hard look, somewhere in between self reliance and a hangover.

“You trying to get to your parents’?”

“Fayetteville. I'm a student.”

“Bad time to drive.” She stared back into space. I wondered if she wrote poetry.

The tow truck finally came. “I’ll talk to you at the station,” the cop said and left. I watched her until she was out of sight and crossed the Interstate. There were two men in a flat bed tow truck. One was a tall, obese man with long, curly brown hair and a round face. The other was thin and nervous looking. They looked like they wanted to invite me home for dinner, but they were afraid I'd fart in front of their dog. I didn’t trust them. Just because my car was totaled, didn’t mean I wanted it scratched.

“Let me get some things out first,“ I said, just to have something to do. I grabbed my backpack and fished my cigarettes out, then I messed around inside the car for a minute. I still thought I could make it to the nearest town if they'd just let me go. It was embarrassing, these people taking over my life. When I ran out of things to fiddle with, I climbed out and stood beside my car and watched the two men haul it up onto their truck. They climbed in and looked at me. I looked back.

The thin one leaned out. “Guess you're riding with us.” I squeezed between them in the cab. The truck was dirty and cluttered. There was a pack of Marlboros sitting on the console. They were listening Iron Maiden loud, which I suppose is the way to listen to them.

“Let me get one of them Marlboros from you, Tony,” the thin one said.

“Ain’t got no more.” I glanced at the pack on the console which looked nearly full.

"I've got one." What the hell. I dug mine out and offered them around.

“Thanks,” they both said, nervously, and we rode the rest of the way without speaking.

Outside, the frozen ground coasted by us slowly. I could smell oil burning with a hard edge of cold.

They dropped me off at the police station in Ozark, which is a hill pretending to be a town.

“Hungry?” The same cop said when I got inside. I couldn’t see the name on her badge.

“No, thanks,” I said. She led me through the station to the kitchen. I never knew police stations had kitchens before. An old man was leaning against a counter, sipping a cup of coffee, wearing baby blue jail issue clothes faded with age.

“Get him something to eat,” she told him, and left me.

“Turkey.” He said.

“What?” I said, offended. He fixed me a plate and sat me down at a card table in the corner.

“I got you turkey and ham. Hope sweet tea’s alright,” he said.

"Oh. Thanks."

"Yep," he said. I wondered what he’d done. DUI, maybe; he had a sort of shaky look about him.

After I ate, the cop showed up again.

“Looks like you’re gonna be here for the night,” she said. “I called your parents. Got any money? Cause if you don’t, we can make arrangements.”

I said I did and we loaded up and she dropped me off at a motel. All of my luggage was underneath Jenny's presents in my trunk, so I left them.

The room was clean and decorated in varying shades of beige with a light greenish-grey carpet. The bedspread had dull flower patterns on it.. I tossed my backpack on the bed. There was a TV against one wall but it didn't work. I sat on a chair by the window, watching the snow fall, and thought about some things. Danger, that's what it was all about. Jenny was wild. Jenny was sexy. Jenny liked to be spanked. Jenny came after me with a knife one time and tried to castrate me when I called her a whore. There was something in her eyes that could make a man kick a hole in the sky. It wasn't love. It was sex. A formless hormonal lust that she floated in like the dead sea.

While I was thinking, I was trying to light a cigarette, but my hands were shaking like a Parkinson's sufferer. I got up to go to the bathroom and discovered that the toilet had overflowed because the pipes had burst. I laid towels out. There was a can of potpourri spray sitting on the back of the toilet. It reminded me of Doug, this mulleted looser Jenny used to hang out with. Once, she'd dragged me to his trailer to do whiffets. Everyone sat around listening to Tool taking hits. When we emptied a can, we tossed it to the side and grabbed another one from the pile of cans. I was afraid to do the whiffets, because I didn't want to put Doug's towel in my mouth to inhale the gas. Who knew where it had been.

Every so often his grandmother would get up and stand outside the door, listening. No one could hear her but Doug. He would shush everyone, jerk the door open and placate her.

After we'd run through a dozen cans of potpourri, Doug took Amy, his girlfriend, into the other room and Jenny laid down on his bed. Her hair flayed out like a halo and I wanted to cry. She told me about how she was gang raped by five high school football players at a party the year before, during our off season.

"Who was it?" I asked.

"You wouldn't know them, they were black guys."

"I know some black guys," I said.

"They're really big guys," she said.

Doug and Amy came back and Jenny led me into another room. She laid on the bed and I stared at her for several seconds.

"We have to be quiet," she said. "Or Doug's grandma will throw us out. Leave your clothes on in case she comes in."

I got into bed with her but all I could think about was those guys.

"Nevermind," she said.

I got up and stood over her. "Can I stay in bed with you?" I asked.

She flashed me that smile, like a dark lake at night that I knew I couldn't swim.

I decided to hike out to the truck stop next door. I was getting hungry again.

In between the hotel and the truck stop was a parking lot the size of the red sea, covered with ice. There was a small hill before the parking lot, which I slid down. I stepped tentatively onto the frozen waves and immediately slipped and fell flat on my back. I staggered to my feet, accomplished two steps, then fell again. Very slowly and very carefully I managed maybe ten feet across the ice. I could see someone I took to be a trucker, dressed in jeans, overweight, in a tee shirt, standing by the door of the truck stop. I took a step and fell. From the ground, I could see him laughing. I glared at him till he went inside. I rose, took a few more steps. The ice was so thick that when I fell, I hardly cracked it. I fell again. When I looked up, there were two men laughing. I quit looking up. After I'd made it about halfway, mostly on my hands and knees, I risked another glance. The men were gone. Probably gotten bored of watching me fall down and gone back inside where it was warm.

I finally made it to the truck stop tired, bruised and so sore I could hardly bleed, just as they were closing the Subway. I stood and dripped on the tile floor, watching the employees wipe down the sandwich making station. I bought a couple of Cokes, some peanuts and things and a tee shirt to change into. It said "Road Kill Cafe," on the back, and had a list of animals commonly spotted lying dead on the side of major highways, with suggestions on how to prepare them as food. It was gray.

I went back outside to face the parking lot again. I looked down at myself. I was dressed very nicely, actually. Slacks, nice leather shoes, a button-up shirt and a long, black leather duster. I was dressed to meet the parents, except now I was covered in mud, wet and miserable; my slacks stained and ruined, my shirt the same. If I were a betting man, I would’ve bet on the other man.

I made it back to my room and collapsed in the nearest chair. I nibbled peanuts, lit a cigarette and attempted to bring it to my lips. I still couldn’t seem to find them. I was still too nervous from everything that’d happened. I stripped off my wool sweater and put on the tee-shirt then I stared at the walls.

The phone rang. I stared at it for a few seconds, then carefully picked it up. It was Melissa, a girl I hadn’t talked to in over a year. The last time I’d talked to her was to tell her I was in love with Jenny.

“How’d you get this number?” I asked, suddenly terrified.

“I called your father’s house to wish you a Merry Christmas. He said you were in a wreck.”

“The police must’ve told him where I was,” I said. “Yeah, I was in a wreck.” I didn’t believe her. Obviously this was some sort of trick.

“So are you okay?”

“I’m fine, how are you?”

“I’m good. So what have you been up to? Still going to school?”

I had to hold the phone with both hands, I was shaking so badly. Melissa always had a sweet voice, I kept thinking over and over. Calm. Boring.

“You sure you’re okay?” She asked.

I told her what had happened.

"It's for the best," she said. "Maybe you should lay off, and just be single for awhile. Take a break."

"You know," I said. "I was a real dick to you."

"Yeah, you were."

Two days later they reopened 540 and my friend Eric braved the interstate with his 4 wheel drive to pick me up and take me home. He'd been stuck in another town behind me with two of our friends. My room mate's sister was stuck further along the road. We'd all toughed it out until the interstate was drivable again.

I chatted the whole way about my plans for the coming year, how I hoped to be more sociable, try new things, learn to dance. Eric dropped us off at home, and my room mate and I stumbled up the stairs. Our apartment was freezing. The power was off. The snow storm had knocked out power to half the state, as well as large portions of Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, even up to Kansas.

My room mate walked over to our stove and turned it on.

"Gas," he said.

"Crank it all the way up," I said.

We stowed our things, and when the apartment got too toasty, we opened the sliding door, brushed the snow off of our balcony chairs and propped our feet up. The trees were thick with ice, their branches round and smooth.

"How long before you get your car back?" He asked.

"Said it'll be two, three weeks all told. New rear axle, new door. Maybe they'll fix that crack in the windshield, though."

"Yeah, probably. Insurance covering it?"

"Yeah."

"Well that's all right then."

"Yeah."

The road below us was lined with dark groves worn into the snow. A car came by too fast and screeched into a tree, knocking ice off of some of the branches. We could hear the thud echoing between the buildings. The driver climbed out and looked around.

"Wow," Steven said.

"Yeah. Hey, I never asked, how was your break?"

"Fine. Nothing to speak of."

"Good."

I went inside and returned with a couple beers. When I got back, the driver had gotten back in her car and was trying to back it out.

"She having any luck?" I asked.

"No. Fucking weather."

The heat from the stove wafted out over us. I handed him a beer and we sat there a while, watching.

2012-01-16T05:00:00.000-08:00

David Letterman said, "There are some people who are born to just not be happy, and I am one of those people." I can relate. I've never been happy. I've had moments here and there, more of them since my daughter was born, but still, I've never been what you'd call a happy person. I don't even know what that means, really. Hemmingway said, "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." I don't understand people who aren't full of fear and self-loathing when they go out into the horror show that is the world. I could happily withdraw from the world, a la Salinger in New Hampshire, except for the whole possibly drinking his own urine thing.

Before we go any further, let's be clear: this isn't some melodramatic cry for help. Really. Really. So please keep any platitudes to yourself. I'm just trying to have a conversation with myself, here. Don't poison the well.

When I think back to my childhood, what I remember is fear, uncertainty, awkwardness. This is all pretty normal, really. But maybe I was just an overly serious kid because I don't really remember happy times, except with my sister. Even then, it was in the face of stunning neglect. A lotof the seriousness came from trying to reconcile what I was being taught in church with what people were actually doing in life. This is something I failed to do.

Then I grew into a serious teenager with pretty much the same foci. Again, I had some happy times with my friends. But I was usually miserable, like a character from Dostoevsky, cowering in the shadows, cursing the prosperous world, the failed student dreaming of Napoleon. But that was all a long time ago.

It's interesting, because I've always attracted people by being funny. I make people laugh. (Hard to believe, I know.) The thing is, often I wasn't being funny. I was being brutally honest. But people laugh. It's strange. It makes me think that either I'm surrounded by idiots or the things I value are worthy of nothing more than ridicule. None of this makes for happy times. But I'm just sort of thinking aloud, here; none of this is really at the root of the issue.

As a young adult, I really saw no options, no future. I mean, I worked my ass off -- not at first. I got off to a slow start -- but I (eventually) worked my ass off to get where I am now. Just because I've never been happy doesn't mean I don't know how to work, quite the opposite, really. Work has been my main source of solace. But I never really thought it was going to make things "better." I don't really know what that means. I just worked because that's what you do. And I was bullheaded enough to actually make some progress. I'm still much the same, pumping out novels, stories, poems, etc., not to mention that I've somehow entered into a "career" in education, but not really expecting to make a lot of money from any of this. There's a line in a Kathleen Yearwood song, "I see happy people, and I just want to touch their hair." That speaks to me more truly than just about anything I could say. She goes on to say, "I paid one of them to listen to me because I lost my way. And now they pay to listen to me because I lost my way." From the album Book of Hate. Nicely ironic. Good stuff. Difficult, but worth it.

The other day, I fed my 8-month old daughter a bottle. She finished it, stretched out, and fell asleep on me. I was exhausted because I'd been sick, but I just sat there and let her sleep on me. It was a perfect moment. I've noticed there's something of sacrifice that coincides with these perfect moments. They're dearly bought; otherwise, they're of no value. She woke up, eventually, and life kept going. And I won't say I 'took that moment with me.' It was over.

The thing is, I want that, those perfect moments. And it scares the shit out of me. Because life is pain, just ask Buddha. I'm a bummer, always have been. I tell jokes and people laugh, but whenever I get too close to honest, they make excuses and take off. Because it's all void, in here. Never-ending void with teeth. (My soul is, apparently, vagina dentata.) But I don't want that for my daughter. It's tiresome. Yes, life is shit. And people are shitty. And I'm kind of ready to give up the fight to try to change that because I don't really think it's a fight I can win. But I keep fighting because it's all I know how to do.

My wife cooks for our daughter -- these amazing dishes, shit I can't even pronounce. She cooks all day, and then dumps it in a food processor and purees it for our daughter. How beautiful is that? And what the fuck do I have to offer to that scenario? Hey, I wrote a poem trying to reconcile a moral life with an immoral world, and it was published in some journal nobody outside of grad. school has heard of. Whoo hoo.

But that's it. That's what you get. Some people say 'nobody's happy.' That's bullshit. Plenty of people are. I see them. They're like fucking fruit flies. Some people get rich for being idiots. Some people get away with murder. Some people have pianos dropped on them. Some people die nobly. Some people just aren't happy. Cest la vie.

2012-01-12T04:31:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to come up with a new author photo, but I'm no good at this. I can make jokes about breaking the camera etc., but really it boils down to a kind of disconnect between internal and external, between the writing and the selling of that writing. Also, I'm really fat. That's my old one which I pretty much use because it's not terrible, but it's not really that awesome, either.

The last photo shoot I had drove Jillian to the brink of divorcing me. I was trying to get artsy with it, to show my pensive, artistic side. It came out something like this ----------->

Except in black and white. Because black and white means it's art. I'm not posting any of them. They're all pictures of me looking confused or distracted as if someone farted off camera.

I googled "author photo" and found that 95% of author photos show a closeup of the author with a limbo background. Maybe 20% of those substitute a bookshelf for the background. Sometimes, they're holding a book or something. Here's an example of what pretty much all of them look like. This isn't necessarily bad, it's just very common. And it's in black and white, so it's art, as we've previously established.

This one I like. It's kind of artsy, but interesting, to me. I like the use of space. It seems to comment on the form ironically. I might rip this one off.

A friend suggested I use this photo from my daughter's baptism. In this photo, the wife and I, clearly famished from a seemingly neverending church service, have decided to eat our baby. It happens. Babies taste good. Like veal. Also, their bones are soft and chewy.

I'm not sure this exactly does it for me as an author photo. If I were to go 'silly' I might do this one instead in which I'm feeding Ellie and mimicking her expression, which implies that, even though she is currently eating, she will never be fed.

Of course, you can't really see Ellie's expression so well, so it just looks like I'm scared of the baby. Also, my gray hair makes it look like I've got some weird bowl-cut.

So the search continues. But does an author photo really have to be of me? There are much more "true" photos of me online than a photo trully of me. For example:

2012-01-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

My mother was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease when I was very young. I spent my formative years watching her deteriorate and wondering when/if it would be my turn. It's a genetic disease, and the specter of contracting it hung over my head all of my early life. After high school, when most of my friends were moving away to college, I was seized by a complete inability to act. Whenever I went into public, I imagined people were staring at me, making fun of me. I was incredibly self conscious to the point of being frozen. When I tried to go into crowded places, a light-blind terror took over and I couldn't do it. It wasn't a question of making myself do something I didn't want to do. This fear was more powerful than my desire to say, buy some new toothpaste, or go to a movie. I hardly left the house for two years. And when I did, I imagined people were hovering around me, whispering about my hermitic lifestyle.

My father and brother, both of whom I lived with, didn't know what the word agoraphobia meant. My father didn't actually believe in mental illness.

I don't blame him. My father was of a different generation. He was fifty when I was born; he grew up during the Great Depression and dropped out of high school to work and help support his ten siblings. He fought in World War II, lost a brother there, and worked hard the rest of his life when he got back. He started a farm with another brother and barely scraped by, and had to subsidize his income by raising fish, livestock, selling gravel, growing grapes for the wineries in Altus, and anything else he could think of. He'd seen his wife, my mother, overcome by sickness until he couldn't care for her anymore and had to put her in a nursing home, leaving him with a teenaged son. He dealt with it by working sun up to sun down and drinking.

As my mother's condition got worse, my father drank Kentucky Tavern bourbon like this: He started early, an hour or so after dawn, down at the Fish Shack (the main building of the farm) with a big glass of Dr. Pepper, the kind of glass you get at a gas station usually called a "Big Gulp" or something like that. He poured in a finger or two of bourbon and filled the rest with Dr. Pepper. Then he sipped that for an hour or two.

Once it was gone, he poured in four fingers of bourbon, the rest water, and sipped that. By the end of the day, it was two fingers of water, the rest bourbon.

My uncle, who was later diagnosed with cirrhosis, had practiced a variant using water and vodka. After he was diagnosed, he would take old, empty vodka bottles and fill them with water. Then he'd mix them the same way he had with vodka; a couple fingers from the vodka bottle, the rest water.

This was only during the winter months, after the crops were laid by and my family turned to our secondary means of income which was raising and selling catfish and buffalo fish. My father, uncles and brother cleaned the fish and drank and talked during breaks. In the evenings, and long into the night, they stood around, drinking and telling dirty jokes. When I was younger, I'd stand around with them trying to urge my father to come home.

"I need a ride," I'd say.

"Walk," one of the other drunks would say. "It ain't far."

Which was true, and though I was a little afraid of the dark and the coyotes, mostly I was afraid, like my father, of being at home, alone with my mother, who was slipping into dementia. It would often be eight, nine o'clock in the evening before we finally made it home. She would have given up waiting for us and gone to bed.

It was funny, at first, hearing all the old drunks telling stories, but as I grew older, the jokes stayed the same, and they weren't funny anymore. I stole sips of people's drinks but they all tasted watered down and cheap.

During the summer, we farmed. My father carried a cooler full of Budweiser beer in the back of his truck. He threw his empties back there, too. Every few weeks, my brother and I bagged up all the aluminum cans and sold them to a recycling place for a few cents per pound for spending money.

* * *

With my mother's condition, my father became a single parent, except that he had to take care of his wife as well as us. He was an affectionate man. He called me Honey and frequently hugged and kissed us on the cheeks. Once, my sister asked him about our American Indian heritage and he told her we were of the Black Feet tribe, because we always stepped in cow piles. He told her that her Indian name was Little Mini Ha Ha.

When he was drunk, he could be mean and pigheaded the way a child can be when you try to make him clean his room. I think he felt guilty, and me standing there, urging him to go home didn't help things. After Mom went into the nursing home, he sobered up and stopped spending as much time with his buddies, most of whom he hated the sight of when he was sober. He started to see them as wastrels. Several of his buddies were on disability, but still worked odd jobs under the table. They lived to drink, rarely read anything and knew little of current events. My father had always prided himself on his knowledge of world events. As he sobered, he filled his new free time with reading and projects, putting as much distance as he could between himself and his old life. But his friends still hung around, reminding him of who he'd let himself be.

This was a time of change, for my father and myself. I worked on the farm as a young teenager but my father saw no future in it for me. "Ain't nothing worse than being a farmer," he told me, "except maybe being a cop or a politician. But that ain't saying much."

So I stayed home and sat with my mother. When Mom went into the nursing home, it left a gap in my life. And I also felt guilty that we couldn't handle taking care of her ourselves. My father felt the same way, I think. Maybe that's why he let me stay home, after graduation, without working.

I had a car, but it was a heap that rarely worked. Every time we took it to some shade tree mechanic, it ran for a day or two, then broke down again. Without a reliable car, it was difficult to find a job, or so I told myself. On some days, my father would urge me to find a job nearby and walk to work, on others, he would talk about the dangers of the world.

"You can stay here as long as you want," he said to me, and so I did. My father never asked me to leave, or openly asked me to do much of anything. Maybe he was avoiding the situation, though my sister told me once that he'd said, about me, "He's had a hard row to hoe."

* * *

My home town was like this:( )
Wynne had eight thousand people, a Wal Mart, some rice fields and a multitude of mosquitoes. There were a couple factories but how long could one expect to work in one before it shut down and moved overseas? I remember when we got a McDonald's, and people were so excited you'd think the food was good. When I was in high school, the thing to do after school was go to Sonic and sit in the parking lot, then drive down the street to the bowling alley, turn around, and come back. For fun, kids parked in the Wal Mart parking lot. And drank. And smoked pot. And did every drug imaginable. And had lots of sex. There was nothing else to do.

When I was growing up, Arkansas was the leading producer of crystal meth. Little Rock was among the top three cities for violent crime, and the Mississippi delta was home to one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country. Arkansas was forty ninth in education under Governor Clinton, and, when laws were finally passed making testing for teachers mandatory, some of my teachers chose, or were forced, to retire.

To succeed in my hometown meant to leave it. This was the lesson drilled into us early and often. Go to school, get good grades and get a scholarship to college. Short of being a teacher, there were very few jobs around that required a college degree. So college equaled moving to Little Rock or Memphis for work.

Wynne was founded when a train car fell off the track. They stood it back up and made it a station. It's a railroad town that stole the county seat from Wittsburg nearly a century before when using rivers to transport goods fell out of favor. Why go down the Mississippi, then up the Arkansas to get from Memphis to Little Rock when you could now send freight straight through on a train? Wittsburg was now just a handful of empty buildings huddled on the banks of the White River. They served as a reminder of the fickle nature of prosperity. After I got out of high school, the buildings were torn down because they were being used to house methamphetamine labs.

But, railroads had gone the way of the river boats. My father would talk about how when he was a young man, he would ride the train in to Memphis for the day. My brother talked about riding it down to New Orleans to see the Super Bowl when he graduated high school in the '70's.

Now, the station had been turned into a flea market on weekends. Trains came through, but they didn't stop. I could hear their lonesome whistles down the hill from my father's house as they headed for Memphis, maybe saying goodbye to this old town, or maybe just telling someone down the line to get out of the way.

I talked about going to college, but my father was against it. He didn't want me going too far away, and really, neither did I. Maybe if he had forced me in a particular direction, I might have moved that way, but probably I would have resisted. I could do anything in the world.

I imagined that as soon as people noticed me, they'd hurl abuse at me. It was an odd sort of narcissism; the idea that random strangers had nothing better to do than this. Though sometimes, I wasn't just being paranoid. I had long hair; it grew down to my shoulder blades and on more than one occasion people I'd never met would yell at me to get a hair cut, as though I were personally offending them. Once, a policeman pulled my friend over while I was with him.

"You taking your girlfriend on a date?" The cop asked, though I had a full beard.

An aunt, seeing me in public once, remarked that she was surprised to see me wearing shoes, and that they must be uncomfortable to me. She lived down the hill from us, and it was her eyes I thought were on me whenever I went outside after this.

I was never diagnosed with agoraphobia. The thing about agoraphobia is it's hard to make yourself go somewhere to be treated. I didn't go to a psychologist until I was in college, and by then, I had worked through the hardest part of it. I went anyway and talked about my family. I never spoke of the terror I felt, still some days; the jolt of suddenly realizing you're standing on ice and it is tilting you towards the darkness and cold of the water, and you can't move.

I had needed time to make sense of things; I'd needed a break. My father didn't know what to do with me, so he left me alone. He just tried not to make it worse. Slowly, I'd pulled myself out of that mire and ventured out into the world. It had just taken me longer than some.

It was not a happy time, in that house, and I knew on some level at least that autonomy was a step in the direction of happiness. If you control your own life, you can make it as good as you want.

Really, what I wanted to ask my therapist was why wasn't everyone like me? A person could go through life and do everything he or she is supposed to do and end up in a nursing home not even knowing his or her own name. So why bother? Why not just stay in bed? Maybe they all just didn't know, or maybe they already knew what I'd finally learned after two years of hiding; that nowhere was safe from change.

2012-01-05T04:00:00.000-08:00

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2012-01-02T04:00:00.001-08:00

Looking at my writing goals list for 2011, I managed to accomplish all but a couple things, which is pretty impressive considering that I had a child, started a new position at work, etc. I had hoped to finish my zombie novel. I did manage to whip it into shape, though. I have a solid 100 pages, but I also completely abandoned the outline in order to accomplish this, so it ground to a halt because I wasn't sure what direction in which to take it. I had also hoped to record some music, which didn't happen. I did start a new supernatural/comedy series and lots of other stuff, so there you go. I wanted to finish a series of stories, and I managed to write several of them, but have plenty more to go. Still, pretty good year.

I have 3 readings coming up this year, in February and April. I hope to have more. This would be my first goal for 2012.

I have a supernatural/comedy novel coming out any day now...my second goal is to market it successfully.

I intend to pay off our car so we have a little breathing room.

I intend to set up a recording area downstairs in our TV room and record some songs.

As far as writing, I have some projects I'd like to finish this year as well as some general things I'd like to move towards. The general things aren't so much goals as just directions. I'd like to write more formal poetry. I'd like to write more of the stories in the aforementioned series.

As far as formal writing goals for the year, they are as follows:

1. complete a draft of "Music" (working title). This is the second-oldest unfinished project I have. It has morphed into something completely different than when I started, but that's fine. It's essentially my Fight Club.

2. finish the zombie book! I want the damned thing off my desk!

3. write the sequel to the Necro-Files. I have a rough outline for this and lots of ideas.

4. undecided novel project. I have a dozen or so solid novel-ideas in various stages of completion. The frontrunners are:

--a collection of linked stories about a race war (this is already 1/3 completed).
--a slipstream novel about angels. This might end up being a long story.
--a Vonnegut/Burgess-esque futuristic novel about a cruise ship full of the last survivors of mankind. I have lots of jokes, lots of details, not much plot for this.
--a YA or maybe middle-grade anthropomprphic book (a la Animal Farm) about birds. I'm pretty excited about the prospect of this one.
--I have a couple literary fiction ideas brewing.

Thoughts?

2011-12-29T04:00:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year—just a few months ago, actually—I did a calculation regarding my aging mother, my very old dog, Kate, and my old cat, Memphis. Accounting for human years, dog years, and cat years, they were all in their late 80s. There is grief, and there is anticipatory grief, and I experienced some of the latter when I reckoned up the numbers.

I should rush to point out the problems with an implication that the grief over the loss a pet can be equated to the loss of one’s mother, or any person close to us. Rather, I will write that the calculation had me thinking about grief when it occurs in clusters.

I’m not going to write here about my mother, who died in September. I’ve done that already, elsewhere and am glad I did. Instead, I want to write about the love of pets. My love of pets.

(Careful readers of Right Hand Pointing, the online journal I founded and have edited for nearly 8 years, will recall (and be amused) that I specifically exclude writings about one’s pets in the submission guidelines. Fate, and Cortney Bledsoe have intersected to hand me a little punishment for that callousness.)

We decided to have Kate euthanized in November. She was old and suffering and was helped in life and into death by her fine veterinarian. Sad, indeed, but, you know, a long life, etc.

I’m writing this at 3:00 a.m. as Christmas approaches, awake because of a dose of night air and adrenaline. Here’s the story. Memphis, the cat, is 17. She’s got renal insufficiency. Lately she’s been walking around the house, crying loudly and in an unfamiliar way. It’s the sound I can only associate with a feline in heat, and I’m confident that she’s not in heat. I took her to the vet today and he assured me he could find nothing to lead him to believe that she is in pain. Her crying, he said, was probably the result of a touch of cat dementia, maybe some transient discomfort. Otherwise, he said, apart from the kidney problems, she appears in decent shape for an old cat. I drove her home and let her out of the car to spend a little time in the unseasonable warm we had today.

We have family with us for the holiday and they brought their dog Louise. Great dog. Louise had just slipped out of the house through an unlatched door and we didn’t realize she was in the yard. She went after Memphis, as her species is prone to do, and it was a terrifying thing to see. I was sure Louise was killing Memphis. My daughter and I finally broke up the fight. Memphis looked completely dazed and traumatized. I brought her in and put her under observation. When she seemed settled down and unhurt, I let her out to pee in the yard. She never leaves the yard. Hours later, she was missing. I walked the neighborhood before bedtime with a flashlight.

At 2:30 a.m. I woke. Still, she was not on the porch. Unheard of. I got dressed, backed my car out of the driveway and searched the neighborhood. I had a bad feeling. I feared she had died from internal injuries or that, traumatized, she had run away. As Christmas approaches in a few days, I feared we would all be anxious and grieving. I felt guilty for not keeping her away from the dog. For not returning her immediately to the vet. For letting her outside after the fight and then again, later, to pee.

The climax of the story is anticlimactic. When I pulled up in the driveway, feeling miserable, there she was, petitioning for reentry. I scooped her up and I thought about our love for pets. Actually, what I thought was "I love this cat."

A few years ago I was in Boston visiting Harvard and attended a Mark Doty reading at the Harvard Bookstore. It was from Dog Years, his wonderful book about the dogs that were his companions during the loss of his lover to HIV/AIDS. During the Q&A a man said, “Here’s what I don’t understand about you dog people, or you cat people, either. You get the pet. You develop this bond. The pet lives a relatively short life and dies. You go through this grief. And then, what do you do? You get another pet and go through it all again.”

We all chuckled, but not Mark Doty. He thought for about two seconds and said, “The agreement to participate in this life is a pact with grief. Isn’t it?”

My mother’s body lies in Grant County, Arkansas. Kate’s ashes are—I don’t know where they are, actually. Memphis sits with me on the couch, interfering with my ability to operate the computer mouse by nuzzling my mouse hand, looking for me to scratch her chin. In nine days, New Year’s Day.

* * *

Dale Wisely is the founding editor of Right Hand Pointing and also co-founded and co-edits White Knuckle Press (digital chapbooks of prose poems, www.whiteknucklepress.com) and the new journal cur.ren.cy (topical poetry, www.currencylit.com). Day job: He has been a clinical psychologist for 30 years and currently serves as Director of Student Services at Mountain Brook Schools in Alabama.

2011-12-26T04:00:00.000-08:00

I might've been 5, 6. Dad was 3 sheets to the wind. I remember him standing in the southwest corner of the living room holding a beer, grinning with his cap pushed back. There was a knock on the door, and Uncle Wheelbarrow came in, dressed as Santa Claus. He was carrying a glass of something dark and evil-smelling. I imagine it was bourbon because that was a favorite drink of my father and his friends. Mom had her arms crossed, and, as Dad got a chair for Uncle Wheelbarrow, declared she was going to bed. She made a brief argument that it was time for me to go as well, but Dad repelled this attack, and she steamed away to bed.

"Come sit on my lap and tell me what you want for Christmas, little boy," Uncle Wheelbarrow said. I didn't want to. Before, I hadn't wanted to go to bed, but now, I'd have given anything to be out of there, even if it meant going to bed early on Christmas Eve.

"Come on, Boy," Dad said.

I sat on Uncle Wheelbarrow's lap. His bear was coming off. He still held the glass of liquor, and it sloshed and spilled on his leg, making him curse: "Sit still!" I was terrified. There was no novelty in this, only confusion about the rules of a game I didn't understand. Uncle Wheelbarrow leaned over me, his hot breath in my ear. "Tell Santa what you want for Christmas."

Here was something every child understands: when the strange man in the red suit asks what you want, it's time to unleash the greed. I listed some things--I don't remember what, exactly. The last thing I said was a Nerf football.

"Football?" Uncle Wheelbarrow roared. "What's wrong with you? Don't you want a woman, Boy?"

I may have started crying; whatever happened, Dad deemed it no longer funny, and I was sent to bed.

* * *

Again, maybe I was 6, though this was a ritual we repeated every year. Christmas Eve, my sister and I snuck into our brother's room and stole his longest socks. We raided the kitchen for treats -- oranges, almonds. Julie had managed to acquire candy bars, so we stuck them in. We drew pictures for everyone and put those in, as well, until the socks were full. Then we hung them and waited for Christmas morning.

Dad's best friend, an old army buddy named James Kennedy, gave us giant trash bags full of presents when we were younger. It was like manna from heaven: toys, games, never clothes, culminating in a box full of quarters he'd saved all year. This was our college fund. Christmas morning while Dad was working, Julie and I would sit on the floor by the tree counting quarters. There was usually a couple hundred dollars worth. When the bank opened, we'd take it all and watch it slide through the change counter.

* * *

Christmas Eve, I'd come home from college to see a girl I used to go out with. I went to a party with her, but things went bad. I went home and slept on Dad's couch until he woke, after dawn, then I headed out, back to college, ahead of a big storm. I made it to Ozark when I hit the ice, slid around backwards, and careened off the road into a tree. I managed to get the car back on the road and limped along until a patrol car came and pointed out that my axle was bent. The policewoman gave me a ride to the station after the car was towed. An old convict fed me Christmas dinner -- turkey and stuffing. The cop took me to a motel where I spent the next two days until my friends, who were stranded along various parts of the interstate as well, could come. Arkansas was frosted with a blanket of ice. I read Flannery O'Connor, and an ex-girlfriend I'd dumped called to check on me.

* * *

Last night, I played with Ellie in front of Jillian's parents' Christmas tree. Jillian and her father played a duet in the other room -- Jillian on violin, her father on piano, while I dive-bombed Ellie with a stuffed-chicken. She squealed and laughed every time I brought the stuffed animal close to her and reached for it in anticipation, until, finally, I made it nuzzle her head. Then she would squeal with joy. As the music was played, Ellie turned and stared at the tree. I couldn't help kissing her head.

2011-12-22T04:00:00.000-08:00

I emailed my buddy Marko Fong:

Cortney asked me to write about something that gives me joie de vivre – something interesting, something I am passionate about, something that blows me away. And now I am paralyzed! Joie de vivre? Passionate? Positive things? Interesting things? What does this have to do with me? You have said my stories are about outsiders. My blog
posts are about TV (and I am pretty snarky, not really positive) and second person! What is interesting about second person? I mean, to normal people? Your Literary Country Club laughs at second person! What am I passionate about? …. What blows me away? Just picking something and labeling it "this blows me away" is scary –someone is going to say, "THAT is what blows you away? What is wrong with you?" Like a Rorschach test. I always hated those, for that exact reason. "What do you mean, you see a bear with a huge penis?" And positive? Who, me?

So far I have come up with: My shower curtain. It is not my shower curtain any more – it got all moldy and I replaced it years ago, but I really liked it and realizing
I liked it was a kind of turning point, that I could have something that just pleased me, it did not have to be "art" and would not change my life in any way but would offer me some measure of enjoyment or comfort once in a while, like when something bad happens and you lie on the couch and someone is there to put a quilt over you and bring you a cup of tea, it will not fix the problem but it is comfort. But…passionate, joie de vivre, blows me away: a shower curtain and a cup of tea?

Science. I just happened to be watching a PBS Nova episode on fractals tonight. Right there, I have lost just about everyone - six people in the country watch Nova! And I do not understand fractals at all! But the thing about the coastline – the smaller you make your ruler, the longer the coastline gets, and if your ruler is infinitely small, the coastline is infinitely long. And the old space as a rubber sheet thing. Infinity. Infinity plus one. Imaginary numbers. I do not understand these things at all, but they are SO COOL! But does it make sense to say "I love this even though I can not explain it enough to tell you what it is"?

"Different Trains" by Steve Reich. A modernist musical composition from the 80s, using a string quartet and a tape of trains and spoken voices of Holocaust survivors - I fell alseep with the TV on one night and woke up to this, it was a documentary musically commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, on PBS again – see, Auschwitz and PBS, how can you put those into a "joie de vivre" post? - and how he was a kid in America travelling back and forth between
his divorced parents in NY and LA and if he had been in Germany he would have been riding very different trains. It gives me goosebumps just to write that. But how to convey that so it means something to someone else? What do you think I seem positive and passionate about? Or does the very idea make you giggle like it does me?

And Marko said:

"…your blog persona is a very happy individual, constantly probing the world for clues about something, I think. It is interesting that you mention almost no in person interaction with other people, but it's also fascinating to see how all these different things stimulate your imagination, and make you examine the world."

Maybe that is it, that is what blows me away, figuring things out! Why do I like looking at my shower curtain? How can a coastline possibly be infinitely long? How can music hurt in a way that feels so good? Is there more to second person technically than the pronoun "you"? This last thing is in honor of my Second Person Study, now a 16-part exploration of second person including two texts on narratology (and a third in the works, and trust me, I have to take it one sentence at a
time) and several second-person and person-and-a-half stories all of which was generated by my observation that I have never read a bad published second person story yet so many people seem to hate it and warn against the evils of writing second person.

I do not think I will ever figure these things out, but I will have fun trying! And there are so many more wonderful enigmas to think about!

* * *

Zin Kenter lives, writes, reads, and plays in Maine, and is currently
contemplating the following: DSL, cable, or landlord-provided wifi? Is
this the year to try the Jacques Torres Buche de Noel? Heifer
International, UNICEF, or the Preble Street Resource Center, or an
even split among them all? Come visit at A Just Recompense
(http://sloopie72.wordpress.com), where Zin sometimes blogs.

2011-12-19T04:55:00.000-08:00

We were given a lot of children’s books before Ellie was born, which is awesome, but it means that we have books we probably wouldn’t have chosen, ourselves. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful; we’ve discovered some great books this way, for example, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, a cautionary tale about being careful what you wish for. But the messages of some of these books isn’t quite so benign. Such as:

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Mike Mulligan is a working class guy who just likes to dig using his steam shovel. He "digs a little faster and a little better" when people are watching and appreciate him, which is a wonderful sentiment. Unfortunately, the march of progress kicked Mulligan in the face, and he was replaced with gasoline-powered machines. In a last-ditch effort to remain useful, Mulligan digs the basement for the town hall, but boxes himself in and can't get out. So they leave him there and build the town hall around and above him. The book presents this as a happy ending, but how can it be? Mulligna is trapped in a cellar, away from the watching, appreciative eyes of people who once made him 'dig a little faster and better.' He is useless, now, relegated to the basement where progress can continue without anyone having to see this cast-off relic from the past. As I was reading this story to my daughter, I was aghast. It's a terrible message for kids.

A book with a much more positive message on the treatment of the working class is Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type. The story goes like this: the cows are cold out in the barn, so they refuse to give anymore milk until the farmer gives them electric blankets. Then the chickens get in on it. The animals communicate by typing messages on an old typewriter, hence the title. The book balances silliness with a valid message about respecting others and being grateful to others for the work they do for our benefit. It also has a funny twist I won't spoil.

Here's one that surprised me: The Polar Express. I didn't remember this book at all, even after reading it. I have to admit, I was excited about it until I read it. The story is, basically, it's Christmas time, and these kids hop a train to the North Pole. They're warmed up with stories about Santa giving them stuff. When they get to town, they encounter a multitude of elves gathering to hear the great fuhrer Das Santa speak. Seriously, I felt chills reading about these interchangeable elves practically worshiping this unapproachable Santa. The scene has all the warmth and joy of an SS rally. One of the kids is given a gift, which keeps him faithful all of his life. Everything about this book is lacking in anything one would want to associate with Christmas. The children are greedy. Santa is treated like a totalitarian ruler. The whole thing left me feeling dirty.

A much better book about giving would be, of course, The Giving Tree. This is quite possibly the greatest children's story ever written, from the point of view of a parent. It perfectly sums up the relationship between a parent and child. I challenge anyone to read this book without sobbing like a kitten.

I've discovered lots of other great books, of course. The books of Rosemary Wells and Mercer Mayer are my favorites right now. One thing that bothers me about these books is that the anthropomorphic creatures in them wear shirts but never pants. But that's a post for another day.

2011-12-15T04:00:00.000-08:00

Jessy Randall: Now let's discuss pizza bagels. What I particularly like about the pizza bagels available at multiple Twelve Corners venues…

Daniel M. Shapiro: We should start the blog with "Now let's discuss pizza bagels," no preface of any kind.

JR: So to continue, what I particularly like about the Twelve Corners pizza bagels is that you get a little bit of flavor/teeth-glintiness of tinfoil in some bites.

DS: Indeed.

JR: Not all bites, but some, because it's not like you're going to be able to remove all the tinfoil, because you are HUNGRY…

DS: You become a sort of trashcan rat for it, as if your life depends on getting every tidbit of cheese.

JR: And also you have only 18 minutes to get to The Bagel Shop or Murray's and back to school.

DS: Right. You're not going to go without cheese on account of foil.

JR: Which is pretty much my philosophy of life. So which are better, Murray's or Bagel Shop pizza bagels, and why? Obviously they are both GREAT, in the way that Shakespeare, etc. are GREAT…

DS: But this is probably too obscure—writing about food that was sold at a place that doesn't exist anymore. Or maybe that's the point: We love things that don't exist anymore.

JR: Well, the Bagel Shop is still there and I got a pizza bagel there in recent memory.

DS: Murray's was just the best, though. Bagel Shop didn't have a chance.

JR: What made Murray's better? We need concrete details here. We're not just fluffing around on our unicorn butterflies here.

DS: Burning hot—perfect for when you're freezing your ass off.

JR: Yes, you can eat them with mittens on, which probably also leads to the tinfoil situation.

DS: The bagels stayed crunchy; never soggy from sauce. The cheese overran the bagel, thus forming the tinfoil bond.

JR: OK. I am in complete agreement. Also, the macaroni salad there had little bits of black olives chopped up into it, which was really good, and you couldn't even tell what it was. I finally asked. I don’t think I ever would have figured it out otherwise. But let's return to the pizza bagels; we don't want to get off topic.

DS: You're telling me, but I didn't mention macaroni salad, did I?

JR: At this point we should insert Anna's recipe for pizza bagels.

DS: OK.

JR: Did you try it? It totally works. My kids loved them.

Anna Primrose Bendiksen’s Recipe for Pizza Bagels!

Essentially the first step is to make garlic bread out of the bagels, but without toasting them as much as you would for garlic bread. This is how I do it. Crush some garlic together with a bit of kosher salt (I do this with a mortar and pestle but a garlic press would work) and mix into olive oil, then brush all over the bagel halves. Bake at 400 degrees F for about 5-8 minutes, or until barely browned. There are a couple of ways to make pizza sauce. Aage's way, which is more involved than mine and better when you're making a whole pizza, I think, is to sauté some more crushed garlic in olive oil and add a can of pureed or crushed tomatoes when the garlic is about to brown. Add pizza seasoning (Penzeys is very good) and simmer. My way—this is especially good for pizza bagels—is to take tomato paste and add a touch of crushed garlic and a lot of pizza seasoning. No cooking involved. At this point you have the makings of a very easy party menu that kids and teenagers especially appreciate. Lay out bagels, sauce and toppings and people can make their own. Place on a rimmed pan (the bagels, not the people) and bake, again at 400 degrees, until done. The whole wrapping-in-foil thing is something I do afterwards.

JR: Are we done with pizza bagels at least for now? Can we move on to Country Sweet chicken wings? Or is that too much Rochester and we need to mix it up a little? And is it true that someone from Brighton High School once drove 27 hours for Country Sweet and was that person Steven Kotok?

DS: Maybe the whole blog entry will be about loving Rochester.

JR: No, because that's boring ... right?

DS: Probably.

JR: I would have thought writing about food in general would be boring to the people who aren’t actually eating the food, just hearing about it. But then, there's the Food Channel, and so many food books and so on, so it seems you don't have to have the food in front of you to enjoy thinking about it.

DS: Steve might've driven from Minnesota, but it wasn't just for Country Sweet, I'm sure.

JR: I feel like someone drove a very long way, had some, and then drove back, maybe stopping to sleep but that's it. The story is apocryphal. We have no proof of it. It does, however, point to the allure of Country Sweet. And let me tell you, there's no point buying the sauce in a jar. Sorry Mom, I know you gave me a jar as a present, but it's just not the same. Part of the taste of Country Sweet wings is the plastic seat beneath your butt, the fluorescent lights, the slightly-sick look of everyone at your table. I think Daniel Pinkwater has a passage in the Alan Mendelsohn book that describes a similar eating venue (I don't want to call it a "restaurant"). I could dig up that quote and we could quote it. Oh, at some point in this discussion we should talk about made-up food in books that you've always wanted to eat, cuz that's literary.

DS: Have you seen Defending Your Life? The Albert Brooks movie?

JR: Yes, but I'm not sure why that is relevant. It was in Mother that we learn of the protective ice covering on ice cream.

DS: Because there's a scene in it where Brooks is eating with Rip Torn. There are several discussions about how some people in Judgment City use more of their brains than other people. Rip Torn eats this little tidbit of something, and Brooks nags him; he wants to try a piece. But Torn uses some large percentage of his brain, and to dumber people, the food tastes like crap.

JR: Literally like crap? Or just bad? What does the food look like in the scene? Maybe we can link to a youtube video.

DS: I think it's kind of small and nondescript, whereas regular people get to eat as much regular food as they want. I love the idea that smart people like crappy tasting food, or that if your brain isn't developed, you think it tastes bad. Kris and I are always quoting from that movie. One of my favorites: Brooks goes to a club, and there's a comedian on stage. Of course, all the people in the audience are dead, so the comedian's banter is odd. Plus, he's not funny at all. He asks Brooks, "How did you die?" and he says, "On stage—like you."

JR: I tried to read Albert Brooks's novel 2030 , which takes place in a future where health care has pretty much bankrupted everybody. It made me so depressed I had to stop. But the good thing about that was, I COULD stop. I’m allowed to stop reading a book if I want to. Anyway, that thing about smart people having different taste in food, that must come from things like caviar or fine wine, foods that don’t taste very good unless you “develop your palate” or some such bullshit. I'm sure we could make a list of foods that are bad when you're a kid and good when you're an adult and vice versa. Like, Spaghetti-Os are good when you’re a kid, and disgusting when you’re an adult (though Ross often eats the kids’ leftover Spaghetti-Os, which is just gross). Or seltzer water. I thought seltzer was horrible when I was a kid, but on the other hand, I remember when I lived in New York City I overheard a little kid in a stroller ask his mom for some seltzer. So maybe if you grow up in New York City you automatically have a more sophisticated palate.

DS: Stinky cheese, gorgonzola.

JR: I would have spit out seltzer in horror until the age of probably twenty. And here’s this kid, little enough to be in a stroller so three or four at the oldest, asking for it.

DS: I don't really like seltzer, even now.

JR: I also remember hearing a kid in New York whining "I want lo mein!" the way non-New-York kids might whine "I want chicken nuggets." But! We are being positive! We are talking about things we love! And I do love New York, and I love Eli's Bread in New York, those long loaves that are really chewy and oniony like a bagel crossed with a French baguette. It’s the sourdough onion bread in this catalog: http://www.elizabar.com/assets/pdfs/ebbroch2010.pdf

DS: I like quail. Kids don't eat quail.

JR: On another topic, but still things we love, I'm listening to Etta James right now.

DS: I listened to her album Tell Mama about 79 times in a row last year.

JR: She 's making me like the song "Stormy Weather" again. Should we talk about the Pittsburgh salad?

DS: I don't love those, though. I haven't even had a Pittsburgh salad.

JR: Okay, how about just the Pittsburgh habit of putting fries in things and on things. Don’t they put fries right on top of hamburgers? And a Pittsburgh salad has fries in it?

DS: Well, they do love fries here. At the ballpark, you can get a giant plate of fries with chili, cheese, jalapenos, etc.

JR: Celie asked me today, "Guess what I'm going to have to eat at my birthday party?" (Her birthday is months away.) So I made some guesses that were all wrong. I asked for a hint. She said, something that goes with fries. I said: hamburgers, hot dogs, sandwiches? Uh ... what? The answer was dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. Of course. Changing the subject, the best pizza is Giordano's in Martha's Vineyard. The best donuts are at the top of Pikes Peak. The best iced coffee is at the little coffee nook in the student center of Colorado College.

DS: Mineo's pizza, about 3/4 of a mile from here, is the best.

JR: No.

DS: People have it FedEx'd to them everywhere.

JR: If you say so. Someday I will visit you and Kris and find out. A very good topping on pizza is thinly cut eggplant, fried in breadcrumbs.

DS: Eggplant?

JR: Yes. I think we might have had it while you were here. From Borriello Brothers? It looks like rectangles of sausage, but it's eggplant, and it’s really good on super-skinny-crust pizza.

DS: Ah. I just remembered something:

JR: That I'm right?

DS: How I judge the quality of a restaurant. I use the same dish across multiple restaurants, the dish that should be good at any decent place. For example, I judge Mexican restaurants by enchiladas.

JR: My decider for Mexican would be chile rellenos. But that probably wouldn’t work, because different places do it so differently. But on the other hand, since that’s definitely what I’m going to order, judging by the chile rellenos would work for me.

DS: I judge donut places by jelly donut. Some say glazed would be a better choice, but I disagree completely.

JR: That's all wrong. I don't like jelly donuts. Oh, speaking of jelly donuts, I'm reading Fat Men from Space to Celie right now, and she totally wants to get a tooth radio.

DS: You would have to have someone else try the jelly donut then.

JR: Yes, I'd have to bring along a ringer. Will would do it.

DS: Dunkin' Donuts basically sucks, in part because their jelly donut sucks. It's harder to be sure that they suck if you try just their glazed.

JR: When we were on the east coast for a vacation, we saw so many Dunkin’ Donuts shops that the kids had a game where they tried to hold their breath between them. This was not actually possible, but gives you an idea of how many there were. We don't have Dunkin’ Donuts in Colorado.

DS: I can walk to one in 3 minutes, but I prefer to drive to the place that has red velvet donuts with icing.

JR: The best donuts, besides the plain ones at the top of Pikes Peak, are the blueberry cake donuts from the Donut Mill in Woodland Park. They are only available ... I was about to say "seasonally" but that would be nonsense. They are only available sometimes.

DS: Right. But you haven't tried red velvet ones with icing.

JR: What is the big deal about red velvet?! WHY DO PEOPLE GO SO CRAZY FOR RED VELVET? It doesn't taste like ANYTHING. It's like eating AIR that has a lot of calories.

DS: It's damn good. It tastes like cake. And yes: I tried the jelly donut first.

JR: It is a complete WASTE of a dessert, a description I normally reserve for flan.

DS: No. It tastes like donuts, in a donut.

JR: No. Red velvet SUCKS.

DS: Right. And blueberry cake is super special.

JR: Godiva had a red velvet flavored truffle. Worst truffle they ever made.

DS: Well, it doesn't make sense to make a red velvet truffle.

JR: We're getting too negative, talking about flan, yuck

DS: This place also has a donut filled with chocolate buttercream.

JR: I was about to say something so grandpa-ish like "I remember when donuts were 35 cents!", but I will refrain from saying that.

DS: Assuming chocolate buttercream doesn't taste like nothing to you, it's really good

JR: Chocolate buttercream is not nothing! Can you name my reference? M.... Mo....

DS: Mötley Crüe.

JR: Moo… Moon....

DS: Moonstruck.

JR: Yup. "Our marriage is not nothing."

DS: Mötley Crüe said that too.

JR: So anyway, what else are we going to expound upon? I would like to praise sauteed brussels sprouts with walnuts. I would also like to put in a word about the combination of beets and goat cheese. Also, we should have a lettuce-off. Radicchio! Arugula! Endive! MACHE!!!

DS: Arugula is inedible. It’s the weeds I pull out of my back yard.

JR: Have you had mache? It's a type of lettuce. It's seasonal (like the blueberry cake donuts). It's very soft.

DS: I will pass.

JR: It looks kind of like bunches of clover. It's very delicious, with a mild flavor. Is there any lettuce you would enter into the lettuce-off? Or am I going to have to run this whole thing myself?

DS: I am not inspired by lettuce, even if it's seasonal.

JR: Perhaps it would be appropriate at this juncture to link to my poem “The Lettuce Connoisseur,” http://morpo.com/index.php?c=display&vol=10&iss=3&disp=422.

DS: I think this blog should be called The People's Cort, by the way.

JR: Bud Cort.

DS: They were showing Harold and Maude at one of our theaters recently.

JR: I would gladly cook dinner for the Bud Cort of Harold and Maude and serve it through a strangely sexual sculpture.

DS: I expect not to be invited.

JR: You can distract Maude!

DS: Bud Cort was good in Brewster McCloud, too.

JR: No, he wasn't. Wait, am I thinking of the right movie? Is he a creepy monk?

DS: No. He's basically Harold.

JR: OK, what movie am I thinking of then? Was there a movie of The Chocolate War and he was in it? Yup. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001069/#Actor

DS: I never saw that.

JR: Don't bother. When this Etta James CD is over, I'm going to bed.

DS: Food is too broad a topic. Maybe we could just write about making pies. Or something more specific than everything.

JR: We could talk about making pies. The trouble is, I don't make my own crust, and that is shameful. But I still make pies, and nobody here complains, so shut up!

DS: The difficulty of making your own crust is overrated, even if you do it the way the crazy lady in my book does it. She suggests that you press foil into the pie pan, press the crust into the foil, bake the crust, freeze the crust, remove it from the pan (by lifting out the foil), remove it from the foil, and put it back into the pan before filling it. This sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually brilliant. Nothing will ever leak through the crust. Ever.

JR: Amy also says making the crust isn’t that hard. But no matter how easy it is, it’s harder than using the refrigerated kind of pre-made crust, and much messier.

DS: True.

JR: If I use refrigerated crust, I might make as many as two pies a month. If I had to make my own crust maybe there would be one pie per year

DS: There are pies I've refused to make because they're too easy.

JR: Well, that is just perverse. Do they taste bad if they are made easy? Is this a question for the ages?

DS: It's just boring.

JR: I see, you make pie for the joy of making pie, the challenge. Whereas I make pie because it causes Ross and Will to get those swirly-eyes that cartoon characters get.

DS: If I'm making it at my mother-in-law's house, I'll do it based on whatever she has. But on my own, I won't do pumpkin pie, or maybe I'll get the pumpkin without any of the spices in it.

JR: I am on my last Etta James song now.

DS: Which album?

JR: At Last! (It has the exclamation mark.) I say I'm listening to a CD but actually I'm listening to iTunes now that I have uploaded the CD, which came from the library.

DS: Try Tell Mama soon. It is my favorite southern R&B album, done in Alabama, even though most of her stuff was made in Chicago.

JR: I will.

DS: There's even an odd version of "I Got You Babe" on it; almost decent.

JR: !

DS: My favorite song on there is "Just a Little Bit." "Security" is another good one.

JR: I sang "Respect" for the kids this morning because they were squabbling and wanted to tell them to treat each other with respect. Celie got really wide-eyed and was like "sing that again!"

DS: Good.

JR: And then she asked if I'd just made that song up. So, that tells me I need to work on their music education.

DS: "Do Right Woman" is on Tell Mama. I think every female singer recorded "Do Right Woman" around that time.

JR: I love “Do Right Woman,” so I will get that CD from the library next.

* * *

Daniel M. Shapiro is a schoolteacher who lives in Pittsburgh. He is the author of three chapbooks: The 44th-Worst Album Ever (NAP Books, forthcoming), Trading Fours (Pudding House Press, forthcoming), and Teeth Underneath (FootHills Publishing). He is the co-author of Interruptions (Pecan Grove Press), a collection of collaborations with Jessy Randall. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Chiron Review, Gargoyle, RHINO, Sentence, and Forklift, Ohio. His poetry website is http://littlemyths-dms.blogspot.com/

Jessy Randall is the Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College. Her stories, poems, poetry comics, and other things have appeared in Asimov's, McSweeney's, Mudfish, Rattle, Sentence, and West Wind, and her collection A Day in Boyland (Ghost Road, 2007) was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. She has a new collection, Injecting Dreams into Cows, forthcoming from Red Hen in 2012. With Danial M. Shapiro, she is the co-author of Interruptions: Collaborative Poems (Pecan Grove 2011). Her website is http://personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall/, and she blogs about library shenanigans at http://libraryshenanigans.wordpress.com/. She lives with her family in Colorado Springs.

2011-12-12T04:30:00.000-08:00

When I was fourteen or so, my mother started having fits of dementia, brought on by Huntington's disease. The fits started with her moaning as though she were in great pain. None of us could figure out what was causing it. She was more or less healthy, aside from the obvious. The first time was at night. She started howling around two a.m. My older brother and I were home and both came running to find my father sitting on the edge of the bed holding her hand, perplexed. Eventually, she fell back asleep.

It was a haunting noise. Inhuman and suffering, it sounded like a damned soul in some Bosch painting. It lasted for a few weeks and then just as suddenly stopped. We couldn’t find anything wrong. Neither could the nurses who came to check on her. We decided it was a phase.

She had several phases. Early on, she ate onions with everything. Onions with peanut butter, onions in her ice cream, she would cut a whole onion up and eat it raw. During another phase she watched the local ABC affiliate on TV exclusively, which was broadcast from the same town where she’d gone to college. She would get out of bed, turn on the TV and stare. Once, the antenna went out, and we couldn’t get reception for a couple days. On these days she would rise, turn on the TV and stare at the static for a few moments, then turn it off and go back to bed. I once tried to change the channel, and looked up to find her charging me like an enraged bull, her walker swinging after me as she pushed me out of the way. This was more surprising than painful, and after she changed the channel back, she sat back down and proceeded to stare out the window.

The moaning phase was the most disturbing, though. I couldn’t stand it because there was no way to appease her. She howled until her voice gave out or she fell asleep. Whenever it started, I left. Sometimes she stood at the door, her moans echoing out over the hills. Coming home from school, I stood at the bottom of the hill, staring up at our house, dreading what I might find inside.

One Saturday, I left her standing at the door, until she finally gave up and went back to watching TV. I was walking down the hill from my house when I came upon my cousin.

My cousin, one of the ones I'd gone to the Baptist church with, had heard the call and was to become a preacher. In going to youth group, I’d always felt uncomfortable around him. I viewed him as my better, because of the call, and in general because he was older and his family was more well-off. But his apparent sincerity was embarrassing, like a religious hall monitor, or the kid left in charge of taking down names when the teacher steps out of class.

His mother rented out a trailer on a plot of land just down the hill from my father’s house, though it was vacant at the time. It was part of the family land, an area consisting of stock ponds, pasture for cattle, and steep ridges that I liked to walk.

He was coming out of the trailer, which they were remodeling for a new tenet, when I met him.

“How are you?” he asked. "Haven't seen you in church lately."

Maybe he saw it in my eyes, but obviously I wasn’t doing well. He reached into
his car and pulled out a Bible.

“You know," he said, "even if it seems like no one else does, Jesus loves you. You have to accept Jesus into your heart. That way, nothing can hurt you. Nothing is stronger than our savior.”

I was shocked that he would preach to me, but at the same time, he struck a chord. Maybe this was what that whole religion thing was about, I thought. I had been going to church all my life, but I hadn't really ever felt anything spiritual. In Sunday school, I was much more afraid of the preachers' wives than of hell. And in church proper, I was mostly just bored, and a lot of what the preacher said seemed not only dense, but insincere. More often than not, they talked about tithes and how we should give money. Everything else seemed to be an abstraction I couldn't get my head around. I didn't see how any of it applied to the real world. It had never touched me.

My cousin talked to me about the story of Job, and said that sometimes God tests us; sometimes we have to suffer, but it doesn't mean that He isn't there, watching out for us. My eyes began to tear. It made sense to me. I understood, suddenly, what I was supposed to have been feeling all those Sundays.

As my cousin talked, I felt something open up inside me like a cramping muscle suddenly loosening. All of the neglect, the frustration, the anger, the unfairness of my life flowed out of me.

“Will you accept Jesus into your heart?” he asked.

I could hear the water of the stock pond lapping against its banks behind us. A train passed on the far side of the pasture. It was like the whole world was listening.

“Yes,” I said, staring into his face.

“Will you accept Jesus into your heart?”

“Yes!”

“Then be saved.”

I felt a warmth enter my body, replacing the void left by the exit of my anger, my
fear. A smile spread over my face and I no longer felt the tears on my cheeks. Everything was warm and safe. Everything was going to be all right.

He talked to me for fifteen minutes or so and then looked at his watch.

“I have to go. It was good talking to you, Cortney. You should come to worship with us tomorrow,” he said.

"I will," I said, as he got in his car.

What a good preacher he’ll be, I thought. I felt better than I could remember
feeling. Jesus. Jesus would help me. I started back up that steep hill.

I felt strangely content as I climbed. I almost looked forward to going back home, helping Mom until my father came home. This was how I was supposed to feel, at least, and I tried very hard to feel it. I knew that it would be well after dark before my father stumbled in drunk. Who knew when my brother and sister would show up. But Jesus would be there.

Mom was getting worse and worse. She’d been falling down for no reason lately, her muscle coordination less and less reliable. She hadn't left the house in months. She could hardly do for herself anymore. Lots of days, if it wasn’t for me cooking, she wouldn’t have anything to eat. Life was getting hard, and it was turning me bitter. I begrudged her the time I had to spend caring for her. I hated being left there, alone with her, and I felt guilty for my ill feelings towards her. And friends? Try bringing someone into the house who didn't have to be there. See what he would think of us. The last one lasted for a little over an hour before she chased him out, screaming. The whole situation was too big for me to make sense of. But now Jesus would be there. He would help.

With every step I felt stranger about the whole thing. When I stepped in the door, my mother saw me and started howling again. I tried to calm her down. I tried talking to her, asking what was wrong, but she only howled.

I checked the TV but it was on her favorite station. I made her a sandwich and offered it, but she pushed it away. I tried ignoring her, going into another room, but she followed me. As the minutes passed, I became more and more agitated. I started yelling at her.

"Shut up!" I yelled. "Shut up!"

She stopped for a moment, but only a moment.

I played music and screamed back at her.

"You won't beat me," I said. "I can overcome this." And she kept howling, following me around and howling until finally, back in the living room I pushed her away from me. She fell onto the couch and was shocked into silence.

I was appalled at myself for having pushed her, but at the same time, it had made her quiet. She tried to stand up and slipped awkwardly back down onto the couch.

There was a photo on the wall to her left from her and Dad's wedding. In it, she was smiling, sweet and pretty in an open and easy way. Her hair had been blond and long. I remembered all the old photos my sister and I used to go through in Mom's photo albums. Some of the styles were so dated they were almost funny. In some, she had big piles of hair shaped into beehives and waves. Others were more tasteful. She'd always been pretty. People acted like she was a movie star; something about her was too good to be here. Now on the couch, her hair was matted and dirty, greying and cut short for convenience.

I stepped towards her to help her up and she flinched. It shocked me and I went into the bathroom and locked the door to get away from her, and from the shame over what I'd done.

I remembered when I was a child that my aunt and cousins had invited me to birthday parties. They always gave the other kids presents so we wouldn’t feel left out, but they were always cheap things wrapped in nice paper with elaborate bows. I felt, then, hiding in the bathroom, as though I’d been given another elaborately wrapped gift, but when I unwrapped it, I discovered that there was nothing but box.

After a few minutes, my mother came to the bathroom door and banged against it with her walker. I kept quiet, hoping she would go away. I thought back on what my cousin had said earlier and knew that he had lied. Jesus wasn't there. There was no one in the house but me and her. If I was wrong, if Jesus was there, it didn't matter because it did me no good; all he was doing was watching. She’d believed all her life, and what had it got her? But she wasn't cursed; she was just a sick woman. Genetics had made her that way, not anything else. There was no devil, no savior, just a door that couldn't keep out the sound of her screaming.

2011-12-08T04:00:00.000-08:00

What Thou Lovest Well Remains, With The Possible Exception Of Fire Maidens Of Outer Space

Deep down, to this day, I love sitting in a darkened theater waiting for the movie curtains to swing aside. A huge screen is revealed and the lights slowly dim. Then life springs onto the screen—big, bright images—but more than images—this is what comes alive before me—a world made of light. I can’t call this solely a love of movies, not exactly. The whole theater is part of it. Even today, though there usually aren’t curtains and the screen is not that big, every time I go to see a film, I feel it is saving my life.

So I thought I would try to respect that primary, primal movie-going experience, and capture a small part of its phenomenology. This is how I’m going to do it.

I was lucky to live a couple of blocks away from a big old theater—the Westmont—in south Jersey—where 50 cent matinees played every Saturday at noon. Two movies, cartoons, previews. Most of the movies I’ve seen there, I’ve seen only that one time. Here is approximately what I remember from three of them (Note: I (emphatically) do not recommend these movies. They are probably explodingly awful pieces of dreck. But some part of them lodged in my brain and filled me with awe. Go figure.)

Fire Maidens of Outer Space

The set up: Astronaut guys go to a moon of Jupiter or Saturn and find girls in tunics and one old guy.

What I remember, more or less: The main thing with this movie is the use of one of Alexander Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances (the Gliding Dance of the Maidens), also known as Stranger In Paradise by Al Alberts and The Four Aces. I have a hazy impression of fire maidens dancing around an altar or temple-y thing to the tune. But my only big visual takeaway from FMOS is the monster. This was a tall guy in a black leotard and what I remember as a really messed up monster face, all contorted flesh and uncombed hair. That sounds like a beatnik but it wasn’t. Specifically, I remember how the monster gained entrance to the-whatever-it-was palace, temple, city. The (let’s say) palace is surrounded by an electrified fence, which the monster is afraid of. This keeps him at bay. Then (as I remember it) he sees one of the astronauts getting around the electricity by putting a ladder over the fence. The monster pushes a tree over and against the wall and sparks fly and the electrified part of the wall shorts out. Then he climbs over wreaks havoc. People get killed. But I was thinking “I am totally going to get over an electrified fence someday with that little trick.”

What I might have had from the snack counter in the lobby: Goobers (never Raisinettes), Sugar Babies (never Sugar Daddy).

What’s great about Fire Maidens of Outer Space? Aside from the title, that music. And, slightly, the cheesecake tunics the fire maidens dance around in. If you’re about 10 years old, male, and had lived a sheltered life by today’s standards, it was totally “Hotcha!”

Voyage to the Seventh Planet

The set up: Boy I still cannot tell you what the fuck this movie is about. I remember the poster had a giant rat-bat-spider on it that played a really minor role in the movie, and that’s about it. I gather it was about a crew of astronaut guys who land on the seventh planet. The seventh planet is, according to my count, the hilarious-to-13-year-old-boys Uranus. Which may be why it wasn’t called Voyage to Uranus (snicker). I think it started on earth, maybe with an ominous “What the hell is going on out there on Planet 7?” But, like a lot of these memories, I could be making that up.

What I remember, more or less: Not much. Astronaut guys land, getting out of their aerodynamic spaceship. It seems the Seventh Planet is basically a big Christmas tree farm. Weird, creepy, uncanny things happen, and they leave.

What I might have had from the snack counter in the lobby: Hershey bar with almonds, Mr. Goodbar, Jujubes.

What’s great about Voyage to the Seventh Planet? There were a few indelible images or scenes which, looking back, felt like some really disturbing surrealism was going on in this movie. I suspect what I thought was crazy, dream-like surrealism was probably total technical and artistic incompetence wedded to a $25.75 budget, but there you are.

So, at some point the crew reaches some kind of barrier and one of the guys puts his hand through it. It gets stuck and when they yank it out it’s frosted, blue, and frozen solid. AAAAGGGGHHH! You know, that could really happen in the cold reaches of the outer solar system. Then there’s the giant rat-bat-spider, which even then seemed to be both an unconvincing puppet and an utterly terrifying nightmare come to life. But the really indelible image that I took away from Journey to the Seventh Planet is the main alien: a super-brainy, mind-controlling blob. It looked like a bubbling vat of chunky Bolognese sauce, with an eye in the middle. Even now, I can’t look at a pot of tomato sauce coming to a boil on the stove without flashing back to the mind-controlling alien of Uranus (snicker). And how do I explain that to people? I don’t explain it. I don’t mention it, ever.

Giant from the Unknown

The set up: Alright, I couldn’t even remember the name of this one. I had to figure it out from googlizing vague descriptions. Giant from the Unknown is in black and white. A [giant] conquistador is brought back to life from suspended animation. He’s covered in mud and is wearing one of those conquistador helmets. He gets thrown over a waterfall at the end. The Giant from the Unknown (wouldn’t that be Spain though? I guess The Giant from Spain (I adore you) didn’t cut it), has a lot of outdoor filming in what is obviously really uncomfortable working conditions for the actors.

They’re out in the mountains and forest somewhere in northern California. It’s cold, it’s wet, there’s snow on the ground, all of which is palpable to me sitting in the theater.

What I remember: Pretty much the above, and possibly not even that much. I don’t remember any of the plot, any of the characters except for “el G. from the U.”, or much else. And yet the scenes of the damp hills splattered with snow and a couple of images still feel totally gripping. Again, the general incompetence, lack of continuity, plot holes, incoherence and low budget of the production is both why I don’t remember more of it (Hey, I remember ALL of Jason and the Argonauts) and also the origin of its allure and hold on me.

What I might have had from the snack counter in the lobby: Sno-caps, Boston Baked Beans.

What’s great about Giant from the Unknown? A lizard or frog jumps out of a rock when a scientist breaks it open. A fucking living reptile and/or amphibian, people. I had a discussion about this scene at school sometime after seeing the move. Was this fifth grade? Maybe. Anyway, we boys decided that this could totally really happen, because there’s a real scientific name for it: suspended animation. In fact we were sure it had happened somewhere, so the movie was based on scientific truth and real facts! To which: whoa. And, as above, the wet, dingy landscape and cold was an unintentional cinema verite background that chilled me.

There’s more, lots more: The Werewolf, mole men, giant grasshoppers, giant snails, westerns. Also The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Great Escape, Project Crossbow, Goldfinger, Dr. No, Cheyenne Autumn, The Three Worlds of Gulliver, and onward and upward. Movies are a mother to me.

You know what else I love. Waffles.

* * *

Michael Gushue co-curates the floating Poetry Mutual Reading Series in Washington, DC, runs the micro-press Beothuk Books and is co-founder of Poetry Mutual/Vrzhu Press, a poetry incubator that sponsors events, publishes books and builds community among writers and audiences. His work has appeared online and in print, most recently in the journal Gargoyle and the online journal Locuspoint. His books are “Gathering Down Women,” from Pudding House Press and “Conrad” from Souvenir Spoon Books. You can hear him read some stuff and talk to Grace Cavalieri on The Poet and The Poem (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetpoem.html). He lives in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, DC.

2011-12-05T04:30:00.000-08:00

The Baptist church was the biggest building in my home town, except for the rice dryers out on the highway. People said the church had been an impressive building years ago, before they'd renovated it. Now the brick was covered with a gaudy white layer that looked like a bunch of pebbles cemented together; four stories of this that seemed to swell at the top, leaning over the elementary school next door like a wedge of brie standing on its point.

My father was an atheist who lectured us about how NASA had sent rockets into space and never seen heaven. Though it didn't seem so at the time, his rants were more directed at making us think for ourselves and not be bogged down in the fear and ignorance he saw around us. He associated Christians with the lowest common denominator; the people who feared black cats as minions of Satan, and lived in a sort of expectant fear that any day now, the world would crumble into ruin and everyone but them would be lost.

But my mother was a devout Christian and insisted that we attend church. My father's only victory was that he refused to go himself. So, thanks to her fear for our souls, every Wednesday night my sister and I went for service, and every Sunday morning I was lumped in with just under a dozen children of the richest and most affluent people in town and forced to go to Sunday School.

One of my earliest memories of Sunday School is of the collection envelopes. Every week we had to bring one, a thin little envelope printed with heavy black lines on which our parents could print their names, address, and the amount they were donating. A box sat in the corner with a slit in the top, and at the beginning of class, we all lined up under the hard eyes of the two preachers’ wives who ran the class.

“Very good,” they would say as we dropped in our envelopes. “Now go take your seat.”

And we went and sat in the chairs in the center of the room, the girls with their dresses flattened neatly over their legs, the boys fidgeting in their khakis.

Once, I was running late and forgot my donation. Being so used to the ritual, I automatically lined up with the other children and approached the donation box.

“I don’t have a donation envelope,” I said, realizing suddenly what had happened. “My mom forgot.”

“Are you sure?" One of the wives said. "I know for a fact that you were told to take home donation envelopes. Well, you can use a new one. Fill it out yourself. I can’t believe you’d waste church money like that.”

I was confused and ashamed. "I don't have any money," I said.

She glared at me. “So you just decided to spend it on candy? Did you stop by the store on the way here today?”

“No,” I said.

“Turn out your pockets,” she said.

The room stopped en masse to stare at me. She searched my pockets and found nothing.

“Well,” she said. “You must’ve already eaten it.”

I sat quietly in a chair, a little away from the other kids. None of them looked at me for the rest of the class, and I was glad of it.

I tried from then on to always remember my donation. Once, some months later, a similar situation occurred, but I had fifty cents that my father had given me to buy supplies at school. So I quickly grabbed an envelope, filled it out, stuck the change in, and took it to the box, aware the whole time of how much heavier it was than usual, since it had change instead of paper bills, of the way it clinked when I dropped it in. I sat through the rest of class terrified that they would call me out but nothing was said.

Class was often conducted in the form of a question and answer session in which the preachers' wives asked questions and watched us struggle for a while until they stepped in and answered. The questions were about Bible readings that I was too lazy to do. I didn't read the Bible at all until many years later.

“Cortney," they might ask, "why were Adam and Eve banished from the Garden?”

To which I might reply, “Because they were naked?”

“And how did they come to know that they were naked?”

I paused. “Because they were cold?”

I would then be sent to sit in the corner, no longer participating with the class. That would have been a fine reward if it weren’t for the lecture that preceded it.

“Really, Cortney, I don’t see how you can think this is funny,” they would say.

“I don't.” Which was true. Nothing could've been less amusing.

“You mean you don’t know? You really don’t know why Adam and Eve were forced to leave the garden? How can you not know that?”

I didn’t dislike sitting in the dunce chair. Being forbidden from participating in class meant that I could relax. Staring at the rest of the class from outside was supposed to be a punishment, but I enjoyed it. It was more interesting to watch the preachers' wives yelling at kids than it was to be yelled at. The children of the richest parents, for example, were never yelled at. They were rarely asked questions, either. Occasionally, one of them raised a thin arm and volunteered an answer and that was enough. It was the poorer kids who were singled out, though of these, even the poorest wasn’t wearing the dark blue Wrangler jeans from Wal-Mart that were all my family could afford. The rest of the families at least made the effort to look well-off, which meant getting their clothes from the mall in Jonesboro, a forty-five minute drive. Mine was considered doomed and damned; too lazy to make the effort.

Once, while exiled to the dunce chair, I found myself staring at the wood grain door. It was a simple, old hollow door that had weathered many grubby children’s hands. It would’ve looked fine in a home, but in the austere setting of the church, it was out of place. I was bored, and my eyes kept coming back to it until I realized that within the grain, I could see the vague outline of a man’s head. He wore an expression of sadness, and I felt suddenly uncomfortable, thinking this. I stared at the face for a long time, tracing the details of the eyes and mouth with my eyes, and tuning out the noise of the class. It was calming, and for once, when Sunday School was over, I felt glad. It was a kind of art, making a face out of the patterns of lines. I had seen faces in doors before. I started doing it everywhere, looking for images and patterns within things; trying to see the world around me differently.

I considered telling the preachers’ wives about the face, but I didn’t know how to explain it to them. They might not see it, and they would probably accuse me of not paying attention. Or worse, they might see it as a sign. There was a house on the other side of town in which someone claimed to have seen three crosses through the frosted glass of a door. Cars lined up for blocks for the next few weeks as people came from every state to witness what they considered to be a miracle. My father said that he'd talked to the man who installed the door, and he had said that you could see all sorts of things in those kind of windows because of the way the glass was frosted.

"One woman thought she could see her dead cat in her door," he'd said.

* * *

During the summers, my aunt volunteered me to go with her two sons to Baptist youth camp and to the youth group. I don’t remember much about the camp except that most of the time seems to have been spent in a swimming pool. I couldn’t swim, which left me stranded in the shallow end alone because all of the other kids could demonstrate their prowess well enough to be allowed in the deep water.

I remember the youth group as being a sort of Sunday School for older kids. We were led by teenagers, who arranged games and mostly just killed time. As soon as we left the car, my cousins lost interest in me and I was left to myself. Soon after I started going, it was decided that we would have a water balloon fight. To do this, we all had to bring balloons, and we all had to wear shorts. I didn’t own a pair of shorts. My father wasn’t particularly thrilled about this whole church thing, and dishing out money to buy shorts I would wear one time was more than he was willing to do.

“Where are your shorts?” they asked when I showed up in jeans.

“I don’t have shorts.”

“Everyone has shorts,” they said.

“I’ll just wear pants.”

“No, you can’t wear pants. You’ll ruin them.”

“It’s just water,” I said.

“And it wouldn’t be fair to let you throw balloons at the other kids when they
can’t throw balloons at you. I guess you just won’t be able to participate. I’m sorry, but we did say to wear shorts.”

And so I sat inside the air-conditioned church and watched the other children being pummeled by the older kids, out in the summer heat. There was an old refrigerator inside, and I found some sodas and drank one.

* * *

It was understood that when one reached a mature age, around ten, one could leave Sunday school and begin attending regular church sessions. This required a baptism, as I had never had one.

I was terrified of baptism. The elder preacher was a thin, fading old man, his heavy white head was large and round as he leaned out over the parishioners and mumbled damnation. I knew that he would drop me. I would drown in the baptismal pool. This was a common fear. My sister waited until well into her teens to be baptized. She wouldn't admit it, but I was certain this was because she was afraid.

Perhaps you’ve seen Baptist churches in movies or on TV. In those churches, the preachers sway, choirs sing, old ladies get up and run around, dancing with the spirit. Baptisms happen in rivers. The preacher stands, holding against the tide, while the faithful wade out and are dunked, cleansed of their sins, and everyone sings. There was none of that here. We used a tub beside the pulpit. Rivers are dirty and there are never enough places to park.

On her day, my sister, draped in a white robe, was led out before the audience. She was fourteen and nearly as tall as the preacher. He asked her if she renounced all sin. She said yes, and then he grabbed her and dunked her backwards into the water. His arms shook and she went down fast. He struggled to lift her out of the water, but he was having problems. The tub was narrow enough that she could grab the sides, and she was able to push herself up and out. He stared at her, and the congregation started singing while someone handed her a towel. That was enough for me. Regardless of the fear for my soul, I remained unbaptized.

2011-12-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

When You Are Old
by William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

On Something I Love: The Poem as Friend
by Joseph Ross

We met in a basement classroom. I was an eager ninth grader when this poem and I became friends. William Butler Yeats’ “When You Are Old” lives very close to my heart and it never strays far. I have loved this poem like a dear friend, ever since I first read it as a high school student.

In twelve perfectly crafted lines, Yeats offers us a most tender love poem, a darkly contemplative whisper from one lover who has died, to the remaining lover who lives. Yeats begins by gently placing us in an intimate, domestic moment and leaves us gazing into an eternity of memory and space, beckoning us to remember.

The poem opens in a quiet experience of solitude. A widowed lover sits alone, before a fire, with the fatigue that life and loss sometimes give. The lover is urged, by the companion who has already gone in death, to “take down this book,/ and slowly read,” and to remember. The absent lover beckons the living one to recall youth’s beauty, to recall the changing passions that came earlier in life. But mostly, the deceased lover pleads with the living one to remember the most honored compliment: that “one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,/ And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”

Can there be a more honest and abiding love? In the midst of ever-changing human emotions, the only love that truly anchors us through life is the love that honors our traveling selves, our changes, our sorrows. It is easy to love the fresh and attractive one. But it takes a decision to love a person who is changing, who knows and names the sorrows of the world and who wears them in the skin. At the heart of this poem, a deceased lover simply asks the living one to remember.

The poem’s final stanza takes us on a dizzying trajectory. The living lover bends down to stir the “glowing bars” in the fireplace, and from there we fly to the “mountains overhead” outside this quiet moment, and then farther still, into the vastness of space, where “Love…hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

This poem has been my friend for many years because it is true. We are all pilgrims and we all change. In the flurry of our wanderings, we yearn for someone to love us, not in spite of our changes, but because of them. This love requires intention and practice. It is an act of the will over time, not of the moment. I have been fortunate to find this kind of love in my life. Yeats’ poem instructs me to nourish and cherish it.

I also love the places in this poem. I can sit before a fire, in silence, and stare into its flames and embers for hours. The delicate quality of flame contains a rare beauty and energy. Similarly, I can stand outside at night and stare into the black forever of space sprayed with stars. In those moments, you know your place, your perfect smallness.

That William Yeats was a genius, I take as doctrine. He wrote “When You Are Old” as a relatively young man, in his late twenties. This poem was part of his second collection of poems titled “The Rose,” published in 1893. Yeats’ love life has been widely commented on. For most of his life he passionately loved Maud Gonne, who would reject his love in favor of the Irish revolution. Later in his life, Yeats loved and married Georgie Hyde-Lees, with whom he had two children. Perhaps “When You Are Old” prefigures that more mature and stable love. Some years ago, I stood at Yeats’ grave in the Drumcliffe churchyard, in County Sligo, Ireland, and thanked him for the friendship of this poem.

Regardless of how this poem emerged from Yeats’ life, it has found a permanent place in mine. Its quiet truth can calm and settle me when I am anxious and scattered. Its lean craft can focus me when I am uncertain. I can often hear this beloved friend, this poem, reminding me to remember.

* Photo of Yeats by George Beresford

* * *

Joseph Ross is part of the vibrant Washington, D.C. literary community. His first book, Meeting Bone Man, will be released in March/April of 2012. His poems appear in many journals and anthologies including Poet Lore, Tidal Basin Review, Full Moon on K Street, and Drumvoices Revue. He co-edited Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib. He has read in the Library of Congress' Poetry-at-Noon Series and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He directs the Writing Center at Carroll High School in Washington, D.C. and writes at JosephRoss.net.

2011-11-28T04:30:00.000-08:00

She is motion on two legs with drool, babbling, and a wicked smile. She is both wave and particle. She bounces from person to person like a pinball, leaving a trail of laughter and destruction. She is a little over one year old and named after an SUV.

Our house is full; fifteen or so of my wife’s cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends have come for Thanksgiving. They are my family, now, and are in my home, and this little girl squeals and laughs as she rips Kleenexes apart and scatters them on the floor like confetti, pulls DVDs from their cases and jumps up and down on them, chews the business end of a fireplace match and runs headlong towards the stairs for which there is no baby-gate, yet. Her mother, all of twenty years old and a young twenty, at that, is texting her new boyfriend on the couch, oblivious.

The little girl’s aunt and uncle who are both younger than the mother, sometimes catch her before she careens down the stairs or out the door, but they are equally intent on card games, eating or looking things up on their iPones. Another teenaged cousin who I haven’t seen in years takes over duties towards the end, and keeps the little girl from breaking her neck, though it's clear she and her own mom are less than thrilled that they are now the gate-keepers for a one-year-old ferral child.

My wife alternately tries to feed the kid the homemade food she's prepared especially for the littlest kids and tries to convince her cousin to put the little girl down for a nap in the pack'n'play set up away from the noise for that very purpose, but is unsuccessful on both counts, so she doesn’t eat more than a few bites of banana and a mouthful of applesauce in something like seven hours, and has no nap at all.

I’m watching my own seven month old, who is being passed around like a new toy. I try to keep an eye on the little girl, the living epitome of unchecked energy, but then someone catches her and I lose her, thinking she’s safe, until she breaks free again and I see her streaking toward the open back-door. All of us are watching her with one eye, but none of us is watching with both. My daughter starts to fuss, and as I move in to take advantage of this and whisk her away from the ruckus, I nearly collide with the little girl. She stops short with a smile and a dirty face, reaches for me, and, as she probably has to every male in the house, asks, “Daddy?”

Fifteen months ago, my wife and I nearly adopted that little girl. This was before my wife knew she was pregnant. Her then eighteen year old cousin was single, unemployed (though she might’ve had a part-time job if she'd wanted it), a college drop-out, and one of the most sheltered children I’ve ever met. I’m not being mean, here, simply honest. At eight months pregnant she’d been dumped by the child’s father, a significantly older guy in the military who’d rather spend his money on expensive toys and his time elsewhere, but who insisted on naming the kid after the SUV. My wife and I had been trying to have a kid for a few years, at that point, and were towards the end of a hail-mary attempt when my wife’s cousin called in distress over her situation.

She said that if she was going to give her baby up to anyone, it would be us, but she needed time to think about it. We felt something like Sartre’s characters in “The Wall,” waiting through the night for the firing squad. We talked it out between ourselves while we waited. We thought: here’s a kid who’s screwed up her life but could still make good. She could walk away and start over. Then again, raising a kid could be the best thing for her. It could be a crash-course in growing up, which she desperately needs. On the other hand, let’s be realistic: What does she know about the kind of hard work and sacrifices this would require? But what did we know about them either?

We tried to be logical. There was no way we could afford a kid just yet. I was training in a new position and, once I had that, gunning for a promotion, but I wouldn’t have it for another year. We had a plan, and that plan required our hail-mary to pay off, sure, but we didn’t expect to actually have a kid for another ten months or so. But here was opportunity tapping at our door. And we knew we could make it work, somehow.

When she called and said she’d decided to keep the baby after all, my wife waited until she got off the phone to break down. We both thought this might’ve been our last chance, but what could we do? It wasn’t our decision to make. We had to respect it and be supportive. We hoped for the best. We hoped she would take advantage of this opportunity, dig in, and do right by her soon-to-be child. When my wife found out she was pregnant a few weeks later, our course was set. But still, in the back of our minds, we wondered: what if?

While the family was in town for Thanksgiving, we had the opportunity to see several approaches to parenting. By far the most developed kid was a teenager, "Martin," whose single mother kept him in line (some would say nagged him constantly). But it was obvious this kid would have a future. It was obvious that his mother understood that the work of being a parent often means acting in opposition to your kid/s' wishes or natural inclinations. Kids test boundaries. It’s tiring to push back, but a lot of the time, you have to if you want the kids to develop positive habits. Another cousin, "Mandy," meanwhile, talked about sneaking out the night before and partying. Martin was sullen during this conversation, feeling left out. He didn’t understand how much his mother was doing for him by making sure he was left out, of course. Being a parent means being unpopular sometimes. Mandy's mother, on the other hand, didn’t even chastise her daughter for sneaking out to spend the night with her boyfriend. She simply grinned, apparently at the horrible joke that her other teenaged daughter was well on the way to having a baby of her own, just like her sister.

There is a lot of pain in this family, and it tends to manifest in self-absorption of one kind or another, which, of course, could be said of most of us. What that means in real life is some non-engaged parents. If I were unkind, I could say that some of these folks were too busy looking for their own gratification and ended up ignoring their children. This is the greatest fear I have about my own parenting. But perhaps that’s the difference; being aware of this means I can be proactive in preventing it. I don’t mean to sound conceited or arrogant. I’m not perfect; far from it. I’m deeply flawed. And if it wasn’t for my wife, I would be much more so. One of the first things I did when my wife became pregnant was start to see a psychologist. This wasn’t because I was depressed about having a kid; it was because I had a ton of issues and I didn’t want to screw my kid up. I didn’t have good models for parenting because of various circumstances, so I look around at other people, and I try my best to figure out what works. And seeing how these folks acted towards their kids, I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

I may well still screw up royally. But I hope I don’t, and I plan to do everything in my power to keep from it.

After everyone left, my wife and I talked about the little girl and everything else I’ve been writing about. “They’re good people,” my wife said. And it’s true, I’m sure. The teenaged mother isn’t actively bad; she’s just a kid who happens to have a kid and is completely unprepared for it. Her mother is freshly divorced and trying to have some fun. Everyone has their own hell, and it’s easy to judge when you haven’t lived with the fumes. We’re too close to the situation to have any real perspective, and I’m sure we exaggerate what we don’t see and take what we do see for the worst. But seeing that little girl running wild while her mother ignored her and her immediate family only stepped in when she became a nuisance, we couldn’t help but wish that her mother had said yes, all those months ago. But there’s not much we can do about it. There’s always going to be horror outside the door. There’s nothing to be done about that. What’s inside the house, that you can affect.

2011-11-24T01:30:00.000-08:00

Court Merrigan is a writer and world travelor. I was first drawn to his stories by the strong sense of place, which is familiar, and at the same time, often exotic. He blogs about writing and life here.

Me: Describe your writing for me: what is a “Court Merrigan story”?

Court: I take characters, bottle them up in a shitty situation, shake well, then minutely record the results.

Me: How important is sense of place to you, as a writer?

Court: Phenomenally important. I normally start with a place, usually even before a story idea, or even a character.

I lived in East Asia for a decade, so a lot of what I'm writing is set in real or imaginary places there. But I'm also from an unknown region of the country called Wyobraska, whose dust and wind bubbles in my blood. Its long empty spaces run through pretty much everything I've ever written.

Me: Have you found that teaching affects your own writing?

Court: Well, I don't teach writing, so not in that sense. I will say that a classroom does offer some insights into how people act under pressure, though. I also have learned a lot about how to be professional from teaching. When you step into a classroom, it doesn't matter how you feel; you have to put on a show that gets your content across. Getting up to write each day is much the same. You have to do it - or at least try to do it - no matter how you feel.

Me: Can you tell me a little about your writing routine?

Court:Now that our ten-month old is (finally!) sleeping through the night, I'm back to getting up at 4 or 5 and getting a few hours of writing in before the day job. I also write as much as I can on weekends and holidays but I've got kids and long ago promised myself that I'd put down the pen when one of them toddled into the room. Turns out, they toddle into the room a lot.

Me: As a blogger and writer, myself, let me ask: how useful do you find blogging to be for a writer?

Court: It has been fantastic for getting to know other writers. Unless you've already got a big name, I think it's pretty unthinkable that you wouldn't have an online presence as a writer, where people can go to read more of your stuff. For example, http://courtmerrigan.wordpress.com/short-stories/
http://courtmerrigan.wordpress.com/short-stories/

I track all my rejection on the blog and archive them on a Failure page. This has been tremendously cathartic for me. I find that once I blog about a rejection, I never think about it again.

Having said that, writing quality blog posts is a lot of work. I don't put nearly so much effort into them as I did when I was starting out. I post pictures. I don't write nearly as many reviews as I should.

Me: I’ve noticed that you’ve placed some excerpts from your novel manuscript at various journals (Fried Chicken & Coffee, decomP, and Midwestern Gothic). Can you tell me a little about this novel?

Court: In common with many others, I've been semi-obsessed with the apocalyptic for some time now. I think it has something to do with growing up in the Reagan-era 80s, the nukes piling up, plus the stack of truck-stop pulp fiction I read as a kid, mutants warring in a seared nuclear wasteland &c.

These days, though, nuclear armageddon, zombie apocalypse, a world-searing pandemic - those seem to me less likely scenarios for the end times than a slow free-fall into barbarity from our present peak of effortless interconnection. What happens to ordinary folks, to the sons and daughters of ordinary folks, when their world winds down around them? When the infrastructure of the infinitely wired past remains before them, untouchable?

So I took 4 kids, abandoned by their mother, left defenseless by a weak alcoholic father, threw them in that cauldron, and saw how far they'd go to stay with each other. Pretty far, I discovered

I finished the novel a little over a year ago and immediately sent it out to a slew of agents. Didn't get much response, so I divvied the manuscript up and started sending excerpts out. Rusty Barnes, Jason Jordan, and the folks at Midwestern Gothic were good enough to pick three of these up. A few other pieces are circulating which I hope will see the light of day, too. I'm hoping that with a few credits such as these, the manuscript might attract a little more interest this time. Here's hoping!

Me: How has being a father influenced your writing?

Court: As I type this, I figure I've got about more 10 minutes to work before my oldest gets up and needs fed and watered. Kids hem you in, no question.

And yet it is wonderful to be interrupted by by a slobbering 10-month old.

I'm one of those who willingly retreats for whole days into the sanctuary of your head. My kids won't allow me to stay there that long, though. I am thankful for it.

Me: Who are your biggest influences?

Court: Among the dead: Hem, for being source of nearly everything. I haven't read him actively in years, but can still quote whole paragraphs from memory. Faulkner, for showing me how language can be pushed its utmost extremes and still tell a story. And Nabokov, for being an absolutely inimitable exemplar of what beauty looks like on the page.

Among the living, I was thrown for a loop last year when I read everything Scott Wolven wrote. That guy has inherited the mantle of Hem and cross-pollinated it with some Cormac McCarthy and Leonard Elmore ("If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it"), resurrected the muscle and guts to heartbreak and noir. A couple of favorites of his you can find online:

"Everything Tastes Like Whiskey"
"News About Yourself"

Will Christopher Baer's vastly underrated Kiss Me, Judas also showed me some of the lyrical possibilities inherent in "genre" fiction. Same with Daniel Woodrell.

I'm also a devoted student of Lorrie Moore. She's heartbreakingly funny.

Me: Who’s writing the killer fiction these days? Who will history remember?

Scott Wolven, for sure.

And there's Frank Bill. This guy is a true original. I can't peg his literary genealogy. I'm not sure he has one. He's got a book out now; here's a couple great ones online:

"Tweakers"
"The Need"

Brad Watson, who lives down the road from me in Laramie, is writing short stories as well as anyone living.

Roxane Gay is doing some really really fascinating things with the short story form. She's on her way to great things, I'm sure of it. Check out the use of Venn diagrams in this one: "Between Things"

Other writers I follow around the internet are Brad Green, Matthew C. Funk, David James Keaton, Marc Horne, Paolo Bacigalupi, Stephen Graham Jones, Keith Rawson, David Cranmer, Rion Amilcar Scott, Tamara Linse, and Rusty Barnes.

No idea who history will remember; I'd like folks to think will be reading Controlled Burn, by Scott Wolven, but more than likely it will be something by George RR Martin on account of his selling a bajillion copies.

Me: What are you working on now/next?

Court: I have four short stories to finish - three crime-ish, one science fictionish - and then I really want to get back to this novel I started more than a year ago. I have one chapter and a whole lot of research done. Now I just need to devote my early mornings to finishing the damn thing.

It is going to be a fantasy novel set in a time and place that, so far as I know, is as yet unmined by literary fortune-seekers. That's all I can

2011-11-21T04:07:00.000-08:00

Here's an excerpt from my young adult novel Sunlight...

1
Saturday

Sol woke to his father's voice singing along with some Oldies station on the radio. Sol had been listening to music but dozed off, and his earbuds had slipped out. They whispered softly from his chest where they'd fallen and he turned them off. His father's voice was low and quiet and tinged with sadness even though he was singing a happy song. It sounded weak, compared to how Sol's mother's voice used to sound. She sang constantly when she drove, though the radio was rarely on. Usually, she sang the old-fashioned songs people sang in choir class and in church. A lot of them didn't make any sense, though some of them had a weird kind of undertone, as though once upon a time, they'd meant something, but people had forgotten what, so that all that remained was the tune, with no real power. Kind of like elevator music.

Sol had always liked her voice. Whenever he heard anyone else sing those songs, they sounded hokey, silly, grown people singing kids' songs. His own voice sounded weak and embarrassed when he sang along with a rock song, as though it wanted to hide. But she was able to infuse the words with a feeling and intensity that made them sound better than they really were. She did that with everything. Even saying Sol's name, she could make him sound better than he felt like he was. He heard her voice, drifting up from memory:

I've got a friend in Baltimore,
Little Liza Jane
I've got a friend in Baltimore,
Little Liza Jane.
Oh Little Liza, Liza Jane,
Little Liza Jane.
Oh Little Liza, Liza Jane,
Little Liza Jane.
I've got a friend in Arkansas,
Little Liza Jane...

He lay, feeling the motion of the car rocking him, and listened to the voice in his memory for a few seconds before opening his eyes. It was the first time he'd woken peacefully in weeks.

Outside the car, it was all sunlight. A brilliant, blinding brightness covered everything. Sol blinked and imagined he could feel the warmth from it, though his father had the air conditioner on. On either side, fields of sunflowers stretched as far as Sol could see. Their green stalks strained up towards the sun. Some of them looked as tall as people, and on top of the stalks, their heads were fat with yellow petals on the outside and a dark eye in the center, as though they were watching the car.

"Are you back with us?" Sol's father asked.

"Almost," Sol said. "Where are we?"

"Almost there," Sol's father said, turning to Sol. "See those sunflowers?"

"There are lots of them."

"Those are Dan and Jill's. They grow them for bakeries and processors all over the country."

Sol watched the dark eyes of the flowers flow past, wondering how they stood, with all that weight on top and only a thin stalk to hold them up. He imagined people with giant black faces and yellow hair standing straight out around their heads, which were so big, the people kept falling down. It made him laugh, until he wondered if there was more, here, than just sunflowers. There was something his mom used to say, and it came to him, then, in the didactic voice she used with her students: pretty is boring if that's all there is.

His father slowed and turned onto a gravel road that split the sunflower field in half.

"I think this is it," he said.

"You don't know?" Sol asked.

"I haven't been here in awhile."

"What if it's not? Don't people shoot trespassers here?" Sol asked. He looked around, nervously.

"You watch too many bad movies," his father said.

"You don't watch enough."

Sol could see a house ahead, rising out of the yellow and black sea of flowers. It was a big white square, two stories tall, full of windows.

"Isn't this the house from Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Sol asked.

"No, that was in Texas." His father glanced at Sol.

"You know what I mean," Sol said.

"I don't want to know what you mean," his father said. "This is a nice place, Sol. It's where your mother grew up. Different isn't bad. It's just different."

Sol didn't answer. At the mention of his mother, something caught in his throat as though he hadn't drank any water in hours.

They pulled up to the house and stopped. Sol's father turned to look him in the eye.

"Will you do something for me?" he said. "Will you give it a chance? It's just for ten days, and I'll be right over in Little Rock, less than two hours away, if something happens. You're fifteen, now. You should be able to handle this."

"Sure," Sol said. His father watched him with a worried look. But beneath the worry was something else, as though his father were about to shatter like a plate dropped on a hardwood floor. It made Sol uneasy. "But Dad," he said, carefully "as soon as I see a chainsaw, I'm out of here."

"Deal," his father said, still too serious.

"And if I see anybody strange in a hockey mask..."

"I'm with you," his father said, his face finally relaxing into a grin. "I never liked hockey, anyway."

Sol allowed himself a smile.

Aunt Jill was short and husky with curly, dark hair. She was tanned a golden brown and wrinkled like an overripe pear. Sol could see the resemblance to his mother in her face, her eyes, especially, which were warm and dark as though they kept a great secret, and the skin around her nose, which wrinkled when she smiled and reminded him of a rabbit.

"The spitting image of your mother," she said. "How old are you, now, 15?"

"Yes ma'am," he said. “Old enough to get married in four states.”

“Well we’ll have to keep you away from Missouri,” Uncle Dan said.

Uncle Dan was stocky, a full head taller than Jill. His arms were long and dangled like an ape's with thick muscles that looked as hard as tree branches. His legs were short and stout and he stood hunched over, as though hiding his height. He was tanned a darker brown than Jill, his face stern as though he smiled only with great effort. He had a ring of gray hair on the edge of his head and a bald dome in the center and wore a bright cap Aunt Jill had woven to keep his head warm though it looked out of place on him.

Sol hadn't seen either of them in a couple years, and he didn't really remember much about them. His father told him he'd been to their house before, but it was unfamiliar. Time had become strange like that for him, though; even that morning seemed so long ago he could barely remember it.

After the re-introductions and exchanges of hugs, Uncle Dan helped Sol and his father unload their suitcases and carry them upstairs. He gave them a tour along the way. The house was a big square with a porch all the way around the front and sides. The front door opened to a living room with stairs along the wall. The wall above the stairs was covered with pictures of children Sol didn't recognize, and lots of old-timey black and white pictures that were probably of Sol's long-dead ancestors. The furniture looked handmade, which, Sol knew from his many outings with his mother to Amish markets, meant pricey. Or maybe Uncle Dan had made it.

Upstairs, a hall split the house in half, with rooms on either side. They each had their own room. There was a bathroom in the back corner, and a couple other rooms. Downstairs, the living room led to a kitchen, with a TV room on one side and a laundry room on the other.

Back in Baltimore, Sol lived in a townhouse, which was about half the size of this house, if even that. On the way back to the car, Sol asked his father where the kids in the pictures were, and his father said they couldn't have kids.

"I guess those are foster kids," his father said.

“You “guess.” So you’re not sure,” Sol said. “It could be kids they’ve gathered up to sacrifice to Cthulu on the Winter’s Solstice. They could keep them chained up in the basement.”

“What?” His father said. “Sol, what are you talking about? No one is chained up in the basement.”

“The attic, then.”

“Sol,” his father said. “No one is sacrificing anyone to...whatever you said. You
definitely watch too many movies. ”

“Cthulu is from a book,” Sol said. ”By H.P. Lovecraft.”

Sol’s father studied him. “When I was your age,” he said. “I was so busy trying to get laid, I didn’t have time for books.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Sol said.

“I didn’t say ‘succeeding.’ I said ‘trying’,” Sol’s father said, sending Sol back inside.

The house smelled fresh and clean, and all the windows were open. Sol took another suitcase upstairs. Through the screen in his room, he could see a wide yard with a garden near the house that curved around the back and a swing set standing empty, with two swings swaying in the wind. Sol went to the bathroom to wash his face, and through that window, could see the back of the house, with more garden, and a path that led to a barn and another small building beside it. Past the barn were a field and a stand of trees Sol could barely make out. Back in the hall, it was so quiet that he could hear the creaking of the swings and voices downstairs. He listened hard, but couldn’t hear any whimpers from the attic or the basement.

Sol was starting to get the feeling he was going to be very, very bored there. His music would only go so far. His father hadn’t wanted him to bring any video games, though he'd snuck in a couple things, and he was pretty sure they didn't have anything like that on the farm. In the TV room, he saw an ancient, clunky-looking computer sitting at a desk in the corner, but it looked like there were probably a couple squirrels inside on a treadmill powering the thing, so you had to put acorns in it to make it work. The more he thought about it, the more depressed he became. It's just ten days, he reminded himself, but it didn't really help. Ten days of being away from his cyber-friends was a lifetime.

He crept down to find everybody else and heard his father's voice.

"He doesn't seem to have any friends," he said. Sol heard the usual clink of ice cubes in a glass that meant his father was drinking.

"How's he been doing, since..." Aunt Jill's voice trailed off. "The funeral?"

"Distant. Withdrawn. Quiet. Not fitting in at school.," his father said. "But he's been like that ever since we moved him into a public school, really."

Sol’s fingers curled into a fist.

"He's always been quiet," his father added. "He'd rather play a video game or read than talk to people."

“That’s because people suck,” Sol said to himself.

"At least he reads," Uncle Dan said.

When he did talk, Sol wanted to say, the other kids hardly ever understood what he was talking about or got his jokes, so he just kept quiet.

"He's just so passive," his father said. "He just lets the world pass him by."

Sol's mom had always said that he let life happen to him, instead of seeking out new things on his own. That was why she'd put him in public school, so he'd have to explore new things and get out of his comfort zone, whatever that meant.

"Growing up is hard," Aunt Jill said. “Especially with what he’s going through.”

Ha, Sol thought; it was a nightmare. He ate his lunch surrounded by kids he barely knew who chattered away at the top of their lungs. They all had their own cliques: jocks, potheads, nerds. Even the loners had a clique. And the word got around that he'd been in private schools, so kids thought he was stuck-up. One mouth-breathing Neanderthal had called him a sissy and a rich boy, and said he would meet Sol on the front steps after school to fight. Sol spent the whole day dreading it and finally forced himself to go to the steps at the allotted time, but the other boy didn't show. Sol had hoped this would be the end of it. Far from it. The next day, the boy spread a rumor that it was Sol who hadn't shown up, and he was labeled a chicken.

His mom had told him that high school was a phase, that these things didn't matter in the long run, and when it was over, he'd never look back. But that was years away. He was stuck in the now, when it did matter. Now, she was gone. And he still had three more years of high school to dread. And it wasn’t like he could just tune out. Sol knew that his one shot at getting out of the herd was getting into a good college, so he’d have some options.

"It's hard fitting in to a new school, Jim," Aunt Jill said, cutting through Sol's thoughts.

"I don't think he wants to fit in," his father said. "I mean he gets the grades; I just wish I could find some way to bring him out of his shell."

Sol cleared his throat loudly and went into the kitchen with the others, just as his father drained the dark liquid from his glass. He greeted Sol with a shy grin, his face flushed. Sol made a point to check his watch, and his father looked away.

After unloading the car, they ate what Uncle Dan called a 'country dinner': mashed potatoes made from real potatoes, home-baked sunflower rolls, chicken fried in sunflower oil, fresh vegetables from the garden; all the ingredients they'd grown or raised themselves, Aunt Jill told them, except some of the spices, and the flour, which they'd bought locally.

"What about the chicken?" Sol's father asked.

"We uh ‘harvested’ it this morning," Uncle Dan said.

Sol's father glanced at Sol.

"What?" Sol asked, looking from his father's face to his Aunt and Uncle. He replayed the conversation in his head. "What do you mean 'harvested'?"

"They mean they killed the chicken and cooked it," Sol's father said.

"What?" Sol asked, "Why?"

"So we could eat it," Uncle Dan said. "For the special occasion of your visit."

"You mean you really killed it?"

"Yes," Aunt Jill said, "I mean we really killed it."

Sol's face dropped into a look of horror. "Is that legal?" he said.

"Uh-oh," Uncle Dan said, holding his arms out to be hand-cuffed. "Lock me up. Chicken killer."

Aunt Jill laughed. "Yes, Sol. It was our chicken to do with as we wanted."

"But, you killed it? I mean," Sol paused, unsure if he wanted to finish the question, "how?" Sol asked.

"Well, first you need an ax," Uncle Dan started to say, but Aunt Jill cut him off.

"Not at the table," she said. She turned to Sol, "it was quick and humane," she said.

"Humane?" Sol said, shaking his head at the word.

"Just don't think about it," his father said, selecting a drumstick. He passed the chicken around and Sol watched everyone else pile their plates high. Uncle Dan took a bite and Sol's stomach lurched like he was going to be sick. When the plate came around, Sol refused it.

"Have some salad," Aunt Jill said, putting some on Sol's plate. He picked at it, but his stomach wasn't in it. Everything smelled like the chicken, even the salad. It smelled so good it made his mouth water, but all Sol could think about was that poor chicken who gave its life for them. Harvested, they'd said. It was like an episode of "The Twilight Zone." He could hear the others chewing and smacking their lips. His stomach flipped like a light switch from queasiness to hunger. He was starving but he felt guilty for being hungry, and even though everything did smell and look good, he stuck with the salad, but still ate little.

After dinner, they went out onto the porch to relax. Sol's stomach murmured, and every time he thought about it, he felt guilty again, so he tried to ignore it. Finally, Aunt Jill went inside and came back with some fruit and nuts and cheese on a plate and handed it to him. Sol wolfed it down thankfully.

"He's not concerned over the feelings of that apple," Uncle Dan said.

"Hush, Dan, let him eat," Aunt Jill said. “It’s not his fault.”

They were quiet for a while and Sol put his earbuds in again and listened to music until he noticed everyone laughing at something Uncle Dan was saying. Sol turned the music off and listened himself. He didn't know what the big deal was; Uncle Dan was just telling stories about things that had happened on the farm or in town recently. But pretty soon he found himself drawn in. Most storytelling Sol had heard was just kids bragging about stuff that probably hadn't even happened or telling dirty jokes that weren't funny anymore once you knew what the words meant. Uncle Dan's stories were different. He was funny, but he didn't tell a story just to get to a punch line. He was like a musician playing an instrument, crafting the details like notes, paying attention to each one. Everyone listened as though it were a concert, and when he finished, they sat in silence again.

"That was funny, Uncle Dan," Sol said.

"Thankee," Uncle Dan said. "Better than a video game?"

"No," Sol said. It made his Uncle laugh.

“It’s real life,” Sol’s father said. “Real life is better than games.” His face was flushed red, and he was slurring his speech. Aunt Jill and Uncle Dan watched nervously.

“Then why do people play games?” Sol asked.

“Because they can’t handle the real world,” Sol’s father said. He looked right at Sol when he said it, so there could be no doubt who he was really talking about. Sol felt himself blush.

“Everyone needs a little escape now and then,” Aunt Jill said. “That’s what we’ve been doing by listening to stories, escaping.”

“There’s a lot of difference between talking about things that really happened and playing a video game,” Sol’s father said. “That’s pure escapism.”

“What would you call drinking alcohol?” Sol said. “Is that ‘pure escapism’?”

Sol’s father got a nasty look on his face.

“Jim,” Aunt Jill said. Sol’s father looked at her, angrily. She shook her head. Sol was surprised when his father clamped his lips together and didn’t respond.

"Well, I'm wiped," Uncle Dan said. "I'm going to bed."

Everyone followed him up, silently. Sol didn’t realize that he’d been shaking until he got to his room. It took him several minutes to stop, and when he finally crawled into bed, he realized he'd left his music downstairs.

He lay listening to the wind and the noises of the night, which were surprisingly loud. There were lots of bug noises, crickets and things he couldn't identify. He was in a world of half-sleep, randomly thinking about things that had happened that day.

Even though his Aunt and Uncle seemed okay, he definitely didn't want to be there. He'd had it out with his father for weeks about coming.

"We're committed," his father had said. He taught sociology at the University of Maryland, and he'd taken one summer term off from teaching in order to attend a conference in Little Rock, which left Sol stuck. So he'd arranged for Sol to stay with his Aunt and Uncle in Arkansas.

"I didn't ask you to do that," Sol said. "You should've asked me what I wanted."

"Well, it's too late now. It's a done deal. They expect us to come."

"You go. I'll stay here."

"Okay Sol. You want to know the truth? That's exactly why I didn't ask you. Sometimes we have to do things that we don't want to do but that are in our best interest. Remember when we had to force feed medicine to your pet rat? She didn't want to take it, but it was in her best interest to take it. It was difficult and painful but it had to be done. And after a couple times, she just laid back and took the medicine. And she got better."

"She died," Sol said.

His father glared at him. "A year later," he said. "Of old age. She was three. That's a healthy age for a rat."

"So going to Arkansas and living on a farm for two months is like giving antibiotics to Daisy how, exactly?"

"Sol, I don't want to argue with you about this. And I don't have to. We're going. That's it. End of discussion."

Sol slammed his bedroom door so loudly he knocked pictures off the wall in the living room. He heard them thud to the floor, which made him feel a little better. Then his father cursed loudly which made Sol feel a lot better.

* * *

Sol woke. For a moment, he didn't know where he was, then the feel of the strange bed reminded him. A new noise had joined the crickets. It was a rhythmic squeaking and a kind of rubbing sound. He'd been dreaming about the squirrels he'd imagined in the computer; someone was making them work really hard and their wheel was squeaking. Now that he was awake, the noise was still going. It sounded kind of like the noises you heard from other beds at boys’ camp. He didn’t want to think about that.

He found his cell-phone and flipped it open. The clock said midnight, and local time was an hour behind Baltimore time, so it was eleven. Too late to be swinging. Maybe it was a bear, scratching itself against something like they did in the zoo. He remembered his mom saying that Arkansas used to be called the bear state, but now most of the bears were gone, except up in the mountains. Was he near the mountains? Sol didn't know. He'd slept through most of the drive. What he remembered was flat land as far as he could see. It didn't seem particularly mountainous. Maybe not a bear then, maybe a deer.

He flipped his cell phone open and used the light to find his wallet by the bed. He flipped that open and dug out a photo of his mom. It was a head shot, showing her open smile and plain, sensible, teacher's hairdo, and clothes. It was the only picture of her Sol had. His father felt that Sol was clinging to the past too much, so he'd taken all of the other pictures and put them away in a box.

"We have to move on," he'd said. "It's been almost a year. You can't sit in your room all day looking at pictures." Sol didn't mention the picture he knew his father kept in his dresser drawer. It didn’t really matter what he said; he’d learned that lesson.

Sol had printed this picture off the website for the school. He stared at it for a long time, then he found the other picture behind it and looked at that one for a long time too. If his father knew Sol had this one, he'd have been even more upset.
Eventually, Sol fell asleep, and dreamed of swinging on the swing set, going higher and higher, almost to the top of the house while a bear with a bald patch and a bright red hat pushed him. On top of the house, Sol could see Daisy, his pet rat from when he was a kid. She was doing something with her back to him and didn't see him, and he couldn't tell what. Sol wanted to jump off the swing and onto the house, where Daisy was, and see, but every time he swung higher, the house grew higher, so he couldn't quite make it. Then a deer came up, singing like Sol's father had been in the car, and said it was his turn, and Sol had to get off.

2011-11-17T05:00:00.000-08:00

The Decade of Torture in Gay America, or Cut ‘em off, Cut it out, or Cut ‘em down

I am attached to my testicles. I can’t foresee a time, a place or a circumstance that would lead me to forsake them, to rid my undercarriage of their furry globosity, or surrender them to a mad scientist. The bond is territorial, as well as psychoemotional. Besides, who else would have them but me? How could they satisfy the needs of any other man but mine? Put simply, they have one master—moi. Moving in the cephalic direction, take my cortex; but first some definitions: Me is the guy you see on the street, turn to your friend and say, “My, who is that handsome and brilliant gentleman”? However, ME is invisible. It is the essence of Me. It is the flow of Me, the conscious Me. There are some philosophers who would argue that my cortex--the nuts and bolts—make Me, ME. That is, the machine is ME. There are some neuroscientists who would agree with them. On the other hand, there are those who would argue conversely. Simply put, the hardware is not the “end product”. So, as it stands, my cortex can either be ME or not. If not, then who, or what, is ME? And what about Me? Rimbaud knew that Je est un autre, i.e., “I is someone else”. Well, that’s all well and good if you are a 17 year-old genius, riddled with lice, and destroying French poetry with ink, sperm, and fire. Easy for him to say. My point is that ME emerges from a very, very large network of intricacies, delicacies, monstrosities, curiosities, and divinities, that no machine can create. ME is outside of the machine. ME rises like a vapor as the machinery churns away. Rimbaud was right. I is someone else and that I is unique to this crinkly universe. It is unable to be held tight in the fist of oppressors or fools with pointy hats and dripping with symbols of beliefs. I have come to understand this: my visible self is superficially alterable. But ME is forever ME. This is not the same as the Self (that’s a bag of Buddhist worms that I dare not open). So here’s the point: there is more to ME than Me…….and my testicles.

Unfortunately, this was not always the case in America the Beautiful. From the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, gay men were being tortured into “normalcy”--and torture is not too strong a word. If any of these methods were used outside of the sanctity of the ward, the practitioners would be tried and jailed. They were hailed instead. The culture of the day, the perfect world of homo-geneity (<>, I said “homo”) decided that the ME of gay men and women did not have the same valence as the ME(s) of the Real America. They had to be altered, or insidiously destroyed. There were many knights willing to rise to heed the call.

Dr. Walter J. Freeman was trained at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School after graduating from Yale College in 1916. His area of specialty was neurology. He began working at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC and while there earned a PhD in neuropathology. He left St. Elizabeth’s and took a position as the head of the neurology department at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC. Freeman performed his first prefrontal lobotomy in 1936. Ten years into his practice he began performing prefrontal lobotomies using a procedure developed by a neurosurgeon in Italy. This procedure did not require the surgeon to enter the skull. Instead, he entered the pre-frontal area through the patient’s eye sockets, thus its name—the transorbital lobotomy. Freeman mastered this procedure known as the “icepick lobotomy”, so called because the instrument used—the orbitoclast—resembled a common household icepick. First, he used electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) aka “shock therapy” to induce seizure and that had an “anesthetic effect” in the patient. Then he would enter the patient’s brain by using a metal pick, wiggle it back and forth, thus severing the neurons in the prefrontal area. Let’s review: first he induced seizure via ECT, then he used a metal instrument, essentially an icepick, to perform a lobotomy through the patient’s eye sockets. In all fairness, until the advent of psychotropic drugs to manage patients who fell into the broad category of mental illness, this was an acceptable procedure.

Thirty to forty percent of his patients were homosexual.

Snapshot: Atascadero State Hospital in Atascadero, California. A mental institution that became known as the “Homosexual Dachau”. Castrations, lobotomies, chemical “treatments”, and experimentation were on the menu of cures for the “perverse”. Guess who stopped by? Now, to be fair, there is no clear documentation indicating that Dr. Freeman performed any icepick procedures on the resident queers. However, why else would a lobotomist be vacationing at such a glorious institution? And there were plenty of folks, i.e., MEs, who needed curing, who needed to be scoured clean of their perversity. Didn’t work. Oh, and don’t bother looking for personal records of these incidents. Not a scribble on a paper. They worked clean.

Then, as now, torturing homosexuals is acceptable. Then, they used orbitoclasts; now, they use laws, lies, bibles, and big happy smiles. This remedy offers the slow death. Destroy hope, opportunity, security, stability, equality, and you destroy the subject, the Me on the street, with the full intent to obliterate ME. Or force them into a very, very dark cave. Not a shot fired, or a noose formed. Except in the cases of the 30% of teenagers who identify as gay: they find just the right rope, just the right height, the right time and the right place. Then they jump into freedom, or sail from a bridge. Tortured into believing that swinging blue from a rope is better than being Me. Not a magazine was filled, no weapons brandished. America is purified by the blood of the sinner. The flags wave over NASCAR and football and churches and the Homeland rests, secured.

But the MEs live on.

* * *

Jim Mancinelli's Bio:

His first chapbook, Primer, was self-published. His second chapbook, In Deep, was published by Plan B Press. His writing is informed by the spirit, the earth, the heavens, the voices of his Italian heritage. His poems have appeared in various issues of Philadelphia Poets, The Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Sea Change, Mad Poets Review, Fox Chase Review and Poetry Ink, an anthology of Philadelphia poets. Jim was a finalist in the 2011 Atlanta Queer Literary Festival, judged by Mark Doty. He has been a featured reader in various Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware venues and a featured reader on Live from Kelly Writer’s House. Jim teaches in the Speech-Language-Hearing Science Program at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

2011-11-14T04:00:00.000-08:00

I woke to the sound of my daughter crying, coming from the bedside monitor. My wife was still asleep, exhausted. I'd been up till 1 working. I got up and stumbled to Ellie's room to check on her. I didn't want to coddle her--we were trying to get her on a sleep schedule, but she needed a diaper change and was probably hungry. I turned on the closet light with the door mostly closed, so just enough light leaked through to see what I was doing, but not enough to keep Ellie from sleeping. I turned to the crib. When Ellie saw me, she smiled and giggled, and wiggled her arms and legs. Her whole body tensed in joy. I stood over her and just took it in.

Before Ellie was born, I always felt like there was--forgive the cliche--something missing, like I was an ill-used toy limping along minus its shed parts. A lot of this came from a childhood spent witnessing my mother's prolonged illness, growing up in an economically devestated area with few prospects of escape, and watching a lot fo my friends fall by the wayside due to drug abuse and hopelessness, among other things. The long and short of it has been that I've spent most of my life feeling like I was pretty much on my own. I spent much of my time in my own head, rather than focused on the negativity around me. But having a child forced me--forces me everyday--to be "here." It's kind of like having a little drill instructor screaming in my ear--sometimes, literally like that. Sure, I'd like to sit around all morning, but the baby must be fed. And she's not going to nap if she doesn't get some exercise and some kind of stimulation, so she needs to go for a walk. And if I want to get anything done for myself, I better prioritize and work efficiently.

Of course, it would be easier to just be a bad father. I could ignore my daughter or pawn her off on my wife. I see it all the time. But the real question here, is which is more rewarding: sleeping a little longer, or getting to see my daughter smile up at me at 4 a.m.? I've slept at least a little just about every night for the past 35 years. I only have so many opportunities to spend time with my daughter.

My daughter makes me be a better person. This is because she calls the bluff inherent in the chip on my shoulder. It's convenient for me to blame certain problems on others, on my environment, on whatever. But what about Ellie's problems? I'm the only one to blame if she has problems, other than physical issues beyond my control. Therefore, it's up to me to be a good father and, by default, a good person. I want to do well at my job so that our situation is secure. I want to drive safely so there's less of a chance of her being injured. The ramifications are far reaching and surprising.

But I'm not just talking about guilt; guilt will only get you so far. When it's 4 a.m. and I see my daughter smile and reach to be picked up, it doesn't matter that I haven't slept. When I see my wife playing with our daughter, I envy her. I want to be part of that.

* * *

Now, it's some time after five. The sun is just starting to add gray to the black pallette of the room. I've fed Ellie, and she's fallen asleep in my lap. Technically, this is a no-no. We're supposed to put her back in the crib before she falls asleep. But my wife is asleep in the other room. I've got a pillow propped against the wall to lean against. I can barely see Ellie's face; she looks tense as though she's considering a difficult problem. I touch her face, caress the space from the top of her nose between her eyes. She relaxes and exhales in a sigh. I've got work in a couple hours; I'm not going to sleep tonight. That's okay. Who needs sleep?

2011-11-10T01:02:00.000-08:00

I first got to know Tom Williams when he was the editor for the Arkansas Review and later American Book Review. When I heard he had a book out, I ran out and bought it. Okay, I wandered over to my computer, and ordered it, but still; you get the point.

Me: Why Mimics?

Tom: Because I’ve always admired this odd gift, this dubious talent, this curious capacity to shape one’s voice to that of others. And because to me it’s a perfect kind of role to explore my usual questions about what is art and what is an artist’s role, especially an artist of color. Essentially, it boils down to this: I had always wanted to write about someone who risks his own personality in the pursuit of becoming a great mimic. I wrote a story about this phenomenon and it didn’t satisfy the urge. I wrote this novella and always loved it, even as it sat, in my various hard drives and floppy disks, for years.

Me: You seem to be lampooning some of the players in the 80s comic boom. Who were the standouts to you?

Tom: I’d hate to say lampooning, though it’s probably an accurate assessment. I tried to be very reverent in my treatment of comedians, from the eighties and beyond. Certainly, to my mind, the comics of that period that find themselves clothed in my character names and behavior are Bill Hicks, Richard Belzer, Robin Harris, Eddie Murphy, of course, and Andrew Dice Clay, who was the real inspiration for Rhino Stamps, and many more. But I tried to get in every period of American comedy history I could too, so there’s also Elaine Boozler and Roseanne Barr, Edgar Bergen and Andy Griffith, Henny Youngman and Bill Cosby, Mort Sahl and Bob Newhart. The only ones that I would not try to smuggle in, either in disguise or obvious allusion, were Pryor and Carlin, who just seemed too big to try to reduce to my stage. Isn’t it shocking to realize, as I just did in typing their names, that both are dead? I keep thinking about all the important figures of my youth who are no longer with us: Joe Strummer, Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, the aforementioned Bill Hicks, Robin Harris. Man, it makes me feel old and sad.

Me: Why did you choose to use no real names of comics?

Tom: Because I wanted to make this more my own and allow for the possibility of what John Gardner calls the “small changes in the laws of the universe” that a tale writer must employ. I knew Douglas Myles was going to do astonishing things, and just didn’t think that would work in a recognizable universe, where instead of having, say, my Jason “Speedy” Gonzalez, you had this world’s Paul Rodriguez. From the first words of this book, which were the first words I wrote when I was drafting it, I knew it took place in a world I was devising, and I just had to keep it of a piece. Though as some have pointed out, there is a great pleasure in playing, Spot the comedian while reading the book, which I entirely approve of.

Me: In the world of this novel, comedy is taken very seriously—so much so that several scholarly journals focus on it. What is our world missing from not respecting comedy as much?

Tom: I’m kind of making fun of the people who take comedy very seriously. The Mimic’s Own Voice is, at its roots, a parody of a scholarly monograph, and comedic studies is my exaggerated version of American Studies and Film Studies and all the kind of developments in the academy that, in the words of my students over the years, make going to the movies a job instead of fun. Yet I think we should take comedy seriously. It’s often the only thing that allows us to endure. And I do think we should revere comedians as much as any artists. Certainly, I’d take Pryor or Carlin, or Rodney Dangerfield for crying out loud, as inspiration over ninety-nine percent of the actors and a good percentage of the musicians of the past fifty years. (True story, I was recently watching Back to School—which I do every time it’s on—and kicked myself for not having a Rodney-like character in the book. A Sam Kinison one, too. Remember him? He’s dead as well.)

Me: What has your relationship with Main Street Rag Publishing Company been like?

Tom: Speaking as someone who has toiled in the shadows for so long—publishing a few stories a year, submitting to book contests to no avail, working with a respectable agent over another book and having it turned down by everyone from Knopf to Highlights for Children—I feel like Scott Douglass and Craig Renfroe saved my publishing life. And for that I’m grateful. Add to that that Scott designed a beautiful book and I had a hand in selecting and shaping the cover art, and that they do so much work on their website and in going to AWP to promote the work, I feel honored to be a Main Street Rag author. As well, the books they’ve published in this series of novellas (that they even published novellas at all!) are ones I feel humbled by: Ben Tanzer’s My Father’s House, Barry Graham’s, Nothing or Next to Nothing. John Oliver Hodges’s The War of the Crazies. These are books to get in your hands, readers, all of them authored, as well, by ace gents.

Me: Who are your biggest influences?

Tom: I really don’t know the answer to this question any more, as I have read so much and been moved by so many—the core group of Roth, P, Percy, W, O’Connor, F, Johnson, C and Faulkner, W—that it seems the answer is everyone. But I want to take time to talk about two key teachers I had: Lee K. Abbott and Jim Robison. I might be the writer I am today if I didn’t read Barthelme and Allende but I would certainly not be without Lee and Jim.

Lee was a tyrant in workshop. You got copies back from him with words slashed out, furious question marks emblazoned, suggestions for similes that you knew were demands. Lee walked around a lot in this room that was reserved for workshops, while all of us sat on worn and mismatched furniture in a circle around the periphery. This one time, when my story was up, Lee stalked me across the room, as if the influence of Raymond Carver could be sniffed out. (It was 1990—wasn’t everyone influenced by Carver then?) Lee said, Who’ve you been reading? I knew he knew. But I stalled, said Richard Ford. Who else, Lee said. Tom McGuane, I said. Tobias Wolff next. Maybe Bobbie Ann Mason. Who else? Lee was smiling. He knew. He knew. Finally I gave it up. He proceeded to talk about how Carver’s stories worked, often bringing together two variables, like the man with no hands and the guy out of work in “Viewfinder” and how at first they would seem almost incompatible, but then develop almost magically in the story as informing each other. My story tried to do that and didn’t. And it was imprinted on me then a couple of things: I needed to figure out what writers were doing but also figure out what I was doing.
In addition to the scoldings—once Lee said, to another student, not me, “In the words of John Saxon in the movie The Appaloosa, “Why did you do such a stupid thing?”, I’ll also never forget the praise Lee gave. One of my paragraphs received, Great three sentence run, and I wanted to frame it. But in all, Lee was the man for craft. He taught where stories started, where they ended, how you got characters alive on the page and moved them from place to place, and how you made sure that the reader was not made to work excessively hard to get what you were up to.

Jim might have been Lee’s complete opposite. He was self effacing in class, often wishing, it seemed, that somebody else would take the lead in the workshop discussion so he could offer an occasional witticism from the back row. He was also genuinely enigmatic. Once, on the chalkboard at the then awful workshop rooms at U of Houston, he wrote a time (I forget it now) and said, “Still the best marathon time for any member of the Creative Writing Program,” then erased it. Looking back, that was the same joy I got out of his fiction: sudden, illuminating flashes that vanished before they showed too much.

If Lee was the man for craft, Jim was the man for ambition. He could look at the draft and see in it the story it wanted to be. He’d say something like, “Tom seems to be working within the high modernist tradition here but violating it just a little with this flourish of uncertainty near the end.” And when my classmates turned to me, I’d nod, wishing I’d known that was what I wanted to do. Then I’d go home and get to work on doing just that.

But it’s like I tell my CW students now, be on the lookout for two teachers who might be the devil and angel who manifest on opposite shoulders. When I’m writing, I’ve got Lee Abbott hovering over one shoulder saying, “You sure about that, bud?” when a story stumbles out of the gates, and Jim Robison hovering over the other and saying, “Aren’t you trying to enter a dialogue with Ellison here?” To repeat: without these two fine men—great writers and great guys—I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.

Me: As an editor for American Book Review, you must’ve seen some good books lately—what really blew you away? Or, if nothing did, what was wrong with them?

Tom: Lydia Yuknavtich’s The Chronology of Water. If all memoirs were like this, no one would be griping about the genre.

Jim Greer’s The Failure and Artificial Light. I think Jim and I dial into the same hidden radio frequency for inspiration. We both love stories of hidden or lost manuscripts, find French film divine, and don’t mind using the proverbial fifty cent word now and then.

Ben Tanzer’s You Can Make Him Like You. How Ben does it, I don’t know. But he writes a book every season of the year and each one’s better than the next. The fact that this one’s about a guy about to become a dad hit home with me, but it’s also a valentine to Chicago, a city that always deserves more love than it gets.

Extie Ecks, Normally Special. A collection of stories in a volume so compact it fits in a shirt pocket, though the characters are as wily as fire eaters and more human than not. I am not a big fan of the short short, but Extie has me reevaluating my aesthetic.

There are more, but these were the most recent and the most vivid. As far as what I see for ABR, I get excited every time I assign a review because it seems like there is , no other phrase can describe it, a fucking shitload of good books out there right now.

Me: Would you mind telling me a little about your writing schedule?

Tom: When I’m working—which I have to say I’m not right now (see reply to next question)—I am at my most productive when I’m aiming at two to three pages a day, seven days a week. Doesn’t matter if it’s a story, essay or longer work, I need to stay with it, from day to day, stopping in the middle of a page, a scene, a graph, a sentence. Rereading the previous day’s work. Making cosmetic changes, then picking up where I left off. I recently read Ron Carlson’s great little book, Ron Carlson Writes a Story, and he had some great advice about not even pausing to look up if, for example, a song you want to put in the story came out the year you’ve set it. I’ve done that, and wound up losing the thread of what I was trying to work with that day. Damn Internet.

I wrote the first draft of The Mimic’s Own Voice entirely by hand, and wonder if I should get back to that routine to avoid the temptation of checking to see, for example, what’s up on Facebook or whether anyone else has given me only four stars on Goodreads.

Me: How has being a father influenced your writing?

Tom: I have not written much at all since my son Finn’s birth in 2009. Reviews and some little essay like deals—I really liked an essay I wrote to introduce Charles Johnson’s story “Popper’s Disease” in an issue of The Collagist—but little fiction to speak of. But it’s not all Finn’s doing. I’ve now changed jobs twice in four years, moving from Arkansas to Texas to Kentucky. But a few things stand out about my writerly life since the happy day Carmen and I were joined by the Finner. My friend Josh Russell advised me to not beat myself up about not writing, and to do “head work.” Josh says that once he started writing more regularly, he had so much stored up. I’m looking forward to getting some stuff on paper, that’s for sure. I’m also more aware that I’ve become such a softy, as a father. I worry about a strain of sentimentality entering into my fiction, too. But above all, I am more aware, as a father that I want to be sure that what I do write is something that Finn will want to read when he gets older. You see: what a softy.

Me: What are you working on now?

Tom: I have a collection of stories out right now, called Among the Wild Mulattoes, and have never given up completely on the novel that my agent sent out back in 05, True To the Blues. One of the advantages of writing a lot that doesn’t get published is that you always have a nice backlog to work with. Not that anyone’s clamoring for more Williams—but I do think I’m about to get back into the game. Just as soon as I finish this interview and the report for my department that’s due in the provost’s office . . . which in many ways is the most complicated fiction I’ve ever essayed.

2011-11-07T05:00:00.000-08:00

A year after we started the testing, Jillian and I were stuck in traffic thirty miles outside of Little Rock. We were supposed to be at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock clinic at eleven to get the results of my test. Then, we were supposed to go immediately to see our psychiatric councilor again. We lived several hours away, but this was the only place in the state that offered the Huntington's test. We hadn't moved in an hour, and it was nearly twelve.
The mood in the car was one of nervous delusion. Jillian was convinced we would get good news. I was convinced we would get bad news. Semis stretched in front of us, down the one open lane on either side of the interstate. Lines of cars intersected the interstate periodically, none of the vehicles moving. The smell of tar permeated everything. Workmen occasionally moved equipment as though trying to appear busy, and then stopped and stood around sweating and talking.
"I bet they go to lunch," I said.
"They better not," Jillian said. "I'm not waiting any longer. Don't see why they couldn't give us the results over the phone."
"That would be too easy," I said.
We were a year into what was supposed to have been a six-month testing period. The first clinic we'd gone to cancelled our initial appointment because their psychiatric councilor refused to work with them anymore. He disapproved of the fact that patients were allowed to leave the testing process without further psychiatric evaluation. We'd fought tooth and nail to have my mother genetically tested, which would have helped clarify the results of my test if mine was inconclusive. Her obstinate doctor strung us along for months, refusing to return long distance phone calls, leaving us on hold indefinitely, before we finally gave up. We'd only talked to an actual doctor once, and spoke with our 'genetic testing counselor' (Sara) only a handful of times.
Sara was an energetic redhead, eager to help us the two times we actually visited her office, but we got the feeling that we knew more about Huntington's disease than she did.
The testing process was hard on me, but it was equally hard on Jillian, who felt that she couldn't burden me with her fears and problems. The only mention made at any point of her needs during this process was by the psychiatric councilor, an odd man we met one time who simply asked her, "How are you holding up?" Before coming back to my mental health, before her eyes could even begin tearing up. At this point, we just wanted it to be over with.
There was no cure, no treatment. It was a win or lose situation. We'd spent a year eating blueberries and trying to go for walks as often as we could. As the testing progressed, we had found ourselves going out to eat because we were too drained to cook. We had both gained weight, and watched TV more and more. I had stopped writing and we both worked longer shifts. We had withdrawn from friends, and the mythology we had hoped to build for our lives was forgotten. We had both hoped that facing the dragon of this disease by undergoing testing would take away its power over us, but it had only made things worse. And as the months dragged on, we'd stopped talking about the testing, about our fears, about our plans. Until it was appointment time.
Sitting there, in the car, I couldn't help but think about the last time we'd made this trip, three weeks before, to have the actual test. It had been a simple procedure; they'd taken some blood and we'd been on our way. Before this, we'd spent a half hour talking to a psychiatric councilor. He was a hawk nosed man who stared at us until we felt like mice, and asked surreal questions to test my cognitive awareness.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"I'm in your office," I said.
"How did you get here?"
"We drove. We took turns. Oh, wait. Did you mean literally, 'how did we get here?' Cause we used Mapquest. I think we took a left on University from the interstate. I don't really remember. Or, did you mean, more in a philosophical sense?" I asked, smiling nervously, waiting for the talons.
"I'm going to tell you three words," he said. "I want you to remember those three words because I'm going to ask you about them later. All right? The words are apple, Ford, Ohio."
He stared at me for a moment and then scribbled furiously on his paper. I watched, growing more confused.
"Draw this," he said, passing it to me. He'd drawn a rough pentagon. "Don't lift your pen. Just draw it."
I drew it and he looked at it appraisingly before jotting something down.
A little while later, he asked me what the three words were.
"Apple," I said. "Ford."
"Do you remember the third one?" He asked. "It was a state."
"Arkansas?" I asked.
"It was Ohio," he said. "Do you know what day it is today?"
"It's Wednesday," I said.
"And the date?"
"Twenty-something," I said. "I don't know. But I never know what day it is. I mean, that's normal for me. "
I was terrified that I had failed the test. Each time he asked a question, I was more nervous, more afraid. The fact that the questions seemed so odd to me didn't help. I thought maybe they weren't odd questions, maybe I was just losing it. Maybe the Huntington's had already started. That could happen. Usually people manifested symptoms in their forties, but it had happened to children, and grandmothers. And the questions just kept getting stranger.
"Have you ever considered suicide?" He asked.
"Yes," I said. Jillian turned and looked at me.
"What happened?" he asked.
"I didn't do it," I said.
Finally, he finished. The psychiatric councilor told me that he thought I was okay to take the test.
"One in four people commit suicide immediately after getting the results," he said. "I'm telling you this so you are ready for it. I think it is imperative that you come here immediately after getting your results. You might even wait and open them here."

"Ohio," I repeated on the trip back. "Apple, Ford, Ohio."

I had started graduate school during the testing process and in order to see our psychiatric councilor and give a blood sample, I had missed my acting class. I was a terrible actor and was only taking the class because the head of the playwriting master's program in which I was enrolled felt that I needed to broaden my understanding of actors. I was the only graduate student in the class, but it was a mixed bag, ranging from a grandmother auditing the class for free to a transsexual who showed up, on the days he came, late, wearing a dog collar, acting his scenes in high camp.
When I returned later that week, the class was strangely quiet. The teacher, a graduate acting student, seemed agitated, nervous. He talked to us about "what had happened," never referring to it so that I had no idea what it was. But we must press on, was the gist of his speech.
"What happened?" I asked.
The teacher turned deer-in-headlight eyes to me. Another student told me that Todd, the transsexual student, had committed suicide over the weekend by overdosing on pills. He was found in his apartment. The grandmother suggested that we all sign a card, for his parents.
I hadn't really known Todd; I don't think any of us in class did. I had always been polite to him, or at least not rude. I'd talked to him maybe two or three times for longer than a sentence. That's all I could say, all most of us could say. After class, I waited to talk to the teacher. He was clearly not taking it well. I didn't know what to say to him that he didn't already know. I apologized for missing class, told him I liked the class; I said as much as I could for as long as I could and left.
Later, in another class, someone brought up the suicide. I said what little I knew about it.
"You look like you're about to start laughing," a classmate said, staring at me, puzzled.
"It's a nervous reaction," the professor said.
I don't know how I felt about Todd's death. Suicide had gone from an abstract thought to being the ghost in the chair beside me. I tried hard not to think about it, and when my classmate pointed out my strange facial expression, I knew that the psychic battle had spilled onto the visible plain. This lack of control seemed like the first step down a dangerous path. Stress, the psychiatric councilor had told us, could bring the symptoms of Huntington's disease to the surface. And what would I do, if I tested positive. What would I do?
When I was a teenager, I'd gotten into vicious arguments with my brother about this.
"I will go off somewhere, out in the woods or something, and shoot myself," I said. "If I had any balls, if any of us did, we'd go do the same for Mom."
"Well stay the hell away from me," my brother said. "If I get it, I want all the time I have to live."
"It's not living," I said.
"Just stay the hell away," he said.
I remembered my father and his brothers taking their mother out of the hospital, when she was dying, and taking her home. They'd organized it like a raid, one brother blocked off one hall, another a different hall, and my father carried her out so she could die in her own bed.
My sister wrote letters to Dr. Kevorkian, praising him for the work he did, for the battle he fought. Dignity was what he was fighting for; the reason my father and uncles had taken their mother out of the hospital, against the doctor's wishes, so she could die with dignity. Is that solace? It had to be. If I'd learned anything in life it was that.

We finally reached the clinic two hours late. Sara was waiting for us in the lobby. She led us to her office and, before we could even sit, told us that the test was negative. I didn't have it. Jillian cried, Sara cried, and I sat quietly, unsure as to how to process this information.
We were inside the clinic for fifteen minutes, then back on the road, back in the traffic. We never even considered going back to the psychiatric councilor. It was an unspoken agreement.
Jillian chatted manically in the car. We talked about kids, talked about buying a house. We made plans again and floated through the next few days, fat and happy, and finally settled onto each other one night and fought like dogs, letting out all the tension that had been building over the last year. When the dust settled, we were empty, and waiting to fill ourselves.

Over the next few months, it occurred to me that I had no plan for this happy ending. Like my brother, I had been so prepared for a devastating result that I didn't know what to do. I was like the old doctor in A Tale of Two Cities, unsure how to live without his chains. I had gone from thinking I had a certain future to being just as uncertain as everyone else.
I was also flooded with guilt. How could I live with myself if my sister became sick? How could I be happy after my mother had suffered so horribly? After the tragedy of my mother's life, I felt, on some level, that I deserved to suffer as she had. It seemed like the least I could do. But this feeling passed. The disease had already consumed my mother's life, I wasn't about to let it have mine.
This, I think, is the true tragedy of my mother's life: forty years overshadowed by fifteen. Trying to make sense of her life was like trying to hear a whisper in a room full of shouting. For me, she had always been the stranger dying in the other room. My earliest memories were of playing school with my sister, our mother reading Happy Hollisters books to us, but even then she was shaky and distant. And later, when she required a nurse, I remember stepping off the school bus and seeing my mother leaning on her nurse a little ways down the road, so as not to embarrass me in front of the other kids. When I was very young, I couldn’t go to the bathroom without her banging on the door, asking me if I needed any help. I couldn’t play without her sticking her head in every few moments to ask if I was okay. Though it bordered on smothering, she seemed to be trying to give us all the attention she could in the time she had. She wanted us to know she was there. She worried. She tried. She loved us. This much, I knew. In the end, isn't this all one could ask from a mother?

2011-11-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

“I Know, It’s Only In My Head:
How One Album Changed a Mind.”

I tend to judge people by the music they love. Not the music that they just listen to, but the music they are passionate about. Of course, if they’re not passionate about any type of music, I usually don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them.
Ask someone what their favorite album is and they’ll waffle. They’ll hem and haw and give you a list, depending on their mood. I have one answer and it’s been the same since 1994. Many great albums have come out since then, but nothing has made an impact on my life the way Counting Crows’ August and Everything After. Nothing has quite captured the essence of who I believe I am, then and now.
“Beneath the dust and love and sweat that hang on everybody, there's a dead man trying to get out.”
In the early 90s, I was a teenager, not unlike other teenagers, but definitely not like all other teenagers. I won’t say my life was the worst life. I know people have had it worse, but it doesn’t diminish the bad things in my life because that’s the life I had to live. Pain is relative. You see, you will have these things that happen to you, things you don’t control or invite, but they happen nonetheless, and they shape you. People will react to these outside forces differently. Some will act out. Some will internalize. Some seem to shrug it off without a second thought. Some of us crawl inside our own heads and refuse to come out.
“Mama, mama, mama, why am I so alone? I can’t go outside I’m scared I might not make it home.”
I was agoraphobic. For three years, I scarcely left my house, not to go to the movies or concerts or my grandparents’ house for holidays. I finished high school at home, which is the only way I would’ve finished because I was flunking out with astonishing ease. For three years, I heard “It’s only in your head.” The mumbles of doubt resounded in my head, and I hated everyone for not understanding, because unless it’s happening to you, you can’t understand what it’s like to drown in this wave of terror every time you felt you were losing control of the moment.
I would sit alone at night in the dark, headphones on, music seeping into my brain. I’d run my palms in circles on my legs until my thighs were numb. I know now it was a form of meditation. You do what you can to escape. This is what I did to cope. I would listen to these angry songs and all of that pent up rage would just boil inside me and my stomach burned to the point that sometimes it was hard to eat.
Then in early 1994, I heard this song, “Round Here” and the first moments when the organ is rising and the guitar comes in, and then these lyrics, the voice and the words were like nothing I’d ever heard before.
“Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where no one notices the contrast of white on white…”
I’ve always had diverse taste in music. I was one of only a few people I knew in the small town where I grew up who had listened to things like Run DMC or the Violent Femmes, but I would also listen to Motley Crue and Lynard Skynard. I just loved music. It was something I craved. I think, looking back, I can remember escaping into songs as far back as four or five years-old, listening to 8-tracks of Roy Clark and the Statler Brothers before school.
But this song was something different and I had to have that album. August and Everything After. I was 19 and didn’t have a driver’s license, because the first panic attack I remember having was standing in line at the DMV when I was 16 and I just turned around and left. My mom drove me to the Best Buy that had just opened up on the other side of town. It was a week day, mid-morning. The only time I would even attempt to go places because I knew there would be hardly anyone there and I could get in and out quickly.
I remember taking that CD home and listening to it, start to finish and again and again. Musically, it blew me away. It was miles away from the “grunge” that permeated the radio and MTV at that time. The closest thing I could liken it to was The Band, but these songs hit me on a whole other level. The instruments merged to create this warm envelope of sound and Adam’s voice…I know he’s heard it a million times, but listening to those songs, it was as if he were speaking directly to me. It’s a ridiculous notion, but when you’ve spent so many years adrift from humanity, it can be overwhelming to find a voice who seems to understand that maybe it is just in your head, but that doesn’t make the pain any less real, and here were these songs about people who felt the isolation, the sadness, the desire to just be seen as who you are and to have someone accept that.
“Believe in me because I don't believe in anything, and I want to be someone to believe.”
What was less obvious to me at the time was the notion of hope that the songs held. It took a while for me to understand that the voice in these songs was looking for a reason to live. “Round Here” was an anthem about figuring out who you are and being okay with that decision, because no matter what you decide, you’re not alone.
The story in “A Murder of One” is a man telling a woman that she doesn’t have to remain in an unhappy relationship because there are options, but the universal message is “just because your life is like this now, you can choose to make it something different.” It’s the perfect end to a collection of songs about despair and hope, the repetition of a lament, a plea, a statement, “Change, change, change.”
I still have the copy of that CD that I bought almost 18 years ago. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to that album. I can’t even give you a decent ballpark figure. It doesn’t matter. After a certain point, it just becomes a part of who you are as a person. As I write this, I’m listening again, and every line still resonates. All these years later, these songs still say better what I was feeling then than the thoughts that I can muster and type out.
In the end, I’m not sure if it’s an album that defines me or it’s me that defines that album. The poet Miller Williams said, “A poem should start as the writer’s and end as the reader’s.” I think that’s a notion that holds true for all forms of art, and to me, it definitely stands in the case of this collection of songs, created by a group of talented musicians, accepted by a lonely kid in a dark room, carried forward by a man still carving out his name.

* * *

Chris Fullerton is the epitome of disaffection, a misanthropic attention-whore who at times has considered himself a writer, a musician and a clown. You can find him all over the Internet, but he isn’t really there: Twitter. Tumblr.

2011-10-31T05:00:00.001-07:00

Six months after we moved in together, Jillian and I became engaged. The next morning, we decided to go hunting for engagement rings.
"Let's check out pawn shops," she said. "It will be romantic." Her parents got their rings from a pawn shop. I was intrigued by the idea of saving money, but I thought, pretty quickly into things, that we would move from pawn shops to jewelry stores, maybe even on the way to the first place.
So we started at the nearest place, Mountain Man Pawn - an overgrown aluminum storage building in a run-down parking lot on the south side of town. Inside, an old man told us, "By the time you get to be my age, if you haven't worked up a good hate for each other you've done something wrong."
We drove all over town, talking about the old man with his odd candor and finally came back to Mountain Man for the ring, and picked up wedding bands there as well.
Later, Jillian called her parents to tell them the news. Her father answered.
"We're engaged," Jillian said.
He was quiet. "Let me get your mother," he finally said.
Jillian repeated the news to her mother and was met again by silence. "Oh my. That was fast," her mother said.
"We've been living together for six months, Mom," Jillian said.
"Don't you think you're rushing? I just wonder if you've thought this through," her mother asked.
"Why can't you just be happy?" Jillian asked.
I was in my office, working. But I could hear the agitation in Jillian's voice.
"What about kids? You're just going to give that up? You're too young to close that door," her mother said.
"I'm the same age you were when you were married," Jillian said.
"But this is different."
After 45 minutes of that:
"I guess the real reason is I can't be happy about you marrying someone who could die a horrible death or need you to take care of him. I think that before you get married," her mother said, "Cortney should get tested for Huntington’s."

"Don't hate them," Jillian said, later. "They're just worried. This is your decision," she said. "No matter what anyone says, even my mother, you have to decide. I'll support whatever you choose to do."
We talked about testing in noncommittal spurts. Mostly, we talked about her parents, wedding plans, politics, anything but testing.
After two days, Jillian called her parents. Her mother quickly broke into tears, explaining that Jillian's paternal grandmother was dying, and Jillian's father was on his way to Michigan to see her.
"Life's too short," Jillian's mother said. "Nobody knows when they're going to die. So if he doesn't want to get tested, he shouldn't have to."
What this meant was that I couldn't be mad at them for trying to force me into a decision. What this meant was that I had to make the decision.

When my mother was diagnosed with Huntington’s there was no definitive test. The gene that produces it was discovered in 1993. The test, at first, was enormously expensive and required multiple testings of family members for comparison, but over time, as more became known, the price dropped to around a thousand dollars. Huntington’s tends to manifest later in life. It is the perfect disease for procrastinators. My mother had three kids and was into her forties before she showed any symptoms. Her father likewise had three kids before he showed symptoms, and his mother was well on in years. This is the norm; symptoms tend to occur during the ages of 45-55, though they can manifest at any time, and my siblings and I had lived our lives as though in the moment of near-sleep dreading the buzz of the morning alarm. When we weren't concerned for ourselves, we worried about each other.
My brother was so sure he had Huntington’s that he never married, never planned for the future, and when he hit his forties, and the disease failed to appear, he suddenly found himself unprepared. He quickly married, became a stepparent and tried to make up for lost time. My sister took the opposite approach. She married young to a man with three kids, and struggled with the decision to have kids of her own and risk passing on the Huntington’s gene before finally giving in and having a son.
I wasn't sure where I placed on the family scale. I tended towards a pessimistic way of thinking, sure that I had Huntington's, but unsure what to do about it. The fear that I might have the disease had made my life swing like a pendulum. Some days, I felt I should live only for that day. What was the point in planning, preparing for the future? If I only had twenty years or so left, I had better live them for all they were worth. This meant that while my friends were settling down with mortgages, I was just starting college. And instead of paying for classes, I was using the loan money to travel.
Other days, I thought that if I didn't have much time left, I had better buckle down and try to achieve something worthwhile. So while those friends were starting careers, I was finishing up work on my first novel and recording demos with my band.
And when Jillian and I met, we settled into something I'd never really had before: stability. We made plans. We talked about children; we talked about careers; we talked about where we'd like to live. We built a mythology for our relationship by seeking out new and strange experiences that we'd both find rewarding and interesting. Instead of going to a movie, we drove around looking in other people's windows. Instead of playing golf, we planted a garden.
But no matter what, my mother's disease was always present, like an image in my peripheral vision that kept coming back.
At traffic lights, I wondered; what if I have it? In line at the grocery store, I pondered it: if I had Huntington's, the big if, what would I do? If my time is to be short, then I'd better do something worthwhile with it. At the fast food drive through, I thought: I'd better make it count.
It sounded good, and yet no decision seemed to be getting made. Jillian stood by during all of this, metaphorically, smiling supportively and trying not to scream.
I had just graduated college and was poised to enter graduate school to study playwriting at the University of Arkansas. I was taking a summer class on filmmaking and not working. And as I got further and further away from making a decision, I got more and more miserable. I began buying books I'd never read, movies I didn't even like, and blowing through my careful summer budget, just to keep myself entertained. I didn't know what to do with myself so I didn't do anything. I floated. I changed the subject. I talked about the weather.
A few weeks after our engagement, I received a letter from the bank. I was overdrawn. The money that was supposed to see me through the summer was gone halfway through the break. I drove all over town, putting in quick applications for a summer job, and then I sat and waited and thought, really thought, about the concept of a future.
Up to that point, I had parceled my life out according to looming deadlines. In nine months, it would be summer, in three months, school would start again. In twelve years, I would graduate with my high school diploma. In four years, give or take, I would graduate college. When I was a kid, I had waited for my father to get home from work. Now, I was waiting for Jillian to get home. All my life, it seemed, I had been waiting. At the Baptist church, they'd taught me that life is a dream and we wake into heaven. We just had to wait it out. When I worked, or even at home, I watched the clock, gauging my actions against the clock. All of these deadlines were tiny reflections of that giant deadline, the moment when I was sure I would wake from this dream of life into the nightmare of the future. All my life I'd been waiting for it, but now, with Jillian, I thought: maybe not. It was too delicate a bird to hold in my hand, fully formed, so I made the decision and didn't think about it anymore. When Jillian got home from work I told her it was time I got tested.

2011-10-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

Helen Vitoria is a poet and founder of a brand spanking new poetry journal, Thrush. In an effort to soften her up so she'll publish me (jk) I spoke with her about her new endeavor.

Me: You just started a new journal, Thrush. Can you tell me a little about the aesthetic of the journal?

Helen: Cort, first of all thank you so much for this interview.

THRUSH, features only poetry. It is bimonthly, with a special Inaugural Issue in December 2011. Aesthetically, the design (I love the final product) is simple and elegant, focusing only on the poems and poet. I wanted an uncluttered atmosphere in which to present the poems, thus leaving all focus entirely on the work we present. It will feature no more than ten poems per issue.

As far as the poems themselves, I am looking for work that is emotive, stirring, a unique voice that will leave a lasting impression with the reader, and perhaps have them return and read the poems again and again, print them. It would be great if a reader stumbled upon a poem they love and then sought to find more poems from a particular poet. Open up a whole new relationship between the reader and poetry itself.

Me: What inspired you to start a new journal?

Helen: There are so many journals that I adore. But, very few if any feature poetry alone. Not all poets write fiction. I want THRUSH to be the journal poets turn to, when they have a poem they want presented in a special way. I love poetry and I think part of me always wanted a journal I can submit to that just features poems. The on line journals that feature fiction, interviews, and art are gorgeous, but sometimes I feel overwhelmed on the site itself. I wanted to present something different.

Ultimately, I guess I started THRUSH because it’s a journal where I would want to submit my poems to.

Me: Have you found that editing affects your own writing?

Helen: So many things affect my own writing. Poets I admire, a community workshop I teach each month, and certainly editing my own journal.

Someone asked me once: What is it that your poems are about? My answer to that is the human condition. I write about the things we all experience - love, loss, hurt, sex, death, the ways people fail one another, etc. As personal as my work is to me, there is no greater compliment than when someone outside the writing community reads a poem I wrote and takes the time to find me and email me telling me how my work affected them. Surprising to me, at times that happens and it always validates something about my poems and leaves me feeling as if I have accomplished the greatest thing a poet can do.

Me: Can you tell me a little about your writing routine?

Helen: My routine varies, I write in my head all day long, no matter what I am doing. I write in my car while driving and record notes into the voice recorder on my phone. I try to make time each day to sit and write, or draft at least one poem, either on my laptop, or on paper. Usually, early in the morning or late at night. I write in complete silence and hope the phone does not ring, and I do not get interrupted. Almost immediately, even with a draft, I read the poem out loud, my dogs are the listening audience. For me, reading my poems out loud helps me with editing, tweaking. It somehow gives life to the poem, almost instantly, and then it helps me to find the direction I want it to go in.

Me: Tell me a little about Corn Exchange, your forthcoming collection?

Helen: Corn Exchange should be out in late November of this year. It’s my first full length collection. Many poems in it are scattered in different journals, the book brings them all together. It’s divided into three sections of poems. Each section represents work from a different period of my personal life.

Me: What has your experience been like working with Scrambler Books?

Helen: I love Scrambler. Jeremy Spencer has made this process so easy for me. I was not sure what to expect, but he makes it all so relaxed. Scrambler approached me back in late 2009, I had a poem that came out in [PANK], the poem was “we were horses”, in my bio I mentioned I was working on a full length collection. A few weeks later, I heard from Jeremy and he asked if I had a publisher. Of course, I did not, and my collection was still in the beginning stages of how I envisioned it. Also, at that point, there was so much more work I wanted to get in journals. I asked if he would wait till I had the collection complete, and he did, it took another year plus. Jeremy is super patient, and I love that he is no pressure. I don’t have a place for pressure when I write. When I finally sent him the completed manuscript, somewhere in my mind I thought well, it will be okay if he no longer is interested. But his notes back to me were wonderful. Since I am a huge believer of fate, I feel Corn Exchange is exactly where it belongs.

Me: Can you tell me a little about your novel(la) in verse, Amsterdam?

Helen: Amsterdam is a book of poems that will tell a story, all the poems are titled Amsterdam as well. It is still in the beginning stages, my hope it to have it completed by Spring 2012, with a total of fifty to sixty short prose poems when complete. Then I hope to find a home for it.

With THRUSH starting up, and other things I am working on, I hope to invest a great deal of time into Amsterdam this coming winter.

Me: Who are your biggest influences?

Helen: I have so many that I love, a few are: TS Eliot, Anne Sexton, Roberto Bolaño, Pablo Neruda, George Seferis, Lucille Clifton, at least another hundred more.

Me: Who’s writing the killer poetry these days?

Helen: Alex Lemon, Kim Addonizio, Carol Frost, Carolyn Forché, Traci Brimhall, Ada Limón, Eleni Sikélianòs, Jeffrey McDaniel, Alison Stine, Kimberly Johnson, John Poch, Nathalie Handal, Anis Mojgani. I could go on for a long time, I feel I am living at a time when some of the best poetry in history is being written.Recently, I have stumbled upon two poets (Tess Patalano, Alexis Orgera) whose work was so outstanding, it instantly left me wanting to read everything they have written and seek out all future work.

Me: Who will history remember?

Helen: All those and many more. History should remember all of us who write poems, we write what we are passionate about, from deep inside us. Poems are our way to sharing who we are. If one is brave enough to share publicly on that level that should not be forgotten easily. For me, the written word is history, it’s timeless.

Me: What are you working on now/next?

Helen: Besides Amsterdam, I just completed and submitted a chapbook titled 1611. I submit to journals I adore, and want to see my work in. I am pouring allot of myself into THRUSH. Some days, I wake up and decide, today I am writing a small chapbook. I try not to plan too much, I sort of go with what I am feeling at the time.

2011-10-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

3) When Drugs Are Good, ‘Mmm kay?

What I quickly discovered after the initial elation at finding out those little white pills had done the trick and that I was now an incubator for a whole new little person was that being pregnant actually sucks big time, at least for the first fourteen weeks or so.

My friend accurately described the indescribable fatigue I felt as “THE TIRED”, and that’s what it was. An entity full of capital letters, an institution within the institution of my marriage, a feeling so potent it was practically a physical manifestation with jet-black wings, fuzzy tentacles and many, many sand-papery teeth. At the time, it was an all-consuming phenomenon that seemed to take over my whole life, but now, after having my daughter and living through the first six weeks of her life, I don’t really remember the specifics of that first trimester fatigue. This is not because “it was all worth it!” and all the pain and suffering has been washed from my memory in a beautiful pink haze of love for my baby, but because the fatigue of parenthood is so vastly, gargantuanly, spectacularly MORE that THE TIRED seems to shrivel up in the sunlight by comparison. And it was all worth it.

What was not worth it was trying to cope with morning sickness at all times of the day except the morning sans medical intervention. I knew it was time to take more drastic measures to alleviate my all-day-sickness when, one afternoon, I came lurching up the stairs of our admin building and gagged audibly and visibly, just as our sweet little old receptionist happened to be walking past. She shook her head, clucked a bit, and handed me the 800th starlite mint I’d gotten from her that day. Yeah, maybe saltines and ginger ale ruled the roost as far as “cures” for morning sickness went when my mom was pregnant with me (thought she claims she never had morning sickness) but we’ve come a long way, baby! Thank God for Zofran. Sure, it’s a medicine originally concocted to help chemo patients deal with nausea, and yeah, maybe it did dehydrate me so badly my kidneys ached, but you know what? I didn’t walk around gagging into my hands anymore and the green-hued dashes to the loo every 20 or 30 minutes practically stopped altogether. Now that’s what I call “worth it!”

4) That “Glow” is Really a Barrel Full of Eels Rolling Around in My Abdomen, Thanks Anyway

I work at an all-girls boarding school in the middle of the Baltimore suburbs, which means when the student body found out I was pregnant (via a skit performed by my 4 advisees, complete with volleyball preggo bellies) my personal space disappeared entirely. Kids I barely knew would run up to me and coo at my mid-section even before I started showing, which was amusing up to a point. After a while I began to seriously consider wearing a hula-hoop attached to suspenders a la those freaky clown pants, just to keep explorations of my food-babies to a minimum. Once I “popped”, though, fuggetaboudit. All hands on deck – or belly, as the case may be.

Working at all all-girls school also meant I got the distinct honor of answering every girl’s deepest, darkest questions about pregnancy, often in the middle of class. Mostly, they asked things like “Are you scared about having the baby? I mean, not having a baby, but HAVING the baby, ‘cause I am totally terrified of squeezing something that huge out of my vaj, no lie.” To which I replied “Then keep your pants on and you won’t have to worry about it.” Mostly, though, I got the question “What does it feel like?”

For all those who adored being pregnant and who felt somehow hollow once you weren’t sharing your insides with a small alien anymore, you might want to stop reading now. I loved being pregnant for the sole reason that I had worked damned hard to get that way, and I really REALLY want to raise an awesome daughter. Beyond that, I’ll tell you what I told my girls: Being pregnant feels EXACTLY like it looks. You feel like someone shoved a beach-ball under your skin, and when those elbows and that butt go rolling past your ribs, it feels like a school full of mackerel just gave your lungs a drive-by tickle. It’s not “nice”, per se, but it is somehow life-affirming, even when said butt is firmly lodged under one’s esophagus and you think you’re going to die from heartburn.

I loved feeling my daughter move because it meant she was alive and well. Beyond that, I’ll take my unagi in a sushi roll, if it’s all the same to you!

5) How every health teacher everywhere lied about the human gestation period

OHMYGOD YOU’RE SO NOT PREGNANT FOR NINE MONTHS – YOU’RE PREGNANT FOR TEN! TEN, I SAY, TEN!

Needless to say, I did not realize this until I hit week 36 and went “Waaaaaiit . . . four weeks in a month times nine months equals having this baby right now, but I’ve got another month to go. HOLY SMALL HUMAN, BATMAN! This shit is BANANAS!”

Thanks a lot, every health teacher everywhere and my terrible math teachers!

6) Plans are for Pussies!

Pardon my French – I couldn’t resist the alliteration and the grotty pun. But seriously, here’s what I learned about Birth Plans: The Plan is to Have The Baby. That’s as far as one really needs to go with it, I think, but I know plenty of other women who feel otherwise. There must be discussions with doctors and protocols put in place, sometimes in writing, and though they’re told not to, they inevitably feel bad that they somehow deviated from said plan if all does not go according to it. This is silly. At the end of the plan, there is a healthy baby (God willing and the creek don’t rise.) I did not have a plan because I know myself well enough to understand the following:

a) There’s something in me that does not love a plan. It’s really, really hard for me to see or think beyond the immediate future, so making a plan for 40 weeks down the road just stressed me out more than it helped calm any fears I had. But I only had one, and it was that birth was going to hurt. Bad. Pain is scary to me, but no plan I could have come up with for Ellie’s birth was going to make it not hurt at some point, so why bother? I didn’t.

b) Giving birth is one of nature’s most powerful events, much like hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis. Do you see where I’m going, here? Nature is unpredictable, gross and sometimes violent, therefore the birth process is equally so. Ergo, no plan necessary. Knowledge about what SHOULD happen and when, sure. Knowing what might happen if things don’t follow the normal path, also good. Thinking happy thoughts about what you’d like to have happen, okay. Making a big master plan based on that ideal scenario? No.

c) I’ve always known something was going to go wrong when I had a baby. It’s just a thing I’ve known, so though we attended the Born Free birth class to learn what the hell everybody’s so excited about in natural childbirth chat circles, I knew that was most likely not the way my own “birth experience” would go. Call it woman’s intuition, or maybe it was that I am the product of an emergency c-section. Whatever. It was in the back of my mind for my whole pregnancy, so no solid plans for a natural birth were made.

All those reasons aside, when my babycenter.com alert popped up that it was time to make my birth plan I thought first about the child floating happily inside me and realized that the only thing that mattered to me was that both of us came through the delivery healthy and, if at all possible, happy. However that happened, I didn’t really care. Like her, I was just going to float and let what would happen, happen.

Not so for some of the folks in our birthing class! We chose to do the “weekender” version of the class, meaning we arrived at the hospital at 8:00 on a Sunday morning and didn’t leave until 4:00 that afternoon, but I’m a total people watching whore, so the time flew for me. I knew pretty much everything we were being taught, so I wasn’t shocked by much (save the model of a cervix at each stage of dilation. 10 cm is FUCKING HUGE!) and that left me plenty of time to ogle the other couples.

When asked if we were committed to natural birth or not, just about everyone in our class gave an emphatically positive answer. It was just the two of us, my husband and me, who seemed fine with learning about how one might make it through a delivery with no drugs without being wholly committed to actually doing it for real. I felt oddly proud to be so undecided, maybe because most of those women were having their first babies, too, and they didn’t know any more than I did what we’d be able to do in the moment. Aim low and you won’t be disappointed? Hm.

One guy was pretty much obsessed with his wife’s cervix and wanted to know if she could feel it changing, if he could measure her dilation at home, and if he could help the dilation along at all by “manual means.” Grrrross. Cort and I just looked at each other, appalled. It was understood that he was to face the wall, hold my hand, and look only into my eyes when I was having the baby, and this sudden discussion of cervical mucus, measuring techniques and color changes just about undid us both. I’m all for full fatherly involvement TO A POINT. I also would like to have sex occasionally, so there was to be no “looking.”

A lesbian couple asked if they could lie to friends and family and say that the hospital only allowed two visitors at a time to be on the premises, another couple wanted to know all about pushing techniques and whether giving birth really does feel like taking a big poop. It was entertaining as hell, and I’d recommend it to anyone with a free Sunday and a pregnant friend!

Leaving the class, Cort asked what I thought about this whole natural birth thing. We were told that if I could make it to 7 cm dilated, then I might as well just keep going without meds because I was almost there and the last three cm were the fastest, in terms of time it takes to dilate. I said I’d give it a shot, but that if I couldn’t do it, I wasn’t worried about asking for an epidural at that 6 cm point, though I definitely preferred the idea of being able to get into any position I wanted to deliver the baby. I didn’t relish the thought of being confined to a bed on my back for hours, but if I had to, I had to. He agreed to work on his massage skills, just in case I went all the way sans drugs.

I think NOT having a plan was the best plan I could’ve had because I got the best of both worlds: the confidence to give a drug-free birth a shot with the freedom to choose mas drogas, por favor, should the need arise. Either way, my baby would be in my arms at the end of that labor, and that’s what I was planning for.

7) Why My Kid Will Be Cawdor, Someday

Turns out it was a good thing I wasn’t 100% committed to natural childbirth. At 42 weeks pregnant and, once again, going in for weekly ultrasounds and exams, I really didn’t care how she was going to make her way into the world, only that she was going to do so SOON. I had gained exactly 15 pounds over the course of the whole pregnancy and up until week 40 hadn’t gotten a single stretch mark. With every day that passed I got bigger and bigger and the skin on my belly turned shiny until I looked like a big pink plum, ready to burst. No longer could I sit up from the exam table without help, no more did I feel like a vaguely off-balance and forgetful but still sexy mom. Now I just felt like a beached whale. Still, when my doc finally slipped off his exam gloves and sighed, I felt my stomach sink a little. “The baby’s not engaged, you see, and this only happens for one reason at this stage in the game: She’s too big. I think we should schedule you for a c-section on Monday or Tuesday.”

Up to this point, every appointment had gone perfectly with only glowing comments from the docs. “Looks good!” “Everything’s on track.” “Great job with the weight gain.” Even after the 18 and 40 week ultrasounds, where you could clearly see Ellie’s noggin as well as the rest of her, no one mentioned the c-word. No one said anything about my incredibly narrow pelvis, not even when, week after week, I had the distinct pleasure of someone trying to shove his or her finger into my cervix to no avail. Nobody seemed to mind that I was literally carrying the baby ALL out front and looked like a beach-ball on legs. Then, suddenly there was no question – this baby wasn’t going anywhere and we needed a new exit strategy.

I walked out of the office after making my appointment for Monday or Tuesday, dejected, and couldn’t figure out why. I sat on the brick wall outside the office, called my parents, and cried. I was disappointed, and that was a surprise. I mean, I was actually psyched to know exactly when my baby girl would be born, and, truth be told, I was pretty relieved not to test my mettle with that whole labor thing.

Still, I’d never had any kind of major surgery before and everything I was dreading most about going to the hospital to deliver the baby was par for the course with c-sections: Sterile rooms, hospital gowns out of which my bare bum would peek, the inability to keep my own undergarments on, catheters, ivs and lots of drugs. Not cool, Zeus. Plus, everything had gone so well for so long that I’d actually started to be able to envision myself delivering my baby by my own efforts and now that chance had vanished like so much fog on a sunny morning.

Needless to say, I got over it, and right quick! I knew when and where my daughter would enter the world and the doc I saw was the best surgeon at the hospital. Plus he was the sweetest little Indian man and I knew we were both in good hands with him. I then spent the remaining 5 days hoping I wouldn’t go into labor, and my mom even asked me to call and see if they could bump up my appointment because she was a nervous wreck. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to be sliced open! The only thing that had me worried was the recovery – how painful would it be? Some of my friends were in agony, some were totally fine, none of them were me. Much like knowing whether or not I could handle the pain of childbirth, there was only one way to find out. And it would happen on a Tuesday, whether Birnam Wood was marching on Dunsinane or not.

8) Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt – it’s also a reason for your doc to tell you about his German vacation in vivid detail

Sure enough, the morning that I was scheduled to go in for my c-section, I went into labor. Luckily, that meant absolutely nothing to the nurses who tried literally 16 times to take my blood, shoved a catheter where the sun don’t shine (surprisingly painless, I might add) and talked smack about each other as they came to check on me and the baby every so often, assuring me that “we’re right on track, aren’t we?”

It did, however, mean something to my tiny Indian doctor. Once he showed up and saw that I was having contractions on a regular basis, looked at the 90 Brightness tone of my skin and heard my slightly insane laughter as I said “Oh HI Dr. Singh! I’m in LABOR!! Guess that means I can’t have my c-section, huh? AAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!” he decided his only recourse was to distract the hell out of me until the operating room was fully prepped and he could drug me properly.

To that end, he calmly held my hand and told me and CL (in minute detail) about the month-long trip to Germany he had just planned. From the opera house at Munich to the tour of every castle in Deutschland, Dr. Singh’s voice kept right on soothing away my adrenaline rushes that came with each contraction. The smell of the cloves he chews calmed me more than the body-temperature saline solution I had pumping through my finally-i.v.’d hand, and for his small but wiry self I am truly grateful.

Especially since I still hadn’t really come to terms with what was about to happen next and was only then beginning to think that maybe being sliced open so another human could enter the world was a slightly big deal and that maybe there could be some side-effects to that. Like, you know, having a child to take care of. FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.

2011-10-20T01:00:00.000-07:00

Because several of our close friends are embarking on the absolutely insane journey called parenthood and have asked us to answer some important questions like: “How do I not walk around gagging and or throwing up every 15 minutes?” and “What do you mean I won’t sleep for months?”, I thought I’d share my own experiences of getting, being, and then getting over being pregnant. Here are the topics that I will discuss in the following guest-blogs:

1) How babies are made when you can’t make babies, and why that led to some surprise on my part
2) Why adoption might’ve sent us both to the loony bin, or Be Careful What You Wish For
3) When drugs are good, ‘mmm kay?
4) That glow is just a barrel full of eels writhing around in my abdomen, thanks anyway
5) How every health teacher everywhere lied about the human gestation period
6) Plans are for pussies
7) Why my kid will be Cawdor someday
8) Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt – it’s also a reason for your doc to tell you about his German vacation in vivid detail
9) When drugs are bad, ‘mmm kay?
10) Why people pepper you with platitudes that in no way prepare you to take care of your kids

1. How Babies Are Made When You Can’t Make Babies, and Why That Led to Some Surprise on My Part

You might have figured out from the pithy title of this section that I had a hard time getting pregnant. We tried for many long and entertaining years to get me knocked up, and only after a truly concerted effort that involved daily temperature taking, month after month of disappointment and an almost constant conviction that I was definitely pregnant this time, for sure, did I learn that there was no way I was going to pass on my mitochondrial DNA without a little boost from our fabulous pharmaceutical industry. Like many women, I have PCOS (feel free to look it up on google image) and, while mine wasn’t a terribly severe case, I did find myself in the rather shocking position of being told I was going to take Clomid for three cycles and that if I didn’t conceive that way that I would then come in for IVF treatments. Notice I say that I was told this is what would happen.

Here’s the first thing to know about making babies with the help of drugs: the first step is almost always to visit with a doctor who does this shit for a living, and therefore your sudden stunned silence at learning that you are defective as a woman is taken for tacit agreement that you’re going to spend bazillions of dollars to create a life that maybe shouldn’t be created, if you believe everything happens (or doesn’t) for a reason. You will continue to ponder this as you go every week (it seemed) to have a pelvic ultrasound and/or the morning after you were ordered to have sex (so they can check your partner’s sperm count. That’s right, he doesn’t even have to go to the office. That’s the definition of BULLSHIT, folks!) and often in the presence of one or more male interns who stand with arms akimbo staring at your lady bits while your (also male) doc can point to the blurry black and white blobs on the screen and say things like “Now, do you see the mass of partially matured follicles here? This is just a mess.” Sometimes you consider not shaving before these appointments, just to show him what a real mess looks like, but you never get bold enough to do that, because what if he decides he’s NOT going to help you after all? That might be worse. Anyway, eventually said doc tells you to take these tiny white pills for five days in a row, and that somehow that will fix it so that your body creates a life. You only sort of believe this, but you figure “What the hell? Might as well give it a shot!” which is a nice, normal thought to have before you make a baby that you will be responsible for for the next two and half decades, at least. Then you head home for lunch and have a pretty spectacular dessert and think nothing of it after a quick shower, ‘cause your life is still your own, it’s only the first round of said meds, and you’re not really sure that you want kids anymore anyway, but any excuse to have “dessert” is okay with you.

2) Why Adoption Might’ve Sent Both of Us to the Loony Bin, or Be Careful What You Wish For

I should mention here that while I was going to a fertility clinic and taking fertility meds in order to be fertile, my 18 year old cousin was busy getting pregnant instead of going to class and studying in her freshman year at college. This was awesome in exactly zero ways but she was the first baby that I ever loved and what was I going to do? Stop talking to her for months after she told me she was pregnant and that I was the only person she’d considered asking to adopt the baby until she’d decided to keep it herself? Yes. Yes, that’s what I wanted to do. But I didn’t. Instead, I told her what kind of prenatal vitamins to take, where to get them, took her shopping for diapers and baby stuff so she could see how much it costs, and decorated little teeny, tiny, organic cotton onesies with her so that we could both pretend for a little while that this was a happy time for each of us.

When she was eight months pregnant, her baby-daddy (or The Inseminator, as my folks referred to him) decided that he didn’t want to do this whole baby thing after all and if my cousin didn’t put the baby up for adoption then she would need to find a new place to live because he was going to kick her out on her waddling, uneducated little butt. When she told me this I felt a whole range of things, not the least of which was elation that this might be the universe telling both of us that I was meant to be her baby’s momma after all!

When my husband heard me plead with her over the phone not to feel like she had no options other than to leave The Inseminator and go home to her mother to raise the baby and to remember that we were always here for her, his head snapped up and he spent the rest of the conversation staring at me with that inscrutable look he gets when he can’t decide whether he’s appalled, thrilled, or just has to go to the bathroom.

Nothing was decided during that phone call, but the next afternoon I got a text from my cousin asking what we’d name her (the baby) if we adopted her. I literally dropped to my knees and thought I might pass out because that question meant that she was actually considering having us adopt her baby. Suddenly, the reality of the situation hit both of us. We’d need to arrange leave, child-care, insurance, a nursery, adoption papers (do we need a lawyer??) and there was so much we didn’t know about babies and how to care for them! Oh my GOD, what did I do, and this is CRAZY! What if The Inseminator changes his mind after we’ve already taken “Lilly” home? My aunt is nuts, what if she changes HER mind and wants the baby, even though she’d been begging my cousin to consider adoption since she got pregnant? The only way this was going to work would be if we cut off all communication with that part of the family, at least for a few years, but could we really do that? In short, Holy Shit. We Might Be Parents In a MONTH.

Eventually, after many many, conversations with my cousin during which I attempted with every fiber of my being not to pressure her one way or the other, it came to the point where she had to decide. She was two weeks away from delivering the baby, so, you know, we needed to know one way or the other. She agreed to take the weekend and just spend it thinking and weighing her options, and I agreed to go to the beach with our friends and not think about it at all.

While I spent the weekend soaking up the rays and many, many margaritas (“hahahah – boy, it would be just my luck that I’m pregnant right now! Yes, barkeep, I WILL have another!) my cousin came to her decision. When we returned home and I checked my messages, she’d left a text letting me know that she was going to keep the baby.
While I knew this was the most likely outcome, it still felt like an elephant had suddenly landed on my chest. I mean, we tried really hard not to get our hopes up, but my husband had been playing “Punk Rock Girl” and “That’s My Daughter” on his guitar for the last two weeks, and it hurt to know that yet another child would be brought into the world and raised by someone other than us. My God, did it hurt. We both went to bed quiet and drained (after a couple more beers and the better part of a bottle of raspberry Absolut) and snuggled into each other as we had for the last eight years while we waited for the sun to rise.

The next morning I woke up and laid in my husband’s arms, squinting in time to the pounding in my head and felt something . . . new. Something sure. Something was suddenly correct and right with the world. I slipped out of our bed, brushed my teeth and put my flip flops on, then drove to the grocery store for a pregnancy test.

It was early and no one was out on the roads. I took the back way past these gorgeous, rolling cow pastures where black angus dotted the hills and the sun slowly burned off the mist left from the rain the night before. I sang along to Faure’s Il Paradiso and smiled as I drove a little to fast along the curves back toward our house. Then I climbed quietly up the stairs and peed on a stick, set it on the sink in the bathroom and walked away.

By that time, Cort was up and in the shower in the master bedroom, but he still had no idea I’d even left the house, much less what I was doing. I went downstairs and started the kettle for tea, then, unable to wait the full two minutes it clearly said to wait on the pregnancy test box, I went back upstairs to the bathroom and just peeked at my peed on stick. Finally, there were two lines where there’d always been one before. I was pregnant.

Oh FUCK. How many drinks did I have this weekend???

2011-10-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

It had been so long since I'd been to the nursing home that I didn't remember which room my mom was in. I tried a couple with no luck, and finally had to ask at the nurse's desk.
“Lilly Hall, first door on your left,“ one of them said. All of the halls were named after flowers: Rose, Lilly, Daisy, Chrysanthemum. Each hall housed specific types of patients. Rose Hall was for just plain elderly people, those who were still mobile. Chrysanthemum was for bedridden patients, those who required more attention. Daisy was terminal, and Lilly was Alzheimer’s; a hodge-podge of symptoms and patients. The way it worked was the more in need of care the patient was, the closer they were to the nurse's station, which was in the center of the building so that the halls radiated out from it like the arms of starfish. Which meant that beds nearest the station were vacated fairly quickly. Every time I came, she had inched closer to the center; so that every time I had to ask a nurse which room my mother was in.
Even then, I wasn't sure, at first, that this was her room. It used to have pictures of Elvis hanging on the walls, and one hanging over her bed like a mobile. When she’d first gone into the nursing home, she claimed to be pregnant by Elvis. She’d seen him in college. When the nurses helped her use the bathroom, she’d say in her garbled, drunk-sounding voice, “Careful of the baby.” The ones who’d worked there long enough to have heard this before played along.
“Is it your husband’s baby?”
“Elvis,” she’d mumble. “Elvis is the father. I’m pregnant by Elvis.”
Elvis’s pictures cluttered the walls, like posters in a teenager’s bedroom, little clippings the size of postcards, some with neat straight edges, some ripped out of magazines, their edges still curled and fluffy from having been licked to facilitate tearing. Some of the clippings were in black and white, some were in glaring color. There were pictures the size of whole pages jumbled together all over one wall.
Now someone had taken them all down. Only one picture remained on the wall near her bed, a picture of young Elvis, with slicked back dark hair, thin and healthy.
I tried to remember the last time I’d been to visit her. Not since last Christmas, I realized. This was Thanksgiving. She was behind the first door, the first room on the left.
She lay quiet on the bed, her bare knees thrusting out from under the rumpled sheets awkwardly. Her feet were tucked under her, making the sheet look like a tent that had fallen down in the wind. Her skin was so white it looked gray. Her eyes locked on us when we entered the room. They looked like a chained animal’s. I stared hard at her, trying to find something familiar in this woman’s face.
“Hi Mom,” I said. "This is my girlfriend, Jillian."
Jillian and I had been together for a couple months before I worked up the courage to introduce her to my mother. Not so much because I was afraid of how she'd respond, as that I was afraid, always afraid, to visit my mother.
“You look like her,” Jillian said, talking slowly. “She’s pretty, good bones, very Southern.” I looked at my mother, writhing on the bed. All the sun had been sucked out of her once blonde hair. Now it was gray, chopped short. The skin of her face was loose. Her whole body was bony and thin.
“She‘s so thin,” I said.
“It’s the liquid diet,” Jillian said.
There was an IV attached to my mother's hand. Something was taped to her throat. Her head flopped from side to side. Her mouth was open; she tongued the air as though she was trying to speak. Her body was in revolt.

Huntington’s Chorea: everyone in the family called it that, including me until my freshman year in psych class when the professor, a Mr. Stroman, broached the topic. He was a round, bearded professor who resembled a chain-smoking koala bear. He lectured from a book he’d co-written and wore Hawaiian shirts and ratty blue jeans whenever the weather allowed.
“Huntington‘s Disease,” he said in class, out of nowhere one day, snapping me to attention. “It’s in the Parkinson’s family. A genetic disorder, attacking the nervous system and the brain. Victims lose their identity, their ability to control motor functions, as the cells of their brain and nervous system succumb, over a period which can last as long as fifteen years.”
I raised my hand, feeling like a ludicrous sort of teacher’s pet. But here was something I knew about. I could tell him that Woody Guthrie, the folk singer who wrote “This Land Is Your Land” had it. I could tell him that one line of it had been traced back to inbreeding in a European royal family.
“It used to be called Huntington’s Chorea, but that‘s wrong,” he said, ignoring my hand. “Chorea means dance. It was named this because of the shaky, uncontrollable spasms its victims suffer. But that’s a very insulting name. It’s a disease, not a dance.” I lowered my hand.
He went on to lecture us about nursing homes. “People dump their parents, their grandparents in these places, and never visit them,” he said. My jaw dropped.
"I wish that the same thing would happen to people who abandon their elderly family members,” he said. “I hope that when they are old, someone dumps them in a nursing home and leaves them to die.”

It is hard for me to envision my mother as a young woman, dancing to Elvis. I have almost no memories of her before the sickness. She was already in her forties when I was born, and she had given birth to my brother eighteen years earlier, making me a late surprise. By the time I was in school, she had already begun her decline. The most persistent image I have of her is of a shrunken woman, head bowed under fine blond hair.
She was in college in the fifties when she and my father met. He went along with a friend to Jonesboro, where my mother went to college. The friend was there to see a girl, and Mom was her roommate. My father's friend gave him fifty cents to beat it. My father spent the money on a milkshake for her.
My parents had been married for two decades when I came into the picture. Theirs was a troubled marriage, my father was poorer than my mother was used to and as her discontent grew, he spent more and more of his time at work, drinking.
All I have of her before the sickness are glimpses. The house was brighter then, the windows cleaner, new, curtained, instead of being blocked by the tacky shades my father installed. She had pretty things. A closet full of hatboxes. She wore scarves, jewelry, and smelled of vanilla lotion. She fried donuts on Sundays and my brother would take us on family drives, though my father was always working.
Most of what we have left of hers comes from before I was even born. Her things have mostly disappeared over the years. There have been a lot of bodies through her room, nurses, relatives, housekeepers. My memories of her could be scribbled on a napkin.
My sister has told me about the nicknames our mother used for us.
"She used to call you Little Boy Blue," my sister says, "Little Boy Blue and Sister Sue."
People I don’t recognize have stopped me on the street, more times than I can remember, to introduce themselves as “a friend of your mother,” and then spent several moments reassuring me that she has always been a beautiful person, a good person, though it is the rare soul who, when pressed, can relate a specific memory of her. My grandmother says she was impetuous, married my father straight out of college. A farmer. She could have married a doctor, my grandmother says, never would have had to worry about money the way she did with my father, but she wouldn’t wait on the guy to finish med school. She ended up teaching elementary school in the Arkansas delta; close enough to Memphis, at least, to go shopping, if she'd had any money.
“She always worried about you kids,” Grandmother reassured me. “When she became sick, she would say, over and over, ‘What’s going to happen to my children?’”

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a child who didn’t really know me, and so I have struggled to take up the slack on my end and discover all that I can about her. But her family is tightlipped and uncooperative. I have wondered if this is due to her illness, or her marriage, or if they are just this sort of people. I have her annual from college; it’s a volume full of people I’ve never known. There’s no mention of Elvis, which just goes to show how little documentation there may exist of a person’s true happiness. There is a portrait of her in my father’s living room, which I showed to Jillian. My mother has big, blonde hair, deep eyes, and an easy smile. She can’t be twenty-five. She's pretty in a Grace Kelly sort of way. There's a mystery behind her eyes that can't be reached, and a sadness. It seems to say, "I was meant for better things. But this is where I am and I will make the best of it." But a portrait is two dimensional, and you can’t learn much from one. I wonder if somewhere behind that smile, she knew what the world had to offer her. I wonder if she still would have smiled.

2011-10-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

Daniel M. Shapiro and Jessy Randall are two very talented writers whose work I had the pleasure of publishing in Ghoti Mag. I was recently able to reconnect with them and talk about their collaborative poetry collection Interruptions.

Me: Tell me about your new collaborative collection: why should I buy it?

DS: It depends on who you are. If you like experimental poetry, humor, intentionally non-poetry language, friendship, pop culture, true collaboration (i.e., both of us contribute to every poem), intentional and unintentional craziness, upstate New York, or some combination of these elements, you will be pleased. Plus, you get two poets for one price. If you get sick of one of us, the other one comes along soon enough.

JR: Don't buy it. Get your library to buy it and then you can borrow it, and so can other people.

Me: Why collaborative? How did you approach writing a collaborative collection: did it just happen organically, or did one of you force the other at gunpoint?

JR: Last time we talked about this, Dan thought it was my idea to start collaborating, but I thought it was his idea. I can't remember exactly how we started doing it, or if there was a direct cause, or what. I know it must have been around 2003, because our first collaboration was published in 2004. At the beginning of course we had no intention of writing a collection of poems; we had the intention of writing one poem together. Then we did another one, and then, for a while, we were doing almost one a day. At some point we realized that we had enough for a book, if we wanted to think that way, and we did.

DS: It was definitely Jessy's idea. I think the main purpose of collaborating was that it allowed us to challenge each other: "I dare you to top this line," etc. Most of the time, we were striving to avoid inside jokes, cuteness, etc. Sometimes, we were even lucky enough to make each other uncomfortable. As Jessy says, I don't think we considered it to be writing a collection until we had enough poems for one.

Me: Can you each tell me a little about your normal writing routines; do you write every day, only when inspiration hits…?

DS: For collaborations, my normal writing routine is: A.) E-mail a line to Jessy; B.) Wait a short time; C.) Receive a new line from Jessy that responded to my previous line; D.) Respond to her line; E.) Repeat A-D. I know there are people who believe the process must be long and excruciating, but we prefer to respond to each other almost instinctively. You're not really responding to a thought honestly if you sleep on it or ask your mom what she thinks.

JR: It was kind of like going to an exercise class with a friend. You know the friend will know you were absent if you don't go, so you have to go or you'll be shamed. I mean, I liked everything about the process, so it wasn't like exercise class in that way! I didn't watch the clock waiting for it to be over! But we had this little noodge from each other most days by email to work on poems. When we were in the thick of it, it was every day, just a minute or two to think of a line or to make a change and then fire it back to the other person, and then maybe two hours later, do it again.

Me: Who are each of your biggest influences?

DS: John Berryman's Dream Songs and The Essential Etheridge Knight are still my biggest influences because I've re-read them so many times. Many musicians have influenced me, too: John Coltrane, Hüsker Dü, Lou Reed, Tim Buckley, Marianne Faithfull, Gil Scott-Heron, Elvis Presley, Patti Smith. I'm also influenced by Pittsburgh people I've gotten to know and/or hear read: Margaret Bashaar, Jason Baldinger, Jerome Crooks, Jimmy Cvetic, Joan Bauer, Kris Collins, Renée Alberts, Don Wentworth. I could say I'm influenced by Jessy, but that would make you say, "Duh," and I don't want you to say, "Duh."

JR: My biggest influence has to be Kenneth Koch, whose classes I took at Columbia University in the early 1990s. He told me (in his mild way) not to use poems to prove that I was smart, not to over-intellectualize. And he had a wonderful, expansive, generous way of talking about poems by great poets and poems by students in the class in the same breath, as though we were all poets together. And of course the New York School of poets was big into collaborating so maybe that's where this all came from in a way. Other influences for me would be Edna St. Vincent Millay, Nikki Giovanni, Russell Edson, Scott Poole, Sarah J. Sloat, Emily Lloyd, Nate Pritts, and getting outside poetry, Lynda Barry, Maira Kalman, Julia Child, Robert Rauschenberg, L. Frank Baum, Ellen Raskin, Daniel Pinkwater, Shirley Jackson, and Louise Fitzhugh.

Me: Did you find it difficult to market a collaborative collection? What has working with Pecan Grove been like?

JR: Uh ... yeah man, the manuscript was difficult to place. But probably not any more difficult than finding a home for any collection of poems. The story of Pecan Grove taking the manuscript is actually kind of interesting, maybe, for anybody who has a manuscript making the rounds. It's one of those very lucky things. We sent the manuscript to Pecan Grove and didn't hear anything from them for maybe six months. During that time Dan and I had trimmed the working manuscript quite a bit. So I emailed PG and asked if we could sub in the shorter version of our ms (thinking they'd rather read a 60-page ms than an 80-page ms, right?). It turned out that they had rejected our manuscript, but we'd never gotten the rejection. Amazingly, though, they said they would be willing to read a shorter version, and then they accepted that version. So I guess the "no" that we didn't receive was more like a "maybe." Thank goodness we didn't receive it! I would never in a million years have tried again if I knew they'd said no! As for working with them, in the last couple of months it's been ... what's the word I want ... "emotional"? I hate that word. But I don't want to say it's been sad or bad. It's been very good. But Palmer Hall, the editor at Pecan Grove, has had some serious health problems. We didn't know the details until he started blogging about it at http://medicalexperiencesmemoir.blogspot.com/. Reading the posts, I felt apologetic that he had to think about our book on top of all the tests and treatments. But then I thought maybe his Pecan Grove work was a good distraction—like the blog itself—sometimes scary health things need to be combated with making art, right? But all that aside, Pecan Grove really knows what the heck it is doing. I mean, the Library of Congress record for Interruptions appeared in WorldCat (the national library catalog) even before the book was officially out. That is just the coolest.

DS: I feel like we had less frustration because there were two of us. It was easier to share setbacks and much more enjoyable to celebrate success together. Collaborations cause some publishers to scratch their heads, and they're entitled to do whatever they want to their heads. Pecan Grove has been putting out high-quality books for some time, and Jessy and I were consulted regularly during all phases of Interruptions. We were lucky to be able to work with Palmer Hall and Louie Cortez.

Me: Who are the standouts in the poetry world right now, do you think? Who will history remember?

JR: I did a project in library school predicting the six contemporary poets whose names would live on, a very scientific kind of project looking at journal publication, book publication, appearance in textbooks and anthologies, and so on. But the six poets on my final list were not poets whose work did anything for me personally. They weren't my favorites or even poets whose work I liked. So ... that isn't really an answer ... that's more like a complaint. One time Dan said that if he didn't write poems he would be "a full time complainer." I think about that all the time!

DS: I will start negative and grow positive while answering this: I have spent countless hours reading poetry online and in print, and I see a lot of poems that do no more than blend contrived "heavy" language (deliberately complex vocabulary alongside "husks," "ribs," "[fill in the blank] the size of dinner plates," etc.) with either trite themes or no themes at all. I don't believe poetry should be defined by a singular bland voice; I believe it's supposed to question boundaries, blend genres, or otherwise expand. I hope history will remember the people who make sacrifices, e.g., people who run their own small presses because they want to make things nobody else could make. Jessy and I both love journals such as Forklift, Ohio, because they are innovative conceptually and physically. They seem to be the products of fearless people.

Me: You use a lot of humor in these poems. Do you find that "the poetry world" responds well to humor?

DS: Jessy and I have talked a lot about how to keep our poems from sounding like jokes and how we don't want to be considered "stand-up poets" at readings. Not long ago, I read a poem that was a series of fake, third-person autobiographies that were outlandish (with zombies and pet ocelots), and I got almost no laughs. Yet afterward, people told me they loved the poem; it was the most fabulous thing they had ever heard me read. I always thought the best way to show that you love a funny poem is to, um, laugh. But perhaps I haven't evolved with the times.

JR: Luckily for us there are multiple poetry worlds. I think there's a poetry world that would find our work frivolous and discount it. And then there's another world -- the world we actually want to get into, maybe are already part of -- where people are going YES! CHEETOS! or whatever. And there are many other poetry worlds too.

Me: If you met David Bowie on the street, what would each of you say to him?

JR: I would tell him that my friend Amanda and I went to see The Linguini Incident TWICE in the theater when it came out and that we both have it on DVD now and we still like it, even though it seems like nobody else has ever heard of it.

DS: I would tell him to get off his indolent posterior and make another album, lest I punch him in his blue eye to make it match his non-blue eye. Or perhaps I would just drool and be a non-hero—just for one day.

Me: What are you each working on now?

JR: Together, we've been working on some diagram poems based on diagrams in The Exploratorium Cookbook, a science museum handbook published in 1975. By myself (does that sound forlorn? but it really isn't) I'm working on a collection of poems to be titled Injecting Dreams into Cows, forthcoming from Red Hen in 2012. I just saw the cover design and it's fantastic. It has a shark!

DS: I am trying to get my first full-length solo manuscript, Sasquatch Job Interview, published. As you probably guessed from the title, it does contain humor, so we'll see how the poetry world (or which of the multiple worlds) responds. With new writing, I had been going through something of a dry spell, but I just wrote a poem I would describe as Stéphane Mallarmé meets Norman Bates. It has potential. And I'm not sure if this counts as work, but I plan to bask in the green glow of Interruptions for an undisclosed period.

2011-10-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

This Trick I'm Learning To Do...(Originally appeared in the Dead Mule)

The night before last I dreamed I was sitting in my old bedroom, the one I inherited from my sister after she moved out, with several friends and Hollywood celebrities. We were talking, having a party, when dozens of snakes dropped from the ceiling.
It is surprising how many phobias I have about that house. I blame the snake dream on stress and an experience from my childhood— we had an old dishwasher in the kitchen that hadn't worked for years. One day my sister, my father, and I were standing in the kitchen, talking. My sister's cat started nosing around the dishwasher, pawing at it, alerting us to some kind of weirdness with it, and so we opened it up. And an annoyed snake stuck its tongue out at us. I think it was a blue racer— a black one, the kind we told stories about how they would chase people or drop on them from trees. At the sight of the thing, the cat leapt from my sister's arms onto my father's neck, a la Piddy Sing. My sister screamed. My father ran to the back door and tried to dislodge the cat from his neck, which took several tries, and finally threw the cat outside. My father was ever the champion cat flinger.
The dishwasher door had slammed closed, so the snake was still inside. I don't remember what we did with it. Dad probably took it outside. I remember that he wouldn't kill it. Sometime soon after that, he sealed the drain pipe up, so nothing else could get in, and finally replaced the old thing with a slightly less-old one.
Looking back, of course, this is a hilarious scenario to me. Afterwards, after the terror had been overwhelmed by the adrenalin and excitement, I remember my sister and myself standing, shaking, laughing at dad's bleeding neck while he fumed. But it was an uneasy laughter.
This scenario represents one of my first memories of intrusion. We had simply been talking, when this thing, this OTHER, intruded into our kitchen, our lives, shattering our illusion of security.

The popular preconception is to think of the childhood home as a place of safety, a place to look back upon wistfully once one has left and entered into the much less forgiving world. I never have thought this. Quite the opposite, in fact. I can't remember a time when I was comfortable in my parents' house, though I was definitely dependant on its familiarity. It was an evil I knew.
Very early on, my mother doted on me to the point of nearly smothering me. A teacher and church member well known in the community, my mother was loved and loveable. And then, somewhere between my Kindergarten and elementary school years, an intruder came into our lives. Mom began to show symptoms of Huntington's disease, and her health declined. She became, over time, withdrawn, reclusive, a stranger haunting the couch in the living room, eyes fixed on the ABC affiliate out of Jonesboro, where she'd gone to college, establishing a pattern in the family of forever looking back.
I wanted to get away from her. I spent all of my time dogging my father's footsteps, riding along and sitting in the truck while he walked the rice fields, begging him to come home instead of spending late nights on the farm drinking with his buddies, which became more and more frequent as Mom's health declined. I wasn't urging him towards a moral path; I simply didn't want to be at home with Mom without some backup. She was becoming, herself, an OTHER, an intruder, a stranger. She haunted that house, and it terrified me because I didn't understand it. One moment, she was my mother, another, she was violent, crying, unpredictable.
I dream about her, too. When I moved out, I dreamed, often, of her as a wraith, moaning outside my bedroom door in whatever apartment I was in at the time, while I huddled in bed, willing her to stay outside.
More recently, after her death, she's become a different sort of archetype. My (and my wife's) favorite dream happened before my birthday, a couple months ago. I dreamed that my wife had bought a bicycle for me and hidden it in the bathroom of my father's house. It is important to understand that as my mother's health declined, she became prone to violent attacks. The bathroom was the only room in my parents' house with a lock on it, so my sister and I hid there. The lock broke at some point, and we would pull a drawer out so that the door would hit the drawer and couldn't open all the way. The door couldn't open far, but my mother was still able to stick skinny, long nailed fingers through, in between bouts of slamming the door against the drawer. But in this dream, the horror archetype, the "safe room" outside of which the monster lurks, scheming a way to get inside, had become the repository of this bicycle, this gift. I knew the gift was there, but I refused to spoil the surprise. I sat in my bedroom (with no snakes in the ceiling, this time) waiting for the big day. But my mother wouldn't have any of it. She wanted me to come play with her. I refused, determined not to spoil the surprise. This, I should add, is very close to what was really happening at the time. My wife had hidden gifts in a certain room of our apartment, and I was thoroughly banned from entering.
But Mom was determined. When I wouldn't come out into the living room to play, she went and got the bike herself and rode it through the house, exclaiming how much fun she was having. But I refused to budge, even when she rode it into the bedroom and did loops. I ignored her until she left and went back to the living room. She offered me all sorts of bribes, finally calling out, "I've got fried chicken." This was enough to draw me to the door, where I saw her, sitting in a recliner in the living room with a bucket of chicken, savoring a drumstick.
This turn, this re-envisioning of my mother from wraith to childlike, playful friend in my subconscious, is at least indirectly due to her death, ironic as it may seem. Aside from the emotional backlash, the opportunity for closure, which played a large part, something else important happened after she died: I found her diary. It was an ancient book, chronicling two summers from her childhood, one when she was about the age I was when she first became ill, then dropping off and picking up again several years later in her late teens, the summer between high school and college. Brief and limited as these entries are, they present a window into her personality, allowing me to fill in some of the gaps.
And really, isn't this the bane of the archetype? Doesn't the killer in the horror film become much less frightening when we realize the reasons for his actions, the motivations, when we begin to delve beyond the chainsaw and see that he is simply a deformed freak, when we learn that his terrible mother isn't real, it's him in a dress, driven mad by constant goading? The terror gives way to revulsion, pity, empathy, sometimes, but the magic is gone. Its hold over us is weakened.
And there's something sad about that. It's a kind of loss of magic, like growing up and realizing Santa isn't real. When I look back at this house from my childhood, I can chalk the snake up to poor plumbing, neglect. It is an old house. The shadows on the ceiling are caused by poor lighting, nothing else. There is no magic, there. There are no demons or ghosts haunting its walls, as I and several friends have believed over the years. The wraith outside my door, in my dreams, is my guilt, my loss; it is emotional collapse trying to get in and confound me, but I haven't let it. My mother was sick and we were children. We didn't understand what was happening, not really. Now I am beginning to understand. The monster is losing its power.
And my snake dream from the night before last isn't even a proper nightmare, because I haven't told you everything that happened. As I said, it was in my old bedroom; I was standing with several people, talking. Some of these people were friends, but most were celebrities. Angelina Jolie was there, Brad Pitt and George Clooney, probably the entire cast of the Ocean's 11, 12, etc movies. They were standing, sipping martinis because this is what celebrities do, when the ceiling opened up and snakes fell onto their heads, into their drinks, curling around their throats like scarves. There was silence, the deep intake of breath...
And they laughed, en masse. It was a well-timed joke, this trick I'd learned to do with my ceiling. They clapped, the women daintily holding cigarettes, their tips burning in long, skinny black holders. They were flappers, they were ape men with robot heads, they were demons and girls I sat behind in grade school. My mother was there, in the back, smiling, young and healthy. All of them turned to me and applauded, thundering, covered in snakes.
And I woke up, realizing that I am no longer afraid of that house; I just don't like being there. It was an epiphany. Sometimes snakes crawl into dishwashers. It happens. Sometimes people die. It is always tragic to someone. Life is full of tragedy and terror. That doesn't mean we have to be afraid of it.

2011-10-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

Things Writers Love...

I don't know if it's because I have a so-so memory or if it's because I'm running around so crazy wild these days, but I'm in love (well, serious crush anyway) with the camera in my cell phone. Look at the following two photos:

I don't even remember where I saw this. All I remember is that I couldn't take it with me, I was in a hurry, and that I would absolutely *die* if I couldn't take away terms like "creep," "nep," and "slub" for use in a poem later on. I didn't have a clue on how to pronounce "griege" (I know now that it kind of rhymes with "sage"). I've made a note in my ever-running ideas notebook; one day, I'll throw some slubs and neps into a poem. (I already have a creep or two. Wait, that was just some guy I dated briefly.)

So *this* photo-idea-chunk actually ended up in a poem:

At first, all I could think was that it looked like a headless-many-armed-monkey tree. The more I looked at the photo later though, the more it became tragic rather than comic. I ended up with these lines to end my poem "Trees of Lower Table Rock, November" quoted here:

again sorrowful madrones and black oaks,
stripped of leaves, with boughs like so many arms,
they take us down from our perch,
see our way out, brush us by
with branches spliced and twined and reaching.

I don't think I would have gotten to this place by memory alone. I had to dwell on the photo.

Sometimes a photo merely fulfills a need to be social. A facebook friend asked for quick snaps of work spaces from other artists and writers. I obliged with:

I gave up a lot of information about myself with this picture. One, I'm a slob, but I tend to try to hide it (note big, disorganized pile right smack in the middle). Two, I can't throw away any of my writing-related tchotchkes and trophies (bonus points to those who can identify some key logos). Three, I have a wacky Allen Ginsberg doll, and I think it has warded off measles, scurvy, and rickets over the years.

And last, access to a cell cam is an awesome way to cheer myself up every now and again. Earlier this year, I went to visit a poet friend in another state. I was thrilled to see I had made the family's chalkboard agenda for the day:

(Don't miss the daily weather forecast in the upper left, and yes, now you know one of my nicknames.) If I'm having an especially crazy day, I pull this photo up for a little laugh, and it works. Like. A. Charm.

* * *

Amy MacLennan has been published in Hayden's Ferry Review, River Styx, Linebreak, Cimarron Review, Folio, and Rattle. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Not a Muse from Haven Books and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems from Ragged Sky Press. One of her poems is available as a downloadable broadside from Broadsided Press, and she has an article on social networking appearing in the 2011 Poet's Market. Her chapbook The Fragile Day was released from Spire Press in September 2011.

2011-10-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

The Shakes...(Originally appeared in the Arkansas Review)

I woke in my underwear in my brother’s arms with dark sky above me. We passed through the front door of our house and down the step and out to his car. He tossed me in the backseat, turned to my father, who followed behind, and spoke,
"You happy now?" my brother said. "You drunk bastard, are you satisfied?"
My father mumbled something I couldn't make out.
They got in and my brother slammed the car into reverse. I slid like a sack of flour against the side of the car, sending a sudden pain through my daze. I realized that I couldn’t move, not even to hold my head from lolling around, obeying only gravity.
"You don't care about nothing but yourself," my brother said and jerked into a curve.
Bang! My head said to the side of the car.
"Sucking on that bottle like you want to die or something. Well go ahead, but don't bring us with you."
Bang! My brother turned another curve.
I strained as hard as I could to flex the muscles in my neck and hold my head still.
"So you like being sorry and good for nothing?" My brother said.
Bang, but much softer now as I started re-assuming control. I felt like I was trying to wake up a sleeping limb, but it was my whole body. I concentrated, tuning out the argument and the confusion, and when my brother turned the next curve, I was able to hold my head still enough so that it only banged a little, hardly hurting at all. By the next curve, I could hold it still. I focused my attention on other parts of my body, and was able to flop myself away from the side of the car.
My brother turned violently, then turned again and slammed the car into park. He jumped out and threw his seat forward. I managed to sit up as he reached for me.
"I can walk," I said, though I didn't know if this was true.
"Come on," he said.
I extended a shaky leg out onto gravelly asphalt. My brother pulled me to my feet. I had to lean against the car to stand.
"Come on," he said again. "If you can walk, walk. If not, I'll carry you."
"I can walk, but I don't have any clothes on," I said.
I looked around. We were in the parking lot of the Cross County Hospital. It was dark and still cold, though it was spring. The parking lot was mostly empty. My father had gone ahead and was just entering the emergency room.
"What are we doing here?" I asked.
"You were shaking," my brother said.
"I'm okay now," I said.
"Let's go," he said.
"I need clothes. I can't go in there like this."
He took a step toward me. "You're going in there right now, whether I have to carry you or not."
My brother was well over six feet tall and broad as a lumberjack. He was a farmer's son, used to long hours of hard, physical work, and he was standing in front of me with his eyes so wide they were bugging out, agitated and dancing in place.
"What happened?" I asked.
"We're going. I'll tell you after," he said, reaching for me.
I pushed his hand off and stepped into the parking lot. There were rocks and pebbles, probably other things that I couldn't see jabbing the soft soles of my feet.
"You gonna make it?" my brother said.
"Yeah," I said, hobbling along.
A nurse came out with a wheelchair, followed by Dad, who still hadn’t spoken. The nurse stood in front of the emergency room doors, holding the wheelchair, and watched me limp. As each sharp rock stabbed into the soles of my feet, I hated her. When we got to the ramp leading up to the doors, she pushed the chair towards me. I walked past, ignoring her.
"He don't need a wheelchair, he needs a doctor," my brother said.
They took me to a little room and laid me on a table. I tried to ask a nurse if I could have something to wear, and my brother said, "Later." The nurse disappeared and came back with a paper gown.
The inside of the hospital was warmer. There was a preponderance of green and a smell of hot glue. All that cold air outside had given me a powerful need to urinate. A doctor came in and shone a light in my eyes, checked my blood pressure and reflexes. My brother and my father were close, but I couldn't see or hear them. Finally, the doctor let me go to the bathroom.
When I came out, the doctor was talking.
"What happened?" I asked him.
"It was probably a grand mal seizure," he said. The name sounded like a sports term. Or maybe like I'd won something.
"What do you remember?" he asked.
I'd spent the day pretty normally, working in the rice fields with Dad and Mike, my brother. Later in the evening, I'd pulled coffee weeds with a weed puller that resembled a miniature scythe. It was hard work, and I’d gotten very hot and dehydrated doing it. I didn't remember eating supper. I'd gone to bed pretty early and woken to this.
The doctor whose name I never learned gave me some pills. "Take one as soon as you get home," he said. My father was to make an appointment at St. Jude's hospital in Memphis in the morning. With that, they released me.
It was only during the drive home that I was able to drag a little bit of info from my brother and father about what had happened, which I still didn't remember, and only over the course of the next few days did I get the full story.
My father had gotten up to use the bathroom some time after midnight. On the way back, he heard a noise and came into my room to find me writhing on the bed. He said that I was vomiting, but I was on my back.
"Nothing was coming out," he said. "You were choking."
He went to the bathroom, grabbed a towel and used it to clear out my mouth so I could breathe.
"Like Jimmy Hendrix," I would say, later.
“Damn,” my brother would say, shaking his head and laughing.
My father woke my brother to drive, and they argued the whole way to the hospital.
"We’d had a real blowout earlier that night," my brother told me. "You were lucky to miss it."
They’d argued over my father's drinking. My brother had thrown Dad out of his room and they'd nearly gotten physical. It wasn’t particularly new; arguing was the fuel that kept my family going in those days.
That night when we got back from the hospital, my brother insisted I take the pills the doctor had given me.
"I'm really sick," I said. My stomach felt raw and sore as though I'd drunk molten metal.
"If I have to stand here and watch, you're going to take them," my brother said. I went into the bathroom and poured a cup of water.
"Maybe if you ate something it'd go down better. Didn't the doctor say not to take it on an empty stomach?"
"I'll eat something in a minute," I said. I forced the pills down and drank the water. My brother stood in the doorway watching me.
"Should get some sleep," he said, finally. "Try to, anyway."
I nodded and he left. I stood in front of the mirror until the heaves started and vomited the pills back up. Then I went to bed. Shortly after I lay down, my father came in and sat beside me. I fell asleep with the warmth of his presence, silent beside me.

The next day we went to Memphis for tests. Never before, that I could remember, had my father taken me to a hospital. He didn’t actually believe in hospitals. When we had headaches, he told us to drink water.
“It’s just sugar,” he said about Aspirin.
He held a working-class distrust of doctors, hospitals, banks, and organized education. He chalked most ailments up to laziness, including my mother's, at least until it became obvious from her deterioration that she was seriously ill, and if he had not actually witnessed the seizure, I doubt that he would have believed it happened. But here he was, taking me to the hospital every week, more than that, he was driving to Memphis to do it.
At the hospital, I underwent a series of tests, including a CAT scan, an EEG test, and I had to come back for blood-work every week. I felt much better that day, though still tired. During the EEG test, they took me to a room and glued little electrodes to my head. The nurse told me to lie down and close my eyes. I immediately fell asleep. She woke me when I started snoring. The CAT scan felt as though I were being loaded into a large oven while X-rays baked me.
I was diagnosed with childhood epilepsy. The doctor showed us an MRI of my brain. He pointed out certain areas that represented lesions.
"How'd he get those?" my brother would ask, later.
"His head swole up," my father would say.
"You always had a big head," my brother said.
"Been thinking too much," my father said.
The doctor said I should grow out of it by the time I was fifteen or so. He gave me pills to take every day and told me to come back if I had any more seizures. It was a lot like going to the school nurse to get out of class.

I researched epilepsy in the county library. I imagined myself walking down the street, falling down, and shaking, while everyone around me stared. Or maybe it would happen while I took a test in class. I wasn't so much scared as intrigued, and I wasn't sure how this condition would affect me. The epilepsy was a random factor that had been introduced into my life for no discernable reason. I expected to have seizures all the time. I read that epilepsy sufferers often noticed hints of impending seizures; certain smells, odd feelings. Because no one seemed to understand it, all sorts of things were thought to trigger seizures. Flashing lights, stress, drug use. I imagined that I was smelling things, seeing things. I warned my family members of impending seizures. "I smell modeling glue," I would say. And everyone would look worried. When school started, I went to the guidance councilor and tried to get out of PE because of my condition.
"Exertion and stress can lead to seizures," I told her.
"Thanks for telling us," she said and sent me back to the gym.

The events of those days, my near death and the interminable visits to the doctors, sparked something in my father. Before this, he had pretty much ignored my existence, and the existence of my sister and brother. After I had the seizure, though, he swooped down on my life like a hungry dog on a bone. He began dragging me all over the state trying to make a man of me. He devised fishing trips, though he raised catfish himself, and we spent many a miserable afternoon sullenly casting lines, our hooks undisturbed in the water of various rivers and lakes. He took me to deer camp a few times, with no luck, though at one outing I entertained myself by pouring spurts of gasoline from a spare gas can onto the campfire, to the delight of our fellow hunters, who were mostly drunk. There were often more bodies than beds, and late one night one of my father's friends crawled into bed with me, throwing his arm over me and muttering something I couldn't make out. I spent the night in a chair. In the morning, the man had wet the bed. Everyone overslept and my father and I spent the morning hunting squirrels instead of deer, of which we shot not one.
He didn't take me out to work with him as much, and when he did, he didn't make me do very much of the work. Mostly, he wanted me to sit in the truck until he got back from walking the levees looking for breaks.
My father's sudden attentions weren't only reserved for me. He bought my mother a walker, and he began hiring a string of nurses to care for her as she became bedridden. The first one, a thirty-something black woman named Tomecka, was the sweetest. She stayed for several months and became almost like one of the family until the day my mother had a violent fit and attacked her, clawed her arms while Tomecka tried to bathe her. Tomecka came into my bedroom and asked if I could help her quiet my mother.
"No," I said. "But I'll try."
Mom was inconsolable, and finally Tomecka gave up and left. We never saw her again.
After Tomecka, Mom's dementia became uncontrollable, and none of the nurses stayed for more than a month; most lasted a day or less, and we didn't bother to learn their names. Soon, my father had exhausted all of the home health care workers available in three counties, and my sister and I tried to take over.
I had taken to arguing with my brother about what I would want done to me if I had Huntington's disease, my mother's illness.
"I would shoot myself," I said with the obstinate assuredness of a teenager.
"Don't come near me," he'd say. "If I get sick, you stay the hell away from me. I want to live."
"That's not life," I said. "You'd be dead; you just wouldn't know it yet."

When my mother developed a bruise on her backside from being bedridden, my father decided to put her in a nursing home before it became a bedsore. The doctor who examined her was emphatic. He made it clear that if we didn't either find a professional nurse or caregiver to take care of her, or voluntarily put her into a home, he'd press charges and the state would take over.
Dad rode with Mom in the ambulance to the nursing home; then he walked back to his truck and drove home. He didn't drink anymore that day, or the next, and for the next two days after that, he laid on the couch in the living room, shaking and grinding his teeth; he sweated the alcohol out of his system. He rose pale, weak and sober, took a long shower and went back to work.

A few days after that, he fired my brother. There was no row, just a quiet conversation I wasn’t a part of. The next morning, my brother was up and out early looking for factory work. I found my father in the kitchen, as I did every morning, hangover, rain, or shine, reading a novel.
“Heard about Burr,” I said. “Burr” was my brother’s nickname.
My father spoke without lowering his book. “No future on the farm for either of you,” he said. “You ought to do more with your life than I did.”
“But that’s all we’ve ever done.” I thought back to a lifetime of seven-day workweeks, half-days worked on Christmas.
“Mike’ll get something. You’re young yet. Maybe you can go to college. Me and Bobby are getting old. We’ll retire in a couple years. Ought to just let it die with us.” Bobby was my uncle. They’d founded the family farm when my father returned from military service after World War II over fifty years ago.
“Some eggs on the stove,” Dad added, without ever raising his eyes from his book.

I never had another seizure after that first one, and shortly after Mom went into the home I was able to stop taking my medication. I had grown out of the childhood epilepsy. Sometimes, though, I'd catch Dad on the way back from the bathroom, late at night, peeking into my bedroom. He rarely closed his bedroom door anymore.

2011-09-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

Jessie Carty is the author of four poetry collections which include the chapbook Fat Girl (Sibling Rivalry, 2011) and the award winning full length poetry collection,Paper House (Folded Word 2010). Jessie teaches at RCCC in Concord, NC. She is the founding editor of Referential Magazine.

Me: Will you tell us a little bit about your new collection “Fat Girl?” Why did you choose this title?

Jessie: I usually have a very difficult time with titles, but “Fat Girl” was always the title for this chunky chapbook.

Me: It seems like weight is the last viable topic of scorn for people—you can’t make fun of anything else and be accepted, socially, but you can still mock someone’s weight. And yet, at the same time, we, as a nation, are growing heavier. Is there something worthwhile in this scorn? Or is it purely a negative thing?

Jessie: Unfortunately, there are still so many people who want (and/or need) to have someone to ridicule. Like you said, it is becoming increasingly unacceptable to make fun of people for their race, ability or sexual orientation (although many people still try to take people down for those attributes still as well), but many people feel that weight is still fair game. I think it comes down to two things: 1 – the fat man is funny so therefore it is ok to make fun of fat people scenario 2 – fat people deserve to be mocked because they should be able to control what they eat. I do find it a negative thing. You never know why someone may be fat. It could be due to medication, they could have recently given birth or heck maybe they just like to eat. Why do you care? (And, of course, I don’t mean you – I mean the universal you).

Me: Do you find public performance of your work to be useful? Necessary?

Jessie: When I started writing again after about a 5 year break (oh that sad little break), I found it extremely meaningful to get out there to read my work because I wanted to connect with other writers. I gave up writing, in part, because I lacked that connection with other people. The internet (dating myself here!) has made it much easier for me to return to writing because it is so much easier to find like-minded people. I also love to hear other writers read their work; it almost always inspires me to write as well. All that being said, now that I am working full-time again I have found that I have less time to participate in open mike events. Now, I have to focus more on readings where I’m specifically scheduled.

Me: How has teaching influenced your writing?

Jessie: I’ve always felt like a teacher, even when I was sitting in a cubicle working insurance claims back in the day. I feel I was teaching through my blog even before I officially began teaching in the classroom. Probably the biggest effect is that I have less time to actually sit down to write. It has made the time I do have to write, however, more precious and productive. A few of my students, of course, have also shown up in poems.

Me: You’re an editor for Referential; can you tell us a little about the journal? How does editing affect your writing? Does it help/hurt?

Jessie: A few years ago I started a YouTube based lit mag called Shape of a Box but it became time consuming. I really loved editing, but I didn’t want to just start another online magazine. The idea for Referential came to me in late 2009 and I launched into at the beginning of 2011. I started with an open call from which I picked a poem to feature. After that people submit poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art, and mixed-media to “refer” from different pieces on the site. I occasionally have new calls for featured work, but the actual business of reviewing referrals has kept me pretty busy.

I think editing has definitely made me a better writer. It is always harder to see the flaws in your own writing, but when you see something in someone else’s work that makes you cringe it is much easier to go back to your own work to then remove the cringe worthy.

Me: You update your blog pretty regularly—writer to writer, let me ask: do you find a blog valuable as a writer? If so, how?

Jessie: I started my blog when I was working full-time in an office and going to graduate school. I had it as an outlet to process all that was going on, but as time has gone on I’ve found less time to actually work on it. I’m now down to about 1 post a week although I will post more if I have book reviews and/or interviews (such as this) to post. My blog has become my personal website. With wordpress software I can register my domain name and create pages so that I not only have a blog, but I also have a place to put up my resume, publication links etc.

A blog can be great for two things 1 – for you to connect with other writers and readers 2 – as a cheap way to put up a website where people can find everything about you in one place. The one thing I always caution about blogging is don’t do it if you aren’t going to read blogs by other people. It is, at least at the start, about community.

Me: Who are your biggest literary influences and how have they influenced you?

Jessie: I always find this kind of question terribly difficult to answer. I remember falling in love with nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss and Robert Louis Stevenson as a child. I loved the rhythm and play of words. I still love that in my own writing. In junior high and high school there was Poe and the romantics (especially fell in love with Blake). What teen doesn’t relish in some melancholy? In college I went through my modernist phase and found myself trying to be a mini-Eliot with allusion riddled poems. All this is background, but I’d have to say now that the freedom of contemporary verse is where my heart is. I love that we can write about ANYTHING especially in the south. Moonshine poems anyone?

Me: What have you read recently that really blew you away?

Jessie: Another tough one! I’m actually reading the novel “Freight” by Mel Bosworth which is wonderfully lyric and narrative all together. I also read Christine Garren’s most recent chapbook “The Difficult Here.” She was my first poetry teacher as an undergrad and she still blows me away. I am inspired by people who write differently from the way I write, but do so in such a magnificent way. I could never write like Christine, but I can dream.

Me: Will you tell me a little about your writing schedule? Do you write every day? Do you have any rituals that help bring inspiration?

Jessie: I have moved a little bit away from writing everyday although I still seem to write at least every other day (that may have something to do with having two days where I teach from 3-9 and others where I teach from 11-2:30 – which days do you think are better for writing?) I still love to write poems by hand so I tend to attempt a new one or two once I have had time during the day to type up anything in the journal from the days before. That always feels like a wonderful little ritual. Speaking of Blake and inspiration together, I am currently using the Tiger poem as a jumping off point whenever I feel blank. I just pick a word in the poem and go with it.

Me: What are you working on now?

Jessie: I dropped a hint about with the Blake Tiger project, but I’m also writing poems from the perspective of Pammy, the daughter of Daisy in the The Great Gatsby.

2011-09-26T01:00:00.000-07:00

I read somewhere that adults aren't supposed to have nightmares--only children do. If this is true, I must be in a state of arrested development. That state would be Tennessee...(if you didn't get that, ask Mr. Wendel). Hardly a week goes by that I don't have a nightmare about spiders or snakes or spiders that spit snakes out of their mouths while the snakes make fun of my weight.

Not all of my dreams are nightmares, of course. Usually, things that should be nightmares are actually pretty funny at the time, or vice versa. I occasionally write things based on my dreams because, in addition to being odd, they tend to be quite detailed and often pretty well-structured. But, honestly, my dreams are usually too weird to be readable.

Having a baby has affected my dreams in three ways. 1. My sleep is frequently interupted, which means I wake in the middle of dreams and therefore remember them. 2. Sleep deprivation makes my dreams even more vivid than usual, and 3. My anxieties are even more extensive than usual because now I've got all my concerns about the baby to add to the usual mix. Now, instead of me being the one at school, naked, frantically trying to dress while the teacher calls roll (and my name does start with a B) it's her.

Here's a pretty tame one: the other night, I dreamed that a nuclear apocalypse had come. FINALLY. It was during a break, and most of the students at the school at which I work and live were gone, though a few remained. The administration called a school meeting, and we all gathered in the theater. We had a radio set up to monitor broadcasts, and out the window, we could see mushroom clouds. Everything was bathed in red light. The administration, as usual, rambled on and had nothing worthwhile to say. They asked if there were any questions. I took that opportunity to go up on stage and begin a comedy routine. And I KILLED. I was mostly doing impersonations of faculty pets, but man, did the audience love it. This performance lasted for several hours, and then we went out to gather what supplies we could. Of course, the remaining students all wanted to sleep over in Carroll, OUR DORM, but we had to say no; there was an apocalypse on, after all.

I used to have dreams that came true, pretty frequently, in fact, but they were always completely useless to me and almost never afforded me the opportunity to get rich. I might dream about eating lunch in the cafeteria with a different group of kids--when I was in school--and then, a few days later, I'd be in the cafeteria and feel deja vu and realize: OMG! I totally dreamed this! Or I might dream about walking around a table...in a strange place...or sitting on a bench in a mall I'VE NEVER BEEN TO. Ang then my awesome power would manifest, and I'd totally go to a new mall or walk around a table somewhere.

All of this has led me to the conclusion that my subconscious is an ass. It plays tricks on me. It intentionally creates Jungian and Freudian scenarios just to mess with me when I wake up. When I was in college and started goint to therapy to deal with my mother's illness, I started dreaming that there were people living behind my bathroom mirror, repeating everything I said in German and occasionally throwing pies at each other. In my waking life, I'm no more afraid of Germans than anyone else who doesn't share a border with them. But this was my subconscious mocking my fears over my own emotional stability, but in an absurd, kind of cutesy way. The people in the mirror sounded remarkably like the cast of Hogan's Heroes.

I did used to have very vivid nightmares about demons plaguing my family and me. I used to dream about my mother as a ghost, howling right outside my door and begging to be let in. My wife complains from time to time about my violent thrashing at night, or the fact that I frequently wake her up by launching out of bed. I still, frequently, dream about various groups of people being out to get me/mydaughter/etc. in a Dystopian future kind of way, except the groups are usually dressed in cow costumes. I can easily interpret these as meaningful images. The armed groups of cow-costumed folks might represent cultural influences. They gather together like a herd of cows, no one challenging the authority of the group, regardless of whether the group is behaving justly or not. They are trying to influence my daughter in some negative way, so I'm trying to escape them. The fact that the cow-men shoot at us with spinach guns, well, I'll leave that one up to your interpretation.

* * *

The other day at lunch, some coworkers were talking about their dreams. They turned to me and asked what kind of dreams I had. For the next 5 minutes, they listened as I related a pretty standard dream I used to have. Then they all got up and left. They've been dodging me ever since.

2011-09-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

My Sesquac
By Glenn Buttkus

I have always believed in the existence of Sasquatch. When I was a kid, my grandfather used to talk about an Indian legend coming out of NE Washington, near Colville and Kettle Falls, the legend of “the wood ape”. It was always portrayed as a monster, a bogeyman. In the 1950’s I paid little attention. Then the 1960’s descended upon us, and there was a plethora of Bigfoot sightings, footprints, and incidents in the news.

Sasquatch is a derivative of the Indian word “Sesquac” meaning “wild man”. It was first coined by the Coast Salish Indians on Vancouver Island, and in the interior of British Columbia. In the Indian languages clear across North America there are more than sixty different names and terms for Sasquatch. The name Bigfoot was just a media term, generated out of sightings and footprints in Northern California back in the 1950’s.

For over 400 years there have been records of sightings of a large hair-covered manlike animal in the wilderness of North America. There have been literally thousands of sightings, and 350 of them have been in Washington State. The last one was on September 10, 2004 in Ferry County. The witnesses are usually people with unimpeachable character. The huge tracks have been photographed, and plaster cast for over 70 years. Native American legends continuously refer to them as non-human
“People of the Wild”.

A lot of folks feel that Sasquatch is a fine fable, and they would like to believe in it. But where is the truth? The evidence suggests the presence of an animal, probably a primate that does exist today in very low population densities. If true, this species likely evolved alongside humans, and it became astonishingly adept at avoiding human contact through a process of natural selection. To others, this same evidence just points to a cultural phenomenon, kept alive today through a combination of misidentification of known animals, wishful thinking, and the deliberate fabrication of evidence.

Putting together all the sightings, incidents, and reports, BFRO has come up with a profile of Sasquatch. It is considered a large, hairy bipedal non-human primate that is distributed over North America. Its size, and its odd gait let people know that they are seeing a creature different from man.

Its skin color ranges from deep black or charcoal to deep brown, sunburned reddish brown, and gray. A few albinos have been seen. It is covered with hair, not fur. Being a primate, it does not molt its hair, replacing one hair at a time; thus the hair cannot be found in wooly patches. The body can have varicolored patches of hair. Most of the time the hair appears clean, glossy, and shiny, but it can be otherwise. Females tend to look cleaner than males. Males have lots of facial fur. Females do not. Long hair on their shoulders bounces “like a cape” as they run. There is long hair on the buttocks, and long hair covers the genitalia.

Then there is the odor of the beast. 15% of encounters reported a stench. Gorillas when stressed exude a gagging powerful aroma. Sasquatch heads look small for their bulk. Sagittal crests exist on adult males, probably bony, which makes them look like they are wearing a hooded sweatshirt. The size of the brain, its volume, is at least the size of a gorilla. It has deep-set eyes under a conspicuous brow ridge. Their faces are flat with prominent cheekbones. Deep brown eyes are predominant, with a red component, like a bloodshot sclera. Albino Sasquatch have blue eyes. The nose is pug-like, but human in shape. The mouth is thin-lipped, and the lips are yellowish. They have large square teeth. Their ears are usually hidden under the hair. The muscles on the back of the head flare out to the shoulders, obscuring the neck, like a weightlifter. So when they turn to see something, they have to turn their whole body, and not just their head.
Like man, each one is an individual. They have been described as everything from ape-like to looking like an old Indian.

Their trunk is carried forward in a hunched over position. They can stand upright, but mostly they don’t. Their shoulders are very wide, about 40% of their height. In a very large man this runs like about 25% of his height. The Bigfoot chest is estimated to be 60” to 75”, and many have described their stentorian breathing. The females have prominent breasts, hair-covered except for the nipples. Their arms are massively muscled and long. Their forearms are covered with longish hair, making them look a little like a forest Popeye. They have very large hands, “the size of paddles”. The fingers are short, and the thumb is closer to the wrist than ours. The hand lacks the thenar pad, that mound of muscle at the base of our thumbs, and this is a corollary of the lowest opposability found in the higher primates. They have dark fingernails, not claws.

Their legs are real big, like 20” in circumference. The calves all look huge. The foot can be up to 27” in length, with no arch, and toes that splay outward. The skin on the soles of their feet is very thick. Their height average is about 7’10”. The tallest reported was 10’ tall. Many that are seen are only 6’-7’ tall, suggesting that these are the younger ones. Their weight is estimated to be 550 to 650 pounds. They think that the largest males, at 10’ tall, with 27” feet, could run 1,000 pounds. They have wide arm swings and very long strides. When seen they are usually just walking. They seem to glide when they walk, and they do not lock their knees, so they look like they are riding a bicycle. Those wide arm swings seem like a cross-country skier with poles. There is no up and down movement of the upper body. Their step length is up to 5’ at a stride, with their feet mostly in line; very little straddle. This is something that a hoaxer cannot duplicate. They do not often run, even when shot at. And they are considered powerful swimmers as well.

They are primarily a nocturnal creature. Perhaps they see well in the dark, with larger eyes, larger pupils, and more rods in their retina. They can walk with ease in total darkness, but they have been seen out foraging during the day too. Often they are spotted just after daylight. They have heightened senses. They stand very still in the forest and listen. But several times they did not detect a human sitting still in full view. With those thick soles on their feet they can travel through blackberry bushes, devil’s clubs, and over sharp rocks without a problem.

In terms of their diet, they are considered an Omnivore, with a substantial Carnivore component. They have been observed catching ground squirrels, and even preying on deer or bear. They can be scavengers too. They eat a lot of road kill. They have snatched kill from hunters. They only eat garbage as a last resort. They only kill livestock infrequently. Some Sasquatch look very well fed, others are skinny.

It is postulated that Bigfoot infants are small, like human babies; but they become fleet of foot quickly. They stay with the mother until puberty, at about age 10. They measure about 6’ tall at that point. Offspring seem to be spaced at about 5 years apart, based on records of group footprints. Mating has been observed between May-June. Most births occur between February-May, suggesting less than a year for gestation. On two occasions females have been seen carrying dead infants. Older grayish Sasquatch probably live to be about 35 years old, so that is three generations per century. Old ones have thin hair, snaggle teeth, open sores, and deeply wrinkled skin. When one dies, it is suspected, various carnivores eat the corpse. Possibly, they themselves are cannibalistic. Rodents eat the bones, and moths consume the hair. The residue of the corpse would fall prey to the acidic environment of the forest. There would be no remnants left that would be visible under the seasonal leaf and needle fall.

They sleep mostly in temporary shelters, padded with available vegetation, like bear grass, leaves, ferns, and moss. Sometimes partial roves are fashioned from broken boughs. Once discovered, a nest is abandoned. The Sasquatch is solitary and constantly on the move. Caves and permanent shelters are only used rarely.

Their upper body strength is legendary. They seem to like to exercise this strength, throwing basketball sized rocks in long arcs to ward off intruders. They have been known to lift up the corners of mobile homes and RV’s, cars and trailers. They can lift and throw full fifty-gallon drums, which would weight 450 pounds, or large rocks that would weigh 200-300 pounds. They twist the trunks of small trees, possibly marking the way, or their territory.

Mostly they travel in silence. They can make patterned repetitive knocking sounds with rocks or pieces of wood. This can be used for long distance communication, or for deterrence. They are capable, however of a complex collection of sounds, starting with whistling [like the Yeti], up through moans, howls, and chilling screams that can rise up from a deep growl. Sometimes, though rarely, they have been heard producing a melodic sound, a collection of complex vocalizations; like a primitive language; soft tones like a woman talking off in the distance. They even make giggling, laughing, and crying sounds.

Mostly they are solitary creatures, but sometimes they can be seen in a group, foraging. The young ones play, and often can be seen, while the adults stay hidden. Males seem to be sighted more often. They move around more. They have a natural curiosity. They will investigate a lighted window at night, or noisy animals in a barn. They will not tear open a backpack, like a bear would. They seem orderly and systematic in stone stacking. They are often polite. If food is deposited for them, they have a tendency to return the favor with a gift; a dog skull, a little pile of stones, fresh evergreen shoots, a small freshly killed squirrel, live kittens, or a turtle. Are these shared food or gifts?

They react calmly to women and children. They try and avoid men. When startled they will leave leisurely, sometimes while even being shot at. There is absolutely no documentation over the last 100 years of a Sasquatch doing deliberate harm to a human being. They tolerate children and small animals. They, like gorillas, have a special distaste for aggressive dogs. They have been seen slapping a 75-pound dog, knocking him 40’, and they have killed them, swinging them against trees. Perhaps this is a reaction based on centuries of conflict with wolves and coyotes. While hiking, if you were to happen onto a Sasquatch, one should not stare at it. Sit down, and groom a companion, or eat food. Sometimes, out of curiosity, they will tarry.

They do not seem to use tools. Sometimes they use sticks or rocks, but rarely. When they die it is mostly from parasites within them secondary to their eating habits and the manner of food. They could die of wounds, or dental disorders, or even gunshots. One does not find remains of dead bear that have died of natural causes either. There are 700,000 bear in North America. There are probably only a few thousand Sasquatch. In America, the highest concentration of Sasquatch population is in Washington, Oregon, and California in the Cascades, which morphs into the Sierra Madre. Most sightings are just chance encounters of single individuals. They are seen most often right at dawn. They are not seen at all during the dead of winter. They may hibernate. A Bigfoot would have to forage over hundreds of miles to sustain its food needs.

This species is deviant from Homo sapiens by anatomy, forehead crest, feet, hands, musculature, body posture and gait, behavior nocturnal, lack of compelling use of tools, lack of apparent language, lack of cultural traits, and sociology. The paleontological affiliation, or identity with Gigantopithecus, as championed by the late Grover Krantz, has many aspects to recommend it. Gigantopithecus Black was a great Asian creature, probably an ape, of the Miocene Epoch; about 24 million to 5 million years ago. Anthropologists have only found a handful of bones to substantiate Giganto’s existence. Possibly, descending from Giganto, the Sasquatch has co-existed alongside humans for hundreds of thousands of years. There is a theory that man hunted Giganto into extinction. Perhaps Sasquatch has a genetic memory and aversion of man the hunter. Maybe, in the shadows, Bigfoot migrated across that land bridge with Asian primitive man. Gigantopithecus was thought to be 9’ tall, and weight 1,000 pounds. Sound familiar? They were the largest “documented” primates to ever walk the earth. At some point there would have been millions of Giganto skeletons extant. Today we have only found a few bones. The entire world’s collection of Giganto bones would fit in a small suitcase. So, again, most animal bones are reabsorbed into the biomass. The process of fossilization is rare.

Some scientists today are endeavoring to prove that Sasquatch, this hulking creature of legend, is not myth. Jane Goodall called for a legitimate study to determine whether the greatest apes that ever lived are still with us, that they persist in the world’s moist mountain regions. Stone age creatures are still with us; some reptilian, some insects, and mammal hybrids. So why not Sasquatch? Goodall stated that the existence of hominids of this sort is a very real possibility. Mythical giant ape-like creatures lurk in the traditions of nearly every Native American linguistic group, from central Asia to the central Rockies.

Not long ago a group of BFRO ( Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization ) enthusiasts and amateurs camped out for two days in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, near Skookum ridge, out on Skookum meadow. They put out food deposits that were mostly fruit. They basted some of the food with pheromones. They blasted out pre-recorded Sasquatch calls on loud speakers at night trying to attract the animal. On the second night they recorded and heard a powerful reply to their broadcast. They collected from one spot where a Sasquatch had lain down to reach across for some fruit, some hair, footprints, and scat. Not wanting to just walk up to the food, this animal lay on its side, and reached across. They were able to fill this imprint with 400 pounds of plaster. So in that Skookum meadow, a giant biped sat down in the mud. The cast clearly shows a hairy forearm the size of a small ham, an enormous hairy thigh, and outsized buttock, and a thick Achilles tendon and thick heel—all from a creature that is not supposed to exist.

When we look at the Bigfoot/Sasquatch phenomenon, there are several theories to explain the sightings.
1. Fear manifestations
2. Misidentification of bears
3. Paranormal/UFO-related
4. The Collective Memory Hypothesis
5. The Sasquatch/Giganto connection.
What is interesting to me is that the patterns of eyewitnesses are not demographic; rather they are geographic. These are not certain types of people. They are just all kinds of people who venture into certain areas.

In addition to the sightings around Mt. Adams there have been numerous sightings on the Olympic peninsula, in and around the Olympic National Park in Grays Harbor County. Loggers, farmers, and tourists have all seen Sasquatch over there. Interestingly, my wife and I spend a lot of time out there on the coast as well, but that is a narrative for another time.

I spend time recruiting friends to run those forest service roads in both areas around midnight with me, creeping down them, having large flashlights, no weapons, and high hopes. So far we have not had the encounter I seek, but I have an intuition about my Sesquac; he waits for me on one of those lonely roads, on one of those late nights. I have seen a UFO up close. My house is haunted and my whole family have seen our “guests”. I was fated to both believe in Sasquatch and to see one in person. But like playing the state lotto, and having a good feeling about winning one of these years, it is difficult to calculate the odds of my success.

* * *

Glenn's bio: Born in Seattle on June 14, 1944, on Flag Day; numerologists seem to love these numbers. Lived like a gypsy child, moving around a lot, growing up with three stepfathers. I was the kid who sat on a bluff above Puget Sound staring out at the islands in the stream and dreaming of buying one some day, when I was a wealthy actor or writer or both. Whenever I want a chuckle I go back and look at some of my earliest poetry, as a teen ager in the 50’s. It seemed to improve during Viet Nam, and my time in the service. I did become a professional actor for a decade, quitting in 1977, and going back to school to be a Special Education teacher, working with the blind. So for most of my vocational career I worked with adult legally blind veterans, a very rewarding job. But I never lost my love of movies, and never stopped writing poetry. I did stop writing novels. Two of them gather dust on a shelf in my basement. I remain unpublished but not unappreciated thanks to blogging and Facebook.

2011-09-19T01:00:00.000-07:00

I was never the creative one, though I tried; when I was a kid, I'd gather my crayons and pencils together, my colored paper, and wait for inspiration to hit, but it never did. I could never draw. My doodles devolved into awkward attempts at geometric patterns. Later, in college, when I took art classes, the professor would stare and puzzle over my attempts at sketches, and once began spouting statistics on alien abductions, apparently inspired by my drawing of a monkey. Our nanny taught my sister and me to make paste, and we went crazy with that, but it was always my sister's vision we followed.

In fact, when I was growing up, my sister was the creative one. Her imagination was somewhere between a barely-restrained wild animal and a tornado. She could turn our living room into a swamp full of aligators who'd drag us down to the depths if we touched the carpet, so we spent many afternoons hopping from couch to chair to piano. Or she pretended there were cowboys on the next ridge, waiting for a chance to pick her off with their Winchesters, poor Little Mini Haha that she was, a lone squaw searching for her Indian brethren. She made clubhouses in the tops of closets, tried to dig a swimming pool in the yard with spoons and trashbags (to line it with) and, at her peak of ambition, attempted to excavate a cliff she was sure was the collapsed tunnel of a gold mine. I went along with her, but, when asked if the Sioux Nation were coming over the hills to help fight off the Cavalry, I saw nothing, but said, "Yes."

In school, when I was given the opportunity to take a test to get into Gifted and Talented classes, I failed. I told myself the questions were esoteric; all of the kids who'd already been in GT passed because they already knew the answers from GT. When one of the questions stated I was trapped in a room with a mirror and a table and asked how I would get out, I had no idea. I'd never been asked to be creative in school, before; I didn't know it was even acceptable.

When I was growing up, my friends were creative. They could draw, write funny stories; they made movies. I helped with the movies, but I was always the awkward, out of place one. Unable to improvise with the conviction my friends showed, I suggested we write scripts, but when asked what to write, I couldn't help. So we continued improvising. I mostly just followed the others; I was just glad to be asked to participate. I was the one who told dirty jokes I'd overheard from my father; they were the ones who came up with fresh ideas.

Actually, I remember the first creative thing I wrote. It was in the sixth grade, I believe. The assignment was to make an autobiography. We were supplied a series of prompts such as What does your family do on the weekends? or What's your favorite holiday? The sad reality was that I had no answer for most of the questions. Or, rather, I was ashamed of the answers I had. On the weekends, we watched TV. My father drank. My favorite holiday--now that was a toss-up. Was it Easter when my brother hid eggs in cow piles? or the Christmas when my Uncle Wheelbarrow (it's a long story) got drunk, dressed up like Santa, and asked me if I wanted a woman for Christmas? I looked around at my classmates--most of them upper class or, at least, middle class; we were middle class on paper, but dressed as lower, at best. We didn't even have a VCR until I got into high school, saved up the money, and bought one. My classmates seemed worldly, happy, worst of all, normal. I answered the few prompts I could, but fell well below the minimum length. So I made the rest of it up. I created a normal family who did normal things; the teacher was fooled. I don't remember what grade I received, though I did well enough; I just remember being ashamed of the whole ordeal.

It was much later in the 11th grade when I discovered the usefullness of creativity. The teacher, who happened to be my aunt, gave us extra credit for creative work every so often. I was ending a relationship at the time. I wrote a terrible poem about it. My aunt was so affected that she made me stay after class and convince her I was not on drugs, suicidal, etc. I was quite pleased.

***

I've always surrounded myself with creative people. The high school friends I mentioned, my bandmates from my days as a musician; later, in college, I hung out with writers and artists, though most of them took themselves too seriously and lacked the real creative verve of my childhood friends. There have been a few standouts. I wanted to live in a Platonic Society but had no aspirations to be the king, just another philosopher. Maybe the treasurer.

Really, I'd give just about anything to go back to the days when we Xeroxed a zine and distributed it around the high school campus and put up flyers and rented out the Progressive Club to perform. Even when I'm nominated for an award or have a book picked up by a publisher, it doesn't quite compare to the thrill of learning that all 50 copies we made of Bert the Bemuzzled Shopping Cart issue 3 were sold.

2011-09-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

Helen Losse is a poet and editor. Her new collection Seriously Dangerous was recently released from Main Street Rag.

Me: What’s the significance of the title of your new collection “Seriously Dangerous?”

Helen: Wow! Let’s jump right in the deep end and hope to swim. The title Seriously Dangerous and the book cover, a fiery cross on a black background, are intended to make a bold statement: Something is seriously wrong with our nation and our world and that something is dangerous. And yes, “the cross without a savior” refers to the KKK. Racism is alive and well in America today. Cowards hide behind our founding fathers and Martin Luther King Jr. but seem to understand neither. I suppose I should tell you that I wrote my master’s thesis on the value of unmerited suffering in the life and works of Martin Luther King Jr., who became far more radical than “I Have a Dream” in the years from 1963 until his death in 1968, and that my study of King helped mold my world view. The study of African American history continues to inform my work.

Me: Spirituality seems to play a key role in your writing. What is the connection, for you, between spirituality and poetry?

Helen: I am a Christian with a message to tell. Poetry is often the medium by which I speak. Good news not only deals with heaven but also with creating a world free of racism, poverty, and war.

Me: Do you feel that your writing has changed since your previous collection, Better with Friends, and if so, how?

Helen: No, not a bit. Better With Friends is a book of poetry that explores the intersections of memory (factual and embellished), dreams (daydreams and night dreams), reverie, and prayer, so that all of one’s thoughts can be envisioned as prayer—so that “pray without ceasing” makes sense even when we sleep. Both books were produced by gathering (collecting) poems rather than writing them “to be a book.” My writing has not changed, but Seriously Dangerous was professionally edited; it is a more coherent book, but individual poems in both are equally strong.

Me: How did teaching influence your writing?

Helen: Actually, I’m not sure it did. I loved teaching and left, not because I was a bad teacher but because I was a very good one, who used up a lot of energy teaching. I felt it was unfair for my family to get what was left, especially when my children were small. I approach writing with the same fervency as I did teaching; I considered both a ministry.

Me: You’re an editor for the Dead Mule; how does that affect your writing? Does it help/hurt?

Helen: Yes, I’m the Poetry Editor. That means I do about 99.9% of the work concerning poetry without checking with anyone. It also means I have a system to speed up the work. I have received countless opportunities due to my work (and exposure) on the Mule. My second chapbook and first book were both published by people I met as a direct result of my position there. In fact, that’s where I met you, Cort. Valerie MacEwan, Editor and Publisher of the Dead Mule, has allowed me the privilege of editing without the responsibilities of establishing a web site. At the Mule, we say “we’re a big ole southern family.” Val is like a sister to me; I love her dearly. She and her husband Rob do the technical stuff; all I do is have fun. All, I say—except writing the occasional rejection letter. Writing rejections makes me consider how close we writers are to our words, how we grow to love poems, sometimes even the bad ones.

Me: The Dead Mule focuses on Southern Writing. Do you consider yourself a Southern Poet? If so, what exactly does that mean?

Helen: This is an answer I’m going to have to make up as I go—you know, like we used to do on essay tests when we didn’t know the answer but knew three facts and had to make it work. I know, we require a Southern Legitimacy Statement from all of our writers (poets and prose writers) as a way to avoid the long lists of accomplishments in a standard bio, that some writers take the SLS too seriously, and others have a lot of fun writing them. I publish all kinds of poems—narrative and lyric, formal and free verse, prose poems, poems by poets from our April Southern Poet Laureates to first timers, and one or two now and again that really aren’t quite up to snuff—in an attempt to make the Mule as diverse as the south. I even accept a few haiku. I’m a poet, who lives in the south and loves it, but I don’t really know what a southern poem is. Does anyone?

Me: Who are your biggest literary influences and how have they influenced you?

Helen: I studied poetry at Wake Forest University with Jane Mead (The Usable Field) who influenced my writing more than any other poet. She encouraged students to “find their own voice,” and I think I have. Dennis Sampson (Within the Shadow of a Man) also influenced me greatly when I was beginning to write by advising me to write clear grammatical sentences. I would say Eve Hanninen, editor of The Centrifugal Eye, and Scott Owens, editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review challenge me to revise more and to eliminate unnecessary words. They both work me hard.

Me: What have you read recently that really blew you away?

Helen: When I read Jessie Carty’s chapbook Fat Girl (now in pre-order) to write a blurb, I was blown away by her bravery and transparency. I was totally convinced that “less is more” by JS Absher’s Night Weather. And I’m always in awe of Tim Peeler’s command of the English language—completely unassuming, then he lets it fly! I wonder what that man’s IQ is. But one totally unexpected ah ha! came as I read Yehoshua November’s God’s Optimism.

Me: Will you tell me a little about your writing schedule? Do you write every day? Do you have any rituals that help bring inspiration?

Helen: Now you’re putting me to shame. I only wish I were organized enough to write daily. And it’s hard to promote a book and write that much. Usually, I read poetry by other people before I write. I do actually read more than I write. I have a muse named Helena.

Me: What are you working on now?

Helen: Okay. I’m going to let the cat out of the bag. I’m working on a re-release of a chapbook that will be used to raise funds for re-building my home town Joplin, MO, after the May 22 tornado destroyed much of the city. My husband and I had left Joplin, where we had been to celebrate my Mother’s 90th birthday, just four days before the tornado hit. My immediate family suffered no losses, but our high school, a hospital, and countless businesses and homes were destroyed. The response to help rebuild Joplin has been huge, but, of course, it’s an on-going process. A group called Joplin Expats made up of people who no longer live in Joplin but consider it their hometown have pledged to help in various ways for the next three years. Profits from this chapbook, Paper Snowflakes 2011, will be my contribution. I’ll be working through a group called Joplin Bright Futures that helps poor children in the public schools. Paper Snowflakes, first published by Southern Hum Press, has been out of print for a while. The chapbook is mostly about growing up in Joplin. I have reworked a few poems and included a few new ones. Paper Snowflakes 2011 will be released from Rank Stranger Press later this year.

2011-09-12T01:00:00.000-07:00

My wife had an idea. One day she was watching me sort my mail into little piles; one for bills, one for junk, one for rejection letters from literary journals. It was a particularly busy day, and I'd received several responses from various journals.
“You have too many books,” she said out of nowhere. I nodded and opened a letter.
“You need more shelves,” she added.
“Too expensive,” I said. “Hey, they signed this one.”
“Try Goodwill, or the Salvation Army.”
“Still too expensive,” I said. “Unless I get the really cheap ones that look terrible.”
"Maybe we could repaint them, or something."
I opened another rejection letter. “This one says, ‘Thanks for the Read’. Guess
that’s good.” I tossed the letter into the growing pile. “What I need is somewhere to put all these,” I said.
"Why don't you throw them away?"
I paused. "Sentimental value, I guess," was all I could think to say. I have a folder that I keep all my rejection letters in, but it really seems a waste of space. I keep all the important information on a file on my computer, but I still hold on to those letters. I guess I must think that maybe some morning I'll wake up and they'll all have transformed into gold.
“I've got an idea. How many rejection letters do you have?” She asked.
"I don't know. A lot."
"We could decoupage a shelf," she said.
Thus it began. We found an ugly old bookcase at Goodwill, about 2 feet wide by 2 1/2 feet tall, and covered it in a medium body gloss gel glaze we found in the paint section at Hobby Lobby. Then we arranged some of my older rejection letters on one shelf, and put another layer of gel over it. We made a collage of the letters, turning them every which way and tearing some of them to make them fit however we chose. The medium body gel dries clear and holds the texture, so we were able to see the brush strokes. Then we used tinted gel to make each shelf a different color. Blue, pink, purple, green, yellow; the bookcase resembled one of Warhol’s celebrity paintings.
So now I’ve shelved my rejection letters. But rejection letters are an ever-amassing product. We found, after we’d used all of them up, that they just keep coming in. We decided to use them to cover a lamp, first the shade, then the body. We’ve been eying a coffee table, and hope eventually to decorate an entire room (the rejection room) in rejection letter decoupage furniture, or to start getting published.

2011-09-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

James Valvis is an incredibly prolific, solid poet and writer who's been producing great work for several years, now. A retired soldier, a father, a poet and novelist; he's that rarest of things: a writer who can crack a joke. He's got a new collection, How to Say Goodbye, coming out soon from Aortic Books.

Me: You write poetry and fiction—do you consider yourself a poet or novelist? What—to you—is the difference between writing poetry and fiction?

James: Both. Neither. I consider myself a writer. That’s all. I don’t bother with classifications. Writing is writing, and I’m happy to do (and sell) any kind of writing. My goal is to excel at all the kinds of writing that interest me. Many of my favorite writers have been solid at a number of different forms and genres. Like Stephen Dobyns, Raymond Carver, William Saroyan, etc.

The difference between poetry and fiction has been blurred so much I don’t know that there is one anymore. If you read the work of, say, Russell Edson, I can see little that separates it and surreal micro-fiction. Very often, when a poem runs long, I take out the line breaks and sell it as flash fiction. Or a story that runs too short can be turned into a poem. Once I turned a literary poem into a science fiction story and it sold at a better place than a lot of my intentionally SF short stories. Go figure.

In fact, I think there’s a strange effect on the ADD-addled modern psychology. People will not read a poem that runs three pages—because it’s too long. But they will read a flash fiction tale of the same exact length because it’s viewed as short.

Me: How has being a father influenced your writing?

James: Immensely. Besides the flood of material it gives me, it has changed how I see even the old material.

For instance, I wrote a lot of stuff about my parents before my daughter was born. Now I see that same material in a different way. It’s not necessarily a better way. I’m not saying that. But it is different, and so it has opened up that material again, making it fresh for me. There’s no doubt you view your parents much differently when you become a parent. Like, suddenly it’s you who has to say no, hand out punishments, demand good grades, etc., and this shines a new light on your childhood.

People without kids, I’m afraid, are forever doomed to see their parents from a single angle.

Me: Who are your biggest literary influences? & how have they influenced you?

James: Well, there are two ways to read this question. There are the literary influences, and then there are the personal relationships that influence your writing. I would say my wife is the biggest influence in my life, including my writing life. My work ethic and writing approach have more to do with the time I spent working with my father in his woodshop and the time I spent in the U.S. Army than any literary person.

Still, I suppose you mean literary influences. And that’s an almost impossible question to answer in any abbreviated way. There are so many it becomes hard to remember half of them. In the end, my literary influences are the entire canon, those who influenced me directly and those who influenced the ones who influenced them. I will say that when I was a young man the two authors I felt very connected to were Raymond Carver in fiction and Edward Field in poetry.

What excited me about them was the way they took everyday situations and language and transformed it into something that had a deep emotive impact on the reader. I wasn’t much for intellectual puzzles, especially back then. I didn’t want to shock people or perfect the world through activism or create for myself a cult of personality. What I wanted was to get on paper the essence—not the reality, but the essence—of what I had experienced as a human being in a way that all people who could read would find valuable. It seemed to me that those authors, and others like William Saroyan, had done that.

Me: What have you read recently that knocked you on your ass?

James: You mean, besides my dentist bill?

Hmm. What doesn’t knock me on my ass? I wrote an essay once, published in Thoughtsmith, about how I love reading old and long-forgotten paperback novels because I think they need me. I’m profoundly grateful to writers of all stripes, since reading is my primary solitary pleasure. I get sentimental about everything I read and it takes a lot for me to dislike something. It can happen, but the writing has to be very, very poor. Usually that kind of terrible writing gets knocked out by the editing process. But sadly, not always.

Anyway, I just finished reading a book of poems by Mather Schneider, He Took a Cab, which I got to read early because I was asked to write a blurb for the book. I thought it was outstanding. Schneider is a writer more people should know. I was also recently reading and loving the stories of Etgar Keret and more poems by Ron Koertge. Finally, I have to mention Vern Rutsala, the best unknown poet (even to other poets) in America.

Me: How would you describe the Valvis style or voice?

James: I wouldn’t. First, that’s something for others to say, not me. But also because I don’t think I have one. I write everything, and in many, many styles and voices. I think there are people out there who try for a style or a pose. They bully everything they write into that style—never mind what the poem or story wants to be.

I try to let my writing be completely free to be whatever it wants. Often technical concerns determine the voice or style of a piece. One of the reasons I can write as much as I do is I do not put up obstacles to writing. I’ve been reading some poets for years who have never once cracked a joke in a poem. Not once! Now, either these are the most singularly humorless people in history, or they are simply blocking anything that might be funny from their work, since they consider it sub-literary. Not surprisingly, I write more than they do, and they can’t figure out why.

Me: You are very prolific. Can you tell me a little about your writing routine?

James: I try to write every day. I try to write both a poem and some prose every day. I don’t always succeed at this, especially the prose part, but lately I’ve been averaging about 300-400 poems, 20-50 short stories, and 2-3 novel drafts a year.

I write in the morning, right after I exercise, since that’s when I’m freshest. I used to be a night writer, but I no longer have the mental energy to perform that deeply into the day. I write for about three or four hours—with some of that time spent editing and some spent playing Hearts.

I try never to let myself buy into excuses to not write. I never leave the desk without getting something done. I write seven days a week, and on all holidays: Easter, my birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, my anniversary, even Super Bowl Sunday. I cannot write on the road, so I don’t write on vacations, but I always bring a novel draft for revisions. I consider a day with no writing progress to be a wasted day.

Me: What are you working on?

James: As far as new stuff, just poems at the moment. I’ve spent the summer editing a YA novel that I expect to send out sometime before the end of the year. I was planning to start a new novel draft in September, but I’ve been called to jury duty, and so I have to put it off until mid-October, since I don’t want to be interrupted mid-novel with something that far out of my routine.

Because I have to wait on the novel, I thought I might spend September writing nothing but short stories. In 1999, to honor Saroyan, I wrote 30 short stories in one month and posted them online as they were drafted. I’ve since wondered if I could do it again. Maybe this will be the month.

Me: If you were to be remembered for one work, which would it be?

James: My daughter.

As for the writing, I have no clue. In a way, I hope there isn’t one. My good friend Michael McNeilly, may he rest in peace, was a brilliant poet. He wrote reams of terrific poems and some short fiction. But he also wrote the turtle poem. You should read it. It’s an awesome poem, one of my favorites, not just my Michael but by anyone. And yet it was so successful and so loved it overshadowed all the other wonderful work Michael did. It was all anyone wanted to talk about.

I wouldn’t want anything I write to do that. I’ve written a lot of poems and stories. To me, they’re like children. I refuse to pick a favorite.

Me: I am looking forward to reading your forthcoming poetry collection. Can you tell me a little about it?

James: How to Say Goodbye (Aortic Books.) It’s due out soon! Maybe September or October 2011. It’s my first full-length collection. Hell, it’s my first collection of any kind. I’ve never even put out a poetry chapbook before, so this is the first time people will have the chance to own a poetry book with my name on it.

It’s a whopper, too. I don’t know how many pages it will end up being, but I sent Kevin almost 300 pages of poetry to consider. It represents over 20 years of my verse. The work is not thematic, but it runs the gamut of styles and subject matter.

I hope people buy it—for everyone they know.

Me: How has being in the military influenced your writing?

James: First, I learned a lot about discipline in the military. I especially learned not to complain. When I listen to some talk about writing, I don’t wonder if they could make it in a war. No chance of that. I wonder instead if they could make it through the first week of Basic Training.

Second, it gave me material not commonly found in the small press. Let’s face it. There are not many poets who would join the military, let alone the army. Yet such an experience is more interesting and singular than whipping up mocha at Starbucks for spending cash while finishing an MFA. Also, when I write a poem about war or army life or soldiers, it has authority because I joined while there was a war going on, trained for war, and knew men who had been in war. I’m not speaking in generalities, which is—rather than sentimentality, as is so often said—the true enemy of effective verse. These are real people to me, not pawns I can use to grind a political axe.

You see, the general population, and especially the general poetry population, are both fascinated and repelled by the military. We tend to get either vilified as baby killers or erected as saintly martyrs. We’re either the evil tools of the imperial government, a real life version of the faceless storm troopers, or we are ignorant victims taken advantage of by dark forces inside the halls of American power. It never seems to occur to people that most of us might be fairly bright souls who believe in America, flawed though she is, and are neither insane blood-thirsty murderers nor children in need of protection from our own ignorance and impending destruction. In the end, most of us are not heroes either. Especially not me. I spent most of my time in the Army filling out forms to send people on leave or attach them to some temporary unit. Hardly Audie Murphy.

A lot of my army poems and stories are anti-war, since who likes war but crazy people, certainly not most of the guys I knew, but a number of them deal with how soldiers and vets are viewed as pawns by everyone, including and maybe especially by those who claim to be speaking for our welfare.

2011-09-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

My wife and I used to live in an old building on the campus of the school at which we work which carried with it many established problems, including ants. And I don’t mean a couple of ants in the kitchen; I mean rivers of ants, dark, oblivious, moving trails that deflated my human-centric ego until I felt like an outsider in my own house. This was just after we’d graduated grad. school and really started on our careers; we’d officially tiptoed into the realm of the middle class, and as such, we were suddenly surrounded with influences we didn’t understand. Whereas, once upon a time, we’d have simply killed every ant we saw, questions of co-habitation and environmentalism were raised: Must I kill everything that annoys me? Sure, these ants might get into our food, but really, they were just trying to live, and if I DO kill everything that annoys me, what kind of person does that make me?

The question was soon answered when some friends came to visit: I am the kind of person who doesn’t want to be embarrassed in front of my friends by having thousands of ants in my house. So I went to the store for some ant spray and traps.

I grew up using traps and bug spray—we had roaches and spiders in my dad’s house from time to time. We killed everything that wasn't invited. When wasps nested in the eaves, we’d douse them with chemicals and watch them drift lazily to the ground and die. My father used to joke that when he put peanut butter in the mouse traps, he found me with purple fingers.

At the grocery store, while looking at the poisons, I saw glue traps and poison for rats and mice with pictures of rats eating poison. The rat and mice models on the covers of the packages were fat, happy, well-fed, groomed, and clearly trained—I mean, how else to get them to model? Someone trained that rat to stand there and pose while the lighting, angles, and all the other necessities of photography were worked out. And that kind of training required nurturing, a gentle touch. Someone fed the rat, kept it healthy, cared for it and then used it to model for poison. It seemed bizarre. Imagine training your cat to be a cat-poison model.

I bought the ant traps and set them out. But I kept thinking about that rat on the box. I used to work at a bank which used glue traps (which aren’t very effective) for mice, and poison outside. Squirrels would get into the poison. Of course, some people think squirrels are nuisances. My father raised cattle and shot dogs whenever they came close enough to bother the cows, worried that they'd start a stampede and injure the cattle. He didn't stop to check for collars or tags. Neither do poisons stop to check for collars and tags.

And, those who are in the know will tell you, poisons just cause the bugs or mice to adapt, so they become stronger and more resistant. This leads to population booms of resistant bugs or mice. This is what I hear. It makes sense, but I’m certainly not an expert on vermin adaptation, regardless of what some of my exes might say.

When the friends left, I did some research. There are all kinds of home remedies for getting rid of ants, like making a line of chalk, for example, because ants don’t like to get their feet dirty. This seemed difficult to believe. Other friends and family members suggested more drastic poisons that killed the ant queen—the only way to really get rid of the ants. We were frozen at the idea of whole-sale slaughter, but the ants came back. How were we going to live in our new roles as enlightened WASPS with ants in our kitchen? And real wasps in our eaves?

We woke one morning to banging on the door. The decision was taken out of our hands; the school had hired an exterminator.

We spent the next year as vegetarians, shooing wasps outside, gathering ladybugs and releasing them into the wild to live free, but I kept thinking about our ant-apocalypse. Clearly, when the chips were down, we would abandon our new-found patchouli-ism. I felt like a fraud. We bought eco-friendly cleaning products, but they cost more and didn't work as well as soap and water usually would. The following summer, we found a really good sub shop with a great Italian sub, which ended the vegetarianism. The truth is: we like meat. I still put bugs outside sometimes, especially in winter, so they’ll just go to sleep. The truth is: I don’t mind most bugs, as long as they aren’t in my house.

But I’m still bothered by that rat model, by questions of profound morality as demonstrated by ones actions, but this was a much more complex issue than simply whether to relocate pests or use dye-free toilet paper. My new ‘influences’ had nothing really to say about the ethics of this.

The truth is, I don’t think I’m cut out to be middle class. I cuss and tell dirty jokes, sometimes even when I’m sober. I’d rather have fried things in big portions to eat than exotic stuff that tastes bad. We moved out of that house after a couple years and moved into the one we’re in now. This one has mice, but it’s okay; the snakes keep them down. Don’t think I won’t kill either if they get in my way, but at least I won’t dress them up and use them as models first.

2011-09-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

I recently had a chance to speak with novelist and writer Matt Baker about his recent novel Drag the Darkness Down, one of my favorite novels of recent years.

Me: Drag the Darkness Down was your debut novel. Can you describe the genesis of the book—what drew you to this story?

Matt: I had the main character’s name – Odom Shiloh – already in mind when I sat down to write it. I constructed the name from two signs off interstate 40, advertising their businesses, Odom-something and Shiloh-something. I’d see it every morning on my commute to work. And one day it hit me, Odom Shiloh. I wrote about forty pages, which is largely the same as it appears in the book, in a quick burst. And I knew I had something. The story really just evolved as I was writing it. The only deliberate choice I made was the decision to make it steer into darker territory.

Me: A recurring theme in your work seems to be hidden organizations and secret lives. What draws you to this idea?

Matt: Well, secret lives are where it’s at for characters and people in real life. Public lives are often boring, superficial, and safe. I think the hidden organization idea is less conspiratorial and more the fact that our lives are managed and influenced and infiltrated, and to some degree manipulated, by unseen entities, and that we’re largely okay with it and don’t give it much thought. So, it creates some fertile ground for creatively exploring what these organizations could be doing, are doing, and what they’ve done in the past.

Me: What has your experience with No Records Press been like?

Matt: It was wonderful. Miles Newbold Clark, my editor, is an engaged and passionate editor, and truly gifted at what he does. He convinced me to keep a few of the very dark scenes in the book - there were a few that I considered watering down or deleting altogether. He tightened the story, shaved off some of the fat for me. No Record just released a new book a month ago, Time Crumbling Like a Wet Cracker by Ryan Dilbert. I read an early version and it's a really good book, a wild, wild story with time traveling and other hijinks.

Me: Who are your biggest literary influences? & how have they influenced you?

Matt: The first book that I really fell in love with was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I’m a Charles Portis fan. When it comes to understated comic writing, I don’t who is better. I think I learned more about how to write a story by reading George Singleton stories more than any other writer. Stephen King’s The Shining was influential. King is so fearless. He’ll go anywhere, do anything; supernatural, historical, realism, all with loyal devotion to the story. James Whorton, Jr’s Frankland and Approximately Heaven. Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ and anything by Donald Harington. Reading The Dixie Association, as a nineteen year old college dropout, reinvigorated my outlook that you can be a smartass and get by okay. The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell perfectly mixes comedy and tragedy, which is something I tried to do in DTDD.

Me: You mentioned Skip Hays' The Dixie Association. Were you able to study under Hays at the University of Arkansas? Did he have any good advice for you?

Matt: I took two undergraduate workshops with him. He encouraged me, and I learned a lot of the mandatory basics in those classes. He's a gifted teacher and a very nice guy. He once drove down to Monticello (about 300 miles) for a reading that I'd organized for The Oxford American, and all I could offer was a bed to sleep in and a pack of Camel Lights and he said, 'What time do you need me?'

Me: What have you read recently that knocked you on your ass?

Matt: I really love Jeffrey Rotter’s The Unknown Knowns. It came out a few years ago. Tom Williams The Mimic’s Own Voice knocked me on my ass. Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination. Dave Zeltserman’s The Caretaker of Lorne Field. I re-read all of Daniel Woodrell’s novels earlier this year and so that would be a few more ass whooping’s. Rebecca Makkai’s The Borrower swept me up really good. Lambs of Men by Charles Dodd White, a tough and terse book that walloped me a bit.

Me: DtDD was set in Arkansas and had a very Arkansas feel reminiscent of Charles Portis, Skip Hays, John Fergus Ryan, etc. Do you consider it a Southern novel? Are you a Southern Writer?

Matt: I’m not a Southern writer. I grew up in Kansas. My family is from Indiana, with a few distant relatives from Kentucky, but there’s nothing bona fide southern in our pedigree. It’s set in Arkansas because I really like Arkansas, and, too, I lived there for about ten years. It’s a very unique place. Aside from its physical beauty, its residents are some of the warmest, strangest, fiercest and funniest people I’ve ever known.

Me: Can you tell me a little about your writing routine?

Matt: My rule is five evenings a week for two hours. This is writing new material, not re-writing or editing. I cranked out a lot of stories and several novels that way in just a few years. I’ve tried to stick to that the best I can and still believe in it.

Me: What are you working on?

Matt: Right now I’m finishing a sequel of sorts to DTDD. Birdshit narrates this time and it’s part crime caper and part literary gothic, I suppose. It’s got the usual twists and turns, and Blakey Flake shows back up, so you know it’s going to be a fun ride. It’s got them hidden organizations you mentioned earlier, and secrets that need to be revealed, and all of that goodness.

Me: If you were to be remembered for one work, which would it be?

Matt: Geez, that’s tough. I have an unpublished novel that I’d love to publish someday that I think wouldn’t be terrible to be remembered by. DTDD would be fine as well. And I’ve written some short stories that not many people have read because they were published in print journals, but I think they stand up pretty well.

Me: You recently published a novel under a pseudonym. What drew you to use the nom de plume? It seems to tie in with your theme of secrets nicely…

Matt: Right, secrets. Well, it’s a ghost story, basically. And I wrote it about four or five years ago and didn’t know what to do with it. I’m a fan of horror novels and films, but I know there’s some discord between literary fiction and genre fiction in the publishing industry. So, I just used a pseudonym. But, now that I think more about it, publishing is changing so drastically and is much more nimble than it used to be, so maybe the rigid categorizing, which mostly served as a guide to where books belonged on the sales floor, probably isn’t as necessary anymore.

Me: Have you hit your stride as a writer? How do you know?

Matt: I don’t know if there are a lot of strides in the writing gig. But I do know there’s a lot of luck, huge mountains to traverse, windy roads to navigate, and plenty of inevitable crashes, too. Just keep driving, is what I say.

2011-08-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

After WWII, when television was really being widely marketed in America (since people could actually afford them for the first time) one of the primary selling tactics—aside from Keeping Up with the Joneses—was family. ‘TV brings families together’ was the idea. Advertisements showed Mom and Dad, smoking Old Gold or Newport cigarettes on the living room couch with little Jimmy drinking his Ovaltine, awash in the heady glow of “Howdy Doody” or commercials for laundry soap. Together. Social mores were created as the neighborhood kids would come over to watch it while mom served cookies made from a package (also a shift in tradition).

The Baby Boomers grew up, drenched in this new TV zeitgeist. And then, somebody voiced that famous cry, ‘But What About the Children?’ Suddenly, TV was to blame for all of society’s ills. Obesity came from sitting too long (it couldn’t have anything to do with the proliferation of fast food restaurants or pre-packaged foods, the shift from rural to urban lifestyles, etc.). Social cohesion was deteriorating because now—instead of one TV in the living room bringing everyone together, most families had one in the living room, one in the bedroom, one in Little Jimmy’s room, and one in the kitchen for Mom to watch while she waited for the Valium to kick in. The dream was over. TV—you bastard. Look what you did to us? We trusted you! Well, fool me once, buddy.

But I would like to go on record in defense of TV. I think the problem isn’t so much the medium as the amount of exposure. I will also say that many of the ills blamed on TV already existed—TV just exposed us to them. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. That same pampered generation who grew up on TV—and then turned on it (let’s not call them “The Baby Boomers.” Let’s call them “The Judas Generation”) have forgotten just how important and useful TV can be for family togetherness. I’ve had some great times watching TV. Some of my fondest memories are of watching TV shows and movies on TV with my older brother. To be honest, it probably didn’t matter too terribly much what was on; we’d joke and laugh along with Mel Brooks’ movies and episodes of “Saturday Night Live” or “In Living Color.” We’d watch “The Twilight Zone” or “Dark Shadows”—really, it’s likely that my love of horror and sci-fi films came from shows like this, as well as watching slasher flicks on TV with my sister. In college, my friends and I watched “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and did our own versions while watching bad, bad movies. Quotes and allusions to TV shows and films run on TV (though edited) continue to color our lexicon. ‘Bugs Bunny’ cartoons, “3 Stooges” shorts, “MASH” reruns; references to these shows pop up in conversations I have with my family all the time. They are references to good memories that we share.

I’m not saying these shows were all high art (or any of them were), but to assume nothing worthwhile can be gained from any art that isn’t deemed “high” is to completely fail to understand some of the more important uses of art. (And to be a jerk.) Art can do a lot of things—educate, incite social discourse, impact us emotionally, etc.—but one thing it does well is leaves us changed in some way. Isn’t laughter a change?

Of course, an argument can be made that many TV shows have been very important. I mentioned “MASH”—as the show progressed, it shifted from straight comedy to social awareness, presenting ideas that might easily have been foreign to some young (and old) minds. Take Oprah—I’m not a fan, but she is an African American woman who appeared in the homes of millions of Americans five days a week, a woman many other women, and plenty of men, turned to for advice, whose influence was widely felt and accepted. This is no small feat in a country that remained segregated in many, many Midwestern, Northern, and Southern towns and suburbs through…well, even now, frankly. I don’t even need to mention the impact new broadcasts have had on us all.

TV can educate in more basic ways. I spent many Sunday afternoons with my father watching “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” and learning about nature and wildlife. Do I even need to mention “Sesame Street?” (Pre-Elmo, of course.)

Of course, there’s crap on TV. But there’s crap everywhere. So we have to sift through it. Also, TV is full of advertisements, the dangers of which…well, that’s a different essay altogether, I think. But nobody watches commercials. You surf or go get a drink of water or whatever.

But what I’m dancing around, here, is that question I dropped but didn’t answer: What about the children? The question is, will I use TV as a surrogate babysitter? Of course not. That’s bad parenting. I should go on record at this point and confuse the hell out of everyone by stating that I don’t actually have TV—we do own two sets, but neither of them receives any channels. We watch movies on them. We simply don’t have time to watch TV, so we don’t pay for it. But I will watch TV with my daughter. Some. I will show her reruns or DVDs of “The Muppet Show.” I will show her “Sesame Street.” When she gets older, we’ll watch Mel Brooks’ movies together, and “Airplane,” and all kinds of TV shows. Hell, we’ll probably break down and get TV cable at some point. And we’ll laugh. And maybe we’ll learn something. And we’ll quote them to each other and nobody else will know what we’re talking about. Unless they’ve seen these shows. But most people will just think we’re dorks. And that’s okay.

2011-08-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

Corey Mesler is one of the most prolific writers out there, and a real nice guy. He owns Burke's Books in Memphis, which is a fine bookstore with great prices and a hell of a selection. Corey has two new novels out as well as a new poetry collection...

Me: I recently read your new poetry collection, Before the Great Troubling. I don’t mean to tie you down but can you tell me what you had in mind with the title? I had a couple theories…

Corey: The title, like all good titles, is both specific and general. Specifically, I am speaking about a very personal troubling. It’s no great secret that over ten years ago I suddenly developed agoraphobia and panic syndrome. I say suddenly, but, of course, as a therapist would tell you, I was building my phobic life all of my days, from not being breastfed, to schoolyard bullies, to a bad first marriage, etc. So, in the poem of that title and in many of the introspective poems in my book, I was harkening back to a time when life seemed better, simpler, less treacherous. But, also, generally speaking, it can be any troubling, personal, professional, political (and those are just the “p’s”!). So, like many writers, I am hoping to hit on universal truths. Everyone has had a “troubling.”

Me: I noticed several of the poems in Troubling were about your kids. How has being a father influenced your writing?

Corey: Oh, Lord, parenting is the Big Subject, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re there, if you’re paying attention as a parent, you’re witnessing the world being born, as it is busy being born every day in thousands of different ways. A human life is a microcosm of the universe. I heard Robert Bly say that poets don’t write anything worthwhile in their 20s. They are just sitting around waiting for a friend to die so they have subject matter. I would say being a parent is a more positive way of agreeing with Mr. Bly.

Me: Who are your biggest literary influences? & how have they influenced you?

Corey: I could make a list as long as a Thanksgiving sermon but I will try to hit the highlights. William Carlos Williams, James Tate, John Berryman, Mark Strand, C. K. Williams, Steve Stern, Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Ikkyu, Merwin, Vonnegut, John Barth, Steven Millhauser, Walker Percy, Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, Iris Murdoch, Joyce, Beckett, Pinter, Albee, Mamet (before he turned into a Republican), Brautigan, DeLillo, Bob Dylan, The Marx Brothers, Leonard Cohen, Looney Toons, Rod Serling. Now, to get to the “how.” When I was young I wrote a lot of late night, sad bastard poetry, full of self-pity and longing for I didn’t know what. But I got to where I could pen a verse that was passable interesting. However, what I really wanted to write was fiction. I just assumed, without really trying, that I couldn’t do it. It was the word count itself that held me back. Then a talisman came into my hands that changed my thinking, and that transformative talisman was Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Little stories that knocked me ass over teakettle. And I thought, I don’t know how he does that in 5-10 pages but I want to aim at that. So I started writing little micro-fictions. That’s probably enough on this question except I want to add, I heard a friend say once, “I am working on a novel,” and I thought that was just about as fine an aspiration as any human being could dream about. A novel, to my way of thinking, may be mankind’s greatest achievement. Better than The Enlightenment, better than walking on the moon, better than tinfoil. And, later, after my 40th birthday, after my father had already gone the way of all flesh, I wrote and published a novel. Landsakes!

Me: What have you read recently that knocked you on your ass?

Corey: This is one of my favorite questions. I don’t meet many new people nor do I socialize much (see agoraphobia) but I can’t think of a better ice-breaker, or a better way to start a confab. I love talking about what I‘ve read. So, lately, let’s see. Kobo Abe’s The Women in the Dunes, Jesse Ball’s The Curfew, Emma Donoghue’s Room, Charles McCarry’s Last Supper, Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now?, Donald Westlake’s Memory. Those were all great novels. Probably the work of fiction I’ve been most excited about in the last couple years is Anthony Powell’s 12 novel cycle, Dance to the Music of Time. I am through book seven and I think it is one of the crowning achievements in 20th century literature. Oh and I’ve just discovered Alice Munro’s stories, which are spun from fine stuff. And let me re-emphasize my admiration for the Fallada novel. I had never read him before and now I want everything by him. In poetry I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen Dunn, Sharon Olds, Bei Dao, Gregory Orr, Roethke, Kay Ryan. I think my pal, Marly Youman’s new book, The Throne of Psyche, is dynamite.

Me: Your first novel, Talk, was completely written in dialogue. We Are Billion Year Old Carbon is a novel in collage. The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores is a kind of portrait of a town (as I suppose Carbon was as well), a very southern novel with multiple narrators and lots of humor. All of these books seem vastly different, stylistically. How would you describe the Mesler style or voice?

Corey: I know, I feel as if, to a degree, I backed through the novelist door by writing my first novel all in unattributed dialogue. I got that idea from reading William Gaddis, by the way. I do think each of my books is unique and, in that way, every one is an experiment. Does that make me an experimental writer? I ask this sincerely. I am shaky on the term but it has been applied to my writing before. I don’t think I have a voice that you can pin down easily. Maybe in the poetry. I try to do something different with every novel because that keeps me interested. I have another “collage” novel, this one set on Beale Street, coming out next year but it is very different from We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon. Thanks, by the way, for finding The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores funny. I think you and I and my friend Mark Hendren are the only ones in that club.

Me: You’re very prolific, Can you tell me a little about your writing routine?

Corey: When I was younger Ben Franklin took me aside and told me this: early to bed and early to rise will make little Corey wise. In middle-age I took that as my guiding principle. I wake every day around 5 and am at the keyboard usually by 6. At that time, on a good day, I feel how God must have felt before the whole 6 days of labor thing. When my wife and I bought the bookstore in 2000 she gave me a great gift, Fridays off to do nothing but write. Then the agoraphobia phenomenon sorta took my legs out from under me and I find myself home a lot. I don’t recommend agoraphobia as a component of one’s writing method but, when I contemplate how much time I am home alone, I think, Damn it, you better be prolific. It is a lonely way of life but it is mine.

Me: What are you working on?

Corey: I am about 1/3 of the way through the first draft of a new novel. Nothing makes me happier than working on a novel. I love the long haul, the Indy 500 as opposed to the 50 yard dash. And, what I am saying about this novel, when asked, is that it is more conventional; it is plot-drive, character-driven. In other words, I am experimenting with not being experimental. I also have a book of stories due out before the end of the year so I will be polishing that with the help of my perspicacious editor. And, always, I am pecking away at poems in the interstices.

Me: If you were to be remembered for one work, which would it be?

Corey: I want to be remembered for Ulysses. Oh, you probably mean something of mine. I don’t know. I am still very fond of Talk. And I am very proud of my new short story collection, Notes Toward the Story and Other Stories. But, if my Beale Street book comes off like I think it will, it may be my best writing so far, so I will want to be remembered for that. I labored long and hard over that book, over every sentence, over every word, and I think it is intricate and funny and off-center and full of anti-history and whimsy. At this point I hope, it, you know, works.

Me: I am looking forward to reading your novel Following Richard Brautigan. What is it about Brautigan that inspires you?

Corey: I came to Brautigan in my late teens and early 20s. He was possibly my first favorite writer. So, in a sense, I thought I owed him homage. My novel, in which he appears as a very persuasive ghost, was really begun when the phrase “following Richard Brautigan” floated across my inner screen. I thought, hm, that would make a nice title. And I’ve always wanted to write a road novel, having read the Beats about the same time I was reading Mr. B. So my novel was born less from being directly inspired by Brautigan’s loopy, winsome surrealism—though I still admire that about him---but more from a desire to touch the part of myself that first began to read books, my innocent younger self.

Me: One of your kids comes to you and says, “Dad, I want to be a writer.” What advice would you give?

Corey: It would make me extremely happy. And I would say to him or her what I would say to any wannabe writer: read a lot of books. Then read more books. Then write and write and write as if Old Scratch were hot on your ass.

2011-08-18T05:00:00.001-07:00

I recently was able to review a short collection called White Spiders by Lisa Marie Basile, whose journal Caper has published my work in the past. Lisa is a kind of literary whirlwind--she runs Caper Journal, Patasola Press, hosts readings all over the place, and is a fine poet in her own write. (Sorry--bad pun.)

Me: What inspired you start to start Caper & Patasola Press? Do you feel that you are achieving your goals?

Lisa: Though Caper is in the process of being revamped and thus is on hiatus, I started it because I loved to read people's work and give people another opportunity to share their voice. I started Patasola Press because I wanted to create tangible pieces of literature, things people could hold and adore, things that would stay around forever. I want to provide authors with a positive and creative publishing process, and more so -- even the playing field for authors out there. Patasola's mission is three-fold: to provide a publishing avenue for new and emerging writers (some will publish their first book with us), promote underrepresented writers, with a special focus on women and multicultural writers and to, again, be an author-focused press. Part of my mission is also to create interesting books, interesting events and be a part of the literary community at large by promoting writers through our new interview series, partnering with literary and equality-focused organizations. I have big dreams, but I like it that way. The main short term goal is to find ways to keep it sustainable and present beautiful, unique work to readers.

Me: You’ve been fundraising lately for Patasola Press. How can folks help out? What do you have lined up for the future of Patasola Press?

Lisa: Patasola Press is and was funded out-of-pocket, with help from authors and friends. It is important that Patasola Press has a financial safety net, not money that we can spend quickly or thoughtlessly, but money that will help us when we need it on projects that come up. Sometimes a project here and there can make the difference in quality (design, printing) or outreach (ads, for one) and having back-up funds is really important. I am a working student and writer, so these funds really go a long way in helping me and my editors make choices that aren't largely dictated by monetary limitations. We're a small press, yes, but we want to have some leverage. The future of Patasola Press sees a complete Siren Series (chapbooks by female writers), partnering for projects with organizations within the community for the arts, a catalogue of diverse and strong literature and poetry, a distribution deal so we can really reach out, an online literary component.

People can a) donate their money to our Kickstarter or if they feel uncomfortable, they can email us patasolapress@gmail.com about sending money via another source. We have a goal (that we'd like to exceed) of $1,500, and as of this date, we're over $1,100. We'd love if everyone could send what they could, be it $5, $10, or whatever. Become a Chimera (Supporter) by donating under $100.00 or become a Siren (Sponsor) by donating over $100.00!

People can b) spread the word, blog about us, profile one of our authors, interview us about our Siren Series or other projects we're doing.

People can c) volunteer their tme as layout designers, illustrators, etc. The more people on board, the more vision and love goes into the work.

Me: Who are your biggest literary influences? & how have they influenced you?

Lisa: Cesar Vallejo, Isabel Allende, Marguerite Duras, Albert Camus, Lorca. I have to give Cesar Vallejo all of the credit. In college, I was writing what I thought of as 'good poetry.' That probably wasn't the case. When a friend gave me Vallejo's work, it changed everything. I was able to see how he strained the human condition through interesting words, giving it both a beauty and an accessibility that made the poem really vivid and meaningful. He didn't just write words, which I was doing. He was evoking something bigger, something tinged with the surreal and macabe. He had a defined yet fluid aesthetic, and he was sincere. In reading Vallejo I promised to keep my work sincere and interesting. Maybe I get it down sometimes, maybe not. But he's a complete inspiration. Another one of my influences is Marguerite Duras. She is able to write so clearly and make such specific literary choices that every sentence is important and lively. Camus, I love, for the same reason -- mostly for The Stranger. I love Isabel Allende because I'm in love with her magic realism and ability to really craft character.

Me: What have you read recently that knocked you on your ass?

Lisa: Marosa Di Giorgio's The History of Violets. She's a Uruguayan poet with Italian heritage, and she's just amazing. She writes of trinkets and shells and naughty ghosts and memories and light and butterflies and bits of things and macabre things and feminine, ghastly things. I love her aesthetic so much I want to live inside her books. She has really inspired me lately, and the more I read her, the more she brings out writing in me that I've supressed for reasons to do with writing painful memories and wondering if readers would like such imagist work. She is able to anchor the author in the worlds she creates. She writes:

When I look toward the past, I only see perplexing things: sugar, jasmine, white wine, black wine, the strange country school I attended for four years, murders, weddings among the orange blossoms, incestuous couplings.

I just love the Black wine. It's incredible.

Me: You recently published Rae Bryant’s collection, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals. What made you fall in love with this book?

Lisa: I love Rae's writing because she has real command of her voice, is able to blend the surreal and the realistic really well -- through the magic and oddness, she shows you our world, and sort of makes you realize how our lives are all very bizarre. She's not afraid to confront to the painful, embaressing, cringe-inducing things in life. Sometimes I hold my breath when I read her work, because I'm embarressed for the character or for humanity or my own life. I know she's good because she's able to make me feel off-balance. Her stories are also very beautiful. She had me at her publication of Empress of the Riverbank in PANK, which was illuminated, odd, sad and lovely. She is good at her craft. Her language and writing is clean but not boring. She's not afraid, but she's thoughtful. That's a literary tight rope right there.

Me: Can you tell me a little about your own writing routine? How do you balance writing with publishing?

Lisa: I tend to let writing fall by the wasteside when working on publishing and other projects. I've been doing so much editing and press work that sometimes I forget who I am. In the end, I use their talent to inspire me to create sometime I'd want to read if I weren't me. I write sporatically. I used to be prolific. But I also wasn't as clever or thoughtful. I now write seldomly, and when I do I labor over everything. I like it better this way. I write when it hits, or when I absolutely need to draw it out like blood. I like to look at pretty things when I write, like the Brothers Quay or vintage anatomy illustrations, ghastly things. When I'm exhausted, sometimes it's just in there, like a storm, waiting. I have to sometimes put down everything and tend to it. So, there isn't a routine. It's just when I start to need to write. I suppose it's rather sexual in its analogy.

Me: What are you working on?

Lisa: I am working with the Poetry Society of New York / The Poetry Brothel on a chapbook called Andalusia, a chapbook about a dream state, written largely in prose-poems. This is my first collection that dabbles with prose-poetry. I'm reading with The Poetry Society of New York/ The Poetry Brothel at our house on Governor's Island this summer, which was granted by the Fund for Governor's Island, generously. I worked on the New York Poetry Festival with them, and read from Diorama, a chapbook my friend Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein and I wrote together. I am also writing new poems, slowly but surely. They're changing forms, becoming longer. In a few weeks, I'll start my last year of my graduate writing program at The New School. I don't love the general concept of MFA programs, as I think they sometimes breed a homegenous sound; I have my own reasons for joining: making connections, noting teaching styles, being in an honest critiquing enviroment (when it is.) I'll finish a book this year as part of my thesis, and I think I'm going to work on a novella-in-vignettes that I started in 2008. I visited Spain this year (and the book is about Spain) so I want to infuse my memories into the writing.

In publishing, I'm putting together the Siren Series for Patasola Press, a new series of female poetry chapbooks. Our first is by the talented T.M. De Vos, called The Dimestore World. I'm also working on final edits for J.A. Tyler's Comatose and Mimi Ferebee's Seraglio, for Patasola Press. I'm also publishing a collection of mythological re-telling by the members of The Poetry Brothel, as a project co-edited by The Poetry Society of New York.

Me: If you were to be remembered for one work, which would it be?

Lisa: I don't know yet, I don't know the answer to your question. I wish I did, but I know my most important work hasn't come yet. I know it'll be there when I finally have to confront the saddest things in my life. And the saddest things haven't happened yet.

Me: You have a book coming out from Cervena Barva Press. Can you tell us about it?

Lisa: Cervena Barvas' wonderful editor, Gloria Mindock, is publishing my full-length collection, A Decent Voodoo. It's a book I wrote in college and was contracted in 2010, so it's been a while coming! It showcases a sensual world of bodies, ritual, location and my minimalist style at that time. A lot of it is about people and places and ghosts -- things I have never seen, people I've never met, places I've never been, and telling my own tales through them. It's about the lines between good and bad, sad and free. I'm in the process of editing it finally and getting endorsements. I'm really, really, really grateful to Gloria Mindock.

Me: Tell me about the poetry Brothel. What is it?

Lisa: I am a member of The Poetry Brothel, which is produced by The Poetry Society of New York, a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas. The Poetry Brothel, specifically, is one project of TPSNY, and it's lovely! I've been in the Brothel for a year now, and it's really inspired me.. The Brothel provides a unique reading and listening experience for visitors. Instead of being read to by a poet at a podium, listeners (Johns, or patrons) here live readings by a number of poets through out one night (there may be music, burlesque or magic shows between) and then they can choose a poet from their live readings or from a book of character bios (each Brothel poet has a character and background, in addition to their real-life poetic selves) and have a private reading. The private readings cost a certain amount of money and the poet takes the listener to a hallway, a bedroom, a chaise longue, a telephone booth (it depends on our location. We've had a residency at The Back Room, a speakeasy in NYC as well as on Governor's Island all summer in a colonial mansion we've decorated fully). The listener hears the poets, can interrupt the reading, ask questions, read poems to the poet. Maybe hands are help. Maybe whispers are heard. It isn't sexual at all, but it's play on the exchange of money for sex for money for poetry. It brings poetry into the arena as a commodity. There's a brothel in Barcelona, Montreal, Hanoi, Chicago, New Orleans, California, and many other places. We could show up at any port and be welcomed. It's a beautiful world that is bringing talented, published poets to listeners in a unique setting. In the end, even if the show is wild and gorgeous, it's about the poetry and craft of language, the connection between people and poets. My name is Luna Liprari. Would you like a private reading?