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VOICE LESSONS Identifying and Creating Perspective in Poetry, taught by Claire Oleson, July 10 – August 14

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VOICE LESSONS
Identifying and Creating Perspective in Poetry
Taught by Cleaver Senior Poetry Editor Claire Oleson
July 10 – August 14, 2021
Asynchronous with optional Zoom meetings 11 am ET July 17 and 24
$200
Questions: [email protected]
Class Limit: 12

Register Now

In this course, we will plunge into the murky waters of what is meant by “voice” in poetry. Each week, we will look at two to three poems by a single poet and investigate how they bring something of the same perspective, tone, specificity, and selfhood to different poetic projects. In light of this investigation, participants will be invited to work on their uses of voice in their own poetry. This class is designed to create a platform on which to find, develop, and hone the connective tissue between different works by the same writer. For five weeks, participants will be encouraged to find themselves within their language and explore the ways in which they may take on an identifiable style while maintaining flexibility across different pieces.

We will work primarily on generating new work, encouraging participants to push their boundaries and hone their voice to create memorable and authentic work. The workshop model will facilitate constructive responses from both peers and the instructor. Particular attention will be placed on the spaces between poems that the participants bring to class.

We will read a few selections of poetry weekly that demonstrate the application of different uses of voice in poetry. By the end of the course, participants will have a better handle on how and where their voice exists in their own work, allowing for more intention and awareness of its application. Far from considering poems as singular revelations in a void, this class is one that is fundamentally about context. Inevitably, we bring our lives and ourselves to the page when we might not mean to: how can we begin to do this with consciousness, control, and thought to how our poems talk to each other?

The readings will be brief but rich, with the intent of inviting multiple re-readings, close readings, note-taking, and flexibility for everyone’s lives and work. Supplemental reading will be available for those hungry for more plums from the proverbial icebox. Prompts will be provided inspired by the week’s reading, but will be designed more as springboards for beginning rather than hard-and-fast regulations. Work will be submitted weekly for peer and instructor review. One piece will be chosen by the student for revision for the final class. Optional Zoom conferences will be held to discuss the reading for those interested. We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and constructive criticism.

A final optional Zoom meeting will be held as a reading of our work.

Instructor Bio

Claire Oleson is the winner of the 2019 Newfound Chapbook Prize and a graduate of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. She has participated in graduate writing workshops with the Kenyon Review, where she also worked for the entirety of her undergraduate career. She has worked as a TA for Northwestern University’s summer creative writing courses. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review online, the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, the LA Review of Books, and Sugar House Review, among others. She currently serves as the poetry editor for Cleaver and lives and works in NYC.

 

Schedule (July 10 – August 14)

New Modules posted on Mondays,

Pieces due by Friday, 11:59,

Feedback from All Due by Sunday, 11:59

Optional Zoom sessions on Saturdays at 11 am ET

SYLLABUS

1: Introductions: What is voice?

We will open with an investigation of what “voice” means and how its both employed (and oftentimes, entirely ignored) in poetry. This week will focus on learning to see how the voice of a poet can be seen across different works of theirs that have totally different goals, but still carry the same author in their stanzas.

2: Joy and Grief

We will take a look at how the same poet approaches heartbreak and celebration. We will explore what places change and what uses of language and mood are maintained between two different emotional extremes captured by the same artist.

3: The Picture and the Lecture

This module will invite an analysis of poems that “show” and poems that would rather drag out their soap box and have you sit down, no pictures included. We will ask how the same voice illuminates the imagistic and the didactic and what survives or dies off between these modes of communication.

4: Caged and Free-Range

In this second to last week, we will dive into two poems: one that embraces a strict form and one that shirks most formal elements in favor of free verse. We’ll ask what it looks like to dress a voice in constraints and what it might mean to let it lead itself, and the language, on instinct and whim.

5: A New Tone

In this final module, we will take a moment to look at pieces by an author that look completely different in both project and voice by the same poet. This week, participants will be invited to make work that encapsulates something totally outside the voice they’ve begun to develop, allowing both the use of voice, and its absence, to become intentional.

 

GRAPHIC PSYCHE: A Workshop in Visual Narrative Memoir taught by Emily Steinberg, June 5-26, 2021

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GRAPHIC PSYCHE
A Workshop in Visual Narrative Memoir
taught by Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg

Four Saturdays on Zoom
12-2 pm ET
June 5,12,19,26
$200
Class Limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

Register Now

Visual Narrative, the marriage of words and images, both ancient and modern, is a potent mode of storytelling that can often be more gripping than either practice on their own. In this workshop, we will discuss the history of visual narrative and the myriad ways of composing with text and image. By the end of our time together, you will create your own short graphic narrative response to the bizarre, upside-down covid, quarantine, lockdown, political circus world of 2020.

In 1996, I worked my way out of a deep painter’s block/depression by writing obsessively about the events of my daily life. In 2005, I pulled the writings out and started drawing them. And I’ve been hooked ever since by the immediacy and vitality of this generous practice that beckons you to write, draw, be playful and explore absolutely anything in the world that captivates you. There are no limits here.  —Emily Steinberg, MFA

Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative and her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn State University, Abington College, and Drexel College of Medicine, where she is Artist-in-Residence. She did her undergraduate and graduate work at The University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in painting and lives just outside Philadelphia.

FUND WHAT YOU FEAR by Marnie Goodfriend

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Graphic design image of uterus, title, and author name.

FUND WHAT YOU FEAR
by Marnie Goodfriend

I lie in bed, my eyes fixated on the fruit trees outside my bare windows. I do not have insomnia. I am bone tired. Recently, my pain is nocturnal. My body waits until my head makes contact with the pillow before fireworks burst in my pelvic cavity. I bend my knees like an upside-down V and press my feet into the mattress. V is for vulture. violence. victim. vampire. vagina.

The other day, my friend Melissa told me about the fund-what-you-fear philosophy. Her words bloat several text bubbles. They remind me of our distended stomachs: agitated, acting out, hardened. There’s something like less than one dollar a day that goes toward endometriosis research and when the medical world is predominantly men … it’s easy to see why they never push money towards diseases that only affect people with a uterus.

Is this a philosophy or just reality? I google “Fund What You Fear Philosophy.” The first entry is the 80s English pop duo Tears For Fears’s Wikipedia page. Other entries include a punk band, a first-person shooter video game, and a 2013 British psychological horror film where the characters are trapped in the same place regardless of what road they take to escape. Knowing these subjects weren’t what I was searching for, Google suggests I drop the word “fund.” “Missing: fund ‎| ‎Must include: ‎fund.”

I met Melissa while interviewing sources for an article I was writing about energy work and endometriosis. She told me it took twenty-one years for her to be diagnosed. At that point, endo had eradicated her right ovary, covering it with black disease her surgeon described as “rotten fruit.” She had a tumor on her right fallopian tube, two endometriomas on her left ovary, clusters of adhesions on her diaphragm, eighth rib, abdominal sidewall, bladder, uterus, and lower pelvis. The disease had chewed a hole through her rectum requiring two layers of separate stitches.

My boyfriend holds onto my left arm; the other dangles off the bed, clicking a control button up and down, the settings high medium low. For other interviews, endo women have shared photos of burn marks on their bodies from extended use of the high setting. If I fall asleep with the red light on, I worry the bed will go up in flames. But sleep never comes to me. I coax my legs to stand and walk to the living room couch which doubles as a sickbed, the heating pad’s electric wire dragging behind me like an umbilical cord attached to no one.

Melissa’s diagnosis is horrifying, but it does not shock me. It reads like one of my own post-op reports, cysts and adhesions covering my pelvic region, digestive tract, and rectum. I stare at my sweatpants’ elastic waistband cinching my stomach and wonder what’s growing inside me right now. Which of my organs looks like rotten fruit? Our front yard is littered with deformed oranges in black, gray, and green mold fallen from a neighbor’s tree. At night, rats feast on the decomposing fruit. We pick them up, but there are always others to replace them.

Melissa and I are getting to know each other the way people with chronic, invisible illnesses do. Once alone, we now know someone who understands our pain, confusion, anger, isolation. We stick together like magnets, offering up our insides, in case one of my pieces fits with hers and we discover something new that could alleviate some of our pain. She is a painter and educator. We are both accidental activists, doctors, surgeons, psychiatrists, social workers, researchers, nutritionists, healers.

If a room of men in powerful positions who are in charge of allocating funds for research on diseases or treatment, they are more likely to fund things they can empathize with. This isn’t new information, but knowing it is unjust, someone gave it a name. I take a highlighter to it, write it on a sticky note. Every time we are seen, I underscore the words so they will glow in the dark. I imagine a million tiny pieces of paper illuminating unlit hallways from beds to couches or guest rooms across the globe. We are guests in our homes and in our bodies. We have no control over when the pain arrives or checks out.

Sometimes I wrap the plastic heat around my stomach. Other times my pelvic muscles cry for me to loosen them from their vice grip. Recently, I’ve been fastening the hot rectangle between my legs like a giant maxi pad. In the medicine cabinet, there are countless bottles of antidepressants and opioids in fuzzy peach, butter yellow, and baby blue pastels. I am not sad or bereft. The capsules are dress up costumes of people I don’t want to be. They’d grow fuzz inside my head, mask the pain, my personality, creativity, identity. Their child safety locks go unchallenged.

In 1990, Ellen Goodman wrote an article about a congressional hearing of the House subcommittee on health and the environment and how in scientific and medical research, testing is primarily done on white male rats. Females are “usually excluded because of what might be called ‘raging hormonal imbalance.’ Not only are men studied more, so are their health problems. All in all, about 13 percent of NIH’s $5.7 billion budget goes to study the health risks of the half of the population that is female.”

In the living room, I prop myself up with a pillow to write a fairytale about a place and time when there was no pain. The truth seeker in me is offended by my attempt to wring out the blood stains and backspaces to the beginning when women were set on fire for claiming to be sick.

In another article, “Endometriosis Sufferers Long Blamed,” Dr. Camran Nezhat, a Stanford University gynecologist, suggests that our 4,000-year history of blaming women for their “angry uteruses” has perpetuated the medical belief that pain with menstruation is normal.

My boyfriend pads into the room and rests his hand on my forehead. You okay? he asks. Mmm hmm. Okay, I nod. He’s told me he can see the pain on my face even when I try to hide it. I fear that if I complain too much, I’ll sound like a hypochondriac or he’ll think that I’m depressing to be around. Too much time on the couch and I’ll appear lazy or privileged. How people imagine bedrest: woman in silk pajamas eating pints of White Halo, online shopping, writing in her journal while binge-watching insert your favorite show. What bedrest actually looks like: unshowered woman in ripped sweatpants not sleeping, not eating, not journaling, crawling out of bed to press her head against the hardwood floor when the pain is too much.

According to Dr. Nezhat’s research, women were strapped into straight jackets, sent to asylums or prisons and subjected to leeches, hanging upside down, and bloodletting because they were attention seekers, experiencing “love sicknesses,” nymphomaniacs, drug addicts or suffering from mental illness. Others were deemed witches and burned at the stake. It is now believed that these women most likely had endometriosis.

I guess I never directly answered his question. I am not okay. What I meant was I will be okay because I can’t not not be okay.

Plato believed a woman’s desire to have sex was intrinsically tied to her innate need to have children. If she does not fulfill this desire, the womb will wander around her body “like an irrational, roaming animal” that will cut off her breathing. In the 1700s, this suffocation was rebranded as hysteria. Women were still hysterical until The American Psychiatric Association ceased using the term medically in 1952.

My GI doesn’t think the burning sensation I liken to someone pouring acid on my heart is endometriosis-related. He suggests I go to the emergency room the next time I have a flare-up and buy some Miralax, the equivalent of liquid Tums, from Costco. The one with the purple cap, he adds as he pats my back on our way out of the examining room.

The Ob/Gyn says he can’t see it, but my endometriosis has most likely grown back because I haven’t been taking care of it. When I decline his script for the hormone injection Lupron developed for chemotherapy, he shrugs his shoulders and suggests pregnancy because it would be the best of both worlds. He never asked me if I wanted to have children (I do), so I have no idea what two worlds he’s prescribing to all of his endo patients.

In pristine white scrubs and a halogen light above her head, my urologist Christine looks like an angel. A decade after my diagnosis, she is first to acknowledge my pelvic floor myalgia, another condition common for those with the disease. Reading the prescription for daily doses of Macrobid in my chart, her forehead wrinkles like a folded fan. Stop taking that. Immediately. And while she can’t help with my endometriosis, I should make appointments with other GIs and Ob/Gyns who have better advice to give. We have to work together as a team. It’s both a pep talk and an admission of what little information is available to women, even female doctors.

The Endometriosis Foundation of America confirms that pregnancy as a cure for endometriosis is a myth. There is no cure for the 200 million women staring out their windows at night while others are sleeping. Many who had taken Lupron developed osteoporosis, permanent joint pain, and nerve damage. A few days after my Ob/Gyn appointment, I read about a woman in Atlanta suing the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture it when her body began attacking her bones after two injections and is now confined to a recliner.

My pain comes in waves, small ones that break into white water before swallowing the shore. Other times they are four-to-six footers, rising, curling into themselves. I paddle wildly to get on top of them, stand up, and ride safely to land. Instead, they pull me under, dragging me like a rag doll. Suddenly, I am without breath and it feels exactly like almost choking to death. I struggle to resurface and find air again. When I do, my mouth opens wide to let all living things pass through—minnows, clams, stingrays, jellyfish. I breathe sharply like a black key, slippery, discordant, jarring, burning. It is my siren song.

Melissa sends me a Facebook group invitation connecting me to 50,000 endometriosis sufferers. Late at night, I stop writing stories and read all the things I could have done to receive better care and take control of my condition. It’s my daily shaming hour. If only social media existed back then, maybe I would have been able to have children. Maybe I would have slept more nights than not. Maybe it could have is the most painful symptom of all.

It’s five in the morning, my boyfriend tells me. In ninety minutes his alarm will fire. I follow him back to bed, grateful he is warm and there is no fire. I lay on my side, abandoning my heating pad to watch him drift into sleep like a dream. I am still wide awake.

Headshot of Marnie Goodfriend.Marnie Goodfriend is a writer, activist, installation, and social practice artist. She is a 2018 VCCA fellow, recipient of the Jane G. Camp scholarship, and a 2016 PEN America fellow. Her memoirs: Birth Marks, a coming-of-age story about a black market baby illegally sold by an infamous baby broker, and The Time It Takes To Leave My Body, chronicling the double rape of two young women by a serial rapist dubbed The Top Gun Rapist, are forthcoming. Her essays, articles, and other writing appear in TIME, Washington Post, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Marnie is essays editor at The Nervous Breakdown.

AT A CAFÉ IN VICTORIA, BC TWO GREY-HAIRED MEN TALK ABOUT LOVE by Kate Peterson

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AT A CAFÉ IN VICTORIA, BC TWO GREY-HAIRED MEN TALK ABOUT LOVE
by Kate Peterson

She’s in the garden all the time
and I’ve got my bridge,
and the next thing you know
you’re living different lives.
One asks the other, If she finds another guy
do you think you’d still be friends?

I wonder if this is generational
or national, men talking this way
out in public, over a cup of coffee.
My ex was absorbed in his book
and didn’t notice, which may also
be generational or national.
After a while he eyed me taking notes
and guessed I was writing about him.
He looked up to say he just realized
he is more American than he wants to be.
Wind lifted in my chest, waves of loneliness
and love I’ll never understand. The way it rises and falls.

The men started up a game of Mahjong
and my coffee was gone so I got restless,
which is obviously generational
and national. Finally, we moved to the water.

Kate Peterson’s chapbook Grist won the Floating Bridge Prize and was published by Floating Bridge Press in 2016. Her poetry, prose, and interviews have been published in Sugar House Review, Glassworks, The Sierra Nevada Review, Rattle, Willow Springs, Hawai`i Pacific Review, and elsewhere. Kate is the director of Get Lit! Programs, home of Spokane’s annual week-long literary festival.

LAST GESTURE by James Miller

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LAST GESTURE
by James Miller

We eat on the porch
when evening heat recedes.

Lamps hang from the oak.
The Conrad novel rests

between us—eighty-nine
pages left to speak aloud.

As you reach out for a drink,
we see a tiny frog, its soft green

curves still as summer, perched
on the lip of your glass. He leaps,

alights on the secret agent,
then the near-blankness

of our table, dry and smeared
with tree sap. Motionless,

aware. You offer a thumbnail
of water and he rests there,

half-submerged. We fall silent,
but miss the last gesture.

He is gone.

James Miller won the Connecticut Poetry Award in 2020. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typehouse, Rabid Oak, North Dakota Quarterly, Yemassee, Phoebe, Mantis, Scoundrel Time, Permafrost, Grey Sparrow Review, Blue River, 8 Poems, After Happy Hour, Two Hawks Quarterly, Concho River Review, Sweet Tree Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @AndrewM1621.

LITTLE GRIEF SONG, JULY 2020 by Laura Tanenbaum

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LITTLE GRIEF SONG, JULY 2020
by Laura Tanenbaum

“But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rages of fog
where we stood, saying I”

—Adrienne Rich, “In those Years”

Today we took the kids to the cemetery, for escape.
No, it’s fine we explain to bewildered out-of-towners.
A place to go. Historical.

You ask, am I grieving:
OK, then, yes, I’m grieving.
The last day on the playground.
Someone sent me a picture and a joke.
Said we were all doomed; we touch our faces so much.
Remember that?
I thought then that I had never touched that person’s face,
not even by accident, and now I never would.

The kids find graves of two brothers
from Maryland who fought on opposite sides
of the last battle of the Civil War.
Reunited at a field hospital,
One said “peace,” the other “traitor.”
“The war between brothers” was propaganda,
but once in a while true. Like everything.
The kids have bandanas; call themselves bandits.

Years ago a teacher blindfolded us &
we touched each other’s faces. It was
acting or dance or maybe anthropology.
I don’t remember but I remember Michelle’s cheeks.
She thought the exercise distasteful.
“I’ve only touched the faces of people I’ve been with.”
I wasn’t with her but we drove to New Hampshire together.
Bad teachers are good at bringing people together.
She met my mother, likely brushed her cheek.

I don’t remember Michelle’s last name.
It’s not true, what they say about now:
People can still disappear from you. Happens
all the time, even before all this.

Did I remember her last name? That first morning?
Honestly I was shaky on her first.
You said that once, about someone now lost to you, and I loved you for it.
You say you don’t miss that now, her, then, any of it,
and neither do I.
Or so I say, sitting softly,
brushing no one’s cheek.
Each day I lose a hundred names.

Laura Tanenbaum is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Aji, Catamaran, Narrative, Entropy, and other publications. She has also published essays and book reviews in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Dissent, and elsewhere.

SAN ANDREAS HEAVEN by Nick Olson

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Graphic design image of mountain range, green PS2 controller, title, and author name

SAN ANDREAS HEAVEN
by Nick Olson

I remember back in the day Nick used to try to get to Heaven. Heaven was a glitched-out place in San Andreas where nothing made sense or seemed quite real, and Nick would come home most days, boot up the PS2, and try again to get into it. There was a specific building in San Andreas where, if you went inside and used a cheat code to spawn a jetpack, you could fly through a certain part of the ceiling that didn’t have proper clipping. There was just one spot where you could fly through, a place that the developers had overlooked. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. This wasn’t something you were ever supposed to be able to come across just walking and jumping around. But if you knew what to look for and you did everything in just the right way, you could lift off and go through the ceiling. Fly right above the interior. From up there, I remember it looked like you had ripped the roof off a dollhouse and were looking down at its insides. And everywhere around the interior, where the outside world should’ve been, there was nothing but blank gray. Gray as far as you could see, in every direction. The way the game worked was that in order to save resources, only the exterior world or the interior world would ever be loaded at any given time, depending on what the character chose. The developers never intended for the player to see beyond the place that had been loaded for them, but Nick had found a way to clip through.

I remember every day he’d go straight back into that building and continue where he left off. You couldn’t save in Heaven, so he’d have to just repeat the glitch every time. There were no waypoints, no markers, so Nick would fly through gray nothing for what seemed like forever before coming across a new interior, some place he had never seen before. He’d go there and take mental notes of everything he saw, then fly back up through where the ceiling should’ve been and look for another place: a space explorer trying to chart new worlds. He’d find interiors you’d only see in passing in random cutscenes, abandoned test areas, and places you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the game. Many of these places were unfinished, so he’d land there and find himself able to walk through the walls, glide through props. It was like he was there but not at the same time.

The wild thing is, he committed so much of that to memory. There was no real way to map all that out. Once you were in the air, there were no landmarks to guide you, nothing but gray everywhere. If you checked your map in-game, it said that you were still at the building you’d originally entered. It was like you had never left. Like you were stuck, even though you weren’t.

I didn’t play San Andreas for years after Nick died. For a while, I just couldn’t. Then, when I wanted to, I couldn’t get it to work. The audio/video wires were old and frayed, and the electrical tape was coming apart, and it was years back, when I was still little, that Nick had spliced in old wires from a stereo system that no one was using anymore to replace the ones that had gone bad. He could’ve just gotten new wires, and I guess I can now too, but I remember how he cut and stripped them down, rubber to copper, demonstrating how you had to twist the proper wires together, like for like, but the two pairs you twisted together could never touch each other. They’d be taped down or pushed in opposite directions. They could be parallel, but they could never make contact again.

I think of checking eBay for a fresh set or searching how to properly splice wires, but I want to see if my memory is still enough. As they come untwisted, gangly and with their individual strands pointing in every possible direction, I have to remind myself that sights and sounds are transmitted through these things. Memories are. I cut a little further into the wires, past the unruly strands to get at the fresh portions, untouched. I cut too much off, if I’m being honest, but it’s just enough to get the two pairs connected again, pushed down onto either side, not touching, and I don’t have electrical tape to make it official, but that’ll be enough. It should hold.

I boot up the old PS2. It’s too early, and the sun is on the screen so I can barely make anything out, but I can hear that familiar old boot-up sound. And when the game cycles through, and I find that Nick’s old save file still works, and I track down that old handwritten jetpack cheat tucked away inside the game manual, I go back to that corner, from memory, and I fly straight up. Away and past it all.

Black and white headshot of Nick OlsonNick Olson is an author and editor from Chicagoland now living in North Carolina. He was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and he’s been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, decomP, and other fine places. When he’s not writing his own work, he’s sharing the wonderful work of others over at (mac)ro(mic). His debut novel, Here’s Waldo, is available now. Find him online at nickolsonbooks.com or on Twitter @nickolsonbooks.

FALL OF MAN, a visual narrative by Jennifer Hayden

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FALL OF MAN
a visual narrative
by Jennifer Hayden

Scroll down for an interview with Jennifer Hayden by Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg
"Fall of Man" by Jennifer Hayden, 2021. Sketch of two nude individuals falling with leaves surrounding them."On October thirtieth, seven months into quarantine, my husband slipped on the stairs." Sketch of man flying through air next to stairs screaming "Fuck." "I was at the post office. And can I have a roll of forever stamps?" Sketch of postal worker behind plexiglass wearing a mask and woman wearing a mask with the words "anti-droplet curtain" "sanitizing station" and "social distancing spot" in cursive around her."Without my phone. Mom? Mom, where are you? Dad just fell down the stairs and I think her really hurt his shoulder I'm calling 911." Sketch of phone left on dashboard in car."Our very-together grown up daughter who's living with us during COVID got him to the E.R. Nothing's broken or dislocated. Well, let me tell you, this shit hurts." Sketch of Dad, daughter, and doctor talking."Following up with the shoulder guy: I bet it hurts. You tore three tendons, not to mention your bicep. You're going to need surgery and several months of P.T." Sketch of Dad, shirtless, talking to doctor. "So we're down one guy for the dishes, garbage, and heavy lifting in our prison cell of three. You're not loading the dishwasher right. What, do I need a Masters for this? I said, get. Out. Of. My. Kitchen." Sketch of Mom, Dad and daughter frustrated."I'm driving to pick up takeout a few evenings later when it all stops." Sketch of Mom wearing winter hat with the word "WHOMP!" above her."Soft heavy impact. Then incomprehension. Suspension." Front view of Mom driving car."Followed by" Side profile of Mom with word "FOOSH!" floating above her."And I'm sitting in my car in a dark field and I am showered with glass." Sketch of small car in field with crescent moon in sky."My turn to call 911. I was fine. The deer that had hit me had lumbered off." Sketch of large deer saying "ow" with car in background."But the incomprehension and feeling of suspension stayed. I just dropped my husband off for surgery. They said I can't wait here, so I wanted to use your bathroom before I drive home. Let me take your temperature." Sketch of Mom in hospital next to worker."Last spring. We can't just stay in our houses for eighteen months until they come up with a vaccine... Can we? Oh God." Sketch of Mom looking out the window."Or maybe it had been there all the time." Sketch of Mom and Dad falling, nude, with leaves surrounding them."Summer. He's going to challenge the election results if he loses. They're going to have to forcibly remove him from the White House. Jesus. We're fucked." Dad looking at iPad with coffee on table."January. I believed in science. I believed in the constitution. I believed they would protect us." Mom wearing cable knit sweater, holding coffee, looking out the window. "I guess the first thing you learn in the fall from innocence is how naked you really are. I need another hug. But now pretend you're someone I haven't seen in a long time." Mom and Dad hugging.

Headshot of Jennifer HaydenJennifer Hayden is the author of The Story of My Tits, the Eisner-nominated graphic memoir about her experience with breast cancer. She wrote the webstrips Rushes: A Comix Diary, and S’Crapbook. Her first book, Underwire, was featured in The Best American Comics 2013, and she has appeared in anthologies. She is working on a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner, and a travel novella called Le Chat Noir, about her dicey relationship with France. She has lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and NYU, and is currently quarantining in New Jersey

I AM THAT GROUP OF PICTURES OF SPIDERWEBS MADE BY SPIDERS ON DIFFERENT DRUGS by Valerie Loveland

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I AM THAT GROUP OF PICTURES OF SPIDERWEBS MADE BY SPIDERS ON DIFFERENT DRUGS
by Valerie Loveland

Scientists call everything an experiment,
…………………….even when ……iit is actually a meme
even when …………………………..it is actually a spiderweb beauty contest
Scientists don’t realize
even when they talk about drugs,
………………………….…………………they are still nerds.

……Who hasn’t been…….. an accident,
an experiment, a copy of an experiment,
……………..another copy of an experiment?

Everyone always tells me I am…………………… so ………………….…..……right:
I am proof there is a part of us all that can be normal.

But I forgot to tell you spider moms die before the babies are born so
…………nobody teaches spiders how to make their webs. I forgot to tell you
a spider doesn’t bother to go back and fix their mistakes.

……………………………………A fact becomes a fun fact
when everyone attempts to tell it to everyone else
……………………………………but everyone already knows it.

…………One time, a person tried to tell this group of photos
……………………………………………………about this group of photos.

I usually display …………………………high contrast black background with white webs
but when I am angry I switch
…………………………………………………………………………to beige background with black webs.

My psychiatrist told me I need to find a new doctor
…………………………………………because he is not allowed to prescribe drugs
………………………………………………………………farther than the fence in his backyard.

Look at this one photo …………and it looks like I am doing better,
…………………………………………………………………………look at the other photos
and it looks like I am doing worse.…… I am doing both.
…………………………………………………………I am not pictures of spiders or drugs
………………………………………………………………but I am constantly asked about spiders and drugs.
I have never been asked if messed up webs still catch bugs.

Valerie Loveland is a poet and programmer living in Philadelphia. She enjoys audio poetry, video games, and fountain pens. Her most recent two books are Female Animal, and Mandilble, Maxilla (Dancing Girl Press). She recently finished [Unsolved Mysteries Theme Song], a manuscript of poems about the 1990’s TV show Unsolved Mysteries.

AMMONITES by Ann de Forest

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AMMONITES
by Ann de Forest

mountains once were ocean  evidence coils beneath

our feet  prehistoric curlicues  not yet nautilus  not yet

snail  not yet calcified turban washed up on the beach

………………………void of any tender

……………………………….creature

 

barely old enough to remember  tasmanian devil’s cyclone

wake  cartoon cat’s stiff armed stumbles  vertiginous eyes

hypnotize  pulsing black & white  watch dangles

………………………sways  eyelids

………………………………fall

…………………………………………………………………..where does time begin?

 

crack the case  find the spring  sister crouched beneath

a crib  a finger flick sends silver spiral shimmying up

spinning down  mesmerized by tiny revolutions

mesmerized by bounce and drop

………………………by boing

…………………………..and hum

 

………………………………………………………………………danger up ahead

 

rattler on the trail  vortex in the toilet bowl  fingers

furled to pack a punch  lobster thrashing in a pot  fallen

leaf and flame-licked letter  go in green  come out red  tail

………………………rolled up between

………………………………your legs

 

tentacles sweep across the map  tempest whirls  turns

one blind eye  twists wind and water  flattening palms pounding

the panhandle  whitening the gulf  your thumbs

………………………too cold to leave

………………………       any imprint

 

………………………………………………………………………curl up & die

 

old woman tends her labyrinth  plants boxwood seedlings

ankle high  a lifetime pulling weeds curves her spine

………………………downward

…………………………….eyes drop

 

fiddlehead unfurls to fern  colors swirl across the page

to seal a book  adorn a spine  ossify as marble  boxwood grows

high  grows round  the generation’s last survivor

walks her labyrinth  sprigs fill to hedge  path

………………………vanishes

…………………………….as maze

 

………………………………………………………………………so easy to lose your way

 

split the pod  find the bean

split the bean  find the finest curling

tendril waiting for instructions to unwind

our own little bean a blip on a screen

………………………nestling in

……………………………a hurricane

 

………………………………………………………………………look down

the rosy sidewalk slabs dotted

with fossils  spinning right under

………………………our eyes

…………..       ………….ammonites

 

………………………………………………………………………look up

obscured by light  expanding

overhead  nebulae  no need

………………………for any

……………………………witness

Ann de Forest’s work often centers on the resonance of place. Her short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Coal Hill Review, Unbroken, Noctua Review, Cleaver Magazine, Found Poetry Review, The Journal, Hotel Amerika, Timber Creek Review, Open City, and PIF, and in Hidden City Philadelphia, where she is a contributing writer. She is currently editing an anthology of essays about walking, Slow Going, to be published by New Door Books in 2021, a project inspired by having twice walked the entire perimeter of Philadelphia, the city she’s called home for three decades.

I’M NOT SORRY by Ali Kojak

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I’M NOT SORRY
by Ali Kojak

They say I should write you a letter. As a goodbye, they smile sadly, for closure. They say closure like it’s a literal thing I can touch, can put in my Amazon cart and click, it’s here. Aha! Now you’re closed. But how do you close a life? Maybe it’s like sending guests home after a party. Thank you for living, I say quietly, as you stand in the doorway not looking ready to leave. I gently push the door in your direction, biting my lip to stop from changing my mind. It’s late, and my kids are tired, I plead, so you step back but keep staring—sadly, silently, into the warm house. Now I push hard and fast, heart-pounding, sweaty fingers turning the bolt frantically. As if you might push back. As if it really matters. As if you’re not a ghost. I sink to the floor—back against the door, head in my knees—and sob. Wait, I scream, come back. I’m not ready. You never respected my privacy anyway.

The official cause of death is an overdose of carfentanil, but cocaine metabolites, fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, and a positive screen for cannaboids all played a supporting role. I think that means you were high AF, but I also hope it means you were peaceful. I hope you were dreaming of floating on your back in a wide, sleepy river, arms and legs spread generously, sun on your face. A current lazily carrying you downstream, breaths deep and rhythmic, each exhale releasing tension that gets carried away by the ripples. Completely content, at last. Of course, that’s also the guided meditation my new therapist uses to keep fear from hijacking my mind, so, you know, take it for what it’s worth. While you survived the wounds of our childhood by self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, I relied on anxiety and perfectionism. It turns out one of those coping mechanisms has higher odds of survival. The unfairness of that threatens to shatter me daily, a sledgehammer of guilt, suspended.

In 2017, the year you died, the U.S. Department of Health and Human services declared a public health emergency to address the national opioid crisis. More than 70,000 Americans died of a drug overdose that year, and Ohio (where you were cut open at 9:05 a.m. on a Saturday morning in October) was the state with the second-highest rate of drug overdose deaths. The heart of it all, we’d roll our eyes as kids, unimpressed by our pedestrian Midwestern life. A heart stopped by the opioid epidemic, apparently. I know these details because in an attempt to make sense of, or maybe find meaning in, your death, I tried to find its place in some larger narrative. Like a puzzle piece, useless in isolation. Oh, I see, he fits right there, that spot—there’s a pattern to all this dying. It’s okay now. I’m okay now. Right? Unsurprisingly, it all still feels meaningless. Did it feel as meaningless to the medical examiner, I wonder, when she coldly cataloged your clothes?

White adult male received in white short-sleeved V-necked t-shirt, pair of white on black plaid boxer shorts with waistband of black, white and blue checked fabric, pair of white Nike sneakers, and pair of short white socks with gray heels and toes. Did she wonder what happened to your pants? Why you had on shoes but no pants? Why is there a description of the waistband of your boxers but no question as to the location of your pants? Maybe she was too busy noticing how clean your white Nikes were, a fellow shoe aficionado. Or maybe when she documented the cutaneous tattoo of a lion with an axe and crown in the lateral upper right deltoid, she thought of her own ink work and questioned the story behind yours. When she charted that your scalp was brown with scant gray and mild bitemporal hairline recession, there’s a chance she thought of her own husband’s impending baldness. Likely though, she kept her mind blank, focused solely on the medical undertaking, professionalism giving her the distance required to do her job. And yet, I can’t help but feel defensive. Did she describe the kind old man who died of natural causes, surrounded by dozens of friends and family, with the same detached tone? Or when she looked at you, did she only see another dead junkie?

I wish I could show her the pictures of you as a child, the ones I collected for your funeral slideshow, the tow-headed toddler with bright eyes and a disarming smile. Sitting confidently on our mother’s lap, looking curiously at the camera. Look, I’d say, at him here. Before all this. Isn’t it obvious he mattered? Don’t you see who he could have become? I also want to show them to the doctor who saved your life the summer before you died, the one I assume now realizes his effort was wasted. All that time, all my talent, for what? Six months? I imagine him thinking, and I resent him for that illusory judgment. Anger always feels better with a target. But also, I can’t shake that first impression.

That summer it had taken your girlfriend days to find you. She knew something was wrong, a sixth sense, and she tried to get everyone to worry. She called every hospital in Cincinnati (blind optimism ruling out morgues), and finally, there you were. You’d been there for at least a day already, brought in after calling your own ambulance when you realized you couldn’t walk. Confused by the searing pain in your arm and leg, you’d waited until you felt like you actually might die. You were dying, it turns out, rhabdomyolysis setting off a chain reaction of muscle death and kidney failure. It’s hard to imagine the pain you must have been in, how much you suffered in the name of self-sufficiency, or embarrassment, or fear of breaking parole, before finally asking for help. I blew through the drive from Chicago to find our parents already in the ICU (together! at the same time!), hovering helplessly over your cord-entangled body, while staff reminded us you were lucky to be alive. Or maybe I just sensed that, as the beeps and dings and whooshes crashed against the walls, a cacophony of uncertainty. So much support, to keep one heart beating. It seems ironic now.

They’d come suddenly to take you to another surgery, and you’d already had a few, so this one was risky, but without you’d die. Not much of a choice, and anyway, they said after we’d know better whether or not you’d live, and what kind of life that might be. A surgeon spent hours cutting out all the dead tissue and muscle from your body, saving whatever he could, giving you the best chance. Of what, we’ll never know. We spent hours in a massive, impersonal waiting room, getting on each other’s nerves and looking at our cell phones. It was more of a lobby, really, with a fireplace and a front desk and hundreds of chairs. So many chairs. A seat for every memory. I didn’t know it was possible to feel claustrophobic in such an open space, and I thought about that time we got in a fight and you ran away and swallowed an entire bottle of Benadryl. How scared I was trying to visualize what it looked like for a 12-year-old to have their stomach pumped, how mom screamed at me, Now look what you’ve done!

Sometimes, I’m caught in that space, in those hours, still waiting for you, checking in relentlessly with the woman at the information desk. A memory stuck on loop. The doctor knows we’re here, right? I ask, over and over, frustrated by how much time has passed without a single update. Hoping she might sympathize with the agony of spending hours not knowing. Because what if you’re back there, dead, and I’m out here, sipping a latte? Sighing, she repeats the line about the note she put in your chart asking the doctor to come out and brief us. (S.O.S., it probably said.) Please, I implore, shoulders sagging. It’s a long surgery, she finally softens, and my system shows they’re still in there. Eventually, I exhaust every gossip magazine on every table in that cavernous room, worn out by trying to equalize the time I sit near each parent, neither comforted by my presence. I make another approach. Don’t be rude, our dad hisses. Asking for information isn’t rude, I snarl back, before switching to what I hope is my most polite smile. She’s typing before I even ask, your patient number memorized. I’m so sorry, she greets me, eyes wide and apologetic, it actually looks like the surgery is over and the doctor has gone home for the day. What in the actual fuck?

My mind spins, and suddenly the room feels small, options closing in around me. I feel like I’m going to pass out, the effect of three cups of coffee and my inability to control the universe threatening to bring me to my knees. The elevator bings loudly, the noise interrupting my spiral. Two men in white coats get off, and I focus on the details to slow my heart rate. Breathe in: they are talking familiarly, an ordinary end-of-day exchange. Breathe out: white rectangular hospital name tags still attached to their pockets. Wait—it’s your surgeon, I realize, and beeline. Tell me everything, I demand, hoping my anger is more apparent than my terror. He frowns, tilting his head to one side. Unprepared for an ambush at the elevator, he apologizes to his colleague. His father, it turns out—they are both doctors and sometimes work at the same place. It’s sweet actually, but in that moment I hate him for it.

He asks calmly (too damn calmly) what I’m talking about, accustomed to anxious family members insisting on answers. I watch his face as I regurgitate all the details, the girlfriend-couldn’t-find-him, just-got-out-of-his-halfway-house, really-trying-to-get-better-this-time, two-boys-who-need-him, I-asked-the-front-desk-over-and-over, they-said-you’d-talk-to-us details, and finally, I see it register. Oh, she’s talking about the addict. But he says slowly, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize he had family here. And I translate internally, I didn’t realize anyone gave a shit. He does, and we do, and we’re here now. Tell us about the surgery, tell us about my brother, their son, her partner, their father. Tell us about the kid who collected baseball cards and Smurf figurines, a tiny pink-onesie-clad baby Smurfette on all fours his favorite. Tell yourself he’s important. And he does tell us all the details, kindly. It’s not enough to make me like him, though later you tell me he’s pretty nice. Thanks to his skill, you didn’t die then, though I think you might have wanted to.

You lost the use of your right arm and leg, and somehow it fell on me to break the news. You called yourself crippled, and useless, and unlovable, and mourned that you wouldn’t be able to wait tables—one thing you were always good at, one job you could always count on. Tears welled up in your eyes, and you asked, Why does this stuff always happen to me? I felt like the obvious answer was because you keep using, but saying so felt cruel, and I figured you knew that already. But the metaphorical question was one I didn’t (never will) have any answers for, so I mumbled something about how this time would be different, would be okay, you’d get through this, you had to, for your boys, and we both pretended to believe it. Both desperately wanted to. Would the exact right words have made a difference? If I had been able to explain God or the meaning of life, would you still be here? Did I even say I love you?

And then they let you leave, which surprised us all. But healthcare isn’t free, and you don’t get insurance on a server’s paycheck. Or in prison. And I know, I know, you tried. You always tried. I found a letter recently you wrote to dad right before you got out of prison the last time, lamenting over how much you’d missed with your boys. I’m going to use this to make a change and live a whole different life, you optimistically scrawled. I have plenty of time to make it right. It wrecks me still, reading that. And even though I spent most of my life waiting for the inevitable call, I thought you had plenty of time too. It’s ironic, how even though the brain uses hope to protect itself from trauma, that same hope can blind us. When I actually got the news, I refused to believe it. That’s not true, I told dad, I talked to him yesterday. Are you sure, I asked him, because sometimes they are wrong? Remember, this summer they thought he would die. Please, I pleaded, have them check again—too blinded by my own grief in the moment to consider his.

In the day/weeks/months that followed, I wrestled with this constantly. How much grief do I get? What is the allowance, for a sister? I am not your parent, or your partner, or your child. I didn’t know that kind of loss—the parent, partner, child kind—and felt greedy taking more than my share. As if grief were a pie, limited in slices. (Although, as an aside, dad died last spring. Presumably from lung cancer but also, I think, a broken heart.) I googled “sibling death” and “sister grief” and “my brother overdosed,” but only one article offered even the tiniest solace. I found a therapist and begged for homework that would help me get over it. Getting over it seemed like a reasonable goal at the time. She suggested the letter. I left when she couldn’t stop the hurting.

It hurt to talk about it, and it hurt to not talk about it. I blame Joseph Heller, because blaming you might crush me. When you do talk about death, after the pleasantries, the requisite I’m-so-sorrys, people usually ask questions. What happened? Were you close? The shame those questions surfaced surprised me. Well, we talked for a couple of hours the day before he died, I’d stammer, not offering up that despite our shared blood, sometimes it felt like we lived in different universes. You were worried about parole, and rent, and feeding your kids. I was worried about piano lessons, and date night, and Netflix. But we understood each other, always, bound by shared history. That counts for something, right? Telling them you overdosed, that was harder. Was I worried what they’d think of you or of me? He overdosed, I’d say quietly, eyes misting. It was terrible, I’d hurry on, before they might think it wasn’t. He was really trying, you know. A friend stopped me once, told me I was reminding her of a grandmother in her building who’d recently lost her grandson to gang violence. The grandmother was fumbling around for the right words to say about her grandson, and her pain, and how the way he lived was connected to his death. Listen, my friend had said to her, you don’t have to apologize for loving your grandson. I caught my breath at that part of the story, empathetic already. She waited until I looked up to personalize it. You don’t have to apologize for loving your brother. You don’t have to be sorry for your grief. Something cracked open in my soul, and I stood there weeping silently, relieved.

My grief is cyclical, the scab picked open again by a song on the radio or someone else’s tragedy. By our birthdays coming up next month, exactly one week apart. You would have been forty-three. Instead, you are dead. And I’m turning forty, the age you were when you died. My seven-year-old self would have thrown a thousand pennies into the mall fountain to be the same age as my older brother, but my almost forty-year-old self just feels sad. It’s disorienting to realize I’m the same age as you, physically impossible, except that death has frozen you in time. And time, for me, has moved mercilessly on. Mercifully too, of course, as distance softens the edges of hard memories, amplifies the tender ones. Even though we were only three years apart, you always felt so much older. Maybe because you were already here when I was born, and I never knew life without you. When you died, forty still felt so far away, like an age I couldn’t possibly imagine. But now, on the precipice, it seems so young. Too young. Too vulnerable. Too much left to do. It’s not fair, I want to scream into the wind, it wasn’t enough time. Is it ever? It wasn’t enough time for you to beat the odds, to find a sponsor who changed everything or have some meaningful experience that somehow resuscitated your will to live. It wasn’t enough time for the right prescription or right therapist to change the distorted patterns in your brain, for doctors to discover an addiction treatment that actually works. It wasn’t enough time for you to watch your boys grow up, teach them all the important things, leave them a legacy marked by redemption. It wasn’t enough time for a happy ending. Maybe it never would have been. That’s the hard thing about death. It steals the possibility of a plot twist, finishes the story, ready or not. Even if a turnaround is improbable, with life, there is hope. With death, there is nothing. More than anything, I wish your story had a different ending.

But in the beginning, you were my brother. And I loved you.

Ali Kojak is a writer, storyteller, and oversharer who frequently realizes she said too much. After spending nearly two decades as a nomad courtesy of the US Air Force, she and her husband put down roots in Oak Park, Illinois, where they are currently raising three wild children and a naughty French Bulldog. You can connect with her at alikojak.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

LEPIDOPTERA by Lorette C. Luzajic

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

butterfly

LEPIDOPTERA
by Lorette C. Luzajic

Pheasant Falls, end of the line. There is only a diner and smoke shop at either end of a triplet of small houses. On the other side, city-potted geraniums and a path to the waterfalls. An arrow points past the narrow choir of pines to the museum.

You have come together from the city to see the birds and the bears, and the butterfly room. You will see mineral specimens, too, a treasure chest of agate and amethyst, geodes and fossils transporting you back in time and deep into the earth. Sticks and Stones, a little known gem of taxonomy.

You come to a dilapidated house, with antlers and boulders strewn through a scraggly garden. There are no signs to confirm you are at the right place, but a cold-faced ibex glares through the window at your approach.

The proprietor is a sleazy little man who looks like he should have been an American rattlesnake preacher instead. He is small and sinewy, but his face is pitted and his lips are rubbery. He sprays when he talks. He ushers you in with a sweep of both hands. There are over four thousand specimens of butterflies here, he tells you, fanning at the grid walls, floor to ceiling. It’s just a drop in the bucket, he explains. There are more than 180 thousand kinds of lepidoptera. I wanted one of each, he says, but then I started collecting bones, too.

The man is scrubbed to shine, as if his mother still takes fingertips with spittle to his hair, and his halfway undone shirt is pressed and white. All this in contrast to the rooms of reindeer and weasels, undusted for years. Lloyd.

You almost understand his passion, his obsession, for fowl and fauna. Yours is for art history, but it is parallel in a way: galleries of still lifes and evolution in painting could be seen as kinds of taxidermy.

Even so, he makes you both uncomfortable with those claw-like little hands of his waving around and also all over you. He thwacks Mike on the back, pushes you both into the next diorama, where a grimy moose head greets you with an empty stare. A bear’s jaws are propped open in mockery of a threat long ago extinguished.

We don’t kill ‘em, Mike, Lloyd assures your man, who has been taking close-up photos with his phone. We just collect ‘em. He thumps him again. We get a call, you see, one bighorn sheep down, do you want it? And we say yes, we’ll take it. His stubby fingers linger for a moment on your upper arm, steal a squeeze.

You see, the big museums, they want whales, dinosaurs, mummies. Lloyd says he’ll gladly take a cache of broken crystals or a marsupial that needs work to get back into one piece.

Lloyd is a leading expert on cadaver restoration and posthumous surgery. Not so skillful with the living.

To make polite conversation, you say you love rocks, too. You flash your mammoth ring, a chunk of blue and Bedouin pot metal from the Jordanian desert. It might be lapis, or it might be dyed. You know how I tell what kind of rocks? Lloyd asks, taking your hand to better see the specimen you’re wearing. Before you or Mike can react, he raises your hand closer, opens his mouth and rakes his tongue, wet and wide and flat across your ring.

You and Mike both freeze, recoil. Lloyd drones on about how you can identify minerals by taste, then something about fixing the wing of the last known passenger pigeon before extinction. You flee to the ladies’ room, washing your prize ring and your hands for a long time. You think about Lloyd, speculate about him growing up unliked by people, retreating into the kingdom before man. You imagine him with a lamp and a needle, putting a small wing back into place, antennae, sorting slides, licking stones, speaking the language of layers of sediments and dead birds.

Lorette C. LuzajicLorette C. Luzajic writes prose poetry and flash fiction that has been widely published, from Unbroken to New Flash Fiction Review. She is the founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Lorette is also a mixed media collage artist whose works have found homes in at least 26 countries, from Latvia to Peru.

TRADE CRAFT by Jason Jobin

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TRADE CRAFT
by Jason Jobin

On the walk home from the bakery, spelt loaf in hand, I look back—because this is the part of town where you look back—and see a guy. He’s late thirties, soft looking, salt and pepper hair, very familiar. Familiar from where? He doesn’t make eye contact, but if he was a serial killer, would he? A real serial killer would feign disinterest and appear much like a normal stranger, maybe even exactly like a normal stranger. I run the rest of the way home. Safe in my room with all the doors locked, I roll a joint and blow the smoke out the window, stinking up the whole place, too worried to go outside. It’s rude to smoke inside. If it wasn’t an extreme circumstance, I would never. And then I roll and smoke another joint, and another, and another, and try to sleep. Who was he? I recognized him. From where? Memory so bad of late. Has he followed me before?

I begin to get concerned.

◊

Smoking on the apartment’s stoop the next morning, I get concerned for real. What’s the deal with this killer? I’m barefoot on the concrete in front of our door. Cold rain starts to fall, the wind-blown drops landing on my toes.

My lungs ache. Breathless. Black goo. All that paper and resin. I keep burning my lips.

But this serial killer. I get to thinking about how he’d attack. My roommate, Angie, wouldn’t be able to save me. She manages the vagina waxing place downtown, and is a saint, but she’s no martial artist. This killer probably came up in the clandestine services. Tours in the Middle East. Wet work squads. He’ll glide in during the darkest stage of night, having watched me for weeks, months even, and no one will stop him.

◊

I start sleeping with an old utility knife under my pillow. A birthday gift from my dad. There’s black tar on the blade from when I use it to scrape resin from pipes. The first night, I keep the knife folded closed under the pillow. The second night, I keep it open.

If you want to be high all day every day, it’s important to plan ahead. Have water, rolling papers, already busted up flower, at least five lighters, bagged snacks. Small sober patches need to be sprinkled throughout the week for grad school. It’s getting difficult. Brain fog. Lethargy. The killer always on my mind. First semester I write epistolary stories where the protagonist runs over a child with their car and is awaiting trial and writing deep meaningful letters to the kid’s parents. Because that’s how you heal.

I’m forgetting more and more words when trying to talk to people. Easy words. Basic nouns like road or pomegranate. Writing’s still going okay, at least. Novel progress. Ideas. But feeling like a fake writer, basically just copying Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and it’s so fucking obvious, all the stuff I’m stealing from that, and anyone who reads the book will know and shame me. Usually writing at like 3 a.m. or later, the single lamp hot on my eyes, weird auras on everything.

I try quitting weed. Again and again, I try. It’s disgusting. Smoke so hot it hurts. Marks on my teeth now. Can’t remember the day of the week. And when I run out, kneeling on the carpet looking in the fibers, sure I dropped some earlier, at some point. Running a playing card or knife along the inside of empty bags—the knife works better, yellow crystal dust in a thin line down the blade, carefully scraped into a pipe, so strong, reeling. But no one at school has mentioned anything. They are so kind to me. And as long as I keep the knife under my pillow and stay vigilant, as long as I consider all the angles, I’ll get through.

The killer might be in for a surprise. Can he possibly know I grew up reading every Tom Clancy novel in print? Devouring them. Tradecraft, reversals, secret skills.

I start to place a door trap when I leave the apartment. In case the killer wants to sneak into my room. What you do is: take a small bowl, fill it with loose change, and when you leave whatever room you don’t want someone snooping in—the door must open inward— you close the door most of the way, kneel down, and put the bowl of coins against the door such that anyone who opens it will knock over the bowl. But this isn’t everything, no. Leave one coin on the carpet next to the bowl.

◊

We’re studying the short form with Lorna Crozier. She’s brilliant, gentle in the right ways, firm in the right ways. Her husband comes in and says I look like a novelist, and it’s the best thing anyone’s ever said to me. The other students are smart and can talk about technique and publish in journals. I try to keep up, writing weird shorts about a drug dealer who made us smoke weed off a homemade contraption of blowtorches, shorts about brewing vodka in university bathtubs, shorts about the girl I had a crush on in 5th grade telling her mom, in front of me, that I was the class clown, and how that felt unfair, and good, and mean.

The paranoia stays. I know they are delusions by now, but I’m still afraid. Knowing, and still. Each day when I get back from the university, I check the coin-bowl and the single coin on the floor, and each day it is unchanged. No one has been in my room, no girls, no friends, no one. Sometimes I forget about the trap and knock the coins everywhere, unable to know for sure if, that one time, the killer had been in there.

Squads of spiders are the only thing sneaking into my room for sure. There must be a gap somewhere, in the window, in the baseboard heater. Big spiders, maybe the size of a tablespoon, are invading. I’ll sometimes feel them on me in bed and have to get up, turn on all the lamps, and put socks on my hands to smash them. It’s the thing where you have a vague sensation something is on you, a brush, a tickle, and then rationalize that, no, it’s nothing, nothing is on you, but recently, when I’ve turned on the light, there has been a real spider. The spiders are real.

The spiders are real.

I almost never leave the apartment, and when I do socialize, like at a bar, I black out. Sometimes also doing cocaine with an old Whitehorse friend who is in Victoria for school. He gives it to me for free because he knows my brother or he feels sorry for my having had cancer, maybe, I don’t know. And then me and him and whoever else is there will yammer and talk circles for an hour, the drip in my throat a split-open battery, and then we do more cocaine, and so on, in the way of cocaine, until much later, and then it’s morning and I’m back at the apartment in my room, naked, grey light spilling through the blinds, and I’ve peeled an orange and impaled it on my thumb and I just sit staring at it, unable to blink, sticky juice down my arm like thread.

Jason Jobin was born and raised in the Yukon. He completed an MFA in writing at the University of Victoria. His stories have won a National Magazine Award and been anthologized in the 2018 and 2019 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. He has been a finalist for American Short Fiction’s Halifax Ranch Prize for Fiction and The Fiddlehead’s Short Fiction Contest. He won The Malahat Review’s Jack Hodgins and Far Horizons awards for fiction. Jason was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Nonfiction Prize and shortlisted for the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He is at work on a novel, a memoir, and a collection of stories.

FISH FEEL NO PAIN by Michelle Renee Hoppe

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FISH FEEL NO PAIN
by Michelle Renee Hoppe

My little brother held a trout, a rainbow burning bright enough to eclipse reflections. The fish did not reflect, but the stream did, and he took a mighty brown watery rock to spill the brains of the flesh, white and red onto the grey wooden dock, a spilling of color all over the dock, and when I screamed he said, Fish feel no pain.

I told him he could not know fish’s mind, not at ten or twenty or a thousand years could he know the inner worlds of slippery things, but that day I learned eating took no feeling.

He picked up the dead limp thing that once swam bravely, meant to be swallowed by dolphins or sharks, whales singing underwater, pelicans that fly without invention, alligators who were also dinosaurs, flamingos that were too, and asked if I’d like some.

When I screamed, he told me, ​Pipe down,​ for what was it but the way of things? Then he killed a mother trout, hooked by her tail and reeled her in backwards. No fisherman could bait her.

She was gutted and her eggs served beside the flesh—red eggs, white flesh.

Michelle Renee Hoppe holds a BA in English from BYU, where she ran a nonprofit for struggling students. She was a NYC Teaching Fellow in special education and a top private educational therapist, working on cases for disabled students. Her work won court cases against the NYCDOE. Her written work can be found in Saw Palm, South 85 Journal, and HoneySuckle Magazine, among others. She is the founder and Creative Director of Capable, a nonprofit dedicated to uplifting and funding the voices of disabled and chronically ill authors and artists. She lectures in Saudi Arabia, where she lives down the street from a Bedouin tribe and a Starbucks. She recently adopted two wild desert kittens.

WEBSITE INSECURITY QUESTIONS by David Galef

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WEBSITE INSECURITY QUESTIONS
by David Galef

What was your first pet’s favorite color?

How many pets have you neglected since then?

This is about your father, isn’t it?

How often do you think about sex?

What did you drink on your first date with Janet?

Who was she there with?

Did you really think he was her cousin?

When you drive from I-78 to your house, what exit do you take?

What little winding road do you always miss right after that?

How old were you before you learned to drive with a stick shift?

This is about your mother, isn’t it?

What do you always quarrel with Janet about?

Why?

How many times has she said in the past year that she’ll leave you?

What’s your favorite Netflix show?

What was your favorite show five years ago?

Which show does Janet prefer?

Who’s told you repeatedly, “Will you ever grow up?”

What food do you most dislike?

Why does Janet cook it at least twice a week?

When did you hire a maid?

So what’s her name?

How could you not even know her name?

Oh, so you could do a better cleaning job?

Where do you think Janet is right now?

Who really goes grocery shopping that often?

How often do you feel inadequate?

Why are you blaming that on your father?

When you can’t sleep at night and stare out the window at the neighbor’s lawn, glowing green-black in the moonlight, then reach out for Janet, her limbs at rest, mouth parted in a perfect bow, where do you think you went wrong?

What joke do you tell that’s made you unpopular at the office?

Which delicatessen do you go to for your favorite sandwich?

Who’s still willing to have lunch with you?

What is the point of your existence?

What would/will life be like without Janet?

Is that pathetic or what?

Where is Janet right now?

Is that just what she told you?

Did she accompany it with one of those false smiles?

Do these security questions make you feel insecure?

What do you suppose Janet’s security questions are?

David GalefDavid Galef has published extremely short fiction in the collections Laugh Track and My Date with Neanderthal Woman (Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize), extremely long fiction in the novels Flesh, Turning Japanese, and How to Cope with Suburban Stress (Kirkus Best Books of 2006), and a lot in between. His latest is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook from Columbia University Press. Day job: professor of English and creative writing program director at Montclair State University. He is also the new editor-in-chief at Vestal Review. Website www.davidgalef.com. Twitter handle @dgalef.

PANDEMIC MOTHER’S DAY, STOKOE FARMS, UPSTATE NEW YORK by Anne Panning       

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PANDEMIC MOTHER’S DAY, STOKOE FARMS, UPSTATE NEW YORK
by Anne Panning

Cost of admission: purchase of two dozen apple cider donuts, delivered to cars by a masked grandmother. As part of the donut deal, you earned drive-through privileges to view exotic animals. The albino wallaby scootched behind a rain barrel; two camels, fully reclined, glanced off to the side: a fuck you to photo ops. We were four of us again: our son, Hudson, had been kicked back to us from freshman year at Pitt. He’d roosted with us again, whipped up gooey onion omelets at midnight, jacked the Volvo seat so far back I couldn’t reach the pedals. Our daughter Lily’s high school would slam shut momentarily: you could almost hear the silence of the greatest pause on earth.

We grew hungry. Rain muddied the road. Where was the baby kangaroo they’d promised? Didn’t they know there were limits to our patience? Finally, an old man stepped out of a tiny shed as in a fairy tale: he snuggled the baby kangaroo inside his flannel shirt. “It’s just too cold out here for this little guy.” He told us we could take a photo. I can’t remember why we didn’t.

By then, I had to pee urgently. We drove up a pale, empty hill. There’s a photo of me crouched behind a pile of old tires: waving, peeing. Which still makes us laugh. Sort of.

Anne Panning has published a memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss. She has also published a novel, Butter, as well as a short story collection, The Price of Eggs, and Super America, which won The Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Four of her essays have received notable citations in The Best American Essays series. She is currently working on a second memoir about her late father, a barber and addict. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.

GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM by Sandra Florence

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GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM
by Sandra Florence

We are playing Concentration. First, she finds the Jacks and then the Queens. Her head was lopsided when she was born, and she stared up at me with rolling grey eyes. I unwrapped her and thought, this is the pure one. Lightens up my life. Released. Escaped from personal injury.

Potatoes. Ducks in a green sky. A turquoise moon. All these things in her. My daughter in red rubber boots crossing the street in rain.

◊

She has not seen her father for some time now. They used to watch prize fights and play dominoes. “He’s going to love another kid,” she says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Now the big mouth scream. The other kid wriggling in her crib. “It’s it,” she says. “The name I can’t remember.”

Diapers flap in winter air. He drives to the bank and opens the vault.

“My hands are so small with the nails painted cherry fudge and my teeth hurt,” she says. “Let’s send him the olive with my teeth prints. Then he’ll know we need the money.”

He takes the money and hands it to the other kid. What we deserve.

◊

A studio garden apartment in the Sunset. The rooms are chopped up and boxy. Frosted glass obscures the garden view. We are so far away. The only night we stay there, we eat in front of the gas heater and then curl up in sleeping bags. She puts her head in my lap, and I stroke her hair and listen as her breathing becomes deeper. Her small body is warm and heavy against mine. I feel small. Swallowed by the night and the fog devouring streetcars. Is there someone in the garden? Moving?

Dream? Water near the pier laps against the dock.

“I dreamed my friend got hurt and the next day she came to school with a black eye.”

“That’s psychic,” I tell her.

“What’s that?” she asks.

She’s hysterical. I’m going to cry tonight. She has pink curlers in her hair. She moves the rubber animals around in the sand tray. Trees, plastic fence, bridge, boat. Mama cow and her baby off in the distance by themselves.

“We know what that means,” the therapist says. “It’s significant.”

“Today at school the boys were chasing us, trying to hit us. We hid in the bathroom. We decided not to run anymore. When they came after us, we hit back. I picked up one of them and threw him in the air.”

At East of the Sun, a long line of children stand by the tables running their fingers through the small toys. Metal leap frogs, water guns in the shape of fish, wooden horses dangling from strings, animals masks, magic rocks, and blue marbles. Every toy for a penny or nickel. My daughter has ten cents. She is rich.

We take Highway 5. I’m going to a wedding. She’ll stay with her father. I drive fast through Altamont Pass and down into the San Joaquin. Rows of business parks and warehouses give way to green fields and the flat farmland. It is hot. Scorching. Waves of heat blast through the floor of the car. At the wedding in the garden, some friends play guitars and a violin. A young woman sings. There is laughter and later tears over the phone when he calls to say he has to bring her back early.

“My wife doesn’t understand. I can’t see her anymore.” He sets her suitcase on the porch steps, climbs into his car, and drives away. Back to the new wife and baby.

Up on Mt. Tamalpais, the kids are piled into tents. Wind whooshes through the eucalyptus trees, and the jagged surf crashes on Stinson Beach. When the bus returns them, their faces are covered with dirt. And later there are photographs. My daughter sitting on a picnic table holding her white hands up to the sun. Her blonde hair is tangled and wild.

We ride the bus downtown to the babysitter’s. She lives in a railroad flat on an alley near the Civic Center. Later, she’ll take my daughter up the street to the childcare center, an old storefront on Hayes St., the only one I can afford. I call from work two or three times a day to check on her. Is she okay? Can I talk to her? Winos stagger past the windows yelling angry threats at the air. The kids play in the cold sun. She makes chalk marks on the dirty sidewalk.

“What’s that?” an old man asks, pointing to her drawing.

Tonight, I go into her room to check. Her small body is there under the covers. I bend low until I feel her breath on my cheek.

We sit in wet sand. July fog. I’ve brought sandwiches and apples for a picnic on the beach, but it’s too cold. The windmill flutters in the tulip garden in Golden Gate Park. She digs in the wet sand, picks up driftwood, seaweed, pieces of shell. I keep my eyes on the green waves crashing under white water and wish I wasn’t afraid to dive in. Surfers ride the waves dangerously close to the rocks. She shudders and says, “Can we go now?” We move into the shelter of the park, and she puts her hand in mine. Squeeze. Quiet.

We get off the trolley and walk up the street to the corner of Arguello and Fulton, and stop in front of the Jefferson Airplane house. It looms large and gloomy. “Are they in there?” she asks. Huge pillars glisten in moonlight as we stand on the sidewalk waiting for music. Nothing. We tiptoe up to the house. She goes all the way up to the windows and peeks in. Nothing.

A card comes in the mail. A picture of a little girl in a pink jumpsuit holding a teddy bear. “Happy Birthday To A Sweet Six-Year-Old.” There’s a check for fifteen dollars in it. She jumps up and down. “See,” she says, holding the card in front of me. “He did remember.” I take the check and think groceries, coffee, cheese, eggs. I do midnight shopping at Cala Foods with the after-hours crowd cruising for someone to take home, and the panhandlers. One old man stretches his hat out to me, and I drop in a dollar.

When I get home, she’s lying in a puddle of moonlight. The card pressed under her cheek.

I read her a story while she soaks in her bath. “Outside,” a story with a girl hero. “We should paint toenails on the tub,” I tell her.

“It’s got claw feet,” she says.

“I’ll give the tub a pedicure,” and I take out red paint and paint each claw. She goes under water giggling. While she soaks, I paint. Vines coming out of the closet. Green vines all the way down the hall. And later in the kitchen, a green zebra appears over the stove. For a whole month, I spend my afternoons painting. There’s a park emerging on one wall in the hallway. Bicycle riders sneak in and out of the trees. Each day when she comes home, I’ve added a new item to the park: a castle, a quarter moon, a ballerina, and a winged horse sailing over the tops of the trees.

“I’ll never be able to let the landlord in here,” I tell her.

“It doesn’t matter. It belongs to us now,” she says.

She looks like her father. Has his round eyes. His mouth and perfect nose. Even his facial expressions. His way of sagging in a chair. His devotion to television. The only thing she has like me is a gold-brown color. I say, “Let’s take a walk. It’s drenched and stormy outside.”

“What about my favorite program where the dad comes home after being gone for years?” she asks.

“He’s not coming,” I tell her and go out into the street. The light is dying and I forget time and the wind pushes me up the hill and I get lost. Dogs rush toward the fence as I pass. It’s dark when I find my way back. She is under a pile of blankets in front of the TV. The blonde ends of her hair poke out. My own daughter who looks nothing like me.

Thirty parents arrive at the school in icy rain to hear about “the rules” and “respecting each other’s space.” We do an exercise, stare into each other’s eyes without blinking. Later, in the science class, a woman stands holding a small boa constrictor. The woman tells me all the kids handle the snake. She offers it to me, but I shake my head and leave the meeting early, thinking this will be the next exercise. I take the long way home through the park. Enormous dahlias unfold in the Tea Garden. Cherry blossoms drop petals into water, and the museum glows in its chalky skin.

At home I find her curled up in my bed. Crayons and magic markers scattered over the floor. She’s been drawing pictures. A girl on horseback. Shooting stars. Rainbows. Flying Sufi hearts. The giant hearts hurl through dark blue skies. She tucks herself down into the pillows. I tell her not to fall asleep in my bed. “I’m not falling asleep,” she says. “I’m just resting my eyes.” Later, I climb into bed beside her. She’s too heavy for me to carry now.

Her grandmother calls to tell her about the new baby girl. “Did you know you have another sister now? Your dad was hoping for a boy, but things don’t always go like we plan.” She hangs up and says, “There are two of them now.”

She writes a story. “The Cool Girl.”

Once there was a girl and her name was Susan and she was 18. And she loved motorcycles. But her mother did not like them. But anyway Susan bought one. The next day Susan and her boyfriend wanted to ride the motorcycle to school. But her mother would not let them. So Susan got very mad. And she and her mother had a fight and her mother would not let her go to school. So Susan thought of a plan. She thought of running away from home. So she did. And when she was riding she got hungry so she stopped at a cafe for a bite of something. And after that she went to France and had a great time and so she lived there. The End.

There are pictures. In one, she’s a dark-haired girl diving off a board into a turquoise pool.

Ballet class in an old Victorian in the Mission. In the purple light of winter, cold wooden floors creak as we walk up three flights of stairs and into a room of mirrors. Legs, white tights. A boy strutting back and forth across the open floor. She whirls around in her black leotard. Catches a glimpse of herself. The teacher is Japanese. Lean muscles. Years of work.

“Hard work,” she says over the heads of the tiny dancers. “She has good feet,” she says, bending to grasp my daughter’s feet in her hands. “Strong feet.” And my daughter’s feet carry her through rain. Through afternoon wind, to the corner store for bread. To the Swedish Bakery for butter cookies. Down littered sidewalks to catch her bus. “Do you pick her up at the bus stop?” Mr. Fiji, her school teacher asks. “Your neighborhood is not safe.” Smiling, he tells me he will teach her to read and speak Japanese.

She speaks to me in Japanese. The words are red and black. Choppy and deep. She presses her hands together, bows her head and says, “Good morning, Mother.” She paints characters on rice paper. Translates for me, “Happiness.” I put the painting in a frame and hang it over our door.

In Japan Town, paper fish fly through the air on sticks, and yellow umbrellas twirl in wind. We buy a pencil box and incense. Drink tea in a shop with red booths. Tea, almond cookies, and spicy crackers. She picks up chopsticks and holds the bowl of rice to her mouth as she eats.

My fortune: “The more you know, the less you understand.”

Hers: “Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.”

In our house on a street that opens to battered storefronts, bars, bookstores, The Purple Heart Thrift Shop, she waits by the phone for him to call. She chews on her thumb, picks up a hand mirror and brushes her hair till the long blonde strands fly up, fan out with electricity. She waits, gives up, puts on a record, and asks her friend who lives upstairs to come and dance with her. Her friend is small with long brown hair. Smaller than my daughter who looks like an awkward fawn as she bows and stretches and turns in the living room with a naïve grace. The two girls whirl and their dance becomes more frenetic, wilder as they fly and laugh and fall. Till the neighbors begin to pound on our floor.

Every day she rides the bus to Valencia and 16th and gets off. She walks home passing Aunt Lil’s Antiques and dodging drunks as she goes. When she comes in the door today, I can hear her hurrying up the stairs. She tells me in a rush, out of breath, “A man tried to get me to go with him. He said come here, angel, I’ve got a lotta money. I ran but he started to come after me, then these two guys chased him. He drove away real fast.”

I call the police, but when they arrive, she can’t tell them anything about the man—just the car—a black Seville. And the money—”hundreds of dollars lying on the front seat.”

She gets a letter from her grandmother. In it there’s a photo of the two girls—one of them about six and the other a toddler. They’re dressed in identical pink jumpsuits. Her grandmother writes a few lines. “Here’s your baby sisters. I thought it was time you got to see them. Aren’t they dolls? And I want you to know I haven’t forgotten you. Love, Gran.”

She studies the photo for a few minutes, holding it tightly in her fingers. Then she turns to me and says, “I don’t know what he sees in them.” She tosses the photo onto the table and begins examining a broken fingernail.

Low riders rumble through the damp air past Mission Dolores and the Integral Yoga Institute where Swami Sachatinanda’s beatific countenance smiles down on his devotees, and just next door old women in old lace cluster under their icons of joy. Church bells and shirtless men returning to their women. My daughter wants to dress in black. To wear the uniform of another culture. A blonde chola in her black derby, black pants, and Chinese slippers. She pulls her hair tightly to one side and pins it back. Takes a red rose and sticks it over her ear. She lines her eyes with black. She looks ten years older than she is. Her lips a deep red. Her friends tell her, “You’re a wannabe.”

“Nam picked a fight with me today,” she says, staring into the mirror rubbing a bruise on her cheek. “We used to be friends, but she belongs to the Wa Chings now. She started yelling at me, calling me honky, saying, come on show me how tough you are. So I did. I forgot all the karate I learned, but I went for her anyway. I was swinging my fists and punching her head. Her friends were yelling, okay girl, okay, okay, stop.”

A boy appears at the bottom of the stairs. He has walked blocks in the rain from the Mission Flatlands where dogs roam freely and women sell tortillas on street corners. Hot and fresh, La Taqueria. Watermelon juice, papaya, mango. He tells me he has come to see my daughter. A silver cross dangles from one ear, and he smiles at me with his eyes.

Boys appear at our door. Black, brown, their hair in cornrows, hairnets, and shower caps. Protecting their most valuable asset. They walk her home from school, come up the stairs quietly, and sit in her room drinking soda and listening to the soul station. Their names are T.J., Bugsy, and Helio. They wear leather pants and Members Only jackets. Their mothers work in factories. They live in Bay Area Hunter’s Point and the Outer Mission. They don’t have money, so they walk and run to get where they’re going, and sometimes they boost what they can’t buy. Helio is wearing his flannels today. A blue bandanna around his forehead. Their names appear all over the city—in the Fillmore and Western Addition. Upper Market and the Embarcadero. “Helio Was Here” and “T.J. the Cool One.” Mexican hieroglyphs bloom on walls covered with bougainvillea. Rise above the salty air.

At school, the girls threaten her. Sometimes on the bus they swear at her, “Girl, you gonna get your ass whipped.” And she tells her grandmother these things, proud of her ability to stir up trouble. The phone rings and her grandmother asks, “Is your boyfriend black? I’ll disown you.”

At the concert the black man at the piano. “I’ve gotta get closer,” she says. She is clapping her white hands. I want to help her find her way down the stairs, through the crowd below. Ushers move toward us. Threatening. Flashlights. I don’t understand. Strange. Alien. My own daughter. The man at the piano, fluid and female as he moves to his own music. His hair braided into a thousand silver beads. He is smiling upward at my daughter.

Sandra Florence taught writing for forty years in Tucson, Arizona, ran two NEH projects in Tucson, and currently writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction and blurs the boundaries between them. She has published creative and scholarly work and has just completed a short story collection entitled Everything is Folded.

LOOKING UP by Sarah Berger

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Looking up

LOOKING UP
by Sarah Berger

One thing I did when I was twenty was fall in love with a Roman Catholic boy and get all confused. I was a half-Jew-half-gentile quasi-Lutheran atheist, led as in a trance to the burly God of Ceiling Paintings like a little girl in a gossamer nightgown. The boy was a convert himself, and his zeal was real. He tried to baptize me (baptise; he was British) using the water pitcher in his college dorm room. He cited doctrine. I said no; I hadn’t gone completely off the deep end of the holy water pool. But I did cherish plans for baptism, someday, in my already-flayed heart.

Another thing I did when I was twenty was rise early, brush my teeth in the cavernous bathroom of the 1964 Rome-Olympic-village-turned-youth hostel, dress and pack and leave with a hunk of unsalted bread in my hand, and hasten to the Vatican Museums. I shuffled with the crowd through room after room of staggering opulence, all as prelude to the best room of all, the Sistine Chapel.

I knew the Sistine Chapel was a big deal, but when I summoned thoughts about it, all I really pictured was Michelangelo in the act of painting it: wearing some sort of burlap poncho, yelling at his assistants, getting paint in his eyes and a great stiffness in his neck. I didn’t know that the recently restored colors would flow in saffron and cerulean waves; that the portraits of prophets and sybils and the scenes from Genesis would play like the arias and choruses of Handel’s Messiah; that it was so full of living, fighting, striving people, so full of thigh meat and flippy little penises and women with fantastically muscled arms and shoulders. The prophets and sybils wore the faces of a dozen grouchy uncles and disappointed aunts at Thanksgiving or Passover. They made me think for the first time about the terrible loneliness of prophets. My group was ushered in and allowed fifteen minutes of astonished communion. Then we were ushered out.

When I was in my forties, I revisited the Sistine Chapel. It happened during the coronavirus pandemic, during the interval between Christmas and New Year’s. I found myself toiling over a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, one of a series of famous paintings. Neighbors had exchanged some puzzles via porch-drop some months before, and I’d ended up with this one. Work took a break, school took a break, and I took a break. I lacked the intellectual energy for a new knitting project or even for watching a new TV series. So I opened the box and began staring at tiny puzzle pieces.

I didn’t know I needed to see my heavy-hearted friends Joel and Zechariah once again, and all the bizarre cruelty of the Old Testament God who created and then punished humankind, and dared Abraham to cut off his son’s head, and sent a fish to swallow Jonah (who faces his fate with bravura foreshortening). All while lads and lasses with finely-turned ankles and tennis-pro hip flexors cling to trompe-l’oeil plaster and gawk and giggle and gasp. It is such a deeply weird work of art. And the weirdness drew me right in. Michelangelo, as usual, shows us worse suffering than our own, deeper despair than our own. Even the rampant nakedness—all those sassy babies and imps and tennis pros—gave me something approaching gratitude for the numbing rotation of hoodies I lived in night and day that winter.

I still check in with the Roman Catholic boy. We’ve video-chatted every few weeks since we’ve been in isolation. He’s still Roman Catholic; I’m once again a half-Jewish half-gentile quasi-Lutheran atheist, after a good run at clinging to the rock face of faith. Maybe it’s a ceiling. Maybe it’s only easy to cling to it when you’re paint on plaster, when you’re sitting on a plinth with a scroll in your lap, and nothing ever happens to you but five hundred years of stunned faces staring up at you. Conservators have always wished those staring faces were wearing masks, because their breath is slowly killing you. But you love them (even their breath) because, somehow, you still love humanity.

Sarah Berger author photoSarah Berger is a writer and classical singer living in Baltimore. Her essays and stories have been published in Prometheus Dreaming, Shards/Glass Mountain, Big Whoopie Deal, Passengers Journal, and The Nasiona. She is writing a novel about a cohort of music students graduating in 1965, and she’s currently in the University of Baltimore’s MFA program in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts. More of Sarah’s writing can be found at www.sarahbergersoprano.com/writing.

CHERRY BOMB by Todd Clay Stuart

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CHERRY BOMB
by Todd Clay Stuart

The object of the game is to see how long we can hold a lit Cherry Bomb in our hand before tossing it away. Ray-Ray Campbell claims he’s champion of the fucking world. Took the title from his dirtbag dad before a judge sent him up the river on weapons charges. It’s like playing rock, paper, scissors or hot potato, except for the ferocious explosions.

Our moms are at work, so Ray-Ray and I are down at the creek on a hot summer day, raiding crab apple trees and smoking Marlboro Reds bought at the bowling alley from the cigarette vending machine with change swiped from his mom’s purse. Unlike his dad, Ray-Ray was pretty good about sharing things he’d stolen.

We patrol the creek in our bare feet, looking for something to kill, something other than time. It hasn’t rained in days, and the water is still and clear, the minnows and tadpoles skittering away in a frenzy. I’ve stripped down to the camo shorts Mom bought me at the Army surplus store the day before a truck bomb surpluses Dad all over the corrugated steel walls of his barracks in Beirut.

Ray-Ray pulls out a wrinkly, brown paper bag from the back pocket of his cut-off jeans. Hands me a plump red Cherry Bomb with a short green fuse. “Ladies first,” he says.

I take a slow drag off my cigarette, use the tip of it to light the fuse. Sparks fly and at three Mississippi, I flip the explosive into the creek and it blows a bunch of crawdaddies out of the water.

“Not bad for a pussy,” Ray-Ray says.

It’s his turn.

He lights the fuse. Raises his fist in the air triumphantly. Closes his eyes. The cicadas are at full song. In a week they’ll all be dead and gone.

At four Mississippi the Cherry Bomb goes off. Ray-Ray just stands there, stone-faced, swallowing his pain, watching his blown-off thumb sink slowly in the cold, clear water. He holds his hand up to his face and looks at it like he’s not sure if he’s won or lost. 

Todd Clay Stuart Todd Clay Stuart is an emerging American writer from the Midwest. He studied creative writing at the University of Iowa. His work appears or is forthcoming in Milk Candy Review, New World Writing, Bending Genres, and Emerge Literary Journal. He lives with his wife, daughter, and two loyal but increasingly untrustworthy pets. Find him on Twitter @toddclaystuart and on his website at http://toddclaystuart.com.

ADDING APPETIZERS by Claire Oleson

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ADDING APPETIZERS
by Claire Oleson

She was sitting on a stool in the basement of the restaurant watching the octopus spin. It was on a cold/cold cycle in the washing machine. This was how they tenderized it, Ellis had told her, overjoyed he had something genuinely interesting to offer. It was this nauseous moving smudge, the octopus, not his telling. She was coming to adore it, the borderless slosh. No, more than that, she could believe she loved it, adjusting her over-the-knee pin-stripe skirt in the cold-damp of the concrete room, it was good. A man she also loved was upstairs, drunk, frying things, cutting real close to his fingers, and working someone else’s shift, and Ellis was on his way down to her, in his unadorned state, in an apron, having been washing dishes, walking down the concrete stairs to finish talking to her about the new crudo option on the menu so she could finish her little write-up for some hyper-local culinary column that at least her dad liked to read. The suckers and the head were a singular hum.

When had she started with the rabbit traps? Seven winters ago when her grandmother had shown her, when they were up north and the snow had settled in whipped-cream heaves on every roof/road/sidewalk/way of getting anywhere at all. It made everybody a trudger. You’d look out past the exhale of farmland and someone would be getting to their truck, in the over-the-knee white, forcing themselves into the day, trudging. No one was delicate. No one was flashing with glimpses of dorsal appendages or outer gills, even though this, she supposed, had been a cold/cold cycle too. That thought was nothing. Her knees looked a little blushed against the stark border of black cloth. Her grandmother had liked French cooking. Her grandmother had tied barbed wire into halos for the rabbit traps and left them in the snow by the wood’s edge. They were attached to something else (Ellis was on his way, she could hear him upstairs), but she could never complete the traps herself. She could only bend and knot the wire with a pair of needle-nose pliers and pass the circles to her grandmother. Her mother would look on. Her mother would pass through the kitchen in little steps and look at the both of them, her eyes stinging with salt water, as if they were killing a man. Her mother’s whole face, one pang. She might have stopped making the circles if her mother didn’t also love the rabbit, the French rabbit, accompanied by glazed carrots, steaming up a frosted window, beyond which some neighbor was dredging their thighs through the snow. She just made the circles and slid them across the table.

The octopus was still making its own feverish orbits when he finally got down to her. His face was so pleased as it ducked under a ceiling pipe. He got to talk to her, her on the stool in the skirt across from the washer, he got to talk to her about the crudo. She had her recorder out, extended towards him. She looked politely happy. This was only a little worse than if she’d looked completely bored. Ellis knew she cared more for the prep chef who did cocaine sometimes, but the prep chef was upstairs getting paid more, not down here in the concrete enclosure with its stagnant fluorescence and one woman gazing at a thrashing cephalopod; Ellis was lucky. What if he just said he loved her and could get her good dinner, good dinner for years. Sure, he didn’t love her yet, but oh he knew he could muster it up, given some time. The tape recorder had its mouth towards him but hers was slightly parted and facing the washer. She was supposed to be asking him something, for sure, but she was tired and crowding her brain with full-fat pictures of brutal winters. Ones where the snow got over the height of the shed, once, but they’d gone on separating rabbit thigh from bones with their teeth like it hadn’t. Biting like they weren’t in any actual danger. Biting like the pale outsides were just salt hills, not the guts of snowstorms. She was supposed to ask him things, but what did he care. There wasn’t another stool. He sat on the floor in front of her. In between her and the octopus. He took up her sight and smiled. His face was so open, teeth haunting just behind his smile, words about to breach. His face was so open; one pang; she thought.

“So after an hour on rinse, we take them out and they are quickly cleaned, chopped, drizzled with olive oil and smoked sea salt, and accompanied with basil leaves and blood oranges and sectioned grapefruit. It’s plated on a dipped plate, not quite a bowl, but with sloped edges that makes a wide pool of it all. Everything is, absolutely, sliced as thinly as feasible. We take the tentacles through a deli meat slicer. They should be like meat-paper. It’s clean and refreshing on the palate. It’s a beautiful opener to a meal, scrapes the long day out of your mouth and sparks it with sodium and citrus.” She was looking at him now, realizing he wanted, almost, to just write the column himself. That no one said “sparked” unless they thought up the word beforehand, hauling it through their brain like an extra body, an extra life to push into the light. It would be a trim and sparse paragraph, thin and shoved to the corner, probably no wider than the sliced crudo itself, certainly not terribly thicker, if he’d meant what he’d said about paper. Okay, why not let him basically do it, him and all his hoping at her.

Her grandmother’s neighbor had come in weeping once. Around her ankle: pinching wire, and out of her grandmother: so many apologies, then an invite to dinner. An invite to the rabbit her neighbor could have been. Her grandmother kneeled and cut the wire off of the jeaned ankle. Nothing had broken skin, but the area was strained and swollen. Her grandmother had traced the red circle with the pad of her thumb, checking. She had been thinking that her grandmother ought to just marry this neighbor. When had her grandfather died? Well before she herself knew how to make halos for rabbits, that was certain.

Just look at her, the neighbor, sitting while a white-haired guilt kneeled by her legs. She was sitting and not crying and trying to let the feeling of being an almost-animal fizzle off her leg. Someone had to marry her. The wet sat in her eyes, poised bright like someone’s waiting child in a too-large chair.

“Is it good?” She pushed the recorder forward half an inch. It was the laziest, most inane question. He knew that. He could love her. Give him six months. Someone, give him six months.

“What? Oh, yeah, I mean I think it’s superb, and I have had it. They, I guess we, test all the new menu additions with the entire kitchen staff. Even if you’re only washing dishes, you get to eat the entire restaurant. It’s truly a stunner and certainly a very unique dish to have offered this far from the coast. I assure you,” he placed a palm on the washer window behind him, “that despite the distance, the octopus is incredibly fresh. Now, it’s not the Italian coast by any means, but show me better in small-town Montana and I’ll quit working here and move in with you.” He hadn’t meant it. Or sure, he had, but he hadn’t meant to mean it. She brushed it off like it was nothing, like it was stray hair on her shoulder, like he wouldn’t absolutely take a blushed knee in this basement and set a hand on her skirted leg and talk himself into already loving her. He watched her write something down about smoked salt. His palm thrummed. It was still on the glass, blocking the picture.

Something upstairs crashed. Something upstairs yelled and balked at flashing oil. What she was in love with was above them, she remembered. He took his hand off the glass and raised a finger. He ran up the stairs under a deluge of swears. He ran up the stairs to where she actually held some adoration. He started swearing along with them, to make it better, to slide into the hurt of the room like a knife into a block. The cycle stopped. The body stilled and slumped. The washing machine beeped four blissful robotic notes.

By the time the day was cleaned, by the time any glow bled out of view of the singular basement-alley window and Ellis came back down to her with new oil burns on his wrists and one on his neck that he’d have to find later, she would already be holding the octopus in her lap. She would be washing fingertips down its legs to check for bleeding, to check for signs of being an animal. Her hair would linger and stick to its damp bulbous head. A few blonde tips would cling to the wet of a cornea when she finally turned to find his face, his coming down.

Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson is a Brooklyn-based writer hailing from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She’s an alum of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review online, the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, the L.A. Review of Books, and Newfound Press, among others. She is also the 2019 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize and author of the chapbook Things From the Creek We Could Have Been. 

 

THE LOBSTER by Gabby Capone

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Pink Lobster

THE LOBSTER
by Gabby Capone

It was winter, mid-December, much too cold to leave him there—the lobster, on my porch. I don’t know how he got there, whether he’d walked or hailed a cab. But it was snowing, and he looked so sad, bright red with embarrassment to ask for my help. And so I decided, I would open my door instead of my arms. I’ve heard that lobsters don’t like to be hugged. He scuttled over the threshold, leaving a damp trail in his wake.

For a few moments we sat at the dining table, staring at each other from either end. I offered to cut the rubber bands from his claws, “You’ll be so much more comfortable that way,” I told him as I reached for my kitchen shears. He didn’t answer, but I could’ve sworn he let out a small sigh of relief when the scissors sliced through his elastic cuffs.

“I’d like you to stay here,” I started, “with me.” I waited for his answer, chest full and heavy—a fishbowl hidden inside my rib cage. Silence leaked into the room. We were quiet for a long time, and at one point, I was certain he was unable to speak. “You need to kill me,” he said, “but I might hurt you. You freed my claws.” My chest deflated, confusion and sadness tapped at the glass of the fishbowl. “No. I can’t kill you, why would I do something like that?” He did not answer this time. He just stared at me with sad, glazy lobster eyes.

Lobsters are not good pets. I wasn’t suited to care for him. He wasn’t suited to be cared for. So we sat, in my warm kitchen, discussing the plan for his demise. “I could buy lobster anesthesia, then boil you,” I offered. The lobster winced. “I could take a sharp knife through your underbelly, hack through the softest spots.” Again, he refused. “I don’t want to kill you,” I whispered, placing my palms flat against the wooden table. “You have to. You know you have to,” the lobster said.

We drove to the beach, my car racing against the setting sun. I left the windows down for fresh air. I thought it would make me feel better—lighter, but it didn’t. As we got closer, the smell of the sea got stronger, and it only made me sadder. The lobster sat in my passenger seat, toying with the radio. The sound of static and washed-out voices came and went. I didn’t even mind that he was getting the leather wet. It didn’t bother me that my car would smell like sand for weeks. We drove for what felt like a long time.

“I’m going to miss you,” I smiled sadly, turning off the engine. He wouldn’t look at me. He just kept trying to open the door. “I hope you survive this,” I said, allowing him to crawl out of the car and onto the pavement. “You too,” he called from over his shoulder, heading towards the wetness and salt. Lobsters that have been captured cannot survive in the wild. The ocean will reject them, and they will die.

Sometimes, you will find a lobster on your doorstep. And you’ll want to love him, but won’t know how.

Gabby Capone is a sophomore at New York University. She has a passion for writing, reading, and creating. Gabby is majoring in English Education and hopes to teach creative writing in the future. Poetry and literature exist at the center of her life, alongside her family and her loved ones.

 

 

WE’VE WAITED FOR VACCINES by Rebecca Entel

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Graphic design image of title, two syringes, and author name

WE’VE WAITED FOR VACCINES
by Rebecca Entel

Of when my father had polio, I’ve heard disjointed details but no narrative. Scalding baths, quarantine, how many adults held him down for the spinal tap, the iron lung, paralysis that one day disappeared.

In the world outside, my grandmother lengthened his Hebrew name with Chaim, Life, and my grandfather delivered bread through the night. Under the covers, his sister plucked the braces from her teeth with scissors.

Each time visiting hours ended, my grandparents stood outside the hospital staring up at a window.

Polio came to him in 1954. The vaccine came to him in 1955.

We’ve spoken of 2020 itself as a golem. We’ve started posting pictures of injections or envious responses to others’ pictures of injections.

No social media archive exists indicating whether my grandparents dreamt of a vaccine/knew it was coming/raged it had come belatedly for their kid/had never felt such relief when it came, even when they thought they could feel no more relief than three of them leaving the hospital, six legs walking.

There’s one photograph of the bicycle bought for him after, with pooled money, and in it my father’s blurry with motion.

We’ve let words into our hourly vocabulary: quarantine, distancing, strains, herd, cases. Daily math problems so vast we can’t see each individual number. We’ve said/meant we, but we’ve been mostly wrong.

Both of my parents remember waiting their turn at school for the shot. When I ask them for memories of receiving the vaccine, that’s the only one: standing in line.

My mother tells me I had the Sabin oral vaccine—drops on my tongue—rather than the Salk injection. She tells me to google, just for curiosity’s sake, the sugar cube version. My mind conjures an image of children not chewing or sucking but letting the cube slowly, slowly dissolve. Thinking of it, I can feel it. A year of sheltering has been something like this: mouth, tongue, et cetera, holding still but activating in anticipation of the sweet.

We’ve reached for metaphors.

Salivating sounds bestial, carnal, silly. I mean more like a waiting that demands all focus. I mean more like a wanting that can’t be helped.

Headshot of Rebecca Entel Rebecca Entel is the author of the novel Fingerprints of Previous Owners. Her short stories and essays have been published in such journals as Catapult, Guernica, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, and Cleaver. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she teaches U.S. literature, Caribbean literature, creative writing, and the literature of social justice. You can find her at rebeccaentel.com, on Twitter @rebeccaentel, and on Instagram @rebeccaentel.

 

MAKING THE READER FEEL SOMETHING. PLEASE. SHOW AND TELL, A Craft Essay by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

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MAKING THE READER FEEL SOMETHING. PLEASE. SHOW AND TELL.
A Craft Essay
by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

 

“Show, don’t tell.”

An old piece of writing advice, generally good advice, but sometimes hard to know how to do it well. Also, confusing, because telling is often part of the showing, especially when writing personal essay and memoir.

The advice stems from how writers can best help readers understand what they are trying to convey—everything from emotions and mental state to the tone of a situation, the nature of a person or relationship, the look and feel of a setting. And much more.

What if I wrote, “I’m so mad!” Do those words and the exclamation point make you feel my anger? They just aren’t enough.  I must work harder to convey my anger.

Writing how an emotion makes us feel in our body or how it looks sometimes works. But it, too, might not be enough. Writing “my face turned red” tells you what I looked like (and it is probably better than “I’m so mad!”), but showing by using such a predictable, overused description probably doesn’t help you feel my anger. And I want you to feel it, not just know about it.

There are many other techniques you can use to show and tell. Here are a few:

  • Share the narrator’s thoughts and internal dialogue with herself.
  • Write a scene when a scene is more effective than a summary.
  • Describe a character’s (the narrator’s or someone else’s) behavior/action and/or reaction.
  • Use dialogue (indirect, direct, summary, inner) as well as show what is not said, or show silence.
  • Bring the senses, details, and description to the page.
  • Find strong verbs.
  • Give an example. Be specific.
  • Choose sentence length to match the emotion/tone.

Now let me show you a few examples where writers have done show and tell well.

EXAMPLE #1:

In Ross Gay’s essay “Some Thoughts on Mercy” (The Sun, July 2013), he discusses racism and writes about a night when he was driving home from work late at night and a cop pulled him over. Gay writes, offering the reader his thoughts, “I wasn’t perturbed by the cop. I had made a decision in the recent past no longer to be afraid of the police.” This is the scene he gives us:

And so, for the first time in my life when a cop came to my car window, I looked him in the eye and asked as gently and openheartedly as possible if he could tell me why he’d stopped me. “After you give me your license and registration,” he said. I handed them over, and he told me simply, “Your license-plate light is out.” I’d had no idea there was such a thing as a license-plate light, and I told him as much, laughing to express my good-natured confusion and gratitude: He wants to do me a favor.

And he smiled—just for a second—then asked if I had any drugs in the car. When I said no, he asked if I had any guns in the car. When I said no, he asked if I’d been drinking. When I said no, he asked again, “You don’t have any weapons or anything illegal in the car I should know about?” (Strange, you might think, for such questions to arise from a burned-out license-plate light.) And I said, looking straight ahead through the windshield, “No.”

Look at all he accomplished in this short scene. Gay “looked the cop in the eye” (behavior/action)—showing a wish to connect and also animating his decision to feel no fear. Ross describes how he asked the cop “as gently and openheartedly as possible” why he’d been pulled over. He could have written about using a sharp tone or asking matter-of-factly. But “gently” and “openheartedly” help us understand the author’s mindset. The cop doesn’t answer the question—he tells Gay he wants license and registration first (direct dialogue). The tension starts. By the time I get to the cop’s questions in a row (first two are indirect dialogue)—and the nature of the questions themselves—the tension escalates more. Having that third question written in direct dialogue—“You don’t have any weapons or anything illegal in the car I should know about?”—ups the tension even more. And then that last moment—of Gay no longer looking at the cop (action/reaction) but “looking straight ahead through the windshield” when he answers no (that is all he says, so note what is not being said/silence—and that’s a short sentence, just “no,” which is also effective at showing mindset). This makes me feel that any hope of change in that moment is gone.

EXAMPLE #2

In Sam Bell’s essay “The Empty Set” (The Sun, April 2020), she writes, “I dated a lunatic in college.” But what does that mean? He had outlandish ideas? He liked to speed on the highway? A label is not enough, so she follows with:

Here are some of the things he did: lit a cigarette as we deplaned on the tarmac and, after he was asked to put it out, flung the butt into the circular engine intake, causing chaos, then ran from the attendants, leaving me behind; kicked in car doors with his steel-toed boots in a very expensive neighborhood; came after me with a hammer; stole all my money. You know what? He’s not worth talking about.

She gives examples of his behaviors (with great details), and by the end of the list (even before the end), I agree and understand what she means when she calls him “a lunatic.” Let’s note the strong verbs: “flung,” “kicked,” “stole.” And then those last two sentences—“You know what? He’s not worth talking about” (not just what they say, but also the sentence length)—convey she’s tired of the mental space he has taken.

EXAMPLE #3

In Sophfronia Scott’s essay “Why I Didn’t Go to the Firehouse” (Timberline Review, Fall/Winter 2019), she writes about being newly pregnant:

I loved that time of walking newly pregnant through New York City as the days were getting colder. I liked knowing I harbored my own bit of heat, a tiny ball of sunshine growing within me and waiting to warm its own universe. I lived in a realm of possibility and I remember being acutely conscious of it, of soaking up life and magic all around me—savoring the sugar of a Krispy Kreme donut melting in my mouth, my steps touching down on pavement that seemed gentle beneath my feet. I walked down Columbus Avenue and I saw a dual face, my own mingled with some aura of my unborn child, reflected to me in the smiling faces of strangers who couldn’t possibly know I was pregnant. But in that strange law of nature, life attracts life, recognizes itself and feeds there. Every face seemed like a harbinger of grace, of the potential held by the being growing inside me. I felt a strong sense of the whole experience being a gift and I was grateful. I loved being in that golden bubble. It felt like where I was supposed to be. It felt like home.

Then suddenly—blood.

Scott begins by describing what is going through her mind (thoughts), how it felt to be newly pregnant—not the physical sensation, but her emotional and mental state. She picks out sensory details and specifics that reflect a sweetness and peace: the donut melting in her mouth, the pavement “gentle,” and every face “like a harbinger of grace.” I was with her in a glowing, happy picture.

Then that single three-word sentence. Jarring? The blood was jarring to her, and she wanted to convey that. She did in one, swift (short!) sentence—not just by the words, but because the sentence is set in its own paragraph.

EXAMPLE #4

Here’s a paragraph from Natalie Lima’s essay, “Snowbound” (Brevity, September 2019), about her leaving Florida to attend her “dream school” in Chicago, only to experience disillusionment at what she finds. Let’s look at how she uses strong verbs. (Basic verbs describe a general action—like “I walked down the hall” and “I sat in my chair”—versus a more specific and stronger verb such as “I shuffled down the hall” or “I slumped in my chair.”) By interspersing basic verbs with strong verbs, Lima’s prose is more effective; an entire paragraph with all strong verbs might be too much. Here I have bolded the stronger verbs.

The inside of your dorm room is muggy when you plop onto your bed. The heat suffocates your skin, so you unzip your North Face and throw it across the room. It lands on your roommate’s desk, almost knocks over her laptop. You want to get up and grab the jacket but your body can’t seem to move. You sit still, sinking into the mattress, trying to remember what it felt like to float.

EXAMPLE #5

In my own memoir, The Going and Goodbye, I was writing about a love I’d experienced with someone when we were both young and I did not yet understand the difficulties that could come in a committed relationship. Instead of saying that, I tried to show it with this scene in which I had asked him to go with me on a ride in an amusement park:

The ride threw us up, up, and down, down, and our bucket spun so fast we slid into each other, smashed skin to skin, and the fair and everything we could see blurred and washed together in an uneasy glimpse, again, again, and neither one of us laughed as the pace quickened, as we spun so fast everything I had ever eaten tossed in my gut, and round and round we went until the sky was in our laps and our bodies felt as if we could not press harder against the bucket’s edges, and up we tossed and down we came and up again and down and up and down and up and down until the dizziness felt like failure.

The ride slowed and stopped. The man ambled over. He lifted the metal rod and let us loose, and we staggered off the ride for which we had paid. We held our stomachs and could not bear the scent of sizzling meat, nor could we look at the fruit in market stalls, their peels broken and the flesh sweltering through. We could not have glanced at scarves swaying in the breeze nor born the sound of water beating against the shore.

We returned to our hotel room and lay on separate beds. We turned on our sides and on our backs, but nothing kept the world from free falling.  

I tried to select strong verbs like “smashed” and “blurred” to create an uncomfortable feeling, and I used a long sentence in that first paragraph to show how the ride went on and on. I also tried to use the senses (e.g., “scent of sizzling meat”) to evoke nausea.

Most of this kind of work doesn’t happen for me on the first draft. My first drafts get my ideas on the page, and later drafts are often when I try out the sort of techniques I listed to see what works best for the piece.

If you look at your own writing drafts, you might see where you can revise, using one or more of these techniques. With enough practice and use of these, you won’t need this list. Your writing will show you where it needs to go to make the reader feel what you want them to.

Shuly Xóchitl CawoodShuly Xóchitl Cawood is an award-winning author. Her books include the memoir, The Going and Goodbye (Platypus Press) and A Small Thing to Want: stories (Press 53). She teaches memoir and personal essay workshops. Learn more at her website.

A GHOST IN THE THROAT, a novel by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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A GHOST IN THE THROAT
by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Biblioasis [North American edition forthcoming in June]
reviewed by Beth Kephart

“This is a female text,” Doireann Ní Ghríofa asserts as her story begins. A rouse. A prayer. A persuasion.

A female text because Ní Ghríofa suffuses her days with the domestic arts of hoovering, dusting, folding, mothering, and bends her prose toward those ticking rhythms when she carves out a moment and writes.

A female text because Ní Ghríofa carries the lament of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an Irish noblewoman of the late eighteenth century, in her bones as she works—a poem called Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, a poem of howling grief erupted from the murder of the poet’s husband.

A female text because the words have risen up in Ní Ghríofa and stayed:

This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thought that swoops, now, from my body to yours.

Ní Ghríofa wants us to know the story of the widow, whose poem still keens across the centuries but whose biography is thin, vanished, vanquished, even, within histories written mostly about men, by men.

Ní Ghríofa wants us to know the story of the widow, whose poem still keens across the centuries but whose biography is thin, vanished, vanquished, even, within histories written mostly about men, by men. She wants us to understand what it is to be driven to exhaustion by the exhilarating desire to find out, to learn more, to exhale the ether of an obsession. She wants us to hear the mewl of her babies in the background as she thinks, the mechanical sigh of the breast pump, the sounds of others sleeping while she lays awake at night, dreaming her way toward Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.

I wish to shout because this book is so profoundly beautiful and so beautifully profound—a female text with so much to say about the ways we serve others (our families, our homes, our obsessions) and the ways that serving shapes us, and how being alone is never being alone, and how imagination always leaves us a few truths short, but it is what we have, it is the best we can do, it may even be the best of us. Imagination yields.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Imagination runs thick in Ní Ghríofa, who, even as a child, was scolded for weaving her dreams into history, her fantasies into facts. She’ll plunk rain into an evening, wash mud through a ditch, instigate a flirtation as she builds her theories about the great Irish noblewoman who, when alerted by an empty-saddle horse that her husband was in danger, leapt upon that horse’s back and rode and rode until she found the man she loved in a pool of his own blood and knelt and drank that blood in her great grief. Ní Ghríofa will haunt city streets and a graveyard for proof of what was—conjuring what is not there, intuiting what must have been. During crowded domestic days, in crowded spaces, over many years, Ní Ghríofa will chase this ghost of the past, and have I said yet how much I love this book, how I clung to it as proof that there is still something new in the literary world, still something worth shouting about?

I wish to shout about this. About a book with chapter titles like “cold lips to cold lips” and “blot. blot.” and “wild bees and their fizzy curiosities.” With lines like: “To work this soil is to sift the archeology of a stranger’s thoughts.” With confessions like: “I have held her and held her, only to find that she holds me too, close as ink on paper and steady as a pulse.” With passages like:

Back at my own clothesline, I think of those women. I arrange my body as they did: I look up. The clouds seem a flood, suspended far overhead. Our pasts are deep underwater. Our pasts are submerged in elsewheres.

I wish to shout because this book is so profoundly beautiful and so beautifully profound—a female text with so much to say about the ways we serve others (our families, our homes, our obsessions) and the ways that serving shapes us, and how being alone is never being alone, and how imagination always leaves us a few truths short, but it is what we have, it is the best we can do, it may even be the best of us. Imagination yields.

It has given us the genuine miracle of A Ghost in the Throat.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning adjunct at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a widely-published essayist. Wife | Daughter | Self: a memoir in essays is her new book. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

PRESENTATION AND PERFORMANCE: The Art of Reading Your Work in Public, taught by Dinah Lenney, June / July 2021

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PRESENTATION AND PERFORMANCE:
The Art of Reading Your Work in Public

A Series of Clinics by Author and Actor Dinah Lenney
Taught on Zoom

Sunday, June 27, 3-5 pm ET $100
Sunday, July 25, 3-5 pm ET $100
Limit 6 participants per clinic
You may attend both clinics, but must register for each one
Questions: [email protected]

Register Now
What’s the secret to a great public reading? Do you worry about losing your place, stumbling over the words, or boring your listeners? In these workshops we’ll discuss the differences between reading and acting, as well as various strategies for connecting with an audience to leave them wanting more. We’ll talk about your choice of material, how long you should read, and how you can fully prepare in order to feel confident your listeners will be engaged and entertained. 

Author Dinah Lenney, a longtime stage and screen actor, will coach you through an excerpt from your own work and help you bring the best to your next live reading. Come prepared with two pages of your text (double-spaced), any genre, in a font that pleases you! These workshops are suitable for writers of every genre and level of experience, from veterans to new writers preparing for their first public readings. 

Dinah LenneyDinah Lenney has played countless roles on stage and television, from Lady Macbeth to ER’s Nurse Shirley. She’s a graduate of Yale, where she didn’t study theater, the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she did, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she presently teaches nonfiction. Dinah’s taught writing and acting in schools all over the country, and co-wrote Acting for Young Actors with director Mary Lou Belli. The author of The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, she also co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Her latest book, Coffee, was published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. Dinah lives (reads, writes, grinds, brews—in a Chemex, by the way) with her husband in Los Angeles.

OPEN WOUNDS: Writing Trauma and Memory, taught by Drew Pham June 7-July 21, 2021

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OPEN WOUNDS
Writing Trauma and Memory

Taught by Drew Pham
5 sessions, 5 weeks (Monday Evening) on Zoom 
June 7, 14, 21, 28, and July 12
6-8 pm ET
$200
Questions: [email protected]
Class Limit: 12

Register Now

“Don’t write a poem about war. Write a poem about standing in your brother’s empty room.”
—Guante

This course isn’t meant to heal the traumas of the past, nor does it seek to make sense of them, rather, we’ll seek out the fragments violently embedded in our wounds to use as the materials from which to craft something new. This inter-genre workshop will focus on the role and use of time, place, memory, narrative distance, form, and negative space, in order to render our traumas into sites of connection between ourselves, our lived experiences, our writing, and our readers.

Together, we will read from a broad range of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction to help illuminate the different roads we might take to begin to build our own narratives from sites of pain and loss in ourselves toward sites of compassion and empathy in our writing. Each session includes a short craft discussion, discussions of assigned readings, craft exercises, and a writer’s workshop (with the exception of our first session, which will be primarily discussion-based).

Although this course seeks to explore the most painful of our experiences with kindness and patience, the readings, discussions, and written work may cause distress. I only ask that those taking this course be mindful of their peers and be gentle with themselves.

Week One: Exit Wounds
Our introductory discussion seeks to navigate our personal traumas by locating sites of trauma, making space for ourselves and others in this process from both within and without our written work, and learning how writing might be used as a vehicle for curiosity, discovery, and empathy.

Week Two: Time, Place, and Memory
In week two, we’ll focus on how we can take the fragmentation that occurs when we’ve been deeply hurt and use these materials to rebuild them into structures that reflect the emotional landscape of the traumatic past. Here, we will focus on time management, making space for place as a concept, and memory as a flawed but essential tool.

Week Three: Mapping the Wound
This craft session is concerned with sensory detail, structure, and constraint. In examining readings on past traumas, we’ll explore how sensory details universalize a narrative, rather than rarifying them. We’ll also examine constraints like lapses in memory, negative space, and silence, and incorporate these into narrative and lyric structures that contain the emotional truths of the experiences we seek to render.

Week Four: Narrative Distances
Week four focuses on considering narrative distance not as a gulf to cross, but as a way of seeing. This week’s exercises, discussion, and readings will center around how employing narrative distance as technique might allow us to see our traumatic memories, our work, and ourselves as whole, rather than fragmented or broken.

Week Five: Scar Tissue|
In our final session, we’ll focus on measures of grace, not just for the subjects of our poems, the experiences we lay bare on the page, or the characters of our stories, but also for ourselves and those around us. This class will be a space for participants to synthesize what they’ve discovered, and extend those new perspectives into their bodies of work, revision, and practice.

Drew PhamDrew Pham is a queer, transgender writer of Vietnamese heritage. A child of war refugees, her work centers on legacies of violence in times of conflict. She has published in Blunderbuss Magazine, McSweeny’s, Slice Magazine, Foreign Policy, Time Magazine, The Daily Beast, and Columbia Journal, among others. She lives with her two cats in Brooklyn, NY, and she serves as an adjunct English lecturer at CUNY Brooklyn College.

Michelle Ross Interviews Dan Crawley, Author of STRAIGHT DOWN THE ROAD, a novella in flash

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Michelle Ross Interviews Dan Crawley, Author of STRAIGHT DOWN THE ROAD, a novella in flash

Dan Crawley’s novella-in-flash, Straight Down the Road, was highly commended by judge Michael Loveday in the 2019 Bath Novella in Flash Award and published by Ad Hoc Fiction. His debut short story collection, The Wind, It Swirls, is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press this year.

Michelle Ross: Straight Down the Road is set during a family road trip. There’s a kind of out-of-time feeling to the trip. Are they on the road for a couple of months? Is it years? For the reader, it feels like the road is home for this family. Is the road home for them or do you know this family in other times and places that don’t appear on the page?

Dan Crawley: I love this question, Michelle. Yes, the “out-of-time” feeling is very intentional.

When I first started writing these stories, I was constantly debating whether to give a timeframe and if I might place these characters in a static setting, like a home. I decided the dad would briefly mention a rental home in a micro but came down on the side of not wanting to specify the length of time they’re on the road. These characters are wanderers, traveling to no real destination.

So the station wagon, the Plymouth, and the road became their only homes. That feels right for the “world” of this novella, which delves into the feelings that emerge from the lack of a safety net. And the changing settings, I think, add to this anxiety the characters feel, especially the mom. I wanted the change of sceneries to be recognizable to any reader, too, maybe reminding them of their own past road trips.

MR: I love how you call the parents “the mom” and “the dad” (as opposed to “the mother” and “the father”). It feels just right. Was this a quick, instinctive choice?

DC: Since this novella is set in the 1970s, I went back to my own childhood. I’ve never called my parents mother or father. Mom/Dad is so much less formal, and I am anything but formal with my own parents! It was an instinctive choice, more endearing, I think.

MR: Let’s talk about titles. In particular, I’m struck by “Ran Out of Money.” The title does so much work for that story, work that might have been otherwise tricky to accomplish in the piece itself. Do you recall whether that title came to you early on or later in revising? In general, do you tend to title stories early in the drafting or later?

DC: Generally, I tend to grab a phrase or a few words from the story for its title. Or even a word that gives a reader the gist of what the story may be about. This happens after a draft or two.

I’m glad you bring up this particular story. My initial thought was to write a flash about this family running out of money. I wanted to place them in a dire situation, with no money for even a motel room or a proper dinner. What would they do? How would they get through a night? So, even though I didn’t realize it at first, this title was there before I even wrote a sentence. I loved shaping a story around this conflict, using such a stylized tone. Here I had a dark moment in this family’s plight but wrote the flash as a romp.

MR: Recently, when you talked about Straight Down the Road for the Desert Flash series hosted by Sudha Balagopal and Rudri Patel, you said you found beginning with the last piece of the book, which had been published first,  helpful. You said, “I need to know where I’m going.” Is that often true for you in your writing?

Dan Crawley: Knowing the ending line for a given story in advance is beneficial when it happens, but most of the time I struggle with endings. I am a big proponent, though, of letting the characters guide the narrative with their dialogue or actions. More times than not, they propel me toward a satisfying conclusion.

For this novella, it was a huge advantage to be writing toward an already known conclusion. It helped me create some of the foreshadowing in the earlier stories, like the dad telling his story of driving a truck when he was young.

MR: Did you write the rest of the stories in random order or in the order in which they appear in the novella?

DC: Including a strong conflict in the second story (“Jumping Off A Cliff”) helped a lot in writing the stories that followed. That thread of the dad’s rash decision was always there in my thinking as I worked on the other flashes although a few of the stories were written outside the chronological order of the novella, like “Five Sugar Cookies and Two Pieces of Beef Jerky,” “Lamb Chops,” “A Classmate,” and “Protective Services.”

MR: I’m curious if there are any pieces that could have been arranged differently and the novella still work as a whole?

DC: I am so happy you asked this specific question. I did spend some time thinking about where to place “Lamb Chops.” I decided it should come after the diner story because the tension is heightened in the stories that follow.

In ordering the stories, I also thought about the mom and dad each having their say. This approach guided the set-up of many of the stories, which made the whole process more feasible to me.

MR: What immediately comes to mind is this series of three flashes toward the middle of the novella: “The Story About the Inebriated Bread Truck Driver,” “Anyplace Can Be Home,” and “Unmoored.” The tension between the mom and the dad escalates in moving back and forth from his point of view to hers.

DC: I’m so glad you brought up these specific stories. The bread truck story is the first moment the mom shows her anger with her husband, snapping back at him. The micro fiction that follows, “Anyplace Can Be Home,” returns to the dad’s POV. I wanted the dad to reveal his view as the provider in their family. He will find a stable home where they all can live together, “which is the way it should always be.” It’s a plea to his wife, really, even though he’s speaking to everyone.

“Unmoored,” which is from the mom’s POV, reveals her anxiety as the family is forced to down-size from the LTD station wagon to the Plymouth Duster, kind of like moving from a large, comfortable house to an apartment. The piece culminates with a story she tells her son about how his dad broke her heart. A desperate appeal for sympathy, really. She does this again in “A Classmate,” divulging her early relationship with her husband. More digs at him to show the rising tension.

I placed “Leaving Zion,” “Let’s Play Ball, Cecil,” and “Powers” together because they represent the moments when the vacation is still at full steam, and the children are not yet aware of their parents’ conflict.

MR: How did you know when the novella was done? That you didn’t need to write any more stories for it?

DC: Okay, I’m one of those weird writers (maybe I’m not so alone in this thinking?) that a piece of writing is never complete. Even with published work, I’m revising stories all the time, a line here or there, typically with work that appeared in journals a long time ago. Regarding the novella, I have had fleeting ruminations about a few other flashes that could’ve fit. One takes place in a drive-in movie theatre. And I’ve got ideas for a few other places this family can travel in their wanderings.

To be honest, though, I am happy with the length and how this novella turned out. At the last moment, when I submitted the novella to the Bath Flash Fiction Award, I had written seventeen stories, and I think they all do the job nicely.

MR: Flash novellas are not a form I’m versed in, but your gorgeous book has convinced me I should read more of these things. Do you remember what the first flash novella you ever read was? Also, do you have a favorite flash novella?

DC: Thank you so much for your kind words, Michelle. I’m glad my novella has encouraged you to seek out more novellas-in-flash to read.

I read Sophie Van Llewyn’s Bottled Goods when it came out in 2018. I was struck by her use of stand-alone flash fiction stories for chapters. And even though its length puts it closer to a novel, I found the brevity of chapters and the interlinked stories dealing with the same characters fascinating. Then I heard the term “novella-in-flash” in the lit community and started looking for these shorter books. Since then, I’ve read a lot of novellas. I love the form. For me, a few standouts are The Loss Detector by Meg Pokrass, The Way of the Wind by Francine Witte, Three Sisters of Stone by Stephanie Carty (Hutton), Three Men on the Edge by Michael Loveday, The Neverlands by Damhnait Monaghan, and The Chemist’s House by Jude Higgins. I’ve read a lot of novellas from Ad Hoc Fiction, too. I just finished two of their recently published novellas: The House on the Corner by Alison Woodhouse and When It’s Not Called Making Love by Karen Jones. Brilliant writing by these two writers. And there are so many other novellas-in-flash out there that I’m excited to read. I really hope this form continues to grow in popularity in the future.

MR: Your book of short stories The Wind, It Swirls is being published this year by Cowboy Jamboree Press. Tell me about that.

DC: I am proud of the work I’ve produced in this collection. It was very kind of Adam over at Cowboy Jamboree Press to see something in these stories, and I’m grateful for such a perfect home for my first full-length collection of stories.

The collection consists of thirty stories, some in long-form and some flash fiction. I think it is a good mix of my realism, image-driven aesthetic. I would say most of the characters in the stories are trying to hang on against the rough winds of relationship or financial woes. Really, this book encompasses the last few decades of my writing. The oldest story goes back to 2002, a long piece I published in The North American Review, with other pieces appearing recently in literary journals. Many of the stories first appeared in now-defunct journals (both print and online), so for many readers, it’ll be like checking out new work from me. I’m beyond excited and look forward to everyone reading it.

MR: What are you working on now?

DC: I’m trying to write a lot of micros and some flash fictions right now. I want to complete a full-length collection of these small stories, and I have about three dozen written so far. I don’t know how long it will take me to finish; I’m such a slow writer. Also, I’m envisioning these stories as belonging to two different categories: “When I was a child,…I thought like a child” and “But when I grew up, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). So my storytelling is going back and forth between these two character perspectives, wants, conflicts.

Michelle Ross is the author of the story collections There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award, and Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (and forthcoming in November 2021). Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Electric Literature, The Pinch, and other venues. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50, and other anthologies. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review. www.michellenross.com

Dan Crawley is the author of the novella Straight Down the Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019) and the short story collection The Wind, It Swirls (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021). His writing appears or is forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies, including JMWW, Lost Balloon, Tiny Molecules, and Atticus Review. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize.

MIXTAPES: The Music of Essays, taught by Claire Rudy Foster and shea wesley martin, June 6-27, 2021

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Mixtapes

MIXTAPES: The Music of Essays

A Workshop in Creative Nonfiction

Taught by Claire Rudy Foster and shea wesley martin
4 sessions, 4 weeks (Sunday evening) on Zoom
June 6, 13, 20, 27, 4 pm PT / 7pm ET
$200
Questions: [email protected]
Class Limit: 12

Register Now

How do you say “I love you” in five words? “I made you a mixtape.”

This class is designed for nonfiction writers who want to explore the wild, creative, fun side of essays. Instructors Claire Rudy Foster and shea wesley martin both use music and musicality in their acclaimed writing, from work in Autostraddle to ALA longlist pick Shine of the Ever. Foster and shea believe that incorporating music into an essay creates landscape, tone, and mood, and can even provide the structure of the essay itself.

Understanding the “music” of an essay builds from learning to listen. Essays, like songs, can contain verses, bridges, and hooks. In essay collections or short story collections, individual pieces speak to one another like the songs on a mixtape. This class will share valuable writing tools that help writers collect, arrange, collaborate, and produce material for essays that are moving, genuine, and deeply personal.

Week one: I made you a mixtape
Week two: Which songs belong?
Week three: Finding the right order
Week four: Embedded messages, hopes, and dreams

During class, writers will share their creative work and learn to find musicality in their essays’ language and lyricism. This workshop is taught by award-winning author Claire Rudy Foster, whose “mixtape” short story collection was an O: The Oprah Magazine pick for one of the best LGBTQ books of 2019; and shea wesley martin, a brilliant writer, educator, and DJ.

Claire Foster Rudy headshotClaire Rudy Foster is an award-winning queer, nonbinary trans author from Portland, Oregon. Foster’s critically acclaimed short story collection Shine of the Ever was an O: The Oprah Magazine pick for 2019. Their essays, fiction, reporting, book reviews, and other writing appear in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Allure, on NPR, and many other places. Foster is Senior Features Editor at The Rumpus. They still believe in the power of well-written sentences.

 

 

shea wesley martinshea wesley martin is a fat, Black, queer, non-binary writer based in the mountains of Vermont. they write about the joy, pain, and triumph of being Black, queer, and not-quite-woman in and beyond this world. a freelance educator, they also research, consult, and write about creating and sustaining liberatory learning spaces.

THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS, a Young Adult Novel by Chloe Gong, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS
by Chloe Gong
Simon Pulse, Simon & Schuster, 464 pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

These violent delights book jacketChloe Gong’s These Violent Delights is a vibrant reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, taking place during the Roaring Twenties in Shanghai of 1926. Gong’s tale of two star-crossed yet ill-fated lovers begins in the middle of a fierce blood feud between two warring gangs: the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers. Described as “an age-old hatred whose cause had been forgotten to time,” their bitter vendetta runs deeper than the Huangpu River that cuts through the city. The weight of each gang’s future rests heavily on the shoulders of both Juliette Cai, heir to the Scarlets, and Roma Montagov, heir to the White Flowers. The pain of betrayal burns at each heir’s core, engulfing their previous love in flames. However, when a sinister presence lurking within the depths of the Huangpu threatens all of Shanghai, Juliette and Roma must work together if they ever hope to save everyone, including each other.

I thoroughly enjoyed Gong’s rendition of a timeless classic, combining Shakespearean pomp with Jazz Age flair. Her story of Juliette and Roma still rings true to the original, but what makes her tale different is that Gong adds historical, sociopolitical, and supernatural elements that give her tale a new level of context and depth. These elements put our two titular characters in a situation that’s more than simply rekindling a love once lost—the fates of the Scarlets, the White Flowers, and all of Shanghai hang in the balance. Told through the perspectives of Juliette, Roma, and a few secondary characters, These Violent Delights explores the struggles of two former lovers not only fighting to define who they are, but also fighting hard to protect those they love.

I appreciate Gong’s choice to subvert the gendered character roles of Juliette and Roma. The dainty, demure Juliette we’ve seen before is now, as Gong writes, a “Killer. Violent. Ruthless. All those and more­—that’s who [Juliette] was now.” As the female heir to the Scarlets, Juliette has to prove herself tenfold because a demure girl has no place leading the gang, but a dangerous woman can.

I appreciate Gong’s choice to subvert the gendered character roles of Juliette and Roma. The dainty, demure Juliette we’ve seen before is now, as Gong writes, a “Killer. Violent. Ruthless. All those and more­—that’s who [Juliette] was now.” As the female heir to the Scarlets, Juliette has to prove herself tenfold because a demure girl has no place leading the gang, but a dangerous woman can. Roma, on the other hand, is written as an heir who is loyal to the White Flowers, but sees things as a means to an end. Driven by emotion, Roma was once favored among his gang, but Gong writes that “…one day Roma had been trusted by his father as closely as one should expect from a son and the next, regarded suspiciously as if Roma were the enemy.” Now Roma makes sure to tread lightly—for his own protection, the protection of what’s still rightfully his, and the power that comes with it.

Chloe Gong

As riveting as Juliette and Roma are, the secondary characters are rife with personalities befitting their namesakes. Juliette’s cousin Rosalind is as Shakespeare writes: “The all-seeing sun / ne’er saw her match since first the world begun.” Stunning, cunning, and beautiful, Rosalind and her sister Kathleen are sisters with a deep bond and affection for one another. Gong brings Shakespeare’s comedic heroines from As You Like It and makes them prominent and capable women worthy of one day running the Scarlets beside Juliette. In contrast, Juliette’s quick-tempered cousin Tyler is the next male in line to rule the Scarlets—posing a direct threat to Juliette. Gong writes, “[Juliette’s] cousin was a boy with steel skin and a heart of glass.”

In Roma’s court we have Benedikt and Marshall, two of my favorite pairs in this story and in the original tale as Benvolio and Mercutio. Gong writes that Benedikt “always seemed to be simmering over something right below the surface, but nothing ever came through, no matter how close he came to it.” A calm, collected peacekeeper, he ensures that Roma and Marshall don’t get into trouble. Marshall is the opposite. Impatient and impulsive, Marshall moves, as Gong writes, “like the world was on the verge of ending and he needed to jam as many movements in as possible.” Then we have the old, wise, and intelligent Lourens reminiscent of Friar Lawrence, offering advice and aid to Roma during his investigation of life and death. Gong’s choice to tell the story from these varied perspectives made me invested in how Juliette and Roma’s actions directly influence their lives as well. The lives of the secondary characters further raise the stakes for Juliette and Roma, as their rekindling love further puts their friends in harm’s way.

What I admire about Gong’s writing is that she uses descriptive language akin to Shakespeare, but modernizes it to the slang and flair of the twenties. She also incorporates Russian, Korean, and Chinese language throughout the story to strengthen her characters’ cultural backgrounds. Though the language is reminiscent of lofty Shakespearean, her imagery and attention to detail create such a gritty yet colorful world that I could clearly visualize.

When members of both the Scarlets and White Flowers fall victim to the maddening demise of the Huangpu beast, Juliette and Roma set off to discover the cause. Although a deep-seated vendetta keeps Juliette from trusting Roma, and Roma has to prove his loyalty to his father, they are both bound by their duties as heirs to protect the members of their respective gangs. Their investigation points to clues of the monster’s origin, but the truth is one that moves beyond the petty feud of the Scarlets and White Flowers­—the monster’s wrath threatens everyone who encounters it, putting all of Shanghai in danger.

Gong weaves Chinese history throughout Juliette and Roma’s story, having Shanghai’s socioeconomic and economic status in the Roaring Twenties influence the operations and allegiances of the Scarlets and White Flowers. Eastern culture finds itself shrinking at the expense of a Western culture seeking to become more prominent.

Gong weaves Chinese history throughout Juliette and Roma’s story, having Shanghai’s socioeconomic and economic status in the Roaring Twenties influence the operations and allegiances of the Scarlets and White Flowers. Eastern culture finds itself shrinking at the expense of a Western culture seeking to become more prominent. Communists are gaining prominence and power within the city through workers strikes and backdoor dealings, threatening the Nationalists who want Shanghai to remain as it was. Juliette notices this, which strikes a sour chord with her pride in being Shanghainese. Roma is the descendant of Russian immigrants who claim parts of Shanghai as their official territory, and he doesn’t want any more competition with other foreigners, especially Communists. French and British influences were taking hold of the city, the integration forming less of a melting pot and more like crabs fighting in a barrel. Gong describes Shanghai as “[a] place that rumbles on Western idealism and Eastern labor, hateful of its split and unable to function without it, multiple facets fighting and grappling in ever-constant quarrel.” This historical context grounds the story, making it more tangible and real for me as a reader.

Gong’s horrifyingly symbolic creature of the Huangpu, described from different points of view spread via rumors throughout the city, is a creature that only terrorizes Shanghai at night, and anyone caught in its wake kills themselves in madness. Rarely seen, the creature takes a form of its own in my mind as a reader, as well as the minds of the characters. What I enjoyed most about the beast was that as foreboding as it was, it was also vulnerable, in a way like the city of Shanghai. One account of the monster describes it “panting, as if in pain, as if struggling against itself, half cast in shadow but doubtlessly an unnatural, strange thing.” As I read further I realized that Shanghai was the same way, a formidable creature that no longer recognizes itself.

As the first book in a series, Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights is a captivating, sharp and suspenseful retelling of an age-old classic. Original and reminiscent of Shakespeare’s story, this work feels entirely new and leaves me excited to see how it continues.

Kristie Gadson is a copywriter by day, a book reviewer by night, and an aspiring comic book artist in-between time. Her passions lie in children’s books, young adult novels, fantasy novels, comics, and animated cartoons because she believes that one is never “too old” to learn the life lessons they teach. Kristie resides in Norristown on the outskirts of Philadelphia PA, which she lovingly calls “her little corner of the universe.”

QUEER (PRIVATE) EYE: Crafting a New Hardboiled Sleuth, a Craft Essay by Margot Douaihy

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QUEER (PRIVATE) EYE: Crafting a New Hardboiled Sleuth
by Margot Douaihy

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
—Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

There’s arguably no writer more emblematic of the hardboiled experience than Raymond Chandler. On the mean streets of Chandler’s fictional Los Angeles, his private eye character, Philip Marlowe, expresses infuriating bravado and self-annihilation in equal measure. It was PI Marlowe who ignited my interest in, and enduring love for hardboiled crime fiction. His lyrical musings about fine whiskey, his tireless dog-with-a-bone persistence, his suit, hat, and gun—it all entranced me.

As a closeted queer growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era, searching for headstrong characters in books felt safer than getting to know myself. I was in awe of Private Investigator Marlowe’s freedom, his devil-may-care brio, unaware that his swagger was probably shaped by his white, heterosexual, cisgender male privilege. Even if the hardboiled dick (yes, that’s the colloquial term for detective) is pistol-whipped, he is never afraid to throw a punch, snark at cops, or chase a lead down a shadowy alley.

Besides the PI’s barbed charms and Chandler’s dexterity at the line level—evocative neon-lit atmospheres, seductive metaphorical turns—Marlowe’s sadness thickens his characterization and the psychological texture of the mystery. In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe readily admits he is “depressed.” Marlowe is a damn good PI who can work a case, but crime writer and critic Megan Abbott observes in a LitHub interview how he “feels control over nothing, not even himself.” The canonical sleuth’s melancholy and cynicism complicate his whiskey-drinking machismo, letting readers see his human frailty, deepening investment in both him and his investigations. Will he fall off track? What’s at stake for him?

Marlowe’s hard to stomach when he demeans and abuses female characters. In The Big Sleep (1939), he slaps Carmen Sternwood to rouse her from a drug-induced haze, repeating the word “slap” four times within the span of two sentences, creating a strong rhythmic effect. The cadence intimates a pleasure in—or fixation with—the act of hitting a woman. Marlowe declares that the opposite sex gives him a hangover.

It’s impossible to deracinate a text from the time and place in which it was written, and Chandler’s craft innovation is undeniable. But as a creative writer who savors the sumptuous rituals of reading—pouring a cup of black coffee, laying on the sofa, and devouring a book in a day—Marlowe’s sexist, racist, and homophobic escapades repel me.

Reimagining the Hardboiled Hero
Inspired by gifted hardboiled writers and interested in crafting intersectional queer mysteries, I developed my own critical-into-creative crime-fiction methodology. The first book in the series is The Scorched Cross, and the sleuth is not a trench-coat-clad PI but a tattooed queer nun named Sister Holiday. If that seems rather wild, it should.

At the heart of my practice is a close engagement with foundational hardboiled texts published primarily in the ‘40s and ‘50s in concert with their feminist counterweights—mysteries by Sue Grafton, Katherine V. Forrest, Laurie R. King, and Sara Paretsky, published, largely, in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The feminist hardboiled and neo-hardboiled authors include women writing mysteries in the context of gay liberation and second-wave feminism, and the politics of these movements informed their narratives.

What I discovered through my analysis of early feminist hardboilers was a startling array of methods for leveraging social identity (re)construction to intensify and sustain narrative suspense. For instance, Sue Grafton’s PI Kinsey Millhone is an ass-kicking, wisecracking straight woman who, in A is for Alibi, smokes out the homme fatale (male version of the femme fatale) in a dramatic flip of the script. Katherine V. Forrest’s Kate Delafield is a fastidious detective and butch lesbian who battles crime and homophobia—internalized as well as externalized—in seedy Los Angeles.

Social comment is not extraneous but an inherent element of the hardboiled tale. In Talking About Detective Fiction, PD James points to hardboiled novels as stories of “social realism and protest.” Similar to the way in which the political tumult and socio/economic ideologies of Chandler’s Los Angeles informed his crime fiction plots (mobsters, for instance), feminist and queer crime fiction authors regularly weave topical themes and identity politics into their projects. Harsh social conditions, such as racism and violence, that threaten queer sleuth characters like Detroit-based PI Charlie Mack in Cheryl A. Head’s brilliant Catch Me When I’m Falling: A Charlie Mack Motown Mystery (2019), indicate some of the hostilities queer and BIPOC women experience on a daily basis.

Examining myriad strategies for weaving social critique into mystery plots helped me devise ways to narrativize contemporary polemics and tensions I find interesting. Accepting that the sleuth genre is both fluid and stable—a living art form that evolves as attitudes evolve—I set out to craft tales that read like satisfying whodunits while centering queer theory, queer spirituality, and queer phenomenology.

Subverting the Lone Wolf Trope
In my wise-guy reversal, I recast the hardboiled sleuth as a thirty-three-year-old tattooed queer nun named Sister Holiday who, as she tries to solve an arson-and-murder case, interrogates herself and her own interleaved identities. The Scorched Cross interlaces multiple mysteries and introduces the queer sleuth as both an investigator and instigator. Intrigued by Lisa Duggan’s suggestion that queer theory holds space for “radical potentiality,” my nun-sleuth rejects fixed binaries and tidy categories of any sort. Sister Holiday breaks the rules and bucks convention as she seeks redemption.

In The Long Goodbye, PI Marlowe describes himself as “a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich … I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things.” Sister Holiday is also a lone wolf of a kind; an out queer woman when she lived in Brooklyn who took a provisional vow of abstinence as a novice nun in her New Orleans convent, but she still considers herself to be “extremely gay.” Like Marlowe, Sister Holiday has a penchant for liquor and women, and her relationship to “vice” is as cerebral as it is corporeal.

Queer “I”
I anchored my novel within the contours of a first-person point-of-view. The opening scene establishes the cynical voiceover as the camera eye. My goal is for the raw energy of the first-person voice and the plot points to dovetail to propel the narrative forward. First-person POVs can be challenging in mysteries because of the expectation for forward motion. Lyrical and metaphorical meditations can vivify the sense of place and intensify character immersion, but they must be used judiciously to keep the story cranking along.

Beginning on page one of The Scorched Cross, Sister Holiday’s voiceover foreshadows the narrative centrality of seeing and introduces the New Orleans heat as its own formidable character in a city of curses and miracles:

A good mystery never starts where you’d think. A sleight-of-hand trick begins off to the side, in a blind spot, like the alley behind my school. The alley was the only place I could smoke. I had no money for cigarettes, of course, but what I confiscated from my students was fair game. Waste is a sin. Not a deadly sin but sinful all the same. So, there I was on the stoop, minding my own business, roasting in the heat that never broke, not even at dusk. I had my goddamned gloves and scarf on, as Sister Augustine demanded. It was a rare moment alone, with one precious cigarette, before I slipped into the convent for supper.

Sister Holiday’s (often obnoxious) attitude and observations—and what she chooses to ignore—expose vital paradoxes that drive the story.

Queer Crime & (In)Justice
The LGBTQ community is not monolithic, but people at the margins often learn skills that prove to be valuable for detection: code-switching, people reading, encoding, decoding, reading between the lines, and inference. Queer people are fighters; from Stonewall to Obergefell v. Hodges, the community has shown resilience. PIs and queers also share more nuanced, unconventional views on crime, punishment, and fairness—knowing how to locate the gaps in systems of power.

To craft a female sleuth figure who capitalizes on her inside/outsider status and her queerness to advance her sleuthing, I needed to codify Sister Holiday’s sexuality in the context of her religiosity. As I began composing my novel, I inquired: would self-selected celibacy and abstinence delegitimize Holiday as a queer sleuth?

According to critic Faye Stewart, the answer is no. In a study of German queer crime fiction, Stewart posits that queer mysteries bring a “socially critical perspective together with boundary-crossing genders and sexualities, inviting readers to interpret queer figures and themes as literary incursions into cultural traditions and political discourses.” Within my crime-fiction framework, a religious lesbian sleuth uses the otherness of her experience and viewpoint to make surprising syntheses, look in unexpected places, connect disparate clues, and take unconventional approaches.

Genre Evolution
The market for queer private-eye tales continues to grow. Just a few of the exciting LGBTQX inheritors of the gumshoe tradition include Nikki Baker’s Virginia Kelly Mystery Series; Cheryl A. Head’s Charlie Mack Motown Series; Kristen Lepionka’s The Roxane Weary mystery series; Penny Mickelbury’s Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione Mystery Series; J.M. Redmann’s PI Michele (Micky) Knight; Sarah Schulman’s Maggie Terry; and my own Sister Holiday novels. The Sisters in Crime website offers more about these books and other queer sleuths who doggedly work the mean streets for their clients, who aren’t afraid to shake up their narrative worlds and expand the genre.  

I believe we need more than new hardboiled heroes following the same old formula. Now is the moment for new paradigms and queer hardboiled heroes who foreground queer storylines. The pedagogical implications are exhilarating: What might contemporary queer hardboilers illuminate about seminal novels by James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, and vice versa?

There’s a singular thrill in experiencing the new within the familiar, to disenthrall from tradition and mint a bold new code. It’s the delicious challenge of writing “genre.” In this generative spirit, I strive to push the boundaries of the ever-evolving PI genre with my mysteries led by a flawed, stubborn sleuth with a queer identity all her own that informs her passion for revelation as well as her taste for vice.

Margot Douaihy, PhD, is the author of Girls Like You, a Lambda Finalist, and Scranton Lace, both published by Clemson University Press. Her work has been featured in PBS NewsHour, Colorado Review, The South Carolina Review, The Madison Review, The Florida Review, and Wisconsin Review. Learn more at her website.

 

COME ON UP, short stories by Jordi Nopca, reviewed by Michael McCarthy

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

COME ON UP
by Jordi Nopca
translated by Mara Faye Lethem
Bellevue Literary Press, 224 pages
reviewed by Michael McCarthy

Come on up cover artAt first, it’s a promise. Come on up!

It’s a pledge made to every up-and-comer in Barcelona. The city provides a backdrop for Jordi Nopca’s short story collection Come On Up, translated from Catalan to English by Mara Faye Lethem. His stories skillfully traverse decadence and depravity, splendor and squalor, the tragic and the comic, the boring and the absurd. They will resonate with anyone who has a decent job, a decent home, and decent career prospects but is still somehow broke.

Take it from Nopca. The city and its denizens are in rough shape:

Barcelona is a tourist favorite, but it’s going through a delicate moment. Some of the most expensive boutiques in the world have opened up shop on the Passeig de Gràcia. The Old Quarter gleams with the urine of British, Swedish, Italian, and Russian visitors, which unabashedly blends in with the indigenous liquid evacuations. In Sarrià-Sant Gervasi and Les Corts, there are some neighbors whose only activity is walking their little dogs and holding on to their family inheritances. […] The Eixample is full of old people and the odd young heir who still can’t decide whether to continue his education, try his luck abroad, or hang himself from the chandelier in the dining room. The district of Gràcia hopes to remain a neighborhood of designers, artists, and students obsessed with watching subtitled films and TV shows. They were lucky folks until they started to lose their jobs; soon they won’t have enough to pay their rents, which are too high, and they’ll have to settle for some shabby corner of Sants, Not Barris, or Sant Antoni, where one can still live for a more or less affordable price.

Nopca deftly evokes the city’s wealth, luxury, and romance and points out that its gravest ills emerge from the allocation of these three resources. College graduates can’t pay rent. Jobless parents move in with their children. Relationships, newly sprung or decades-old, collapse under the stress. By all measures, Nopca’s characters are trapped, and there doesn’t seem to be a way out of the economic purgatory that is modern-day Barcelona.

Then, it becomes a taunt. Come on up!

Jordi Nopca

Nopca’s breezy prose disguises his characters’ despair. The never-ending job search becomes just another part of growing up, not the product of a deeply dysfunctional economic order. If his characters don’t believe this, they go insane, which many do. Nopca’s stories portray this progression—ambitious job-seeker to unemployed bum to raving lunatic—as just as much a part of Barcelona’s culture as paella or Gaudi’s architecture. The question overshadowing the book is one the characters can’t bear to answer: Is financial desperation part and parcel of life in modern Spain?

Such misfortune afflicts the titular characters of “Angels Quintana and Felix Palme Have Problems.” The title perfectly captures Nopca’s understated, bone-dry wit. When Felix loses his job as a bartender, he gets drunk all day and stuffs fruit in the exhaust pipes of parked cars and motorbikes. For him, it’s a desperate attack against boredom; for others, it’s “another silent way of saying ‘We’ve had enough,’ from a highly qualified generation of those who still haven’t found their place in a job market that’s turned its back on them.” If it was an act of protest, Felix Palme didn’t know it, but that hardly seems to matter. The “banana battalion” as it is termed in the media represented another outburst against an intolerable economy. If that isn’t a protest, what is?

Even those with gainful employment suffer the casual cruelty of global capitalism. In “An Intersectional Conversationist at Heart,” Victoria, a promising journalist, witnesses an author she hardly knows ruin her career on a whim. Everyone who’s worked with Biel Auzina, the titular “Intersectional Conversationist,” attests to his hellish personality and literary ineptitude, but still, he reached a status in the Spanish literati that Victoria dared not dream of. The story would be Kafkaesque if it didn’t feel so true. In detached yet engaging prose, Nopca shows that the recipe for success is part industry, part luck, and mostly pure chance. Even that might not be enough.

By turns, however, it becomes an invitation. Come on up . . .

To a lover’s flat, that is. In “Don’t Leave,” Nopca follows romance’s sinuous course through shopping mall courtship to foiled late-night intimacy. Miriam is an art history major, but any ambition she has beyond working at a clothing outlet is left unspoken. A man, whom she dubs Robin Hood rather than learning his name, begins chatting her up on his way home from work, their longing for intimacy hidden behind their stunted small talk and “funny” stories. Soon, Robin Hood becomes her only hope for moving forward with her life.

But Nopca never allows his characters a happy ending. Rarely, though, does he subject them to undue suffering. His characters begin and end at the same point. The break-ups, job losses, arguments, demotions, financial sacrifices, and romantic humiliations sum up to zero. In a society that prides itself on upward mobility, stagnation is more frustrating than outright failure. This is Nopca’s most piercing insight.

Robin Hood washes up drunk at a bar by the story’s end, feeling worthless. “Every once in a while, one of the men glanced at him to make sure he still hadn’t collapsed,” Nopca writes. “It was as if he were a silent, invisible ghost. The visitor’s presence didn’t affect them in the slightest. They didn’t even seem to think he had a soul.” Barcelona will do that to a young man looking for love.

All that’s left is a sigh. Come on up.

Francoist Spain rarely comes up in this book. Some older characters briefly recall their lives in those decades, but Nopca never expounds on it at length. “Candles and Robes” discusses it most openly. Once a week, the teenage narrator visits his grandparents for lunch and hears stories of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. To his disappointment, they “increasingly focused on seemingly unimportant details. The day Franco’s troops entered Barcelona was remembered for the textbooks that were left in the empty closets by the classroom.” The dramatic mixes with the dull, and the two become inexorably conjoined, a theme in Nopca’s work.

Simultaneously, the narrator’s dad tries to learn the saxophone. He watches countless YouTube videos of virtuoso players but can hardly eke out a note. Nopca finds a surprising parallel between futile saxophone lessons and Catalonia’s economic plight. In his nuanced telling, the dad’s efforts come to embody the struggle of a generation of Catalans, for they have the same chance at escaping Franco’s baneful legacy as the dad does at learning the saxophone. The fight for economic well-being is waged in every apartment in the city, but day by day, it becomes a lost cause.

An entire nation was promised there would be nowhere to go but up. When moving up becomes impossible, what is there left to do but try?

Michael McCarthy headshotMichael McCarthy is an aspiring writer of prose, poetry, and nonfiction from Braintree, Massachusetts who attends Haverford College, where he intends to major in English. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner.

A MEMOIR CONVERSATION with David Marchino and Beth Kephart

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A MEMOIR CONVERSATION
with David Marchino and Beth Kephart

A former student (now a writer and a teacher) finds himself in his once-teacher’s memoir. A conversation ensues about mirrors, facsimiles, and blankness.

Hello, friend. Before we get into the thick of this, I’d like to thank you for having this conversation with me. I’d been anticipating Wife | Daughter | Self for a while now. I must admit though that one of the reasons I was excited was that in a few places throughout the book I show up and rear my head. Just last night, I read one of these sections—“The Four Times I Became a Teacher”, which originally appeared in LitHub—to my partner just before bed.

My reading started as a joke, some faux bravado: I’m in a book. But that section so moves me, and it did last night. I hear your voice in those words, and, boy, does your writing insist on being read aloud. It became an intervention almost, my reading: That’s who I was then, and that’s where I came into now. Reading it aloud, then, closed a distance for me.

I know you’ve recorded yourself reading the book, a days-long marathon session. What was that experience like for you?

—David

Dear Mr. Marchino—

Remember all the different ways you would sign your emails to me, and to others—your great talent at the sign-off? May your jawn be pristine, you’d write. Keep Warm and See You Tuesday. Or: Walk. Don’t Run. I am thinking about that now as we have this email conversation—how to address you, what to say, how we will begin (now that we’ve begun) and how we will sign off. 

But what I want to say first is that having you read WDS and having a conversation about it with you is, to me, a big thing. WDS is a memoir about relationships, of course—who we are in relationship to others and who we are in relationship to ourselves. But it is also a meta creation, a reflection on memoir as genre and craft woven into the memoir that is being made and unmade. I learned memoir by reading, writing, and teaching it, by walking into a classroom with students such as yourself and realizing all I didn’t know and had better find out soon. You are in the book because you’d have to be in the book. And what a privilege it has been to watch you emerge as a teacher in your own right—you teaching memoir to communities of those who grieve, teaching memoir to the young, writing memoir as you teach memoir. Teachers open the door, make room for the next. The next lives inside WDS, which is to say, you do

To answer your question: Reading this book aloud for the Blackstone audio version was tremendously challenging. There were the technical bits—the cold room, the Covid era, the fact that I was a child lisper and still have trouble saying some words. But mostly it was deeply emotional. It was like reading one long prose poem and not trying to cry when confronted with the hard stuff again. I actually got very emotional reading the pages you reference here. Because, gosh, being a teacher is really beautiful and exceptionally hard. I was thinking how I almost blew it with you, while trying to advise you on your honors thesis. How I pushed you to the brink—and yet you didn’t fall.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is Charles D’Ambrosio and his book of essays, Loitering. Do you remember how you’d go to the Penn bookstore and read the volume, sitting on the floor? Well, there’s an essay in there called “Any Resemblance to Anyone Living,” where D’Ambrosio is talking about what it’s like to find himself in the pages of an ex-lover’s novel. WDS is memoir, of course, but doesn’t the D’Ambrosio essay echo for us—this experience of being in another’s book, this experience of writing another into your book? 

Loitering–yes! That was my escape text back in college. When I was overwhelmed by class readings, I’d drift into the bookstore and hide somewhere with that book. Thinking about the essay you mention, I’m drawn to D’Ambrosio’s use of the word “redecorated”. He’s portrayed in a work by an ex-lover but finds that this representation is redecorated: his rough edges are smoothed out. His character is neutered, he says, less interesting. I read this and think shag carpet over hardwood, a bathroom tile wallpapered over. Not bad necessarily but absent something. Robbed of a certain, well, character.

When I’ve taught memoir, I’ve always stressed that writers should take care of their characters, but that language is reductive, too, not far from D’Ambrosio’s redecorating. Really, I should have said, “Show your characters from all sides. Give us the good and the bad.” That’s the trick, I think. Just as no one wants to be made out as the antagonist–and I wonder if such a thing can even exist in a memoir–nobody wants to be sanctified. Our nostrils burn should the writer blow too much smoke. Honest, I think the greatest kindness a memoirist can do for the folks they write about is show them as richly complex as they are. Nobody really wants to be damned or revered, only seen. And seen completely.

I think that’s why reading myself in that section of WDS impacted me. It was clear you had seen me, and you were sharing that in this book. You did push me with that thesis, but, also, I was a bit of a jerk. You were my writing coach, and I was skipping practice.

On the subject of being written, you’re the main character of this book, but what I find interesting is how much time you spend looking to others. Even the title is telling, you define yourself by what you call “the apostrophes”: someone’s wife, someone’s daughter. Your exploration of self–your reflection–came through the lens of so many others. Could you talk about this decision, or why you decided to structure the book this way?

A Mirror,
—David

Dear A Mirror: One of the best parts of (still) learning how to teach is trying to imagine the right books for the right writers at the right time. Loitering was, at that time, the perfect book for you. D’Ambrosio is, actually, always current, always pressing, and this notion of his, of redecorating—which you beautifully articulate (hey, did you ever think about teaching D’Ambrosio yourself?)—holds great currency with me. So do your words about burning nostrils and anti-antagonists and wanting to be seen.

(Also, I don’t think I’ll ever quite be able to think of you as a jerk, A Mirror. Just as a student writing the hardest story of his life. A story with consequences.)

WDS is, in many ways, a recursive book. I return to themes, reexamine assertions, untie the conclusions, start again. I wanted the book to mirror life in that way. We never really do know, do we, about others. Nor do we ever truly know about ourselves. We are endlessly compromising and negotiating our path toward and away from the family we were born into, the people we have chosen, and all of those in between. We want to please them or we want to extract ourselves from them, we want to know them, we want them to know us (or we don’t). We hold parts of ourselves in check, eternally. But what parts of ourselves? Who are we when in the company of a lover or a father—a version of ourselves, or our actual selves? Who are we when we are alone, in the company of memories that haunt us precisely because we cannot—we never will—fully establish these memories as true or truly interpreted.

Did my father love me? Did I love him in the best possible way? Was I less of me because I gave so much time and care to him? Or is caring who I naturally am? Is caring me at my finest?

I wrote to find out. That is part (but only part) of what memoir is for.

I remember you and I once having a conversation about these sorts of things. One of your lines from that conversation is also floated through the book. Have you found it yet?

Dear Beth,

I can’t pin down my line, which actually feels appropriate for this conversation. I think we’re circling around the idea that it’s exceedingly difficult to truly “see” yourself. Whatever line of mine you included, held some essential quality of me for you. For me, it was just noise to fill the air, a passing thought. That you’ve held on to it and included it is more evidence of your keen eye, but, for me, it proves it’s near impossible to observe your own life while you’re still in the thick of it.

I asked you about reflections earlier and about finding the right lens so to speak. But, even a perfect reflection transforms its viewer. All these recent hours spent on Zoom have taught me this. We can examine ourselves but only obliquely. We catch glimpses from the periphery. This has me thinking about WDS as a search for a more perfect mirror: the person or relationship in your life that will fully reveal you to yourself. You keep returning to themes because you never get that perfect view. The search continues.

This search, this attempt to find out, you say is part of what memoir is for, and this brings me to my last (and most unfair) question. Throughout the book, you make brief gestures to current events or the news, and your characters try to find ways to withdraw from all of it. In the course of the pandemic, at one point or another, everyone I know has wished for an escape. As a writer, myself, I thought my writing would be the way out, but I’ve been frozen by all that’s happening. Frequently, I’ve asked myself what room is there right now for one person’s story? And so, I ask you (unfairly) what can memoir do for us who feel immobilized by the world around us? I ask you, who teaches memoir at the University of Pennsylvania and through your own Juncture Workshops. I ask you, who has written extensively and profoundly on the memoir genre in Handling the Truth and, again, in your memoir workbook Tell the Truth. Make It Matter. I ask you only because I can think of no one more equipped to answer.

Good Luck, My Friend,
—David

Friend:

And yet. Look at this question. Look at all the interludes that are yours, in this conversation of ours. You are writing. You have written. Your words (beautiful as always) are here.

To answer your perfectly fair and considered question: A blankness settled in with this pandemic. Suddenly, we were all turning off pieces of our lives—taking long, masked walks on the opposite sides of the street from other masked walkers, standing far apart in grocery stores trying to express ourselves through the slivers of our faces still available to others, closing our doors, watching doors close on us, sending cards and tiny handmade things in lieu of — so many things. Our lives became in-lieu-of lives, and yet we memoirists, or many of us, felt that, with words, we could at least persist. We were alone. We had time. We didn’t need to travel anywhere but into the contours of our own minds.

But how hard that writing became. How hard it was to believe that our struggles, our sadness, our loneliness, our losses, our stories meant anything at all in the face of Covid news. How hard it was to stop feeling anonymous, just one of many millions waiting, fearing, hoping for hope. Some of my dearest friends took notes on their days, so that they would have these notes later, for when they were ready to write truly again. Some stopped writing altogether. I began to make blank books, a symbol for the vast wordlessness I was so often feeling.

But slowly, very slowly, I began to write essays again. Small pieces. No big book in mind. I found that I had begun to pay attention to different things—the sound of silence, say; the artifacts we might leave behind; the intensity of the love we’ve felt but hadn’t taken the time to fully language. I found that, in the stark surrounds of the pandemic, within the blankness, I was feeling, seeing, hearing the world in new ways, in ways that challenged me, in ways that changed my relationship to the world and to myself.

This, then, is the answer to your question. We must allow ourselves to experience the paralysis. We must not force the words. We must sit with ourselves until the world is made new to us, and when we have the words for that newness—of observation, of reckoning, of emotion—we write those words down. We write them so that others might be awakened with us, so that their paralysis might quietly shift, so that we might, quietly, leave a trail away from blankness.

I hate leaving a trail away from this conversation, but we are more than 2,000 words in. I wondered, when we started, how I would sign off, but I’ve decided. I’m not signing off.

David Marchino is a Philadelphia-based creative nonfiction writer and educator whose work has appeared in The Penn Review, RKVRY Quarterly, Cleaver, and elsewhere. His essay “No Goodbyes” won the 2016 Penn PubCo Award for Best First-Person Narrative, and his personal narrative “Going Places” was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart. In the past, he served as a citizen-artist on behalf of ArtistYear, teaching a creative writing curriculum at Alexander Adaire Elementary in Philadelphia. Currently, he is assistant director of the Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the Kelly Writers House and the administrative assistant at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a widely published essayist. Her memoir-in-essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press on March 2. More at bethkephartbooks.com

 

 

AVOIDING / EMBRACING: Strategies for Writers with Anxiety Disorders A Craft Essay by Bailey Bridgewater

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

AVOIDING / EMBRACING:
Strategies for Writers with Anxiety Disorders
A Craft Essay by Bailey Bridgewater

Ah, writing and mental health conditions—a power couple in the collective imagination of what influences how artists create. Biographies, movies, TV shows, and even books have reinforced the idea that psychological ailments produce the very best writers. It’s hard not to over-emphasize Edgar Allen Poe’s alcoholism, Sylvia Plath’s suicidal ideation, Emily Dickinson’s agoraphobia, or David Foster Wallace’s depression because we have been lured to focus more on these writers’ diagnoses than their process or even personality.

I’ll admit, I fell for it. I have suffered anxiety my whole life. As a child, it manifested itself in nervous ticks like picking my lips and severe panic around people I didn’t know well. Despite being the most advanced reader in my class, I would count paragraphs and figure out which passage I would be asked to read aloud, then practice in my head until the teacher called on me.

My condition severely hindered my writing process. I could dash off flash fiction in something near panic, but I could never finish a longer piece that required me to focus on it for multiple days. When I could, inevitably, I would re-read what I had, decide it was trash and I was a fraud, then not write anything for months or even years. Nevertheless, I avoided even thinking about medication. Wasn’t my anxiety what made me a writer? Wasn’t my ability to craft strong dialogue caused by my need to replay conversations over and over in my head? Weren’t my obsessive thought patterns what led to my best story ideas?

It took a weeklong residency in the middle of Alaska to help me discover the strategies that could make me a productive writer even with severe anxiety. Turns out, these techniques work for me whether my condition is medicated or not, and I suspect they may work for other writers struggling with the same challenges.

Alaska Changes Everything

When I accepted the residency at Chulitna Wilderness Lodge in remote Lake Clark, I planned to write a collection of short stories during the single week (all I could take off work). I thought constantly about the stories before I left. I jotted notes about characters and plots and settings. I outlined each one. But a strange thing happened when I arrived at my tiny cabin on the beach – I couldn’t write a single story. I started four of them, and each fell as flat as me on black ice. I panicked. I only had seven days. I had to have something to show for myself.

What if I had nothing to show and the organizers told everyone in the writing business that I was a fraud and I was never published again? What if they canceled my residency and made me pay full price for the time I had spent there because I had not written anything? What if at the end of the week I had to stand up for my presentation empty-handed and all the other artists laughed at me?

As I sat at dinner one night, too stressed to eat my fresh salmon, listening to the other artists talk about the wonderful things they had accomplished that day, I considered packing my bags and saving myself the humiliation. Then the lodge owner told a story about the pioneering woman who founded the lodge. It was captivating. This, I realized, was the story I had come here to write!

My immediate instinct was to research. Oh, how my academic brain wanted to find every book on female pioneers, about Lake Clark, how to build a log cabin, the social context of the time period, what people wore in the early 1900s, and period-appropriate vocabulary. But I knew I couldn’t. I didn’t have time. I devoured that delicious salmon and rushed back to my room to start the first novel I would ever completely draft.

My anxiety, task-master that it is, told me that I had to finish the entire book before I left Lake Clark, or I would never be able to complete it – so that’s what I did. For 6 days I did nothing but sleep, eat, and write. I finished on the last morning with 65,000 words and a manuscript that, in retrospect, was awful, but which taught me the key to finishing a novel while anxious: speed writing. The compulsion to finish that novel before I left residency, though obviously rooted in my disorder, led me to nearly all the writing strategies I use today, four completed novels later.

How I Recreated a Residency

Though the novel I drafted in one week was not particularly good (surprise!), an article I read on my way home from Alaska about missing men in the Kenai Peninsula offered the inspiration I needed to write my next book—a police procedural that has garnered positive feedback from several agents. I knew that if I wanted to write that book while back at home and working full time, I was going to have to try to write the way I did in residency. Here are the strategies I adopted.

  1. Open the work-in-progress document, but do not read it.

In residency, the first thing I did upon waking was sit at my desk and open my draft document. Even now, the first thing I do on a weekend is open my document before I’ve even made coffee. I use the notes I made the night before and write forward at least a few paragraphs, just to get my head in the right space. This ensures that, after making breakfast, I will immediately come straight back to writing.

I am careful not to let myself read what I have already written, because reading all the previous pages only sows self-doubt, and the temptation to begin editing what is already on the page is overwhelming. Self-editing while still drafting is a black hole that can kill a novel faster than anything else for me.

  1. Don’t be a librarian!

Just as I must be careful not to read what I’ve previously written, I also consciously stop myself from researching while I draft. I did not have WiFi in Alaska, and I don’t turn it on while writing now. In residency, the only historical information I had to go on was the lodge owner’s story, a two-minute video of the woman who became my main character, and a book about the region that mentioned her death-by-plane-propeller. I could not possibly fall down the research rabbit hole.

A major feature of my anxiety is obsessive thought patterns. What might start as a simple search to find the population of Seward can easily end five days later with me reading the training manual for Alaska State Troopers, memorizing the organizational structure of their reporting lines, and fretting over how to convey every detail about what they would carry in their SUVs. Even if I do find my way out of this thought-spiral, my writing can suffer because I feel the need to prove to the reader that I’ve done my research, which results in the inclusion of far too much irrelevant detail.

  1. Duly noted. And noted only.

While drafting, I keep a running list of facts I need, such as what time the sun sets in Anchorage at the end of November. Jotting them down prevents me from getting hung up on them (or worse, starting to research) while writing. Only once the entire novel is fully drafted do I look those facts up and insert them. Then I have beta readers tell me what still needs more exploration, and only then do I research, with the aim of addressing their substantive concerns only – not checking whether my description of the texture of snow falling after a solar eclipse over the water at the end of December is realistic.

  1. Don’t get out of that bed.

End-of-day notes have also become a permanent feature of my writing process. When I save my document and close my laptop, I make notes in a paper notebook about what scene I plan to begin next, and place that notebook on the nightstand when I go to bed. If left unchecked, I would jump up 20 times and stumble to my laptop to add a detail or make a change to the manuscript. Instead, I jot those thoughts in the notebook, so it’s all in one place when I’m ready to revise. Plus, I sleep better.

  1. Kick a friend out of their own home.

For myself, and likely for many people with anxiety, writing at home is extremely difficult. Anxiety is often accompanied by obsessive compulsions and/or attention deficit disorder, and it is easy to get distracted by the dust on your desk, or the cat, or what you’re going to make for dinner, or that nitpicky project you meant to do six months ago, but suddenly needs to be completed right this very instant. I cannot write in coffee shops – being surrounded by other people talking and watching videos and, God forbid, looking at me, is a recipe for disaster. Remote Alaska was perfect, but I can’t exactly go live off the grid.

My solution to this problem came accidentally when a friend asked me to watch his dog three nights a week while he attended class. (His dog, ironically, has severe separation anxiety.) Sitting in another person’s house for hours at a time, for me, provides the perfect opportunity for uninterrupted writing. I feel strange watching other people’s televisions, so I bring my laptop and use those 4-hour blocks to work. Since the house is not my own, I’m not tempted to clean or cook. If my friend ever completes graduate school, I may have to just regularly kick him out of his own home.

  1. Take ownership of your anxiety.

While the relationship between anxiety and writing may be problematic, it can also be symbiotic. Anxiety can compel writers to speed on, rushing toward a deadline no one but they themselves imposed. Writing can also worsen anxiety if the process is not handled with care. Every writer is affected by the condition in different ways, but here’s the truth – leaving a serious health issue uncontrolled does not a better writer make.

What worked for me is accepting this aspect of my mental health, and finding workable strategies. All I needed to get started was as simple as applying to 20 residency programs, biting my nails while I waited to hear, getting on two jets and then a 3 passenger prop plane, taking an hour-long boat ride across a lake, cutting contact with everyone I know, and letting other people cook and clean for me while I wrote in the most remote part of the country where bears lurk around every corner. Talk about facing your fears!

Bailey Bridgewater’s fiction appears in Crack the Spine, As You Were, Fiction on the Web, and many other places. Her collection, A Map of Safe Places, will be published by Red Bird Chapbook this year, and a short story “In Silence, The Decision” is forthcoming from Hoosier Noir. Read more at her website.

 

 

 

THE SHARPEST TOOLS IN THE DRAWER, a masterclass with Lise Funderburg, April 3-24, 2021

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THE SHARPEST TOOLS IN THE DRAWER:
Honing Critical Distance in First-Person Narratives
A Masterclass by Cleaver Nonfiction Editor Lise Funderburg

Four Saturdays on Zoom
12:00pm – 3:00 pm:  April 3, 10, 17, 24
$200
Class limit: 10
Questions: [email protected]

Register Now

Writing from personal experience is always a double-edged sword in Creative Nonfiction: on the one side, we have almost limitless access to material. On the other, familiarity often breeds blind spots, cheating the work of dimension, resonance, and narrative drive. Through close readings of exemplary work, craft essays, writing exercises, discussion, and peer review, we will build strategies and practices that elevate your personal essays and memoir projects. Expect to become a stronger writer, a better reader, and an enthusiastic reviser.

Lise Funderburg HeadshotLise Funderburg’s latest book is Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents, a collection of all-new work by twenty-five writers, which Publishers Weekly deemed a “sparkling anthology” in its starred review. Previous books include the memoir, Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home, and the recently reissued collection of oral histories, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity. Her work has been published in the New York Times, TIME, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, MORE, Chattahoochee Review, Oprah Magazine, and Prevention. Lise has been awarded residencies at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, MacDowell, Thurber House, and Blue Mountain, among others, and she won a Nonfiction Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches at the Paris Writers’ Workshop.

SYLLABUS:

Session 1: Filling the toolbox

Session 2: Experimenting with Form

Session 3: The Art of Revision

Session 4: Deep Dives: Close Looks at Student Work Samples (up to 5000 words)

“Lise spoke deeply and generously from her own formation as a writer, and about the writing of her two very different books. In my journey to become a published writer of a memoir, even though my formation is as a visual artist and critic, her generosity gave me a case in point to think about. Right now, for me at least I am finding the most inspiration from the teachers of these workshops as models for professional-level work in the field.”

“Lise is sensitive and generous while giving constructive criticism. She is also adept at guiding group discussions.”

Write Where you are

A GREAT START: Your Novel’s Opening Pages, taught by Lisa Borders | April 11 – May 9, 2021

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A GREAT START
Your Novel’s Opening Pages
Taught by Lisa Borders

4 weeks
April 11 – May 9
Asynchronous with an introductory Zoom meeting April 11 at 2 pm ET

Register Now$200
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

Off to a Great Start: Your Novel’s Opening Pages

Many agents and editors say they will not read on if they are not hooked by a novel in the first five pages. Yet writers often get wedded to an opening that was the easiest entry point into the novel’s first draft, but may not be the most dynamic place for the book to begin. How does a writer decide where a novel should start? What strategies do novelists use to hook readers – including agents and editors – from the first sentence, paragraph, page, scene?

In this class, we’ll read essays about openings and examine narrative strategies used in a variety of novels; study the basics of plot and do exercises to help you discover your novel’s best opening; and provide feedback on your novel’s first 5 – 6 pages (up to 1800 words). The class will be mostly asynchronous, with discussions and workshops taking place online. We’ll start with a Zoom class to get to know each other better before sharing our pages.

SCHEDULE

Week 1: Novel openings overview: understanding structure and finding your point of attack

Week 2: Types of Openings | Worshop 1

Week 3: The First Sentence |Workshop 2

Week 4: Novel openings analysis | Workshop 3

“Lisa Borders is a wonderful teacher. She understands craft so well.”

“Lisa knows her stuff, she is also very positive and encouraging. The course was also well organized on Canvas.”

“Lisa is an EXCEPTIONAL teacher—her advice was phenomenal, and she created a culture which facilitated other writers in giving great feedback as well. ”

“The other participants were really dedicated and gave wonderful responses and insight during the workshops. The readings selected by Lisa, and her framing/introduction of various techniques, was both interesting and helpful.”

Lisa Borders’ second novel, The Fifty-First State, was published by Engine Books in 2013. Her first novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, was chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing’s Fred Bonnie Award, and received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards. Lisa’s short stories, essays and humor have appeared in The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Post Road, Washington Square and other journals. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and fellowships at the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. Lisa also teaches at Boston’s GrubStreet, where she founded the Novel Generator program and co-founded the Novel Incubator program. More information on Lisa is available at lisaborders.com.

Write Where you are

 

AFTERBURN: Flash Revision, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | April 4-April 25 2021 [SOLD OUT]

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AFTERBURN
A Workshop in the Art of Flash Revision
Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa

3 weeks
April 4-April 25
$175
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

Register Now

Flash fiction may be born in a lightning flash of inspiration, but crafting works of perfect brevity requires time and patience: sometimes cutting, sometimes adding, and sometimes starting all over again. In very short stories, every word must work, and revision is as much a part of writing flash as it is of writing longer prose. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll practice the art of revision. Flash fiction writer and editor Kathryn Kulpa will share first drafts, revisions, and published versions of her own work and that of other flash and short fiction writers. Students will learn different revision strategies and how to apply them to their own work. We will create new flash together and work on taking it through several revisions, and students will also have the chance to bring existing stories to the workshop to revise with a goal of publication.

I loved having the ability to work on the material at my own pace, at my own time. I met several writers who I will continue to stay in touch with.

This was a great workshop that led me places I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. It also resulted in a recent publication. Woot!

I loved the prompts! And Kathryn’s astute feedback, of course!

Kathryn Kulpa workshop leader photoKathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020 (Pelekinesis Press).  Her flash fiction is published or forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf, and she serves as flash editor for Cleaver Magazine. Kathryn has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College and has led writing workshops at the University of Rhode Island, Stonecoast Writers Conference at the University of Southern Maine, Writefest in Houston, Texas, and at public libraries throughout Rhode Island.

 

 

Typewriter writing Cleaver Workshop and cleaver logo

THE ART OF FLASH, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | Feb. 25-March 28, 2021 [SOLD OUT]

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THE ART OF FLASH

A Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction

Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa

Feb. 25-March 28
5 weeks
$200
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected] 

Flash is a genre defined by brevity: vivid emotions and images compressed into a compact form. We most often see flash fiction, but flash can also encompass prose poetry, micro memoir, lyric essays, and hybrid works.

In this class, we will take a close look at different styles and forms of flash fiction, as well as flash nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental works. Each week, we will read and discuss one or more example-works and generate new work from prompts. Students will share their work for peer and instructor feedback, then will choose one story to revise for the final class.

This workshop has weekly deadlines and assignments to help motivate you to write, but the work can be done at your own pace and on your own time—there are no required meetings (although we may have an optional Zoom pop-up or two and bonus prompts for those who are interested). We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and constructive criticism.

Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020 (Pelekinesis Press).  Her flash fiction is published or forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf, and she serves as flash editor for Cleaver Magazine. Kathryn has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College, and has led writing workshops at the University of Rhode Island, Stonecoast Writers Conference at the University of Southern Maine, Writefest in Houston, Texas, and at public libraries throughout Rhode Island.

SYLLABUS

Topic One: Time and Place

Time constraints in flash fiction—handling transitions—telling a larger story through a selected moment—zoom lens or wide angle?—creating a vivid setting in few words

Topic Two: Voice, Character, and Point of View

Choosing a lens—whose story?—first, second, and third-person—single or multiple points of view—speed dating: shorthand character reveals

Topic Three: Where Prose Meets Poetry

Borrowing poetic techniques to create brilliant flash—image is everything—white space and stories in stanzas—the right sound—the power of repetition

Topic Four: Flash Frontier: Experimental and Hybrid Forms

Prose poetry—lists, recipes, and want ads: hermit crab stories—lyric essays—ekphrastic flash—using found objects to tell a story

“I loved having the ability to work on the material at my own pace, at my own time. I met several writers who I will continue to stay in touch with. “

“I learned so much. Most other flash workshops aren’t as detailed as this one. I came away with new tools to employ in my writing.”

 

Write Where you are

PITCHING YOUR ESSAY, taught by Claire Rudy Foster | March 14, 21, 28, 2021 [SOLD OUT]

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Pitching Your Essay decorative poster

PITCHING YOUR ESSAY
taught by Claire Rudy Foster

3 Sunday Zoom Sessions
March 14, 21, 28 4pm ET, 1 pm PT
$200
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

Register Now

The pitch letter is a writer’s calling card, providing the all-important first impression on editors. Good pitches stand out in the slush, signaling that you’re talented, professional, and ready to work with them. Bad ones rarely get a second chance. Even talented, bright writers get rejection letters when their pitch letters don’t reflect their abilities. If you’re tired of hearing “no,” a great pitch can be the key to the “yes” you’re hoping for. This class is designed for any writer who seeks publication: no homework or outside assignments, and no previous publication credits required.

Good pitching etiquette opens doors for writers and can lead to better bylines and bigger rates. If you write to publish, pitching is an important skill to have—one that is rarely taught in writing programs and MFAs. This class will teach you to avoid landmines and resolve issues that all writers contend with. How do you get an editor interested in your work? How do you sell your great idea without sounding pompous or unprofessional? How do you decide which editor to pitch to on a masthead? What do you do if you don’t have industry connections? Rather than guess, this class will help you prepare for the all-important pitch.

Week one: What do I have to offer?

Week two: Who’s a good fit for my writing?

Week three: The perfect pitch

During class, writers will build confidence in their pitches as they craft an all-purpose pitch letter that is adaptable and versatile. We will discuss our writing from a business angle and learn to understand what editors are looking for in a pitch. This workshop is taught by author Claire Rudy Foster, who publishes an average of 200 articles, stories, reviews, and essays per year. Foster also reviews pitches as Senior Features Editor for The Rumpus and is a veteran slush pile reader.

Claire Foster Rudy headshotClaire Rudy Foster is an award-winning queer, nonbinary trans author from Portland, Oregon. Foster’s critically acclaimed short story collection Shine of the Ever was an O: The Oprah Magazine pick for 2019. Their essays, fiction, reporting, book reviews, and other writing appear in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Allure, on NPR, and many other places. Foster is Senior Features Editor at The Rumpus. They still believe in the power of well-written sentences.

What I Learned from Jennifer Egan’s Use of Sensory Detail, a Craft Essay by Sandy Smith

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A woman browsing the fiction section of a bookstore

What I Learned from Jennifer Egan’s Use of Sensory Detail
A Craft Essay
by Sandy Smith

On a friend’s repeated urging to read Jennifer Egan’s 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Visit from the Goon Squad, I went to my small local bookstore. They had no copies of Goon Squad in stock, but there was a single copy of Egan’s 2006 title, The Keep. Since Egan is a well-respected author and the flap copy looked promising (“…relentlessly gripping page-turner…rich forms…transfixing themes”), I took it home and dove in. I didn’t expect to be as engaged as the hyperbolic blurbs promised, but I found myself fully immersed almost immediately. When I came up for air nearly an hour later, I asked myself how The Keep had managed to pull me in so quickly and so thoroughly that I’d missed the ding of the microwave and the beguiling aroma of leftover lasagna.

Over a dish of sadly steam-logged pasta, I went back to the beginning to re-read, paying closer attention to try and suss out what was so gripping. It hit me that Egan was using sensory description in a way that allowed me to subconsciously ground myself in the novel’s world. And her sensory cues were so masterfully deployed, they’d superseded the sounds and smells of my own kitchen (a rarity).

At first read, I didn’t know what it was about the opening pages that had hooked me or even that I was hooked. Nothing much was happening in the story yet, and the only character introduced at that point was neither likable nor unlikable. Nevertheless, I’d lost track of time (and dinner) because I was so absorbed.

Right away, in the first two paragraphs of page 1, Egan incorporates descriptors affecting all five senses: sight (“the towers had those square indentations…  that little kids put on castles when they draw them”—an especially effective use because we have to dig into our own recollection of kids’ drawings to access that image); sound (“he heard [the falling leaves] crunching under his boots”); smell/taste (“the air was cold with a smoky bite”—we can smell the burning leaves but the word “bite” here evokes taste as well); touch (“Danny felt [the leaves] landing in his hair”).

Jennifer Egan

Egan’s particular genius in utilizing descriptors this way lies in her subtlety. At first read, I didn’t know what it was about the opening pages that had hooked me or even that I was hooked. Nothing much was happening in the story yet, and the only character introduced at that point was neither likable nor unlikable. Nevertheless, I’d lost track of time (and dinner) because I was so absorbed. Once I started paying attention though, it leapt out at me like one of those hidden pictures that emerges in 3D from a seemingly random pattern of shapes: Egan doesn’t avalanche the reader with a surfeit of showy adjectives and adverbs. That kind of showboating is tempting, and I’ve been guilty of it in my own work (and consequently grateful for editors), but being heavy-handed with spurious details comes off more as tedious than captivating. A deft writer like Egan knows restraint pays off, and instead she salts the text with sensory cues that dwell below even normally perceptive (as opposed to critical) reading, serving as a means of connection rather than distraction.

The sensory description continues throughout the narrative. Even brief passages contain elements of touch, smell, sight, and taste: “Danny picked it up and smelled: mold, wet wood. The glass was thin and hand-blown, colored bubbles around its base. The taste was outright freakish: a reek of decay mixed with some sweet, fresh thing the decay hadn’t touched.”). Sensory reference points not only engage the reader viscerally in the moment, but they create the collective ambiance of the book, which lingers between reading sessions and helps the reader re-engage the next time they pick up the book. And wouldn’t this be an efficient way to add depth to a piece of short fiction too, where economy of language is especially important? I tucked this lesson into my craft toolkit as well.

Familiar sensory details take on additional significance when the narrative gets tricky, a consequence of varying settings and personas. The Keep’s narrative voice switches between close third person POV and first person. For long portions of text, these are distinct and easy to follow. But as the book reaches its climax, these voices blur and intermingle, as the story lines themselves do, so that the identity of the first-person narrator is eventually revealed through the third-person narration in a contextual flip-flop. This fairly complex structure is made navigable by a breadcrumb trail in the form of relatable sensory cues. Whether the text drops us into the dungeon of a decrepit European castle or an American prison cafeteria, we can orient ourselves in the foreign landscape by the smells, tastes, textures, and sounds that are as close as the dinner plate on our kitchen table.

At the castle, Danny observes the neglected pool: “Its water was black and thick with scum . . . a smell of something from deep inside the earth meeting open air, full of metal and protein and blood.” In prison, Ray describes the “smell that gags you when you first walk into the prison building . . . cigarettes, germ killer, sweat, chow, piss.” The details are so richly evocative, I had no trouble switching between the two wildly different locations and narrative voices. I stayed connected with the text because although I’ve never been in prison or fallen into a hell-mouth pool, I’ve smelled these smells, so my personal catalog of sense memories helps bridge the gaps in my experience.

Regardless of whether I believe in the possibility that an ordinary castle of stone and wood may be haunted, I’m willing—and, more importantly, able—to accept that it is because Egan doesn’t just tell us it’s haunted. She lets us smell and hear and taste how natural the keep is before hitting us with the supernatural. The jarring disconnect is what makes it scary, and I didn’t have to work too hard to suspend my disbelief. Even though there were a couple of implausible plot points that might otherwise have derailed my interest, I kept right on reading.

Though sometimes we do want readers to work a little harder, to penetrate the surface and mine for meaning on their own, I saw in The Keep that the more layered the detail, the better and faster the connection—the buy-in is achieved without making readers labor over it.

In Egan’s hands, sensory detail is revealed as a significantly useful implement in the writer’s toolbox. This turned out to be a critical takeaway for me, as I sometimes ask a lot of my readers. Leonora, the narrator of my slightly fabulist literary novel, is the ghost of a chimpanzee. When I set about revising my first draft, guided by the way Egan creates accessibility in The Keep, I paid extra attention to the sensory details that would help readers empathize with Leo, who’s not only nonhuman, but nonliving. This was important because as a character-narrator, she does the heavy lifting of the story. Although in her afterlife she’s anthropomorphized, Leo’s still a chimpanzee. To establish her humanity, I gave her memories (she has a nostalgic fondness for monkey stink); desire (for the taste of hardboiled eggs and fresh mango); and dread (she can’t bear the sound of children’s laughter), all tied tightly to the senses.

Though sometimes we do want readers to work a little harder, to penetrate the surface and mine for meaning on their own, I saw in The Keep that the more layered the detail, the better and faster the connection—the buy-in is achieved without making readers labor over it.

In the end, my bookstore’s failure to stock Goon Squad was serendipitous. I would have missed out on Egan’s object lessons in forging robust reader-text connection right away. When you need your reader to seamlessly acclimate, not interrogate, the skillful use of robust sensory detail delivers every time. That’s a lesson I didn’t know I needed, a keeper.

Sandy Smith author photoSandy Smith is a writer and editor whose short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Brevity, Sky Island Journal, Gravel, and The MacGuffin. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside, and is currently at work on her second novel. Visit her website to learn more.

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY, Part 2, taught by Tricia Park | May 9-30, 2021

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EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY, Part 2 of Two
A Workshop to Jumpstart Your Writing
open to all levels and genres
Parts 1 and 2 may be repeated or taken out of order
taught by Cleaver Editor Tricia Park
Asynchronous Version

4 weeks
May 9-30, 2021
$250
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]Register Now

“But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

In this class, we won’t try to fix what isn’t broken. We’ll hold our vulnerability and begin creating from where we are. We’ll give ourselves permission to commence, no matter how fragile the surface under our feet feels. Together, we will enter and engage with the work as it begins to speak to us, and we’ll allow ourselves to follow that uncertainty and see where it takes us.

THIS CLASS IS OPEN TO WRITERS OF ALL LEVELS AND GENRES. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments; provide and receive feedback on writing you produce in our workshop.

This class offers weekly deadlines and assignments but you can work at your own pace and on your own time—there are no required meetings (although we may have an optional Zoom check in or two to provide additional support and inspiration.)

What you’ll get in this class:

  • Gently intriguing prompts to jumpstart your creativity
  • Reading and discussion of texts by inspiring writers.
  • A safe and supportive environment to cultivate your writing.
  • Small, clearly defined weekly assignments to keep you motivated.
  • New writing that you can continue to nurture and grow at home.

Each week, we’ll explore exercises/prompts that I hope will generate work that will surprise and delight you. We’ll also read and discuss texts that I’ll provide for you as examples to emulate and prompt new writing. Most importantly, I am looking forward to the community we’ll create together so that you may feel free to venture eagerly into your uncertainty and take new and playful risks in your writing.

There will be space to share your work and receive feedback on your writing. I’ll provide clear guidelines for constructive feedback on new and early drafts. The focus of this class is to develop your practice and generate new writing!

If possible, I encourage you to write long-hand for your generative work and then transcribe to the Canvas discussion board but a laptop or tablet is also fine.

Note: The Canvas platform works best with the Chrome and Firefox browsers. If you are experiencing technical difficulties in Safari, try accessing the class in a different browser. There is also a Canvas Student App available through Apple or Google Play.

CLASS OVERVIEW:

Week One: Freewriting and Playfulness

Elizabeth Gilbert writes, “I made a decision long ago that if I want creativity in my life – and I do – then I will have to make space for fear, too.” We’ll find ways to move through resistance as we approach our writing with playfulness and curiosity. We’ll dive into freewriting and whimsical exercises/prompts.

Week Two: Using our Senses 

Maya Angelou reminds us that “once you appreciate…one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses.” Sensory details infuse our writing with richness and dimension. We’ll respond to prompts that encourage us to take in our surroundings and connect with our senses.

Week Three: “Gaming” our Writing 

In this class we will explore ways we can “game” our writing, approaching it obliquely with a light-hearted touch. We’ll see how prioritizing “play” through constraints and rules can, paradoxically, free up our writing.

Week Four: Writing Down Memory Lane

Lois Lowry says, “I’ve always been fascinated by memory and dreams because they are both completely our own. No one else has the same memories. No one has the same dreams.” We’ll delve into our unique memory banks to mine our past and present, generating writing that is bound to surprise us.

“It got me writing again after a fallow time, and has helped me clarify my writing objectives.”

“Tricia is a fantastic and natural teacher.”

“This workshop was really supportive! Tricia was such a great guide. Even as we spent long periods writing, she was there to create an inspirational space, help us change tack, and encourage experimentation and playfulness without worry.”

“A warm, smart, generous teacher. Her prompts were genius.”

“Tricia has a wonderful way of balancing the movement of discussion and interplay between writers with her suggestions, guidance, and recommendations. As someone who’s led writing workshops, I really appreciate the skill and art of that! Tricia really created an environment in which everyone, I think felt included and supported. She shared wonderful resources with us, as well.”

Write Where you are

 

Tricia Park Author PhotoTricia Park is a concert violinist and writer. The recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, she has appeared in concert on five continents. Tricia is the producer/host of a podcast called “Is it Recess Yet? Confessions of a Former Child Prodigy.” Tricia is a graduate of The Juilliard School and received an M.F.A. from the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Alyss, and F Newsmagazine. She has also been a finalist for contests in C&R Press and The Rumpus. Currently, she is a Lecturer and Artist-in-Residence at the University of Chicago. Tricia has taught creative writing online and at the University of Iowa.

In this class, we won’t try to fix what isn’t broken. We’ll hold our vulnerability and begin creating from where we are. We’ll give ourselves permission to commence, no matter how fragile the surface under our feet feels. Together, we will enter and engage with the work as it begins to speak to us, and we’ll allow ourselves to follow that uncertainty and see where it takes us.

UNSHAPING THE ESSAY: Experimental Forms, taught by Sydney Tammarine | July 18 – August 14

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UNSHAPING THE ESSAY:
Experimental Forms in Creative Nonfiction
Taught by Cleaver Editor Sydney Tammarine
for intermediate and advanced nonfiction writers

Session: 5 weeks
July 18 – August 14
Zoom meetings 11am – 12pm EST on Sundays 7/18, 7/25, 8/1, and 8/8
$200
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

Register NowMemoirist Patricia Hampl said, “Memoir isn’t for reminiscence; it’s for exploration.” Just as nonfiction writers explore the world and the internal landscape of their lives, they also explore the landscape of language: What is the best way to tell your story? How can the form we choose help us convey complicated ideas and experiences? And how do we know when a structure is working for us, rather than limiting us?

To answer that last question, I’ll borrow a few words from writer Brandon Schrand: “[I]f you have finished reading something experimental and if by the end, you can’t imagine it written in any other way, then the piece was successful.”

In this class, we will explore the boundaries—and boundlessness—of creative nonfiction, diving deeply into questions of memory and language while trying our hands at various innovative forms. Topics will include:

Week One: Found Forms, also known as the “hermit crab essay”
Week Two: The Braided Essay, to help us write what’s too hard to speak about directly
Week Three: Nonlinear Narrative, a breaking-free to flash backward and forward in time
Week Four: The Lyric Essay, where poetry and prose intersect

We will have weekly readings, writing prompts, peer workshops (asynchronous through Canvas), and discussions (synchronous through Zoom: 11am – 12pm EST on Sundays 7/18, 7/25, 8/1, and 8/8). Students will also revise one essay for instructor feedback. We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and enthusiastic feedback on their work.

Sydney TammarineSydney Tammarine’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, LIT, Pithead Chapel, The Missing Slate, and other journals. She is the co-translator of a book of poems, The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and teaches writing at Virginia Military Institute. She has led workshops at The Ohio State University, Hollins University, Otterbein University, and at high schools, including as Writer-in-Residence at Appomattox Regional Governor’s School. She serves as flash and creative nonfiction editor for Cleaver.

POETIC ANATOMIES, taught by Claire Oleson |  March 20 to April 24, 2021 [SOLD OUT]

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antelope skeleton

POETIC ANATOMIES:
Dissecting Form and Formlessness in Poetry
Taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson

5 weeks
March 20 – April 24
Class limit: 12
$200
Questions: [email protected]

The workshop content was well-designed and presented. The experience was been markedly positive for me. I was starting essentially at zero, never having attended a workshop or formally studied poetry. The workshop provided a base for future independent study. The comments and encouragement from Claire and other participants were a much needed boost to my self-confidence. The new poets I have been made aware of is of inestimable value. I will definitely be subscribing to future workshops.

In this course, we will investigate how form is used in poetry to create meaning, house language, and allow the content of a poem to achieve a significance that echoes beyond the bounds of its literal words. Whether participants are wholly new to sonnets and couldn’t tell you whether a villanelle is part of a cake recipe or a manuscript, there will be room for growth, experimentation, and attentive feedback.

We will work primarily on generating new work, encouraging participants to push their boundaries and hone their voice to create memorable and authentic pieces. The workshop model will facilitate constructive responses from both peers and the instructor. Particular attention will be placed on the formal life of the poetry we read and write.

We will read a few selections of poetry weekly that demonstrate the application of different forms in poetry. By the end of the course, students will know how to recognize poetic forms “in the wild,” know the origins of the form’s creation, be able to write within the form, and know when and where it can be broken with significance. The readings will be brief but rich, with the intent of inviting multiple re-readings, close readings, note-taking and flexibility for everyone’s lives and work. Supplemental reading will be available for those hungry for more plums from the proverbial icebox. Prompts will be provided inspired by the week’s reading, but will be designed more as springboards for beginning rather than hard-and-fast regulations. Work will be submitted weekly for peer and instructor review. One piece will be chosen by the student for revision for the final class. Optional Zoom conferences will be held to discuss the reading for those interested. We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and constructive criticism.

A final optional Zoom meeting will be held as a reading of our work.

Claire is a talented instructor. She makes each participants feel heard and valued and created an engaged forum. I truly value how much craft she imparted to us in such a short class.

SYLLABUS

1: Introductions: What is form: The body of the poem?

We will open with an investigation of what “form” means and how its both employed (and oftentimes, entirely ignored) in poetry. This week will focus on prose poetry and what it means to start, first, with a seeming abandonment of all things conventionally poetic, but still embrace the title of “poem”

2: Haiku and Haibun

We will take a look at two linked forms and discuss the history of these forms, their background, and how they work in concert with one another. With a knowledge of poetic history, participants will approach their own work with a chance to make decisions of form and formlessness that will come weighted with intention.

3: Sonnet and Derivations

This module will invite an exploration of classic forms of the sonnet as well as more contemporary evolutions. From the Shakespearian strict structure to what James Gate Percival entitled “The American Sonnet,” readers and writers will take a tour of authorial intent and poetic migration.

4: Villanelle and Sestina

In this second to last week, we will dive into two forms that employ repetition. Learning about how the same line written twice can come to carry an entirely different meaning, we will focus n reading and writing for sonics, sensation, and transformation.

5: The Final Form

In this final module, we will unleash the writers to confine or free themselves: they will approach a written piece of their own and make careful edits with peer and instructor feedback in mind as well as the gained ability to tweak their pieces into forms wholly their own. This will be the week for revision, encouraging everyone to push their boundaries and consider how their final piece’s consciously engage or break from form to elevate and embody their language.

New Modules posted on Mondays,
Pieces due by Friday, 11:59,
Feedback from All Due by Sunday, 11:59

I was incredibly impressed by how supportive, safe, collaborative, and engaged this workshop was. That positive tone was set from the beginning by Claire and reinforced throughout and was reflected in all the participants.

This workshop contributed greatly to my growth as a writer by challenging me to read new work and consider form more deeply than I have before.

Cleaver Poetry Reviews Editor Claire Oleson is a Brooklyn-based writer hailing from Grand Rapids Michigan. She’s a grad of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. Her work has been published by the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, Siblíní Art and Literature Journal, Newfound Journal, NEAT Magazine, Werkloos Magazine, and Bridge Eight Magazine, among others. She is also the 2019 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize and author of the chapbook Things From the Creek We Could Have Been. 

 

Write Where you are

TELLING TRUE STORIES, taught by Sydney Tammarine | May 10 – June 11, 2021

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TELLING TRUE STORIES
A Workshop in Creative Nonfiction
Taught by Cleaver Editor Sydney Tammarine

5 weeks
May 10 to June 11, 2021
Class limit: 12
$200
Questions: [email protected]
Register Now

Writer Dinty W. Moore says that creative nonfiction equals curiosity plus truth. CNF comes in a variety of forms: from expansive memoir to intimate personal essay to the lightbulb “eureka!” of flash. But in any form, the CNF writer is a guiding voice in the dark: a storyteller seeking truth, thinking alongside the reader toward a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world.

In this class, we’ll practice the essay in its most dynamic form: a verb that means “to test; to practice; to taste; to try to do, accomplish, or make (anything difficult).” Each week, we will read and discuss one or more example essays and generate new work from prompts. Students will share their work for peer and instructor feedback.

This workshop has weekly readings and writing assignments to inspire you—and deadlines to motivate you—but the work can be done at your own pace and on your own time. There are no required meetings, although we’ll hold optional Zoom write-ins and discussions for those who are interested. We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and enthusiastic feedback on their work.

Sydney TammarineSydney Tammarine’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, LIT, Pithead Chapel, The Missing Slate, and other journals. She is the co-translator of a book of poems, The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and teaches writing at Virginia Military Institute. She has led workshops at The Ohio State University, Hollins University, Otterbein University, and at high schools, including as Writer-in-Residence at Appomattox Regional Governor’s School. She serves as flash and creative nonfiction editor for Cleaver.

SYLLABUS

Topic One: Writing the Tough Stuff

In our first week together, we’ll explore: Why does the most powerful writing often come from loss, grief, or trauma? What value do the “tough stories” of our lives have to others? Why is nonfiction uniquely posed to connect us to others, and what value do the “tough stories” of our lives have to them? We’ll also practice strategies for writing our toughest material in an environment that’s safe and encouraging.

Topic Two: Finding Your Truth

Novelist Tim O’Brien often talks about the role of truth in his fiction: “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why a story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” In CNF, we have an obligation to truth that is greater than just getting the facts right. How do we write the story-truth, the happening-truth, as best we know it? Can any piece of writing be objectively true? We’ll talk about strategies for writing in the face of these questions, and also for finding what we think we can’t remember.

Topic Three: Hell is (Writing About) Other People

Writer Anne Lamott said, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” But that doesn’t always feel so easy, does it? This week, we’ll practice making characters in nonfiction—including yourself—feel real on the page, and discuss the ethics of writing about other people.

Topic Four: Finding Poetry in Prose

The Seneca Review describes the lyric essay as “[l]oyal to that original sense of essay as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense,” but with prose that “might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic.” This week, we’ll try out such poetic logic, experimenting with moves that can bring the music of poetry to our prose.

“Other than the topics that were all useful and valuable, Sydney included a wonderful revision exercise that I had never considered before–incorporating prose poetry into a piece. I revised my least favorite piece, and it became my favorite piece. ”

“Sydney was a very gifted teacher, capable of elevating my writing, even though I’m a beginning writer. I appreciated her sensitive, thoughtful and practical feedback and how she managed the feedback we gave each other.”

“Sydney was one of the more considerate, warm and insightful facilitators I have met. She was a sharp and welcome contrast to some of the horror stories that we sometimes hear about how such groups can be unkind and kill budding writers’ desire to “expose” their work.”

“This was a fantastic group with a great sense of community. I miss them.”

“I had never experienced the value of the writing community for feedback and encouragement. Wow, Sydney really set the tone, offering acceptance and providing lots of positive direction.”

Write Where you are

SISTERHOOD: How the Books we Both Read Helped Me Write My Sister’s Life into Fiction, a Craft Essay by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

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SISTERHOOD
How the Books we Both Read Helped Me Write My Sister’s Life into Fiction
A Craft Essay by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

When my sister, Susan, was still in elementary school, a family friend gave her a book for her birthday, The Wizard of Wallaby Wallow, by Jack Kent. Dyslexic as a child, Susan wasn’t much of a reader, so the gift was unusual. In time though, she overcame her disability, it seemed, because she wanted to read the instructions for building things.

Even after she managed to build her crystal radio set, or her darkroom, or teach herself how to play guitar, words and language were never Susan’s forte. Her conversations with friends and family often ended in arguments, and she could be cruel—prompting friends not to speak to her for years at a time—without meaning to be. During one of her lowest periods, when she was anorexic, my mother could not talk to her without the help of puppets. Mickey Mouse became her favorite interlocutor.

For years, I knew I wanted to write a novel about Susan’s life and death. She grew up gay in a straight world, but as a musician found somewhere she could be comfortable: at the center of the punk rock movement in Los Angeles. Singled out early in life as a genius—despite her difficulties with reading, she aced mathematics and figured out word problems by studying their patterns—she felt forced to succeed academically and professionally, though her desires lay elsewhere. Susan eventually forged a career as a software engineer in the dot-com boom, before her death from breast cancer. But how to render her into words, which had often defied her? How could I express her unique perspective on the world in her own language, when our relationship, like so many others, was marked by the failure of language, of communication?

When I began work on Sisterhood of the Infamous (forthcoming from New Meridian Arts Press, February 2021), I told myself I’d avoid this problem through the usual routes: research and interviews. I researched the causes that most inspired her adolescence (punk rock and gay liberation in the 1970’s), and interviewed several people. But Susan’s friends were as mystified by her sudden bursts of anger, crying fits and long-held grudges, as I was. They too did not understand what had made her so inconsolable, volatile, and why her favored target for that volatility was often herself. (“She was a raw nerve,” one woman explained. Another said repeatedly, “because that’s the way she was.”)

When I tried to mold the facts of her life and times into fiction, all I got was exposition: a mini-history of the L.A.’s punk scene, for instance; or a listing of the real-life slights and insults she suffered as a child and teenager. I realized I had yet to find her language, the rhythm and tone of how she spoke and thought; the linguistic framework that enabled her to always depict herself as an outsider, rather than the protagonist of her own story. Stumped, I thought back over the words we did share during her lifetime. And that’s when I realized: that language, Susan’s language—the characters it might animate, the conflicts it would alternately create and resolve, the subject matter it would be most concerned with—had always been available to me, in the form of books that she read.

Going back over the books we had in common—from picture books to children’s novels to the works of Kathryn Harrison and Dorothy Allison—I began to see a set of “instructions” for depicting a character with her life history, her passions, and her disappointments. Although the characters in these books did not have exactly the same problems Susan faced, nor necessarily speak or think in a way she might have, each of those authors had figured out a way to make those characters seen through language.

When I talk about the language of these books, I mean more than vocabulary, syntax, or style. I’m talking about the possibilities these books verbalized, the propositions they expressed about the world: Would you really want to change everything about your life, when that everything is all you know? How should a girl, or a woman behave, when burdened by a past that is unfathomable to others? Somehow, Susan had come to trust the characters and their circumstances in these books as authentic and deserving of her curiosity and sympathy. They also taught me about what could be credibly illustrated or interpreted of my sister’s life: how if she were to read a book about herself, what would it cover, and how might it sound.

The first book Susan and I shared was The Wizard of Wallaby Wallow that she received at age seven, about the perils of imagining a different life for yourself, and realizing something valuable about your current situation. This picture book apparently remains popular (according to Amazon’s sales figures), so no more spoilers here. But The Wizard of Wallaby Wallow has a winning message and a happy ending. My sister did not read the book for years, although I wish she had earlier. What impresses me now is what an adept choice it was for her, even at that young age. She had always wanted to belong somewhere, or to someone, a longing that’s addressed in another book she was given on a different birthday: Mandy, by Julie Andrews Edwards (yes, that Julie Andrews, now a frequent children’s author).

As a chapter book with pictures, Mandy is a bridge between reading levels. Susan was particularly possessive of this book (because I stole so much of her stuff, she had to be!), and I was allowed to read it only if I didn’t take it into my own room. So, read it I did, on the floor of the hall, next to the bookcase. I would return to it many times, for its fairy tale lyricism and the audacity of its protagonist. Mandy is an orphan story; orphans are common in children’s literature because they reflect a paradox about childhood. Children love and depend on their parents, but also feel encumbered by them; an orphan is a vehicle that enables readers to explore this conflict.

My sister wasn’t an orphan, of course, but she always felt unable to crack the code of friendships. More important to my sister’s story is the conundrum Mandy makes for herself as she pursues her heart’s desire. That Mandy may not know exactly what she truly wants is not some pedantic lesson, but a consequence of Mandy’s journey, her maturation. She is a good girl, much as Susan was. Nevertheless, Mandy surprises herself by lying and stealing to fulfill her quest.

This reflects the predicament I believe my sister often found herself in: she felt that her ethics were being tested by her friendships, or the actions of those she called friends. She struggled over how to honor those friends without losing her sense of self. Eventually she decided to do the right thing, or so she said, and it cost her dearly, and she became a loner afterward, pining for real connection.

Yet Susan was not friendless. At the time of her death, she had several friends in her own age group, and also counted some of their parents and even their children as friends. But she was often reclusive, preferring to stay home and sticking close to our mother. Our father was a complicated, charming but ultimately incompetent husband and parent (our parents divorced as Susan began college). She refused to speak to him for close to thirty years, and gravitated toward books that documented the sundering of the parent-child bond. Through these books I came to understand the physical and emotional fallout she endured because of that break.

I hadn’t read Kathryn Harrison’s novel Exposure when I noticed it on the floor of her bedroom as I watched Susan sort through her laundry one day. But I knew its premise and immediately recognized why Susan would be interested. Its depiction of a twisted father-daughter relationship, and the self-destructive path the daughter takes as a result, is still shocking two decades after it was published. Our father, for all his faults, was not the self-absorbed artist who alternately neglects and exploits his daughter, as is the father of the book, and my sister did not have juvenile diabetes, like the daughter, Ann, had. But as I read the book, I realized that like Ann, Susan found herself trapped by certain physical circumstances that deeply scarred her mentally. She became a prisoner of her body, its demands and aspirations. In Exposure, Ann’s body seems to drive her deadly fight or flight response. Susan’s size, her physical and emotional weaknesses, framed her conceptions about what is normal, beautiful; to a degree, even what is wrong and right.

Similarly, Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina is another tale of bad parenting; this time, the mother is the culprit. Set in crushing poverty that begets stunning violence, Bastard could not be more different than the world in which my sister and I were raised. But Allison’s brutal vision of growing up unwanted was a reminder that the elements of our upbringing that were merely rueful and regrettable to me were devastating to Susan. The long, slow breakup of our family amounted to a full-bore assault on her confidence and self-image. She also might have imagined redemption—in some form—in a similarly transgressive way as Allison’s alter ego in the book, Bone, accomplishes.

I gave Allison’s Cavedweller novel to Susan for one of her birthdays, because its lead character is a rock ’n roll singer. I thought she would appreciate the story of a rock ‘n’ roll singer, though I worried she’d misinterpret the gift. Cavedweller celebrates a quiet, nearly anonymous life over the supposed perks of stardom. I was not necessarily recommending the same for her, but hoped she’d be taken by the novel’s epic exploration of mothers, daughters, reconciliation and second chances. It turned out that Susan had already bought and read the book.

This was when we were both in our early thirties, both frustrated with careers and relationships. In the decade that followed, both of our lives changed in ways we couldn’t have anticipated, much like the sprawling destinies of the characters in Cavedweller. After that birthday, I stuck to safe gifts, like CDs or fancy dinners, or a T-shirt featuring her favorite concert venues or musicians. For her last birthday, which she failed to make by three days, I mailed her an early present of a hoodie that said, “Central Park Zoo,” guessing she could still appreciate the private joke (she was the keeper of a legion of stuffed animals) .

In fictionalizing my sister’s life, my job was not to imitate the scenarios or style of these books, but to remember them as a foundation. Once I’d re-read them all, I no longer wondered how my sister would like to be depicted as much as what would be plausible and how she would react in certain situations. In the novel I eventually wrote, there’s still much I did not include because I could not figure out how to make some situations believable, or relevant to the plot powering the narrative.

Though I had moved closer, I think, to rendering my fictional character, Barbara, into language and situations that honored Susan’s life and her own words, in the end, the book embodies, as of course it must, my own language. No matter how well informed I became, no matter how much I tried, in many ways I still failed to capture on the page Susan’s playfulness, what some might consider her best quality. But I believe in the character I created out of her life, fashioned from the hurt she could not forget and how it skewed her vision and prospects. The dilemma that my novel’s characters face is the one my sister tried to solve. Then she ran out of time. I hope, through yet another shared book, I was able to give her a little more.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is a poet, novelist, and occasional essayist in New York. Her first novel, The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War (Amberjack Publishing), was a finalist in two categories in the 2019 Eric Hoffer awards. Her memoir is An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir (Jaded Ibis Press 2014), and her next collection of poetry will be Medusa’s Daughter (Animal Heart Press, 2021).

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Max Goncharov on Unsplash

WHITE MAGIC, essays by Elissa Washuta, reviewed by Eric Buechel

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WHITE MAGIC
by Elissa Washuta
Tin House, 432 pages
reviewed by Eric Buechel

White Magic Book CoverIn Elissa Washuta’s book of linked essays, ​White Magic​, she writes about her substance abuse candidly, describing getting high with cough syrup as a teenager in her school’s bathroom between classes. In a later scene, a doctor pleads with her to stop drinking—there’s something wrong with her insides, and she’s been urinating blood. As these essays progress, Washuta retraces the reasons for her self-destructiveness in a culture that treats her, a Native woman, as an expendable object. To understand her experience, she uses ideas from witchcraft, tarot, astrology, and even Twitter discourse as resources. With this, she creates a beautifully-rendered piece of art that isn’t easily labeled.

Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz tribe of southern Washington. I grew up not far from their reservation. I also lived in Seattle during the time that she did, frequenting many of the places described in this book. As a child, I had no conception of ancestral land or colonization. These things were deemed too uncomfortable to be discussed. Displacement and environmental racism were facts I only came to be aware of later in life. To read about the Seattle that Washuta lived in for a decade as it grew into the tech ogre it is, and inhabit those same spaces through her writing, is a gift for any reader interested in the real history of the United States.

In the essay “Centerless Universe,” the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture selects Washuta as writer-in-residence at the Fremont Bridge. The guidelines are vague, stating “that the writing shall illuminate some aspect of the bridge and the bridge’s history, be it real or metaphorical.” Washuta needed the money, even if she was skeptical of the project and its benefactors, so she took the position. She writes:

“Before Seattle, there were steep hills, bent rivers, tideflats, lakes, bogs, spirit powers, forests, people, longhouses, and prairies forming a system of fluctuation and movement of time and land. Then the bostons– the word people up and down this coast used for white men– turned places into property: terminals, shipyards, mills, railroad beds, dumps, cesspools, homesteads, parks, streets, wharves, trestles, bridges, canals.”

This place was important to indigenous peoples long before white culture descended upon it. From her perch atop the busiest drawbridge in the United States, Washuta struggles with her presence and the concept of development and progress. She lists the series of displacements of the Native population one after another alongside the construction of the city’s infrastructure. “Assembling the above history…” she says, “felt like pulling out bones through pores.”

Seattle is a character throughout these essays, and Washuta examines it without nostalgia. It is a predominantly white city, with the indigenous population making up a disproportionate amount of the houseless. Washuta speaks of herself as “white-passing,” but she argues that in a culture that seeks to assimilate difference, this labeling is an act of aggression against sovereignty. Her time in Seattle was difficult and characterized by alcoholism, self-loathing, and a feeling of alienation. Rather than turn away from these memories, Washuta is intellectually attentive to them. She examines what they signify to her spiritual recovery and what reverberative effects she may still carry. She is interested in ways we tell our stories, both individually and collectively, and what these mean to those they don’t benefit.

In the essay “The Spirit Cabinet,” she reflects on her process of remembering by keeping index cards of events as they come back to her and listening to these cards intuitively to learn how they should be arranged—thereby forming her work. She writes: “I’ve begun noticing dates, the time loops are tightening, trying to show me something, and I’m doing my best to obey.”

Elissa Washuta

Washuta intertwines her own experience alongside history’s violence. This serves to place the reader into Washuta’s creative process while also highlighting the reverberative effects of occupation. With this mirroring technique, she explores how the personal and political are inescapably linked. She explores Native American myths of the Northwest, but she also finds purpose in places where we are told it isn’t kept. For example, Washuta treats the pop culture of her childhood as symbols. The things that she remembers, even if seemingly innocuous, have significance for her still; even if that significance is not apparent to her at first, she mines these memories for an explanation. The reader is shown the intricacies of the origins of Phil Collins’ motivations behind “​In the Air Tonight”​ and its subsequent Snopes article, put directly into a reframed frontier in the classic early computer game ​Oregon Trail,​ and is made aware of the hidden significance of the surreal children’s movie The Adventures of Mark Twain.

She writes of colonization but is quick to dismiss the violence inflicted on her body, such as rape and ensuing trauma, as a metaphor for it. She is colonized, yes—which helped perpetuate this violence as a central facet of the American experience—but that is only some of the story. Washuta utilizes this approach skillfully. At one point, she likens her post-traumatic stress disorder to a tyrannical rule, furthering our understanding of what it means to be actors in a society that requires abuse and power to function. Comparisons like these, which create a continuous sense of empathy and connection with the author, are repeatedly built on throughout the essays.

Washuta speaks of wanting to “ungrow” back to a child that still believes fully in magic. This notion permeates much of the book. As the author engages with the history of the land she inhabits, she attempts a form of unlearning on her intellectual path, to find a knowledge more resonant than the prescribed teachings that indoctrinate us from an early age. This method helps her view the past for clues of understanding while taking steps towards the release of painful feelings that no longer suit her. In this, her writing shows the nonlinearity of healing.

Eric Buechel, Fall 2020 InternEric Buechel is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. He has a BA in Psychology from The Evergreen State College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where he was the fiction editor for Lumina and taught in the Right to Write program through Westchester County Corrections. He works as an editor and English tutor.

A BOOK BY ANY OTHER NAME: ON TITLES AND DATING: A Craft Essay by Melinda Scully

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A Man and a Woman behind a fogged class window

A BOOK BY ANY OTHER NAME: ON TITLES AND DATING
A Craft Essay
by Melinda Scully

Imagine a reader is on a blind date with your book or short story. Maybe a friend set them up, or they ventured out for a local singles speed-dating extravaganza. The specifics don’t really matter. The point is, the reader is on the hunt for a new story to love, and it could be yours. How exciting!

Your story walks up to the table, and in mere moments, the reader subconsciously asks and answers about seventeen questions in their head, maybe starting with…

  • What is your story wearing?
  • Did it walk up confidently?
  • Is it smiling?
  • Does it smell weird?

Did your story pass the test? Did you even know you were being tested?

Let’s hope so, because by this time your reader already knows whether they want to proceed with the date. Readers are ruthless. If they don’t like your first-date disco suit, they’ve already rung the rotation bell and moved on to their next option.

That is the power of first impressions. In fiction, that is also the power of titles. Readers are supposed to judge a title. The author knows that you’re doing it, so theoretically, they’ve chosen that title with love and care.

Except… when they don’t. How often do we type “STUPID DRAFT #3” and hope a title will eventually manifest (and if it doesn’t, we resort to using the jazziest simile our story has to offer)? Or, we start the page with a title that sounds snazzy, and we never think about it again? Too many of us forget that the title should be a selling point—not an afterthought. We must craft it as an honest, interesting representation of our work that smacks the target audience right in the face. It should intrigue the reader. Flirt with them.

We could talk about what makes a title fantastic, but a great title is like a great date: there’s not a single formula, but you’ll know it when you see it. Bad titles, though? We immediately identify them on others’ work; unfortunately, we aren’t so good at recognizing our own. Can you confidently say you’ve never made a bad first impression without knowing it?

So, for all of our edification, behold—an incomplete list of weirdos you don’t want to show up on your blind date:

The Catfish

Wasn’t she supposed to be a 5’11” volleyball player?

Ever read something and think wow, that is not what I thought this was going to be about? You got book-baited. I know sometimes it is fun being fooled by a title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and To Kill a Mockingbird are fortunately not about birds. So, what’s the difference? If your title is misleading, ask yourself whether the deception serves a specific purpose. If not, please reconsider bamboozling your readers.

(Fake) Bad example: Boys Gone Wild

(Real) Good Example: The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

Bland-as-Toast Man

He’s wearing khakis, works in accounting, and good god, he has nothing interesting to say.

Unless your title is ironically boring, you probably don’t want your reader’s eyes to glaze over before the first paragraph. Come on! Your story isn’t tedious, so why should your title be?

Bad Example: Watching the Green Light

Good Example: The Great Gatsby

 

Lady of Mystery

“So, what do you do?” “Why do you own a Ouija board?” Ask away. She won’t tell you squat.

A title should at least hint at something interesting the reader will experience in the story. What’s the tone? Where is it set? Who’s it about? Can I have one teeny tiny little mental image? Give your reader something to react to.

Bad Example: Regrets

Good Example: The Kite Runner

 

The (Figuratively) Naked Lady

She has no boundaries. In fact, she already mentioned her raging yeast infection. Do you even need to know more?

I know, this doesn’t seem fair. You just told us not to be mysterious! Well, it’s a balance. If you share all of your secrets upfront, then what is going to keep the reader interested?

Bad Example: Death of the Southern Dream

Good Example: Gone with the Wind

 

The Philosopher

He’s soooooo deep. Too deep. He should really introspect introspectively. 

This is when the author uses the title to make an unnecessary value statement (probably one that the text already makes for itself). Or, the author chose the title for their own personal or sentimental reasons (ones that the reader will never understand). Remember, the title is for your reader and the betterment of your story. Not for you.

Bad Example: Murdering Misogyny

Good Example: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

 

Wait, what’s his name?

It definitely started with a K. Or… a Q. Is it tacky to ask for his business card?

These are the titles that sound clunky, are hard to remember, or are exceptionally difficult to pronounce. You need people to be able to say the name of your story out loud. As a test, try saying it five times fast. If you can’t manage it, your readers won’t be able to either.

Bad Example: Oliver Oglethorp

Good Example: Oliver Twist

 

He’s Wearing a Literal Disco Suit

Trying hard, but not in the right ways.

Mid-workshop: “I picked the title because it sounded cool.” Yeah, we can tell.

Bad Example: A Hodgepodge Monster Called Prometheus

Good Example: Frankenstein

Do these guidelines always apply? Well, no. There are a handful of situations where a disco suit might be the right choice—for example, if you’ve got sweet dance moves, and you’re headed to a Halloween party. The point is that first impressions matter, and also, there is a lot of room for error. Avoiding common pitfalls will maximize your chances of a second date with the reader. When in doubt, ask a brutally honest friend for an opinion. They’ll tell you if your suit has too many sequins.

Melinda Scully HeadshotMelinda Scully is a fiction writer and operations strategist based in Dallas, Texas. Besides writing, her skillsets include math, competitive swing dancing, and spreadsheets. She is working towards her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Find her on LinkedIn or on Instagram @melindascully.

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Jack Finnigan on Unsplash

 

 

LA BALEINE by Claire Rudy Foster

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

humpback whale

LA BALEINE
by Claire Rudy Foster

I did not know anything about whales until I became one. In the first trimester of my pregnancy, I transitioned, changing into a creature that was part meat and part ocean. My pregnant body was flush with proteins, ions, and nutrients for the first time since my childhood. Like a whale’s, my body produced massive amounts of progesterone, a hormone that blasted through me like tropical waves. My twenty-three-year-old heart refilled my capillaries, deadened from heavy drinking and drug use. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that I was actually glowing, the way pregnancy is said to imbue a halo around you while you’re gestating. My cheeks were pink all the time, as though I was permanently post-coital. I sweated more. My body felt like it was filling out, as though my cells were plumping up like pillows of sweet ricotta-filled ravioli immersed in hot water. I floated, swollen, into the next phase of my life.

At the time, I was working in a bakery. I woke up every morning at three to go turn on the ovens and start rolling out pie dough. I could barely stand at the counter, and prepping food, baking, and buttering sandwiches made me dry heave. My hands had become awkward flippers, and the smell of cinnamon stuck to me like a barnacle. I measured sour cream, streusel, crystallized ginger, and berries while my body expanded, making room for my son.

Weighing a whale is nauseating business. No scale on earth is big enough. Weighing a whale requires transgression; it makes the assumption that the human question “how big is it?” is more important than the sanctity of the whale, which carries the answer to that question in its very name. How big is the whale? Very.

Long ago, the only way to guess one’s size was to wait until it washed up, dead, on a beach. Whoever found its bloated, gaseous carcass cut it into pieces and loaded them individually onto a balance. Chunks of whale were dragged by horses or loaded onto trucks and heaved onto weighted platforms that were quickly stained with whatever chemicals leak from a corpse that has been preserved in salt water and then roasted in the sun. The stink and blood must have been unimaginable. Yet, whoever was doing the measuring must have been willing to breathe it. Some days, I sagged against the pastry counter, struggling to breathe. I was out of my element. My own body was too oppressive on land. It was only getting worse.

In most mammals, blood content more than doubles in the first weeks of pregnancy, increasing from twenty percent to 100 percent. In the beginning, each vein blossoms with plasma and grows luscious as the placenta forms against the budding embryo. Plasma is what you sell to pay your rent at the end of the month; back then, I didn’t know that there was more than one part to my blood. Platelets and blood cells and plasma rushed through me and into the miniscule veins that connected me to the growing dot that would one day be my son.

At least I wasn’t doing it alone, in the beginning. I didn’t wear my plain silver wedding band in the kitchen but left it at home so it wouldn’t be ruined. If I said that I was married, nobody believed me. I was too young, too surly, and too wild. Nothing about me suggested I could be a wife or mother. I wasn’t feminine in that way; what I was, was sexy.

I lost my job in the first month of the pregnancy because of my morning sickness. When he fired me, my boss said, “That’s what you get.”

“What did I do?” I asked.

He looked at my chest and trailed his eyes down my front, “You did it.”

I thought pregnancy protected mothers from the awfulness of men. Naive, I believed that marriage was an exchange: you chose one man’s bad behavior, and it absolved you of having to deal with any of the others. Wedding rings, too, were supposed to repel negative attention. They signaled respectability. I’m not available. I blushed when my boss pointed out my condition. Desire was always the blood in the water. When his eyes lodged in my cleavage, I knew what he was seeing: a barely-legal sexpot who was playing at being an adult. He stuffed a few bills into a plain white envelope. Taking it, I felt as though he had paid me for a trick. I put the money in my purse, conscious of the way my shirt buttons stretched over my new, expanding body.

Fuck you, I thought, though I didn’t say it.

Fucking was how I got into this mess.

Pregnancy is the only period when the mother and child are the same. One body. One conjoined system of nerves and veins. The baby moves, and the mother senses its vibration. The mother eats, breathes, sleeps, and rides the waves of hormonal change, and the baby responds to it. They are linked in every way. There was a brief window in my life between when I stopped being part of the “we” of my family and entered the “we” of my marriage and then straight into the “we” of my pregnancy. I was rarely myself; I was always part of some other family, chosen or biological. I didn’t question this or even notice it. I simply accepted it as natural. The whale who lives does not wonder, why me? Wondering is for people; we are born to second-guess ourselves. So many facts we know about whales are the outcomes of fantastical theories. We cut them, thinking we will find their secrets inside. In fact, we’ve learned most about whales by studying them without interfering. Because we watched, we learned the position of the calf inside its mother, tailfirst, the way they are born backwards so they will be saved from drowning. The mother’s body goes to great lengths to deliver them, healthy, into the sea.

I called my mother to tell her about the baby, like I was supposed to. I didn’t mention the lost job or the morning sickness that engulfed me in waves of bile.

“Mom, I have good news,” I said, “I’m going to be a mother.”

The longest pause in the world, so long I thought my phone had dropped the call.

“Are you still there?”

“I went and sat down,” she said. Her voice was flat and bleak.

“I guess we can skip the champagne,” I joked weakly. She didn’t laugh. Within two weeks, she and my father came to visit us in Portland, Oregon. On their second day in town, they took Matthew and me to lunch. I was more than a little green around the gills and exhausted, too sick to eat. Matt and I fought constantly, but we put things on hold in front of my parents. I picked at my food, we managed to sit side-by-side in the restaurant’s plastic booth without touching, and then we walked home.

Matt and my father stayed out on the sidewalk while my mother, under some pretext, went upstairs with me. I slumped on the carcass of the linen-upholstered loveseat that was a gift from our decadent San Francisco cousins. The unmade Murphy bed was still pulled out from the wall with my grandmother’s double wedding ring quilt on it, covering a wad of stale sheets and wool blankets. Matt’s school papers and our tabby’s kitty litter mingled on the floor. Folded laundry covered our only chair. The trash hadn’t been taken out. The apartment was less than 400 square feet, but I couldn’t muster the energy to care about cleaning. I was too tired to do more than limp from the bed to the bathroom.

I was struggling out of my coat when my mother leaned toward me from her seat on the bed. Her hands were clasped together, and her face looked earnest. I couldn’t follow what she was saying. My stomach hurt. I wanted her to leave so I could go back to sleep. She told me that it wasn’t too late for me to change my mind, and that I had so many good things going for me. My education, my future, all that they’d worked to give me, these gifts would work in my favor. I listened, trying to understand what she meant, when suddenly, Matt burst in like a fist and slammed himself into the seat next to me. To my surprise, he took my hand. On the day I told him I was pregnant, he’d thrown our mattress at me