CLOTEL OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, a novel by William Wells Brown, written in 1853, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Posted on July 15, 2020 by thwackJuly 15, 2020

CLOTEL, or, The President’s Daughter
by William Wells Brown
Penguin Classics, 320 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

In 1998, scientists performed a DNA test to answer one of the longest-running rumors in American history. Historians could no longer deny the truth: Yes, Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. But plenty of people already knew that. William Wells Brown knew this beyond a reasonable doubt when he published Clotel in 1853, a novel that imagines the lives and tribulations of Jefferson’s slave-born daughters. The characters are all fictional, but Brown’s creative liberties stray little from reality. Masters frequently made concubines of their slaves, so why would Jefferson be any exception? Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal” were a farce in Brown’s eyes, because only in antebellum America could a president’s daughter be born in chains.

The 1850s were an uncommonly productive decade in American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 and Herman Melville published Moby-Dick a year later. Walt Whitman released the first edition of Leaves of Grass while Emily Dickinson trickled out the first of her poems. These works went on to become mainstays of high school and college curricula while Clotel, the first novel by an African American, undeservedly fell into relative obscurity.

The 1850s were an uncommonly productive decade in American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 and Herman Melville published Moby-Dick a year later. Walt Whitman released the first edition of Leaves of Grass while Emily Dickinson trickled out the first of her poems. These works went on to become mainstays of high school and college curricula while Clotel, the first novel by an African American, undeservedly fell into relative obscurity. Within its pages, Clotel mingles some of the best elements of each of these authors. Brown has Hawthorne’s critical eye for religion, Melville’s encyclopedic dedication to facts, and Whitman and Dickinson’s curiosity for human lives. At the same time, Brown writes with an authoritative talent for social commentary that places him in a category all his own.

Brown was already an established name by the time he wrote Clotel. His memoir, the Narrative of William W. Brown, was one of the best selling ex-slave narratives of the 1840s, second only to that of Frederick Douglass. He wrote his debut novel while living in exile in England to escape the grasp of the Fugitive Slave Act. He returned to the United States to lecture on abolition across the country, all while continuing to write plays, memoirs, and other nonfiction. Clotel’s influence can be seen scattered throughout the American canon. Brown’s depictions of passing, “tragic mulatto” characters, and other racial themes would be further developed by contemporaries like Frank J. Webb, later writers like Charles W. Chesnutt, and much later figures of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

The novel may be titled for Clotel, but it divides its attention equally between Clotel, her mother Currer, and her sister Althesa. After Jefferson’s death, his daughters and Currer are sold to the highest bidders, by which point their relation to the former president has been ignored. The family is separated and spread out across the South. Clotel and Althesa are sold to men who intend to take them as illegitimate wives, while Currer has been sold to a tyrannical plantation owner. As each navigates the unique circumstances of their enslavement, each woman swims against the current to try to reunite the family.

By placing the women in dramatically different scenarios, Brown constructs a broad cross-section of the United States, from which he criticizes white America’s many faces of hypocrisy.

By placing the women in dramatically different scenarios, Brown constructs a broad cross-section of the United States, from which he criticizes white America’s many faces of hypocrisy. Clotel and Althesa’s “husbands” pretend that their marriages are genuine and loving, but they quickly relegate their “wives” to servants the moment the opportunity to marry a white woman arises. Masters turn to religion to justify the “peculiar institution” of slavery, but conveniently ignore scriptures that decry it. Brown dismantles the idea that the United States was a free nation for anyone besides white men, writing,

They have tears to shed over Greece and Poland; they have an abundance of sympathy for “poor Ireland;” they can furnish a ship of war to convey the Hungarian refugees from a Turkish prison to the “land of the free and home of the brave.” They boast that America is the “cradle of liberty;” if it is, I fear they have rocked the child to death.

As much as Brown rebukes white Americans, he also provides a valuable model for allyship. When Currer is sold to Reverend Peck, we are introduced to his abolitionist daughter Georgiana. She, unlike her father, sees slavery for the moral and religious atrocity that it is. Adhering to her principles, she badgers her father as he stubbornly ignores her. Her father’s death comes as a relief to her because she then gains the authority to free his slaves. Yet, Brown tactfully dodges portraying Georgiana as a white savior. Far from it, Brown is precise in noting that the slaves, through their own grit, saved themselves. Georgiana is an example of how whites could be helpful to that end, but are by no means the primary actors.

After Clotel is sold by her “husband,” she escapes and traverses the country while passing for a white man. She remains intent on finding her mother and sister, but she is obstructed along the way. The people she meets give the novel room to digress to describe the systems and circumstances that added to slaves’ oppression. Brown does not shy away from incorporating real examples of lynchings or slave captures to paint a grim portrait of the South, often citing newspaper clippings to ground his point. At one turn, Brown even describes how an epidemic of yellow fever in 1831 New Orleans disproportionately impacted slaves as they were forced to fill in for whites who had fallen ill. Soon, once tensions rose, protests caught fire, prompting Brown to ask,

Did not the American revolutionists violate the laws when they struck for liberty? They were revolters, but their success made them patriots—we were revolters, and our failure makes us rebels. Had we succeeded, we would have been patriots too. Success makes all the difference.

As the father of the African American novel, Brown’s work established the genre’s potential for invoking change. Clotel doesn’t just document America bending towards justice, it actively applies pressure.

As the father of the African American novel, Brown’s work established the genre’s potential for invoking change. Clotel doesn’t just document America bending towards justice, it actively applies pressure. Brown is always clear and concise in his demands. Even today, as oppressive systems have evolved into new forms, Brown’s words remain enduring directives for equality. In a philosophical moment, he describes how the first slaves were brought to Virginia only a few months before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. The passengers of each charted two halves of America that would run parallel to each other for centuries. Four hundred years later, the question Brown raises in Clotel still remains unanswered: “When shall one of those parallel lines come to an end?”

Dylan Cook is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies English, with a concentration in creative writing, and Biology. He often reads and writes, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at dycook@sas.upenn.edu.

THE DARK HEART OF EVERY WILD THING, a novel by Joseph Fasano, reviewed by Michael McCarthy

Posted on July 12, 2020 by thwackJuly 13, 2020

THE DARK HEART OF EVERY WILD THING
by Joseph Fasano
Platypus Press, 272 pages (forthcoming, September 1, 2020)

reviewed by Michael McCarthy

In the moral universe of poet Joseph Fasano’s debut novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, death lurks in every corner of life. A father, bereaved of his wife, must journey through the teeming forests of British Columbia and hunt a fabled mountain lion, to him the very “mind of the wild.” Three years ago, it mauled his son, the father powerless to save him. Now, as he narrates his monomaniacal fight for survival, the hunt for the mountain lion becomes an obsession, borne of unfathomable grief, to exact revenge on a world that has stolen everything he loved.

It is a dramatic book, straddling the sentimental and the brutal. Accordingly, it divides each chapter into two sections, one to the hunt and the other to his marriage. While he recalls memories of his wife to last him through the cold and deadly wilderness, the memories end inevitably, as he fears his hunt soon will, in death. Loss is the overpowering theme of his life. When he returns to the woods to avenge his son’s death, he is chased by wolves and forced to eat snow, and he must reckon with the possibility that there are some things a man cannot save.

I use the word “man” deliberately. Despite its intentions, Dark Heart is characteristically masculine. For all the mystical poeticism layered over the hunt, it embodies a Hemingway-esque male fantasy. What’s more virile than roughing it alone in the wilderness, outfoxing ravenous beasts and still more ravenous hunters? While it strives for something nobler than its subject, its failure to address the gendered aspect of the father’s hunger for revenge chains the novel to the ground whenever it tries to soar.

Alongside his wife’s death, there is a more latent loss, another strike at his masculinity. Just as he lost his wife, he lost also his role as husband. This complicates his marital reflections in the wilderness. Is he remembering her or recreating her in his own image? Regardless, she comes across as a bland, incomplete counterpart to an obscenely masculine hero. He hunts; she dances. He shows his son how to build a house; she brings them lemonade. He gets to go on wild adventures; she tends to house chores. To his credit, he seems at least somewhat aware of this inequality. At one point, he recalls this exchange with a premarital lover:

“You are not ready.”
“For what?”
“To hold someone and not—” she searched for the words “—not make of her what you need.”

This could describe either Fasano or his protagonist.

It would be unfair, however, to characterize Dark Heart solely by its refusal to buck these misogynistic tropes. Rather, they read as something the novel struggles against. The narrative gropes for higher meaning through magisterial prose, equally concerned with philosophical abstractions as with blood-and-guts reality, and though it never fully succeeds, it reaches heights most books dare not consider. The prose alone can bring you to tears. It challenges, cleanses, saddens, lifts, pierces, and consoles, sometimes within a single paragraph. Take this passage as emblematic of the atmosphere Fasano conjures:

It was pleasant once to track in the early autumns, the chickadees and the violet-green swallow beginning always to sing their unfinished praise, the heron that always came north out of its range to cross once a season over the valley and disappear over the pines to god knows where. […] I’d loved it, too, the purring and caterwauling of the animal itself, and in the thaw of youth I’d believed in the myth that we were brothers, that if you hunger for something strongly enough in the night, strongly and without pride or malice, you become it, and whichever one of you is chosen to fall will yield itself willingly and truly in the nature of things, as a body at the high noon of its truth gathers back the vastness of its shadow.

If this language captivates you, so will the entire novel. Fasano is relentless in maintaining his narrator’s dense, hypnotic, imaginative voice. It accounts for almost all of the novel’s emotional range. Just as it details the father’s gory injuries and self-administered treatments, it gives way to moments of bracing tenderness. By now, the likeness to Moby-Dick should be obvious. (Really, just substitute a white whale for a mountain lion and a lost leg for a lost son.) When it isn’t bogged down in masculine reveries, it earns the comparison, describing universal themes with invigorating passion: mortality, grief, hope, darkness. Whether the prose succeeds in elevating the novel to the lofty existential plane it aspires to, the reader must decide.

Joseph Fasano

If, in fact, the reader does decide. I still haven’t made heads or tails of the novel weeks after finishing it. Did I enjoy reading it? Frankly no. Has it fascinated me? More than almost any other book I can recall. It seems to me that this is how the novel was meant to be read. That is, not read but reckoned with. You must yield to its intense vision and follow the father’s voice to its last end. The novel doesn’t captivate you. It takes you prisoner.

After a story shadowed over by death, it ends on a note not devoid of hope. Fasano allows his protagonist to escape the book’s endless shadow, the darkness to lift, in a way utterly surprising yet perfectly fitting. Nevertheless, I lament the much richer novel he didn’t write. Clearly, he can write powerfully about anything he sets his mind to. I just wish he had devoted his capacious artistry to deconstructing the limiting gender roles that limit his own narrative. I find myself repeating a verse of a poem the narrator’s wife reads to him: “I wish what I wished you before, but harder.”

Michael 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.

EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY II: A Workshop to Jumpstart Your Creativity | August 8 to September 5 | Taught by Tricia Park

Posted on July 10, 2020 by thwackJuly 15, 2020

EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY II
A Workshop to Jumpstart Your Writing
open to all levels and genres
taught by Cleaver Editor Tricia Park

5 weeks
Aug 8, 15, 22, 29, Sept 5
5 Zoom classes, Saturdays 2-4 pm Eastern Time
$150 early bird / $200 regular
Class limit: 12
This class can be taken on its own or as a continuation of Part I
Questions: triciapark@cleavermagazine.com

EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY is a five-week online generative writing course for writers of all levels and genres. In these days of uncertainty and rapid change, it’s difficult to know what to hang onto. And social distancing leaves us struggling to maintain our mental wellness during this undetermined period of isolation.

But what if we can use this time to develop a skill; start a new project; follow a passion?

What if this sudden surplus of time is an opportunity for experimentation?

What if we embrace our vulnerability and take a deep dive into the unknown?

What might we discover about ourselves?

For many of us, the challenge is not getting to the writing desk but knowing what to do with ourselves once we’re there.

What does it mean to develop a writing practice? How do we create momentum from where we are right now? What if destabilizing ourselves as writers could move us forward in our work if experimentation and play catapulted us into our best writing?

As a classically trained violinist, I spent years looking for the “correct” way, endlessly seeking the most efficient path, setting myself upright if I began to wobble. The truth of the matter is that all of us—writers, artists, musicians—enter into the creative process from a place of instability. Our objective should not be to straighten up and fly right, but to embrace that physics and allow our work into it.

What you’ll get from the classes:

Once a week, real-time meetings with your instructor and cohort.

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.

Tricia 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.

HOW WRITING FICTION HELPS ME—AND MAYBE YOU—DEAL WITH PAST TRAUMA, a craft essay by Kelly Fordon

Posted on July 7, 2020 by thwackJuly 7, 2020

HOW WRITING FICTION HELPS ME—AND MAYBE YOU—DEAL WITH PAST TRAUMA
A Craft Essay
by Kelly Fordon

In her essay “Nine Beginnings,” Margaret Atwood answers the question, “Why Do You Write?” nine different ways. In her honor, while completing my recent short story collection, I Have The Answer, I challenged myself to answer the question: “How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?” nine different times.

Honestly, I probably could have gone on even longer.

How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

I write about trauma to stop dissociating.

After I was sexually assaulted in high school, I did not initially understand what had happened to me. I was Catholic, raised in a strict household. My mother told me that if I went into a room alone with a boy, anything that happened after that was my fault. For that reason, when I decided to make out with a boy in high school, and things went south, I blamed myself, froze, and waited for it to end. When I first wrote about it, I had no choice but to fictionalize the event. I didn’t remember anything about the house where I was assaulted, the bedroom, or even who else was at the party. The only thing that stuck with me was the name and actions of the perpetrator. Fiction allowed me the space and leeway to set a scene to replace the one my mind had erased.

How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

I write about trauma so I can hear my own voice.

After you are traumatized, and you go to therapy and you spend months working through it, you very hopefully have a few voices in your head. You have the voices of your family and friends all telling you (again, hopefully) that what happened wasn’t your fault. You have your therapist’s voice in your head, again, hopefully telling you it wasn’t your fault. If the traumatic incident was experienced by others on a large scale: a mass shooting at a concert, 9/11, a car crash, you will read essays, letters, newspaper accounts of the event, telling you exactly what happened from many different angles and probably how you should feel about it.

But only you can write your own story, and your deepest feelings. Only you know what happened specifically to you. In order to hear that voice, your inner voice, the most important one, you must silence everyone else and write it down.

How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

Fiction allows the writer to tell the truth, but tell it slant. To taste the fear, but not get too close. Fiction allows the protective armor of distance. When I wrote the fictional story, “The Devil’s Proof,” loosely based on my own experience of assault, I just wanted to blur reality a little bit to figure out how much reality I could stand.

How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

Fiction provides additional protection from judgment—both your own and other people’s.

Writing “The Devil’s Proof” allowed me to explore my feelings of violation and frankly, horror, and share that moment with other people without the risk of having to name the actual perpetrator or be judged by friends or family members. Later I wrote about the assault in nonfiction, but for the first run through, it felt more comfortable to be able to say, “No, no, this is just a story.”

You may find you have more empathy for the protagonist in your “fictional” story than you do for yourself.

Sejal Shah, author of This is One Way to Dance, in her essay, “Craft Capsule: Breaking Genre” writes, “There is magic in fiction, in not having everything you write be attached directly to you. In my stories, I draw from a wider field, and I’m not worried about how something sounds, if it would make my public self cringe. If you grow up in a deeply private, Hindu, conservative, traditional family as I did, fiction and poetry offered a different code, a cover.”

How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

You may find you have more empathy for the protagonist in your “fictional” story than you do for yourself.

For years after, I blamed myself for initial assault, and for going out with the boy a second time, a mistake which led to my rape. But then I created a character who was my age, went to the same school, and was every bit as naïve as I had once been, and I found that I was crushed by the decisions she made, because she was so innocent. I had complete empathy for her and by then understood the complexity of what had happened to her (and the societal complicity) in a way I simply would not have allowed if I had been talking about myself, or my own decision-making process.

In short, I would have been harder on myself, and discovering that taught me about the insidious nature of shame, how debilitating it can be. Conversely, the empathy I felt for my protagonist helped me heal.

How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Writing fiction allowed me to create a new—better—storyline. In the hero’s journey I created for my character in “The Devil’s Proof,” she has the last word. I did not.

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey has been used as a powerful metaphor and descriptor of the recovery path for survivors of trauma. In “Trauma Recovery: A Heroic Journey,” authors Brenda Keck, Lisa Compton, Corie Schoeneberg and Tucker Compton advocate studying and implementing the hero’s journey in order to take back some power, “Writing the story of the assault helps the writer move from injured to transformed…Survivors have been unexpectedly thrust into a storyline they did not choose nor are they offered the option to decline.” Conversely, in the Hero’s Journey the protagonist starts out with no power, sets out into the unknown, confronts their demon, so to speak, and return victorious.

How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

Making art is transformative.

In her Poets & Writers Magazine essay, “The Heart-Work: Writing about Trauma as a Subversive Act,” memoirist Melissa Febos explains: “Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me. And I believe that stories like these have the power to transform the world. That is the point of literature, or at least that’s what I tell my students. We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to one another.”

Making art is transformative.

How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

Fiction writing allows the writer to create the story that fits the feeling.

When we are writing fiction, we don’t have to tell anyone exactly what happened, instead we can create the circumstances on the page that reflect how an experience felt. Sometimes the “true” circumstances will not feel equal to the reaction.

My story “Superman at Hogback Ridge” is based on a real event. One summer day, a young, skinny, tattooed man who was clearly very angry, and acting erratically, startled me when I was sitting in my car after it had stalled out. He jumped out of his car, screamed some vitriol at me, and then drove away.

That was not a very exciting story and it feels like a pathetic reason to be “traumatized,” but I was going fishing, it was a beautiful day, and ever since then, I can’t get over the feeling that anything can happen at any moment. I wasn’t traumatized, but the incident haunted me, so in the story, I made the man a meth addict and handed him a gun. My fictional story reflected my fear (which was outsized) in a way that the actual “true” event did not.

In other words, I took control of the story and changed it in order to convey an exact level of terror. By writing that story, I was able to figure out where my own fear was really coming from—my own lack of control.

How does writing fiction help you deal with your own trauma?

In study after study, expressive writing has been proven to have a positive effect on both mental and physical health.

Studies by James W. Pennebaker, the Regents Centennial Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, show that by putting emotional upheavals into words, we start to understand them better. Once we have a better handle on our problems, we can move forward and get on with life.

After I described the feeling of being assaulted in “The Devil’s Proof,” I was able to go on and write the true story in the 21.2 issue of River Teeth. Writing fiction helped me circle the experience and poke at it tentatively with my stick. Later—35 years later to be exact—I was able to face it head-on.

Better late than never.

Kelly Fordon’s new book is the short story collection I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press). Her work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review, River Teeth, and other journals. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book, and other honors. Other publications include a full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press) and three poetry chapbooks. She teaches at Springfed Arts, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit. Visit her website.

Cover image by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS, a novel by Ocean Vuong, reviewed by Claire Kooyman

Posted on July 6, 2020 by thwackJuly 7, 2020

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS
by Ocean Vuong
Penguin Press, 256 pages
reviewed by Claire Kooyman

Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone. —Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong’s writing is steeped in memories, the history of which sometimes precedes him chronologically. This was true of his poetry in the collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and it is also true of his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, recently released by Penguin Press. This novel is a recursive exploration of the path memories take through a family. The narrator’s life is impacted by the traumas his mother and grandmother suffered before he was born. As a very young child, Vuong’s narrator, Little Dog, learns quickly that not all authority figures can be trusted absolutely, and that even unconditional love has flaws. Throughout the novel, Vuong illustrates that we are all sharing space with the past, even as we exist in the present.

Little Dog (a nickname given to Vuong’s narrator by his grandmother as a way to make him seem less enticing to evil spirits who might steal him) writes to his mother as a way to confess and relate to her as an adult. His mother knows few words in her native Vietnamese or in English and cannot read, so she will never know what he is saying. The epistolary style of the novel, then, is ironic. Perhaps Little Dog knows that this is the only way he can explain himself to his mother, even if she will never understand; this style allows the narrator to express freely what they cannot discuss face-to-face. He brings up things his mother might not understand, like the racial heritage of American celebrities, and things too painful to discuss, even with time behind them. Even if most readers can’t directly relate to Little Dog’s Vietnamese immigrant heritage or the challenges of being gay, many children and parents feel unable to truly express themselves to the other, even without the burden of language standing in the way. This novel is like a book of secrets your mother or son might never tell you.

As a reader, one might question whether On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel at all. The writing fluidly switches from more traditional storytelling to something that resembles Vuong’s poetry. Is this a novel-length poem, or a novel written like poetry? He uses line breaks that a prose editor might assume were typos in a different work:

For summer. For your hands

were wet and Trevor’s a name like an engine starting up in the night. Who snuck out to meet a boy like you. Yellow and barely there.

Ocean Vuong

This passage about what Trevor is to Little Dog blends the best of poetry and prose beautifully. He disregards paragraphs and narrative for strong images and emotion; faced with white space, we linger on Little Dog’s hands reaching for Trevor the way that the narrator himself does in his memory. We feel the time he spent with Trevor, without it being explained to us in longform.

Vuong’s speedy switching between topics also evokes his poetry. Much of this novel reminds me of his poem, Aubade with Burning City—not just because it deals with fallout from the Vietnam War, but because of the stylistic way Vuong approaches his material. He approaches the themes of war, identity, and belonging from many angles, shows us the individual threads, and then weaves them together until the reader sees it was always one large tapestry. From “Aubade with Burning City:

Milkflower petals on the street
……………………………………………..like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright …

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
………………Open, he says.
………………………………………..She opens.

The juxtaposed images found in this poem (milkflower petals, pieces of fabric, the bubbling teacup) are like the many disparate topics of Little Dog’s letters: Tiger Woods’s undiscussed Asian heritage, his grandfather’s significance in his life, his agreement with his mother about how hard it is to be different in America. In the novel, the sections are broken up by the different subject matter. But then, the themes coalesce: in both the novel and the poem, the present American influence is linked to mistrust and racism. Tiger Woods is part Asian, and a product of the Vietnam War—and Paul, Little Dog’s grandfather, is connected to him solely because of war, too. Much of the novel does this: takes disparate pieces and slowly pushes them together, until the reader can see the similarities.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous follows Little Dog as he grapples with his family’s identity, and the identity of being Vietnamese in a culture that attempted to destroy Vietnam. As if that weren’t enough, he also struggles to come to terms with being gay during the nineteen-nineties. His relationship with Trevor echoes his grandmother and grandfather’s during the Vietnam War: an interracial relationship with shame, remixed for the modern era. Like Little Dog, Trevor has pieces of himself that feel impossible to reconcile. Home is not a refuge for him; Trevor’s alcoholic father represents the popular opinion of a country and culture that do not understand either them, or gay sub-culture. Little Dog writes:

I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.

In the third section of the novel, an adult Little Dog returns to where he grew up to attend a funeral. In this portion, he also discusses the death of his grandmother, and the return of her ashes to Vietnam. Again, we see Vuong approaching the same theme from a different angle: many versions of the word home are returned to in this section—literally, the physical locations of Little Dog’s own home, and Vietnam, the original home of his family, and, less tangibly, the concept of home, of memory. He repeatedly says, “I remember the table” in this third section—sometimes referring to specific tables from his memory, and sometimes just discussing the idea of constructing, or reconstructing a memory.

Little Dog reminds us that memory is an active process, like art. Neither exists in a vacuum, but both are instead little universes unto themselves that are actively created by individuals with pasts. With much effort and introspection on Vuong’s part, they flicker, alive for a moment: briefly gorgeous in the mind of the reader.

Claire Kooyman lives in Boulder, Colorado with her cats, Tom and Finn. She graduated from University of Colorado Boulder in 2018 with a degree in creative writing. She was recently published for the first time in Not Your Mother’s Breast Milk. She enjoys the view of the mountains from her balcony, and the sound of geese flying overhead.

An Interview with Mike Avery, author of THE COOPERATING WITNESS, by Andrea Caswell

Posted on July 2, 2020 by thwackJuly 2, 2020

An Interview with Mike Avery
Author of THE COOPERATING WITNESS
Literary Wanderlust Press
by Andrea Caswell

In Mike Avery’s debut novel, an ambitious law student is determined to find the truth to save an innocent man accused of murder. But the truth is never black-and-white, and the secrets she discovers hit close to home. The Cooperating Witness is a compelling legal thriller in which the moral ambiguities of justice are on trial. Mike Avery mines his fifty-year career as an attorney and law professor to craft a suspenseful story of murder, the mob, and a young woman’s determined idealism. In the following interview, conducted via phone and email, the author discusses his novel, the freedom of writing fiction, and the complex intersection of our legal system and morality.

Andrea Caswell: You have extensive experience in the legal profession. What insights did this give you in writing The Cooperating Witness?

Mike Avery: My legal background was very helpful. I’ve known a lot of people like my characters: burned-out lawyers like Bobby Coughlin and idealistic students like Susan Sorella. I felt I knew how they might think, and how they’d react to situations that presented themselves in scenes. I’m also very familiar with FBI frame-ups, having litigated a well-known case over a period of several years. My goal was to create a story that was true to life, in the sense that it could actually happen in a courtroom, but was also dramatic.

AC: Susan struggles with feeling alienated in the male-dominated world of criminal law, and sexism adds to her challenges. She needs a strong mentor, but finds that mentors are “still few and far between for a young woman interested in criminal defense.” Why do you think that is, and are there solutions on the horizon?

MA: The opportunities for women as criminal trial lawyers have been gradually improving. During most of the time I was active in court, there were very few successful women criminal attorneys on the defense side. There were more women prosecutors, because Government agencies were required to have equal employment opportunities. Women are saddled with the macho notion that the public has, the stereotype that a criminal defense lawyer has to be aggressive and combative. No doubt that influences the choices that clients make when it comes time to retain a lawyer. There is, however, more than one way to be effective in the courtroom.

AC: Your novel explores the complex relationship between the law and justice. Susan discovers that the law isn’t always about right and wrong, and many of us might be surprised by that fact. Is that an inherent contradiction in our justice system?

MA: I think Susan discovers, particularly in terms of the relationships she and her father have with mob boss Frank Romano, that right and wrong as defined by the law do not always take into account moral imperatives. Or to put it another way, as she tries to seek justice, she finds she is confronted by conflicting obligations. In TV shows and police procedural novels, it is a cliché that private detectives or the police have to cut corners to nail the bad guy. I think that concept is overused and probably encourages police lawlessness. In this book we see what happens to the FBI agents who believe that the end justifies the means.

AC: The novel is set in Boston, from its gritty wharves to the elegant Parker House Hotel. One scene takes place in the Rosebud Diner, which was a local dive when I was in college and is still there today. What makes Boston the perfect setting for your novel?

MA: I lived in Boston for almost forty years and practiced criminal law there for nearly thirty of them. I know the culture. There is a rich diversity of characters in the community to draw upon when writing fiction.

AC: We experience the action from multiple characters’ perspectives, including Susan’s boss Bobby, FBI agents, prosecutors, the accused, and even the charismatic mob boss Frank Romano. How did you decide to inhabit those different minds, and what were some of the challenges these POVs presented?

MA: When I started writing fiction, I knew nothing, niente as my murder victim Tony Francini would say, about writing from a given character’s point of view. My first drafts were all over the place as I flitted from one character’s perspective to another in the same scene. So, point of view became an object of study for me, with the assistance of my teacher Stuart Nadler from the Bennington Writing Seminars. One of the things I read, and I’m sorry I can’t recall who wrote this, was that you can’t answer the question, “What does a barn look like?” You can only imagine what the barn looks like to a specific person. In each chapter I tried to imagine what the action looked and felt like to the character whose point of view I was using, and then to describe it in the language that he or she would use.

AC: How difficult was it to write a female protagonist, to give voice to her inner thoughts and feelings?

MA: That was very difficult. Whether I did a good job or not is something readers will decide. I got a lot of help from strong women in my life, including Jill, the woman I live with. In particular I have to thank my daughters Katie and Samantha, who are young, very independent, smart, and feminists. From time to time I’d ask them to read a section of the book to tell me whether I was off-base. To the extent I got things right, I have to give them credit. But to the extent that I made mistakes, I’m afraid I have to take the blame.

AC: The novelist Susan Scarf Merrell has said that “responding to art with art is what artists do.” You reference other art forms, such as Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the movie Casablanca, and a painting by the German expressionist Max Pechstein. How did those works find their way into your novel?

MA: What characters respond to, whether in literature or film or the visual arts, can deepen a reader’s understanding of them. When Susan first goes to the co-defendant’s lawyer’s office, she notices a painting on the wall, a Pechstein that I was fortunate to see at the Brücke Museum in Berlin. As Susan reflects on the exploitation of one of Pechstein’s models, it mirrors her own feeling of being sexualized as a woman in a professional role. The painting captured that sense of vulnerability very well.

AC: Food figures prominently in the book. Susan works at her family’s restaurant in the North End, where we enjoy strolls past Italian grocery stores and cafés. Characters dine on traditional antipasto platters, and homemade pasta with puttanesca sauce. Is it fair to say you’re a foodie?

MA: I love to cook and love Italian food, so I spiced up the story with it. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when Bobby Coughlin is attempting to get himself together to try the murder case and prepares chicken marsala as a metaphor for what he has to do to get ready to walk into the courtroom.

AC: The late film scholar Robert Warshow posits in his classic essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), that gangsters are portrayed as mythological figures who we know we should condemn, yet we can’t help but admire them too. Susan experiences this conflict with Frank Romano, the local mob boss. He’s charismatic, “an elegant criminal,” but ultimately his success will be his downfall; he’s recognizable as a tragic or anti-hero. How did you conceive of Frank Romano?

MA: Romano is a man whose life took an irrevocable turn early. Maybe he could have been someone else, or done something else, but he is a mob boss. At the same time, he is generous, intelligent, highly literate, and capable of tender feelings. No person is all good or bad and Romano shows us that.

AC: You’ve published legal treatises, and more general nonfiction books about law and politics. How different was the experience of writing fiction?

MA: Writing fiction is very different. I love that I can just make things up. When writing about law I have to footnote everything. In law one has to attempt to be logical and have everything make sense. When there are contradictions, one has to explain or resolve them. Usually one is attempting to be persuasive, or to craft an argument. In fiction, things can happen, as they do in life, that are unpredictable and make no sense. One of the things I have to work on as a fiction writer is to let that happen and ignore my legal personality that wants to put everything in order.

AC: Have you started your next project?

MA: I’m writing the sequel now. Susan is practicing law and working with a strong female mentor to defend a new client charged with murder.

AC: You’ve devoted much of your career to civil rights law and social justice reform. Which organizations do you see doing great work in these areas right now, and how best can we support them?

MA: There are many organizations doing excellent work at the moment. I work with the National Police Accountability Project (NPAP), a project of the National Lawyers Guild. We assist lawyers who bring lawsuits against officers and police departments for misconduct by the police. We are expanding our work to assist community organizers who are struggling to hold the police accountable for civil rights violations and to bring about needed changes in how police departments operate. NPAP can be found at https://www.nlg-npap.org/.

To learn more about the author or The Cooperating Witness, visit his website.

Starting as an ACLU staff lawyer during the Black Panther murder trial in New Haven in 1970, Mike Avery enjoyed an exciting career as a civil rights lawyer. He represented victims of police abuse and racial and sexual discrimination and defended people charged with everything from peaceful protesting to murder. In 2007 he obtained the largest judgment ever awarded against the FBI, $101.7 million, for the wrongful conviction of four innocent men for murder. The crime was actually committed by an FBI informant. He has served as the President of the National Lawyers Guild and was one of the founders of the National Police Accountability Project. Avery spent 16 years as a law professor at Suffolk Law School in Boston. He has published several non-fiction books, is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, and spent a year as an exchange student in the former Soviet Union at the University of Moscow. After retiring as a professor of law, he obtained a Master of Fine Arts from Bennington College.

Andrea Caswell holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is a fiction editor at Cleaver Magazine. Her work has been published by River Teeth, The Normal School, Fifth Wednesday, Columbia Journal, and others. In 2019 she was selected as a fiction participant for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, Andrea now teaches writing in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

CONNECTED BREATH: Glass Wind Instruments for Intimacy and Vulnerability by Madeline Rile Smith

Posted on June 29, 2020 by thwackJune 30, 2020

CONNECTED BREATH
Glass Wind Instruments for Intimacy and Vulnerability
by Madeline Rile Smith

Growing up, I never imagined I would become a visual artist, let alone an artist working in hot glass. In high school, I was required to take an art class, so I signed up for a glass elective, with no idea what I was getting into. At first, I was terrified of burning my fingers, but after a few sessions, the hypnotic presence of melting glass in a flame lured me in. Hot glass is always moving; it has rhythm. The artist must respond with her own movements. You cannot control glass on your own terms; the glass will always be the one to set the terms of engagement. When you work with glass you must be humble and accept that you will fail over and over. A day’s work might shatter into a hundred pieces if you get cocky or overconfident. Glass demands a zen mind. When your piece is destroyed in an instant, you accept it and keep working.

Madeline Rile Smith making a glass trumpet on the torch.

Flameworking in my studio in the glass department at Rochester Institute of Technology

I’ve been playing violin and viola since I was a toddler. By the time I was in high school I was prepared to have a professional career in music but was sidetracked due to a serious chronic pain condition. When I began working with glass, I realized it was like playing an instrument: your body and hands work together to produce something delicate and ethereal—and often ephemeral.

Like music, glassblowing is a collaborative art form.

Like music, glassblowing is a collaborative art form. In the hot shop, artists need a partner to breathe air into the blowpipe as they manipulate the 2300-degree blob of molten glass. The collaborative nature of glassmaking is similar to that of chamber music, where bodies are coordinated and orchestrated in space toward the group effort of a shared goal. My strongest memories from childhood involve practicing with my classical string quartet—with me on viola, two violinists, and a cellist. We spent untold hours in collaborative rehearsal, detailing the minutiae of musical expression in order to create a unified sound that would transcend the sum of each of our solo instruments. In an ideal ensemble, each member approaches the group with a sense of generosity, putting forth an effort that extends beyond each individual, toward the shared goal of collective expression. The tender and dynamic tension of music can be broken at any moment if one member of the group falters. The act relies on a delicate state of interdependence. The music is not complete when a member of the group is missing, and a single person cannot carry the experience alone, much like the communal act of creation in the glass studio.

Madeline Rile smith plays glass duo instrument

A trumpet for two simultaneous players. When my partner finds his note, I attempt to push him off of it to create mine. Our breaths compete and combat inside the instrument to create a tone. The backpressure of another person blowing into the trumpet creates a significant challenge. Part shared effort, part battle of breaths. We both end up winded.

To me, the communal aspects of glass and chamber music require the kind of trust that is necessary for strong collaboration. Music and glass both rely on mutual understanding of subtle, non-verbal gestures—a moment’s eye contact or a punctuated breath can be used to synchronize coordinated movement or a pause.

Madeline Rile Smith flameworking a glass instrument

Flameworking a glass instrument. I use a torch powered by a mix of propane and oxygen. The flame is about 3600 degrees Fahrenheit.

This spring, I began a series called “Instruments of Connection and Compromise,” a collection of glass wind instruments that require multiple players. There is something squeamishly intimate about sharing a mouth-activated instrument with another person. You and your partner must stand shoulder to shoulder, simultaneously blowing into a hollow vessel to create a tone. As you exhale, you can feel the back pressure of your partner’s breath on yours, like your mouths are touching, but from a distance. Your breaths intermingle, creating a sound while simultaneously knocking one another off the note as soon as you establish it. Blowing into a glass trumpet makes the entire instrument buzz. When your partner buzzes into their mouthpiece, it causes your lips to tingle, as if you were kissing, by proxy, through a curving glass tube.

“Duel Duet” in action.

There is a humorous absurdity that I love about the glass trumpets. I craft them through a meticulous flameworking process, using techniques similar to scientific glassblowing. The end result is a long winding trumpet, like a device from a Dr. Seuss story.

The charge of my work has changed, eliciting visceral reactions of repulsion, echoed by a longing for the connection we were once allowed. In the age of Covid-19, the act of breathing can no longer be taken for granted; a healthy unencumbered breath is revealed to be a gift.

“Close Enough to Tickle,” 2020. A glass instrument for three wind players.

As the instruments are played, the performers’ bodies awkwardly huddle around one another. Spittle accumulates inside the trumpet body, while shrill honking noises are produced. To me, the ridiculousness of the performance creates friction against the precise technique required to create the glass trumpet.

“Duel Duet,” 2020. A glass trumpet for two players.

These instruments were conceived and created only weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic spread to the United States. A week after this series was completed for my MFA show, my studio was padlocked by the university, all thesis shows were canceled, and the meaning of my work changed overnight. What began as a humorous and awkward gesture became terrifying. The thought of standing close to someone, let alone breathing into the same glass tube while swapping saliva, was horrifying. The charge of my work has changed, eliciting visceral reactions of repulsion, echoed by a longing for the connection we were once allowed. In the age of Covid-19, the act of breathing can no longer be taken for granted; a healthy unencumbered breath is revealed to be a gift.

Duel Duet from madeline smith on Vimeo.

Madeline Rile Smith is an American artist working in glass. She earned an MFA in glass at Rochester Institute of Technology and a BFA in glass from Tyler School of Art. Madeline draws upon her musical background to create glass musical instruments that explore the physical connection between players. She utilizes hot glass as a performative medium to consider notions of intimacy and compromise. Madeline’s sculptural glasswork has been exhibited in venues throughout the US and featured in New Glass Review 41 and 35. She has instructed glassworking in schools and institutions throughout the East Coast, including UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, Salem Community College, and Rochester Institute of Technology. More at her website, MadHotGlass.com or follow her on Instagram @MadHotGlass.

Performance photos by Elizabeth Lamark. Gallery photos by Scott Semler. Special thanks to Ethan Townsend, Ying Chiun Lee, and Jensen McConnell for performing on these instruments with me.

IN THE WOODS, a visual narrative by Emily Steinberg

Posted on June 29, 2020 by thwackJune 30, 2020

IN THE WOODS
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg

Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine, where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, and her short comic “Blogging Towards Oblivion” was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at emilysteinberg@cleavermagazine.com.

CLEANNESS, a novel by Garth Greenwell, reviewed by Nikki Caffier Smith

Posted on June 25, 2020 by thwackJune 25, 2020

CLEANNESS
by Garth Greenwell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages
reviewed by Nikki Caffier Smith

Buy this book on Bookshop.org to benefit Cleaver

The week I read Cleanness, Garth Greenwell’s sophomore novel, I didn’t go outside. This was in Brooklyn during the third week of April, 2020—at the peak of COVID-19 cases in New York. We were warned to stay inside as much as possible, a difficult feat in a small one-bedroom apartment with a partner and two cats. I found myself lying about, staring at the ceiling, or cleaning, or reading, or cleaning some more. I found myself at odds: to go outside or stay in? To release my pent-up energy or do what I was told? Of course, in a case like this, staying in was the only conscionable thing to do. But the thought remained and followed me through my reading of Cleanness.

At its heart, Cleanness is a novel about duality: the duality of spirit, of desire, of self-perception. How one can be “dirty” and “clean” at the same time. With deft and expressive writing, Greenwell questions our understanding of these concepts. What does it mean to be dirty? What does it mean to be clean? To go outside or stay in. To stay in or go outside. Perhaps they are just two facets of the same thing.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Cleanness takes place in Sofia, Bulgaria, which will ring a bell for those who have read Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You. Both books follow the same unnamed narrator as he navigates life in this foreign country, searching for meaning, for feeling, for something he cannot quite name. And if What Belongs to You read as a kind of looking-in (at the narrator’s life, his past and his present), Cleanness reads more like an opening up: it peels back the layers that remained hidden in Greenwell’s first novel. We get a messier and even deeper sense of who the narrator is.

At its heart, Cleanness is a novel about duality: the duality of spirit, of desire, of self-perception. How one can be “dirty” and “clean” at the same time.

The novel is arranged into a lieder cycle (fitting with the narrator’s love of music and opera). Each chapter is sequenced to fit a specific pattern. The first section, comprised of three chapters, presents the narrator in three roles: as a teacher, as a sexual partner, and as a resident of Bulgaria. The second section explores his complex relationship with a Portuguese man known simply as R. The final section is set up similarly to the first, but in reverse order.

At times Cleanness feels less like a novel than a collection of short stories all concentrated on the different facets of a single man. And it’s true. Each of the nine stories in the book could stand alone, but together, they form a whole person.

The “separateness” of each chapter is no accident. It serves an important purpose: from the moment the novel begins, the reader is at the heart of the story. There is no single climax in this work, but rather climaxes throughout the ebb and flow of the narrator’s experiences. Greenwell is one of those rare authors who is not concerned with what the novel structure demands of a story, but rather how a story demands to be structured.

Garth Greenwell

And it’s not only the novel’s structure that mirrors the story it tells. Greenwell’s prose is intensely introspective, so much so that even in scenes with conversation, we still feel completely inside the narrator’s head. This is in part due to a complete lack of dialogue markers, which gives the novel a stream-of-consciousness quality and a poetic awareness that makes sense for Greenwell (who is a poet first and foremost). Greenwell’s prose elevates the narrator’s character, drawing him in sharper and sharper detail as we move along.

And here we are, back at the beginning. Back to the burning, acidic question that haunts every facet of the narrator’s life. What is cleanness? Is it wisdom that he can impart to his students? Is it connection to a country despite the fact that it doesn’t accept his queerness? Is it love? Is it the absence of shame? He struggles with desire, which looms over him, shameful and secret. Sex, for the narrator, is particularly resonant.

The sex in Cleanness is honest and explicit, sometimes violent, erotic, and brimming with meaning. And Greenwell doesn’t shy away from the messiness of sex. In reading these sections I was reminded of a long paragraph in the middle of What Belongs to You, in which the narrator recounts coping with an abusive, hateful, homophobic father in his adolescent years, absorbing his hatred and turning it inward. In Cleanness we see the grit and grime of this past displayed in sexual encounters. “I had never whipped anyone before,” the narrator explains, “but that was how my father had done it, taking the strap to us, as he said, that was how he punished us.”

He grapples with the desire to be punished and the desire to punish, feeling ashamed of both. The reader feels that pain and confusion explicitly. “Was it joy or defiance or despair, I wanted to know where one ended and the others began,” the narrator thinks. There is a constant push and pull, either a resistance or a giving in.

For who hasn’t wanted to do something they feel they shouldn’t? I think back to my desire to spend the day at the park when I had been warned to stay inside. There is shame in our desires. There will always be the public gaze looming over our decisions, over how we perceive ourselves. Will we choose to be dirty or clean? And where do we draw the line between the two? Can we definitively say that one is good and the other bad?

In the middle section, the narrator finds a release, a kind of brightness, in his relationship with R. About sex with R. he says: “Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.”

But while he is grateful for the liberation from shame that R. provides him, the narrator still feels a dark longing. “I wanted something brutal, which was what frightened me,” he says, “I wanted to go back to what R. had lifted me out of…I wanted to ruin…the person he had made me.”

It is this inner war that makes Cleanness so relatable. For who hasn’t wanted to do something they feel they shouldn’t? I think back to my desire to spend the day at the park when I had been warned to stay inside. There is shame in our desires. There will always be the public gaze looming over our decisions, over how we perceive ourselves. Will we choose to be dirty or clean? And where do we draw the line between the two? Can we definitively say that one is good and the other bad?

At one point the narrator touches upon something, a release of shame, perhaps temporary, but there nonetheless. A stray dog comes to him in a moment of vulnerability for them both. It is a dog he knows well, and she wants to be let in. “She was dirty,” the narrator thinks. Then, in a moment of forgiveness, for himself, for the dog, he adds, “but what was a little dirt, I thought as I turned the latch, I should have let you in a long time ago, I said, I’m sorry.”

Nikki Caffier Smith is a writer living in Brooklyn. She received a BA in Creative Writing from The Gallatin School at New York University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Typishly and Awakened Voices Magazine, and a short story of hers will soon be featured on Kaleidocast Podcast.

Sources:

Jones, Alden. “The Rumpus Interview with Garth Greenwell.” The Rumpus.net, 1 Feb. 2016, therumpus.net/2016/02/the-rumpus-interview-with-garth-greenwell/.

Kerziouk, Olga. “An Introduction to Bulgarian Literature.” European Studies Blog, 20 June 2016, blogs.bl.uk/european/2016/06/an-introduction-to-bulgarian-literature.html.

Wolahan, Emily. “5 Bulgarian Writers You Don’t Want to Miss: Center for the Art of Translation: Two Lines Press.” Center for the Art of Translation | Two Lines Press, 23 Feb. 2017, www.catranslation.org/blog-post/5-bulgarian-writers-you-dont-want-to-miss/.

An Interview with Sharon Harrigan, author of the novel HALF, by Virginia Pye

Posted on June 15, 2020 by thwackJune 15, 2020

An Interview with Sharon Harrigan
Author of the novel HALF
University of Wisconsin Press
by Virginia Pye

Writers have a way of finding each other in Virginia, thanks to several strong literary non-profits. Sharon Harrigan teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville and I used to help run James River Writers in Richmond. We met years ago at the annual JRW Writers Conference. When my first novel came out, Sharon generously reached out and offered to interview me for Fiction Writers Review. I moved to Cambridge several years later, but we continued to keep track of each other’s careers, cheering on each new publication. I’m delighted to interview her now about her debut novel, HALF. In sparse, lyrical prose, it tells the story of identical twins who speak in one voice, until they can’t any longer.

Virginia Pye: It’s a daring idea to write a novel from the perspective of identical twins. I gather that you’re not a twin yourself, which makes me curious why you chose to tell the story this way?

Sharon Harrigan: I didn’t set out to write about twins. What I wanted to do was write about empathy and intimacy, the kind of platonic closeness I had with my older brother growing up. So originally, the characters were singleton siblings, different genders. But then when I took this concept of sibling bonding further—because exaggerating our real-life can distill the experiences and make them clearer—these characters became so close they were indistinguishable. That’s when I realized they had to be twins or my readers (and I!) would get confused.

I’m also using sibling love to say something about all non-romantic love. That when we empathize with someone, we feel their pain—and their joy. It’s as if what happens to them happens to us. That’s something we especially need to be reminded of during these increasingly divisive times.

VP: When the two sisters are children their story is told in vignettes that have an immediacy to them. The scenes and other characters are described in poetic detail, using the senses and focusing on how a child might process the world. How do you think that showing the story through the twins’ eyes in this intimate way helps your reader relate to them?

Sharon Harrigan

SH: Children don’t yet know a lot about the bigger world, so they experience things more close up, more focused on what they can immediately perceive with their senses. There’s something magical that we lose once our world enlarges, and as a child, I promised never to forget what it felt like to be small. I’m trying to remember on the page that helpless quality, that sense of awe for people who are bigger, and the credulity, as well as the fluidity between the real and the magical. That’s a lot of what the novel is about: the blurred lines between the actual and the imaginary, the spillover between mythology and mental illness, the lies we tell each other and ourselves so much we believe them, the truth that stares us down but we don’t see it because we’re in denial and the crushing disillusionment that sometimes arrives at the end. Isn’t that an apt description of what it means to grow up?

VP: The twins share the same perceptions and perspectives in their early lives, but as they grow and start to know other people, they begin to become distinct from one another. This transition comes about slowly and leads to a surprising rupture. Can you talk about the way that difference is introduced as a crucial element in your story?

SH: We know at the beginning that the girls can’t speak in one voice forever, and it’s that instability that drives a lot of the dramatic tension. I tried to make their gradual separation feel natural. That’s the way it often is when we drift apart from people—whether it’s our twin, our best friend, or our spouse. Sometimes we don’t see it coming, and it’s a shock when we can no longer deny it. One of my readers described the separation like this: “The narrator dissolves before our eyes.” The whole book is held together by the dual narration, so when that is gone, it’s like the floor falls out from under our feet. At least that how I wanted it to feel.

When my daughter read the novel, on the other hand, she said the twins’ separation felt like a relief. “The twins were never exactly the same,” she said. “Nobody is. But their closeness is so important to them that they hide all their differences, not just from each other, but from themselves. When they finally break apart, they don’t have to cover up anymore.”

People suppress their differences in order to be part of a group all the time. Think about high schoolers and their desire to fit in. They end up dressing the same, talking the same. We also do this when we join a church or a profession or a political party. I had my students do an exercise using the “we” voice and one of them said something I found fascinating. He is in a men’s group, and the facilitator tells people not to use the “we” voice when they are sharing because it is often used to hide from personal feelings or assert unity where there is diversity. The “we” voice allows people to hide. And yes, that is true for my twins.

VP: One crucial way the twins are bonded to one another is through their understanding of their abusive father. And yet his death is what finally separates them. In this way, he has a divisive effect on them in both life and death. Was it difficult to write such a destructive character?

SH: He became more intense in later drafts because I let myself give him mythic proportions. He is, in a way, Zeus. At least some people think he is. And just like a Greek god he can destroy things on a whim. He can also be so powerful and charismatic that he’s irresistible. He’s a hero-monster, like some of the men we see in the news every day. He is also a real man, the kind of real man I’ve read about in memoirs. I read a lot of them, because that’s what I teach. One of my early readers said the father exemplifies a Midwestern type: the tough but truly loving father who is determined to make his children strong by bullying them. And yes, this is how I remember my own father. He truly thought he was doing the right thing.

VP: Without giving away too much, I’d love to hear you say more about the end of your novel when the twins reveal their very different views of the past. The distance between them becomes vast. Can you share more about how memory plays a role in defining who they are and who they aren’t to one another?

SH: That’s a great question. One of the reasons I used the structure I did—one chapter for every year from ages five to twenty-two—is to give readers the sense that they are seeing a life being lived in real time, the way it is for the characters themselves. Then by the end, when the twins are adults and remember that life in two different ways, we can recognize how memory works, how it is not an objective truth but something filtered through an individual’s biases.

VP: Finally, I love to hear about the journey debut novelists have traveled on their way to publication. Can you share yours?

SH: I remember when your first novel was published, and I was so inspired by your success. It made me feel hopeful. Thank you for that!

I’m a late bloomer. I’m 52 and this is my first novel. My first book, a memoir, was published three years ago. It’s funny because I started writing seriously when I was 14 and thought I was getting an early start! I took poetry classes at the Detroit Institute of Arts. My brother and I got special permission to be able to attend because these were adult writing workshops. I gave a reading at the DIA when I was 18. I’m pretty sure I was the youngest person ever to do so. In my early twenties, a small press was going to publish my poetry collection. It was typeset and everything, and then they went bankrupt. (That collection has still not been published, but I now have a press that’s interested, all these years later!) I became a mother too young and then a single mother, working as an editor full time and also freelancing, hustling to make rent in New York City. My writing became something it didn’t feel like I could afford to do. Only many years later, after I remarried, did I get an MFA and start writing prose and restart my stalled writing career.

I love to hear stories about other writers publishing late. Margaret Renkl, who wrote the amazing memoir-in-lyric-essays Late Migrations, one of my favorite books of the past year, published her first book at age 57. And that book has brought her acclaim, including an invitation to become a New York Times columnist. People like her inspire me to think: It’s never too late!

Sharon Harrigan teaches at WriterHouse, a nonprofit literary center in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is the author of Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir. Her work has appeared in the New York Times (Modern Love), Narrative, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Virginia Pye‘s collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, was awarded the 2019 IPPY Gold Medal for Short Fiction. Her debut novel, River of Dust, was an Indie Next Pick and a 2013 Finalist for the Virginia Literary Award. Her second novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenis was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by the Richmond Times Dispatch. Her stories and essays have appeared in Literary Hub, The New York Times, The North American Review, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. She’s taught writing at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, in high schools, and most recently in Boston at GrubStreet. She can be found on FB, Twitter, Instagram, and at www.virginiapye.com

WHAT I CARRY, a YA novel by Jennifer Longo, reviewed by Aja Todd

Posted on June 12, 2020 by thwackJune 12, 2020

WHAT I CARRY
by Jennifer Longo,
Random House Books for Young Readers, 336 pages
reviewed by Aja Todd

Buy this book on Bookshop.org to benefit Cleaver

From the very first moment of her existence, Muiriel was born alone. Found abandoned at a medical center with no parents to claim her, Muiriel has lived in foster care her entire life. But blessed with a book of survival by naturalist John Muir and her experience in nearly twenty different foster homes, seventeen-year-old Muiriel knows she will not let her past dictate her future:

Aging out is terrifying.

Still…I can’t wait.

I can’t help believing I will be okay. Maybe I’m setting myself up for spectacular failure, but all this time I’ve been so lucky; if I am as perfect as I can be, I bet I can stave off the likely possibility of being homeless within a year, or pregnant, or dead. Outcomes for kids who age out with no family are mostly a nightmare, and it makes me furious. I refuse to let the stupid circumstance of my birth ruin me. I am a Muir, for Christ’s sake! Not in meaningless blood, but in what truly matters. I believe that the nurses who held me and named me could tell John Muir’s singular life force is in me and in our shared name, and I will end my childhood the way it began: alone. Finally free to live and take care of myself in the wilderness of the wide world.

I hope.

In her latest novel, What I Carry, Jennifer Longo brings us on a heart-warming journey of independence, love, and vulnerability. While it can be difficult for anyone as a teenager to find their place in the world, Longo delicately conveys what it’s like for a girl who never had a solid foundation to start with. For Muiriel, she believes her only true home is the unchanging outdoors —the forest, the night, the stars — and the only foundation she can ever rely on is herself.

That is, until Muiriel meets her final foster mother, Francine.

Across Seattle waters on a thirty-minute ferry, Muiriel appears to find paradise in the cozy home of Francine. Unlike past caretakers, Francine’s interests are all too similar to hers. While others enforced rigid boundaries on Muiriel, Francine gives her something she’s never experienced before: freedom. Freedom to take her time and adjust to her surroundings, to explore her new town, to meet new people. To Muiriel, it all feels too good to be true. Despite her instincts to survive and disconnect from the world, Muiriel starts to find comfort with Francine who strives to understand her; she makes friends who like her for just who she is; she even gains an opportunity for the career of her dreams. There doesn’t appear to be anything holding her back from a promising future.

But it’s difficult to trust others; it’s even more difficult to trust happiness.

Jennifer Longo

Longo’s What I Carry wonderfully explores that specific, transitional moment in one’s life. A moment that isn’t pushed forward by external events, but the struggles within oneself. Throughout the novel, readers learn why Muiriel carries herself as she does, and why being presented with this new support system is all too strange for her to accept. Too often in fiction, characters in foster care are shown as victims rather than people who, like anyone else, are just trying to survive. Muiriel represents that survival. Her strong sense of justice, independence, cautious behavior, yet love for other people show what she needed to get through the rootless life she has had so far. And while readers may find this new home an obvious solution to Muiriel’s uncertain future, her experiences have proven the danger of staying, and it all may be too much of a risk to take.

The story of Muiriel teaches us the importance of learning someone’s circumstances before judgment, the patience pain needs to dull, and the strength that is needed not only to be independent but to depend on someone. Through the beauty of that small town, the comfort of Francine’s home, and the openness of new friends, Longo shows us the power of love beyond family ties.

Aja Todd is a growing writer and editor from Chicago. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Fiction at Columbia College Chicago, where her work can be seen in Columbia’s Hair Trigger anthologies. She worked at Cleaver Magazine as an editorial intern in Spring 2020.

ASK JUNE: Coronavirus II: The Old Marcher and the Masked Baby

Posted on June 9, 2020 by thwackJune 9, 2020

A note to my readers:

Here are a few more coronavirus-related letters. Knowing what I know now, I would have submitted them all at once, a few weeks ago, instead of spacing them out. Things have changed so quickly since that first batch: problems like nagging mothers and the niceties of social-distancing behavior may seem petty and quaint as compared to the deadly-serious questions and sweeping protests following the murder of George Floyd. I will submit my second batch of letters now, but humbly, in hopes that they may provide a moment of entertainment for those of you who are taking a break from weightier matters, and that they may still be of use to those of you who are still worried about contracting the virus during normal daily activities.

By the way, I do think we should still be worried – unless we live in New Zealand or Antarctica —and behave accordingly. Police brutality, social unrest, and a long-overdue focus on racial injustice have, quite rightly, been the lead stories this past week. And the virus has apparently peaked in some places. But there are still plenty of new cases and new deaths, and the same people are still at high risk. So please guard against slacking off.

On that note, I will preface my batch of older letters with a very recent one:

Dear June,

I want to march and bear witness. This feels like the moment America has been waiting for. I am at high risk for the novel coronavirus (68 years old, high blood pressure) and my wife is at even higher risk. What should I do?

Terribly Torn

Dear TT,

Back when I was a wee tad studying Ethical Theory, we used to talk about how hard it is to maximize two variables (like achieving the greatest good for the greatest number). It is equally hard to combat multiple catastrophes. Ironically, I happened to be discussing this very problem last week while dog-walking with the editor of this very magazine, when we were hit by something called a derecho — which I later learned is sort of like a mini-tornado that moves in a straight line — and had to run for cover with our dogs, like so many Dorothys and Totos. We made a snap decision that racing into my car to avoid gale winds, flying branches, and toppling trees made more sense than avoiding enclosed spaces and staying six feet apart.

What I’m saying is that you have to weigh your catastrophes and how best to combat them. Knowing so little about your situation, I hesitate to advise you either way. But I will give you three overall factors to consider. First: Is there a way you can march in relative safety? I can imagine circumstances where coronavirus risk would be minimal, say at a small local march, very likely to be peaceful, in an open area, early in the day, in a location that’s accessible on foot or by your own personal bike or car.

Second: If you do not think that you can march without risk of close personal contact, much less disorder and violence, is marching the best way for you to work for change? For those of us who have a long history working for change, it is hard not to be a public part of history. But you have to stay healthy and alive if you want to be of long-term assistance. Ask yourself whether you can’t do more by working steadily from home or some other safe place, at least for the time being. You may have special skills to offer. You may, despite being a reader of literary magazines, even have some money you can send to the NAACP, or BLM and BLM-sponsored organizations, or the swing-state candidate of your choice. You can certainly make calls, send letters, and importune your friends and family, either on your own or on behalf of worthy organizations and political candidates.

Third: Bear in mind that, when you put yourself at risk, you are also risking the health and even the lives of others, not just your wife but also those who may have to take care of you. Where I live, hospital and other health-care workers are still asking people to stay home when they can, and I am sure that goes at least double for high-risk people. And there is evidence that the virus has a disproportionate impact on black health-care workers.

Whether or not you march, I hope you take heart at the sight of so many brave and determined younger people who are out there protesting. With them around, we may get through this.

—June

Dear June,

I see that you are back with us and willing to handle questions of coronavirus ethics and etiquette. I have two for you, both from a walk I took around my neighborhood today.

Here’s the first one: A woman (wearing a mask) passed by me on the sidewalk carrying an infant who was also wearing a mask. Isn’t this dangerous? Isn’t that too young for masks? Is it child abuse? Should I have stepped in and said something? Called 311?

And the second one: A few blocks later, as I was passing my bank, I encountered an elderly gentleman trying to open the door to the ATM vestibule, which requires a card swipe. He clearly didn’t know which end of the card to swipe and, besides, that door is unusually hard to open even when you’ve successfully swiped. As I watched him struggle, I debated with myself about what to do. After a while, I decided to help. I motioned him to stand away from the door, but he didn’t understand, even when I asked, politely. After a lot of back and forth, I just stepped up to the door, into his space, and swiped, and opened it, letting him inside. Was I putting him or myself at unnecessary risk?

—Man-about-town

Dear MAT,

According to the CDC, children under two should not wear masks, “due to risks of suffocation.” The case you mention may fall under some rare exception, say if the infant was severely immunocompromised and was being rushed to a nearby hospital while wearing a properly-positioned N-95. But this seems wildly unlikely, and anyway your letter implies otherwise. So yes, the situation is dangerous, and the baby is too young. (When a baby absolutely must be in a situation without proper protections and social distancing, the CDC recommends using a baby carrier and covering it with a cloth, always keeping the cloth in sight.)

If you ever see a masked baby again, I urge you to speak up—be nice: most of us are doing our best—and say that you’re sorry to intrude, but that the CDC says masks are unsafe for kids under two. Be sure to keep your own mask on and stay at least six feet away. If the person with the infant disagrees or doesn’t believe you, ask them if they would please call their pediatrician just to be sure. Normally I warn people against being officious, and I have a deep personal aversion to making a scene, but a little life might be at risk here.

I am guessing that most people would remove the mask, or at least appear to be thoughtful and extra-vigilant as they walk away. In that case I would not call 311 or anybody else—especially if the baby is in a front-carrier or being held by the adult such that the adult has what the CDC calls “a direct view,” not in a stroller or backpack where the adult might not notice any distress until too late.

I doubt whether this case amounts to child abuse. Neglect, just conceivably, depending on the circumstances. Misplaced vigilance or simple mistake, most likely. Not that characterizing it matters at this point.

Now on to the elderly man outside the ATM vestibule. I would like to know more about this. How long did you wait? Was the man wearing a mask? Were you?

Since you do not mention taking his card, and you do mention that this was also your bank, I assume that you swiped with your own card, and that neither of your touched each other. So far so good.

And were you both wearing masks? If not, I would have advised you to walk on by the bank (or stay put, but at a six-foot distance, if you had also been hoping to get to the ATM). This is especially true if you were the unmasked one because, as we have all heard a zillion times, the purpose of everyday non-respirator masks is to protect other people, not oneself, and it would be highly irresponsible for you get in the space of an elderly, and therefore high-risk, person without proper protection.

But let us assume that you were both masked—in which case the risk was of course greatly minimized, but still present. Was it necessary for you to move into that sacred six-foot radius?

Since the vestibule required card entry, I am assuming that the bank was closed, so the elderly man could not rely on any help from a bank employee, which might have been slightly safer (if only because of the employee’s being on the other side of the door).

Okay: it’s just you, him, and the door. Separate card: check. Masks: check. And, unless you were at a bank inside a mall, or trying to get into a vestibule within a vestibule, I assume you were both outside. According to the latest research, transmission from brief non-contact exposure to another person in an outdoor setting is minimal.

Bur does the need outweigh the risk? That’s the hard one. I remain unconvinced that the man would not have figured things out eventually. I mean, there are only four ways to stick an ATM card into an ATM. I am really clumsy and a terrible guesser where card swiping is concerned, and even I muddle through if left alone.

It also sounds as if he never actually asked you to swipe him in. There was a lot of motioning going on, but I get no clear sense that he wanted any assistance. Of course, he may have been totally confused and disoriented, but an amazing number of older people do have their wits about them. And if he really was that confused, he probably should not have been in at the ATM withdrawing money on his own anyway, assuming he could figure out how to do it.

If I were you, I would have waited longer, until the man ether got inside by on his own or began to walk away in disgust, in which case I would have been able to open the door at a safer distance, wave him in, and skitter away as he neared the entrance, taking care to hold the door long enough so as not to knock the poor fellow out cold when I let go.

But reasonable people can differ on this one, I am sure. You did a kindly-meant—if perhaps just a bit condescending—thing, with what I am guessing was a good result: the man got inside and I bet nobody caught anything from your ten seconds of shared outdoor space.

Dear June,

I am a technical writer (divorced, no kids) and live alone. My city is still under a stay-at-home order and is likely to be for at least two more weeks, maybe longer if the numbers start moving up again.

My problem is that my elderly mother, who also lives alone on the other side of the city, has been focusing her coronavirus worries on me. She is convinced that I am taking all sorts of stupid risks and calls to nag me on a daily basis.

But, June, I am being really careful and don’t think I deserve this. Since the stay-at-home order came down about a million years ago, I have not gone to a restaurant, beach, or any crowded situation. I walk my dog, and sometimes take a socially-distanced walk with friends, always in a mask, and I shop maybe once a week with gloves and a mask and sanitizer and all that stuff. I don’t let anybody into my house except my boyfriend and my best friend, and she does not let anybody into her house except her boyfriend. I work exclusively from home these days, and all my meetings and conferences are remote. I wipe down everything that comes into the house. I wash my hands at least ten times a day and recite an entire Shakespeare sonnet every time (116, 18, or 29). I have not had to refill my gas tank in two months. In fact, the only person I ever visit is my mother, and now—although she wants me to come by at least twice a week—she won’t let me inside her house, so I just stand there while she nags and worries on the porch.

How can I get her to back off on the nagging?

—Irritated

Dear Irry,

You sound as if are doing most things right. Assuming that you are not at high risk for the virus, in which case I would suggest food delivery out of an excess of caution, your trips outside the house all seem fine, and the nagging unwarranted in that area. You also seem to be doing a commendable job sanitizing your house and yourself.

It is the visits from your BF and BFF that concern me, and they concern me enough so that, if I were your mother, I might nag you, too. You do not tell me whether you, your boyfriend, your friend, and her boyfriend (let’s call those last three Max, Ella, and Leland) are truly a closed coronavirus “pod.” Is your boyfriend Max in close contact with anybody other than you? Housemate, family, coworkers? If so, you have to include each of these contacts, and all their close contacts, and so on, as possible sources of infection. The same is true of Leland, of course: if he is in contact with anybody other than Ella, you should be wary of him—and of Ella, since she sees him. Don’t forget that it is possible to have COVID-19 and be a “silent spreader”—a source of infection yourself even if you haven’t yet, or don’t ever, develop symptoms. Unless you and Ella and Max and Leland really are a closed system, all four of you pose some risk to other people, and to one another, no matter how healthy you currently feel.

The principle is pretty much the same for COVID-19 as for STDs: you have to consider every contact’s partners’ partners, and their partners, and so on. The big difference of course, is that the virus is transmitted far more easily, and in many more ways. Short of staying behind closed doors at all times—which, for most of us, is harder to manage than avoiding unprotected non-monogamous sex—we can never be absolutely sure we are safe. But we can be reasonably sure if we take the precautions you already take, and strictly limit our at-home contacts. Please take care.

Not that any of this answers your question, which was not how to avoid getting the virus, or whether you have in fact been taking the appropriate precautions but, rather, how to keep your mother from nagging you. I chose to start with the issues behind the nagging because I want you and your friends to stay safe.

But I may also have been trying to avoid your question because maternal nagging is such an intractable problem. And nagging based on fear for your kid can be practically Pavlovian. Parents start worrying about their kids about 20 seconds after the positive pregnancy test and, even though this virus seems to be sparing most younger people for the time being, there is still enough peril out there—medical, economic, social, ecological, political, you name it—to make any parent worry. And when parents worry, they nag. I should know, since I am one of them.

My guess is that the best you can do about your mom’s nagging is to remind her of all the precautions you are already taking and, perhaps, point out that your chances of becoming seriously sick through the virus are vastly less than hers. You can demonstrate your familiarity with CDC and local guidelines and how well you follow them. And you can, I hope, reassure her now, or soon, on the closed-pod issue, if that is something she nags about. If not, for God’s sake don’t remind her.

Most important, just try to go easy on her, and at least pretend to listen to any advice she has to give. She may not have a lot to do except fuss and fret about you and any other precious, indispensable people in her life. I hope that there are a few, so the nagging gets spread around a bit.

By the way, your mom is being cautious, but properly so, about your staying outside her house when you visit. (See “silent spreader,” above.) A quick trip inside, disinfecting as you go and staying masked, probably would not cause any harm, but why take the risk without good reason?

One last point: I am a big fan of Shakespeare’s sonnets and applaud your using them as your hand-washing accompaniment. How long can a person sing “Happy Birthday” twice without starting to doubt the merits of personal hygiene? (These days I usually lather my hands to political prose, like the Preamble to the Constitution and the two chunks of the Gettysburg Address I can remember, all of which play out at about 25 seconds.)

I also admire your three sonnet choices. But I believe that, after several months of this, it is time for you to branch out. Learn two or three new ones now, while you have the time. I love #8, for some reason, maybe because it’s about music, and is itself musical. Also #130, especially “If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.” #29 (“When in disgrace…”) is great to declaim, and #98 is both lovely and topical, since we missed out on spring this year. But I would stay away from anything where he talks about Time in capital letters, and of course avoid #60, where our minutes hasten to their end.

With five or six sonnets in your quiver, you should be prepared for any pandemic.

But perhaps I digress. Stay safe, and try to visit your mom on windy days, which will help both to disperse viral droplets and modulate the sound of nagging.

Dear June,

As if it weren’t upsetting enough to fear for my life and my loved ones and the future of democracy and how long my employer is going to be in business, I am feeling really bad about the way I am handling this quarantine or stay-at-home order or whatever you call it. Like most people I know, my partner and I are working from home, and my job actually takes much less time than when I had to commute and lunch and schmooze. We live in a nice-enough place and don’t have kids at home to worry about.

I feel like I should see this as an opportunity, but except for a couple of my closest friends, it seems that everybody else in a situation like ours is making much better use of their time than I am—even my partner is following a rigorous exercise program, learning Italian, and helping set up a letter-writing and funding campaign for local candidates. Me, I overeat—and not even home-baked goodies, just the stuff we get delivered—and sleep in, and call my friends and family until they are probably sick of me, and then lie on the couch, scrolling through social media on my phone or watching CNN and MSNBC in horrified fascination. I only do chores when absolutely necessary for domestic peace. Meanwhile, all my Facebook and Instagram buddies and Zoom colleagues sound like my partner on steroids. The meals they post! The skills they’ve acquired! The modern operas they’ve streamed! The beauties of nature they have discovered and appreciated and recorded! The good deeds they have accomplished remotely!

This situation feels like a test of who we are, and it turns out that I’m not all that great. If I were Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, I would wake up the same every morning, except fatter. What do you think is wrong with me? Do you have any ideas about why I am so bad at this?

—Self-disillusioned

Dear Selfie,

Please, please go easy on yourself.

I don’t see anything wrong with you, unless you count paying too much attention to social media. You must know by now that personal social media wouldn’t last a week without posts designed to make people feel inadequate. Okay, they would still have animal antics and inflammatory politics. And of course there are some people (mostly grandparents) whose posts are just innocent bragging, and a smattering of others who honestly want to inform or amuse their friends. But most of what’s posted on social media is like holiday newsletters: bowdlerized, inflated, slanted, and cherry-picked, leaving the reader wondering why their LED-lit wreath from L. L. Bean suddenly looks so pathetic and banal. Think about it: if the people who post about those operas also watch NCIS reruns while eating Hostess Snoballs, are they going to tell you?

I note that the only other subpar quarantiners you know are among your “closest friends.” Could this be because you actually learned about their lives through close personal relationships and first-hand experience, not social media?

And even assuming that many people you know really are living fuller, more productive lives than you right now, so what? We all have to survive these times as best we can. If you come through this pandemic and this quarantine alive and sane, and haven’t intentionally or negligently hurt anybody else, I would count you a success—and it sounds as if you’re on track.

But it also sounds as if you are anxious and depressed. If so, and even if your depression or anxiety has reached clinical levels, you are far from alone: The Washington Post just reported that, for every 100 American adults, 34 show “clinically significant” symptoms of anxiety, depression or both. (I wonder how many of them are crying on the inside while they post images of laughter and Thai barbecue around the home fire-pit?) When I read the Post article, my first response was to wonder what was wrong with the other 66 Americans—and yet depression and anxiety, however “warranted” by the circumstances around us, sap our energy and strength and health and joy, and are well worth combating. It wouldn’t hurt for you to see somebody (if virtually, for now).

As I hope I have made clear, I do not think you are “bad at this,” and doubt whether the concept even makes sense. But I do think you would be considerably happier—and possibly more active and energetic and generally Facebook-worthy, but that’s icing on the cake—if you take control of your overall screen time. There are apps for this. I prefer the simpler method of setting an alarm on my phone and then jumping up and heading outside with the dog or into the shower but, if alarms don’t work for you, you can always find an app that will record your screen time, admonish you, time-limit certain activities, etc. Try not only to disregard most of your social media, but also to see less of it.

Then there are the news and commentary channels. These—the two you mention, in fact: CNN and MSNBC—happen to be bones of contention in our house. Ward loves to watch them on our living room TV, and to have them play in the background while he does the crossword and goes through the mail and so on. I am usually good for about a half-hour at a stretch, at which point I start getting angry and impatient and even feel a little sick—not because I disbelieve the what I hear, but because I do believe it and would just as soon not have to hear any of it more than once, if that. It’s important to learn what’s going on, of course, but I find that I can only cope with a certain level of repetition and vitriol.

Neither of us is right: what energizes Ward enervates me. I therefore do my best to limit my TV news time and focus on radio and, best of all, print media, preferably actually in printed form (Nice heft! No soul-sucking comment section!) You sound more like me than like Ward, so I strongly suggest that you do likewise.

In sum: do what you will. If you can, try for the middle ground, somewhere between perfection and self-destructive wallowing. Don’t obsess about eating and exercise, but do get off the couch a bit more often (I lure myself outside with silly podcasts) and try to keep that COVID 15 to 15 (mine’s hovering around 14, and that’s on top of a recent knee-injury 20). But if you blow it, what’s the big deal? What does it matter on the world-disaster scale?

As for all those phone calls you make to your friends and family, keep at it. I am sure they love hearing from you, and it is always better to err on the side of more rather than less attention to your loved ones during an isolating time like this.

—Onward and upward!

Cleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at AskJune@Cleavermagazine.com. Find more columns by June in her attic.

Cover Photos by Koshu Kunii and David Veksler on Unsplash

TO THE BONE, poems by Angela Narciso Torres, reviewed by Alina Stefanescu

Posted on June 7, 2020 by thwackJune 7, 2020

TO THE BONE
by Angela Narciso Torres
Sundress Publications
e-chapbook, 34 pages
reviewed by Alina Stefanescu

To The Bone is a book about the particular sort of remembering that accompanies losing a parent to Alzheimer’s. The poet’s mother is brought tenuously, haltingly, on the page. A sense of slippage is accomplished through layering, repetitions, and fluctuating temporality to reveal how a disease of memory appears to the mind struggling to find shore in presence.

“If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot.” So begins the first line of “If You Go To Bed Hungry”, a series of adages and if-then statements, the superstitions handed along by a mother, which establish place as memory, itself, or the act of remembering.

The next poem, “Sundawning”, is dedicated directly to her mother, Carmen. Here we enter the recurring sensory themes and motifs: the piano music, the scent of “guava and rust”, the mother’s hands on the piano, her voice singing kundimans. Pacing isn’t so set so much but stanza-length or white space but through the use and repetition of certain verbs, and this sort of verbed breath-making sets Torres’ poetic voice apart.

The use of italics to offset the mother’s words renders them stable, set apart from the unreliable shifting text. There is a sense in which italics also hallow these words like a song refrain; the italics tell us what to remember:

The sweetest meat clings—
she insists. Peels a mango.
Amber rivers training her elbows.
A trail of L’Air Du Temps wafts
in her wake.

The perfume, translated as Air of Time, and various scents, act as anchors through which the mother is held in place. Scent is our most animal memory, our strongest connection, our pheromonic drive, an elemental and intimate way of knowing, and Torres returns to certain scents as if to draw more from them.

Rosaries are recurrent motifs, whether in dreams (see “Sundowning”) or in the title, the frame itself, as in “Self-Portrait With Rosary Beads”:

I am olive wood,
carmelian, plastic, black onyx. Am rosebuds
pressed into fragrant spheres. Your heat
is my mask; your worry, my fire. Pick
your mystery.

Time, space, and personhood blur; the point of view is somewhere outside the narrator, in the air between daughter and mother. We see this in “The Immigrant Visits Her Mother,” a long stanza with tiny twists after enjambments, and the emptiness that seeks the italics of the mother’s voice–the one that was real. Insofar as Alzheimer’s asks one to recreate the absent mother, to fill the vessel they’d abandoned, the poem is an act of preservation that crumbles as it proceeds.

Even when using first-person, Torres rarely inserts herself into the poems; she is there as an archivist, a witness, a keeper of memories. There are multiple I’s. “Narrow Bed” is heartbreaking in its gaps, its chunks of white space, its details–a still-damp blue robe, “a narrow bed” in a row of narrow beds, “chenille slippers”, and “why am I here“–that existential question which acquires a different valence in the context of a disremembered life. This question is worse, somehow, in the mouth of amnesia, in the unmoored self.

Torres offers piano music as a language that hasn’t been lost between mother and daughter. In “Fugue and Prelude,” music serves as a metaphysical metronome, keeping time between the then of childhood and the now. The narrator marks time as “decades of preludes ahead”. In “What I Learned This Week”, the taut tercets circle the question of time–what time is, what it means to know in time:

……..Some say music memory
is the last to go. Still, I have no windfalls

for the empty baskets of my mother’s eyes.
When I returned from Manila, the peonies I’d left

in half-blossom were stunted by spring storms.
A bud that will not bloom is called a bullet.

Pain is carried in blossoms and botanical elisions. In this way, loss is personalized without the poet claiming it.

In “Recuerdo A Mi Madre”, the narrator watches her mother sleep when she was still intensely inhabited, still herself” as recognized by others. The poet continues:

……..I dipped my pen
in father’s tears. To know

my mother requires
the patience of a miner

carving amethyst from rock.
To know my mother

is to memorize
a labyrinth of longing.

Again there is “her guava scent” accompanied by piano music, “prayer and dirge”, and the longing, named this time, as labyrinth. There is no motion forward, only a circling with no relief or reprieve. There is no kenosis, no spiritual revelation–just the slow theft which becomes part of the seam of things.

Angela Narciso Torres

Torres grapples with difficult questions by using botanical and entomological metaphors as a sort of counterpoint to carry the weight. I loved “The Abscission Layer’s form–a diptych in two-columns, one column constructed of words from an encyclopedia article on leaf layers, the other column a loose collage of words from diagnosis, folk remedies, “the jagged calligraphy of twigs”. I read it vertically and horizontally several times, and found new things in each layer of this leafing. “Some Uses of Friction” approaches the issue of assisted living and her mother’s care by using data about insects, building a metaphor from cricket wings, to inhabit, rather than resolve, insoluble tension.

“Self-Portrait As Revision”, an anaphora of “I am” statements, offers the most exposed view of the narrator. The “I am” sets out a solid presence, a voice which can be held accountable, an active being rather than one who is acted upon. Since Alzheimer’s is a story of helplessness for all parties, and there is no bystander–no one who is not a victim– I value this poem’s attempt to speak for the poet, and how it shifts directly into “Sea Psalm”, which addresses a god in psalm form, both visually and lyrically. “Let me begin again, Lord.” In this revision, however, the poet returns to a reliance on something outside the self, a note of supplication.

The poet continues reaching towards her mother in “Pearl Diving”, a list poem in eight sections, through kundimans and rosaries. There is an image that haunts me in this poem–an image of the mother’s hands praying an “invisible” rosary, running her fingers along beads in the air. And “What Happens Is Neither” beginning nor ending. The loss continues in the land of remembering the mother whose memory no longer includes her husband.

There is no resolution, no revelation, no final reckoning. “Trees know best the now of things,” the poet says in the book’s final stanza. In the slight inversions of syntax, the use of botanical certainties, the absence of an inhabited, stable narrator, Torres leaves us with the mother’s words lined up like rosary beads to fondle again, again. It is difficult to write loss in Alzheimer’s without losing the integrity of the subject, and I admire Torres’ skill in keeping love entire without minimizing the cruelty of diseases which attack memory.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com or @aliner.

HARD TACK by Jamie Alliotts

Posted on June 5, 2020 by thwackJune 15, 2020

HARD TACK
by Jamie Alliotts

It’s a damp, drizzly November night—Thanksgiving—and I can’t help but think of Melville’s famous orphan, who sets out from this insular city of the Manhattoes, goes to sea with branded Ahab, and eats hardtack with his shipmates aboard the doomed Pequod. ■ Blinky grew up on a cattle ranch in Miami. As a boy, he spent time in foster homes, on the street. He tells me about his father—then asks me to leave him out of it. Saw his mother for the first time when he was 12 or 13, around the time he started smoking crack. Saw her again—and for the last time—a few years later. ■ Blinky met the love of his life in Central Park. He was sitting on a bench, drinking a forty. Dani was sitting nearby. Hey, she called over, can I have a sip off your beer? No, replied Blinky. “She got all huffy and puffy, started talking shit in Spanish to her friend. ‘This cracker, blah blah blah.’” After a minute or two, he said—also in Spanish—Hey, I understood everything you just said about me. Dani blushed, got flustered. “Then I told her she could have the beer.” Soon, they were dating. She’d tell him about things like Pangaea, ask him about the farm animals back home. She spoke Spanish, English, German, Portuguese. ■ Blinky eventually asked Dani to go to Florida. They spent five years there. “We used to dress up as clowns and do street performances.” What kind? “Do jokes, bug around. Shit that clowns do.” By the time Miami police found Dani’s body, she and Blinky had been together ten years. Something about her death didn’t jibe. “The autopsy says one thing, the cops ruled it an overdose.” What’d the autopsy say? “She had lacerations on the back of her head, bruises running up and down the side of her body.” His voice softens. “She was everything. My best friend…” ■ A crisp, smiling couple stops, hands us each a small bag. Inside are soaps, lotions, Oatmeal & Shea Butter body wash, a single tampon. We thank them. They move on. I look over at Blinky. “We’re gonna need bathrooms and vaginas for all this,” I say. Laughing, he pulls out a small box of Ritz crackers. “I don’t have enough teeth to eat hard crackers. Baguettes, maybe. There’s not much to a baguette. I could just eat the inside.” ■

After kicking heroin in 1999, Jamie Alliotts went on to study writing at Columbia, Oxford, Dartmouth, and Iowa. A native of Oradell, New Jersey, he’s won awards and fellowships for his playwriting and essays, which appear or are forthcoming in Star 82 Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Bayou, 40 Towns, and elsewhere. Alliotts is writing a series of stories about the horrors associated with twelve-step recovery, as well as a memoir about his experiences as a heroin addict in the U. S. Navy and on the streets of Manhattan during the 1990s.

Cover Photo by Jamie Alliotts

AFTERBURN A Workshop the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | August 3 to August 22 [SOLD OUT]

Posted on May 29, 2020 by thwackJuly 13, 2020

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

3 weeks
August 3 to August 22
Sold out
$125 early bird / $150 regular
Class limit: 12
Questions: kkulpa@cleavermagazine.com

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.

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook

Posted on May 29, 2020 by thwackJune 12, 2020

MINOR DETAIL
by Adania Shibli
translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
New Directions Books, 144 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook
Buy this book on Bookshop.Org

Tables need at least three legs to stand; guitar strings only ring when taut around two points. Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s third novel, takes its title as a challenge: how much can hinge upon one moment? How can a single moment of pain bridge the past to the present?

Shibli, a novelist and academic, is one of the few contemporary chroniclers of the West Bank. Her writing is concise. All of her novels fall under two hundred pages, all of her sentences are pared down to the bare minimum. In describing her new novel, Shibli said that her writing philosophy boils down to, “what is written, and what should never be written.” Her careful narration is more than the iceberg strategy of implying a story beneath the surface. Instead, Shibli’s writing is in tension with what it cannot say. Information is cut out not because it’s useless, but because, like the sun, it’s too painful to look at directly.

The novel is split into two nearly equal parts that mirror and distort each other. It begins in 1949 in the Negev Desert. Israel has just gained independence, but their military presence lingers, leaving an Israeli officer and his unit to comb the desert looking for anyone who can be deemed suspicious. The officer has no name or features. He’s given only enough detail to suggest a form from his outline. He is one man and he is fifty men, each more hostile than the last. Shibli’s narration puts him on a leash and scrutinizes his every move. After he’s brutally bitten by a vague “creature,” he sets out to kill every spider in his path. Was it a spider that gave him his wound? Probably not, but he can’t bring himself to heal without inflicting pain somewhere. It becomes a part of his routine. He lives, he eats, he breathes, he hates.

Adania Shibli

The officer’s penchant for hate becomes the fulcrum that pivots to the second act. Under the officer’s hand, the soldiers find a Bedouin camp, kill the inhabitants, and torture a young girl. Routine hate. So routine that, in the present day, a young woman is intrigued by the event because of, “the date it occurred, perhaps because there was nothing particularly unusual about the main details.” Enter a new, nameless representative: a Ramallah woman who pays more attention to outlines than the bodies that fill them. As she investigates this murder, pieces of 1949 (the desert, the officers, the spiders) bleed through time into her life. Her obsession with minor details from the past blind her from properly seeing the present. She travels from Palestine deep into Israel, retracing the Bedouin girl’s path, retracing her history, but never approaching an opportunity to rewrite it.

It’s from this repetition, this historical déjà vu, that emerges Shibli’s narrative control. The novel’s halves are linear in themselves, but their entanglement prevents them from ever being distinct. Time vacillates between the past and the present. Just as the events of the past shape the present, experiences from the present shape how we interrogate the past. A lot has changed since 1949. By land area, Palestine is a small fraction of what it used to be. But, as Shibli reminds us, the people are still there, and they are far from minor. The nations have changed shape, but the terms of war have remained the same. With them, the experiences, casualties, and memories of war continue into the present. Shibli demands that they be heard, because the present can never improve without reconciling the past.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead! Actually, it’s not even past.” No novel exemplifies this maxim better than Minor Detail.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead! Actually, it’s not even past.” No novel exemplifies this maxim better than Minor Detail. It’s rare that a novel so subtle in its construction and sparse in its prose can cut so deeply. Shibli warps time, collapsing the past and present, to depict a Palestine that has learned to live with wartime atrocities, “in everyday life.” In the novel’s present-day half, war lives as an unwelcome, unhealthy, and unyielding presence. Like polluted water, it can be easy to ignore if you’re not the one who has to drink it. Shibli’s novel is an order to look, listen, and taste for yourself.

THE BIG WARM HOUSE An Essay on the Art of Becoming a Writer by Emma Sloley

Posted on May 28, 2020 by thwackJune 1, 2020

THE BIG WARM HOUSE
An Essay on the Art of Becoming a Writer
by Emma Sloley

I’m thinking of a particular house, a house whose characteristics vary but whose essential nature remains unchanged. Let’s call it The Big Warm House. I’m not saying this very literary house is benign, necessarily. In some stories, the warmth is a trick, a fatal illusion from which the protagonist must eventually flee. The walls are so thin you can hear every burst of laughter or weeping, or else they’re as thick as a medieval prison. The size is also unreliable. You might assume a big house implies wealth, a certain level of bourgeois status, comfort. But sometimes the house is big because it has had to expand to contain all the terrible secrets.

As a baby bookworm, I spent hours out of sight and hearing of my family, tucked away in some dusty corner of the house, frantically reading as if words were a finite resource and I was close to finishing my ration. I was a slightly odd child, not eccentric enough to be noteworthy, just slightly withdrawn and socially awkward, waiting to grow into my forehead and teeth and the colt-like legs my sisters and I all inherited. My favorite books were about houses. Well, they were ostensibly about the people who lived in the houses, but it was in the corners of the houses that the true drama lived.

I appreciated the cursed fantasy world of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, but secretly I was far more interested in the wonderfully gloomy house through which the children entered that world. They had the run of the place without any functional grown-up interference, which struck me as the height of decadence. Though the descriptions of the décor were sparse (I mean, everyone was eager to get to Narnia, understandably), I loved reading about the faded English splendor of the rooms, the gardens, an oak wardrobe big enough in which to get truly lost.

Children’s literature has no shortage of great houses: the chaotic, come one-come-all cheeriness of the Weasley’s Burrow in Harry Potter; the Moominhouse in Tove Jansson’s enchantingly oddball Moomintroll series; the cabin in the Little House on the Prairie books, which in spite of the titular adjective doesn’t feel small at all. Even Bilbo Baggins’ house, though diminutive, fits the paradigm: the hobbit hole from Lord of the Rings is a source of hospitality and comfort, an ad-hoc meeting place for the community where there’s always a kettle on and a pipe to be smoked (if you’re into that kind of thing).

I loved the escape these fictional homes provided, but I also thrilled to their familiarity. I had no trouble imagining the big warm house because reading about it transported me there; I lived inside those houses. My real family’s ramshackle Edwardian family home was a warren of oddly-shaped rooms and surprise doors, of chimneys that went nowhere and chimneys so cavernous the cat sometimes got stuck in them, her plaintive mewling reverberating eerily through the walls. It was a place of dinner parties that never seemed to start or end. Of projects never quite finished, test swatches of paint on walls and windows propped open with books. As a child, I learned early that the temporary can become permanent.

Perhaps that’s partly why I felt an instant kinship when I encountered characters like Cassandra and Rose Mortmain from Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. We didn’t bathe in the kitchen sink, but we weren’t too far off during the many years in which our house was a DIY work-in-progress, our lives a kind of architectural progressive dinner party. Each of us—my parents, me, my three sisters— would live in a room designated our own until the time came to renovate it, then we’d move into another room, and so on until normal meant camp beds in the corner of the lounge room, a piano in the bedroom, piles of scuffed shoes in the walk-in pantry. There were always raucous communal meals and a stream of visitors, and plenty of suitors came to call, even if they were never for me.

Like the ill-fated Berry family of John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, I grew into adolescence nodding knowingly at the many iterations of the titular hotel because the salient aspects of that life felt familiar: how frustrating to mark out a territory as one of multiple siblings; how bourgeois ideals of normality could warp a child’s developing identity; how the roof under which you all lived could come to feel like both sanctuary and prison. All those early Irving sagas—The Water-Method Man, The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules—to some degree fixated on houses as a locus of comfort, desire, and betrayal; the bricks-and-mortar manifestation of a hero’s longing for home always too slippery to grasp.

The big warm house represents a bulwark against that pressure, but of course bricks and mortar are no defense against a civilization in peril. Houses might represent civilization, but they are also the first totems of civilization to fall.

During my Brontë years, I loved Jane Eyre madly, but I loved Rochester’s house even more. Even a literal madwoman in an attic can’t dampen the dangerous romance of a home in which you could lose yourself both literally and figuratively. This is the big warm house as liminal space. Standing on the threshold, the reader is suspended between two worlds. Ahead of you, a life of fulfillment and happiness glimpsed through a golden crack in the parlor door; behind, the cold loneliness of the moors where pariahs are doomed to wander forever. Visiting Wuthering Heights was even more treacherous. On the one hand, the promise of a roaring hearth fire and some juicy gossip: on the other, melodramatic ghosts and a host who’s extremely fucked-up, emotionally speaking.

Later, I developed an appreciation of the houses under whose roofs Edith Wharton’s gilded unfortunates played out their fates. They were more like big cold houses, their opulence and prestige a poor trade-off for the chilly inhospitality and betrayals that took place within. There was a constant stream of visitors—a classic hallmark of the big warm house—but chief among the visitors was class anxiety, who always proved a total bitch to evict. The only way to escape those rooms was via death, either social or literal. But they were so lavish and beautiful, the time spent there was almost worth it!

The big warm house doesn’t have to be a mansion. In Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, the “residence” is a ramshackle lot called the Pit in danger of being swept away in a hurricane, but it’s nevertheless where familial love and loyalty live, at least temporarily. Abject poverty is recast as a chance to catch up with the whole fam in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where Charlie’s home is both a haven and a disturbingly privacy-free zone. In Anne Enright’s The Gathering, the Irish working-class family home is a fulcrum around which its many damaged members revolve, a place where siblings can’t seem to help returning even when they know grief awaits, because something else lives there too—the chance to forgive one another and oneself.

In life, I crave the comfort of the big warm house, but I also need to get away from its demands in order to write. I think many writers are like this, building the house into their stories instead of trying to live in it. To properly capture home, we must leave.

Before I’d even put pen to paper to write my first novel, Disaster’s Children, the fictional house was already built, existing even before my characters did. I knew the survivalist ranch on which these people lived would be a wonder of design, because they were building a utopia, and utopias are always beautiful. The main house is both an architectural triumph and a convivial gathering place. How could a utopia exist if it didn’t involve the comfort of walking through chilly woods at dusk and spotting the golden glow of a house wavering through the trees? The promise of camaraderie, of food and drink, of refuge, of people who finally understand you, of rest.

My stories are often about a world coming apart. The big warm house represents a bulwark against that pressure, but of course bricks and mortar are no defense against a civilization in peril. Houses might represent civilization, but they are also the first totems of civilization to fall. Houses can be flattened, burned down, bombed, swept away. They can squash witches, sure, but they can in turn be squashed. Marlo, the protagonist of Disaster’s Children, understands on some cellular level that in order to become her best and truest self she needs to flee the binds of the ranch, her beloved big warm house.

The thing I believe writers (and perhaps also readers) need to know about the big warm house is that it’s built on a foundation of contradiction. Everyone who lives inside must crave solitude but instead find themselves bumping up against furniture, beds, each other, themselves. They must be forced into intimacy and driven apart by failing to understand one another. The fictional house must always be full of people but also profoundly lonely. The house must represent safety but also danger—a waystation between two worlds, though never exposing in which direction lies folly and which salvation. Most importantly, the inhabitants of the story house must be torn between desperately wanting to get away, and wanting never to leave.

Emma Sloley’s work has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, Yemassee Journal, and the Masters Review Anthology, among many others. She is a MacDowell fellow and her debut novel, Disaster’s Children, was published by Little A books in 2019. Born in Australia, Emma divides her time between the US and the city of Mérida, Mexico. You can find her on Twitter @Emma_Sloley and visit her website to learn more. Her novel can be purchased via BookShop.

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE, Image as an Engine in Poetry, a Workshop taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson | July 11 to August 15 [SOLD OUT]

Posted on May 25, 2020 by thwackJuly 12, 2020

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE
Image as an Engine in Poetry
Taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson

5 weeks
July 11-August 15
SOLD OUT
Class limit: 12
Questions: claireoleson@cleavermagazine.com

In this course, we will explore how images can serve as the engine in a poem: driving the language as a plot might in a story or novel. 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 visual life of the poetry we read and write.

We will read a few selections of poetry weekly that demonstrate the potential of images as communicative engines. 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. Participant 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.

SYLLABUS

1: Introductions: What is an image?

We will open with an investigation of how language can create images and what these images offer to poetic work. In this first week, we will focus on writing from the image out: beginning with a picture, and allowing it to jumpstart a poem.

2: Imagism and its Departures

We will discuss the movement of Imagism that emerged in the early 20th century. From an understanding of how images came to hold meaning in and of themselves, we will navigate writing pieces that showcase images as more than what they literally seem.

3: Form and Function

This module will invite an exploration of some selected poetic forms, drawing specific attention to how the “frame” of the poem itself contributes to, enhances, and communicates the images it may hold. We will write with consideration to form, but with the specific bounds and restrictions set by each writer as they desire.

4: Color Theories

This module will be dedicated to examining the role of color in poetry. How do blues and reds suggest temperatures? Can you tell the “heat” of a poem? What do noticeable color swatches or departures from the expected colors change a landscape? How can a color speak, hold water, and mean anything at all when its perceived without it actually being there? For our assignment this week, we will work on writing pieces that speak to color as mood, scene, an environment rather than as a breed of light alone.

5: The After-Image

In this final module, we will inspect what images linger with us after each piece and how our work can create memorable and unshakable pictures in a reader’s mind. This will also be the week for revision, encouraging everyone to push their boundaries and consider how their final piece’s build and end on picture.

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

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.

TELLING TRUE STORIES A Workshop in Creative Nonfiction Taught by Cleaver Editor Sydney Tammarine | October 19–November 20

Posted on May 22, 2020 by thwackMay 23, 2020

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

5 weeks
October 19–November 20
Click here to register
$125 early bird / $150 regular
Class limit: 12
Questions: sydney.tammarine@cleavermagazine.com

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 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.

THE ART OF THE SCENE: A Workshop in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction taught by Lisa Borders | August 2 – September 4

Posted on May 21, 2020 by thwackMay 24, 2020

THE ART OF THE SCENE
A Workshop in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction
Taught by Lisa Borders

5 weeks
August 2 – September 4
introductory Zoom meeting at 2 pm ET on Sun Aug 2
$200 early bird / $225 regular
Class limit: 12
Questions: lisaborders@cleavermagazine.com

The writer Sandra Scofield describes a “pulse”—that spark that makes the story come alive— as a vital element to all scenes. This pulse is especially crucial for opening scenes, as many agents and editors report that if they are not hooked on a manuscript within the first five pages, they will not read on.

But what is a “pulse,” and how can a writer ensure that each scene—not just the opening— has one? How can we write in such a way that our characters come to life, that a scene breathes emotion and urgency, while moving the plot forward and keeping tension taut?

In this class we’ll look at opening scenes, pivotal scenes and transitional scenes in published novels and memoirs, analyzing them for a “pulse”—that spark that makes the story come alive—and for the ways in which they hook the reader, introduce the characters, and (for opening scenes) signal the book’s scope. We’ll define the elements of a scene and discuss techniques for writing scenes that breathe emotion and urgency while moving the plot forward and keeping tension taut.

We’ll also workshop an opening scene from your novel or memoir in progress of no more than 1800 words in length, applying a checklist to help you determine whether your book’s opening passes the “pulse” test—and if not, strategies for creating a first scene the reader can’t put down. You will then revise these scenes, or submit a new opening scene for instructor feedback.

This class will have one synchronous meeting: an introductory Zoom meeting on Sunday, August 2 from 2 – 3:30 pm EST. Writers will receive a schedule for submitting scenes to be workshopped in Weeks 2 – 4 as part of the Week 1 lesson.

Readings will include scenes from works by Rishi Reddi, Hanya Yanagihara, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Strout and Piper Weiss, among others.

SYLLABUS

Week 1: Introduction

What is a scene?
Scene elements
Creating tension within a scene
Readings

Week 2: Types of Scenes – Part I

Opening Scenes
Pivotal Scenes
Readings
Four scenes workshopped

Week 3: Types of Scenes – Part II

Flashback Scenes
Transitional Scenes
Readings
Four scenes workshopped

Week 4: Scene vs. Exposition

Definitions
Debunking “show don’t tell”
Pacing
Readings
Four scenes workshopped

Week 5: Scene CPR

Checklist for revision
Revise workshopped scene or submit new scene to instructor

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.

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS, a memoir by Jenn Shapland, reviewed by Claire Oleson

Posted on May 14, 2020 by thwackJune 6, 2020

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS
by Jenn Shapland
Tin House Press, 266 pages
Reviewed by Claire Oleson

The book jacket for "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers" by Jenn Shapland. A navy blue book cover with a pleasing font in green and white.

Click to purchase this title.

Jenn Shapland’s hybridized memoir and biography straddles what its seemingly-impossible title suggests: an ability to write about oneself by writing about someone else. Far from taking on a myopic or narcissistic project, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is eager to talk about the self for the sake of empathy, to revive written-off lives, to question presumed heterosexualities, and to make a bodily connection with now-irrecoverable marginalized bodies. Spurred by discovering letters written between the Southern playwright and novelist Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie, Shapland dives into the paper trail of a writer she wasn’t previously researching. On the hinge that the letters she discovered while interning at the Harry Ransom Center were highly unexpected love letters between two women, Shapland opens the door into the book that follows and into her own still-forming identity simultaneously.

So much of this biography lives in flux. It jumps anachronistically between times and places, between Carson’s young adulthood, her time at Yaddo (an artist’s retreat in Saratoga, New York) and at the February house (an artistic commune in Brooklyn), and even back and forth between Carson’s narrative and Shapland’s personal life. The empathetic bridge Shapland constructs between herself and Carson McCullers is, too, incredibly watery and mobile. It’s a bridge set up largely on the word “queer,” which here can mean gay, LGBTQ, bizarre, failing at normalcy, and or can denote relationship between a myriad of these possible definitions. This bridge is crossed through mutual identities, through a longing for a lesbian history, which, as Shapland writes, “there hardly is,” and through a desire to find the language to cross a long-held lexical gap and retrieve the queer narratives that a normative history would abandon.

Consciously situated in this lexical gap that queer women have historically occupied, (particularly closeted queer women from points in history where queerness was not eagerly recorded and was often intentionallly erased,) Shapland’s experimental work of nonfition digs through muddled archives searching less for Carson’s exact life and more for the possiblility of her love. Shapland has written a speculative investigation on purpose. As she remarks “In a world built by men for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register– and is not registered, i.e. written down” she shows a sort of thesis early on: an intention to write down, to name, and in doing so, to have something which she, too, might go by. Unequipped with the word “lesbian,” McCullers calls “the women she loved her ‘imaginary friends’” and permits, even insists, that they navigate a space between the real and the covert, the actualized and the forged. The reader watches McCullers, without a vernacular for her loving, married twice to the same man whom she narrowly escaped dying with, given something of an extension, a clear empathy in the writing and recording that Shapland offers here.

Jean Shapland

As it embarks on an entirely unestablished form of biography, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is not afraid to show itself in progress. Readers encounter Shapland contending with partial accounts, content at finding shards and glimpses rather than neat and finished stories. Carson McCullers is also shown struggling with partial stories, unsuccessful pursuits of women she adored, and an unclear conception of her own sexuality and identity amongst real “imaginary friends.” Shapland sees this struggle for identity, this existence outside of easy or clearly accessible language, as a familiar “protracted becoming.” Shapland shows that queer history is always in contention with loss, with a lack of resources, of material, of proof, and even of language with which to preserve and communicate itself. To see Carson’s queer life amidst biographers who would straight-wash it, Shapland suggests “you have to read like a queer person.” It is less an immediate sharing of language, and actually, as Shapland astutely writes, a shared “dearth of language” that most characterizes how a contemporary queer writer might connect to one locked in a time where she could not easily write herself down.

There will always be less queer history than history. It may always be called “queer history” in a need to specify itself whereas the defaulted histories, the overwhelmingly heterosexual, white, male, and colonialsit histories will be, Shapland demonstrates, “given the benefit of the doubt.” Perhaps because of its roots in this sense of incompletion, as the book unfolds, it is always showing its own process rather than presenting a finality. Shapland notes that memoir itself “is peeking into the windows of your own life. A voyeurism of the self. An interior looting” and that in her work, she is “perched outside [her] own house as [she tries] to see into Carson’s.” Structured in short vignettes, some no longer than a page, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers arguably navigates queerly as well– maybe because it wants to, but also, more likely, because it has no other way to be. It is a queer piece of writing that teaches queer readership simply in being read. To empathize with Shapland’s work sifting through transcripts of Carson’s therapy sessions, which Carson recorded with the intention of writing her own biography, is to empathize with the longing to find longing that might look like your own. Here lies what the book might be said to be “about.” Less than any one life story, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers d etails a search and a want, a need for connection, and an effort to acquire language for what so much of history has deemed unspeakable.

Shapland peeks in to Carson’s life at different windows, detailing flashes of her living, her marriages and divorces with Reeves McCullers, her relationships with women, and her life’s possible relationship to Shapland’s own. In its sentences, this book opens the cupboards of Carson McCullers’ life and exhibits little-known inventories of Carson’s personal and emotional materials, down to a lost ashtray. However, as a whole, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is much less about Carson McCullers and much more about a need for queer women and queer artists to know that their lives are not alone, are not only in silences between speech, and have existed long before they were able to be spoken of.

Yes, unfailingly, the narrative is peppered with knowledge of Maggie Nelson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, t he visual language of androgyny, Audre Lorde, and many other notes that may linger longer in a queer readers’ ears as a language that lingers behind individual words. It is fun and sad and as contemporary as it is historical, pulling from highly academic, nuanced, and difficult ways to relate to obscured literary pasts as well as punchier ways of relating. One of the latter is communicated early on in the text when Shapland writes “Like, same” in response to Carson’s title The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. F rom examining Carson’s wardrobe to eating pizza in Carson’s home in Georgia to unearthing the medical aftermath of her strokes to combing through her photographs, Jenn Shapland is, as she puts it “hunting lesbians” where other writers have only found Carson’s “traveling companions, good friends, roommates, close friends, dear friends, obsessions, crushes” and “special friends.” Shapland is renaming, is making real and whole the imagined and the partial.

Backed by extensive research, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers closes the lexical gaps that concern its opening with belief rather than a documented citation. Shapland decides that “When Carson says she was in love, I believe she meant she was in love.” With this act of believing comes an invitation to the reader, an ingenious and vital request to join Shapland in the same language, to allow a love to be sufficient to be known and named and sustained on its own mere utterance. Shapland’s writing transcends genre and bends established modes of language. She takes a grammatical descriptivist’s approach to liberating queerness form erasure, and, in insisting it be written, allows Carson’s history to become a bridge to readers and writers now, permission to have a history in the first place.

Cleaver Poetry Reviews Editor Claire Oleson is a writer hailing from Grand Rapids Michigan. She’s a 2019 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. Her chapbook is forthcoming in May, 2020. Contact her by email.

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE, Image as an Engine in Poetry, a Workshop taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson | July 11 to August 15 [SOLD OUT]

May 25, 2020

THE PROPULSIVE PICTURE Image as an Engine in Poetry Taught by Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson 5 weeks July 11-August 15 SOLD OUT Class limit: 12 Questions: claireoleson@cleavermagazine.com In this course, we will explore how images can serve as the engine in a poem: driving the language as a plot might in a story or novel. 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 visual life of the poetry we read and write. We will read a few selections of poetry weekly that demonstrate the potential of images as communicative engines. 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. Participant work will be submitted weekly for peer and instructor review. One ...
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MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS, a memoir by Jenn Shapland, reviewed by Claire Oleson

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Book Jacket

May 14, 2020

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS by Jenn Shapland Tin House Press, 266 pages Reviewed by Claire Oleson Jenn Shapland’s hybridized memoir and biography straddles what its seemingly-impossible title suggests: an ability to write about oneself by writing about someone else. Far from taking on a myopic or narcissistic project, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is eager to talk about the self for the sake of empathy, to revive written-off lives, to question presumed heterosexualities, and to make a bodily connection with now-irrecoverable marginalized bodies. Spurred by discovering letters written between the Southern playwright and novelist Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie, Shapland dives into the paper trail of a writer she wasn’t previously researching. On the hinge that the letters she discovered while interning at the Harry Ransom Center were highly unexpected love letters between two women, Shapland opens the door into the book that follows and into her own still-forming identity simultaneously. So much of this biography lives in flux. It jumps anachronistically between times and places, between Carson’s young adulthood, her time at Yaddo (an artist’s retreat in Saratoga, New York) and at the February house (an artistic commune in Brooklyn), and even back and forth between ...
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An Interview with Claire Oleson, author of THINGS FROM THE CREEK BED WE COULD HAVE BEEN, by Andrea Caswell

April 28, 2020

An Interview with Claire Oleson Author of THINGS FROM THE CREEK BED WE COULD HAVE BEEN Newfound Press, 64 pages by Andrea Caswell Claire Oleson’s chapbook, Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, is the winner of the Newfound 2019 Prose Prize, awarded annually to a chapbook-length work of exceptional fiction or nonfiction that explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding. In the following interview, she discusses the work, and how making art can reshape our understanding of what we see in the world. Andrea Caswell: The stories in this collection are language-driven, intensely intimate, and saturated with beautiful images. Did any of these stories begin as poems or prose poems? Claire Oleson: I enjoy navigating in the spaces between prose and poetry; in Creek Bed, I hope a poetic dedication to the individual word is visible alongside the breathing space that prose gives to its subjects. I wanted the size, the "living room" of a story, with the minutia and pace that poetry can offer. Also, somewhat in retrospect, I've found my writing across genres is often propelled by sight more than distinct action. I wanted image to offer propulsion, like plot can, but I wanted everything I ...
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BURIED ALIVE: A TO-DO LIST, poems by Carole Bernstein, reviewed by Claire Oleson

September 18, 2019

BURIED ALIVE: A TO-DO LIST by Carole Bernstein Hanging Loose Press, 80 pages. reviewed by Claire Oleson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver From satirizing the mechanics of the American workplace to discovering motherly devotion in the myth of Persephone, Carole Bernstein’s third poetry collection Buried Alive: A To-Do List takes readers through caves and coffins alike, showing what living things still kick inside the previously presumed-dead. The book follows a loose chronology, drawing from glimpses of her living to form the picture of a complete and complicated life. Bernstein is unafraid in her direct examinations of familial sexual abuse, injury and aging, and the unfolding joys and strains of motherhood in clear, occasionally very casual language. This book trusts its reader with image and metaphor but also consciously stays married to narrative; a majority of the poems in Buried Alive: A To-Do List navigate by chronology, desiring to approach the terrifying and mundane with equal clarity. Before the life of the speaker unfolds, the second poem and the titular piece of the book takes us to her coffin. In “Buried Alive: A To-Do List,” we see the speaker contend with waking up buried alive, a circumstance which prompts them ...
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99 NAMES OF EXILE, poems by Kaveh Bassiri, reviewed by Claire Oleson

July 8, 2019

99 NAMES OF EXILE by Kaveh Bassiri Newfound, 40 Pages reviewed by Claire Oleson In his poem “Memorial Day” Kaveh Bassiri tells us: My absence is momentous. When I left Tehran, a revolution ......swelled in my place. When I left Berlin, the wall came ......down. And when I leave tomorrow, the airports will close. It is inside this momentous absence that Kaveh Bassiri’s prize-winning chapbook 99 Names of Exile traces its focus⁠— a conscientious unravelling of what it might mean to be gone from a place and have it be (at least partially) gone from you. The specific absence Bassiri focuses on is accompanied by a sense of irrevocable inaccessibility; it comes after forced immigration and it leaves behind it a different Tehran, a different Berlin. This exile is complex and shifting, it is not the product of a static or singular expulsion, but perhaps more accurately, it’s an imposed exercise that takes continual effort survive. Later in “Memorial Day” the speaker notes “Each morning, in order not to sink, I have to bail the news out/ of me.” Staying aloft is not a default in Bassiri’s poetics of absence, it too requires a constant expulsion of words as news ...
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PORTRAIT OF A BODY IN WRECKAGES, poems by Meghan McClure, reviewed by Claire Oleson

October 8, 2018

PORTRAIT OF A BODY IN WRECKAGES by Meghan McClure Newfound, 43 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson Excellent writing is often lauded for its ability to transport and disembody the reader, to enrapture so completely that its audience floats along the sentence and forgets their place in the room. Meghan McClure’s Portrait of a Body in Wreckages does not do this, instead, much of its excellence is found in its proficiency to embody the reader, to address them in their own physicality, and move along the level of the cell as well as the sentence. Composed in blocks of poetic prose, this work explores the speaker’s relationship with their body, its limits and its multitudes, its wholeness and breakages, and its existence within both anatomy and language. Oscillating in focus and tone, much of Portrait of a Body in Wreckages educates, telling us “Your right lung is bigger than your left” and “Ounce for ounce, bone is stronger than steel” These quick and fascinating statements begin inside the medical and clinical, categorizing, and analyzing of anatomy which demands a distance from the body to know (it is very difficult to test for yourself, on an inhale, which lung feels larger). But ...
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TART HONEY, poems by Deborah Burnham, reviewed by Claire Oleson

May 16, 2018

TART HONEY by Deborah Burnham Resource Publications, 72 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Divided into four sections, Deborah Burnham’s poetry collection Tart Honey seems cut into citrus slices— edible, organic, and aware of some lost and bodily whole it re-composes in the formation of its parts. The poems feature modern relationships with too much absence, a dissolving picture of Apollo 13 soon taken over by a persona attempting to collect her body into experiencing her partner, and paintings with colors that spill into cells, among other simultaneously harmonizing and divisive images. Divided into four sections, Deborah Burnham’s poetry collection Tart Honey seems cut into citrus slices— edible, organic, and aware of some lost and bodily whole it re-composes in the formation of its parts. Experiences and sensations become as important, if not more so, than physical presence, even on occasion manifesting into doppelgängers of bodies. For instance, in “The night the screen fell out” Burnham’s persona has learned “to live bravely with no other body/ in the house” just in time to have a bat cut through her room at night. This bat is not alone either, but casts a reminder for the persona’s ...
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BLACK GENEALOGY, poems by Kiki Petrosino, reviewed by Claire Oleson

January 7, 2018

BLACK GENEALOGY by Kiki Petrosino with Illustrations by Lauren Haldeman Brain Mill Press, 45 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Situated between a national and a personal history, Kiki Petrosino’s poetry book Black Genealogy sifts through the past in search of lost identity, language, bodies, and self-possession amidst the legacy of the Civil War and slavery in America. The book details an exploration of both a familial and a larger American reality through the lens of a contemporary African American persona. Split into two sections, Black Genealogy consists of both unlineated prose poetry as well as highly-structured villanelles, a style of poem originally associated with ballads and oral storytelling. Both forms, especially in the context of Petrosino’s subject, seem to bring a sense of narrative story to the poetry, and because of this, a noticeable absence when the narrative contended with proves to have been lost, ignored, and or intentionally obscured by the country in which it occurred. Negotiating with a history that was blind towards the humanity of Black people in America, Black Genealogy is a work of sight determined to bring the readers’ eyes, thoughts, and awareness up close with ...
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FLOWER WARS, poems by Nico Amador, reviewed by Claire Oleson

August 10, 2017

FLOWER WARS by Nico Amador Newfound, 35 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson Like a scene is set to music, a vision of the body is set to language in Nico Amador’s poetry collection Flower Wars. In this book, biology is boiled into word, punctuation, metaphor, and syllable, leaving the reader’s understanding of physicality and the human inhabitance of flesh up to a new breed of interpretation— that of one on the page. Moving between prose poems and lineated pieces, Amador addresses hair, gender, Pablo Neruda, shifting personal identities, hummingbirds, and so much more as a central narrative through-line begins to surface between stanzas. The opening poem of Flower Wars, “Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair,” borrows its title from a Frida Kahlo painting and begins with the statement “There is the dream of exposure and then there is the act of it—” immediately drawing a boundary between rumination and action and perhaps also putting the poem itself, as a form that works an invitation to thought, into question. The reader, if familiar with Kahlo’s painting, can call to mind the image of Frida in a suit and bearing a short, traditionally masculine-coded haircut. The image and the painting are stationary, ...
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HEMMING FLAMES, poems by Patricia Colleen Murphy, reviewed by Claire Oleson

March 5, 2017

HEMMING FLAMES by Patricia Colleen Murphy Utah Sate University Press, 78 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson On the peripheries of almost constant domestic emergency and conflict, Patricia Colleen Murphy’s poetry collection Hemming Flames lights up disaster and familial antipathy with humor and endurance. Many of the pieces in this collection share threads of the same story, featuring reoccurring family figures and familiar, though often growing, conflicts. There is an undeniable amount of devastation and trauma inside these family stories, but Murphy’s true skill lies not in showing what’s often the obvious and expected pain of it all, but in bringing a humor and an odd sense of the mundane to seemingly shocking moments. In the collection’s opening poem “Losing Our Milk Teeth,” the speaker details how their father “will be all/ smiles. He’ll say pass the mother/ fucking peas.” These lines are at once foreboding and strangely funny; in a scene where the mother is not wholly present, a request for her return is tucked into an expressed desire for peas, all barbed with an impatience and anger which suggests familiarity coexisting with aggression. As in the opening poem of Hemming Flames, many of the poems to follow also ...
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THE LOVERS’ PHRASEBOOK, poems by Jordi Alonso, reviewed by Claire Oleson

January 9, 2017

THE LOVERS' PHRASEBOOK by Jordi Alonso Red Flag Press, 68 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson Translation arguably holds a fascinating and unique role in literature—acting as a conduit between ways of understanding and communicating—but whether or not translation is used for uniting or differentiating separate languages is something more complicated and baffling to answer. In one of the best responses to this question I’ve encountered, Jordi Alonso’s poetry collection The Lovers' Phrasebook unpacks words considered ‘untranslatable’ in English into full, articulate poems. Alonso’s approach is particularly interesting in how it avoids direct or literal translation; Alonso’s pieces do not exchange one ‘untranslatable’ word for one English word, but instead, dismantle and reconstruct the word out of its native language and into an expanded experience or story. The Lovers' Phrasebook is able to at once communicate the untranslatable while also acknowledging the gaps and deficiencies in the English language which prevent a word-to-word exchange from being an adequate way of presenting the relationship between languages. In the collection’s opening poem, the only piece not titled after an untranslatable word, one of book’s most integral themes is introduced. The poem, “The Dream of Uncommon Language,” begins: I do not dream of ...
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YOU ASK ME TO TALK ABOUT THE INTERIOR, poems by Carolina Ebeid, reviewed by Claire Oleson

December 12, 2016

YOU ASK ME TO TALK ABOUT THE INTERIOR by Carolina Ebeid Noemi Press, 75 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson Poetry is often in danger of being understood as purely conceptual material in need of processing and interpretation in order to become meaningful or real. It can be easy, after wading through stanzas, to lose a grip on time and place and the sensation of occupying a body. However, despite the ethereality and distance from reality poetry often possesses, Caroline Ebeid has proven that it can also be used to ground and remind us of the physical rather than simply blur or distract from it. In her collection You Ask Me to Talk About The Interior, Ebeid employs a sort of “bodily language,” flexing smoothly between word and body until the two seem irredeemably tied. I would argue that Ebeid, and this collection in particular, works to close the distance between words and what they mean, bringing the signified and signifier together on the physical stage of the paper. In the opening poem “Something Brighter Than Pity,” a persona spends “hours folding & unfolding” the learned forms of “swans in origami”. Because this picture is the first detailed in the book, ...
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DISINHERITANCE, poems by John Sibley Williams, reviewed by Claire Oleson

August 17, 2016

DISINHERITANCE by John Sibley Williams Apprentice House, 98 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson Language is almost intuitively understood as a tool for possession—a form of communication which allow us to hold and deliver ideas between minds. However, John Sibley Williams’s latest poetry collection, Disinheritance, demonstrates how language itself is anything but concrete or possessable. By employing themes of abstraction, fictionalization, and absence, Disinheritance depicts a reality that is only accessible through distortion. Williams’ poems hone in on the moments where language breaks off, proves insufficient, or only serves to describe a situation rather than explain it. In this way, Disinheritance investigates how poetry can both be made out of language and escape it. Like a snake eating itself, Williams’ lines often turn back on themselves, admitting that their bodies are made out of English while also refusing to be limited by the borders of their syllables. One of the first poems in this collection, “November Country,” uses a sense of abandonment to raise questions about presence and absence that much of the collection concentrates on. In “November Country,” instead of helping his grandfather dig a grave, the speaker decides to gather the earth rather than empty it, declaring, I ball ...
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THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson

June 22, 2016

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT by Melody S. Gee Cooper Dillon, 55 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson Communicating soreness, strength, weariness, and victory by tapping a reader’s own muscles for empathy, Melody S. Gee’s latest poetry collection, The Dead in Daylight, uses language to both construct and dismantle bodies and lives. As if preparing an animal for the table, Gee’s poems divide “body” from “life” and “muscle” from “meat.” Divided into two halves, “Separate Blood” and “Bone,” this book reaches out to its reader with both life and decay, fingers extended from the pages to read the pulse of its audience. In what can be understood as taxonomies, eulogies, butchering instructions, and ways to heal a nerve, The Dead in Daylight confronts life and death directly and sharply and softly, a heartbeat edging out from behind every line. The first poem of the collection, “I Cannot Make a Torch of Green Branches”, begins: The living does not burn, even after cold protests of smoke. Green branches will not take a spark like the dead. Here, Gee provides imagery that immediately seems to contradict itself. What’s still living is portrayed as not volatile, not useful, not bright or active, while the ...
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EDIBLE FLOWERS, poems by Lucia Chericiu, reviewed by Claire Oleson

June 2, 2016

EDIBLE FLOWERS by Lucia Chericiu Main Street Rag, 62 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson It’s easy to forget, in the middle of reading a stanza or a paragraph or a recipe for sauerkraut, that language is something constantly occupied with its author’s intention and its reader’s reception — it is not still nor discreet nor impersonal, no matter how inhumane the result may taste. Lucia Chericiu’s poetry collection Edible Flowers, through its personal and intimate depictions of history, home, fruit, bodies, and language, communicates how language is constantly in translation, moving between nerve-endings and letters, and irrevocably infused with the humanity that authored it and the humanity that receives it. The poems of Edible Flowers are largely occupied with how both the material and the lingual in people’s lives come with human stories ingrained in their meanings and purposes. In these poems, and in the reality they came from, all objects and words betray a time and a place and a person. A tree grown in a drought means a neighbor has stolen water, an old women’s hands aren’t merely tools but things which “bespoke hours and years she toiled,” and the propaganda people are forced to memorize is made ...
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EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY, a Workshop to Jumpstart Your Writing, taught by Tricia Park | June 27 – July 25 [SOLD OUT]

Posted on May 12, 2020 by thwackJuly 12, 2020

EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY
A Workshop to Jumpstart Your Writing
open to all levels and genres
taught by Cleaver Editor Tricia Park

5 weeks
June 27 to July 25
5 Zoom classes, Saturdays 2-4 pm Eastern Time
$150 early bird / $200 regular
Class limit: 12
Questions: triciapark@cleavermagazine.com

But what if we can use this time to develop a skill; start a new project; follow a passion?

What if this sudden surplus of time is an opportunity for experimentation?

What if we embrace our vulnerability and take a deep dive into the unknown?

What might we discover about ourselves?

For many of us, the challenge is not getting to the writing desk but knowing what to do with ourselves once we’re there.

What does it mean to develop a writing practice? How do we create momentum from where we are right now? What if destabilizing ourselves as writers could move us forward in our work, if experimentation and play catapulted us into our best writing?

Syllabus:

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: Walking 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.

Week Four: Following our Obsessions

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “a man is what he thinks about all day long.” In this week’s class, we’ll discover ways to follow our obsessions and redirect our mind’s tendencies to fuel our writing.

Week Five : “Gaming” our Writing

In the last 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.

What you’ll get from the classes:

Once a week, real-time meetings with your instructor and cohort.

Gently intriguing prompts to jump start 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.

Tricia 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.

Emily Steinberg’s QUARANTINE JOURNAL

Posted on May 7, 2020 by thwackJuly 13, 2020

Emily Steinberg’s
QUARANTINE JOURNAL

Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic “Blogging Towards Oblivion,” was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA. and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at emilysteinberg@cleavermagazine.com.

TELLING TRUE STORES, a Workshop in Creative Nonfiction, by Sydney Tammarine | July 27 – August 28 [sold out]

Posted on May 6, 2020 by thwackJuly 12, 2020

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

5 weeks
July 27 – August 28 [sold out]
$125 early bird / $150 regular
Class limit: 12
Questions: sydney.tammarine@cleavermagazine.com

SYLLABUS

Topic One: Writing the Tough Stuff

Topic Two: Finding Your Truth

Topic Three: Hell is (Writing About) Other People

Topic Four: Finding Poetry in Prose

THE ART OF FLASH, Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction, taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | June 20 — July 25, 2020 [sold out]

Posted on May 6, 2020 by thwackJuly 12, 2020

THE ART OF FLASH

A Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction

Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa

Both sessions of Kathryn Kulpa’s The Art of Flash are sold out—new classes by Kathryn will be announced shortly!

Session 2: 5 weeks
June 20 — July 25, 2020
Register now
$125 early bird / $150 regular
Class limit: 12
Questions: kkulpa@cleavermagazine.com [sold out]

Session 1: 5 weeks
May 9 — June 6, 2020
$125 early bird / $150 regular
Class limit: 12
Questions: kkulpa@cleavermagazine.com [sold out]

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 point 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

THE ROYAL ABDULS, a novel by Ramiza Shamoun Koya, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Posted on May 4, 2020 by thwackJune 20, 2020

THE ROYAL ABDULS
by Ramiza Shamoun Koya
Forest Avenue Press, 303 pages
Reviewed by Beth Kephart

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Cover of The Royal Abduls: Ramiza Shamoun Koya. A view across a golden lake of apartment buildings, which reflect the Taj Mahal onto the water.

Click to purchase this book

Where do we belong, and to whom? Are we most ourselves when we are by ourselves, or are we most free when rooted deep inside family responsibility?

During the day and a half that I ravenously read Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel, The Royal Abduls, I asked myself these questions. I leaned into the lives of Koya’s magnificently drawn characters, into the nest of troubles they inadvertently twigged together, into the love they did not know how to express. Or forgot to express. Or ran out of time to express.

As it happens.

The Royal Abduls is a family story about an Indian-American boy named Omar, his parents, his aunt, his grandparents, and his friends. Every character here is reckoning with a post 9/11 world and its overt and unarticulated prejudices. Omar, who is eleven when we meet him, has recently adopted an Indian accent and is researching (and fantastically embroidering) a family history no one has actively passed down. His aunt, the persuasively particular evolutionary biologist Amina, has just moved to DC, Omar’s hometown, to join a toxic research lab. Omar hopes his aunt will help decode the mysteries of his family’s past and immediate present. At the very least, perhaps she’ll transport him to a local cricket game and yell spontaneous insults with him at the opposing team. After all, Amina has just left a long-term boyfriend who had hoped she’d settle down with him, and Omar is the closest thing to a son Amina will ever have, and so there should be privileges.

With clear but never plain language, Koya allows her story to unfold—Omar’s troubles at home, Omar’s troubles at school, Amina’s challenges at the lab and challenges as the aunt she tries so hard to be. Spectacularly plausible but original, well-paced but sensuous, Koya’s plot thickens with events Amina cannot control. Omar’s plight as a young boy judged by the color of his skin and the lonely desperation of his fantasies is deeply moving. Amina, like most of us, does not have answers for the questions that he asks:

She searched her mind for the words that could soothe the hunger in his heart and the fear in hers. She understood his ache for reassurance that their family, history, the world made sense. But all she could think to tell him was that he should find a way to escape into an inner world, to fiercely guard his solitude. Because there were no guarantees, and there were always people who were disappointing and cruel, and you could go your whole life searching but never find a place where you belonged. But she couldn’t say that, not to an eleven-year-old.

Amina loves but she’s always running. She admires commitments she can’t make. She endlessly judges herself, asking herself (and so asking us) whether our passions have as much value as our actions:

Did studying insects count for anything in such a world? She doubted it and yet she had no choice; this was what she loved to do, it absorbed her. She had fought for this career, and she didn’t want it cheapened by the fact that she was a passive bystander in a world that demanded impassioned activism. If she were a better person, she would be protesting and supporting legal action and spending her money on campaigns. Or fighting for the freedom of women, Muslim women like her mother’s mother and sisters and cousins, in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or Nigeria…. But instead she would go to the Himalayas to stalk wild things and pray not to be disturbed.

Don’t read The Royal Abduls if you are hungry; scene after scene steams with a dish, a scent, a meal. Don’t read it if you prefer the kind of stories whose endings you can easily predict; the ending of this story aches and it is earned.

Do read The Royal Abduls if you are searching for hope in a complicated world—not every day hope, not the Hollywood version, but the kind that honors the nearly irresolvable dualities of ourselves. We’ll never have everything we want because we’ll never know just what we want. We’ll never be who we want to be, because our changeable world keeps reconfiguring our options. What we can do, Koya suggests, is stop protecting ourselves from love, on the one hand, and stop hoping that love won’t be messy, on the other. Because love is messy. Love is a question we can never perfectly answer.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. A memoir in essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in February 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

ASK JUNE: The Quarantine Edition

Posted on May 1, 2020 by thwackMay 1, 2020

Dear Readers,

First, let me apologize to you for not having posted in so long. What with one thing and another, my alter ego in the real word became preoccupied. But the pandemic has vastly increased her free time: once she has decontaminated the day’s deliveries, Zoomed for an hour or two, walked the dog, done a little reading and writing, sent off a few irate messages to our elected (who knows how, as Gerard Manley Hopkins would say) officials, and beaten back despair and other existential stuff with carbs and Netflix, there’s really nothing left to do except cleaning and giving advice. So here I am; and, happily, my re-emergence has coincided with a flurry of novel-coronavirus questions. Ahem!

—Love, June

Dear June,

I live with my sister. She is constantly reminding me how grateful we should be because we are safe and solvent, have a roof over our heads, etc. She has always been like this, but now that we are stuck at home because of the coronavirus she is going into high gear with the gratitude.

I like to think that I am as appreciative as the next person, but right now I am feeling scared and restless and claustrophobic. I miss my friends, I get frustrated working from home because I suck at tech, I am worried about the future, and I miss my boyfriend, who is back in his hometown for the duration. But I can’t talk about any of this to her, or even really show it, because it sets off her whole gratefulness thing. I am losing my shit. Do you have any advice for me? Do you think that I am a spoiled First World person? Should I confront my sister?

—Whiny Ingrate

Dear Not-So-Whiny Friend,

Although you, like me, are comparatively lucky in many ways as we face this pandemic, you don’t strike me as especially spoiled. The issue doesn’t come down to being spoiled and self- absorbed on the one hand or being actively, vocally, continually grateful on the other. We all just have to get through this.

It is wonderful to feel gratitude. Although I confess that I have a hard time myself trying to summon up that old thankful feeling when it won’t come naturally, I envy people who can, or don’t have to. Counting one’s blessings and trying to have a positive attitude are both good ways to gin up one’s mental health a bit, stay calm, and sleep better. Gratitude can also be a way of gaining perspective, another thing I’m in favor of because perspective—in the sense of seeing how well off one is, relative to the way things could be—tends to make the more fortunate among us smarter and kinder and less tiresome.

But enforced or, worse, competitive gratitude is another matter entirely. I am not sure if your sister is one of them, but there are plenty of gratitude-enforcers out there who believe that we have some sort of obligation to swell with grateful joy for most of our waking hours. This is irritating, and it is none of their business. What I find especially annoying about people who try to shove gratefulness down our throats is the way they seem to hit their stride just when we have more things than usual to feel ungrateful about. Of course, we are glad that we didn’t die when our new car got totaled, that our extremely painful stomach condition is not life-threatening, that our cat lived a happy life. But we would still rather have our car, our digestion, and our cat—and few things are more enraging than people who use the language of cheerful concern when what they are really telling us is to get over ourselves and suck it up.

So it is during this during this pandemic. Those of us who are healthy, financially secure, and working from home obviously have it much better than those who are hospitalized with the virus, newly unemployed, destitute, or risking their lives at essential jobs. I am sure that you honor the essential workers and sympathize with people in trouble. But it doesn’t make you a monster if you also feel, or even say from time to time, that you would really like to go out and have a beer or get your shoes fixed or have sex or not wake up at three A.M. from nightmares about gasping out your last breath alone, in a ventilator, while armed protesters waving Confederate flags and swastikas march past your room.

Since neither of us has anywhere to go just now, let me tell you a story. I came close to losing it myself during a Zoom meeting last week where a colleague of mine, “Melanie,” almost drove another colleague to tears with her toxic positivity. As one does, we were breaking the ice by going around the room, or in this case the screen, reporting on how we were all holding up during the stay-home-orders phase of this pandemic. Most of us answered with some variant of “we’re fine, just a little-stir-crazy,” but our youngest member, a single mom named “Lara,” told us in a trembling voice that she was really having a hard time coping with a toddler and a full-time on-line job, couldn’t sleep, and was starting to doubt that her new medication would ever kick in. While the rest of us were all making soothing noises and trying to convey sympathy and understanding as best we could considering that our faces were low-resolution blobs the size of postage stamps, Melanie—whose turn it admittedly was—started telling the group how lucky we all were, brightly emphasizing the all, while looking at Lara as pointedly as one can look at one among many low-resolution blobs. For the rest of the meeting Melanie never missed an opportunity to say something about how blessed and we were, or how we should never lose sight of our privilege. I am sure I am not the only person who felt that Melanie was not just ignoring but actually rebuking poor Lara, who left the meeting early.

You are a good-enough person. Don’t let your sister get to you.

But should you confront her? I don’t see any real ethical issue here: the only question is whether confronting her would work. I would love to help you find an answer, but your letter does not tell me much about her motives, or how she responds to criticism.

I can’t tell whether, when she says that she or you or somebody else “should” be grateful, she is passing moral judgment or simply talking about relative good luck. For all I know, she may simply have a sunny personality, and most or all of her pronouncements may be sincere, if utterly counterproductive, attempts to cheer you up.

On the other hand, her expressions of gratitude may be pious, passive-aggressive dismissals of other people’s reality. Or they may be a little of both. Or they may be words she no longer really hears herself saying, knee-jerk reactions she’s picked up from a few too many inspirational articles or sermons or Hallmark Channel movies. Or she may be talking more to herself than to anyone else, trying to beat back dissatisfactions of her own.

You may not much care what her motives are; her “gratefulness thing” would be annoying no matter what the source, and I suppose the issue is not so much whether your sister means well as whether you can get her to stop. But it may be easier to rein her in—or, perhaps, to accept the inevitable– if you give them some thought.

Have you ever tried to tell her how you feel? Your asking whether you should confront her suggests not. If you don’t think she will just go on the defensive and dig in, I suggest that you make the attempt. It does not have to be in the form of a confrontation, or even a formal sit-down. You could just wait for an opening in one of your daily conversations and try to explain that sometimes her cheerfulness in the face of your worries and fears makes you feel worse for not being as happy as you “should” be. If you want to risk a possibly hostile, and almost definitely touchy-feely discussion, you could go on to explain that you sometimes feel that she is not listening to you, or even that she believes you are not entitled to your feelings—but that might be taking things too far, especially given that you are locked in the same house with her for the foreseeable future.

Good luck. And if your sister keeps up with the relentless gratefulness and good humor, take heart by thinking about the tens of thousands of us other “lucky” Americans, safe at home, who still curse the fates with some regularity these days.

You are not alone.

—June

II.

Dear June,

If there are three ATMs in a row, and the two end ones are being used, is it okay to use the middle one at the same time?

—Impatient

Dear Imp,

Unless the ATMs are each six feet apart, it is not okay. The same goes for picnic tables, urinals (or trees, or whatever else men pee against), parallel checkout lines, and everything else that is not six feet away from the next thing. I am sure that, as a fellow Earthling, you know that six feet is the current minimum for safe social distancing—and we should definitely regard this as a true minimum and aim for wider distances whenever possible, since people tend to sway, stumble, make wide turns, and forget what they are supposed to be doing.

This six-feet concept does not strike me as hard to understand. Implementing it in the face of your more oblivious or obnoxious fellow-Americans may be another matter though, as we’ll see in the next letter.

Stay safe, my impatient friend.

—June

III.

Dear June,

I was in the supermarket yesterday and the man behind me in line was clearly closer than six feet away as marked on the floor AND he was touching everything around him AND his so-called mask wasn’t covering his nose. I didn’t know how to let him know how much this bothered me without making the situation even worse by raising my voice over my mask or moving farther away and into someone else’s space ahead of me—is there a good way of letting people around you know about the guidelines without increasing the risks?

—Crowded and Tense

Dear C & T,

I agree that moving closer to the person ahead of you may make the problem worse: you will be in her space, and the person behind you is likely to move up and maintain the same unsafe distance as before. A better bet is to try to get the offender to move backwards, or at least stand still until you may safely move ahead.

I don’t know what kind of mask you have, but I have taken some walks with a friend where we both wore two-ply cloth masks and stayed six feet apart, and we did not have too much trouble keeping up a conversation—although, come to think of it, we have become much more economical and impersonal in our speech lately, with fewer confidences and almost no adverbs, now that we have to shout at each other in public spaces. But my point is that, unless you are wearing a plastic face shield, or an N-95 under a balaclava, you will be heard if you turn around and say “Six feet away, please!” to someone who is fewer than six away from you. Just be sure to enunciate clearly. It could help if, still clearly enunciating, you also said : “I might have the virus.” After all, any of us might.

If he says, “Oh, sorry,” and immediately backs up, looking sheepish, you could perhaps add a reminder about how masks work – but you and those around you should be okay if he maintains a safe distance so, if he gives any indication that he is the kind of jerk who might take offense and do something really stupid, I would hold my tongue about the mask.

If the line behind you and the offender is very long, or otherwise likely to experience some sort of domino effect if he backs up, you will have to assess the situation. If you are towards the front of the line or near a store employee, you could ask them to reposition the line, while gesturing meaningfully with your masked head toward the person behind you. Otherwise you should probably wait until the person in front of you has moved up and then, before advancing yourself, ask the offender to move up a only few feet so a safe distance can be maintained.

As for his touching everything, it sounds as if most of the damage has already been done. I would bide my time and tell Customer Service once you check out, on the off chance that somebody in authority wants to do a little extra spraying the areas the offender may have touched—although that is likely to be the whole store. This is why I hope that, since you are a careful person, you treat everything you buy AS IF somebody touched it. We all should.

Be careful out there!

—June

IV.

Dear June,

My fiancé and I moved in together two years ago. Bob and I have a tiny apartment, basically one sunny kitchen-living room, a small bedroom, and a smaller bathroom. The bedroom door is just a curtain, because of some zoning law about windows, and so there is really no privacy unless you’re in the bathroom.

Until the virus hit, we didn’t have any serious problems with the small apartment or with our relationship. We have been happily talking about getting married, which we plan to do about a year from now if all goes well. We have very different careers, in different parts of the city, so our lives have been totally separate during the day. Nights and weekends we’d spend maybe a third of our waking hours at home together, and the rest of it outside the apartment – either together, on our own, or with our separate friends.

We live in a coronavirus hot spot and have been here in the apartment together for six weeks. Our life is safe and orderly. We both work long hours from home, doing jobs we like. Once a week we lay in supplies. Every so often we walk over to a nearby park at off-peak hours for a socially-distanced walk. Thanks completely to me, we also have a Zoom movie club and weekly happy hour.

The problem is not so much that I am getting lonely and a little bit bored. That is to be expected under the circumstances. The real problem is that my fiancé just loves this life. He says he is so happy that now he gets to work every day with his back six inches from mine. That we sit down together every single night to watch Netflix or read books on the same couch. That we eat every meal together. He told me the other day that sometimes he wishes it would never end. He seems to find this idea romantic, but I find it stultifying. Last night we were sitting next to each other on the couch watching reruns and he took my hand and said; “Isn’t this lovely? This is what life will be like in 40 years, when we retire. I can hardly wait.” It was all I could do not to shudder.

Add to this that he is starting to irritate me in all sorts of small ways. Words he overuses, ear hair, stuff like that. I am starting to look forward to work meetings because one of us has to go into the bedroom to attend them. I don’t think I could survive twenty or thirty years of retirement if it were anything like this—not with Bob, anyway. I have no idea what to do. Should I talk to Bob about this? Do you think this is a warning from God about what I have to look forward to?

—Stifled

Dear Stifled,

I like to think that God would not kill some 200,000 people just to warn you about Bob, but your own inner voice may be trying to tell you something. Let’s try to decide whether to listen.

First, as to the small irritations: It is perfectly natural to feel irritated by anybody with whom you are forced into constant close contact, even someone you love very much. Although comfortable, your quarters are extremely cramped for a quarantine situation. You apparently have no in-person social contact with anybody other than Bob. The world outside is terrifying and the future is unclear. If you thought of your fiancé as adorable 24-7 under these circumstances, I would worry a little. It is of course possible that your current irritation with Bob will persist, or even increase, after we return to whatever normal we are going to return to. But there will be time enough to worry about that later; and what you’re feeling now, in these extraordinary circumstances, has very little predictive value.

As to Bob’s loving this life: I do worry, just a little, about that. But perhaps all he is saying is that he treasures you, not that he would really want the two of you to live a confined, sedentary, predictable existence from now on. He may also, like many of us, feel a certain anxiety about what happens next; at least, for the time being, he and the woman he loves are safe at home while deadly microbes, economic depression, government insanity, a changing climate, and angry ignorant people swirl around outside. (Think of Ygritte in the cave, if you watched Game of Thrones.)

We have to believe that repeated lengthy stay-at-home orders will not be the norm, in which case the real question is not how happy or irritating Bob is in his present situation, but whether he proves to be just as happy and significantly less irritating when the stay-at-home orders are lifted. If he does, everything should be fine. And if he doesn’t, you will be free to move on.

As to the remark about retirement: I admit that, on first reading, Bob’s looking forward to so tedious a retirement gave me pause. But this may just be a clumsy way of saying that his job is stressing him out. Or maybe he was trying to pay you another extravagant compliment, on the order of “I’d rather be under house-arrest with you than in surfing in Cancun with anybody else,” and it came out kind of creepy. It also occurs to me that, by the time you are in your later retirement years (say 85), you too might actually like to live a quiet life with your longtime partner.

I think that your far-off and theoretical retirement is a topic you can safely, even humorously, discuss with Bob right now, both to sound him out about how he really views your distant future together, and as a metaphor for your current restlessness. Let him know that, as long as you can still get around, you plan to do so, and that you look forward to spending your golden years building latrines in developing nations, reviving your torch-singing career, running for office, and the like. If he seems receptive, add that you are also looking forward to adventures in the much nearer future.

In the meantime, feel free to speak up about specific minor irritations if you think doing so will, to borrow language from all the drug tests we hear about lately, be safe and effective. (You might ask him if, since the barbershops are all closed, he’d like you to clip those ear hairs.) But as for the overarching issue of his generally irritating you so much these days, I would definitely keep mum for now, and possibly forever. With any luck, it won’t be long until the world opens up again and you can do what you need to let off steam, which is sure to include seeing a lot more of other people and a little less of Bob. Or things will get so much worse that a few ear hairs won’t matter any more—you’ll be too busy teeming up to beat back locusts and lance boils.

I hope that you get sprung soon, and that Bob shares your joy when you do.

—June

P.S. Are you planning on having kids? In that case, Bob’s love of home and capacity for what most of us see as boredom could become a major asset. He can be the one who plays Candyland and restacks blocks over and over and, in the fullness of time, helps with the Math homework.

Dear June,

Hi! I have two kids, five and seven. My kids were in our yard playing nicely together, when my next-door neighbor’s kid wandered over and asked to join them.

What should they have told him? What should I tell them to tell him in the future?

As for my neighbor, why won’t she talk to me?

—Dubious Dad

Dear Dubious,

Cryptic letter, this. What did you or your kids, in fact, do when the neighbor kid came over? And has your neighbor stopped speaking to you because she is angry about whatever you or your kids did, or is she simply refusing to talk about social distancing while letting her kid traipse all over the neighborhood?

No matter. Let’s look to the future.

Here’s what you should do: call or email and explain whatever happened. Tell your neighbor that you are following the recommendations [or, depending on where you live, the legal requirements] for social distancing and aren’t having anybody over to your house for the time being. Ask her to explain this to her child. It wouldn’t hurt to say something friendly, like how sad it is that these delightful kids can’t play together until the stay-at-home order is lifted. You could even suggest that your three kids all go on line and play some age-appropriate video game.

As for your own kids, I assume that they know that there is a virus going around and that this is why they are staying home from school and not seeing grandma and so on. Make sure they also know that this distancing rule goes for EVERYBODY unless you tell them otherwise. Tell them that, if the neighbor kid comes over again, they should—very nicely—say “Sorry, we can’t play because of the virus” and immediately come back inside the house and find whatever adult is supposed to be watching them. The said adult should then call the neighbor and remind her (or her partner, if any). Tell your kids that this goes for any child who comes into the yard.

If the kid keeps coming over, keep sending him home and calling the neighbor. And for God’s sake, watch out for your own kids. At five and seven, they can’t be expected to negotiate issues of social distancing with other young children.

Image credits: Evgeni Tcherkasski, engin akyurt, Yunming Wang, Nathan Van de Graaf, visuals, and L N on Unsplash.

An Interview with Claire Oleson, author of THINGS FROM THE CREEK BED WE COULD HAVE BEEN, by Andrea Caswell

Posted on April 28, 2020 by thwackApril 28, 2020

An Interview with Claire Oleson
Author of THINGS FROM THE CREEK BED WE COULD HAVE BEEN
Newfound Press, 64 pages
by Andrea Caswell

Claire Oleson’s chapbook, Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, is the winner of the Newfound 2019 Prose Prize, awarded annually to a chapbook-length work of exceptional fiction or nonfiction that explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding.

In the following interview, she discusses the work, and how making art can reshape our understanding of what we see in the world.

Andrea Caswell: The stories in this collection are language-driven, intensely intimate, and saturated with beautiful images. Did any of these stories begin as poems or prose poems?

Claire Oleson: I enjoy navigating in the spaces between prose and poetry; in Creek Bed, I hope a poetic dedication to the individual word is visible alongside the breathing space that prose gives to its subjects. I wanted the size, the “living room” of a story, with the minutia and pace that poetry can offer. Also, somewhat in retrospect, I’ve found my writing across genres is often propelled by sight more than distinct action. I wanted image to offer propulsion, like plot can, but I wanted everything I included to belong to sensation, to be incapable of happening anywhere outside of a body.

AC: The artist Corita Kent said, “Art does not come from thinking, but from responding.” To what are you responding with Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been?

CO: Alongside this desire for the writing to feel embodied, I also want the readers who come to it to feel like they belong inside its feeling. Here, I don’t mean that they “belong” in the sense that there’s a neat space carved out for an audience-surrogate, but far more that the story isn’t complete until someone is in it, feeling it. Following the quote you provided, I think it’s fair to say that if I wanted to be easy, to be point-blank, and solely focused on convincing, I would have written an extended essay on image, gender, bodies, and ownership. This would have been neater than what I’ve chosen to do: a slew of surreal-adjacent and often absurd stories that take longer to tell you what a thesis could blurt. But I come to you with no footnotes and more mess because I agree with Corita Kent here; this isn’t art until it’s being responded to, occupied, waded in. In that same vein, certainly everything I’ve written can be taken as a form of response. I’d love to say I’ve involved some thought too, but absolutely, the best feelings and needs and evenings I’ve communicated in Creek Bed come from having carried feelings and needs and evenings.

I want these stories to be spaces people come to live in, if only briefly, and to encounter as potential lives or ways of living. —Claire Oleson

AC: Tell us about the title.

Claire Oleson

CO: I thought about pulling a title from one of the interior stories, but this felt like a missed opportunity to sneak more writing in, and I didn’t feel it would envelope everything included with a flexible but precise name. Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been is a stupid title because it’s long, it takes time to write out, type out, google, or tell someone. I sort of love it for being a little bit stupid, but in all earnestness, I made it and picked it because I feel it presents a sense of possibility, calmness, fear, and absurdity in one (labored) breath. I want these stories to be spaces people come to live in, if only briefly, and to encounter as potential lives or ways of living. There’s a lot of water in these pieces and the first piece opens inside a creek, so I feel invoking an immediate sense of setting from the cover that flows right into the first story offers an organic and (forgive me) fluid entrance. Oh also, god, I will confess that I was thinking of the poet C.D. Wright who has a book legitimately titled The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. To me, this is superb. It gushes and it leaves things behind with you. A title like this feels like someone is standing in front of you, continuing to hand you delicate things you can’t possibly carry but also can’t afford to drop. You just have to be overwhelmed. I thought of doing something more stupid and longer than Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, but in the end, I thought C.D. Wright has already done this so well, I might as well be humane to my publisher and cover artist.

AC: Visual arts, such as photography and painting, are integral to many of these stories. How would you describe the role of other art forms in your creative life?

CO: There is a lot of visual art and I put it in to continue to ask people to see as they’re reading. I love knowing that every piece hung/illuminated/shoved/presented in these stories is going to be completely different, reader to reader, despite their semi-static existence in the inked word. Everyone leaves with their own different gallery and there’s no one right, Platonic canvas or neon light. The seeing done by reading makes them, again and again, and it recruits the reader in their making. Because many of my characters are teetering on deciding whether or not what they’re making is “good” or “beautiful” or “ignorant, insufficient, unworthy,” some of that decision gets to come from how the reader decides to hang, frame, and know them. In my life outside of writing, I like to keep up drawing and a pinprick of painting when supplies are handy. I think I know just enough of each to know that I’m a hobbyist (but, with adoration). Having worked at both has taught me the delightful truth that, all day, we are seeing wrong. It’s not until you sit to commit something in front of you to paper or canvas or cardboard that you process what you think a face looks like is entirely wrong, in a series of minute but critical ways. It’s really wonderful to be so incorrect about what we take to be the basics. Seeing, a lot like reading, is often taken as a passive task, something that just inhales. Making art and looking at art is quick and elated to show you that seeing is something you do and can learn to do better but not perfectly. Reading, too, is a work. Reading is deciding to believe in small and nonexistent rooms and move things around in them for a while. Please, if you’re reading this, come into the Creek Bed and mess up the furniture.

AC: Each story in the collection is narrated in the first person. What were some of the narrative decisions you made as you wrote these?

CO: I wanted everyone written to feel like they were speaking for themselves. I wanted every protagonist to have both the freedom and constraint of being steeped in their own thoughts alone. With some free indirect discourse, the reader gets gleams of other characters’ priorities, but the bulk of narration is dedicated to one person at a time. This is, I think, the hardest number of people to be at a time. Amidst the teetering moments of emergency or non-emergency that my stories center on, the feeling of being in one brain can manage to be both the most comforting and most alarming thing. First-person is an allowance to be candid alongside the pressure to be impressive, coherent, and interesting, for both the characters and writer; so I hope my teetering, one-at-a-time people are just that. And if they’re average and incoherent, hopefully they’re at least devastatingly fascinating to make up for it.

AC: Tell us about Newfound. What inspired you to enter their chapbook competition? What have you enjoyed most about working with them?

CO: I’d seen Newfound’s chapbooks prior to submitting and I think the physical books they produce are made with such detail, care, and clear desire to thoughtfully make a fitting physical body for a work of writing. Coming to the end of my undergraduate career, I had begun to amass pieces from workshops that I still liked even after bringing them through everyone’s teeth. I wanted to do something with them that would let them belong to and with one another. I think these contests offer a wonderful gateway into publishing for authors who are looking into the world of books after having appeared in journals. Chapbooks are also so digestible and offer a lot for the short prose or poetry writer while still providing the distinct and individual object that’s dedicated to one author. Working with Newfound has been lovely; they’re responsive, kind, invested, and showed enthusiasm for my work from the time of my initial submission to the binding and distributing of the books.

AC: What are you working on now?

CO: Ooh, surviving. Some writing is happening. I’m mostly invested in finding productive and lucrative-enough work in the current climate. But I’ve made some poems I’m not unfond of, some lavender simple syrup I’m very fond of, and I’m preparing to prepare to cultivate the desire to make a full-length manuscript.

To purchase a copy of Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, click here.

◊◊

Claire Oleson is a queer writer hailing from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Kenyon College, where she won the Propper Prize for poetry and the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Award. Her writing has been published by Limestone, Newfound, Bridge Eight Magazine, Sugar House Review, and the Kenyon Review online. She is the senior poetry editor for Cleaver.

Andrea Caswell holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a fiction editor at Cleaver Magazine. Her work has been published by River Teeth, The Normal School, Fifth Wednesday, Columbia Journal, and others. In 2019 she was selected as a fiction participant for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, Andrea now teaches writing in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

NEW TRENDS FOR SPRING, a comic by Emily Steinberg

Posted on April 22, 2020 by thwackApril 22, 2020

NEW TRENDS FOR SPRING
A Comic by Emily Steinberg

Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic “Blogging Towards Oblivion,” was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA. and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at emilysteinberg@cleavermagazine.com.

SQUARE HAUNTING, nonfiction by Francesca Wade, reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Posted on April 21, 2020 by thwackJuly 8, 2020

SQUARE HAUNTING
by Francesca Wade
Tim Duggan Books, 383 pages

reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

The book jacket for "Square Hunting." Portraits of Virginia Woolf, H.D., Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, and Dorothy Sayers are outlined in several bright colors.

Click here to purchase this book

In a short piece of writing on “London Under Siege,” written during World War II, Virginia Woolf wrote that “everybody is feeling the same thing: therefore no one is feeling anything in particular. The individual is merged in the mob.” Reading these words now, as we live through a different collective social crisis, I am reminded of the significance of individual intellectual and emotional life as a key form of sustenance and even political action.

I came across this quote in Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, an examination of the intellectual and personal lives of five furiously independent women living in Mecklenburgh Square, at the far edge of Bloomsbury, between the two world wars. In her introduction, Wade expressly notes that “these women were not a Bloomsbury Group: they lived in Mecklenburgh Square at separate times, though one or two knew each other, and others were connected through shared interests, friends, even lovers.” All five women were searching for ways to find fulfilling and engaged public lives in times of emergency, yet their views on how to do this often radically differ.

The emphasis in Wade’s book is on individuality, these women’s rooms of their own, rather than a monolithic view of a ‘feminist life.’ Besides Woolf, Square Haunting introduces us to the poet H.D., the classicist Jane Harrison, the economic historian Eileen Power and the detective novelist Dorothy Sayers. The vision of gender itself presented throughout the book is complex. H.D., once called the “perfect bisexual” by Freud in their analysis, wrote, “I have tried to be man or woman but I have to be both.” Sayers enjoyed wearing men’s clothing, writing “if the trousers do not attract you…for the moment I do not want to attract you, I want to enjoy myself as a human being.” These women are ambitious, not simply as women, but within their respective fields.

So how does Wade show this? She brings us through the peculiar turning points in which all these women lived in Mecklenburgh Square. These moments of transformations range from H.D.’s youthful tumult and unhappy first marriage to the late years of Harrison in which she turned abruptly from classics to Russian literature. Square Haunting is an episodic book, though one full of reverberations across different times. In the space of this review, I can’t hope to cover the full range of stories in the book. The two final sections, on Power and Woolf, had a surprising urgency as I sat reading during our current state of emergency.

Power was trained as a Medieval Historian at Cambridge and started her career as a lecturer there until 1920, a time when women were still not granted full membership of the university. She moved to teaching at the London School of Economics, an incubator for the developing Labour Party and a home of progressive ideas. Power was invested, both in her historical work and political engagements, in internationalism. She was an enthusiastic proponent of the League of Nations, the aspirational united global front set up after the First World War. Her major 1939 lectures on the wool trade in English medieval history, meanwhile, writes Wade, viewed it not as a time of small self contained communities but rather of

‘large scale international trade.’…For Eileen Power, the greatest horror of war lay in its negation of personal bonds: its infringement on private freedoms and its disdain for the human values of empathy and tolerance. As a historian, she wanted to mobilize against fascism and nationalism, and to affirm, through her writing, the value of a cultural tradition that transcends borders and rejects parochialism.

Francesca Wade

Reading Power’s passionate arguments for what she called “world citizenship” is striking now, as we find ourselves on a precipice between global solidarity and parochial isolationism. Power, notes Wade, was “always determined to define herself in opposition to what she thought of as stereotypical ‘Bloomsbury,’” focusing her gatherings in Mecklenburgh Square on “action, not aesthetics.” Woolf moved to Mecklenburgh Square as World War II raged and London lived in fear of bombings. The question which would occupy her was “how to go on, through war.” She moved through it writing through a complex tangle of the past and the present. She began writing her biography of the art critic Roger Fry, finding the current crisis “not so real as Roger in 1910 at Gordon Square, about which I’ve just been writing . . . how I bless Roger, & wish I could tell him so, for giving me himself to think of—what a help he remains—in this welter of unreality.” She also began writing about her own memories, finding them “‘more real than the present moment,’ and…she was able to ‘spin a kind of gauze over the war’ by retreating into a world that existed only in her mind.” Slowly, this extended to the present as Woolf “decided to interweave vignettes of the past with diary-like entries on the present.” In Woolf’s section, a commitment to creativity and individuality become what Wade terms “a form of resistance” amidst crisis.

Visiting Mecklenburgh Square through this book allows for a useful escape from our current moment to understand it better. Jane Harrison wrote, inspired by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, that “each of us is a snowball growing bigger every moment, and in which all our past, and also the past out of which we sprang, all the generations behind us, is rolled up, involved.” Wade’s book is the ideal type of biography for the moment with layers of enjoyable historical detail of all kinds as well as an argument for the independent life. By going into the past and particularly past moments of crisis, it is possible to start imagining a future.

Gabriel Chazan is an art historian and writer. Gabriel completed an MA at University College London and BA at Sarah Lawrence College. He writes a newsletter on art and books on The Expanded Field.

POLITICS IS FOR POWER, nonfiction by Eitan Hersh, reviewed by Brian Colker

Posted on April 14, 2020 by thwackJune 6, 2020

POLITICS IS FOR POWER
by Eitan Hersh
Scribner, 288 pages
reviewed by Brian Colker

Buy the books in this article through Bookshop.org to support indie booksellers and Cleaver

On a recent Sunday under quarantine, my spouse Susan Sheu and I donned costume wigs for our Zoom meeting. Twelve volunteers from the Los Angeles area sat at our respective kitchen tables, couches, and easy chairs and wrote postcards for California 38th District assembly member Christy Smith, who is running for Congress via a special election on May 12. Susan came up with the concept “wigging out for Democracy”; she thought that wearing wigs would be a festive and interesting way to make the Zoom meeting less tedious. It worked well: despite the quarantine and general malaise, wearing the wigs did add levity and made the afternoon go by faster.

Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, believes that Zoom meetings like this are critical for progressives. In his new book, Politics is for Power, he contrasts volunteer activity with posting rants on Facebook or watching the news, which he brands “hobbyism”. For decades, organizers from Saul Alinsky, infamous ‘radical’ and author of the classic Rules for Radicals, and Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz, the intellectual godfather of Obama For America, have pondered how to get liberals off their couches (and off social media) to take meaningful action.

Hersh wants to know why so many educated white Americans consume a tremendous amount of news but rarely volunteer or perform any type of political activity. One-third of Americans spend two hours a day on politics, and 80% of this group are hobbyists. Most hobbyists are men, and they tend to be white. Hersh’s theory and worry is that hobbyism masquerades as activism, leaving a vacuum that bad actors or extremists are filling. He gives the ominous example of the North Carolina KKK helping get opioid addicts off the street and then recruiting them. The Klan is pursuing political power.

Eitan Hersh

Prior to 2016, I was one of the hobbyists that irritate Hersh; after 2016, I became an activist (he uses the word ‘volunteer’). Hersh has had a similar journey: he and I both have the fanaticism of the newly converted. Hersh’s analysis veers off track in places, but I support his general thesis: partisan news consumption is rampant, and bad for democracy, and is hurting the volunteer actions that would strength the country. We need to rebuild the state parties from the ground up, and to do so means engaging face-to-face with neighbors in a way that delivers service to them.

Hersh traces hobbyism to the decline of party control over the nominating process (i.e., the popular primary model—which started in 1972) and the rise of cable news in the 1990s. Since the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the advent of cable, news has become written for outrage and to entertain partisans. This combination of populism and an unrestrained political media business model has created political news consumers.

This has caused partisanship to explode. As one would expect, the most partisan people tend to be the best informed. However, despite the popular cliché of uninformed rubes consuming Russian propaganda, the best informed are the biggest consumers of fake news:

The researchers found that participants who were most interested in and most knowledgeable about politics consumed fake news the most. Those people weren’t easily duped by the lies of fake news stories. They were sophisticated consumers who sought the fake stories because they are junkies.

Hersh’s conclusion is that hardcore partisans are literally addicted to the highly partisan rivalry, identical to a rabid sports fan. They are also less likely to interact with those on the other side (or, presumably, to volunteer).

The make-up of the most engaged donors and primary voters have become sharply ideological on both sides, so that moderate politicians are disincentivized from running for office, and those in office are punished for compromise and rewarded for starkly partisan positions. The media environment is amplifying this—conflict is more entertaining than long, technical debates that grind towards legislative compromise:

On cable and social media, ideologues call out politicians who veer toward compromise. They one-up each other in taking more extreme positions. A politician presents a proposal, and a news network can instantly find someone who is outraged that the proposal doesn’t go far enough to please her or her side. To an audience, the outraged hot takes are more interesting that the commentators praising compromise or deals that cede an inch to the opposition.

The fact that media broadcasts conflict, and partisans share these clips on social media, make politicians focus on their media presence and image, to the detriment of their relationships across the political spectrum.

woman in long purple wig; man in shaggy black wig; political attire

The author Brian Colker and spouse Susan Sheu hosting a “wig” party on Zoom in April 2020.

Hobbyists are drawn to national politics almost exclusively—Hersh likens it to casual football fans watching the Super Bowl. They ignore statewide contests (other than voting down ticket) and have a dismal record voting in local political races, in which less than 1 in 5 voters participate. Local news is boring and for wealthier hobbyists, it doesn’t really matter much. Working class, immigrants, and other vulnerable groups have a much greater stake in local elections because those policies impact their daily lives. Hobbyists focus on emotional issues —think puppy mills—and on charismatic leaders and gossipy races. It’s the theater, not the power, that excites the hobbyist.

Hersh has a test for those who believe they are doing something more than news consumption: he asks if anyone would notice if you stopped your activity. For those volunteering, there tends to be a commitment and a network that expects the volunteer to show up for events and actions. Dropping out would lead to questions about what happened and why. Passive news consumers have no such expectations or relationships. Rachel Maddow doesn’t call viewers when they skip her news hour.

Hersh’s evidence of hobbyism is stark—less than 5% of the general population did any volunteering at all—a single action—for the 2016 elections:

Among daily news consumers in 2016, less than 4% reported doing any work whatsoever on behalf of a campaign or party that election year. Even among those who reported they were afraid of Donald Trump, only 5 percent reported that they did any work to support their side.

And even that number is largely exaggerated. It is not for lack of leisure time—Americans average 5 hours a day of it, which is largely spent watching something. African Americans and Latinos are three times likelier to volunteer than whites, due to a collective sense of threat and bound fate. More affluent whites lack this fear and can afford to treat politics like sports —something to be passionate about, but ultimately entertainment that has little bearing on their lives.

Hersh offers several explanations as to why this is: local party organizations are very weak (by design, as a reaction to the corruption and racism of local leaders in the 1940s-1960s) and the actions they ask volunteers to take don’t feel very meaningful—using a canned script to call, text, or door knock with—and they tend to be very top down.

Interestingly, sociologist Theda Skocpol notes that Tea Party Republicans are much more comfortable with this top-down model than liberals, which explains why the Tea Party was very effective during the Obama years. However, it is unclear why this is the case: other than resorting to gross generalizations, like Republicans are more authoritarian and follow orders unthinkingly, what would explain their willingness to volunteer more? I would want to know if they are more motivated to action by fear, for example.

Throughout the book, Hersh interviews people who have become political organizers and describes how they learned this activity and what they’ve done with their power. The thread through all the cases is that political organization is all about local, face-to-face networks and providing something the community needs—helping neighbors with their immigration issues, helping neighbors get someone onto a local school board, helping neighbors solve a problem. By providing basic services like babysitting, disaster relief, and elder services, Democrats can rebuild political power at the grassroots level. Providing services could be the secret sauce to building networks—especially across partisan divides.

Where I take issue with Hersh is his approach the book as both a neutral analyst and as a burgeoning democratic activist. His analysis of political partisanship and the media are framed as a ‘both sides’ argument. This ignores major differences in the two camps. The Democratic party, and progressives, have moved leftward since the 1990s, but the Republican party and Conservatism has become so ideologically extreme as to be unrecognizable as a mainstream political party. According to the Manifesto Project, which analyzes political platforms across the globe, the American Republican Party has grown more akin to a European far-right party. Per the New York Times’ analysis in June of 2019:

According to its 2016 manifesto, the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.

Tea party Republicans denying Obama was a US citizen, stoked by their version of ‘mainstream’ news, is hardly equivalent to liberals protesting a ban on Muslim immigrants, an outright xenophobic and illegal policy. Since Trump’s election, his party has embraced anti-democratic attacks on the rule of law, the separation of powers, the media, and on voting itself. Opposition to this administration is not just liberal partisanship equivalent to the Tea Party movement. Resistance groups like Indivisible rose in 2016 as a desperate attempt to rescue American government itself, in addition to advancing a liberal policy agenda.

The book would have been stronger had Hersh not attempted to generalize his argument across the political spectrum. He is clearly not a Republican of the Trump era, nor does his analysis touch on why they have embraced radical anti-democratic values which would have been unthinkable as recently as the early 2000s.

Hersh describes on a key element of volunteerism that is highly problematic—the boring and robotic nature of volunteer engagement. Scripted calls, texts, hand-writing writing postcards and door knocks are not exciting ways to pass the time. This may explain a fundamental reason why people choose passive consumption over volunteerism—the former is effortless. Saul Alinsky, in Rules for Radicals, discusses a principle of organizing—it must be creative and have an element of fun. Hersh misses an opportunity to go deeper on this subject, because it is crucial for understanding the disconnect between the hobbyist and the volunteer. The local leader who rules the small organization recruit for foot soldiers to do the tedious work. For many affluent whites, this work is uninspiring and beneath their perceived skill level. Mid-career professionals do not relish tedious work, but more to the point—they don’t like following directions.

Volunteers need to feel better after an event. It is not JUST about servicing their needs—their emotional need for connection and efficacy must be harnessed. The same rules for talking to voters apply to volunteers—they need to be offered a genuine ability to contribute in a way THEY find meaningful. If a hobbyist is induced to make phone calls for a campaign, she or he will need to be recruited and managed with care to ensure it is a positive experience and it will be repeated.

One reason the Obama campaign was so successful in recruiting huge numbers of volunteers is that it encouraged small local groups (five to ten people) to work together. People were able to work with their friends and feel like they had a lot of autonomy. It also allowed the groups to be nimble and change strategy as the campaign went on.

Hersh’s book is an important one for Democrats and those who oppose Trump and Trumpism in 2020—we will need an army of volunteers to take back power at the local, state, and federal level, and hopefully the book will motivate some hobbyists to turn off the news and get off twitter.

Brian Colker is a management consultant for benefit organizations and a grassroots organizer in Los Angeles. He is CFO of the Grassroots Democrats HQ.

RING THE BELLS, a visual narrative by Emily Steinberg

Posted on March 30, 2020 by thwackJune 9, 2020

RING THE BELLS
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg

Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic “Blogging Towards Oblivion,” was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA. and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at emilysteinberg@cleavermagazine.com.

The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Posted on March 3, 2020 by thwackJune 20, 2020

The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories
by Joyce Hinnefeld
Wolfson Press/American Storytellers Series, 97 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Click to purchase this book

Some attributes of the fine short-story writer, as noted and further refined while reading Joyce Hinnefeld, who also happens to be a fine novelist (read her In Hovering Flight, if you haven’t already had that pleasure):

To be precise and precisely patient.

To enter quickly into the whole world of the thing with a minimum of explanation and a surfeit of knowing.

To arc toward the kind of surprise that does not shatter the hidden rules of the story.

To make of language something vital.

There are five Hinnefeld stories, four of them previously published in literary journals, in The Beauty of Their Youth, a release from the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. One is about the legacy of a “pool of desire.” One is about the accessorizing of a family crime. One is about the tragedy of idle desires, another about an artist and his elastic resume, and another about a mother and daughter on a trip abroad and the reverb of the personal past. The stories take us to Bucks County, PA, inside the pages of a Carson McCullers book, toward Everglades gators and gun shows, through the annals of art, across parts of Greece and Rome—a tour of landscape and psyche that is seamless, self-assured, quietly inventive. Hinnefeld doesn’t break her own spells. She doesn’t remind you that she’s writing.

While every piece in this collection is mesmerizing in its way, I wish to highlight the two bookends. “Polymorphous,” which opens the book, is launched by a first paragraph that contains a thousand seeds but remains rooted in a single patch of earth. Everything that is to come is augured here: Joan’s relationship with herself, Joan’s relationship with her neighbor, Joan’s relationship with her world, Joan’s relationship with time. It’s worth quoting in full, for what it teaches us about Hinnefeld’s method, which is to say her artfulness with encapsulation and the care she takes to be thorough but not didactic :

By the time she was 20, with a little baby and a household to run, Joan had already started to seem like some sort of local exotic to her friends from high school, home from college on their breaks. All because she canned her own vegetables and sewed her own clothes and breastfed her son, at a time and in a place where those things wouldn’t come back into fashion for a good while. Now, forty years later, she still gardened and canned and sewed. She’d even gone back to school and finished her own degree eventually, with a nice and useless and exotic major in English. But by now the things that made her colorful in the eyes of her friends and neighbors was her weekly outing with her eighty-year-old neighbor, a gay man named Richard Meredith.

Richard and Joan are prickly friends. Richard’s own exotic past contains complicated secrets. A pool of desire in that Bucks County land percolates with still-unanswered questions. History wields power over both these characters and they wield power over each other, the ebbing and flowing of which provides the tension in the story.

Joyce Hinnefeld

In “The Beauty of Their Youth,” a mother and her 20-year-old daughter travel to Greece and Italy—the mother with hopes both of strengthening the bond with her daughter and of revisiting the people and places she remembers from an abroad summer years before. Fran, the mother, is both claiming and reclaiming, in other words, whereas Miranda, the daughter, is determined to see this new-old world through her own eyes. When the two meet up with Fran’s long-ago lover (in Greece) and long-ago friend (in Rome), Fran is confronted with a new and unwelcome version of the mythology she’d webbed around her youthful adventures. She is forced, as Hinnefeld writes, to reckon with some of the ways she’d not been trusted, some of the ways the world hides the most human parts of us from view:

There were things you didn’t post, Fran thought now, wide awake at three AM. Often the most important things, the things that had indelibly shaped your life. Your family’s secret history. Your marriage to a junkie. Your daughter’s slow, sure drift away from you. Your husband’s thoughtless and fleeting affair all those years ago. And your chronic thoughts of leaving him.

Hinnefeld writes empathetically. She writes, too, with lacerating emotional economy. In between she layers in the world—its reflective surfaces, its values, its artistic traditions, its gators, the secrets that are suppressed until they aren’t.

THE ROYAL ABDULS, a novel by Ramiza Shamoun Koya, reviewed by Beth Kephart

May 4, 2020

THE ROYAL ABDULS by Ramiza Shamoun Koya Forest Avenue Press, 303 pages Reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Where do we belong, and to whom? Are we most ourselves when we are by ourselves, or are we most free when rooted deep inside family responsibility? During the day and a half that I ravenously read Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel, The Royal Abduls, I asked myself these questions. I leaned into the lives of Koya’s magnificently drawn characters, into the nest of troubles they inadvertently twigged together, into the love they did not know how to express. Or forgot to express. Or ran out of time to express. As it happens. The Royal Abduls is a family story about an Indian-American boy named Omar, his parents, his aunt, his grandparents, and his friends. Every character here is reckoning with a post 9/11 world and its overt and unarticulated prejudices. Omar, who is eleven when we meet him, has recently adopted an Indian accent and is researching (and fantastically embroidering) a family history no one has actively passed down. His aunt, the persuasively particular evolutionary biologist Amina, has just moved to DC, Omar’s hometown, to join a ...
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The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld, reviewed by Beth Kephart

March 3, 2020

The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld Wolfson Press/American Storytellers Series, 97 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Some attributes of the fine short-story writer, as noted and further refined while reading Joyce Hinnefeld, who also happens to be a fine novelist (read her In Hovering Flight, if you haven’t already had that pleasure): To be precise and precisely patient. To enter quickly into the whole world of the thing with a minimum of explanation and a surfeit of knowing. To arc toward the kind of surprise that does not shatter the hidden rules of the story. To make of language something vital. There are five Hinnefeld stories, four of them previously published in literary journals, in The Beauty of Their Youth, a release from the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. One is about the legacy of a “pool of desire.” One is about the accessorizing of a family crime. One is about the tragedy of idle desires, another about an artist and his elastic resume, and another about a mother and daughter on a trip abroad and the reverb of the personal past. The stories take us to Bucks County, PA, inside ...
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SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN, poems by Gregory Djanikian, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Soujourners of the In-Between Book Jacket

February 18, 2020

SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN by Gregory Djanikian Carnegie Mellon University Press, 90 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In his new heartbreaking and affirming book of poems, his seventh, Gregory Djanikian writes past complexity toward the elemental and the binding. He unites the “beautiful and the raw,” plays no tricks, displays no tics, exploits nothing but the moment and the thought that accompanies it. He finds the reader wherever the reader is, then webs her into his space and time, a place where a hand run along the back of a cat returns “the animality of my own skin/the trees in slanting light,/ the blue sky breathing its blue/down to the greening fields.” (“What Is a Cat But a Voice Among All the Other Voices”) In Djanikian’s space and time, the end may be near, it may be hastening toward us, but it is still, as yet, a yonder. Sojourners of the In-Between is organized into five escalating parts. It’s a little noisy in the opening pages, full of harbingers and yelling priests, a street corner mime, the clink of wine bottles, a stained tablecloth, “The world’s blips and pings, street traffic,/glass clatter, hammer clank…” ...
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DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY, a novel by Julie E. Justicz, reviewed by Beth Kephart

October 31, 2019

DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY by Julie E. Justicz Fomite, 300 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Many years ago, as a feature writer for a magazine, I spent weeks visiting with a family whose oldest son communicated not with words but with his body. He said yes or no, go away or come near, I don’t want it or I do by hurling himself toward gestures of acceptance or disdain. He was a beautiful boy, nearly adolescent, larger than his mother who was struggling now to control his outbursts by setting him into a warm bath or hugging him close and overwhelming to his father, who had left his job so that he might try to build a school that was just right for his own son and others. This family was among the most extraordinary I’ve ever spent time with—full of love, chasing hope, unwilling to give up on this first-born child of theirs, and yet so devastatingly exhausted. I thought a lot about this family as I read Julie Justicz’s novel Degrees of Difficulty. Here the child at the center of the heartbreak is third-born Ben, born with damage to his twenty-first chromosome, an “omission in the blueprint” that has ...
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RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL by Faith Sullivan, reviewed by Beth Kephart

October 9, 2019

RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL by Faith Sullivan Milkweed Editions, 256 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Books recalibrate our imaginations. They expect us to make room, to put on our nearest pair of shoes and walk the hall, the street, the cornfields, whispering to ourselves and to the wind. When Faith Sullivan began writing what has become known as her Harvester books—novels like The Cape Ann and The Empress of One and Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse—she invited readers to join her in a fictional Minnesota landscape, then gave them many reasons to return. Sullivan’s Harvester is a palpable place. Its people are relatable and real. They carry burdens and they engage in kindness. Their bones bend with the hills. Now midway into her eighties, Sullivan is still finding, within Harvester, commonplace stories of everyday appeal. Her new book, Ruby & Roland, begins not in Harvester, but in Illinois, where Ruby Drake is living an idyllic childhood with a childlike mother until her parents are killed in an accident. The orphan moves in with one family and then with another, packing tokens of her youth and holding memories near. It is at the Schoonover farm, in Harvester, that Ruby becomes who she ...
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THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING, a memoir by Long Litt Woon, reviewed by Beth Kephart

September 9, 2019

THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING by Long Litt Woon translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland Spiegel & Grau, 292 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver When I read memoir I want: something to crack and something to rise, something to arc and something to stream, something to move across the page and, as it does, to move me. I bought Long Litt Woon’s The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning for the promise embedded in the premise. How would Woon make her way back into the world after the shocking, sudden death of the fifty-four-year-old husband with whom she had spent all her adult years? What do mushrooms have to do with recovering from such a loss? Does anybody ever actually recover? Woon, who moved to Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student at the age of eighteen and stayed because of her love for her husband, Eiolf, is not, as it turns out, interested in the literary fissures and expansions and movements that generally interest me. Her prose, as translated by Barbara J. Haveland, is determinedly straightforward, lavishly undecorated, direct and directly to the point. Her ...
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ART CAN HELP, essays by Robert Adams, reviewed by Beth Kephart

September 3, 2019

ART CAN HELP by Robert Adams Yale University Art Gallery, distributed by Yale University Press, 88 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver “[I]f you begin with an idea you’re usually beat before you start,” writes Robert Adams in Art Can Help, as he tries to imagine Edward Ranney photographing the Canyon del Muerto, and, so, here I begin, having been holding this slender silver volume in my hand all afternoon, interrupted only by the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower and the smell of some ambient spray paint. (A long sentence, a beginning.) The book marks Adams’ attempt to dissuade his readers from Jeff Koons-style glitz, which is to say “imitations that distract us or, openly or by implication, ridicule hope.” We are reminded of the power of art, Adams suggests, by studying art that is real. The work of Edward Hopper is here in these pages, as are the images of Eugene Buechel, Ken Abbott, Julia Margaret Cameron, Dorothea Lange, and others, but if you are already concluding that this is a book of pictures and captions, you’d be wrong. This is a book of eclectic wisdoms and collegial awe. “I am asked with ...
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THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO, a novel by Carlo Collodi, reviewed by Beth Kephart

August 24, 2018

THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO by Carlo Collodi illustrated by Attilio Mussino translated by Carol Della Chi MacMillan (1926), 401 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart The Oldest, The Newer, and the Four Pinocchios The Pinocchio in the book on my lap is not the persistently gullible feather-in-his-cap Disney version with the Jimmy Cricket conscience and the wish-upon-a-star existence. My Pinocchio—La storia di un burattino—comes from the mastermind himself, the Italian serialist Carlo Collodi, born Carlo Lorenzimi, who didn’t start writing for children until late in life. He’d been in the seminary as a young man. He’d volunteered in the Tuscan army. He’d written satire, translated fairytales, and by the 1880s, it would seem, he was primed for his most memorable creation. You don’t have to stretch to note the parallels that dominate our news cycle. Donald J. Trump was prefigured more than 130 years ago. If Disney’s Pinocchio is an affable, pliable ingénue who was reconfigured, according to the lore, to look more like a boy than a puppet, Collodi’s is an anti-hero—a wooden thing with barely any ears who mostly can’t see beyond his own nose, no matter its current proportion. He is persistent, insistent, impossible, exasperating, willfully obtuse, a ...
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THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW Beth Kephart and Bill Sulit Interview Each Other

August 12, 2016

THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW by Beth Kephart For many years, my husband, William Sulit, and I have collaborated on projects for corporate America—annual reports, commemorative books, employee magazines. When corporate America changed—when the cultures shifted, the ideals, the relationships—we began to explore a new idea, a company we could create and manage as our own, a company through which we could define the quality of the product and the nature of the conversation. We have called that company Juncture Workshops. Through it we offer memoir retreats, a monthly newsletter, and video essays that showcase the work of memoir masters and offer ideas and prompts. As with most things, of course, it all sounds easier than it has been. Here we provide a behind-the-scenes look at our memoir-steeped lives, post video production. ◊ STORY: They would need a teleprompter. They would need a script. They would need umbrella lights, an iPhone mic, a steady camera, an army of tripods. They would call this thing that they had made their Juncture memoir shorts (and here those things are: www.udemy.com/the-stories-of-our-lives/learn/v4/overview). Lessons on writer’s block. Lessons on illness. Lessons on time, or nature writing, or the kitchen. They would twine Mary-Louise Parker and James Baldwin, Abigail ...
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THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU, a young adult novel by Beth Kephart, reviewed by Rachael Tague

May 18, 2016

THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU by Beth Kephart Chronicle Books, 256 pages reviewed by Rachael Tague When I sat down to read Beth Kephart’s newest novel, This Is the Story of You, its title and cover art caught my attention—personal, serene, then chaotic. I read the first line of chapter one—Blue, for example—and fell in love with the writing. A quarter of the way through the book, I adored each character, and connected with Mira, the narrator and protagonist. Kephart’s mesmerizing writing, wonderful characters, and themes of strength and endurance thrilled me from beginning to end. Mira Banul is “medium everything—blond, built, smart.” She lives on Haven, where “We were six miles long by one-half mile…We were The Isolates. We were one bridge and a few good rules away from normal. We were causal bohemians, expert scavengers, cool.” Haven, a tiny island on the East coast, is a vacation destination in the summer. At the end of the season, the year-rounders return to their school in a refurbished bank and rule the island after-hours. Mira’s best friends, Eva and Deni, have done everything together for as long as they can remember. They work together, study together, compete together, and ...
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HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart reviewed by Stephanie Trott

August 18, 2013

HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart Gotham Books, 254 pages reviewed by Stephanie Trott It is a rainy Tuesday in January and I lace up the new cherry-red boots before heading out the door of my warm little warren. Through the stone-laden campus, across the slippery streets of town, and onto the train that will take me into the city. I am in my final semester as an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College and I still have not learned to buy shoes that fit my feet — I dig into the walk through West Philadelphia, burdening myself with blisters that will not heal until the first flowers have shed their petals to spring. Stumbling onto the porch of the old Victorian manor, I step into the most challenging, inspiring, and rewarding fourteen weeks I’ve yet experienced: I step into Beth Kephart’s Creative Non-Fiction class. Flash forward one and a half years later and I am standing on the back steps of my first apartment, wearing shoes that (finally) fit and hooting jubilantly at the tiny brown box in front of me. I hug the cardboard to myself as though I could absorb the details ...
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DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart reviewed by Michelle Fost

June 6, 2013

DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart illustrated by William Sulit New City Community Press, 190 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost When I lived in Philadelphia, I sensed its history underfoot. One pleasure of Beth Kephart’s lively new historical Philadelphia novel is the strong fit of the writer’s project and the story she tells. In Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent, Kephart looks at material from the past that we might consider lost to us and demonstrates how traces of that past stay with us through research and writing. In her story of William Quinn in 1870’s Philadelphia, too, much has been lost. As fourteen-year-old William goes in search of what has been taken from his family and as he thinks about what he is missing (including a murdered brother and a father in prison), we see that a great deal of what is loved can be recovered. William internalizes his brother Francis’s voice and can imagine what Francis would say to him at an important moment. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent shines as a novel about grief itself, suggesting that in thinking about what we miss, we keep what’s missing alive. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent opens with a haunting ...
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WILLIAM SULIT, Chicken Dance

March 4, 2013

CHICKEN DANCE by William Sulit & Beth Kephart Digital 3-D Design A conversation between a writer wife and her artist husband, in a quest to understand Important Subject: A chicken BK: You spend hours in your garage studio (among the ghosts of a skinny car, in the shadow of night visitors, within walls yellowed by old fuels) fiddling with electronic pencils and twinned screens, and you come up with ... a chicken? Why a chicken? How did your chicken begin? WS: It began with a sphere about the size of a golf ball. I'm sure electrons are involved but what is really being manipulated are vertices. This chicken was really a way to test 3D printing technology (color and all). No lofty idea—just that as someone who works with 3D "art," I wasn't going to leave that stone unturned. BK: And I thought I had married into lofty. Didn’t you promise me lofty? Okay, then. You began to pull and poke at this thing, began to manipulate these vertices. The computer can’t resist you. There isn’t any tactile feel to this material, no smell, nothing that gets your hands dirty. Do you still consider this art? Because, at the very ...
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SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart

February 1, 2013

SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart I said it would be nice (look how simple I made it: nice) not to be marooned in the blue-black of night with my thoughts, I said the corrugated squares of the downstairs quilt accuse me, I said the sofa pillows are gape-jawed, I said there are fine red hairs in the Pier 1 rug that will dislodge and drown in my lungs, I said I can’t breathe, I said, Please. It wasn’t hard. But you were asleep by then, west to my east, uncorrupted by the plain and the soft of my imagination, the occasional and wire whipped and cruel: you couldn’t be touched; you wouldn’t stir; you. I broke and I climbed out and I climbed through and I climbed down into the blue black red threads and sat until a fat clack cracked the hollow between the walls and I knew that it was the long-nailed scrabble of a squirrel or the procrastination of the fox or the wolf that is my thoughts. That was the first night after. Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of fourteen books, most recently Small Damages, named to many best-of-year lists. Three new books are set to be ...
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SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN, poems by Gregory Djanikian, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Posted on February 18, 2020 by thwackJune 24, 2020

SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN
by Gregory Djanikian
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 90 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Click here to purchase this book

In his new heartbreaking and affirming book of poems, his seventh, Gregory Djanikian writes past complexity toward the elemental and the binding. He unites the “beautiful and the raw,” plays no tricks, displays no tics, exploits nothing but the moment and the thought that accompanies it. He finds the reader wherever the reader is, then webs her into his space and time, a place where a hand run along the back of a cat returns “the animality of my own skin/the trees in slanting light,/ the blue sky breathing its blue/down to the greening fields.” (“What Is a Cat But a Voice Among All the Other Voices”) In Djanikian’s space and time, the end may be near, it may be hastening toward us, but it is still, as yet, a yonder.

Sojourners of the In-Between is organized into five escalating parts. It’s a little noisy in the opening pages, full of harbingers and yelling priests, a street corner mime, the clink of wine bottles, a stained tablecloth, “The world’s blips and pings, street traffic,/glass clatter, hammer clank…” (“Music Making”), the bark of a neighbor’s dog, that aforementioned cat, who also sings. The world buzzes and the poet heeds, his poems derived from hub-bub, his language caught up with the sounds.

Section 2 finds the poet this side of aggravated—privately annoyed by the poor conversationalist, a little superior to a neighbor named Grace, irritated by the stranger who sits beside him at a concert. From “And Another Thing:”

Such dislike for the woman who’s come late
to the concert making our whole row rise just
as the tenor sax hits its high E-flat and now
she’s sitting next to me and texting—my god!—
during the drummer’s lithe percussive
rhythms which are not my rhythms judging
by my heavy foot beats ….

By the time Djanikian’s narrator is, toward the end of section 2, officially unnerved, we are too, “… pacing the afternoon/like a high-wire walker/from room to room/counting the steps.” (“Loose Ends”) What is one to do with all that noise? Where is one to file the irritants?

Gregory Djanikian

Now something tilts. Now, in the final three sections of the collection, Djanikian turns his focus toward the things that fall away and the things that will remain, without us. The poems see beyond the irritants toward the bats from which we keep our distance, the loosestrife in the garden, the touch of a wife’s hand to the “soft lips” of a cow, the material accumulations of our lives. The poems here are clear-eyed and life-besotted, they are quieter, unafraid of (but not lethal with) uncertainty. The poet has time to think. He has time to stand. He has time to wait, but what is he waiting for? For a letter to arrive? For a cat to sing? For an answer from a person no longer with him? Djanikian’s mother imagines her own passing in one poem. Djanikian imagines his own heaven in another. There is too much of everything. There is too little. From the poem “An Uneven Dozen”:

Antinomies
The paradox of time, giving me too much time
and sometimes not enough at the same time.
Morning, evening. Seconds, years.
When I’m late for everything.
I’m early for everything else.

In the final glorious poems of the In-Between, it is always about time—about time and how we live it. Searingly unpretentious, the closest thing to authentic I can imagine, Djanikian’s lines provide a kind of shelter, as, with him, we watch and wait and wonder.

HOW TO BUILD A HEART, a young adult novel by Maria Padian, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Posted on February 11, 2020 by thwackJuly 1, 2020

HOW TO BUILD A HEART
by Maria Padian
Algonquin Young Readers, 339 pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Click here to purchase this book

Isabella Crawford doesn’t keep secrets, she guards them. Protects them:

People love to talk about themselves, and if you keep directing the conversation and questions back to them, they leave the interaction with the impression you’re the absolute best. Even though you haven’t told them a damn thing.

I’m crazy good at this game. And I’ve had years of practice.

For Izzy, a failure to safeguard a secret means the life she meticulously crafted for herself is in jeopardy. She’d prefer not to keep most of her life hidden away; but she also knows that the less you share about yourself, the less you get hurt.

In her new novel How to Build a Heart, Maria Padian brings us into Izzy’s world with one of her biggest secrets: she’s poor and lives with her mother, little brother, and dog in Meadowbrook Gardens, a trailer park on the outskirts of town. Aside from her best friend and closest confidante, Roz, nobody knows where she lives – or how she’s lived. And she intends to keep it that way.

However, that’s only one of the things that Izzy chooses to keep to herself. She keeps her interactions with Roz hidden from her mother (who deems Roz “a bad influence”) and she never tells anyone that she and Roz have a penchant for spying on popular guys named Sam Shackleton (in his own backyard). Izzy’s teachers and classmates don’t know she’s one of the only kids in her school who still uses a prepaid cellphone and has to buy her own minutes.

Maria Padian

In one seemingly-perfect moment the opportunity of a lifetime presents itself to her family: they can get a new house—an actual house—through Habitat for Humanity. All that’s required is putting in a few hundred hours of sweat equity and telling their story to the surrounding community to help raise funds for the build. This means that everyone in Clayton County—from her school friends to her classmates—will know her most closely-guarded secret.

It’s here Padian takes the reader on a deep dive into the many themes of this book, all bound by a single overarching question: what is the price we pay for keeping secrets?

Padian explores this question through a balance of vivid description and witty, discerning storytelling – giving a refreshing zeal to Izzy’s first-person narrative. It’s this balanced writing style that helps envelop the reader in Izzy’s world. Her emotions run raw across each page, written with a passion fueled by Padian’s shared personal experiences.

Through Izzy we begin to consider the weight secrets hold. Izzy’s mastered art of keeping secrets is built upon the ability to lie, or at the very least withholding the truth. Lie after lie, she keeps parts of herself private from others at the expense of her own happiness, unable to live her life to the fullest. Izzy’s secrets also hold a greater burden; her desire to keep her lifestyle hidden puts her family’s new Habitat home in jeopardy. Without her cooperation, their story may not be impactful enough to get the support they need to build. The only other option is to get the help of their estranged Crawford family, but her mother’s own secrets prevents that from happening. Then there’s Sam Shackleton who – through a series of well-timed coincidences – has taken a fancy to Izzy, which will end her friendship with Roz if she finds out.

The secrets that surround Izzy – those she keeps and those kept from her – become the cracks that weaken the foundations of her life: family, friends, opportunities, love, and fulfillment. She thinks secrets are necessary for survival, but what Izzy and the reader come to realize is that secrets and lies only help you survive, honesty and truth help you live:

…Secrets don’t stay secret for very long. It all comes out, in the end.

Padian’s How to Build a Heart encourages us to embrace our authentic selves by letting go, not only of secrets, but of the desire to hide parts of ourselves in hopes that others will accept us. The key to building a heart, as Padian passionately writes, is a solid foundation of self-acceptance. Once Izzy begins accepting who she is, the need for keeping secrets diminishes. There are, of course, secrets we are all entitled to; however, this book teaches readers that some secrets are a heavy burden. Through honesty, the truth unburdens us of our fears, releases us from what holds us back, and frees us to live our lives to the fullest:

I cannot remember the last time I felt so light. Maybe it’s because my arms are finally empty of stones.

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.”

INCIDENTAL INVENTIONS, short pieces by Elena Ferrante, reviewed by David Grandouiller

Posted on January 20, 2020 by thwackJune 21, 2020

INCIDENTAL INVENTIONS
by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein, illustrations by Andrea Ucini
Europa Editions, 112 pages
reviewed by David Grandouiller

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

“Me” who? We’ll always know too little about ourselves.—Elena Ferrante

Incidental Inventions book jacket. A woman in a red dress peaks out for behind a white curtain

Click here to purchase this book

Who is the Italian novelist we call Elena Ferrante? Since her first novel’s publication in 1992, she—with the help of her publishers—has carefully maintained the real author’s anonymity. Many readers have treated this guarded privacy as a playful challenge, making theories and guesses, particularly in recent years as Ferrante has become increasingly celebrated. The Italian philologist Marco Santagata, after analyzing her oeuvre, suggested she might be the writer Marcella Marmo (Marmo and her publisher denied this). More controversially, the journalist Claudio Gatti dug up financial records to claim that Anita Raja is the author behind Ferrante—others suggest it may be Raja’s husband. One can imagine the confirmation of one of these claims could incite a variety of reactions in Ferrante’s readership, but there’s a more fundamental question behind that of the author’s identity: why do people want to know?

What makes some readers so curious about a writer’s “real life”? Do we (because I’m one of them) want the fiction to absorb reality—to make a fiction out of the writer? Or are we trying to absorb fiction into reality? Maybe we feel alienated by the wall that is fiction—artists giving their eyes and minds and hearts and imaginations to the reader without having to give themselves.

“I refused to form a relationship in which I would be in a subordinate position,” writes Ferrante, “forced to yield to the enormous power of someone who is silent while you ramble on, asking you questions without ever really responding to yours, concealing from you his drives—while you reveal yours in the most vulnerable way.” This comes from Ferrante’s new book, Incidental Inventions, a collection of weekly columns written for The Guardian from January 2018 to January 2019, released in November from Europa Editions. In this passage, she’s talking about therapy, but the description could be applied equally to a readership, and the idea of her relationship with readers makes this book particularly striking—a pseudonymous fiction writer exposes to the reader a comparatively unmediated self. The wonder she expresses is presumably her own, the shame, the joy, the generosity, the fear, the pride.

I say, “comparatively unmediated,” because in nonfiction, the writer assumes responsibility for the narrator in a way the fiction writer doesn’t, but this is not to say the narrator and the writer are the same—there is always mediation. In David Shields’s collage manifesto, Reality Hunger, he quotes memoirist Patricia Hampl saying, “It isn’t really me; it’s a character based on myself that I made up in order to illustrate things I want to say. In other words, I think memoir is as far from real life as fiction is. I think you’re obligated to use accurate details, but selection is as important a process as imagination.”

I suppose Hampl’s distinction is slightly beside the point when it comes to Ferrante, who does not exist. If the writer’s relationship to the narrator is the defining difference between nonfiction and fiction, what does the term nonfiction even mean when the writer’s identity is unknown? Can I really call it “comparatively unmediated”? Can I say, “The wonder she expresses is her own?” Does it even matter? Does it make my encounter with this narrator less legitimate? In the new book, Ferrante goes further than Hampl and points out the artifice inherent in writing at all:

My effort at faithfulness [in writing] cannot be separated from the search for coherence, the imposition of order and meaning, even the imitation of the lack of order and meaning. Because writing is innately artificial, its every use involves some form of fiction. The dividing line is rather, as Virginia Woolf said, how much truth the fiction inherent in writing is able to capture.

Maybe this is all I should need from a narrator—an effort at faithfulness as she constructs a self on the page. This makes me think, too, of how much the writer’s work, in this respect, is the work of every social being, how identity is often performance, in life as much as in art. “I invent myself for a journalist,” admits Ferrante, discussing her practice of taking interviews only by correspondence, so she has time to consider and compose her answers, “but the journalist—especially when she is herself a writer—invents herself for me, through her questions.”

If I begin to think of all human intercourse this way, I’m free to stop thinking of the invented narrator, in fiction or nonfiction, as a wall between the writer and me. I can begin to understand intimacy as the goal of invention. The writer behind Ferrante can’t give herself to readers, because the self can’t be contained—what she can do is create an artificial container, pour as much of herself into it as she wants, then offer it to the world, printed and bound and accompanied by Andrea Ucini’s illustrations. Which brings me back to the book—I’ve put off discussing it directly for too long.

In the fifty-one columns that comprise Incidental Inventions, each around five hundred words, Ferrante responds to prompts presented to her by Guardian editors at her own request. “I had no experience with that type of writing,” she explains in her introduction, “and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it […] I told the editors I would accept the offer if they would send me a series of questions.” Her self-awareness and humility are attractive, and the title itself—Incidental Inventions—understates the sense of purpose with which the narrator navigates each topic. But these pieces aren’t the work of someone who’s just trying her hand. Short and tightly woven, each of them meanders the landscape of the writer’s memories and thoughts with a practiced nonchalance, driving all the while toward a kind of volta in the last few sentences, and ending, usually, in a punchy, epigrammatic final line: “What perhaps should be feared most is the fury of frightened people” or “We can be much more than what we happen to be” or “All in all, I’m doing fine.”

I wish the prompts had been printed with Ferrante’s pieces. I wondered, leafing through this calendar of idiosyncrasy, about her reactions to the editors’ questions, and also about how forward the editors had been, knowing how carefully Ferrante maintains her anonymity. How many questions did they ask that related directly to her biography, and did she resent it when they did, or did she take it in stride, being used to it by now? Do any of these columns answer the questions directly, or does she interpret them freely, wandering the open water once the coast is out of sight?

These are greedy questions, in some ways—the person Ferrante presents in this one-sided conversation is already so full and rich. We get reading recommendations, film recommendations, career advice. We learn about her first love and about the reasons she laughs when she does, about her fear of old age and her fear of letting her fear be seen. We learn why she admires her daughters and why she admires women who chose not to be mothers. We read some of what she thinks of Caravaggio, exclamation marks, religion, sex, Italian fascism, of lying and learning and change. She says a lot about writing—writing when you’re young and when you’re older, writing before bed or when you wake up, smoking while you write or writing after you’ve quit smoking.

And underneath all these things, providing the energy with which she propels each thought, is the wonder, “the wonder—the wonder of knowing how to read, to write, to transform signs into things.”

◊

As I write about Incidental Inventions, I’m thinking of another book that I consider linked to Ferrante’s collection—In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, published in English in 2016. The books share many characteristics: both were written in Italian, both translated into English by Ann Goldstein. Both writers are women whose novels are internationally acclaimed but who, before these books, had published little nonfiction. Each of these books was conceived as a series of weekly columns for a periodical (Ferrante for The Guardian, Lahiri for Internazionale).

Lahiri’s book is more focused than Ferrante’s. It follows a progression: she learned Italian, moved to Italy, transitioned from writing in English to writing in Italian. But she strikes many of the same topics as Ferrante—the wonder associated with learning to read, for example, or their interactions with journalists. Each of the books has a chapter on writing in a diary, in which they both describe having outgrown the diary. Ferrante remembers having begun to invent things in her diary when she was young, to account for lost time or missed entries, and so she gave up journaling and wrote stories instead. Lahiri, as an adult journaling in a foreign language, says, “Writing only in a diary is the equivalent of shutting myself in the house, talking to myself. What I express there remains a private, interior narration. At a certain point, in spite of the risk, I want to go out.”

A diary is not totally unselfconscious or unmediated, but this going out is still a momentous turning point in the life of the writing. A more elaborate, more conscious performance by the narrator is necessary, or at least expected. This going out is what Ferrante’s and Lahiri’s writings have in common, an emphasis on establishing a consistent voice, a persona, a narrator to whom readers can attribute each thought and experience, so that we begin to fill out the image of a figure, even if it isn’t exactly the image of the writer herself. Ferrante speaks in similar terms about the accumulation of qualities which makes possible the idea of a film star she admires: “[Daniel Day-Lewis] is a sort of title by which I refer to a valuable body of work […] If he should suddenly be transformed into a flesh-and-blood person, poor him, poor me. Reality can’t stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously.”

But maybe it’s exactly this indecorous spilling that some reality-hungry readers want. “Books are the best means […] of overcoming reality,” writes Lahiri, but maybe we want reality to overcome the book. Maybe we want the diary and not the story. Or the diary as well as the story. Is that possible? Where do we find it?

“Literary novelty,” writes Ferrante, “if one wants to insist on the concept—exists in the way each individual inhabits the magma of forms he is immersed in. Thus ‘to be oneself’ is an arduous task—perhaps impossible.” I think this is true, and it makes me wonder: how little advantage do most writers take of the diversity of possible forms available to them? And would employing a greater range of forms fragment the invented narrator in such a way that readers would get (maybe not a truer but) a different kind of insight into the person behind the persona?

I think a form that does this fragmentation well is the “crônica.” A giant in this tradition is the Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector. Her Selected Crônicas, published individually in the Jornal do Brasil between 1967 and 1973, is like an encyclopedia of short forms—they range in length from a single line to one or two thousand words; they are proverbs, parables, and myths, short stories, reflections, interviews, memoirs, bits of transcribed dialogue, brief scenic sketches. Lispector makes little or no distinction, across these columns, or even within each column, between the fictional and the real, though she uses both first- and third-person narration throughout. This wide range may not have been a transgression of genre, in Lispector’s context, since she was taking advantage of the freedom of the form, which her translator, Giovanni Pontiero, calls, “a genre peculiar to Brazil which allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone,” he says, “is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or weekly columns in the European or U.S. press.” But to bring her indiscriminate range into a different literary context could be transgressive, could be productive.

Ferrante’s columns are not generically transgressive, except inasmuch as the frame of anonymity produces a unique reading experience. They’re much more consistent, even conservative, in style and structure—which is certainly not a weakness. But I think it’s important to note, by way of comparison, the possible breadth of the form she’s working in, and to call the breadth good. Ferrante’s narrator maintains her integrity, her wholeness, however artificially. That’s a different kind of victory than Lispector’s, but all of these writers help revive in us “the wonder—the wonder […] vivid and lasting.”

David Grandouiller lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he writes about faith and religion, Christian education, film, cats, and music. He is a third-year candidate in the MFA in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University and the Nonfiction Editor at The Journal. His essay, “Holy Uselessness,” was a finalist for the 2019 Orison Anthology Award in Nonfiction, and a group of his essays won the 2019 Walter Rumsey Marvin grant from the Ohioana Library Association.

Source for the biographical Ferrante info:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-unmasking-of-elena-ferrante

OUTSIDE MYSELF, a young adult novel by Kristen Witucki, reviewed by Donna W. Hill

Posted on January 19, 2020 by thwackJuly 1, 2020

OUTSIDE MYSELF
by Kristen Witucki
Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 232 pages
reviewed by Donna W. Hill

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Click here to purchase this book

Superbly written, Outside Myself by Kristen Witucki gets to the heart of the human experience. Blended and broken families struggle with issues that tear parents and children apart. Trying to do their best, they are fettered by incomplete and often false information. At the center of it all, two very different blind characters, determined to create their own place in the world, grapple with the negativity in their families, communities and themselves.

Outside Myself covers roughly fifteen months from May 1994 to August 1995. It is told by two narrators; Tallie, a young and precocious blind girl, and Benjamin, a withdrawn grandfather who works at a library for the blind. They represent different age groups, genders, races, belief systems and causes of blindness, growing up in different eras with different rights under the law.

Tallie, the child of a broken marriage, attends a Christian youth group, where she realizes that some of the kids want to pray for her healing. She wonders why so many people are invested in her becoming sighted. Whether through medical advances or faith healing, their actions say they can’t accept her as she is. Even her father believes he must keep her safe until she can get an operation to restore her sight. Tallie knows what being ostracized and bullied means, but she grapples with her own insensitivity to others.

Divorced and estranged from his family, Benjamin rents a tiny room in the house of an elderly woman and her thirty-five-year-old, dope-smoking grandson. Through memories of his early childhood, we learn he once had some sight – not enough to fit in with the sighted world and too much to fit in the visually impaired one. He was out there on his own, trying to have more sight than he did. He could focus on just one print word at a time. “Everyone was in denial about the vision problem, even me.”

An avid Braille reader, Tallie wants to learn more about the cure her father has mentioned so she calls the adult section at the Library for the Blind and speaks with Benjamin. For the first time, Benjamin shares his own blindness with a client and challenges her beliefs. Tallie has never encountered a blind adult and, though angry, is intrigued by him. Their interactions help Benjamin examine his role in his family’s separation, while Tallie begins to seek independence from her own family.

Kristen Witucki

Witucki interweaves the two points of view with uncommon agility. Her ability to blend action, dreams, and memory allows their stories to unfold smoothly, drawing the reader into their separate worlds, even as she brings them closer together. Music, literature, and the love of learning are lifelines throughout the book. There is a commentary on Heidi, Swiss author Johanna Spyri’s classic children’s novel. Tallie’s concern for dry leaves and Benjamin’s relationship with the moon provide glimpses into their inner lives.

Misconceptions and stereotypes about blindness persist. The book helps readers consider that sighted people don’t always have the answers and highlights some of the challenges they have maintaining the attitudes of hopefulness and curiosity necessary for blind people to make a leap into an independent, nonvisual lifestyle.

Witucki’s experiences have placed her in an ideal position to tell this gripping and necessary story about the struggles and triumphs of life without sight. Born totally blind, she earned three master’s degrees in teaching gifted students, creative writing and teaching students with visual impairments and she is the Curriculum and Content Editor, Blindness and Visual Impairment at Learning Ally, the world’s largest library of volunteer-narrated books.

Outside Myself is unique in many ways, not the least of which is its double, first-person point of view. Carefully constructed with clear, concise language, nuanced characters and unexpected twists, it is an inspiring and enjoyable read. This beautiful and honest story of a mentor relationship reaches into several worlds to expose the deepest pain and the greatest triumphs of the human spirit.

Donna W. Hill is the author of the educator-recommended young adult novel The Heart of Applebutter Hill, a fantasy for middle school and older readers. Find it in print and eBook versions through Amazon and other outlets. It’s available through Bookshare and Learning Ally for readers with print impairments. A former Philadelphia street performer, songwriter and recording artist, Hill lives in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains with her husband, her guide dog and their rescued kitty. Learn more at DonnaWHill.com

Purchase Outside Myself in Print, eBook & Audio Formats

Outside Myself is Kristen Witucki’s first full length novel. Purchase it and The Transcriber, a story for adolescent emerging readers, and follow Kristen at:

https://www.amazon.com/Kristen-Witucki/e/B00BCQVL4K%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Audible has Outside Myself Narrated by Stephanie Keefer and Royal Jaye. Listen to a Sample at:

https://www.audible.com/pd/Outside-Myself-Audiobook/B07CY6KGFQ

Options for readers with print impairments

Outside Myself is available through the National Library Service for the Blind & Physically Handicapped (NLS), part of the Library of Congress. Both books are also available through Learning Ally.

THE PROBLEM WITH SURFING AND WRITING: a Craft Essay by Nate House

Posted on January 18, 2020 by thwackJune 6, 2020

THE PROBLEM WITH SURFING AND WRITING
A Craft Essay
by Nate House

Last summer I was supposed to finish a novel. But there were waves, so many waves. I did my best to try, to write.

Woke up at 4:30 in the morning, took the dogs out under the stars in our yard, smelled the oysters and salt from the Delaware Bay two miles to the south. Went back inside to attempt to write a few hundred words before the sun came up. Often, I wrote nothing worth a damn, gave up, put a few boards in the van, drove to my favorite break in South Jersey, one my wife and I loved. Got into the water and wondered how it was possible to surf perfectly glassy, waist-high waves all to ourselves in the most densely populated state in the country. When a wave came my way I turned, paddled, stood, walked to the nose of the board and lost myself in that magical moment where nothing else in the world mattered. Nothing, except catching another wave.

Herein lies the problem: being a writer who surfs, a surfer who writes. When there is a wave to be ridden, everything else in life—dogs, loved ones, deadlines and writing—gets put on hold. To make matters worse, once you’re completely and totally stoked from the waves, writing a coherent thought, especially one that attempts to describe the sublime experience of riding waves, becomes virtually impossible.

This could be why there are so few books about surfing that have been able to adequately capture the experience of walking on water. Yes, Daniel Duane’s Caught Inside, William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days and Alan Weisbecker’s In Search of Captain Zero paint colorful portraits of the surfing life, and are filled with beautiful descriptions of the ocean, dolphin, and waves. Yet, the true experience of surfing itself seems to elude even the most talented surf-writer.

One could argue that all writers struggle to describe our most intimate and intense moments, agonizing over sentences that allow the reader to experience the love, sex, and heartbreak of their characters—but writers of those topics know that we all (hopefully) have likely brushed up against all three, and uses our knowledge and shared metaphors to put us into the mind and body of the character so we can feel or at least understand what they feel. Love, sex, and heartbreak can be put into a language we all speak. Surfing, I’m convinced, cannot.

Instead of writing about surfing, the best we surfers can do is try to use the experience of the sport, the pursuit, to open our minds in the same way jogging does for writers like Joyce Carol Oates or Haruki Murakami. While it may be impossible to write after surfing, what often happens—at least for me—is that a few hours in the ocean creates an intense awareness to my surroundings, be it the ocean, people, or even the traffic. It is during these moments of heightened sensitivity where we humans become aware of the smallest details—the old man in a brand new Mercedes at the gas station sitting alone, frantically scratching lottery tickets; the dead cat on the side of the road; the laughter from a group of teenagers smoking pot on the beach.

After some of the best surf sessions of the summer, I’d often find myself tearing up while watching videos of Bruce Springsteen bringing audience members up on stage. This increased sensitivity, when properly harnessed, might, I think, expose the writer—or at least this writer—to all the small details that make us human. The same details that make for good writing.

Here in Jersey, we had one of the hottest summers on record. The sand on the beach burned our feet. Cases of flesh-eating bacteria along the coast increased, most likely due to global warming. The flies, brought from the back bay to the beach in the light west winds, sawed through any exposed piece of flesh. The news incessantly pointed out the moral failings of our president, and yet his supporters still backed him. We surf to escape all of this, and yet it sometimes makes all that news all the more devastating because of our enhanced sensitive state.

I’ve been surfing for over twenty years, writing for thirty. I still struggle with each of them, trying to figure out how to make the two activities, my two passions, work with all the other parts of my life. When I’m at my worst, struggling with life, with surfing and writing, my wife kindly guides me back to Percy Shelly:

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. ‘The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.

Surfing is its own form of art. It “spreads its own figured curtain” and “withdraws life’s dark veil,” leaving its victims unable to find the words to describe a single moment in time, shared by board, mind, body, wind, tide and sand, that connects us to all the beauty and suffering that exists in the universe. Surfing and writing keeps us searching for that perfect wave, sentence, or poem so we can experience that moment again and again and again and again.

Nate House’s fiction has appeared in Armchair Shotgun, Kudzu House, The Bicycle Review, Monday Night Lit, The Schuylkill River Journal, and other publications. His columns have appeared in both local and national newspapers. He worked as a reporter for The Philadelphia Tribune and currently teaches at Community College of Philadelphia.

Image credit: Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov reviewed by Dylan Cook

Posted on January 16, 2020 by thwackJune 20, 2020

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES
by Varlam Shalamov
translated by Donald Rayfield
New York Review Books, 576 pages

reviewed by Dylan Cook

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

Sketches of the Criminal World Book Jacket. A black-and-white photo of a raven sitting on tree logs in front of empty desert

Click here to purchase this book

A man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins don’t survive. A doctor refuses to treat new patients, fearing that someone has been sent to kill him. Characters like these populate Varlam Shalamov’s criminal world, the depraved underbelly of society born and bred in the Soviet prison system. Many of the criminal world’s citizens were locked up under vague pretenses of “counterrevolutionary activity,” so why should they uphold the laws that failed them in the first place? Why not murder and steal before your neighbor beats you to it? Morals, after a while, can become relative. Life in prison may get easier without a domineering boss, cheaper without children to care for, and safer without new faces in the ward.

Varlam Shalamov was a natural dissenter. Born to an Orthodox priest in 1907, Shalamov lived as a staunch atheist. As Josef Stalin rose to power, Shalamov joined a Trotskyist group in direct opposition to the new government. There, he helped distribute pamphlets that were highly critical of Stalin, leading to his first imprisonment from 1929 to 1932. He continued writing politically charged pieces that brought him in and out of prison camps in Kolyma, the Far East of Russia, from 1937 to 1951. In the decades that followed, Shalamov documented his experiences through thinly veiled fictions in the six-part Kolyma Stories. The first volume, published two years ago, contains an updated translation of the first three parts, with stories that have been widely known since the 1980s. By contrast, many stories in Sketches of the Criminal World were only recently discovered and appear here in English for the first time. Together, the two volumes constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s fiction. While his writing was suppressed in the Soviet Union, his stories leaked out into Europe and beyond, placing him on the world stage as one of the foremost chroniclers of the gulag. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, admitted that Shalamov’s personal experience in the prison system was “longer and more bitter,” and that Shalamov shed necessary light on life in Soviet prisons. Only in 1987, five years after his death, were Shalamov’s stories published in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev’s more lenient policies.Given his history, it’s unsurprising that Shalamov’s work is itself a protest, battling opinions on multiple fronts. Many “stories” in this collection are simply essays masquerading as fiction, offering Shalamov a platform to comment on literature, incarceration, and the intersection of the two. Russian literary giants like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Babel were all too mawkish for Shalamov’s taste, and their attempts to accurately write about criminals simply missed the mark. None of these authors lived among criminals, real criminals, long enough to properly understand their rituals and influence. Shalamov did. By writing these stories, Shalamov was providing what he thought was the most genuine account of the gangsters who lived in and controlled Soviet gulags. There is nothing redemptive about these characters—they’re no Robin Hoods or Jean Valjeans. For Shalamov, criminals are not romantic ideals; rather, they represent the nadir of human morality.

There are two breeds of criminals in Kolyma. First are the freiers, the petty criminals that have no place in the criminal world. Most of these people were taken in under Article 58, a part of the Soviet penal code that allowed the government to arrest citizens under any suspicion that they were disloyal to the state. These everyday people that struggle against the system are the “criminals” that Shalamov fears are being canonized. They’re far from the hardened criminals, the gangsters, that live and thrive in this system. Being a gangster is more than a career, it’s a generational calling. The gangsters in Shalamov’s writing are the sons and grandsons of gangsters, and they bear children to one day fill their shoes. Naturally, the gangsters prey upon the freiers, stealing bread rations from them and murdering them when convenient. The freiers want to survive; the gangsters want to wield more power. Shalamov, through his first-person narration, does not firmly align himself in either camp. He treats both sides equally, and by doing so, he gestures towards the transition from freier to gangster, from human to inhuman. In “The War of the ‘Bitches,’” the narrator witnesses rival gangs in conflict. As the “war” presses on, the gangs begin recruiting both freiers and gangsters into their ranks. The narrator watches inmates futilely join and switch sides, asking:

How? Could the ceremony of kissing a knife change a criminal soul? Or had the notorious crook’s blood changed its chemical composition in the veins of an old crook just because his lips had touched a steel blade?

Reading Shalamov often feels like a quick slip into darkness. Many of his stories are poignantly short, often fewer than five pages, some no more than a paragraph. Today, these would likely be categorized as flash fiction, offering glimpses into characters’ lives without any direct plot. Shalamov knew the effect of this length, and he used it with great precision. His shortest stories focus in on an object or moment and strip them of their familiarity. In “Graphite,” one of the most famous stories from the collection, Shalamov directs his attention towards pencils. Pens, he says, are the preferred writing implement in prisons. Only indelible ink ensures that gangsters cannot cheat in a card game or that doctors cannot alter a death certificate. Pencil marks can be erased and changed to change fate, so pencils are seldom found in Kolyma. In a few pages, Shalamov turns graphite into an unattainable luxury. He shows that the criminal world is not entirely isolated from the civilian world, but runs parallel beneath it. Pencils are simply one of the freedoms that become alien when crossing over into a prison camp like Kolyma.

The natural world that houses these prisoners is just as antagonistic as any gangster or mob boss. High in the Arctic Circle, Kolyma winters last for nine months of the year, and the short summers are hardly enough to thaw the ice. A short walk can become dangerous as frostbite can set in within minutes. Out of both respect and fear for this environment, Shalamov’s writing is that of a naturalist. Describing flora and fauna are some of the only times Shalamov embellishes his usually terse prose style. Stories like “The Path” and “The Waterfall” depict the brief Kolyma summers and the respite that they provided. Natural warmth like this was a gift of hospitality in an otherwise unrelenting environment. “The Resurrection of the Larch,” more than any other story, shows the inextricable tie between the prisoners and nature. It was common for prisoners to send larch branches to their families, not because they were particularly pretty, but because they could come back to life in a glass of water. By sending home life, prisoners could send a message, more tangible than a letter, that they were still there. At the start of the story, the narrator writes:

In the Far North man looks for an outlet for his sensitivity, when it hasn’t been destroyed or poisoned by decades of living in Kolyma. A man sends an airmail parcel: not books, not photographs, not poetry, but a larch branch, a dead branch from living nature.

Map of Russia with the Kolyma Region shown in red. Modified from Wikimedia Commons.

To Shalamov, survival itself was an act of defiance. Staying alive meant that your will was stronger than the prison systems. In the most personal, autobiographical story of the collection, “The Examination,” Shalamov recounts the process of becoming a paramedic. In his early years as a prisoner, Shalamov worked in coal and gold mines. He fought to become a paramedic, a less strenuous job, knowing full well that his body likely couldn’t take more abuse in the mines. Shalamov’s life comes down to a chemistry exam given by an indifferent proctor. Chemistry, we learn, is one of his weaknesses because his chemistry teacher was executed for counterrevolutionary activity. Now, the knowledge he was robbed of is the only thing that can save him. Living through his exam meant living through his sentence, a win against the Soviet government. “I survived,” he writes. “ I walked out of hell. I finished the classes, ended my sentence, outlived Stalin, and then returned to Moscow.” In a world shadowed by Stalin’s Iron Curtain, the general secretary is very rarely mentioned. Shalamov uses the name sparingly, only when he’s sure of a victory.

“How does someone stop being human?” Shalamov poses the question to the reader many times throughout his stories. Slowly, he begins to answer it by offering bite-sized portraits into life in a Soviet gulag. Bringing clarity to an oppressive regime’s darkest moments wasn’t pleasant for Shalamov, but it was necessary. Doing so could have easily placed him back in Kolyma, but political dissidents like Shalamov have to take that risk. His relentless, macabre imagery is painful, both for the subjects and for the author who is reliving these moments. The fact that Shalamov was able to produce these stories at all is a testament to his integrity as an artist and documentarian. He leads us down the path towards inhumanity. He shows us that this path is lined with theft and murder and indecency, but he never outright blames anyone for following it. The criminal world could not exist without the government that created it, so this journey is just a symptom of the Soviets’ immoral, self-serving policy. Shalamov lays this bare as he brings us all the way to inhumanity. Only then, lost and battered, can we start answering the bigger question: How do we go back?

Dylan Cook author photo

YEAR BY YEAR: Poems by Lynne Sachs reviewed by Sharon Harrigan

Posted on January 15, 2020 by thwackJune 24, 2020

YEAR BY YEAR: Poems
by Lynne Sachs
Tender Buttons Press, 64 pages

reviewed by Sharon Harrigan

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

YEAR BY YEAR: Poems by Lynne Sachs book jacket; varying years written in alternating text types

Click here to purchase this book

When Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she asked herself one simple question: How have the private, most intimate moments of her life been affected by the public world beyond? The poems she wrote in response turned into this book. One poem for each year.

Sachs is a well-known experimental filmmaker. Year by Year is her first book of poetry, and in many ways it can be appreciated as the logical extension of her career as a visual storyteller. She describes her films as combining “memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes.” Such a description might also be applied to her poems. Year by Year dips into memoir when it recounts events in her personal life. The glimpses into current events have a documentary feel. When Sachs describes moments she was present for but cannot possibly remember, such as her own birth, the book takes us into fictional territory. The hybrid form (memoir/documentary/fiction) is one experimental element. But even more innovative is the way she often presents us with two versions of the same poem. The handwritten draft and the final typeset poem face each other, resembling a book of poems in translation where the original and translated versions run in parallel.

I first read Year by Year in two sittings, focusing only the final versions of the poems. It is unusual for me to consider a poetry collection a page turner, but this book was. It propelled me through time from the poet’s birth to the birth of her daughters and beyond, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Iraq War.

On my second read, I scrutinized the handwritten drafts alongside the final versions, one poem at a time, letting them resonate individually. The experience was fascinating not only because it showed what choices the poet made to tighten each poem, but also because reading the two versions side by side created a not-quite-synched stereo effect, or perhaps something close to a superimposed image in a film.

In “1962,” for example, the final version reads: “Two baby girls brown and blonde/at home with mom and a nurse.” The draft version is less distilled, but it has its own appeal: “A plan, an American plan, two eggs any style, not the Continental breakfast, baby girls blonde and brown at home with mom and a nurse, a black woman whose name no one remembers.” In particular, the fact that no one remembers the nurse’s name, in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1960s, sets the stage for the Civil Rights events that will happen in the later poems.

In “1966,” “fields of daddodils that never drooped” becomes “Droopless daddodils.” The conversational tone shifts to a pared-down diction that sounds more childlike and more artful at the same time.

Lynne Sachs

The draft version of “1978” includes “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which the final version simply calls, “a feminist book on the body/I wish I loved.” The line breaks allow us to read the sentence as a whole and as a fragment, at the same time. We infer that the narrator wished she loved the book, but also that she wished she loved the body, the female body, her own body, enough to be comfortable learning more about its sexual functions. Having the name of the book on the facing page adds to the emotional impact, because so many of us know that book well, a cultural touchpoint that reminds us of how uncomfortable it can be to attempt to claim our bodies as our own.

The first poem in the book sets the tone by introducing the concept of time—the time of day, the time of year, the time of life of the poet’s parents when they became her parents: “Born at dinner time on an August evening,/the child of a twenty-one and twenty-three-year-old” are the opening lines. The use of time adds to the cinematic quality of the poem, grounding us in an “opening shot,” instead of the abstract or fuzzy entrance to a poem that a reader might expect. .

The poem “1964” immerses us in a scene that shifts from close up to zoom, from a little girl’s room to the vast night sky. We see the magical thinking of a young child, who might believe she can reach the stars or that she can change her parents’ behavior. The poem suggests the lack of control children have in their lives and the way they cope by refocusing their attention outward. As Sachs puts it, “My mother and father are fighting on the other side of the door./I lick the window next to my bed and pretend to taste the stars.”

It is not surprising that a poetry book by a filmmaker is lush with images. Even something as visually static as a phone call becomes vivid and tangible in “1982,” when the narrator is making a transatlantic call to her brother: “His hello transforms this dirty glass box/into four dynamic movie screens.” The poem then offers us glimpses of what the narrator imagines she sees on those screens, the events she is missing by being far from home. The poems also sometimes convey abstract concepts as physical objects, such as in “1961” where the future is a crystal ball that the newborn drops from her hands. It shatters and scatters “down the hall/out the front door of the hospital/into the sweltering darkness.” The “camera” zooms in to the tiniest of hands and then pans out to the room, the building, the outdoors. We can imagine two different “cameras” filming at the same time at vastly different scales.

Natural beauty and headline-making violence appear in the same stanza, showing, with that juxtaposition, that we cannot escape from the world around us. In “1999,” for example, “In our front yard now, Columbine grows wild./With each bloom, I think of her, a mother too.” The narrator cannot even look at her Columbine flowers without thinking of the Columbine school shooter. Again, Sachs uses something visual and concrete to pan over to the homophones they might prompt in a reader and writer alike.

Similarly, in “2004,” the narrator’s daughter’s first solo ride on the subway is made to coexist with explosions in the Madrid metro by terrorists. The public and the private collide in its own kind of explosion on the page in a visual way.

The book ends with the fifty-year-old narrator looking back over her life—another visual reference. The scene is her birthday party, where she “perform[s]/split-second happiness for the camera.” The last stanza reads:

I catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror
take another look at my own silent film
and listen once again to the soundtrack
I’m playing over and over.

This scene can be interpreted literally as the narrator watching a film she made. But the “film” is also a metaphor for her life, her private and public memories, and, by extension, this book. The last line is “I’m playing over and over.” As an artist, Sachs keeps playing, again and again, with each of the thirty-three films she has made over the decades and now, with her first book of poems, which are just as inventive and fresh, just as delightfully playful with form. These poems are innovative but never intimidating or deliberately opaque. Instead, they invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.

Sharon Harrigan is the author of the novel Half (University of Wisconsin Press, June 2020) the memoir Playing with Dynamite (Truman State University Press, 2017). She has published more than fifty stories, essays, and reviews in the New York Times (Modern Love), Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include: finalist, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for the Novel; International Book Award, first place in memoir, second place in new nonfiction; May Sarton Book Award finalist; Kinder award for best short story from Pleiades; Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award from Key West Literary Seminar; Sarah Pennypacker Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and Ted Berrigan Award from Naropa University. She teaches writing at WriterHouse, a literary center in Charlottesville, Virginia.

IN SOME ALIEN PRAIRIE by Alice Hall

Posted on December 29, 2019 by thwackDecember 29, 2019

IN SOME ALIEN PRAIRIE
by Alice Hall

birds flying overhead
the birds don’t circle the ways they do here…….collected in one
large cloud……a blanket of ‘of’ …….there’s no following
in backwards time…no picking back up or undoing…..the glass
hardens almost immediate…the soft bubble at the tip smoothed
to hard nub….the sound of liquid in yr straw….….a suck bitten
between handful of teeth…. it thinks of things which need
splitting…..division….via money…….via labor….…. via you’re
too stupid…………look….how pretty….….i’ve become..in yr
absence……..look how you’re faking just look….you’ve peed
yrself all over N –– J ––– Transit,….you’ve lost….yr flip flops in
old bridge & now we’re getting kicked off the train b/c, well,
b/c i’ve sworn off swearing sworn off being a woman yelling
instead i’ll be a reliquary….….so how about……..you give me yr
xbox?……yes, it was me….yr bungled up boyfriend….…come to
sew all the patches on yr clothes
…………………………………………………& come to split the field in two

Alice Hall is poet living and working in Buffalo, NY, where she is pursuing a PhD in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Previously, she taught poetry and writing in Portland, Oregon. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Prelude, Dream Pop, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook One Million Nude Women (Industrial Lunch.)

Image credit: Michael Jin on Unsplash

TWO POEMS by Jeremy Radin

Posted on December 29, 2019 by thwackJune 2, 2020

TWO POEMS
by Jeremy Radin

Ode to the Nectarine

O secretive sunrise of an armadillo,
won’t you please uncurl for me? Of all
the fruits I know you alone must live.
Fiery armadillo dredged through blood
& yolk, I have been watching you for hours,
waiting for you to emerge from yourself
& shuffle across the kitchen counter, sniffing
at the knives. I set out a plum for you, bowl
of dead spiders. I haven’t the faintest as to
what you like to eat. The encyclopedias
keep your secrets well, but I am persistent,
little Jupiter. I will witness the unwitnessed.
Your unfolded golden splendor. Treasurous
armadillo, shall I place you in a bedroom
with another of your kind—scattered petals,
incense burning, Al Green playing low? Shall
I leave you to it & peek through the keyhole?
No. My eyes would never survive it; the sacred
savagery of your love—a pair of burning gods
divulging to the dark the unspeakable
violence of sugar.

Marriages

The Fries

At the burger joint your friend thinks it is funny
to snatch, while you are not looking, the fries

one by one off your plate, & stuff them, grinning
into his mouth. Even after you’ve explained to him

that it’s as if he’s reaching over & eating your beloved’s
hands, how she is all you have: a wife of piping gold

to stave off an encroaching dark. Though you gesture,
half-joking, with your edgeless knife. Though you growl

like a goblin Pagliacci he whips his hand, again & again,
eight, nine, ten times—until you hunch, ogre-ish, over

the fries as though communion were possible only here,
upon this bed of chipped linoleum. But what does he

care, munching the beloved—until something begins
moving within him, & he grimaces & leaps & rushes to

the bathroom, where, bending over the toilet bowl he
stares at what he’s vomited out: nailed, knuckled, & pale:

a mass of wriggling fingers…

The Sprite

The server brings
the Sprite & before
she is halfway turned
from your table
you’ve finished
the Sprite & request
another & within
seconds it too
is gone so she brings
another, then two,
then pitcher & you
do, you drink it straight
from the pitcher
like a mug
of coffee, jug of wine,
a vessel in which
white mums
have been melted,
& yes, of course,
you marry the Sprite,
you walk the aisle,
speak the vows,
lift the veil,
smash the glass,
& lick your love
off the floor…

The Oreos

So simple to be both lovers at ………….the same time one
munching a sleeve of Oreos…………. as the other begs him to stop
one shoving Oreos into his mouth…………. the other floating up
into space one gasping through crumbs…………. the other bellowing
but one’s head is a sugar swamp…………. so the other isn’t heard
while hauled through sleeves of stars…………. entreating the first
to take a break breathe…………………….. but one does not rest
one advances like an ocean……. …… pulling catastrophe
into insatiable tide………………… ….. as the other goes
finally silent ………….…………………………………swallowed up
in the hungry hush ………….………….…………. the plump dark
………….………….………….………….………….………….………….picking its teeth

Jeremy Radin author pic Jeremy Radin is a poet and actor. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, The Journal, Muzzle, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He is the author of Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody, 2012) and Dear Sal (Not A Cult, 2017). He lives in Los Angeles where he once sat next to Carly Rae Jepsen in a restaurant.

Image credit: Heidi Kaden on Unsplash

THE CREATURE CRAWLIN by Trevor Alixopulos

Posted on December 29, 2019 by thwackJuly 7, 2020

THE CREATURE CRAWLIN’
Notes on Fatherhood in 2019
a Visual Narrative by Trevor Alixopulos

Trevor Alixopulos’ visual narrative presents a thoughtful and visceral glimpse of new-parenthood through a male lens. In this piece, he questions the very nature of existence and what it means to be human. Who is this new being? How is the parent’s life now different? As he moves through time and space, Alixopulos gives us his own take on generational shift.

—Emily Steinberg
Visual Narrative Editor, Cleaver Magazine

Trevor Alixopulos is a cartoonist, writer and editor. His graphic novel, The Hot Breath of War (Sparkplug Comic Books), was nominated for Outstanding Graphic Novel in the Ignatz Awards and featured on tcj.com‘s “Top 100 Comics of the Decade.” His nonfiction comics essays have appeared on popula.com, where he was also a designer and editor. His various comics and illustration venues and clients include Los Angeles Review of Books, Kaiser Permanente, Fantagraphics Books, Turner Broadcasting, Seven Stories Press, Playboy, East Bay Express, North Bay Bohemian, and Scout Books. He lives in California.

Full Text:

It perhaps reveals some essential psychological fact that I experience the good things in life, falling in love, having a baby, as isolating experiences
Baby: bah Father: bah

(Of course I am not alone in this, I have a partner, a family)
Father: are you real?
Mother: he doesn’t seem real

But in the past 11 months of fatherhood, while bringing much that is new, also revealed much that was always there, for good or ill. Into the light are dragged loneliness, inexplicable rage, and hidden resources, the good and bad alike

A rock is thrown into my subconscious, and the mind gropes in what comes up for relevant memories. My dad taking me with him in the pre-dawn to deliver papers, to the burger king he worked at, on his tractor mowing yards. Memories are distortions though, we recall the unusual, discard the typical , assign normalcy to what remains.

My father’s wisdom is lost to direct inquiry, it can only be inferred.

My paternal name, Αλεξόπουλος, means “son of the protector.” There is more to fatherhood than love and protection. With this little boy, I wonder what it would be like to raise a child in a world you knew. To set them on paths you walked, schools you attended, subway lines you rode. Perhaps the ceaseless change devalues fathers.

A child heightens the temporal vertigo of aging. The minutes fly by in a panic. He changes. We live a thousand lifetimes before the big long now of adulthood. He is not the same boy I left in the morning, when I return in the evening.

A baby is a little spaceman from beyond. A vulnerable stranger to a hostile world that is not theirs.

You get older and you become more like the world, it becomes more like you. Hip and strong, everything’s pointed at you. Every caprice, trend, draft notice.

Then some time in adulthood the world moves past you. You aren’t so much of this world anymore. You have one foot back in the beyond. Hard to say what of any value gets passed on.

These musings are likely artifacts of that mopey nature of mine, besides being drawn from a deep well of unwisdom. The parties are fixed, he’s teaching me teaching him.
Baby: AAAAHHH
Father: He’s like a cult leader, breaking down our personalities to indoctrinate us
(Day 10 of sleeping on the living room floor in order to “sleep train” him)

It’s been interesting to observe myself in this pressurized state. Having a child sort of exposes how much of your self-involvement was situational and how much was truly hard wired.
Baby: zsha
Father: Why is it I only ever have one good pair of pants

Not to imply that taking care of another has to be an unselfish act. At some point, living compounds too fast for us to process. Grief and loss surrounds, pulses and gathers in the dark beyond the hearth. We feel like refugees in our own lives, we take refuge beyond our selves.
Father: Jeez this is like the 10th article about “saudade” I’ve seen shared, people are fucked up!

I remember, a couple of years ago when my dad got sick. I quit my job, went on unemployment, spent most of the year driving up and down the state to check on him. I was alone on the highway. At the time it seemed hard.

Life is a series of ordeals, each more difficult than the last. Even so, we miss them when they go.

FIELD WORK by Nathan Lipps

Posted on December 29, 2019 by thwackDecember 29, 2019

FIELD WORK
by Nathan Lipps

He wakes back bent into a kind of platform
for what is meant to be goodness.

Heat of the sun in the soil near his face.

Imagine wind noticing itself.
That kind of silence

each morning. Across the field a body
of another, watching.

What Hegel said about two souls.
Each holding a seed

in their loose fists. Terrified
to let go, knowing the need

to sow. To join that patch-work quilt
landscape to something.

Receiving the fly-over-fuck-you
gift of nothing, despite the effort.

Back to bed, the soil cooling.
Again, again.

Terrified of claiming.
Of being claimed.

Nathan Lipps lives in the Midwest where he teaches English courses. His work has been published in the Best New Poets, BOAAT, Colorado Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere.

Image credit: Samuel Myles on Unsplash

SWINGERS by Alex Behr

Posted on December 29, 2019 by thwackDecember 29, 2019

SWINGERS
by Alex Behr

I want an easy swing, that parabolic arc over grass, weeds, garter snakes, grubs, snapping turtles, beer cans, rotten logs. My legs out, my head and chest back. My arms taut. My thighs and ass pressed against the ball of rope: extending joy. I want that stomach lurch and gravity unease; blood shivers. I’ll land and wave to the one who pushed me, and I’ll climb back up the hill or out of the water toward that woman I’ve dreamt of so often. My REM time melts into her: strange visions of roads illuminating before us as we ride our bicycles in the dark. Is she dead, too?

We drink cheap wine stolen from Safeway and that woman—she has many names—will scratch her initials on my skin with a rock. Not deep, but enough to see later, before I rub myself to sleep. I’m seventy-nine. Can I admit to that rubbing? Older people who seek pleasure might have their hands tied to the arms of wheelchairs. So they rock back and forth. Maybe they drool. Maybe they moan. We don’t ask why. No one’s told me what’s appropriate now. I’ve been to more funerals than strip joints. I can’t ask my doctor. The only one who’s touched me recently was the nurse, but she stopped those friendly pats once I asked too many times to touch her hair extensions. I try to be friendly and culturally relevant, but I’m off the game. Can’t call anyone a turkey. They wouldn’t know what I meant.

To be a lover of the dead ones.

My last stripper friend died or stopped answering emails. (I should check—we do that now, in our seventies.) I’d wanted to co-write an advice book with her. Her thoughts on “basic dick.” How her vagina is hers. How she walks to demonstrate her dominance. The stripper mystique. No one will rub her velvet dress in a disco without her permission. I let strangers touch me. It’s how I was raised.

That swing: that cleaving from ordinary burdens. I present to clouds, to dirt clods, to the sun that I once believed saw me: spidery veins and rubbered skin. My crooked teeth. My barking laughter. My white roots showing through drugstore black. Something unseemly about the old. The flesh museum.

My age spots. My creaks. My slowness. My brain works like spongy brakes. I need more time for things to make sense, to remember the right word. Climate change is a useful topic with younger people. They want to talk to me, now that Roger’s dead. I took the gazelle rug to Goodwill after one made a fuss in an interview. The ivory-handled cheese knives went, too.

I sit across from Teddy, a man I’ve hired to go through my dead husband’s correspondence. We are in a booth, and the vinyl sticks to the back of my legs. I’m wearing a skirt that’s too short. We got so many clothes in the mail from groupies. I was too cheap to throw them out, but I did donate a lot to Goodwill. It’s embarrassing, what women send. Those stained thongs? The thing about aging: I lost weight. I can fit into the miniskirts, the fringed vests, the rayon jumpers. Most still have a faint scent. Roger always came home with some new odor. The suitcase reeked.

I hired Teddy because he’s handsome, but he’s off. I’m not into perfection. I like off-brand. Always choose the drummer, never the singer. That’s my motto and it’s served me well. Look at me now: I’m financially solvent. Penicillin solved the road romance and tour disease crises, or I insisted that Roger wear condoms. God, who cares now what he did or didn’t do. His ashes are on the bathroom shelf by his dentures.

Teddy, across from me, tells a story while driving French fries through catsup. He offers me a French fry. I shake my head no and sip my herbal tea. It’s about that childhood reckoning. He found maggots in a Hostess Ding Dong at the back of the cabinet, and at first he believed they were Rice Krispies. “I thought,” he says, “the world isn’t what it seems.”

Alex Behr’s writing has appeared in Tin House, The Rumpus, Salon, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, Planet Grim, was published by 7.13 Books.

Image credit: Jacob Rank on Unsplash

A FAMILY MAN by Theo Greenblatt

Posted on December 20, 2019 by thwackJune 2, 2020

A FAMILY MAN
by Theo Greenblatt

[TW: This piece includes sexual assault scenes that may be triggering for some readers.]

Many times she had imagined, graphically and in slow motion, the bullet penetrating the pale, soft flesh of his temple; she knew intimately the faint indent, how it was edged with a line of graying strands slicked back with a dab of Brill cream, the shadowy crater of a chicken pox scar between the hairline and the eyebrow. She saw the skin parting and gently enveloping the smooth, hot tip of the metal missile, as if the bullet were melting its way in, as if the flesh itself welcomed the intrusion. This was the extent of her fantasy. She had never imagined the bullet exiting, or the blood. There was so much blood.

She went to the kitchen for a bucket and some Mr. Clean; took a sponge from the sink, a yellow one with a green scrubbie side, and a roll of paper towels. When she returned to the den she set the bucket down on the floor and began to sponge the blood—and other matter, she noticed—from the wood-paneled wall behind his chair. She worked carefully and methodically, but not with any thought as to “covering her tracks” or destroying evidence. She had no intention of hiding, it was just that she could not bear the mess. She wanted the room, the “scene,” to look clean and well-kept when it was examined. She sponged the entire wall, where sticky flecks of blood glistened as high as she could reach, and down to the floor where it had seeped into the crack between the molding and the patterned carpet. It had a particular gamey odor that wasn’t entirely dispelled by the industrial tang of the cleaning fluid. She almost liked that smell; it reminded her of hunting trips she had gone on when she was small, tramping through cold woods in gray morning light, her hands warmed by the ham and egg sandwiches packed in foil which she was charged with carrying.

She had to change the soapy water in the bucket three times before the wall was clean. She used Windex and paper towels to wipe down the pinkish spray that by now had dried onto the computer screen and keyboard. She winced as her touch on the keys produced an electric crackle and an image came into focus. She spread her hand so that the paper towel hid this image from her view. She could do nothing about his clothes or the blood soaking into the papers on the desk where his head now rested. It created a slowly changing pattern as it oozed and dried across the pages. She did not want to disturb the position of his body. There was a satisfying irony in the way his left arm seemed to point at the hinged picture frame (all the family members in separate frozen moments), his right arm palm up in his lap, head directly face down on the blotter. Not a sleeping pose, not restful, but the grace of arrested motion, a dance collapsed. She felt that the mess was acceptably contained in that small area, limited to his person and what might be considered his personal space. This was, after all, a deliberate act, rich with intent, not some out-of-control crime of passion. This was justice, this was necessity.

◊

It had never occurred to Frank that he could be aroused by the product of his own seed. True, he had felt repulsed by his wife’s body, hard and bloated like a badly upholstered sofa, but he thought that was a man’s natural reaction to pregnancy, and did not seem connected to what came later for him. When, as a young father, he noticed his reaction to the innocent touch of his small children he assured himself that this too was natural. For a long time he did not acknowledge that he moved around them in ways that resulted in their contact with his genitals; carrying them at a particular angle, holding them on his lap just so. When his son Tom was five, six, seven, he was entranced by the way the boy’s small penis evoked the shape of his own member; he could remember touching himself secretly when he was that size, thinking he must be the only person who could feel this because no one had ever spoken of such a thing to him. The two-fold thrill of touching Tom—feeling himself and the boy respond at the same time—was a pleasure he could not bring himself to forego.

As Tom grew older and more like him in size, more adult in his physique, the excitement diminished for Frank. His daughter Karen was beginning to appear less childlike at this time, too, but her maturing body had the opposite effect on him. She was not becoming womanly in the way that his wife Louise was womanly. Instead Karen had a spring-like newness, everything budding and blossoming at once. Her breasts were small and delicately formed, not heavy and pulpy like his wife’s; her limbs were smooth and ropy from outdoor play. Slowly Frank’s desire veered away from Tom and he sought time alone with Karen. At first he only touched her, held her against him for what he knew to be too long, and then secluded himself in the bath or bedroom to relieve his tension. He imagined over and over again the pale almost hairless triangle beneath her bathing suit bottom, and her slim legs parting like a cheerleader’s V.

The anticipation he created with this fantasy eventually became unbearable to him. Finally one night, fetching Karen from a late babysitting engagement, he consummated his need for her in just the way his imagination had detailed so many times. She had been asleep when he picked her up and he had suggested she lie down in the back seat of the Taurus on the way home. She didn’t question his pulling off the road or his clambering in on top of her. He avoided looking at her frightened face, pressed his mouth against her neck instead, feeling his own hot breath create a wet patch on her shirt collar. He drove the rest of the way home in red-faced silence, grateful for the solid seatback between himself and his daughter.

After the first time with Karen he could hardly bring himself to caress his wife. Louise was not unaccommodating, but he found her body grotesque in comparison with Karen’s. He developed the habit of staying up late to watch the news and Louise went to bed uncomplainingly without him. Nightly he would enter Karen’s room and, in the muffled dark beneath her flowered duvet, whisper hoarsely his love for her until he spent himself there.

Frank declined to examine this behavior in depth. He was sure he was a normal man with normal needs and desires. Just as no one had ever spoken to him as a child about the pleasure of touching himself, he assumed now that other men gave in to this uncontrollable urge and simply didn’t discuss it. Now that it had become part of his routine, he was able to set aside his thoughts of Karen during the day; it was a part of his life that simply didn’t touch on the rest.

When Karen started high school, he forbade her to date; she was allowed out only with groups, and kept to a strict curfew. Louise concurred unquestioningly with this. For Karen’s safety, it was understood. During these years Karen’s body changed, became hardened to him, and when at last she left for college, Frank had steeled himself to the loss. By this time he had outfitted the den with a home computer, and was finding his consolation online. Here in the privacy of his home office, while Louise assumed he was paying bills and poring over sports scores, he was able to find hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of boys and girls like his children had once been—gentle, delicate-looking children whose bodies appeared soft and compliant. He gazed with unstinted longing at their tender private parts, imagined their small hands running over his flesh, and was content to massage himself to climax this way rather than resort to relations with Louise.

For several years Frank looked no further than his computer screen for fulfillment of his sexual desires, and the period of his nightly conjugations with Karen faded into a blurry, unreal memory. It was easy to pretend it had never happened since he was certain that he shared the secret with Karen only. Karen herself never alluded to it, although relations between them were always distant and a little formal. He was not close with Tom, either, although no real animosity ever surfaced, and he had truly forgotten the extent of his earliest preoccupations with his son. Occasionally it occurred to him that this was not the sort of father he had set out to be, aloof and forbidding, but he did not really feel that he could have done anything differently.

When grandchildren came into his life, Frank allowed himself to be carried away by the same sense of fatefulness, of life’s inevitable course. At first when Tom and Karen visited with their own young families, he stayed out of the way, allowing Louise to sponge up the milky pleasure of having babies in the house again. But as they grew into toddlers and older, he felt the children sought him out. Louise’s attention was not enough for them, or it was diff

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