Miriam Libicki, Introduction by Tahneer Oksman
TURNING RIGHT ON CASSADY: A Visual Narrative
The cover image of Miriam Libicki’s five-page comics essay, “Turning Right on Cassady,” shows an oversized and emptied pair of sandals superimposed on a street map of Columbus, Ohio. Sandals, and feet more generally, feature prominently in this short but evocative piece, which recalls a teenager’s fitful and defiant walk across town to get to the north end of a street that touches home.
Those familiar with Libicki’s work will recognize in this short essay the themes of alienation, rebellion, and rootlessness that wind their way through her semi-autobiographical serial comic, jobnik! As in “Turning Right on Cassady,” the protagonist of jobnik! is often in search of a tangible connection to place, a place whose absence expresses itself through an intangible sense of longing and disconnection. Here, in short bursts of colorful images, the narrator’s observations of the sights and scenes that surround her, each bound in symmetrical rectangular panels, blur the distinctions between front and back, up and down, inward and outward. We are plunged into the point of view of a teenager whose conflicting needs—for independence and safety, adventure and refuge—dissolve conventional notions of time and space, and expose us to a world that feels, somehow, alluringly out of scale.
In discussing her process of putting this comic together, Libicki explained that she used Google Street View to help her reimagine the journey. As she described it, “One afternoon at my computer I virtually reenacted the whole walk.” In “Turning Right on Cassady,” the reader, too, is invited on a virtual reenactment, one that deploys the power of comics to allow you to walk a mile (or seven) in someone else’s Tevas.
–Tahneer Oksman, March 2015
Miriam Libicki was born in Columbus, Ohio. After living in Jerusalem and Seattle, Washington, she is now based in Vancouver, BC. She completed her B.F.A. from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is currently completing her M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She is the creator of the autobiographical comic series, jobnik!, which recounts her service in the Israeli army during the Second Intifada. Her other nonfiction comics have been published by Rutgers University Press, Alternate History Comics, The Ilanot Review, and jewcy.com.
Tahneer Oksman is the Graphic Narrative Reviews Editor for Cleaver Magazine. Her book on Jewish identity in contemporary women’s graphic memoirs is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. She is Assistant Professor and Director of the Academic Writing Program at Marymount Manhattan College.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #9.
Kim Steele lives in Chicago, where she spends most days reading near the space heater. Kim Steele has been previously published in the flash fiction zine Oblong and writes the occasional book review for Cleaver Magazine. You can follow Kim Steele on twitter at KJ_Steele.
Danielle Harms is a writer based in Washington, DC. She is an Assistant Term Professor in George Mason University’s English Department, where she earned her M.F.A. in creative writing and was the editor-in-chief of Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art. Danielle Harms writes about everything from the classroom and overseas travel to her research on the Korean women who survived “comfort stations.” Read more at 
Lucy Ribchester was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and grew up in Fife. In 2013 she won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for fiction. In January 2015 she was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award, and the same month her first novel The Hourglass Factory was published in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand by Simon & Schuster. She also writes about dance and circus for Scotland’s The List magazine.
Sally J. Johnson received her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where she served as managing editor for the award-winning literary journal Ecotone. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Collagist, Bodega, The Pinch, Weave, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere. She is a poetry editor for Green Briar Review and works as a publicist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Find her online 
Suzanne Cope is the author of Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Spirits and the Return of Artisanal Food and has published essays and articles in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, Render, The Riveter, and New Plains Review, among others. Suzanne Cope is also a creative writing studies and food studies scholar and teaches writing at Manhattan College.
Jeremy Freedman is an artist and writer living in New York City. His photographs have been exhibited in Europe and the United States and were recently featured in Redivider, The Monarch Review, The Citron Review, and The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Cartagena, Eclectica, Otoliths, The Wilderness House Literary Review, Orbis, and elsewhere. More work can be seen at 
Ariella Carmell is an 18-year-old writer from California. Recognized by the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom, Falmouth University, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cadaverine Magazine, Burningword, Crack the Spine, Vademecum, Crashtest, Eunoia Review, and Canvas Literary Journal, among others. She also serves as a blog contributor for The Adroit Journal. Come next fall, she will attend The University of Chicago to study literature and creative writing.
Cathy Ulrich knows lots of other useless things, like how Depression-era criminal Alvin Karpis taught Charles Manson how to play guitar. Her work has been published in Crab Creek Review, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Literary Orphans, and others.
Catherine Nichols is a writer and editor whose stories and articles have appeared in a number of journals, including Vestal Review, flashquake, Every Day Fiction, and Monkeybicycle. Her most recent book, Alice’s Wonderland, explores the many adaptions inspired by Lewis Carroll’s classic. She lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband and their much-pampered pug.
David Novack wrote, produced and directed the IDA Pare Lorentz award-winning documentary Burning the Future: Coal in America (2008), which has screened theatrically and on The Sundance Channel. He has been a producer, post supervisor, and associate producer for many films and television series, including Kimjongilia (2009 Sundance Official Selection). He has a Bachelor of Science in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and a degree in music from Berklee College of Music. He is a professor of film at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design and the director/producer/writer of Finding Babel (2015).
Dylan Hansen-Fliedner is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and poet. He has a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in cinema studies and English, with Honors in creative writing. His poetry has been published by Gauss PDF and 89plus/LUMA Foundation and has been featured in The Atlantic. He is the co-director of the feature film Driving Not Knowing (2015) and co-editor and associate producer of Finding Babel (2015).
Nancy Hightower’s work has appeared in storySouth, Word Riot, Gargoyle, A cappella Zoo, Prick of the Spindle, Prime Number Magazine, and is forthcoming in Sundog Lit. Her short story collection “Kinds of Leaving,” was shortlisted for the Flann O’Brien Award for Innovative Fiction, and Port Yonder Press will publish her collection of poetry, The Acolyte. She currently reviews science fiction and fantasy for The Washington Post.
Kathryn Smith’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Rock & Sling, The Cresset, Theopoetics and RiverLit. She lives in Spokane, Washington. Read more of her work at 
Leticia Urieta is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and is a fiction candidate in the MFA program at Texas State University. She won Agnes Scott’s Academy of American Poet’s prize in 2009 and her work has appeared in Cleaver, the 2016 Texas Poetry Calendar, and Blackheart. Leticia lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and two dogs. She is using her love of Texas history and passion for research to write a historical novel about the role of Mexican soldaderas in Texas’ war with Mexico.
Kallie Falandays is the author of Dovetail Down the House (forthcoming from Burnside Review). You can read more of her work in PANK, Salt Hill, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She runs Tell Tell Editing and edits Kenning Journal.
Heather Jones’s plays have appeared in GLO, an annual festival of one-acts by women, The Philly Fringe Festival, Asheville Fringe Festival, The Dali Museum, and the Tampa Museum. Her writing has been published in literary magazines, including The Louisville Review, Cartagena, and Connotation Press, an Online Artifact. Heather teaches writing at University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. “Willie: Premonition” is adapted from her novel-in-progress, Tennessee Murder Ballad.
Jerrod E. Bohn completed his M.F.A. in poetry in 2010 at Colorado State University. His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Phoebe, The Montreal Review, Smoking Glue Gun, alice blue, FRiGG, SPECS, Word For/Word, Watershed Review and elsewhere. He currently lives in Seattle where he teaches English and yoga, and he enjoys cooking and getting outdoors.
K.C. Wolfe’s essays and short stories have been published in Gulf Coast, The Sun, Prime Number, Joyland, Redivider, Under the Sun, Swink, and other magazines. He serves as the nonfiction editor for the magazine Sweet, and lives, on average, in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Jessica Hudgins is currently earning her M.F.A. at Johns Hopkins University. Her work is forthcoming in Portland Review and Glassworks.
Talila Baron recently completed her debut novel, Blotted Out. Her stage plays have been produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, New York University, and the Abingdon Theatre in New York. A winner of the Wilner Short Story Award, Female Eye Screenwriting Competition, and Jane Chambers Award for Playwriting, Talila Baron was a also a finalist for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, a finalist for the Beverly Hills Film Festival, and a semi-finalist for the Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship. Talila Baron holds an M.A. in creative writing.
Patrick Ball lives in Philadelphia and is currently studying for a doctoral degree in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He grew up in Sheffield, in the United Kingdom, and has had short stories published in the British literary magazines You Stumble Into A Room Full Of Poets and The Cadaverine Magazine.
Marc Labriola is a writer of fiction and poetry. Most recently, his work was published in Hawaii Pacific Review. His story 
Debra S. Levy’s work has appeared in Columbia, Alaska Quarterly Review, Brevity, Little Fiction, and The Molotov Cocktail, among others. She writes fiction and essays, and blogs about dogs and cats at 
Donald Collins is a transgender advocate and X-Files enthusiast from Virginia. He is currently finishing his B.A. in screenwriting at Emerson College in Boston. His debut short fiction appeared in Literary Orphans #16.
Rebecca Lambright is a high school senior from Cleveland, Ohio. Rebecca Lambright holds a National Gold Medal from the Scholastic Writing Awards, was a national finalist in the Norman Mailer High School Writing Awards, and a Kenyon Review Young Writer. Rebecca Lambright spends her time playing the violin and finding new ways to cook grilled cheese sandwiches.
Gabriel Thibodeau studied English and creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Los Angeles, where he writes stories, develops creative content for award-winning children’s products, and occasionally pretends to be other people.
Taylor Rickett received his M.F.A. from Drew University and has placed work with Naugatuck River, Stone Highway, and NEBO Reviews. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, and splits time between fishing, teaching, and writing.
Herman Beavers is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Undergraduate and Graduate Chair in the Department of Africana Studies. He teaches courses in 20th century and contemporary African American literature and creative writing. Most recently, he has published essays on Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Lately, his poems have appeared in The Langston Hughes Colloquy, MELUS, and Versadelphia. He has just completed a scholarly monograph, Changing the Order of Things: Geography and the Political Imagination in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, which endeavors to read Morrison’s more recent novels. He serves as an advisory editor for The African American Review and Modern Fiction Studies.
Jennifer Moore is the author of The Veronica Maneuver (forthcoming, The University of Akron Press), and What the Spigot Said (High5 Press). Her poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Best New Poets, Columbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere, and criticism and reviews in Jacket2, Spoke Too Soon, and The Offending Adam. A native of the Seattle area, she holds degrees from the University of Colorado and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jennifer is an assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio Northern University and lives in Defiance, Ohio.
Ernest Hilbert is the author of two collections of poetry, Sixty Sonnets (2009) and All of You on the Good Earth (2013), as well as a spoken word album recorded with rock band and orchestra, Elegies & Laments, available from Pub Can Records. “Atlantica” will appear in his next book, Caligulan, which will be issued by Measure Press in hardcover in September 2015. He hosts the E-Verse Equinox Reading Series at Fergie’s Pub and works as an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist.
Rachel Hochhauser is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in Per Contra, Clapboard House, and Connu. The recipient of the Pillsbury Foundation Creative Writing Award and an alumna of NYU, Rachel also holds a master’s in professional writing from the University of Southern California, where she served as fiction editor of The Southern California Review. You can find her non-fiction in the likes of Daily Beast, The Date Report, and Inc. Magazine. Recently, she finished her first novel. Find out more at 
Conor Kelly was born in 1952 and grew up in Dublin, Ireland, where he taught in a secondary school for over 30 years. After he retired from teaching in 2011, he moved to rural France where he now lives. His poetry and criticism have appeared in various Irish, British, and American publications, including The Southern Review (Louisiana), Poetry Review (London) and Poetry Ireland Review (Dublin). Conor Kelly has also had poems published in The Huffington Post and Rattle (Poet’s Respond) (USA), Snakeskin (England), The Honest Ulsterman (Northern Ireland), and All Floors (Ireland). Conor Kelly runs a twitter account dedicated to the short poem (
Down by the river, where the banks burn blue with dragonflies of every shape and size, a woman lives alone. And yet the friends who sometimes visited her home have stopped coming due to their suspicion (which they developed independently of one another) that the woman was already entertaining some unknown guest upon their arrival. One friend conjectured that the woman kept a stuffed toy in the house, perhaps a guinea pig or a duck (or something equally gregarious), and did not want her friends to know that she believed it to be real. The reason the kettle on the stove was always hot or boiling when her guests arrived must be because the doorbell had interrupted teatime with her stuffed friend, and not because the woman’s hospitable nature enabled her to anticipate the precise moment of her guest’s arrival (as her friends had previously supposed). Another friend maintained that the woman must have a secret lover, bound and gagged upon the bed. This friend did not wish to imagine the scene any further. A different friend was certain that the first friend (with whom he’d had a quarrel) had arrived there first and instructed the woman to keep his presence a secret, so that he could eavesdrop on their conversation and use it against him later. This caused him to stomp out of the house once and for all, too angry even to remember that he should slam the door for good measure. A cockroach who had stolen into the woman’s bedroom knew the house to be regrettably empty. The cupboards were secure, and there was nowhere dark to go save for under the retreating shoe, so eager to close the distance between itself and its own shadow—one that is lengthening, even now, upon the poorly paved ground.
palette of the door with little rhyme or reason. Lines form leading nowhere. The grooves the dog is building seem to deepen with every blow, as if a hole might form a gateway for him alone. But what is there for the little dog to bother reaching? For what reason is he knocking with the full weight of his body? The light in the other room wavers and wanes, diluted by the light of day. The doorknob is so gold, it catches the sun and seems to turn with the seconds. There is a pool of incandescent drool where the dog has been standing, and one can see his slug-like tongue return to where it singly squirms in sticky darkness. He forgets why his little legs have carried him here, and he exits back into the hall, where the fallen crumbs beckon to him like the time-hardened heels of his master. He sits in obeisance to some command that no one might have uttered long ago.
Ever since childhood, the man has been certain that his own ears are those of an inbred, domesticated rabbit. Not a lop-eared rabbit with ears that wilt before they ever have a chance to bloom, but the kind of rabbit whose ears stick up and spread like wings, or legs, or the two ticklish points at the end of a snake’s forked tongue. The man’s concern over the welfare of his ears increases whenever he is in a low-ceilinged room or lying down with a lover who whispers quietly to him while tousling his hair. She is apt to misjudge the reach of his ears, and her words’ cotton-swab attempts to close in on the circuitry of his thoughts are always destined to fall short. The elevator also irks him since it causes his ears to pop and sets them throbbing like a tuning fork. It is only when he takes a bath that his mind is set at ease. His ears seem to hunker down around his head like the skin of a peeled banana waiting to be swallowed. Their soft weight against his cheeks makes his upright head feel firm and reliable, as if it is capable of dispersing all the soaped-up suds in a triumphant burst of waves and rubbed-together sponges. And yet he can barely bring himself to pull the plug when it’s all over. With its deep, unintelligible language, the drain entices the water to fill its every hollow and descend somewhere unknown with baritone bravado. The man cannot forgive the drain for stealing the element with which he is so intimately acquainted, and so the drums in his ears begin to beat to the rhythm of war. But no one else is aware of the man’s antagonism toward drains, and they do not hear the pounding in his ears. There is only the ticklish feel of a whisker that sometimes slips past the man’s lips when he kisses, and his feet that leave such massive footprints that no one thinks twice about shrinking his head.
It was time to get the baby dressed for the picnic. The bonnet (round and floppy as a cat sitting on an ottoman and luxuriating in the rays that fall upon its fur like so many fleas) had lost its strings. What can be done with a bonnet that is missing its strings? It certainly must not go on the baby’s head, for no matter how sunny the day, a sudden wind might work itself up into a flurry and steal it to use for its own self-beautification, or else simply to make itself visible when there are no trees, flags, clouds, or other friends of wind in the vicinity. And what is worse is that the wind would get away with it. Who, after all, would condescend to prosecute the wind? Perhaps a kite (that has failed to be uplifted) might condemn the wind for lack of trying along with aforementioned theft. And to add a dose of pathos, the baby could be squeezed on the cheeks and persuaded to cry. But all of these conjectures contribute nothing to the sought-after resolution of our predicament. What about the stringless bonnet? What about the picnic? The baby requires some attire, some attention. If this goes on long enough, its diaper will surely need changing, though it’s unclear exactly who is authorized to change a bonnetless baby. And into what exactly? With no bonnet to be had, the baby might as well be an inedible toadstool waiting to be picked up from the ground. A bird might alight on it at any time, which would likely result in more droppings to be dealt with. Even more bothersome is the prosecution of the wind—without it the bird has no free ride and is liable to remain there for a period of time that is incommensurate with its purpose(lessness). And yet, doesn’t the bonnet deserve to be examined more closely? Perhaps the bonnet has consumed its own strings and they are lying hidden in the folds of its belly, wound around like the intestines of the cat who has just finished its dinner. The baby does not know that it is missing a bonnet, that its crown is as hairless as an old man’s, or even that its head is, in fact, a head. Before it can be stopped, the baby props itself into a standing position using the ottoman, and the bonnet is overturned. Soon there is nothing inside the bonnet but the baby’s head, the recovered strings so snug under the chin that the baby’s fat seems to form another bonnet with strings of drool reaching toward the little feet, getting hopelessly tied up along the way.
Emily Grelle holds an M.A. in Russian studies and a B.A. in English. Her work has appeared in journals such as Spoon River Poetry Review, Sundog Lit, Thrice Fiction, Storyscape Journal, and Zaum. She grew up in Chico, California, and also spent several years in Russia and North Carolina. She now lives in a very old house near Monterey, where she works for a novelist and leads a creative writing program for children.
Originally from the Seattle area, Elizabeth Alexander is an undergraduate studying English and creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. She serves on the writing staff and executive board for Classless TV and has been previously published in The Penn Review. She writes fiction, flash fiction, essays, and screenplays.