FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES Collages by Sherry Shahan
Feeling shipwrecked in 2020, I began ripping words from the heart of old magazines. My scissors were like me, rusty and dull. The glue, too thick. My collages resembled drawings found in a kindergarten classroom. I like that about them; it frees me from ideas of what art should be. Decades ago I approached photography much the same way. I rarely considered myself a professional even after my photos appeared in national magazines and newspapers. My collages seem to spill into two categories: those that pick at the scabs of humanity and those that reflect promise and possibility. Both styles express my purpose, passion, and personal truths.
—Sherry Shahan, September 2021
Bizarre Dance
Endurance
Day Dream
Waiting
You Are Not Alone
Floating
Sherry Shahan has wandered the globe as a travel journalist, often watching the world and its people from behind: whether in the hub of London, a backstreet in Havana, or alone from a window in a squat hotel room in Paris; whether with a 35 mm camera or an iPhone. Over the past many months, she’s begun looking inward, living more fully inside her own skin. She is no longer too old or too slow. She moves at her own pace, eschewing imperfections and embracing her authentic female self. Her art and photography have appeared in Los Angeles Times, Gargoyle, december, Backpacker, Country Living, Lemon Sprouting, Open Minds and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and taught a creative writing course for UCLA for 10 years. www.SherryShahan.com
At fifty, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I drove my 1989 BMW motorcycle from Philadelphia to The Hambidge Center in the mountains of northeast Georgia for a three-week writing residency. They provided me with a cottage in the forest, with floor-to-ceiling windows and enough space for a person to spread out their work. My first feelings, when I’d taken off my jacket and sat down, were—as Wendell Berry describes it in “Stepping Off”—“along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement / a little nagging of dread.” It was so damn quiet.
I’ve always felt an aversion to quiet. I was a hyper only child. The kid with the firecrackers and toy soldiers. The teenager with the boombox. As an adult, I am a talker and—I wince to admit it—a loud one. “Silence,” as William S. Burroughs said, “is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
In my humble opinion, I’m qualified to write an essay about silence precisely because I compulsively verbalize. I’m the least silent person in the room. I observe silence from the outside looking in. With the least “natural” perspective on the matter of anyone you know.
◊
The Elephant of Silence built a house beside the sea. It contained all you’d need, including a bed and fine teacups. He liked to wash teacups and stare at the sea out the window. His radio cackled, “The Last Forest contains 8,609 trees. A great number, albeit less than last year.” As he replaced his dishrag, he noticed an odd scene out the steamed window: a bride in white washed up on the surf.
There came a knock. He opened his door. The bride stood there dripping wet beside her pet pig. He invited them in. The bride burst in and, with effort, lifted the Elephant of Silence as if he were her groom. Her legs trembled. She moaned. Held there, feet off the ground, the Elephant of Silence waited patiently as the sun set. The pet pig stared at them with open admiration. Soon the bride was pancaked under the Elephant of Silence.
The pet pig butted him with his snout for pure joy. “Shall we go for a walk?” he asked. The Elephant of Silence packed them a picnic lunch. That night they slept in the Last Forest and their dreams were tinted spinach green. Next morning they began climbing the mountain. It took them 2,000 years. Dynasties fell. The forest vanished behind them. They might have been the last two creatures in existence, for all they cared.
At the peak of that foggy mountain, the Elephant of Silence spoke, at last, with reverence: “I have never met anyone as silent as you.”
I wrote this poem in 2012, soon after I started living with my wife, Tiina. The Elephant of Silence is her, I think. I didn’t mean it that way, but it’s unmistakable. She’s from Finland, where folks value calmness and tranquility over storytelling and arrogance. I’ve been to “parties” in Finland where a group of friends sit for extended periods in complete silence. I’ve sat with men in saunas where none of us say anything; they just sip beer, happy as the day they were born.
When there’s a gap in a conversation, I’m the one who panics and fills it with small talk. It’s taken me years of marriage to grasp the importance of leaving space while talking, for everyone to gather their thoughts. What’s more, Tiina is a philosopher. Smarter than me. Far more logical. It might be clear to you already, that in my poem I’m the pet pig, following along beside her, learning from her.
◊
Being by myself in the forest at Hambidge reminds me of another writing retreat I went on at twenty, in 1989. I—living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I grew up—had just decided that I was a writer, and figured that meant I should have some alone time. So I borrowed my father’s 1975 Ducati motorcycle and drove four hours to our old camp in Bear River, Nova Scotia, where my parents and I lived for a year when I was a kid.
The camp, five miles from town and a quarter-mile in the woods from a dirt road, was no longer the cozy candle-lit gingerbread house of my childhood. It had been adapted by neighbors into a hunting shack. They’d shoved the stove under my parents’ old loft and sat at the window, leaning their rifle on the sill. When a deer showed up, alert and beautiful, they shot it. The spirit of the house was gone.
Nevertheless, I arrived full of gusto, with a pen and a sheaf of empty pages to fill with poems. I was set on finding inspiration deep in the forest. What I found, instead, was silence. And loneliness. I was alarmed. I felt aversion, and wanted to escape.
Pure stubbornness kept me from jumping back on the bike and riding home that very day. I had, after all, bragged to my friends about the writing retreat I was going on. So I sat in the armchair, read a long terrible novel a girl had lent me (Sidney Sheldon, If Tomorrow Comes), wrote a poem, slept, and sped home promptly the next morning.
That might have been the longest day of my life.
◊
I always knew that there was value to being quiet. But it’s hard. I resisted.
Despite the noise I generated, I did grow up in a culture of silence, of a sort. My parents were hippies and meditators. Our house contained walls of books on Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, Sufism. Novels, nonfiction, my dad’s math books, comic books. They were readers. There was space in the house for contemplation and curiosity.
I was an only child, used to creating my own games. I was often in my room playing chess by myself; reading comics; playing with toy soldiers. Was I quiet at those times, or perhaps humming and singing to distract myself? I don’t know.
When I became a writer I didn’t think it would have anything to do with silence. But it does.
◊
Over the days at Hambidge I settle into a routine, making my peace with the quiet. Since it’s my weakness, I sit with it. I meditate. I walk slowly in the forest, staying alert but trying not to obsess about ticks and bears and rattlesnakes. I stare at the ceiling. And, slowly, as the dread diminishes, I feel calmer. My focus deepens.
I love the feeling of quiet pooling, when I give it space. I get hungry for it. After days full of such quiet, even the calm communal dinners—populated by seven polite artists, the banjo player from Atlanta, the sculptor from Arkansas, the painter from Spain—seem jarringly noisy. Then I walk briskly back to my cottage in the semi-dark, shut the door behind me, and lie on my back staring into nothingness, until I feel like myself again.
◊
One morning, while I’m lying on the couch puzzling through a poem, I see a movement. A deer at the edge of the deck. Brown on green. Infinite gentleness.
I sit up straight, she sees me, goes still.
Ears high and aimed at me.
◊
When I try to listen in the Hambidge cottage, I realize it’s never really quiet. The house creaks and tics. There are birds outside. The fridge, every hour or two, hums for a while. Cars on a near road make an oceanic whooshing. And of course my tinnitus: a constant buzzing in my left ear from all the rock concerts and discos I went to in my 20’s.
Quieted, other quiet memories from my life, as if on an ice floe, drift by.
Waiting tables in a packed restaurant in Temple Bar in Dublin, August 1998, at noon the day after the Omagh bombing, we were quiet an entire minute. Not a glass clinked.
Sitting by myself in the desert sand outside Las Vegas in 1992.
Hanging upside down from a tree in Bear River in 1977.
Sitting to dinner with my parents, thousands of times, holding hands before we ate.
◊
It’s more about trying to be quiet—that intention, active listening—than a lack of noise.
Or perhaps, my wife who loves neuroscience might say, the poems come from synaptic firings, which occur in a kind of silence.
All I know is, when I’m quiet the poems happen.
When I allow myself the luxurious time and space to slow down and focus, poems spring up out of the cobwebs. The Elephant of Silence is seated in the middle of the room, his great trunk wrapped around my chair. The Elephant of Silence is the room.
I did not say the poems spring up out of myself, for I, and my feeble psyche, don’t feel like the wellspring. Poems arrive like deer. If I’m quiet, they sometimes surprise me with a visit. If I run up to grab them, they bound away.
II.
Silence is, rather than the negation of sound, quiet.
But is consciousness ever quiet? Not mine!
The mind is a noisy intersection between internal thoughts and external environment. Many of us search our entire lives to find a balance between internal and external, which compete incessantly. We use external stimulus, like music, to distract ourselves from unpleasant internal thoughts. Some drugs, like Adderall, treat this process as an imbalance that can be corrected chemically.
Some religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, suggest we use a mantra—a “sacred” utterance (like Om, or ॐ), considered to possess mystical qualities, repeated with eyes closed—to calm down the internal.
To some extent, I think, the good relaxing feeling derived from mantras, or creating in any form, comes from minimizing internal thoughts and external stimulus, and maximizing focus.
◊
Where does a poem come from? Quick answer: the consciousness of the poet.
Long answer: silence (as I define it), which includes quiet, contemplation, focus, oblivion.
Silence:
1. Absence of sound; quiet 2. Stillness; calmness; meditation; contemplation; imagination; dreams; the inner world
3. Fascination; sustained absorption; focus 4. Oblivion
First comes our intention to be quiet. With luck, we find it. I shut my eyes. I find a spot under a tree. I quit my job pouring drinks in a disco (Dublin, again). I buy earplugs.
Once I want quiet, it walks beside me. Nearer than I’d thought.
Stillness follows. Now I’m sitting, facing the window, not tapping my foot, not fidgeting. Breathing deeply. And with stillness comes images, the inner cities flashing with lightning.
Contemplation, or reflection, is the impulse toward stillness, and vice versa.
I’m no longer running through a crowded market just to get through it, but walking slow and breathing and pausing to look at the bearded man on a unicycle. I’m riding a bicycle rather than driving. I’m sitting by a lake rather than riding a bicycle.
I am the dreamer. The source of all poems.
With contemplation, images percolate, formlessly. Focus brings discipline to stillness. Focus brings form.
I’m sitting by the lake, a cloud catches my eye. Rather than just looking at the next cloud (or my phone), I hold that cloud in the mind, let it pool, see where it leads. Does it look like a fractured ship sinking into the blue? Is it Coleridge’s “painted ship”? Or Franklin’s ship, trapped in the blue ice of the Northwest Passage?
◊
I want quiet, it comes. The body goes still. The inner world shivers awake. I’m suddenly absorbed in my external environment. Objects pool, morph, go meaningful.
These states of mind can blend, occur in different order. Stillness might happen before quiet. Contemplation and focus might mean the same thing. Some dream, others “think.”
And, it’s worth repeating, by silence I don’t really mean the absence of sound. One can contemplate on a noisy street, with focus. Silence is possible within noise.
John Cage’s composition, 4’33” (1952), is about silence but not the lack of noise. His score instructs performers to take their places and not to play their instruments for four minutes, thirty-three seconds. As a result, the piece consists of the sounds of the environment that listeners hear while the performance lasts.
If we foster contemplation and focus, we can find form. Every artwork—no matter how vers libre it seems—has form. In Cage’s piece, the form (albeit malleable) is the length of time (4’33”), the performance space, the musicians, the audience, the time of day, the light.
◊
Oblivion is the limbo-feeling I sometimes get if I stare too long into the forest or night sky. It says that I am an insignificant speck on the face of the earth, and that my life and my poems are meaningless.
This is, I think, the feeling that scared me at twenty in the forest of Bear River. A feeling of lonesomeness bordering on worthlessness.
But if we hold the feeling of oblivion, and don’t resist it, its value emerges. Because the truth is, of course, we are insignificant specks on the face of the earth.
John Donne liked to imagine himself “coffind”: he posed for his own funeral monument, and slept in his future coffin. Such a reminder of death, putting our brief lives into perspective, is surely healthy.
But we should not stay in a coffin for a week. It’s like a whirlpool that sucks us down in the flesh and heaves us out a husk.
◊
The 1968 spaghetti western, Il Grande Silenzio (The Great Silence), directed by Sergio Corbucci, animates this idea of oblivion.
It’s a sublime revenge narrative. The main character, called Silencio, is the fastest draw in the West. As a child, bandits cut Silencio’s throat and kill his parents. During the film he, the “hero,” hunts them down. And falls in love with a Black woman named Pauline.
Il Grande Silenzio is set in winter, with great white vistas swallowing up the tiny towns. People freeze in snow, drown in frozen lakes. Everyone shivers. Death is close.
Corbucci leads us to think that the great silence is God, in the form of Silencio the savior. But at the end, the gang of bad guys (led by Klaus Kinski, with nasty charisma) murder all the good guys, including Silencio.
How refreshing! And uncomfortably realistic. The Great Silence, it turns out, is death, coming up the driveway for the good folks and the bad.
III.
By silence, I don’t mean secrecy or censorship; the silencing of voices. I’m not talking about passivity, or what Audre Lorde meant when she said, “Your silence will not protect you.”
Rather, the silence that encourages the opposite: the quiet that allows us to know ourselves. That lets us become more ourselves; more of whatever it is we are already.
◊
Allowing our wounds to surface (contemplation), holding those wounds long enough to write them down (focus), and deciding which wounds will stay in the poem (extended focus as editor), all require a degree of stillness and quiet and patience.
If we are telling the poem what to say, impatiently (viz. noisily), then the good parts (the cloud “magically” turning into Franklin’s ship) might not have a chance to evolve.
We artists love the accolades and the recognition of art, what little comes to us. But the crux of making artwork happens in moments of silence when we are alone. Or moments—among people, with or without noise—when we, like turtles, have withdrawn and found focus, which is an aspect of silence.
Such silence is the source of the work, its theater, its portal of transmission to the reader.
David Lynch describes, in his non-fiction book Catching the Big Fish, how meditation has been a tool for him to become the person and artist he is. The big fish, he says, is the great idea, the film, the line, the vision. We bring ourselves to the water and wait for it to break the surface.
We cannot force the big fish to come. All we can do is live a life that best allows us to glimpse it, when and if it comes.
◊
A simple and ancient idea. When we’re still and calm, the work appears to us. For an artist silence is, as Lao-Tzu said, “a source of Great Strength.”
Rumi summed it up well: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing / and rightdoing there is a field. / I’ll meet you there. // When the soul lies down in that grass / the world is too full to talk about.”
Where does art come from? That field “beyond ideas of wrongdoing / and rightdoing.”
◊
The deer visits me again. This time I’m reading, facing the big window.
I watch her, but do not move. I don’t even lower the book.
We are both completely still.
John Wall Barger’s essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Hopkins Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry Northwest, Literary Matters, The Rumpus, Rain Taxi, Jacket2, and elsewhere. His fifth book of poems, Resurrection Fail, is coming out this fall with Spuyten Duyvil Press. He’s a contract editor with Frontenac House, and teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. (johnwallbarger.com)
PRESENTATION AND PERFORMANCE: The Art of Reading Your Work in Public
A Masterclass by Author and Actor Dinah Lenney Taught on Zoom
Sunday, October 17, 2021, 3-5 pm ET $100 Limit 6 participants Questions: [email protected]
Cancelled
What’s the secret to a great public reading? Do you worry about losing your place, stumbling over the words, or boring your listeners? In this masterclass we’ll discuss the differences between reading and acting, as well as various strategies for connecting with an audience to leave them wanting more. We’ll talk about your choice of material, how long you should read, and how you can fully prepare in order to feel confident your listeners will be engaged and entertained.
Author Dinah Lenney, a longtime stage and screen actor, will coach you through an excerpt from your own work and help you bring the best to your next live reading. Come prepared with two pages of your text (double-spaced), any genre, in a font that pleases you! These workshops are suitable for writers of every genre and level of experience, from veterans to new writers preparing for their first public readings.
Dinah Lenney has played countless roles on stage and television, from Lady Macbeth to ER’s Nurse Shirley. She’s a graduate of Yale, where she didn’t study theater, the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she did, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she presently teaches nonfiction. Dinah’s taught writing and acting in schools all over the country, and co-wrote Acting for Young Actors with director Mary Lou Belli. The author of The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, she also co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Her latest book, Coffee, was published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. Dinah lives (reads, writes, grinds, brews—in a Chemex, by the way) with her husband in Los Angeles.
Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer from South Florida. She holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University, where she won their 2018 Le Baron Russell Briggs Undergraduate Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Split Lip Magazine, Pidgeonholes, The Conium Review, and elsewhere. She is an incoming MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
AFTERBURN
A Workshop in the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa
3 weeks August 8-29 $200 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected]
Flash fiction may be born in a lightning flash of inspiration, but crafting works of perfect brevity requires time and patience: sometimes cutting, sometimes adding, and sometimes starting all over again. In very short stories, every word must work, and revision is as much a part of writing flash as it is of writing longer prose. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll practice the art of revision. Flash fiction writer and editor Kathryn Kulpa will share first drafts, revisions, and published versions of her own work and that of other flash and short fiction writers. Students will learn different revision strategies and how to apply them to their own work. We will create new flash together and work on taking it through several revisions, and students will also have the chance to bring existing stories to the workshop to revise with a goal of publication.
I’m no longer afraid of the revision process. Kathryn arms you with resources, tools, and exercises that build confidence, then puts you in the editing chair with your own work and others. A well-paced, excellent class.
I loved having the ability to work on the material at my own pace, at my own time. I met several writers who I will continue to stay in touch with.
This was a great workshop that led me places I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. It also resulted in a recent publication. Woot!
I loved the prompts! And Kathryn’s astute feedback, of course!
Revisions are something I tend to ignore. I write pieces and let them sit and gather dust. This workshop helped me to think about writing as a process and not a one and done activity.
Some amazing exercises that I will use over and over for other projects!
Moriah Hampton received her PhD in Modernist Literature from SUNY-Buffalo. Her fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in Entropy, Rune Literary Collection, Hamilton Stone Review, The Sonder Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at SUNY-Albany.
“Everyone wants to have an illusion of themselves, that they’re a bit attractive, but the older I get it seems more important to be absolutely honest and direct.” — Chantal Joffe
When I was a kid I discovered Seventeen Magazine and it really messed me up. I recently googled it and was shocked to see that it debuted in 1944. I always had the impression that it began in the ‘60s or ‘70s when I was a subscriber. From Wikipedia: “It began as a publication geared toward inspiring teen girls to become model workers and citizens. Soon after its debut, Seventeen took a more fashion and romance oriented approach in presenting its material while promoting self-confidence in young women.” I have to disagree with this idea of promoting self-confidence in young women.
What I think it really did was cause many young women to angst about their faces and their bodies; something I did for a very long time. That and having a beautiful mother led me to focus on the topic of aging in a youth obsessed culture when I began my art practice.
I use clay (a medium historically excluded from the fine art world) to investigate the aging process, a notion rejected by many and specifically linked to failure as it relates to women. Through unidealized female faces and figures, I explore themes of identity and memory; referencing my own body to claim agency as the subject and owner of my work. I hand build my pieces with stoneware and paper clay. Colorants including under glazes, stains, oxides and graphite are applied to a figure’s surface to further magnify a countenance of grace and wisdom seen in senescent women.
I create my work through a lens of empowerment to address contemporary issues faced by women.
Lonely Girl Room 315
Lonely Girl Room 315, detail
Lonely Girl Room 122, back view
Truth from Within
Truth from Within, front view
Between Two Worlds
Between Two Worlds, detail
Whisperers
Whisperers, side view
Time’s Relentless Melt
Works
Lonely Girl Room 315
2013
Ceramic, Under Glaze, Iron Oxide, Pastel, Wire
14″ x 10″ x 6″
(photographer – Mike Healy)
Lonely Girl Room 315, detail
(photographer – Mike Healy)
Lonely Girl Room 122, back view
2013
Ceramic, Under Glaze, Iron Oxide, Pastel, Wire
14″ x 10″ x 6″
(photographer – Sean Deckert)
Truth from Within
2016
Ceramic, Copper Carbonate, Wax, Wire
20″ x 36″ x 14″
(Photo courtesy of Phoenix Art Museum)
Truth from Within, front view
(Photographer – Amy Weaver)
Between Two Worlds
2020
Ceramic, Copper Carbonate, Wax, Wire, Desert Debris
21″ x 57″ x 9″ (figure)
(Photographer – Joshua Steffy)
Between Two Worlds, detail
Whisperers
2015
Ceramic, Graphite
10″ x 13″ x 11″
(Photographer- Chris Loomis)
Whisperers, side view
(Photographer – Chris Loomis)
Time’s Relentless Melt
2014
Ceramic, Graphite
8″ x 18″ x 7″
(Photograper – Aaron Rothman)
A native of Philadelphia, PA, Constance McBride’s work centers on issues most experienced by women. When residing in the Southwest, observations of the desert made a transformative impact on her practice. Her work has been supported by grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Forum, Philadelphia Sculptors and the Arts Aid PHL program. Museum exhibitions include Phoenix Art Museum and Udinotti Museum of Figurative Art in AZ, Las Cruces Museum of Art in NM, San Angelo Museum of Art in TX, The State Museum of Pennsylvania and Biggs Museum of American Art in DE. Notable gallery exhibitions include Craft Forms at Wayne Art Center and The Clay Studio National in PA, America’s ClayFest International at Blue Line Arts in CA and Beyond the Brickyard at Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in MT. McBride’s work has received attention from Yahoo News, Visual Art Source, Philly Artblog, Philadelphia Stories, Schuylkill Valley Journal and the international platform Ceramics Now. Now living and working in Chester Springs, PA, she is actively involved with art communities in the Philadelphia metro area. McBride earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Arcadia University, Glenside, PA. See more of her work here.
“Everyone wants to have an illusion of themselves, that they’re a bit attractive, but the older I get it seems more important to be absolutely honest and direct.” – Chantal Joffe
When I was a kid I discovered Seventeen Magazine and it really messed me up. I recently googled it and was shocked to see that it debuted in 1944. I always had the impression that it began in the ‘60s or ‘70s when I was a subscriber. From Wikipedia: “It began as a publication geared toward inspiring teen girls to become model workers and citizens. Soon after its debut, Seventeen took a more fashion and romance oriented approach in presenting its material while promoting self-confidence in young women.” I have to disagree with this idea of promoting self-confidence in young women.
What I think it really did was cause many young women to angst about their faces and their bodies; something I did for a very long time. That and having a beautiful mother led me to focus on the topic of aging in a youth obsessed culture when I began my art practice.
I use clay (a medium historically excluded from the fine art world) to investigate the aging process, a notion rejected by many and specifically linked to failure as it relates to women. Through unidealized female faces and figures, I explore themes of identity and memory; referencing my own body to claim agency as the subject and owner of my work. I hand build my pieces with stoneware and paper clay. Colorants including under glazes, stains, oxides and graphite are applied to a figure’s surface to further magnify a countenance of grace and wisdom seen in senescent women.
I create my work through a lens of empowerment to address contemporary issues faced by women.
[click on any image to enlarge it]
Lonely Girl Room 315
Lonely Girl Room 315, detail
Lonely Girl Room 315, back view
Truth from Within
Truth from Within, front view
Between Two Worlds
Between Two Worlds, detail
Whisperers
Whisperers, back view
Time’s Relentless Melt
Works
Lonely Girl Room 315
2013
Ceramic, Under Glaze, Iron Oxide, Pastel, Wire
14″ x 10″ x 6″
(photographer – Mike Healy)
Lonely Girl Room 315-detail
Lonely Girl Room 122-back view
(photographer – Sean Deckert)
Truth from Within
2016
Ceramic, Copper Carbonate, Wax, Wire
20″ x 36″ x 14″
(Photo courtesy of Phoenix Art Museum)
Truth from Within – front view
(Photographer – Amy Weaver)
Between Two Worlds
2020
Ceramic, Copper Carbonate, Wax, Wire, Desert Debris
21″ x 57″ x 9″ (figure)
(Photographer – Joshua Steffy)
Between Two Worlds 3
Whisperers
2015
Ceramic, Graphite
10″ x 13″ x 11″
(Photographer- Chris Loomis)
Whisperers – back view
Time’s Relentless Melt
2014
Ceramic, Graphite
8″ x 18″ x 7″
(Photograper – Aaron
A native of Philadelphia, PA, Constance McBride’s work explores themes of identity and memory with an emphasis being placed on issues most experienced by women. When residing in the Southwest, observations of the desert made a transformative impact on her practice. Her work has been supported by grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Forum, Philadelphia Sculptors and the Arts Aid PHL program. Museum exhibitions include Phoenix Art Museum and Udinotti Museum of Figurative Art in AZ, Las Cruces Museum of Art in NM, San Angelo Museum of Art in TX, The State Museum of Pennsylvania and Biggs Museum of American Art in DE. Notable gallery exhibitions include Craft Forms at Wayne Art Center and The Clay Studio National in PA, America’s ClayFest International at Blue Line Arts in CA and Beyond the Brickyard at Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in MT. McBride’s work has received attention from Yahoo News, Visual Art Source, Philly Artblog, Philadelphia Stories, Schuylkill Valley Journal and the international platform Ceramics Now. Now living and working in Chester Springs, PA, she is actively involved with art communities in the Philadelphia metro area. McBride earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Arcadia University, Glenside, PA. See more of her work here.
Scroll down for an interview with Jennifer Hayden by Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg
Jennifer Hayden is the author of The Story of My Tits, the Eisner-nominated graphic memoir about her experience with breast cancer. She wrote the webstrips Rushes: A Comix Diary, and S’Crapbook. Her first book, Underwire, was featured in The Best American Comics 2013, and she has appeared in anthologies. She is working on a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner, and a travel novella called Le Chat Noir, about her dicey relationship with France. She has lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and NYU, and is currently quarantining in New Jersey
An animal, let’s say
my dog, has issues
with the end of the world.
She’s lined the back porch
in plastic bottles
to collect moon water
to pour in a juice glass
to drink with breakfast
to douse her children with you are
holy.
In our side garden,
the bees
lap it up like Mountain Dew.
Inside a church,
the pendulumic golden bowl
of donation passes while the soul sits
like an ephemeral burrito
in the abdomen or thorax. These
are her meditations.
Bitch II.
Here wet heat wrinkles
the ridges of stretch marks,
a bellied tomato
vines rot at the speed
of a sleeve of ash,
humidity
stills in a woman’s
vertebra, they’re all sleeping
with their chiropractors.
This is the after.
Man,
left her high and dry as a leather saddle.
Her poems
used to be of
overwhelmingly this
the yellow green of tannery water,
marrow, oily eyes.
Bury a skull, any skull
and cavernous tomatoes
will walk from the fields,
red valves onto pavement.
Bitch III.
Everyone knows how
a biscuit should sit
in the hand. Sage gravied,
say grace-full spring onions
the second largest beginnings.
Here,
the order goes
seed, bulb, biscuit
all split open the same way,
steaming, such delicately constructed
biology. We used
your mother’s recipe.
Over the phone, she and I
spoke of ham hock,
jaws, a creaminess
that could be the inner thigh
of almost spent milk,
the expiration dates.
◊◊
Sophia Friis is from South Carolina and a current undergrad at Furman University for a degree in Sustainability Science. Her work appears in the Barely South Review and the Yellow Chair Review. She keeps bees.
STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT Hospital Service Association
of Pittsburgh
April 22, 1943
Patient Mrs. Margaret Smith Hospital Sew. ValleyCitySewickley
SubscriberDavid Smith Group 1143 Contract 55788
Statement of Account This statement from Blue Cross details the charges for the subscriber’s wife and their baby’s thirteen-day stay in the hospital following the birth on April 8, 1943. The subscriber fulfills his financial obligation for this bill as he will all others during the ninety-four years that will span his life. Throughout his adulthood, he will disparage those who abdicate these responsibilities as “free-loaders,” as “deadbeats,” will flare his nostrils when talking about his brother who was forever calling him for a bail-out. In a thank-you letter to this baby when she was in her late forties, he will tape a three-quarter inch clipping from a magazine: “Depression dad, he was like so many other dads of his generation who had starved their need for love in their hunger for financial stability, for certainty—and for control.” When she receives this letter, this daughter, still in thrall of her father, will be impressed that he is insightful, will feel sympathy that he denied himself the love he deserved. She will miss his more important message, that even he knew he must always be in control.
Hospital Service Association of Pittsburgh The subscriber at the time of this birth was a district manager for the Chevrolet Motor Company. After the war, he will borrow $2,000 from his mother-in-law and buy into a Chevy dealership in a small town in western Pennsylvania. Through time, he will remain an automobile dealer until he sells the business when he is seventy-five years old. He will remain a devoted Blue Cross subscriber after his retirement—allegiance is an important trait for this man.
April 22, 1943 In April 1943, Allied troops had the Germans cornered in Tunisia. Mussolini’s morale was flagging in Italy. The subscriber tracked this news with worrisome fervor. Three days from the date of this statement, he will turn thirty-two and though a father, he needs to get over there before the goddamn war is over. The Army has finally accepted him as a Volunteer Officer Candidate. He will leave for basic training at Camp Wheeler, Georgia three weeks after his third baby arrives, who will turn out to be his most loyal child.
During the three months of training in ’43, the father will report that as an older enlistee, he tried to help the younger, weaker recruits. This was unfavorably noted in his record. A Lieutenant Colonel discovered the subscriber had earned his Able-Bodied Seaman card while a teenager. The Lt. C. offered the elderly volunteer an honorable discharge from the Army in exchange for a two-week training and admission to the Merchant Marines who were in desperate need of experienced men to navigate ships. The subscriber was proud to accept this proposal.
Patient: Mrs. Margaret Smith The patient (known as “Peggy” or “Peg”) was born to middle-aged physician, Fletcher White, and humorless Anna Graff, who weighed less than a hundred pounds. Her family had a live-in cook who also functioned as a maid; a laundress who came to the house twice a week; a man who chauffeured her sister and her to where they wanted to go and who served as the butler. Peggy took golf, tennis and piano lessons. In this life of privilege, she never learned to cook more than hot cocoa and a three-minute egg, or to balance a checkbook, or to wash and curl her hair.
After two failed attempts at college, Peggy completed a course at Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School. In 1936, she responded to a newspaper ad to work for a securities firm. Her interviewer was the subscriber. With Anna’s focus on her older daughter who she was trying to marry off to a man of the proper social class, she missed Peggy’s high-octane sexual attraction to the six foot, four-inch tall, handsome salesman from New Jersey. The couple eloped in June of ‘37.
By the time of this hospital statement, Peggy’s husband had worked for Chevrolet several years, parking her in towns far from family and friends. The country was now at war. In a January ‘43 letter to a friend, Peggy confided, “It took me a long time to come around to [it] (the subscriber enlisting in the war), but I think he is right. He has had the bug since last March (long before I was ‘Preg Peg’ once more). He has tried every branch since then.” Married almost six years, she must have had an inkling that she would endure a marriage defined by bending to her husband’s bidding. In time, she will end up with six kids, not the two she had always imagined. She will live on a farm the subscriber buys without telling her. Peggy’s resistance will always be minimal and ineffectual, unknown to him. Behind his back, this baby, when a girl, will overhear her mother say from time to time, “After Dave washed out of Officer’s School, he was taken in by the Merchant Marines.”
Hospital: Sew. Valley Of their brood of six, this baby will be the only one born at Sewickley Valley Hospital. In the same letter to her friend, Peggy had written: “My father died the day after Thanksgiving. If he were still alive, we wouldn’t have considered my going back home but it works out very well this way as Mother has room for us, Snuffy [the older son] can go to kindergarten & Mother has a colored gal & a gas furnace—so there will be no cooking, dishes or furnace.” (In her previous home in the Allegheny Mountains, Peggy had battled the coal furnace and the drafty windows that let in the snow. She resorted to chopping up the children’s wood toys for kindling.) One can picture Peggy happy to be resting for almost two weeks after this baby’s birth, relieved to be away from her noisy two- and four-year-olds left with her mother. The baby, while growing up, will hear her mother say on occasion, “Children should be seen, but not heard.”
City: Sewickley Sewickley was a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh. Families belonged to country clubs and had help to manage the household. Children were sent to boarding schools in the East. Anna married Fletcher assuming wealth in the family—after all his father was Judge White of some renown. But her husband treated doctoring as a hobby, generating a meager income. Fortunately, Anna’s bachelor uncle Harry set up a trust fund for his great-nieces. She managed it with great care, so no one in town was the wiser.
Peggy will always think of herself as a Sewickley girl. When her children meet new friends, she will ask, “Does she look like somebody?” This means, they all will know, does the friend look like they could have come from Sewickley, from old money, from the upper class.
Subscriber: David Smith Known as “Dave” or “D.H.” by his friends, his fellow auto dealers, the subscriber will be called Dad by four of his children (Snuffy, the oldest, will refer to him as “the old man”), but this baby girl will continue to call him Daddy long after he dies.
At the time of the hospital bill, he has survived the Great Depression by tumble-weeding through jobs as an orderly at the Massachusetts State Hospital for the Epileptic Insane, riding “shotgun” running booze from New York to speakeasies in Hoboken, NJ, as a door-to-door Hoover Vacuum Cleaner salesman. When he is eighty-five, his adult children will gather at the home of this daughter. They will videotape him retelling his Depression tales, their voices chirping in the background, exhorting him to retell their favorites. He was born the oldest of three boys, named for his father, a “cold Irish Protestant” (the subscriber’s words). From whom he learned the art of storytelling is unclear, but he relished a rapt audience and could weave a yarn worth paying for.
It is known from a letter from Peggy to her husband that he shipped out of New York with the Merchant Marines in March 1944 (Dave, the romantic in this couple, saved every bit of correspondence he ever received from his wife). It can be surmised he was living with his wife in Sewickley after his discharge from the Army and during the early months of this baby’s life. To her twenty-year-old brother-in-law, a bomber pilot stationed in Germany, Peggy will write that her infant was driving Dave crazy as they tried to wean her from the bottle to a cup. She suggests her husband might willingly sell this squawking baby “for a nickel.” (Peggy is known for her sense of humor.) Indeed, the mother will recount in later years how the baby wailed so furiously, they had to close the windows so as to not disturb the neighbors. Perhaps the parents should have noted her staunch resistance to giving up the bottle might have foreshadowed the girl’s determination to figure out how to get what she needed in this family.
Dave will not see his baby again until early 1945 when he returns stateside following an injury during the Battle of Anzio. In following years, he will refer to her as “the runt of his litter” due to her scrawny size. It will sound like a term of endearment to the girl who by then has learned how to become his favorite.
Group: 1143 Contract: 55788 The fortuitous date of this birth—while the subscriber was still employed by Chevrolet and before he left for Basic Training—allowed Blue Cross to cover the majority of the charges for the hospital stay. Timing will continue to work in Dave’s favor. He will own the Chevy dealership in the 1950’s when his loyal customers buy new cars every other year, move on to Volkswagen just as the VW bug becomes a craze, then to Mazda when Americans begin buying Japanese cars. He will purchase his 109-acre farm, then all the surrounding farms as land is appreciating in value.
His children will all grow into hard-working, good-hearted people—no drugs, excessive alcohol, no trouble with the law. Yet, ever the pessimist, Dave will not view his life as a success. In his eighties, he will regularly phone this daughter with revolving complaints about his other children. Money will be at the root of his dismay as he ruminates about which ones have taken advantage of his largesse. “Everything in my life turns to shit,” he will tell her. This daughter listens without pointing out how absurdly lucky he has been.
ACCOMMODATIONS:
Private_____x__________ Semi-Private_____________ Ward______________ Seriously—could anyone consider that Peggy would not be in a private room? Though Dave will make frugality his hallmark, chanting ad nauseum “Waste not, want not,” “A penny saved is a penny earned” to his children, he will also want to be viewed as a man able to provide handsomely for his wife. In those early years of their marriage, he will never complain about bills from Lang’s, their town’s tony dress store, or for the furniture Peggy and the interior decorator select at the Joseph Horne Department Store in Pittsburgh. His bitterness about their different values around money will come years later.
Days’ stay: __13______ {Flat rate $___7.50___________ $97.50 $65.00 {Rate per day ……………..12 Baby 1.00 12.00 12.00
Baby: The infant will not be identified on this bill, but she will be listed on the birth certificate as Carol Earhart Smith. The child will learn as she is growing up that she was named for her mother’s favorite uncle, Carroll. She will also be told Carroll is how her name is spelled on her Baptismal Certificate though she has no record of it. Her mother will refer to her as Carol in letters to the father during his stint in the Merchant Marines. Carol will learn to write her name with that spelling as she enters first grade. However, when she attends a prestigious girls’ school for her freshman year of high school, she will somehow become Carroll. She will never recall how this happened, which is astoundingly odd as she will be known throughout her life for her excellent memory. Carroll will like this spelling as it differentiates her from so many other Carol’s with the popular name. Due to all the unaddressed drama in her family life, she, by the age of fourteen, will have learned to avoid questioning what she doesn’t need or want to understand.
Though a sober young child, this daughter will become chatty by first grade and, while an excellent student, she will receive “Carol talks too much” on every report card. From time to time, she will be a bit of a smarty-pants, challenging her Bible-school teacher on how many books there are in the Bible, knowing full well most people do not include the Apocrypha in their count. She will know that how intelligent she is makes her father proud. He will ignore all the “O’s” for outstanding on her report card and will suppress a smile as he finds some minor point to pick on. With the other kids, he will focus on how they need to do a whole lot better.
When she is seventeen, Carroll will ride a bus alone for two days to Rapid City, South Dakota. Though she has been led to believe there will be a job for her, it turns out there is none. She will on her own organize a program for Oglala Sioux Native American children at a community center. Liking this feeling of doing good will convince her to pursue a career in social work. For more than four decades, Carroll will treat adolescents, couples, individuals—depressives, alcoholics, incest survivors, schizophrenics, those with bi-polar disorder, conflicts with family members. During this time, she will have four children, a caring husband and will believe herself fortunate, so fortunate to have had such a normal childhood, such a happy life. Her problems are minimal compared to her clients.
Carroll will be relieved she is nothing like her mother who she has always viewed as shallow, a lightweight holding no power. She will make her father her role model—frugal, well-organized, a doer, in control of his life. Her filtered lens, in refusing to acknowledge the other parts of him, will constrain her relationships with her siblings to ones that are friendly, but guarded.
Six years after her father’s death, her reverence for him will fall apart.
That Peggy would have a phone in her private room is no surprise (though the charge, not covered on the subscriber’s plan, equals almost half that of the stay of the infant). Who she called is a mystery. Did she talk daily with her little boy and toddler daughter, reminding them to be good, to say please and thank you? It’s impossible to imagine her telling them “I love you,” as no child will hear her utter those words while growing up. Grandmother Anna caring for them was not known to tolerate any sign of what she considered rowdiness. After Dave leaves for Officer’s Training, then months later for the Merchant Marines, Anna will complain so much about the children, Peggy will ship Snuffy to his father’s parents in New Jersey where the boy will be unconditionally adored for the only time in his life. Perhaps the phone sat idle for most of the days, used only to commiserate with a friend or two whose husbands were already overseas. Perhaps she avoided hearing how her children misbehaved by allowing that phone to rest in its cradle. Never one to consider the cost of things, she would not have worried about her husband paying for something she rarely touched.
TOTAL CHARGES_______________________________$129.44 $94.60 SUBSCRIBER SAVING__________________________ $ 94.50* [mistake] BALANCE TO BE PAID BY SUBSCRIBER______ $ 37.84* [correct balance]
Services as indicated are hereby acknowledged:
__________________________________________________
Signature of SUBSCRIBER
Dave signs David H. Smith in his legendary scrawl, the “D,” “H” and “S” slanted to the right and large enough to smack you with. Smacking comes to mind with this father as he will be remembered for hitting the back of his children’s heads for spilling milk at dinner, for moving too slowly to complete their chores, for not grabbing piglets fast enough when he was trying to deworm them, or for any number of minor infractions. Smacking will include his badgering with vicious words and the frequent use of his belt. When his children are adults, they will have a broad range of memories about, and feelings toward, their father. Some will hold onto fierce bitterness, some a messy mix of fondness and loathing. Carroll’s devotion, for the duration of his life, will be unwavering.
The subscriber’s signature will reflect how he lived up to all his financial obligations whether they be the annual bank loans to purchase new cars, college educations for his children, the dozen years of assisted living care for the wife he stopped loving decades earlier. He will disperse much of his wealth to his children through shares in his land and auto dealerships (though he will also keep track of those he feels have taken advantage of his generosity).
Only after her father’s death will Carroll learn about the cruelty he foisted on several of her siblings, recognize his crushing control over every financial, physical, and emotional part of the family’s life. Only then will she come to understand that her father left this earth with a balance owed.
After a career in social work, Carroll Sandel took her first class at Boston’s Grub Street Writing Center in 2010 and felt as though she had leapt off a cliff. That exhilarating, terrifying feeling re-emerges each time she sits at the computer to write again. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, Pangyrus,r.kv.r.y., The Drum and Grub Daily. She was a 2014 and a 2017 finalist for the nonfiction prize in New Letters. Currently she is working on a memoir of linked essays exploring her untrustworthy memories.
WHAT WILL GROW YOU UP REAL FAST, HE SAID
by Will Schick
“What will grow you up real fast,” he said, “is doing Little League for twenty-some years.”
I waited for the punchline, but Norm kept on talking.
I gestured to the waitress to pour me another cup of coffee.
A man dressed as a rooster, mask and all, was in the parking lot doing the worm, the moonwalk, the Bernie, twirling a poster board shaped like an arrow with the words “Super Pollo Rico” printed on it. I thought, What’s this Rooster Man doing out there? He should be on a professional dance team or something.
Norm went on.
“When you’ve got a house with a kid in the suburbs, and your wife says, ‘We should sign our boy up for T-Ball,’ so you sign your kid up for T-Ball. You’re up there on the bleachers and it’s cold and raining, and your kid can’t hit the damn ball for nothing. And the last place you want to be is at this park on the cold metal benches, but you smile anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to do. You sit back and try and relax and sip on the bit of whiskey in your mug.”
I thought, Man, is Norm really going to make me sit through another one of his stories?
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“And then the kid goes on to play in fast pitch games, so you start volunteering to coach.
“Every night after dinner you’re out in the yard playing catch. There’s baseball camp in the summer, trips to Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame, and those stupid little Topps baseball cards you buy.”
A woman in a decrepit station wagon pulled up to Rooster Man and said something that set him off. He threw down his rooster mask screaming, flailing his arms like a literal chicken with its head cut off, kicking the USMC and OIF stickers on the bumper of the car before it skidded out the parking lot.
Then he started crying.
I turned back to Norm, who was blabbing on about T-Ball or something.
“He makes varsity pitcher and takes the team to all-state and nationals. Because, you know, the town you’re in is just one of those places that always wins. There’s college scouts and they want to send your boy to school. You pack up your station wagon and head out to tour them. You don’t want your boy to be strapped for cash while he’s studying and playing ball, so you send him money every month. You call and ask him if he’s doing okay. Every now and then, you drive up to his school to watch his games.”
I didn’t want to listen to this shit. Norm was being Norm and I knew the story could go on forever. I looked out the window. Rooster Man was trying to break the poster board, holding it over his knee, cursing like it was taunting him.
I texted my girlfriend. I figured maybe I’d check this Super Pollo Rico place out, maybe I’d get us something on the way home tonight. “Chicken tonight, babe?”
“And then right when your boy is about to graduate, your wife gets sick with something the doctors say is no big deal. But it is a big deal, and when you find out about it, it’s too late. And they apologize to you, but it doesn’t matter, because she’s dead. Your savings are gone, you’ve lost your job, you’ve got a leak in your roof, and groundhogs are starting to eat up your lawn. And when you think things can’t get any worse, your son refuses to talk to you.”
My phone dinged with a message. “Chicken sounds so good :)”
It was only 7:30 and Norm was on about this cancer story again. I wanted to say, Jesus, Norm, who doesn’t have a sob story? I mean, I lost my mom to cancer when I was 12. My dad kicked me out my house when I was 16. At least your son’s still around even if he doesn’t talk to you. Get over yourself, Norm. But I didn’t say anything. I let him go on.
“The kid says you were never really there when he was growing up. He starts to listen to your crazy in-laws. They say stuff to him like, ‘Your father’s the one who killed your mom’ because they think your insurance was shit. They blame things on your drinking, and all your son remembers are the few times you got drunk and said some stuff to his mom when he was a kid.”
“Yeah. Like drinking’s a crime, right?” I said. Maybe if I changed the subject, I could point out the drama going on in the parking lot. But Norm looked past me and kept on talking like he always does.
“He forgets all about how you used to coach his baseball games, the time you spent with him in the yard, the things you did to make him happy. But you don’t complain, you don’t fight. You loved his mother, and you love him too. And because he’s your only family, you decide to just plow on.”
I thought, Man, Norm’s really trying to get me to feel sorry for him. At least we aren’t outside twirling a poster board for money. We have real jobs. If there’s anyone we should feel sorry for, it’s that Rooster Man.
Norm’s phone finally buzzed with the address for the bathroom job we’d been waiting on.
“Time to go, kid,” Norm said. We got up from the table and paid our bill.
“Hope you get to connect with your son sometime,” I said.
“He died a few years ago back in Iraq.”
I’d been working with him for six months now. It was the first I ever heard him say anything about his son being dead.
I figured I should say something, but Norm was out the door, on the way to his truck. I followed him to the parking lot and climbed into the cab.
“What you make of that guy in the rooster outfit?” he said.
“I been trying to tell you,” I said. “What’s he been through?”
He turned the key in the ignition.
“That’s the kind of shit that will grow you up real fast,” he said.
Will Schick is a Marine Corps veteran and current MFA student at American University in Washington, D.C. His work appears in a variety of military publications including the Marine Corps Gazette, the US Naval Institute’s ProceedingsMagazine, and Duffel Blog. In his off-time, Will serves as a volunteer writing group leader for the homeless.
CHILDREN DANCE ON GRAVES[1]
by Anon.
collected by Sir Peter Cotton
edited by Sophia Lee
In time, he would come to bear great hatred toward the juniper[2] tree. He would hate the soft sheen of its[3] needles and its slender twisting limbs. He would hate the roundness of its berries, so plump and tender. But most of all, he would hate its scent.
The young hunter spent his boyhood years swinging from the boughs of a myrrh tree, in whose oil his nursemaids cleaned his hair[4]. He was an active child, perpetually turning cartwheels around his caregivers and chasing small game in the park[5] around his manor. He would catch rabbits with fur so sleek and fowl with feathers so fine that he didn’t mind at all the quiver of their throats beneath his hands—how fearfully they gazed at him with wide, innocent, and watering eyes; how their hair-lined lips or beaks shuddered for breath, or perhaps whimpered, each emitting long, low croons that would be shrieks were it not for the boy’s hands around their throats, and their limbs thrashing, thrashing, thrashing in pain, struggling to bound away, but all in vain, as their muscles tired, and their bodies whole—head, neck, lids, and limbs—fell limp[6]. It was activity that he favored above all else. Though his tutors endeavored time and again to detain him long enough in the sitting room to discharge a lecture or two on mathematics and rhetoric, his mind, after taking a keen interest in geometry and oratory for some few minutes, wandered toward the window and slipped straight out his head as easily as earwax.
Young Master, if only you had deigned to mind your tutors! Perhaps if you had rather sat in the shade than sprinted in the sun during your youth, you would have had more energy to spare in your manhood[7].
In the first flowers of the young hunter’s spring[8], his extraordinary beauty brought much delight to his nursemaids and to the female society of P——. But of all the young ladies invited into his parlor, only one ever caught his eye, and he had beautiful eyes, far superior to those of Miss Woodhauser of Heartfelt in color and to those of Miss Bennoit of Longborn in fineness[9]—so superior that the young man often thought, prior to meeting Miss Arabella Smith of Paphos[10], that no woman could equal him in strength or beauty.
“But why has not Miss Smith visited the manor in so long?” inquired the old nursemaid.
“Surely,” he replied, “you cannot expect one as busy as Miss Arabella Smith to spend all her time in my parlor. Nor can I be expected to wait in the manor all afternoon for the gracious young lady to bless us with her presence.”
No, one cannot expect that of me any longer. Miss Smith is a vain, selfish, lazy, and simpering little creature. Worse, she is a bore[12]. I would rather dance on my mother’s grave[13].
Footnotes:
[1] “Children Dance on Graves” is a modern translation of CDOG MS 150316, originally collected by Sir Peter Cotton in the early 19th century and now held at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Center at Palvent Library. In 1831, the full manuscript, whose title and author are unknown, suffered extensive damage due to a fire at the Ashburnham house. “Children Dance on Graves” is all that remains of the manuscript.
[2] “Juniper” is derived from the Latin juniperus, from junio (‘young’) and parere (‘to produce’).
[3] There is some doubt as to what this word actually says. Many feminist literary scholars have argued that in the original manuscript the word is “her” rather than “its”, and that the juniper embodies the woman who is the hunter’s object of both desire and hatred. Unfortunately, the damage sustained by CDOG MS 150316, in addition to the rather untidy penmanship of the author or scribe, has prevented consensus among even the most skilled graphologists. I have transcribed the word here and in the three instances following, as “its” in order to avoid the provocation of what may be rightfully called biased interpretations.
[4] Compare Adonis’ birth in Metamorphoses X. The princess Myrrha gives birth to Adonis after she has been transformed into a tree. The naiads that find the baby bathe him in drops of myrrh, the tree’s tears.
[5] This is strikingly similar to Venus’ sexual analogy of her body to a park in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.
[7] Many critics have argued that the hunter’s “manhood” refers both to his age and to his genitals.
[8] Compare the diction Ovid uses to describe Orpheus’ affairs with young boys in Metamorphoses X.
[9] Perhaps it is merely chance that the names Miss Woodhauser of Heartfelt and Miss Bennoit of Longborn bear similarities to Miss Emma Woodhouse of Hartfield and to Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn.
[10] Paphos, on the island of Cyprus, is known as the city closest to the legendary birthplace of Venus.
[11] A significant piece of the manuscript here has been burnt. We can infer, however, from the remaining pages and from other 18th-century writers’ sparse references to “Children Dance on Graves” that Arabella is a young, independent Englishwoman of a large estate who reciprocates the young man’s affections during his courtship. We may also infer that some private intimacy occurs, or begins to occur, between the young man and Arabella, resulting in the great embarrassment of the man, the termination of his courtship, and his subsequent scorn of juniper trees, juniper perfume, progeny, cemeteries, women, and Miss Arabella Smith of Paphos.
[12] Note the homophony of “bore” and “boar.” Once again, the author seems to be trying to link his story with that of Adonis, who is famously impaled by a boar in his groin.
[13] There are those who argue that he has danced on his mother’s grave. If we take the young man to be an Adonis figure, we may also interpret his boyhood swinging on the myrrh tree as a “dance”, of sorts, on his mother’s body.
Sir Peter Cotton MBE is an British linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician political commentator, social justice activist, and anarcho-syndicalist advocate. Sometimes described as the “father of modern linguistics”, Sir Peter is also a major figure in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the “world’s top public intellectual” in a 2005 poll.
Originally from New Jersey, Sophia Lee is a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, studying English and Linguistics. She serves on the editorial board of The Penn Review and is currently working at Penn Press, the Penn English Language Programs, and as an assistant to Sir Peter Cotton MBE.
UN PETIT D’UN PETIT
from Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames by Unknown
discovered by Luis d’Antin Van Rooten
Un petit d’un petit
S’étonne aux Halles
Un petit d’un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu’importe un petit d’un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.
Luis d’Antin van Rooten, was born in Mexico City, coming to the U.S. as a child. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA degree in architecture, and worked in that field until the second World War. He developed an interest in the stage, and acted at the Cleveland Playhouse. His vocal qualities got him into radio, and in addition to radio serial work (“Nero Wolfe” was a prominent starring role), he got recruited by the Army as a radio announcer. His excellent language skills made him especially valuable, as he could broadcast in Spanish, French, and Italian, in addition to English.
Sherry Shahan has wandered the globe as a travel journalist, often watching the world and its people from behind: whether in the hub of London, a backstreet in Havana, or alone from a window in a squat hotel room in Paris; whether with a 35 mm camera or an iPhone. Over the past many months, she’s begun looking inward, living more fully inside her own skin. She is no longer too old or too slow. She moves at her own pace, eschewing imperfections and embracing her authentic female self. Her art and photography have appeared in Los Angeles Times, Gargoyle, december, Backpacker, Country Living, Lemon Sprouting, Open Minds and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and taught a creative writing course for UCLA for 10 years. www.SherryShahan.com
John Wall Barger’s essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Hopkins Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry Northwest, Literary Matters, The Rumpus, Rain Taxi, Jacket2, and elsewhere. His fifth book of poems, Resurrection Fail, is coming out this fall with Spuyten Duyvil Press. He’s a contract editor with Frontenac House, and teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. (
Dinah Lenney has played countless roles on stage and television, from Lady Macbeth to ER’s Nurse Shirley. She’s a graduate of Yale, where she didn’t study theater, the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she did, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she presently teaches nonfiction. Dinah’s taught writing and acting in schools all over the country, and co-wrote Acting for Young Actors with director Mary Lou Belli. The author of The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, she also co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Her latest book, Coffee, was published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. Dinah lives (reads, writes, grinds, brews—in a Chemex, by the way) with her husband in Los Angeles.
Jennifer Hayden is the author of The Story of My Tits, the Eisner-nominated graphic memoir about her experience with breast cancer. She wrote the webstrips Rushes: A Comix Diary, and S’Crapbook. Her first book, Underwire, was featured in The Best American Comics 2013, and she has appeared in anthologies. She is working on a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner, and a travel novella called Le Chat Noir, about her dicey relationship with France. She has lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and NYU, and is currently quarantining in New Jersey
Sophia Friis is from South Carolina and a current undergrad at Furman University for a degree in Sustainability Science. Her work appears in the Barely South Review and the Yellow Chair Review. She keeps bees.
After a career in social work, Carroll Sandel took her first class at Boston’s Grub Street Writing Center in 2010 and felt as though she had leapt off a cliff. That exhilarating, terrifying feeling re-emerges each time she sits at the computer to write again. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, Pangyrus, r.kv.r.y., The Drum and Grub Daily. She was a 2014 and a 2017 finalist for the nonfiction prize in New Letters. Currently she is working on a memoir of linked essays exploring her untrustworthy memories.
Will Schick is a Marine Corps veteran and current MFA student at American University in Washington, D.C. His work appears in a variety of military publications including the Marine Corps Gazette, the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings Magazine, and Duffel Blog. In his off-time, Will serves as a volunteer writing group leader for the homeless.
Sir Peter Cotton MBE is an British linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician political commentator, social justice activist, and anarcho-syndicalist advocate. Sometimes described as the “father of modern linguistics”, Sir Peter is also a major figure in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the “world’s top public intellectual” in a 2005 poll.
Originally from New Jersey, Sophia Lee is a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, studying English and Linguistics. She serves on the editorial board of The Penn Review and is currently working at Penn Press, the Penn English Language Programs, and as an assistant to Sir Peter Cotton MBE.
