Lillian Lowenthal is a recent graduate of Vassar College, where she majored in Creative Writing and minored in Asian Studies. Lillian currently lives in Baltimore and is working to complete the first draft of a novel. In her free time, she swims, rides horses, and is teaching herself to sew.
The oldest version of my forthcoming middle-grade novel that I can access on my computer is dated 2010, though I know the drafts go back much farther. For one thing, these pages have equal signs where apostrophes should be, indicating that it was wonkily converted to Microsoft Word from WordPerfect. Anyone remember WordPerfect? I recall that the initial glimmer of the idea came to me soon after the release of my first book—and only other children’s novel—when my now twenty-six-year-old son was two.
As is often the case with fiction, the idea was born out of an image from my own life: me, as a little girl, staring at a childhood photo of my much older half-sister and noting the similarities in our faces, along with something else I recognized, something beyond appearances yet somehow there, even in a black and white snapshot. This wasn’t a sister I was close to. In fact, I barely knew her. For most of my childhood, my parents had passed her off as a distant cousin. Still, our resemblance was unmistakable and that fascinated me. Meanwhile, the sister I lived with and loved fought with our mother constantly and, the year she was twelve and I was six, she ran away. Back then, running away and general “incorrigibility” were illegal offenses for minors. My parents brought her to court and she was sent to reform school, a situation both heartbreaking and complicated.
Even in my thirties, when I saw that glint of a novel in the memory of a small, lonely girl holding a photograph, I barely understood the fraught dynamics of the house I’d grown up in and had no intention or desire to try to capture them on the page. What I was interested in was much simpler and more universal: a younger sister’s longing for an older one who is out of reach.
I named my fictional half-sisters Molly and Alison and separated them, not by the kind of family secrets and strife that kept me from my own sisters, but by mere distance and logistics. Ten-year-old Molly lives with her parents in upstate New York, while twenty-year-old Alison lives with her mother in London. I began a first draft in 1998 when email was still a rarity in homes and video calls were far in our future. Without these luxuries of communication, the sisters write letters on slender sheets of airmail paper. But technology wasn’t the only thing missing from my earliest manuscript drafts: so was a plot. If I had to sum up that original story in an elevator pitch, it would have sounded like this: Ten-year-old Molly begins to worry that she’ll ruin her older half-sister Allison’s long-awaited visit after Molly’s best friend complains that she finds her own little sister clingy and annoying.
A friend who is a literary agent read my first less-than-fifty-page draft and gently told me that more had to happen, and that without trouble there was no story. Fine, I thought, and threw in a necklace that Molly had stolen from Alison the one other time they saw each other, back when Molly was five and Alison fifteen. The truth was I didn’t really buy that such strife was necessary. While reading, I tend to wade through conflict the way I wait out chase scenes in movies, anxious to get back to the good stuff: beautifully rendered scenes and sentences, characters whose inner lives reflect and inform my own.
I should mention that my background is in poetry, which may be why my focus, as both reader and writer, has never been on action and tension, but on sound, resonance, and well-drawn moments. I say may because it occurs to me now—and perhaps you’re ahead of me here—that the very thing I became a reader to escape was the tension in my childhood home and the devastating actions of the adults around me.
That 2010 draft—the oldest salvageable attempt at my novel—ends abruptly in the midst of its one tense passage: Molly returns Alison’s necklace, meaning it as a kind of welcome gift, but is met with her sister’s hurt and fury that Molly had taken it in the first place. It’s an overblown response and a completely unbelievable scene, which I’m sure is why I stopped there and went back to poems and personal essays, genres where I felt sure of myself.
Yet I pulled that fragment of manuscript out of the drawer periodically through the years. I can see why. Molly has a captivating voice, even in her earliest iteration, and the pages contain lovely moments. And there was something necessary in that undeveloped story. While there was no lack of children’s books about divorce or newly blended families—the young protagonists living through the trauma of unexpected, unwanted, and often colossal change—I hadn’t found any that explored the unique but also common experience of being a child of a parent’s second or third family. I still haven’t, and I get why that situation is overlooked. Place a story years after the painful decision to divorce or the dramatic reshaping of a family, and you miss out on some good plot-driving, page-turning material. But what I know from the inside is that, if the children of those latter marriages have siblings they don’t live with or fully know, it’s likely they long to have them in their lives. And one thing that propels a more internally focused story is desire.
“What does your character want?” the gurus of story structure ask in the many books I read as I oh-so-slowly taught myself how to write this novel.
It’s hard to explain why in retrospect, since I had my desire line from the start, it took me so long to find Molly and Alison’s story. Especially given that I’d already written one middle grade novel and sold it to a big five publisher. But my first book, inspired by the quiet lyrical children’s novels I loved—Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall, Cynthia Rylant’s Missing May—made it in just under the wire before most agents and editors would only consider books, especially for kids, that had Plot with a capital P.
Here are some notes from my agent friend after reading one of my many revisions: “Give Alison an inheritable disease, or let Molly discover Alison is a drug addict…Don’t just give Molly one big thing to contend with, make it five.”
I held the phone to my ear and wrote this all down, disheartened but not entirely surprised. In my day job as a librarian, I watched children’s fiction, by then frequently set in fantastical worlds, growing busier and more action-packed. Though I knew my novel needed higher stakes, when I thought of throwing one dramatic event after another at Molly, my mind grew cloudy, and I put the manuscript away yet again. What kept drawing me back were the exceptions to this trend— beautifully written, realistic, and compelling books by Jacqueline Woodson, Rebecca Stead, Rita Williams-Garcia. I read and reread them, trying to understand how they were made. I also continued to read craft books, including Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing, where I found this:
“Plot can be as intricate as a whodunit, or as simple as a character experiencing a small but significant shift in perspective. But invariably it comes from the people we create on the page.”
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By this time, I had inserted the Internet into my manuscript, not simply to bring the story up-to-date, but I had begun to see how its use could deepen the sisters’ long-distance connection. With video calls a regular part of their lives, their relationship can already be in place when the novel begins. Alison is no longer just an idea to Molly, but a person. As Molly puts it, “…what I am is worse than being an only child. Only children don’t have someone in particular to miss.”
Someone in particular. Plot comes from the people we create on the page. What does your character want?
Molly wants her sister. She wants her the way I wanted my own after she left our troubled family, the way I still want her (though she’s no longer alive). But after you ask what a character wants, the next question is: What is she willing to do to get it?
That’s where I was stuck. Alison lives thousands of miles away. She’s twice Molly’s age and has her own life. Molly could do no more about that than I could have done about what kept either of my sisters from me. This was the wall between me and my plot. Molly needed agency where she had none.
Unless…she thinks she has agency? Buried in my notes from that long-ago call with the agent is this: “Show Molly moving forward and fouling up.”
Make Molly foul up. That, at long last, was it.
I changed the opening so that when we meet Molly she’s operating under a misconception. Having learned that Alison is finally coming to visit, she assumes that Alison is moving in with the family. This makes sense to her because, in every other family she knows, siblings live together. Upon learning this isn’t the plan, Molly does everything in her meager power to try to make it so. As she attempts to bend things to her will and fit them into her deeply felt belief about what a family should look like, conflicts arise, along with enough twists and surprises that I found myself excited to know what would happen next. Also, because Molly comes to us flawed, she’s able to grow. Over the course of the story, she develops a fuller understanding of who Alison is and what she’s been through and finds her way to a compromise that serves everyone. Molly also comes to the realization that there are many ways to be a family.
By taking my time and uncovering my novel’s plot in my own way, I’d discovered its theme.
I am sometimes frustrated with myself and embarrassed that it took me nearly a quarter century to complete a hundred-page novel. But all along, I worked on writing projects in other genres, each informing the other: my ear for poetry evolving into an ear for dialogue, attempts at plotting the novel teaching me to add more movement to my essays.
“Things take the time they take,” as Mary Oliver says. Still, I’m startled to realize that the children I originally imagined reading August Or Forever are now all grown up. My hope is that they’ll pick it up anyway, to share with their own kids.
Ona Gritz’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Ploughshares, Brevity, River Teeth, One Art, and elsewhere. Recent honors include two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays, and a winning entry in The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 project. Her new middle-grade novel, August Or Forever, will be out from Fitzroy Books on February 14th. Find her at onagritz.com
Michael McCarthy‘s work has appeared in Beyond Queer Words, The Adroit Journal, and Prairie Schooner, among others. His debut poetry chapbook Steve: An Unexpected Gift is forthcoming from the Moonstone Arts Center in Philadelphia in early 2023. Originally from Massachusetts, he currently studies at the University of Carlos III in Madrid, Spain.
She would go to Paris.
When this was all over, this is how she would start again.
But today she would go back to caring for him, undo the hook and eye they’d put on the outside of his bedroom door so she wouldn’t find him in the middle of the night peeing into the kitchen sink or looking for the knives she’d stashed in her car.
When she unlatched the hook in the morning—she wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold, it was already loose—she would find him dazed, poised like a prize fighter in the middle of a ring, hands clenched in ready fists, feet in a “come get me” stance, his eyes wild and frightened.
He didn’t recognize her until he did.
Sometimes, she felt noble and kind.
On good days—hers, that is—she became the person she wanted to be. Stoic. Sacrificial. Indifferent to the melted ice cream pint in the oven and the television remote he thought was his phone, a leg into the arm hole of his t-shirt, the car keys, his, gone.
Days of rage and calling out. But to whom?
When he could still remember that the trash was Tuesdays, that the blue bin was for recycling, the green for everything else, she was hopeful. The neurologist called it “executive function.” Blue means this. Green means that.
Until the morning she found him kneeling on the front lawn, sorting through chicken bones, rank paper towels, rusty apple cores and frayed orange rinds, crusted yogurt cups, and greasy crumpled tin foil, staring at the array that lay all around him.
As children, they had fished for minnows on the Farm Creek bridge. String tied around the mouths of brown Borden’s milk bottles. Wonder Bread for bait. They threw crabapples at passing cars. He ran away before the car could stop.
He liked to confess things to her mother at the white formica table in that split-level Connecticut ranch with the sunken living room, next door and identical to his, after school.
Her mother drank Scotch and made him baloney sandwiches. She hadn’t known that.
These were the stories he could remember. As if she didn’t. Again and again.
Someday she would forgive herself for not loving him better. Wasn’t that what love was, really? Spoons didn’t have to be with spoons. So what if she had to tie his shoes?
Him. An empty bottle. Staring at the water as it seeped into the rug. As if it wasn’t too late to get it all back in.
Lyn Chamberlin is a writer and consultant living in Connecticut whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere across the web. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Lyn’s flash nonfiction piece “The Prize Fighter” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.
Judge: Meg Pokrass
We writers know how this goes… We submit our work to a literary contest. We wait. We wonder if the readers felt moved in all the right places; if they were engaged, intrigued, enlivened… We know how many fine talents are out there, and the process of waiting to hear back is not fun. As a contest judge who is also a devoted writer of the form, I take it strongly to heart.
The strength and integrity of the stories I read blew me away. As in any high-level literary contest, there were vastly different approaches to telling a story: There were flashes where the narrative lived right on the surface and others which offered skilful clues, and where the author trusted the reader implicitly. There were stories that showed the reader everything and stories that gave away nothing. Some characters were minimally drawn; others were created in microscopic detail. Some held me tightly in their grip all the way through yet lost me as late as the final sentence. There were some powerful themes including relationship breakdowns, racism, homelessness, strained parent and child connections.
It was only after rereading the stories for a number of weeks that my favorites became clear. Ultimately the winners were the ones that inexplicably moved me emotionally above everything else, and that I kept re-engaging with, trying to figure out how the writer worked their magic. It became a matter of recognizing that certain pieces had chosen me, not the other way around.
—Meg Pokrass, October, 2022
First Place: Sabrina Hicks
“When We Knew How to Get Lost”
Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona with her family. Her work has appeared in Five South Journal, Flash Frog, Pidgeonholes, Trampset, Monkeybicycle, Reckon Review, Split Lip, Milk Candy Review, with stories included in Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. More of her work can be found at sabrinahicks.com.
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Second Place: Janet Burroway
“The Tale of Molly Grimm”
Janet Burroway is the author of nine novels including The Buzzards; Raw Silk, Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of The New York Times Book Review). Her Writing Fiction is now in its tenth edition, and Imaginative Writing is soon to be published in its fifth edition. She is the author of the memoir Losing Tim and the winner of the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University.
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Third Place: Dawn Miller
“The Egg”
Dawn Miller’s most recent work appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Typehouse, Jellyfish Review, Guernica Edition’s This Will Only Take a Minute anthology, and The Maine Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Connect at www.dawnmillerwriter.com and on Twitter @DawnFMiller1
HONORABLE MENTION
Laura Tanenbaum
Fannie H. Gray
Andrea Marcusa
Lisa Lanser-Rose
Andrew Stancek
Emily Hoover
James LaRowe
Paul Enea
Kris Willcox
Christina Simon
FINALISTS
Theo Greenblatt
Meredith McCarroll
Amanda Hadlock
Madeleine Barowsky
K Moore
Ron Tobey
Sarah Freligh
Nicholas Claro
Joe Artz
Lyn Chamberlin
Flash Contest Judge MEG POKRASS is the founding editor of Best Microfiction and the author of nine collections. Her work has appeared in over a thousand literary journals. Her flash fiction, “Back on the Chain Gang” will appear in The Best Small Fictions 2022, and another flash fiction story, “Pounds Across America” will appear in a new Norton anthology Flash Fiction America, edited by James Thomas, Sherrie Flick and John Dufresne, in 2023.
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
Je suis maitre du silence
—Rimbaud, “Enfance”
I.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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]
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.
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.
SENSITIVE SKIN
Ceramics by Constance McBride
“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.
SENSITIVE SKIN:
Ceramics by Constance McBride
“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
