3 Sunday Zoom Sessions
March 14, 21, 28 4pm ET, 1 pm PT
$200
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]
The pitch letter is a writer’s calling card, providing the all-important first impression on editors. Good pitches stand out in the slush, signaling that you’re talented, professional, and ready to work with them. Bad ones rarely get a second chance. Even talented, bright writers get rejection letters when their pitch letters don’t reflect their abilities. If you’re tired of hearing “no,” a great pitch can be the key to the “yes” you’re hoping for. This class is designed for any writer who seeks publication: no homework or outside assignments, and no previous publication credits required.
Good pitching etiquette opens doors for writers and can lead to better bylines and bigger rates. If you write to publish, pitching is an important skill to have—one that is rarely taught in writing programs and MFAs. This class will teach you to avoid landmines and resolve issues that all writers contend with. How do you get an editor interested in your work? How do you sell your great idea without sounding pompous or unprofessional? How do you decide which editor to pitch to on a masthead? What do you do if you don’t have industry connections? Rather than guess, this class will help you prepare for the all-important pitch.
Week one: What do I have to offer?
Week two: Who’s a good fit for my writing?
Week three: The perfect pitch
During class, writers will build confidence in their pitches as they craft an all-purpose pitch letter that is adaptable and versatile. We will discuss our writing from a business angle and learn to understand what editors are looking for in a pitch. This workshop is taught by author Claire Rudy Foster, who publishes an average of 200 articles, stories, reviews, and essays per year. Foster also reviews pitches as Senior Features Editor for The Rumpus and is a veteran slush pile reader.
Claire Rudy Foster is an award-winning queer, nonbinary trans author from Portland, Oregon. Foster’s critically acclaimed short story collection Shine of the Ever was an O: The Oprah Magazine pick for 2019. Their essays, fiction, reporting, book reviews, and other writing appear in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Allure, on NPR, and many other places. Foster is Senior Features Editor at The Rumpus. They still believe in the power of well-written sentences.
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.