Category Archives: Thwack
WHEN WILLPOWER ISN’T ENOUGH: A Writing Tip by Moriah Hampton
A Writing Tip by Moriah Hampton
When Willpower Isn’t Enough
Recently, I set aside a story I’d been working on for over a year. I did so reluctantly after revising the opening section to build to certain plot points I selected from earlier drafts. The more I revised, the more dissatisfied I became. It was like watching dominoes lined up between two walls topple over one by one. Despite knowing that something prevented the story moving forward in an interesting way, I continued to revise. I have goals, I told myself. Six stories into the collection I want to publish someday, I anticipated completing the seventh story I was revising and starting on the eighth, my momentum steady until the project was complete. Writing takes work, I reminded myself, which entails not quitting when it becomes difficult but pushing through whatever obstacle lies in the way. But sometimes will power isn’t enough. Sometimes a story requires less of us, not more, in order to be told. That story does not await fully formed in another realm in a Platonic sense but rather, necessitates that I become the right person to tell it. So I set it aside, acknowledging that I may never be that person. If and when that time comes, I occupy the space between what is and what will be fashioning myself through the stories I tell further into existence.
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.
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I TOOK INSTRUCTIONS FROM MY HANDS, a craft essay by Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart will teach an all-new interactive Zoom masterclass for Cleaver on Sunday, February 24 2-4 PM: WRITING ADVANCED BY CATEGORIES: TURNING OUR OBSESSIONS INTO STORIES. Join us live or purchase the recording. More info here.
Beth Kephart
I TOOK INSTRUCTIONS FROM MY HANDS
The writer as maker is the poet who weaves, the essayist who stitches, the quilter of fabrics and words. They are Virginia Woolf baking bread and Elizabeth Bishop watercoloring. They are Zelda Fitzgerald cutting paper dolls, Stanley Kunitz among the seaside garden bees, Lorraine Hansberry and the allure of her sketches, and Flannery O’Connor gone exuberant with her pen-and-ink, sometimes linoleum-cut cartoons.
(Also Leo Tolstoy. Also Charles Bukowski. Also Lars Horn.)
The hands and the head. The ineffable and the uttered. The touch and the tone. The counterpoise and the hush. The one who sees and the one who, having seen, somehow finds the words.
I came to making late in life. I brought to this sudden, unquenchable passion no discernible or historic artistic talent, beyond the intuitive sense for color I profusely expressed in my childhood Spirographs. I fail the draw-the-circle test. I cannot crayon inside the lines. I cannot pull a pot from a spinning wheel (how desperately I tried, as if my entire sense of self depended on the outcome). I’m a dramatically, even dangerously, poor student of instructions.
To this abbreviated list of reasons not to try, I’m obliged to confess this: My husband is a real artist. I know what real art is.
Still: the temptations of paper. Still: the allure of acrylic paint and brayers, cyanotype solutions and sunlight, needles and waxed linen thread, carrageenan and alum, paper screens and pulp, so sweetly miniature and quite prettily fine scissors with intricately curved blades. If I could write a book, couldn’t I make blank books? Couldn’t I fancy up covers, marble-up endpapers, cut the signatures and stitch?
I began the way one might: by making handmade cards. (Hundreds of cards!) I advanced (it didn’t take long) to chain-stitched booklets. (Hundreds of booklets!) After that I was on a chase—cork-covered books and canvas collages, hardcover volumes and origami-pocket books, Coptic stitches, French-link stitches, strange knots that I invented. (I stopped counting.)
Oh, how lucky were all my friends, receiving my mad makings through the mail. Oh, how lucky my son and husband became—paper gifts for every birthday, holiday, most minor of excuses for paper-anointed celebrations. And when a broken ankle laid me up for several months, my real-artist husband helped me launch a shop on Etsy, through which I began to sell my things, tucking an extra something special into every box to surprise the buyers.
Making was the way I lived through crushing headlines. It was the way I settled my fast-beating heart. It was buying supplies and opening boxes and dreaming curious paper inventions—joyfully, unfettered. It was standing at a tall table with the window open and the song sounds of birds filtering through. I began to design my life around the making—the rooms where we live, the distribution of my time, even the writing I was writing and the lessons I was teaching becoming infiltrated by the things my hands would do. New structures. New colors. New arrangements. New hybridities.
It was obsessive, sure. It was too much, clearly. I knew it, but my house knew it more—creaked beneath the weight of all the made things, the stacked boxes, the tins of waxed linen threads. It was time to slow the paper crafting down, to redistribute my things and time, to turn from the production of the handmade books to experimentations in other paper arts where I would have to begin again. I spent happy mornings dyeing Hanji paper with the stuff of dandelion juice and turmeric tea and steamed saffron. I drew lopsided flowers into floating marbling paints just to see what the blooms would do. I built collages that were time-consuming in their construction and un-gallery worthy in their nature and whose only purpose was to teach me something new about how shapes complement shapes and how colors contrast colors.
I slowed myself down. I eased the pressure on the house. I taught more, I read richly again, I began the harrowing process of writing my first adult novel. Still, I maintained, or perhaps I mean to write that I sustained, my life in paper. My life in paper became the antidote to the anxiety that riddles my bones, and these times.
My life in paper both quieted and steeled me.
Perhaps for the writer who is a maker there is no going back. Perhaps we are at our best when we add ourselves up to a sum of new parts. Perhaps in the making we grow both more fierce and more gentle, more certain and more yielding, more deeply seeing and better seen. Perhaps our inner lives have been waiting all this time for instruction from our hands.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three dozen books. Her new book is My Life in Paper: Adventures with Ephemera, from Temple University Press (November 2023). Her most recent craft book is Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com.
Cover image © 2024 Beth Kephart
Anni Liu
Anni Liu is the author of Border Vista (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2022. She’s the recipient of an Undocupoets Fellowship, a Gregory Djanikian Scholarship from The Adroit Journal, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri and the Anderson Center. She’s an editor at Graywolf Press.
WRITE LIKE YOU’RE DYING: A Writing Tip by Layla Murphy
A Writing Tip by Layla Murphy
WRITE LIKE YOU’RE DYING
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
I never knew what a death doula was until I listened to an episode of NPR’s Life Kit the other day focused on relationship repair. It seemed odd at first that a podcast episode on relationship repair—presumably with other, living, people—would include a segment on death. But the relationship to be repaired by these end-of-life caregivers is our relationship with death itself.
Death is scary. It’s taboo. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s painful. And, I think engaging meaningfully with death would make us all better writers. In arguing that we ought to confront death earlier, more frequently, and more head-on, my take is very similar to that of the death doula who appeared as a guest on this episode of NPR. Her name is Alua Arthur, and she quickly convinced me that the key to a sensually and emotionally full life is a true understanding of what it means to die, and of what becomes important when we know that our life is coming to its end. Arthur’s clients wanted to just taste their favorite souffle, or feel the sun on their face, not, say, go to Machu Picchu. Learning about their lived experiences in dying, and hearing all the beautiful things they felt like doing at the end, seemed very much like a list of the best things to write about.
So my tip is to complete an exercise in perspective-taking to get in touch with the content of a truly full, sensuous life—and then write about that. Think, what exactly would you want to do with your time if you had very little time left? Based on what Arthur shared of her own clients, I have a few thoughts. Perhaps you would want to rewatch your favorite movie. Or listen to all your favorite music. Likely, you’d have a list of foods you would want to taste—maybe after a lifetime of dieting. And I mean really taste them. You’d want to let the dark chocolate melt away on your tongue, and to relish it sensually, and completely. You would want a massage, maybe: The feeling of another’s fingers on your shoulders one last time, or the sensation of a lover stroking their thumb across your hand. You would want to smell a fresh fire, and to smell Christmas. You would want to hear your grandparents tell you they love you. You would want to tell them you love them. In fact, there are so many people you’d want to express your love to—and you would want to do it with abandon. With locked eyes, or faces touching each other, feeling each other’s love. You would want to go swimming in the middle of the night, in the cold, and feel the air get knocked out of your lungs, and the blood rush through you to warm you up in the water. You would want a pint of your favorite beer. You would want a soft blanket around you and you’d want to take a delicious nap. If you doubt that this is what becomes important at the end of life, I encourage you to listen to Alua Arthur speak from experience and expertise.
All that feeling, all that sensation, all that emotion, is what I think we often try to get at with other writing prompts and exercises. We want to share detailed experiences with other people, our readers, so we try going for walks and writing down what we see. We try writing down all we can write about, say, oranges. We try to write by hand, or in the dark without looking. But what are we writing about? What is the good, really good writing, really talking about? In my view, great writing gets at all the things that would feel important to us as we’re dying. Writing about real love, real perception and reaction. How good it feels to get your hands in the soil under a temperate sun, and the smell of rain that just ended, or that’s anxious to begin. The perspective-taking exercise forces us to get really descriptive, which is a hallmark of compelling poetry and prose. What is it about the cherry that is so gratifying? What is the experience of eating it really like? Can you tell me that? Are you able to articulate the sensuousness? Can you make me think about dying, and can you make me love the way I feel when I take that perspective? Can you make me love, truly love, the experience of it, through your writing? Tell me about the peach fuzz on my face touching the peach fuzz on the face of my mother as I kiss her goodnight. Tell me about the juice falling down around my chin when I bite a perfect, cold, crisp, red apple. Tell me about the woozy way I feel when I’ve been sitting out in the sun for too long, next to a gentle ocean and the murmur of other beach-goers just like me. Tell me about how much I love them, and how. That will make for good writing.
My tip, then, is to write like you are dying. I hope it helps you to write well. But more than that, I hope it helps you to live more expansively, more self-indulgently. And to share that life, that full life, with everyone around you—your readers, of course, included.
Cleaver newsletter editor Layla Murphy is an Iranian-American writer—when she’s not being a refugee resettlement case manager, a restaurant host, or a Spanish tutor, that is. While a student at the University of Pennsylvania, she co-founded Quake Magazine, a publication dedicated to exploring sex and sexuality through art. She has also written for 34th Street Magazine and The Daily Pennsylvanian. Read her essays and poetry on a personal blog: aslongastherearepoppies.com. Got a Writing Tip for our newsletter and feature? Email her at [email protected]. View her bio page here.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Writing Tips.
Live & Recorded Classes
Live & Recorded Classes
Find community and grow your craft in our online workshops. We host both synchronous and asynchronous courses using Zoom and Canvas, an easily accessible, private online platform. Whether you’re a new writer or a well-published pro, you’ll find motivation, structure, constructive criticism, and a dedicated cohort.
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SUMMER 2024
KATHRYN KULPA: Submit Your Flash (and Get It Published)! May 19
Instructor: Kathryn Kulpa
Dates: Sunday, May 19, 2024, 2-4 pm ET on Zoom
Can’t make it on May 19? No problem. A recording will be sent to all registrants.
Cost: $60
Open to writers of: Flash Fiction, Flash Nonfiction, Hybrid Forms
Writing doesn’t stop when you pen the final line, or even when you make the final revision. If you’ve written a flash story, and it’s wonderful, you probably want it to be published so you can share it with the world—but first, there’s that pesky process called “submissions.” This class will help writers at all levels untangle the sometimes daunting process of taking your flash and microfiction from private to public.
In this class, you’ll learn:
- How to format your stories
- Tips for cover letters and bios
- Where to find journals looking for flash—and strategies for narrowing down seemingly endless lists
- How to make sense of rankings and data, and when to ignore them
- Three ways to make editors hate you (and how to make them love you, maybe
- Some strategies to survive rejection
Kathryn Kulpa has published more than 100 stories in journals from Atticus Review to X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and her work has been chosen for Best Microfiction and the Wigleaf longlist and nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. She is senior flash editor at Cleaver and is also the author of two chapbooks, Girls on Film and Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted. She has a micro-chapbook forthcoming from Porkbelly Press, and won the 2024 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition.
SOPHIE LUCIDO JOHNSON, Write Funny, Masterclass June 23
Instructor: Sophie Lucido Johnson
Dates: Sunday, June 23, 2024, 2-4 pm ET on Zoom
Can’t make it on June 23? No problem. A recording will be sent to all registrants.
Cost: $60
Open to writers of: All Genres
Since the dawn of the written word, humor has been a tool to tell the truth and target our humanity with brevity and a masterful air of ease. In fact, writing humor is no joke: there are a lot of complex principles and ideas that can make or break a piece of writing. Including humor in more serious pieces can provide levity and make deeper themes more salient, making this workshop appropriate for writers of all stripes. We will focus on the nuts and bolts of the ever-expanding genre of humor writing, and practice ways to incorporate levity into all types of compositions.
Sophie Lucido Johnson is the author of Many Love: A Memoir of Polyamory and Finding Love(s); Love Without Sex: Stories on the Spectrum of Modern Relationships; and Dear Sophie, Love Sophie: A Graphic Memoir in Diary Entries, Letters, and Lists. She is a cartoonist for The New Yorker Magazine, and has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bon Appetit, The Chicago Reader, The Believer, McSweeney’s, and lots of other places. She lives in Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
BETH KEPHART: The Writing is in the Details, Masterclass, July 28
Instructor: Beth Kephart
Dates: Sunday, July 28, 2024, 2-4 pm ET on Zoom
Can’t make it on July 28? No problem. A recording will be sent to all registrants.
Cost: $60
Open to writers of: All Genres
“Details aren’t automatically interesting,” Sarah Manguso once wrote, an aphorism that rings abundantly true. Details either illuminate the story or occlude it. They establish a pattern, render a character, extend an invitation to a particular time and place—or they make a mess of things. How do we know if the details we layer into our stories are truly telling details? How can we expand our capacity to generate fresh and meaningful details, while vanquishing those that are merely fluff or, worse, self-negating contradictions? In this master class, we’ll look to the work of Claire Keegan, Elizabeth Hardwick, and James McBride—isolating key details, taking note as those details evolve across pages, and discussing the additive impact. Generative prompts will be offered, as will opportunities to collectively edit oversaturated prose that will be created expressly for this purpose. This workshop is for writers at all stages, working in all genres.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly 40 books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. Beth’s newest book, the acclaimed My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera, sprang from her own obsession with paper. Beth’s most recent craft books are We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class and Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com. Read Michelle Fost’s interview with Beth about My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera here. is the award-winning author of nearly 40 books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. Beth’s newest book, the acclaimed My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera, sprang from her own obsession with paper. Beth’s most recent craft books are We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class and Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com. Read Michelle Fost’s interview with Beth about My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera here.
MEGAN STIELSTRA: Get Out of Your Head, August 25
Instructor: Megan Stielstra
Dates: Sunday, August 25, 2024, 2-4 pm ET on Zoom
Can’t make it on August 25? No problem. A recording will be sent to all registrants.
Cost: $60
Open to writers of: All Genres
“Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1926. “On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night, the body intervenes.” This workshop examines how memory lives in the body, using our own stories and experiences as a contribution to a wider cultural and political dialogue that centers human beings. Pulling from both literary and oral storytelling traditions, we’ll engage in activities that will take our writing out of the head and into the body, generating new work and digging deeper into material you’re already exploring.
Writers and storytellers at all levels are welcome. While the workshop centers the personal essay/memoir, writers of all genres may find it useful in the development of story and character.
Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, the Nonfiction Book of the Year from the Chicago Review of Books. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, Longreads, Guernica, LitHub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Steppenwolf Theatre, and regularly with the Paper Machete live news magazine at the Green Mill. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and is an editor at Northwestern University Press.
RECORDED CLASSES: Missed it? No problem. Buy the recording.
- ANNI LIU: Behind the Covers: Publishing Your Book. Purchase
- JESS SILFA: Show Us Your Best: A Guide to Creative Writing MFA Applications. Purchase
- MEGHAN STIELSTRA: Urgency and the Personal Essay. Purchase
- MEGAN STIELSTRA: Let Others Carry It: Publishing as Practice. Purchase
- BETH KEPHART: Writing Advanced by Categories: Obsessions into Stories. Purchase
- SARA LEVINE: Delusions of Grammar. Purchase
- SHEREE L. GREER: Point of View as Play and Practice. Purchase
- JEN MATHY: You, Inc.: Building Your Writing Brand. Purchase
ENGAGEMENT CORONA by Jeff Pearson
Jeff Pearson
ENGAGEMENT CORONA
“The mouth of weeds
marriage.” She shivered. “It’s—it’s a death!” –John Ashbery, “Idaho”
Absence holds rings on our fingers,
bright, until each ring’s syntax is muted
with flash flood weather steaming the windows,
plies of books crushing me like flattened flowers.
Trust the rain. The view of the lake was there.
Pleased to meet you; there are no clouds here.
I gave you misguided orange flowers,
carpet burns from car seats, old sweat, and ache
swarming the depths. Only at the lake
love mis-trusts the rain your body made.
The latex condoms never decompose
in a bed of wild dampened roses.
Does a martyr volunteer on his knees?
Lick salt from all of your sweat glands? Take me.
Lick salt from all of my sweat glands, take me
to your love life (Bishop) on page 45,
bulbs of hyacinth on the microwave,
where clothing is flung, and bees
subdued, wallow in pollen, buzz
around in the brash sun. Take me to your love
life where you page and scratch through books of
skin, my own naked back, suck and feed
on sugar, an emerald humming bird.
I will scatter spliffs of flower petals
like a bloomed dust jacket. The only word
for the curled flowers, scarred nettles
of a love life dried and once crumpled,
my dad’s wedding band on my finger.
My dad’s wedding band on my finger,
prunes it like an irritant band-aid.
Textures, my sisters said, were from chainsaws.
I am not married into polished gold.
I pretend with my left ring finger to
be married like an Irish claddagh ring
with the point of the heart toward my wrist.
I think my finger is swelling into
diabetes like my Dad’s. Handicapped,
peddling with a left hand of just a fist—
how much sugar had he drunk? On a hand-
cart like a frost-bite saint. I never saw his
ring finger-less. My mom’s gift, in gray
velvet, soft as the skin of an aspen.
Velvet, soft as the skin of an aspen
bubbles out amber sap with our joined names.
My father said never carve the skin
of trees, tattoo a love symbol and pain
the tree. Still we ampersand our own promise ring.
The tree will bleed until it yearns to burn.
All in the name of the love of saplings,
pine beetles, ants, termites, skunk urine.
We will be a love of forest fire—
ferocious fire! Matches of passion
that crack open pine cones that cry,
ripe as mating fire bugs this season.
We start to carve J. A. & J. R. P.,
Field guides float in love with wild flowers.
Field guides float in a mud of wild flowers.
We lay a Levi blanket out to sink
like the dream you had. My hair fills with burrs,
rubs static through to my glazed brain, too drunk
to remember my own face. I can’t bless
this mess, but I prove my love by forest;
brush ants out of your hair with my scratched hand.
A sacred grove where God, Jesus, Man, and
The Holy Ghost are seen. Too beloved
to believe anymore that we too love
crushed lilac breath and closed-off waterfalls.
Bloomington Lake rains black and blue all day,
I read the first poem I showed you. It’s soaked.
“She performs the elementary backstroke. . .”
“She performs the elementary backstroke,
as the wedding stares at a maw of peaks.
I’m afraid this bride might sink like her veil,
I would prefer her in a swimming pool,
blue depth of the lake unknown. The dark maw
reflects off ice water like a giant bear trap;
the bride flew gently from a swing of rope.
Should the party swing to her and follow,
one at a time or wallow in lilies,
on the bank singing, when ya gonna get
mar-ried, mar-ried, when ya’gon get mar-ried,
sweet, little buffalo boy? The soaked bride
yells, the only thing real in me is clouds,
our pelvises decorated with stars.”
Our pelvises decorated with stars,
we sleep too close, and you have night terrors.
You are scared tonight because you remember
whoever wakes in the night must tell the other
I love you. We will both die, sometime.
“I must go first,” but you will have good health.
No bubblegum in your hair from my mouth,
cradled in the bedsheets singing a hymn
that can’t ever smell like me. Fall asleep.
I think about death every night now.
But I pretend I am excited for tomorrow
to wake, see who gets up first to feed
the cat. Callus drool, the way sweat lingers.
Absence will hold rings on our fingers.
Jeff Pearson is a graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA Program and a past resident of Idaho State Hospital South. In 2017, Jeff Pearson won Permafrost’s New Alchemy Prize for ‘User Review of Medications.’ His chapbooks include Sick Bed and Location Services, which can be found on his website, http://poesyjeffpearson.com. Jeff Pearson works as a mail carrier in Moscow, Idaho.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #43.
WRITE LIKE AN ANESTHESIOLOGIST, A Writing Tip from Isabel Legarda
A Writing Tip from Isabel Legarda
WRITE LIKE AN ANESTHESIOLOGIST
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Write like an anesthesiologist.
By this I definitely do not mean intentionally (or unintentionally) put someone to sleep, but rather, approach your writing project as a living, breathing being you put active energy into protecting through dangerous territory.
“Dangerous territory” for writers includes:
- daily challenges like time scarcity, procrastination, distraction, and interruption;
- occupational hazards like exhaustion, multi-tasking, the need for research, and neglect of
other important tasks or life relationships; - faults to work against, such as pride, complacency, lack of self-awareness, rigidity,
scrupulosity, and resistance to constructive feedback; - emotional setbacks like anxiety, feeling stuck, artistic jealousy, excessive self criticism,
the need for external validation, loss of motivation or tenacity, and probably our worst enemy, self-doubt.
A few suggestions from my day job might be of help:
Engage in singular focus. Anesthesiologists protect patients by putting intense focus on a single individual at a time. For a writer this might look like knowing a character in a story really well, writing to a single, important, imaginary reader (as one of my earliest mentors, the late Larry Woiwode, suggested) rather than to an “audience” or “market,” and devoting protected time to a given project to the exclusion of other projects.
Prepare for the unexpected. The night before each work day anesthesiologists habitually imagine the what-ifs for every surgery and come up with a Plan A, B, and C for coping with each. As a writer, perhaps you are a plotter and have a detailed, thirty-page outline for your novel in progress. But what if your main characters, because of the traits they have (and that you know intimately), veer into uncharted territory? Bring your toolkit of strong verbs, engaging dialogue, and vivid imagery and follow the energy of the scene. Or, perhaps you’re a pantser with no idea where to go next. Imagine three different contingencies for your characters, ask some what-if questions about them, and come up with a Plan A, B, & C for each possibility.
Optimize brain waves. Anesthesiologists in many places now have the technology to monitor patients’ brain waves, not just their vital signs. Brain waves may matter for creativity, with high levels of alpha waves in the right temporal area possibly associated with the mind forming unusual associations. Ever wonder why you get your best ideas in the shower, while driving, on a long flight, when you’re just about to fall asleep, or when it’s raining out? The mental relaxation promoted by these environments, soundscapes, or physiologic states might be optimizing brain states conducive to creativity. Try meditation or brown noise to encourage “The Muse.”
Finally, keep moving. Anesthesiologists are constantly moving toward “emergence”: the moment an unconscious patient awakens and reconnects with the world. They’re under pressure to make sure surgeries proceed efficiently and can’t get hung up on setbacks, even painful ones. A bad draft, a hurtful rejection, or a piece that has to be put away for a while even after multiple revisions might feel like failure in the moment, but it’s all part of working the clay: work done for the artistic process, valid and valuable whether it “goes well” or not.
Isabel Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to the United States. She attended New York Medical College and is currently a practicing physician in Boston. Isabel Legarda’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in America, Ruminate, The New York Quarterly, Matter Monthly, Qu, West Trestle Review, and others.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Writing Tips.
AN INTERVIEW WITH KATHRYN KULPA, AUTHOR OF COOKING TIPS FOR THE DEMON-HAUNTED by Jessica Klimesh
Jessica Klimesh
An Interview with Kathryn Kulpa, author of COOKING TIPS FOR THE DEMON-HAUNTED
I recently had the delightful opportunity to interview Kathryn Kulpa about her latest chapbook Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted, winner of the 2022 New Rivers Press Chapbook Contest. Kathryn is an editor and workshop instructor at Cleaver, and I’ve had the good fortune to be a student in a couple of her workshops. So I was especially excited to chat with her and learn more about her process, her ideas, and how she so successfully took 14 captivating yet discrete stories and made them fit so effortlessly and perfectly together.
The stories in Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted are full of a spectral kind of splendor, displacing the reader with a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, as in this opening to “Sororal”:
Sister Sister always takes the front and makes me ride in the back. Sister with her doll that’s a ghost of her, ghost of me, held tight in her hand like she’s never going to let us go, my gaze fixed eternally on the back of her head, O Sister Sister her bunny rabbit ears her bunny rabbit nose. Why is she me if I am not her?
Jessica: I’ll start by saying how amazing this collection is! I reread it when I found out I’d be chatting with you, and I found the stories even more hauntingly beautiful on this second full read-through. In fact, I was struck by the fact that, in my opinion at least, there’s not one story out of place in this collection. So, I’d be interested to know: Did you start with a theme? What was your process for writing, sorting through, and ultimately choosing the stories for this collection? Did you find yourself rearranging, removing, and adding much as you put the collection together? What factors influenced your decisions?
Kathryn: Thanks, Jessica! I began with a theme of hauntings when I was putting this collection together, but that was more a retrospective process: I didn’t start out with an idea for a collection and then write a bunch of stories to fit. The stories were written at different times, and published individually, but I’ve noticed a dark, gothic quality in my work coming more to the forefront over, say, the last five or six years. Which makes sense—I’ve always loved reading weird fiction, and when other kids were playing tag, I was the one running around with a broom and starting a witch club—but it didn’t really come through in my writing as much until recently. The title story came from an ekphrastic writing workshop I took with Lorette Luzajic, editor of The Ekphrastic Review, and it was inspired by a surreal painting by Rosa Rolanda. It occurred to me that it would be the perfect title for a flash collection, and then I started thinking about another story I’d published recently, “A Vocabulary for the Haunted,” and it all came together pretty quickly after that. Those two stories set the tone for the collection. Other stories that I considered for this collection had elements of magical realism or fairy tales or something dark or supernatural, but if they didn’t feel “haunted” they didn’t make the final cut.
Jessica: Something else that struck me about Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted is the level of emotion packed into each piece, as well as the powerful and exciting mix of reality and un-reality. Some stories are startlingly real, like “Knock” and “Happy Meal.” And “Boy, Dog,” too, which I found myself holding my breath through each time I read it. But other stories have more clearly spectral elements, like “Layover,” one of my favorites, which delicately displaces the reader, creating a subtle but growing sense of gentle foreboding. Could you talk a bit about how you get your ideas, where they come from, and what influences whether you might use more surreal elements in a story or not?
Kathryn: I’m glad you mentioned “Layover.” There are a few stories I’ve written that are taken almost directly from dreams, and that’s one of them. The images of the shower, the strange clothes, the anonymous hotel room and the TV that only played loops of old Star Treks—all from the dream. I woke up and started scribbling down images frantically so I wouldn’t lose anything. Later, I realized the parallels with Greek mythology, and that gave me a way to shape it beyond random dream imagery, but I was hoping it would retain that disorienting nightmare feeling. The surreal elements came naturally! “Happy Meal” was a story that surprised me; it was just going to be a humorous piece about a kid driving a mom crazy in the car and then it went in a very different direction. One of those happy accidents (happy for the writer, not the characters) where you just start writing without a plan. It started with an image of the interior of this car, which was my grandfather’s old car, and I had such a vivid memory of the blue upholstery and the smell of coffee and French fries.
“Knock” was inspired by some passages and descriptions I ran across doing genealogy research; I’ve always been fascinated by that mid-century, post-World War II period and the gap between how life was portrayed in media and advertising and the understories that weren’t told. And “Boy, Dog”: I think that came from a lot of things that had been in my head for a long time. When I was a kid I wanted a dog desperately but it took years to wear my parents down to actually letting me get one, and in the meantime I read all the dog books I could find, these anthologies of “best loved dog stories,” and they’d always have these tales of hero dogs who’d save their masters from falling into the old well; I also would always notice these overpasses along the highway, where people had spray-painted messages or hung class banners, and I’d always think how dangerous that would be; and, finally, the story of Matthew Shepard always haunted me, and all of those things came together in that story, but I also wanted something magical about it. Something that would make it more than a story where the bad guys win.
Jessica: Because I’ve been in a couple of your Cleaver flash workshops, I know that your focus is short and very short fiction. Could you talk a bit about how you started writing flash and what its draw is for you.
Kathryn: Someone in my writing group introduced me to flash fiction, and initially I was kind of skeptical—shouldn’t we know more about these characters? Shouldn’t we have more backstory?—but I got converted pretty quickly. I went to a writing workshop where the leader was following the practice of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and having us do these short timed writings. You’d have a prompt and then she’d set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes, and the idea was to get through the internal editor and censor and just get it all down on paper. I can be a procrastinator, so I found that having a limited time really worked for me! (It may not for all writers, and that’s fine.) I started writing these really brief pieces at the same time that I was writing longer stories. I think this was also around the time that I read the original flash fiction anthologies Flash Fiction and Sudden Fiction and started looking at the form as its own form, not an abbreviated version of something else. I know when my first short story collection came out, in 2005, I was already writing and publishing flash, and I included two flash pieces in the collection, but some reviewer clearly had no clue and complained that one of them was “only two pages, barely a story at all!” I think that’s less likely to happen now, but I’ve still taught flash workshops in libraries and had people who’ve never heard of it. Some of them end up writing great flash stories, though!
Jessica: It feels like flash is becoming a more popular, or more recognized, individual form. I notice much more attention being given to it, but I don’t know if that’s just because it’s my own genre of choice and so I just seem to notice it more. What are your thoughts on the form and/or the future and/or popularity of the form?
Kathryn: I think you’re right: flash is having a moment. I don’t think it’s quite in the mainstream yet (and that’s all right with me), but it’s definitely not as far out as it was; well-known writers are coming out with flash stories and collections, it’s being published in glossies like the New Yorker and not just in university journals or obscure lit mags, and there are more awards and recognition out there for flash writers. There are a lot more online journals providing space for flash and micro writing. I’ve also seen a lot more how-to books on writing flash. I don’t know what this is going to mean for flash ultimately. It will probably all shake out in the end. I do think the current popularity could have some downsides, people who come to flash because they think it’s “easy” compared to writing “real” stories, and that you just have to follow a formula or have a twist ending or take a piece out of a longer story and call it flash. As we know, no such luck! Writing good flash is hard.
Jessica: You were previously a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest (2015). Was your process/experience with New Rivers Press similar to your process/experience with Vella? Specifically, was there anything that you learned from the Vella contest that helped you when you were preparing to submit to the New Rivers Chapbook Contest?
Kathryn: Vella was a micro-press with one person, Lisa Mangini, in the lead as editor and publisher, so it was very small and personal. One thing I liked about that contest was she sent me a selection of their other chapbooks, so I could see what they’d published and look at the book designs. I was able to choose my own cover design and I asked an artist friend to create a photograph for me. With New Rivers, the press was part of a university publishing program at Minnesota State University Moorhead. It was still a small press, but I did deal with a few different editors as well as the head of the program. One difference was that I couldn’t choose my own cover image because creating a design was part of the publishing program for the students. But they were good about consulting me and getting my ideas, and, in both cases, I had final approval on edits.
Unfortunately, as of this spring, New Rivers Press is no longer associated with Minnesota State University, so that has made it difficult as far as distribution. One local Rhode Island bookstore was able to get copies before the program was shut down, and I got some for myself and I’m selling them on my website and Etsy shop, but of course it’s not the same as having books available through Amazon or Small Press Distribution. And it would be nice to have a press that did more of the work on publicity, but I know even writers with bigger publishers end up having to take on that job themselves, or hire an independent publicist to do it.
Jessica: Lastly, what advice would you have for someone putting together a chapbook collection and preparing to submit it to either contests or open submission periods for publishers?
Kathryn: If you win the contest or get your manuscript accepted, you’re going to have to answer a lot of questions about the ‘what’ of your collection, so it’s important to have that clear in your own head first. Imagine you’re a bookseller or a librarian, and someone picks up your book and says “What’s this all about?” How do you describe it? What’s the mood? What’s the vibe? How do the stories work with each other, how does one lead into the next, is there a larger story you’re telling through these individual pieces? Find the stories that are the heart of your collection and think about where they will fit, and remember that you need a strong beginning and ending to capture the first readers at these contests or publishers, who are probably reading so many manuscripts. Print out all your essential stories and all your maybes, live with them for a while, shuffle them around, and be ruthless about cutting stories that don’t fit. There will always be another collection! Most important: make sure you love it.
Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a writer and technical editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Atticus Review, trampset, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Does It Have Pockets, and Whale Road Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions, and she recently won 3rd Prize in the South Shore Review Flash Fiction Contest. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.
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BE INSPIRED by Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart
BE INSPIRED
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
I know. I know. So grotesquely obvious. Except for the essential sequitur: Be inspired by what?
The metronome flick of your puppy’s tail?
The mellifluous hum of the antique AC?
The letter m, lowercase, written, for the first time, by a child?
The problem is, the possible sources of inspiration can be measured by infinitudes, and to write we need some curb or cramp, a boundary or horizon, a wall against which to toss our nouns or a pocket into which to tuck our thoughts.
We need a place to start; we need some traction.
Here’s the first page of Autoportrait, by the author Jesse Ball:
I read Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait and found I admire its approach to biography. It is an approach that does not raise one fact above another, but lets the facts stand together in a fruitless clump, like a life. He wrote it in his thirty-ninth year. In my thirty-ninth year, this book follows his.
And there it is—the place where Ball’s book starts, the borderlines the author gives himself. He will write in a way that does not create a hierarchy of facts. He will pursue a “fruitless clump.”
Go to your shelves. Pull down a favorite book. Study its first lines. Write down the constraints that the author suggests and then make them your own. Maybe you’ll end up writing toward color (Bluets). Maybe you’ll pursue the chemistry of tears (The Crying Book). Maybe you’ll write to reach someone (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous). Maybe you’ll start to think very hard about “how much we pad our lives with … stuff.” (Index Cards).
Let another writer’s structure or obsession shelter your thoughts. Then exhale and free yourself to take a good long look around.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops (now running the Story of You lecture series), and a book artist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com and etsy.com/shop/BINDbyBIND.
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SOMATICS by Gillian Perry
Gillian Perry
SOMATICS
It had been a month since my miscarriage, two weeks since I decided to take my maternity leave anyway. I justify it like this—I’m not leaving the office for maternity, maternity had left me instead.
Davis leaves for work in the morning, tie tied, hair slicked back, a pitiful look at me as I lay in bed with my eyes open.
“Feel better, hon.”
Davis does yoga and reads books about “Somatics”—a mind-body connective healing theory or practice. His books are full of primary colors and energy, loopy illustrations and listening. They make me want to judge him. At night he does yoga and practices meditation, which I used to think was good for him and good for us. One of us should be balanced. But now it feels aggressive and in my face. Davis is centered, I’m not. Davis is healthy, I’m not. Davis can be happy without our daughter. I can’t.
I listen to his footsteps travel from room to room, the click-clack of his shoelaces hitting the wood floors. He is opening the doors to all the rooms in our home as he does every morning, for feng shui, for airiness, for the idea that my surroundings and I are in harmony. Slamming them closed after I hear his car peel out of our driveway is a nice little release—maybe he intends it that way.
Today, his tires spit gravel. Sweat drips in a single bead into the small of my back, and I try to go back to comfortable darkness.
Feet in socks, I take silent steps to every door. Slam to the shower curtain and the toilet and my bottles of creams and toners that lined the counter like potions. Slam to the empty mason jars on the kitchen table, catching moonbeams for Davis. Slam to the rows of twisted faces and inhuman coloring of the little Sunbonnet Sue figurines Mom had given us, to start a cabinet, a collection. I put my hand on the doorknob to the nursery, cold with her absence, and try to close this door too. But today, clouds and gray sky from the window draw me into the belly of this lost room, a swirl of color like a threat.
The view from the window is nice. It frames a park we had hoped she could play in. I saw her in the swings with Davis and I, in the fields and hills, exploring. Davis and I had bought her a little denim bucket hat that tied on the bottom, the strings new and uncreased. It is tossed on the crib, hanging on a bed knob.
The denim feels soft in my fingers; it still has the new smell of plastic and chain stores. I hold it to my cheek and look out, feeling the stillness of a morning turning afternoon. The world is growing into something I can recognize. I spin the little hat on one finger.
As the hat loops, orbiting my unclean aura (Davis would say my gravitational pull was affecting it or something), I hear her. It must be her. I spin the hat faster and close my eyes, thinking I am somehow summoning the spirit of my lost daughter. Irrational thoughts haven’t been scaring me, lately. When I open them, crust dotting the corners of my eyes, I see I have not summoned her. I have summoned them instead.
They are a little troupe of girls who look to be on the edge of preteen gawkiness. They burst like light—darting from one parking space to the other like electrons outside a nucleus. Their messes of hair propel them forward and around, over and under, living, breathing, alive.
I ball up the hat in a fist and feel pressed out to observe. Fresh air could blot clear what I am seeing. As I step out onto the porch, the sun streaks through the threatening sky, dappling the parking lot in spots of sun and heat. I settle into the plastic Adirondack chair, zoom in on these creatures the nursery window had brought me. They seem unbothered that my porch is close enough for me to hear their conversations. The group is also uninterested in what I am interested in, which is one of them, flat on her stomach, in a parking space.
As the girls chase each other and pay the facedown one no mind, the sun reveals itself in little patches of light. Soon, the empty parking spaces radiate heat in little waves, like music. I understand the one that was already there, in a space. She has to listen. She felt the heat through her sneakers, pulling her down, to a sun bed, a sun blanket, a sun pillow.
“What are you doing?” This speaker has a frizzy halo of red curls and stands tall above the rest, which made her Best, to me. She draws the attention of the others.
The parking space sun-soaker looks up, her lips dotted with gravel bits. She grins, then returns to the asphalt. Sun seeps into her forehead. She turns her arms so her elbows face up, so her palms can fill up with heat like sponges. Heat washes her clean.
One says something like, “Is she ok?” and is quick to the parking space’s side. Fast.
Fast lays in the adjoining parking space, and the sun-drenched one turns her cheek to face her. She smiles. Because she has a secret, I think.
“Ohhh, it’s warm,” Fast purrs.
“It’s more than that.” She answers like it is gospel, like they are in the hush-hush of church where people are talking to higher powers in their head.
“It’s sun power!” She lifts her face to the sky, a girl seal in a parking spot ocean rock.
The heat and light ignite her skin, and I know she will burn anyone she touches. Suddenly, she is fire and she has no choice but to run the flames off of her back. She springs up, a phoenix, a dragon, and runs. I catch her flaming eyes. She is Wild.
They deserve the sun, these girls. The porch is shaded, and I have no shoes on. Chill creeps into my skin and nudges me. If I lean over the porch rail, the sun could kiss me too. But I don’t want them to notice me, to take away any of the sun power.
That evening they leave with arms slung around each other, faces flecked with dirt and blooming red with sunburn. I watch them speed away on their bikes, chasing the sun, chasing each other. My heart breaks a little, and I chide myself for my fresh attachment to them. I stand and stretch and feel the hat drop off of my lap. It lays flat on the porch planks. A day in my hands has weathered it. It looks rougher than before, worn. I shake it out, the crinkles and creases in the strings making my heart seize.
By these crinkled strings, I carry it to Wild’s parking space. My legs pump, arms swing, stomach aches—I am being moved to deposit this for them. It feels like I don’t really have a say. I understand that they should have this piece of me. Of her.
◊
On the third day my daughter’s hat is ignored, I decide to start evening meditation, to think of nothing. For me, it is straight to the nursery to sit and hum and become blank—Davis says that’s a “site of trauma,” the nursery. When I am nothing I think of the Parking Lot girls. I feel a pulse in my fingertips. When I think of them, I can think of her. I think of what they will do with my baby’s little hat. I think whatever they do will teach me about her.
Davis calls the meditation practice “sequencing.” We are supposed to notice the order in which tension leaves our bodies. I notice pain in my squint because I can’t quite close my eyes. The park is best when the darkness creeps into the edges of the sky, when the clouds show the last of their color. Orange. Pink. Purple. I notice my ears ringing as the bugs drone, and the girls grow louder, more boisterous. Bubbles on a roiling boil.
They have been visiting me every evening–wild girls with wild eyes and wild hair and wild hearts. They run until their legs run out of blood to pump them. They slam their sneakers into the pavement, atom zips. Their knees are skinned. Their lips are blue. Their ears are tinted with sunburn or goosebumps. Knees, lips, ears.
I unwind my legs and leave the meditation me—my pouty lips and furrowed brow and empty, empty silence. I hear their laughter.
Tonight, a New little creature with braids and red cheeks is their shadow. I watch her—she holds herself a little too straight. She purses her lips. She blinks back watery eyes or tears.
The meditation pulse is back in my fingertips, and I wonder if they feel it too. The connection, our connection, a bumblebee buzz on the surface of our skin. They are chasing Fast, and it seems like nothing will pull them away from the game. I walk my fingers over my bare arm, trying to mirror their steps.
The hat sits in the parking space that held so much power just a mere week ago, blackened with tire tracks. They have no use for it.
I watch the New one, different from the others, more polished. She trails Best, arms crossed to keep herself warm. It is getting chilly, but they never wear jackets. Best seems oblivious to New, as she hollers at the others to give Fast no way out of their game. New is moving her lips, but no sound seems to emanate from them. Fast laughs with her head tilted back, her mouth open wide as if she is collecting raindrops. Suddenly, Best corners Fast and she takes off into the parking lot, leading the girls in a squealing frenzy. New trails them, trying her best to giggle along with them.
I consider going inside.
I tell myself they are annoying and too loud and I have better things to do. The truth is that I can’t bear another night of them ignoring the hat, the piece of her I had offered. I try to listen to my goose-pimpled legs humming with pins and needles, telling me that I really don’t feel like standing up. That is a part of meditation and body awareness—noticing what your body was trying to tell you.
The chase continues. Through the bike rack. Through the parking lot. Onto each dusted, fading paint line that bordered each space. I sit forward and push my palms together, thinking that Davis would find me insane. A reason he had married me, he said one night over frozen pizza. With a tap on my nose, “You’re just a little insane, you.”
Best leads them into a cluster around the parking space, Wild’s parking space, to make a plan of attack. They don’t treat it differently from any other space in the lot. It is as if they forgot the power of the sun, the thing that had brought Wild into their sisterhood. I am not hurt, no I’m not. That would be insane.
They huddle, hands on shoulders and loud whispers. The hat is just a piece of scenery, absolutely nothing special. My eyes are wet. My chest deflates. Until, until, the New one. Special. Perfect. She leaves the huddle and reaches down to it, squatting to investigate, letting the chase continue and leave her behind.
Her braids fall forward like two arrows to my hat. The hat is upside down, waiting for her head to snuggle into it. She squats as if she were looking at her reflection in a puddle, as if my hat could show her who she could be. She isn’t Wild or Best, but she is there, looking at what I left.
Instead of placing it on her head, she picks it up by the rim. I don’t know what made me think she would put it on. The hat would fit a cat or a teddy bear. The hat, my daughter’s hat, is being walked to them like a birthday present, like an open treasure chest. She is a little beggar girl asking for crumbs, from those she wanted to be sister to. My baby’s hat, her prize.
Best sees that she has something and stops her. I sit on the edge of my plastic chair, chill dotting my arms. The girls grow quiet, the game forgotten. They say something to one another that I can’t hear. Heads bowed and hands clasped and one clump of sisters talking about me. Or my daughter. Dusk softens the sky to a dark denim blue. On soft feet, I patter to the screen door, reach an arm inside to turn on my porch light.
I blink hard, seeing shadow spots from my new light. Blink. They’re giggling and chattering. Blink. The hat is gone, at the core of their huddle, I hope. Blink. The girls scatter, digging in the grass like dogs.
They claw at the dirt with stubby nails, pulling up clumps of grass and soil. The sky is growing darker. Their arms and hands and nails are full of earth. The hat sits upside down under a streetlight. They are filling it with their dirt. My body hums with a warning buzz, like a wrong note. Like a crescendo.
New beams, the guardian of the dirt hat. She stands over it and directs the girls to different corners of the park. Under the streetlamp, the shadows give her length and stretch, as if she is suddenly all of them.
I listen to this ringing in my ears, thinking they are trying to tell me something about my baby. To teach me, like I wanted. It is like they had some secret knowledge of where she really is, buried somewhere. They are reuniting her with her things. I didn’t need them to remind me of that, I needed them. To be with me. To let me in. I sigh, loudly, pitifully. Not one ponytail or pigtail flips in my direction.
Then, again they are gone—through the bushes and up the hill, never even a look in my direction. What is it about me? What kept the distance between us, really?
I lean against the porch rail, pressure on my abdomen, wetness on my abdomen. Dew and heft pushing me to do something. Maybe her hat isn’t really enough for them, for me. Maybe the hat isn’t special.
I see two headlights reaching for me from the driveway. When they light my face, Davis honks as if he’s home from war and not his office job. He hops out of the driver’s seat, checks the edges of his reflection in the side mirrors, and jogs to me with open arms. He slows his happy steps and puts two flat hands out toward me.
“Oh, are you grounding right now, babe?”
Grounding is the somatic way to stand still. I think how I must look, empty glazed eyes rooted on this porch, astounded by the Parking Lot Girls and their digging.
“I…” I’m not sure how to answer him, my mind is playing me scenes of the Parking Lot girls piling dirt and rocks and maybe wriggling worms into what was supposed to cradle my daughter’s skull.
“Oh I’m so sorry, you’re still in it.” He puts his hands on my shoulders gingerly as if his touch could bring me to my knees. He kisses my cheek and I notice his lips are chapped. For someone so conscious of his body’s needs, I’m surprised he isn’t drinking enough water.
He turns on the light in her nursery and my eyes follow his shape as he pulls boxes off of the shelves in her closet. He’s humming. My head is throbbing.
◊
That night, sleepless and furious that Davis lay still and quiet like a corpse, I go to the park. I sit on my knees, face the memorial we had made for my daughter—me and them. Looking at my half-baked girl in a mound of soil, I am glad she wasn’t born. I don’t understand girls like I thought I did. I don’t understand myself like I thought I did either. My head pounds, and I think that maybe this is a good revelation.
I lay back in the grass, like I had seen them do when they ran out of things to talk about. Tracing my finger in the dirt, dew seeping into the curves of my shoulders, I feel a heat, like anger. I imagine them around me, digging into me like they had this grass.
Watching New cradle my daughter’s hat felt like releasing tension from my jaw. Maybe it should. A somatic sensation—my mind instructing my body to feel better. Yes, each piece of her was a piece of me that could be given to them. Maybe I should be Teacher. I could show them how it hurts.
Davis doesn’t know I did this: offered a token of our baby to this little pack of creatures, thinking of it like therapy. He would tell me that children, not young women just children, behaved irrationally all the time. They didn’t mean to hurt me. They were just playing. They were being them.
I sit up, dust grass and wet dirt off my shoulders. My fingers dark with soil, I put them to my nose, trying to understand.
New still dressed cleanly. I close my eyes, seeing her rosy cheeks and braids. She doesn’t seem to be like them, not really. She is more of the mermaid princess fairy sprite that I expect from little girls.
I pull my father’s Swiss army knife from my pocket. I remember thinking it was an odd gift, especially for my sixteenth birthday. He hadn’t even bothered to wrap it, just yanked it from his back pocket, pressed it into my palm.
“It’s tradition,” he had said, like it was an embarrassing thing to say. “You’re the firstborn, you get the knife.” Like most tradition, I got to accept it without question.
My firstborn was never going to take a breath. The obligation of it had been released from me now. The knife is red and reflecting my thumbprints and screaming at me that now I am being irrational.
I want to understand them, to be right about this. I want New to see who they really are, turn her cheek to my porch and run into my arms. My mind, her body—connection.
◊
Davis leaves for work this morning and says, “You’re looking better these days.” I smile and have a cup of coffee and think all day about what they will do.
They come later than usual, the new one radiating joy. A decision has been made, something has been said. They are an ink blot spreading, opening, widening to let her in. Thank God, I think. Thank God she’ll be able to see them truly, tonight. Thank God I will too.
They sit in a circle on the grass, their hearts beating the same beat. I feel it too, a thumping in my neck. Darkness settles over them in a purple-blue haze, and the first stars pierce the air with chill. They fall into a hush.
Best walks over to the hat, still full of dirt. She sees my knife, like a little red tombstone, and gingerly picks it up, turning it around in her fingers. I wonder if she knows what she is holding, if she is mapping together this knife and the bucket hat, conjuring my daughter.
My heart beats. I listen to it and think of Davis. He’d say, “Isn’t it exhilarating that your heart can beat like that? What is your body trying to tell you?”
She brings the knife back to the circle and talk swells. They open all the little compartments, trying the corkscrew in the dirt, the nail file pressed on Wild’s tongue. The moon lights them up as if they are sacrificing someone, something. Best had brought each of them a flashlight. They click the lights on and hold them under their chins, their faces contorting in shadow.
Best opens the compartment with the longest, thickest, most intimidating knife. The girls whisper and giggle.
Best sticks out her fat thumb and stares at them through the veil of dark. They see the flash of metal, but Best makes no sound as it cuts her skin. I inhale, night air filling me, gleeful to have anticipated something. I hope she doesn’t cut too deep.
But then, she touches her thumb to her forehead. Then, to each of the girls’. I thought they would hurt each other. I thought they would hurt themselves. When Best touches her sticky thumb to New’s forehead, I see her cheeks lift.
“Me next! Me next!” Fast kneels next to Best and eagerly offers her thumb. The blood thumb ritual repeats and for once, the girls seem to have nothing to say. Nothing at all. This is New’s chance to run. But she is cross-legged and wide-eyed. Anchored.
Wild, with her loud cry, makes a racket at her turn. Breaking the silence. While she is hooting and using the one curse word they know, New’s smile grows and grows. She must love to be a part of something, even if this something is chaos and wildness. Would my daughter have been a part of something? Was she a part of this? Was I? It was my knife. It was her knife.
Wild touches her thumb to each sister with such clarity and such force that I feel she must have done it before. I wonder what it feels like to have a sister’s heartbeat sink into your temples.
Wild takes the little knife from Best and approaches the new one, breaking their circle to kneel in front of her. I close my eyes, darkness and nothingness giving me the clarity to hear their small voices.
“Ready?” she asks her as if New would ever dare to say no.
Her little face must have ogled Wild’s blood-smeared forehead. She takes quick, loud breaths.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
Wild’s cackle makes me open my eyes.
New sticks her thumb out to Wild, her soft, lily-white thumb like a tiny moon in the dark. Wild tips the blade into her skin and it splits open in a thin curtain. As the blood forms little droplets, she smiles and touches the line to Wild’s brow. Her touch is delicate.
I watch as she presses the skin of her thumb to each of her sisters with a tenderness they can’t replicate. It quiets their pulses. It makes them giggle, like they are much younger than they look. Best rocks in place, in a knowing way. Their ritual doesn’t have to be so carnal, so serious. This new one has become Mother, the last to share her blood, the last step to connect all their dots. My stomach aches. She has made them beautiful.
When New finishes pressing her skin to each of them, she looks across their circle. She looks at me.
“Now what?”
“We howl!” Best instructs.
And each of them howls to the empty darkness, their voices a blend of all that they are. New, now Tender, her voice sweet. She needs them and they need her, but God, I need Tender too. I tip my head back, my neck creaking and craning.
I howl for my Olivia. I howl for who I am without her.
Gillian Perry is a writer originally from California, currently in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is a fiction MFA graduate of UNC Greensboro. You can find other work of hers in the Carolina Quarterly and Heavy Feather Review.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #42.
Lillian Lowenthal
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.
FROM DRAWER TO BOOKSTORE IN JUST TWENTY-FOUR YEARS: The Long and Worthy Journey to Publication by Ona Gritz
FROM DRAWER TO BOOKSTORE IN JUST TWENTY-FOUR YEARS:
The Long and Worthy Journey to Publication
by Ona Gritz
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.”
◊
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
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.
THE PRIZE FIGHTER by Lyn Chamberlin
Lyn Chamberlin
THE PRIZE FIGHTER
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.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #40.
Announcing the 2022 Cleaver Flash Contest Winners and Finalists
WINNERS & FINALISTS
CLEAVER’S 2022 FLASH CONTEST
Winners, Honorable Mentions, and finalists will be published in Cleaver’s Issue No. 40, our 10th-anniversary issue
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.
FLASH ARCHIVE
VISUAL NARRATIVES ARCHIVE
VISUAL NARRATIVES ARCHIVE
FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES by Sherry Shahan
Sherry Shahan
FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES: Collages
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
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
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #35.
THE ELEPHANT OF SILENCE, a poetry craft essay by John Wall Barger
THE ELEPHANT OF SILENCE
by John Wall Barger
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.
◊
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?
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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.
◊
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 Dinah Lenney, October 17, 2021
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]
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
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: Flash Revision, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | August 8-29
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
Moriah Hampton holds a PhD in Modernist Literature from SUNY-Buffalo. Her fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared or are forthcoming in The Coachella Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Ponder Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, Poetry South, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships through Soaring Gardens Artists Retreat, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and SUNY-Albany Initiatives for Women. She currently teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at SUNY-Albany and is a contributing writer at the NY State Writers Institute. Originally from the southeast, she is of Scottish and English descent and a Cherokee Nation citizen since 2024.
Photo by Dakota Gilbert
SENSITIVE SKIN: Ceramics by Constance McBride
Constance McBride
SENSITIVE SKIN: Ceramics
“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.
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. Constance McBride earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Arcadia University, Glenside, PA. See more of her work here.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #33.
Sensitive Skin: Ceramics by Constance McBride
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]
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.
BISCUIT POEM by Sophia Friis
Sophia Friis
BISCUIT POEM
Bitch I.
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.
Image credit: Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #27.
STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT by Carroll Sandel
Carroll Sandel
STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT
STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT
Hospital Service Association
of Pittsburgh
April 22, 1943
Patient Mrs. Margaret Smith Hospital Sew. Valley City Sewickley
Subscriber David 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.
HOSPITAL SUBSCRIBER’S
CHARGES SAVINGS
Admitted___4-8-43___{a. m} Discharged: _4-20-43__ {xxx}
date {p. m} date {p.m.}
. xxx
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.
OPERATING (Delivery) ROOM _____________________________$5.00 $5.00
ANESTHESIA (Administered by hospital employee No__Yes_x_) $3.00 $3.00
MEDICATIONS______________________________________________ $2.10 $2.10
LABORATORY_______________________________________________ $7.50 $7.50
Other charges (specify)___________Phone____________ ____ $5.34
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.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #25.
WHAT WILL GROW YOU UP REAL FAST, HE SAID by Will Schick
Will Schick
WHAT WILL GROW YOU UP REAL FAST, HE SAID
“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 Proceedings Magazine, and Duffel Blog. In his off-time, Will serves as a volunteer writing group leader for the homeless.
Image credit: LincolnN on Pixabay
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #25.
CHILDREN DANCE ON GRAVES by Anon. collected by Sir Peter Cotton as told to Sophia Lee
Anon
CHILDREN DANCE ON GRAVES[1]
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.
***[11]
“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.
[6] Note the wordplay of “limb” and “limp”.
[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.
Image credit: Plum Leaves on Flickr
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Joke Issue.
PRINTING OUT THE INTERNET by Kenny Goldfish
UN PETIT D’UN PETIT by Unknown discovered by Luis d’Antin Van Rooten
Unknown, discovered by Luis d’Antin Van Rooten
UN PETIT D’UN PETIT, from Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames
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.
Image credit: psyberartist on Flickr
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Joke Issue.
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