The Spark

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sat, 18 Jun 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Forget Me / Hit Me / Let Me Drink Great Quantities of Clear, Evil Liquor
KATIE SCHMID

Poetry
42 pages
6” x 9” Perfect-Bound Trade Paperback
ISBN 978-0990903550
First Edition
Review Copy: Paperback
Split Lip Press
Pennsylvania, USA
Available HERE
$10.00
Review by Do Nguyen Mai

Captivating in its surreal imagery, Katie Schmid’s tender, poignant writing in Forget Me / Hit Me / Let Me Drink Great Quantities of Clear, Evil Liquor invokes deep, slow-moving yet prevalent nostalgia for the American Midwest, pulling the sun below the evening horizon as the neighborhood’s children race home for dinner. Schmid’s poems are slow to punch, yet they build and build the same way rain fills a house—slowly but surely.

Forget Me / Hit Me / Let Me Drink Great Quantities of Clear, Evil Liquor begins by dragging readers to drown in both the pain and joy of remembering not only the past, but also such a place as the narrator’s memories of the Midwest.

The bigger sky.
Endless summers that consumed winter whole.
(And the whole while, someone in a tiny town
afraid to leave her house. Someone haunted
by the hungry ghost of her mother
(from “Someone Eats Bitter”)

Instead of quick, hard blows only in certain instances, Schmid interweaves sentiment with the dreamlike landscape of her Midwest, steadily drawing out the breath of readers through the consistent pacing of impact.

The central pieces—“The Daughter Psalms”—are, perhaps, the most tender pieces in this collection, songs sung both achingly and lovingly from daughters to their dear fathers who, unfortunately or not, are not left untouched by the dreamlike nature of Schmid’s Midwest.

Maybe he never thought to be a father:
his motorcycles, his reckless
burning as a boy, those tattoos. But we love him.
(from “The Daughter Psalms: blue bird motel”)

Despite the focus of notions of the Midwest tending to remain on men and boys, it is poems of this collection, such as those of “The Daughter Psalms,” that refocus the stories of the Midwest onto the daughters, the lovers, and so on.

In the dark, boys lie on their beds and listen to the katydids and frogs wetly hum. So, too, they hum. A bat whines. A boy thinks of all that he will kill. All that will try to kill him.
(from “Some brief information about the Spartans”)

For all Forget Me / Hit Me / Let Me Drink Great Quantities of Clear, Evil Liquor is a bittersweet journey through the dream of memory, the collection is one that brings back to the surface longing and love for that which has been left behind.

DO NGUYEN MAI is a Vietnamese-American poet and musician currently residing in the Los Angeles Area. In her free time, Mai can often be found researching Southeast Asian history and teaching Vietnamese to young children. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Rambutan Literary, a social media manager at The Fem, the interviews editor at Crab Fat Mag, and the visual curator for the journal Half Mystic. You can find her on Twitter and Tumblr at @lotuscrowns, and on her website donguyenmai.weebly.com.

• The reviewer received a copy of this book through a Twitter giveaway and submitted the review in full. The reviewer does not have a personal relationship with the author or publisher. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Waste
ANDREW F. SULLIVAN

Fiction | Novel
256 pages
Perfect-Bound Trade Paperback
ISBN 978-1-938103-40-7
First Edition
Review Copy: Paperback
Dzanc Books
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Available HERE
$15.95
Review by Eric Shonkwiler

Relentlessly depressing, depraved, dirty, disgusting. More d-words. Dig Dug. That last one is in there because Waste takes place in the 80s, and because Larkhill, Sullivan’s fictional stand-in for Oshawa, Canada, may as well be underground. Waste is, first and foremost, not your typical novel. It’s not your typical Pollock/Palahniuk shock-lit/grit-lit/meth noir, and it’s important to know that, to realize it, preferably before you read the book. Any number of readers could come away from this book without thinking, and they’d shelve the book as the one of the sadder, more ugly things they’ve ever laid eyes on.

Waste follows a few days in the lives of Moses Moon, a sad young skinhead; his lackeys—even sadder than he; and Jamie, Moses’ co-worker, who manages to hit a lion on the streets of Larkhill. Bad fucking luck, right? This collision opens the novel and begins the precipitous decline of these characters, their downright downward spiral, into an even lower plane of misery than that upon which their lives already existed. The lion belongs to a crooked, broken man; one who employs equally broken men, but men with a knack for brutality.

Sullivan takes his time in this novel, such that it’s easy to forget the plot. Everyone gets his turn, his tale told, his little section of the tapestry of Larkhill illuminated. This can be a drag, for sure, but once you remember the title of the novel, and after you (admittedly) slough through your first few extended backstories, you realize that Sullivan is not trying to take you from point A to point B. This is a more complicated journey than that. To get from point A to point B, first Sullivan has to build the road to get there, and it so happens that road passes mouths full of broken teeth, stomped faces, abandoned asylums, and a body hidden in a barrel of fat. Sullivan is creating for his reader several lost generations.

Moses’ father has left both Moses and his mother, Elvira, for the better land of Arizona (which ought to tell you something). Elvira, herself, had her brain stove in by a bowling ball, and she spends her days in a bathtub in Moses’ and her hotel room. Jamie has a failed marriage and a young child named Kansas, and her appearance in the book is perhaps the only, dim, dusty ray of sunshine in the book. Add a suicide/patricide, to taste. Cripples, losers, racists, chained bears, all this and worse in Larkhill. These events, the lives of these characters, swirl together, in a low-hanging metaphorical fruit of a half-clogged toilet draining, to an inevitable but not entirely obvious conclusion.

Despite Waste’s lowbrow trappings, Sullivan has written a deeply moral tale. The plot is secondary. The A to B, above, is not what’s important. What is important is to consider every life in this book; every life spent, abused, trashed, and burned. This is not a farfetched book. It’s our world, with a slight bent to the sinister. These lives are possible—indeed, much of what Sullivan has written comes from records of actual events. And like real life, sometimes you don’t learn from events so much as you witness them. That’s what Sullivan has done here. He’s stood witness to people lost and forgotten, the dross of capitalism, the runoff of greed. Even the villain is a ruined figure, trod upon by his surroundings, by those born into a luckier life than he.

Waste asks of its reader what it asked of its author. See what happens in the everyday grinding of the gears of this world. Remember it. Be sickened. Just don’t be okay with it. In the early pages of the book, Moses is relaying the contents of a TV show to Jamie, on their way home from work. In puffed-up racist fashion, he describes a fire at a school for the mute, and a girl caught in said fire, “melts her whole mouth shut […]. Her skin burns […] like candle wax.” Jamie, sleepily aghast, says, “Moses, why? Why is this something you would tell me?” And Moses’ answer is, essentially, that things can always get worse.

Eric Shonkwiler is the author of the novel, Above All Men, chosen as a Midwest Connections Pick by the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association, and the Luminaire Award for Best Prose-winning short story and novella collection, Moon Up, Past Full. His second novel, 8th Street Power & Light, is forthcoming from MG Press in fall 2016.

• This book was sent to Alternating Current from the publisher after the reviewer had a reading event with the author and brief online interactions over social media. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 12:00:00 +0000

One True Loves
TAYLOR JENKINS REID

Fiction | Novel
352 pages
5.3” x 8.2” Paperback
Also available in ebook and audio formats
ISBN 978-1476776903
First Edition
Review Copy: Kindle Mobi
Washington Square Press
New York, New York, USA
Available HERE
$16.00
Review by Nicole Tone

Are our lives pre-determined? Is there one person we’re meant to be with? These are questions Taylor Jenkins Reid has been exploring in her novels over the past few years. Her most recent release, One True Loves, Reid explores not just the idea of “one true love” as the title suggests, but the idea that we live multiple lives within our own singular lifetime.

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there’s a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than the others.
(Loc. 147)

Emma Blair has lived two perfect lives. The first was with her high school sweetheart, Jesse, who was supposed to have died when his helicopter crashes in the Pacific Ocean. The second life begins after Jesse’s death. What’s presented as a second chance at love as the summary suggests isn’t a chance; it’s a complete change in what Emma thought she wanted. It’s not just that she moves on in her love life; she lives a completely new life compared to what she had with Jesse.

But that’s where things start to go sideways.

When you lose someone you love, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll ever feel better. That, one day, you’ll manage to be in a good mood simply because the weather is nice or the barista at the coffee shop on the corner remembered your order.
(Loc. 1075)

Emma’s dead husband is found alive. Suddenly, Emma has this new life, a new fiancé, and one foot back into her previous life: a life with her husband in California, a life as a writer, as a traveler, as someone without roots except for the ring on her finger. She’s grieved for the death of her husband, yes, but now she has to decide which life she must grieve: her old one, or her new one.

Do you ever get over loss? Or do you just find a box within yourself, big enough to hold it? Do you just stuff it in there, push it down, and snap the lid on it? Do you just work, every day, to keep the box shut?
(Loc. 2886)

This isn’t just a typical story of what-ifs and choosing between two men. Reid goes deeper than that. Emma is forced to figure out what life she really wants, what life she really belongs in. For those of us struggling with figuring out what’s best for us—in love, in our careers, in our lives—One True Loves is a must-read.

Nicole Tone has her BA in Creative Writing and Literature from Southern New Hampshire University and is working toward her MFA in Creative Writing at Chatham University. In her free time, she is an editorial intern for REUTS Publications and the Industry News Coordinator for the Women Fiction Writers Association. You can follow her on Twitter at @nicoleatone or visit her website at nicoleatone.com.

• This review was requested by Alternating Current at the interest of the reviewer. The reviewer does not have a personal relationship with the author or publisher. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sun, 29 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000

The So-Called Sonnets
BRUCE McRAE

Poetry
84 pages
5 ½” x 8 ½” perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN 978-0-9792410-5-5
First Edition
Silenced Press
Columbus, Ohio, USA
Available HERE
$14
Review by Nicole Tone

Poetry, as with all things, can feel antiquated especially when following the traditional meters set forward by the Masters of our languages. Sonnets are supposed to follow a certain rhyming pattern, a certain number of beats per measure, as with any song. But in looking at tradition, and turning it on its head, great poets—contemporary Masters—are born. They don’t just write beautiful words but cut open their hearts and leave them to dry on the page. Bruce McRae’s The So-Called Sonnets does just this.

Sonnets are known to be about love—romantic love, the wanting of someone you are trying to woo. McRae begins his collection with the loss of love:

It was here, and now it’s somewhere else,
a thing that’s not worth mentioning.
A thing gone down a drain
only to rise out of the cold lake,
reaching up like a hand,
missing a ring, missing a finger.
(“Unfounded,” p. 14).

But this love is specific to the love of a person, where his collection is about so many different types of love, grouped together like different stages of a storm. Beyond the obvious hints to water and weather—

And the rain with teeth in it,
with a few deft strokes a rain implied.
(“Painting,” p. 6)

—the cadence of each poem calms and becomes intense as the narrator moves through the loss of a relationship, the beginning of a new one, of a return to family, to accepting of his fate. As with any life cycle, the narrator grows with each new poem and with this growth comes a shift in what he cares about. This cycle is slow in an enjoyable way, the way afternoon rains are or a good cup of tea is. Even in the narrator’s acceptance of his fate—

As if dust-devils, as if a cobra, like Orion;
up and up and up it rose, cradled on a burdened wind;
That thing that doesn’t have a name,
and no one, and no thing, can stop it.
(“Risen,” p. 73)

—there is indeed a resolution that leaves no questions unanswered. It is a satisfying journey from the death of a relationship to, perhaps, the death of McRae’s narrator who is seeing many lives flash before his eyes. For the poetry lover, it is a loving embrace, a blanket of warmth and comfort to know that, even in a storming sea, they are not alone. For the prose reader, it is a new adventure, though one that feels familiar, like a new cover of your favorite song.

NICOLE TONE has her BA in Creative Writing and Literature from Southern New Hampshire University and is working toward her MFA in Creative Writing at Chatham University. In her free time, she is an editorial intern for REUTS Publications and the Industry News Coordinator for the Women Fiction Writers Association. You can follow her on Twitter at @nicoleatone or visit her website at nicoleatone.com.

• This book was submitted to Alternating Current by the author. The reviewer does not know the author and received the book from Alternating Current at random. • Permalink • Tags: The Volt

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Wed, 25 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Furthermore
JOSH WARDRIP

The principal feature of Furthermore, and its claim to engineering genius, is the structure’s mechanism for autonomous development and expansion. Incredibly, the original complex occupied just one acre and remained thus for several years while founder J. L. Furthermore tested and refined his now-famous Theorem. Furthermore today encompasses cities, states, bodies of water, nations. Residents live in mostly identical units of seven hundred square feet, and while certain attributes can be modified to accommodate special needs (of the disabled, the elderly, or, perhaps, the eccentric), each apartment typically contains a lavatory, a kitchen, a sitting room, sleeping chambers, and an auxiliary space. At the tenant’s discretion, these areas may be demarcated by walls or arranged as an open-plan studio. Regardless of location, each residence has a large window offering a generous view of an urban or rural setting (or combination thereof). Outside light is provided by enormous lamps built into the ceiling. This light is calibrated to resemble natural sunlight, just as the sculpted landscapes appear nearly identical to the fields, streams, islands, and mountains one might find outside the structure. Perhaps better, even. While some contend that simulation impoverishes the soul, I prefer to think of Furthermore as an improvement upon the world, a triumph over the limits of what is given.

Like most technicians at Furthermore, I have been reassigned to tasks of a more pedestrian sort. Improvements to the system architecture based on new extrapolations of the Theorem eventually obviated the need for administrators to oversee its workings. I was not born here, but I will certainly die here. As with all departed residents, my body will be processed into compost and spread over Furthermore’s chiseled earth, nourishing its abundant flora. Though dissent is rare, certain members of the externalist faction have quarrel with the disposition of the dead, condemning what they see as a subordination of dignity to utility. Conversely, the progressive internalists say that composting should, additionally, be an option for the almost dead, the terminally ill, or the terminally dissatisfied, and even in some instances unwanted offspring below a certain age. These positions are not without merit. Let me repeat, however, a basic precept (paraphrased from the only extant record of the Theorem, a damaged and incomplete text): Suffice to say the structure knows what is best for itself.

The exterior walls are designed to repel any attack, whether by missile, bomb, aircraft, or other means. They rise out of sight into the clouds, taller than any mountain of the earth. The precise height and thickness of the walls are indeterminate since they continually change as the edifice grows and adapts. The absence of guiding engineers, of oversight, in the structure’s evolution is the great maddening puzzle of Furthermore. I will try to clarify this mystery by recalling some first principles.

Above all, the structure is sovereign. It is true that J. L. Furthermore built the first primitive complex, but once the process was fully implemented and set in motion, it could not be undone or otherwise amended. The particulars of the Theorem died with the author. The extant record I spoke of contains only foundational notes from Furthermore’s days as a graduate student; almost nothing remains of the Theorem’s byzantine formulae, which are said to have occupied several thousand pages.

Second, it is infinitely adaptable. That is to say, it not only freely expands but may also continually modify its existing constitution. The dimensions of any given space can spontaneously change. Though most alterations are innocuous enough, it is not unheard of for an apartment to shift abruptly to an entirely different part of Furthermore. The dislocation could be fifty feet or one thousand miles, which might prove jarring to newer residents. Ours is not to complain but to comply. And the relative sameness of Furthermore from one grid to the next helps ease such transitions. Despite this homogeny some say chaos governs the core, that the endless modifications are illogical and without purpose. The philosophers, however, have shown that the Architect—in his goodness and wisdom—was no prankster, and it was not in his nature to erect a subterfuge for anarchy. The absurdity of such claims is self-evident.

It has been suggested that all strife might cease with the enactment of a universal language. There is little question that the dialects of the unstable regions are of inferior character—mongrel variants lacking the clarity and grace of the predominant Furthermore tongue. It is no wonder the speakers of these lesser idioms should have muddled thoughts and lead depraved lives. Advocates for the universal language have proposed what is called, quite simply, the Furthermore Standard (FS). As best we can discover, FS most closely resembles the Architect’s parlance, drawing heavily upon the fragments of the Theorem. Though not yet compulsory, FS is already the preferred style for all official communication and is by far the most spoken dialect in Furthermore.

Some years ago a massive book purported to be the lost text of the Theorem was circulated by an anonymous publisher. Composed of dense, arcane jargon, the book successfully deceived much of the public. Linguists, however, comparing the text with the authentic fragments of the Theorem promptly dismissed it as forgery. Likewise, mathematicians who examined the work determined that its formulae were gibberish and could not have been produced by J. L. Furthermore. Such a hoax would not be inherently harmful were it not for certain passages, quietly inserted into all the harebrained theorizing, that are plainly subversive. One such excerpt I will reproduce here from memory (since all known copies were long ago removed from circulation):

Whereupon Colossus should navigate
The brine and collide with the stalwart shores
Of the continent, wherefore the ingrate,
Who in folly said, “This world is not yours,”
Will fight against the elder warriors
Who in their time have seen their towers burned,
Their lakes tinged red, their fragile peace upturned.

And then sweet doom shall take the rising beast.
En masse, his legion white-fleeced timid sheep,
Their eyes afraid to gaze toward the east,
Will slice themselves at the gullet or sweep
Below the midsection; their blood will seep
In holes and clog the gears that should not be
Until he meets his end beneath the sea.

This is preposterous, of course, and I include it here only for historical purposes and entertainment. I should point out that eastward expansion is fully underway, and what little resistance we’ve encountered has been ameliorated. And though it’s clear the author seeks to make his or her points via symbol and metaphor, I remind you there are no “gears” to “clog,” as it were, that Furthermore’s sublime mechanisms are surely sabotage-proof. Lastly, such bombast is inconsistent with what we know of the Architect’s writing, which was plain and factual. He certainly would not have employed such an archaic form as verse to delineate his thought. The most plausible explanation is that the forgery was written in whole or in part by the radical poet Todd Kueker (leading some to term the hoax the Kueker affair), who has been missing for more than five years. We believe he is either deceased or in hiding in the Lane province, near the western wall.

While it pains me to waste time on trifles such as the Kueker affair, in my role as public relations director for East Qanne, I am required to comment on matters relevant to citizen morale. And thus my days are spent: composing memos on the issues of the day, clarifying metaphysical conundrums, fostering serenity and temperance among the residents of my district. All of this I accomplish without leaving my apartment. Which is not to say I never leave my quarters; it’s just rarely necessary. Though written communication is my métier, I do sometimes appear in video transmissions. To be sure, my features are altered during such broadcasts, not to ensure my safety but because I am ugly. It is true that I was once an engineer. You might think my present work causes me discontent. It does not. On the contrary, it has helped me discover the highest virtue of all: peace through acquiescence.

I am, however, deteriorating. Sedentariness has engendered in my body a terrible lethargy I fear will one day render me immobile. I am not, as you might think, obese. Food is rationed according to one’s minimum caloric requirements, and it is, rest assured, quite healthy. I suspect my troubles stem from something more serious than a lack of movement. There is a constant ache in the back of my neck and a metallic taste in my mouth; it is rare that I pass solid stool. Doctors say I am in perfect health. I find this difficult to accept, but I must as our facilities are state of the art and our professionals the best available. My own diagnosis is simply this: I am an imperfect facsimile of a human, and I have been since birth.

But I haven’t told you about my quarters. Though it is not impossible that an exact duplicate somewhere exists, I’d like to think my peculiar configuration is unique among the apartments of Furthermore. Like all units, it is approximately seven hundred square feet. Unlike any other I know of, it’s comprised of fourteen rooms, each measuring roughly seven feet by seven feet. All but one (and perhaps one other, which I will tell you about) have the same single light fixture built into the ceiling. There are thirteen doors, each with a unique lock and key. The front entrance, facing south, opens into a foyer that contains, among other things, a coat rack, two umbrellas, and a master light switch. A door in the south wall leads to another anteroom, this one empty, with a door in each of the four walls. The western door goes to the lavatory, the eastern to the kitchen. At the south wall of the kitchen is the only entrance to the dining room, which has a small table and a single chair. Back in the anteroom, the southern door opens into the primary work room where there is a desk and other implements of my trade. This is where most of my day is spent. A secondary work room lies to the south. It, too, contains a desk and sundry office supplies, and it is here where I typically pass my evenings. Turning to the north, through the primary work room and back again to the anteroom, then west to the lavatory, one finds to the south the changing room, which holds all of my clothing and other personal accessories. There are no closets, just rods for hanging items and a simple, compact chest of drawers. The next room, again to the south, has a fish tank with fish in it. Next, once more to the south, is the reading and sitting room where there is a reclining chair. East of this room is the bed chamber with a twin bed and a nightstand. Once more to the east is the storage area. In the past I owned things; I now own much less. This room houses the few items I’ve no use for in daily life. Finally, beyond the northern door of the storage room, lies the sanctum sanctorum. It is empty and unlit, and I go there rarely, only when necessary. Like the rest of the apartment, there are no windows here. If you’re paying attention, you have noticed that I’ve only described thirteen rooms, whereas I said at the beginning there are fourteen. There is a fourteenth room. It lies to the south of the bed chamber, and while there is no door, opening, or other indicator, it is surely there since I specified it when I submitted the design request for my quarters (Furthermore officials are sometimes accorded special, though modest, privileges in matters of housing.). I cannot easily describe its exact function or even its contents. When I am ready, I will have the door installed, or perhaps I’ll simply tear through the wall and thrust myself into its horrible wonders.

I fear that in these notes I have too much dwelt on fringe elements, thereby implying their numbers are significant. They are not. Their means are limited, and their influence rarely extends beyond their own secluded circles. This compulsion to seek comfort and solidarity in groups surely indicates a profound deficiency in some essential area of life. The serene joy of solitude and the sustaining routines of work compel me to remain in this world and shun, for now, whatever hidden places might usurp all that I know in my heart to be true and real.

The 2016 Luminaire Award for Best Prose
NOTABLE MENTION

We are pleased to announce this story as a NOTABLE MENTION finalist for The 2016 Luminaire Award for Best Prose, honoring the independent press’ best short stories and hybrid prose works of the year. The winners are selected by an external panel that judges all pieces blindly and selects the full list of 12 finalists from hundreds of entries. Alternating Current does not determine the final outcome for the judging; the external judges’ decisions are final.

JOSH WARDRIP’s fiction has appeared in New Orleans Review, Gargoyle, Chicago Quarterly Review, American Letters & Commentary, and many other journals. He studied at the University of Kentucky and Texas State University. He lives in Pittsburgh and works as an academic editor.

• This story first appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Issue 23 • Help us pay our authors. Authors receive ~80% of your tip, after necessary transaction and administrative fees. Even small change makes a difference. • Permalink • Tag: The Current

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Mon, 23 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000

I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World
JARED YATES SEXTON

Fiction | Stories
188 pages
6” x 9” perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN 978-0-9909035-6-7
First Edition
Split Lip Press
Available HERE
$16.00
Review by Al Kratz

Listen up, World. Jared Yates Sexton has something important to say about the state you’re in and your future. A reader might not always like what he has to say about the world, but, since Sexton is a great writer, the reader will likely love how he says it. The collection of stories that the author self-describes as weird and the publisher calls experimental, I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World invokes a mixture of contradictory emotional responses. It is a funny yet scary, brutally honest yet hyperbolic distortion of reality. It’s satire at its best.

In a review of his previous collection, The Hook and the Haymaker, I described the writing as a literary Exile on Main Street, the gritty double album classic of the Rolling Stones. Now, I Am the Oil invokes more of the Doors and Jim Morrison’s world-view: “Motel money, murder madness. Let’s change the mood from glad to sadness” (“L. A. Woman,” the Doors).

In 25 shorts, averaging about six pages each, Sexton sets a dark and weird mood, established up front in the lead story, “You Are but a Pilgrim Venturing to a Strange and Honest Land.”

On the cab ride in the driver turned and said, Did you know Hope and Despair are sister and brother and you are their distant cousin?
(p. 3)

This is how the people of this world behave. They’re odd and philosophical and make the protagonists ask questions. Is this a dream? What is exaggeration? What is reality? They may not always like the answers. When this narrator asks the passenger next to him on a plane if something is wrong, she answers of course it is. There’s always something wrong. The ending of this story unfolds a welcome mat for the reader to Sexton’s weird world, which is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, George Saunders, and Amelia Gray.

The domestic scenes central to his other two collections continue here, but these new couples find themselves in even more desperate times. If those earlier stories were about that moment when things are about to get weird, the new stories center on the idea that even after they get weird, they can get weirder. One couple finds themselves caught up in the buzz of a serial killer that the media has somehow turned into a hero. Excitement rises and falls on the killer’s activity. What should be a threat to their world is a motivator. Hope is turned around. The protagonists are almost always on the losing end, and humor might be their only grace.

A presentation. My girlfriend and me sitting in our living room, on our couch, drinking glasses we haven’t owned in ages. Pay attention to the graph, she says. The peaks and valleys tell the entire story. Here is the height of our love. She points to a wonderful swell in the past. And here it is, she says, pointing to a rot-colored line that runs to the bottom of the poster board. This is today, she says. This is where my love has ceased, she says. I think I’m dreaming, I say. You’re not dreaming, she says.
(p. 21)

Everything is possible in this world. Even Jennifer Aniston makes an appearance. Hallelujah is found in a bomb. A mother is discovered in a grocery store aisle and transformed into a movie star. Lines are blurred between everyone’s fortune and curse. A father knows not to break the gaze of his ten year old son because

weakness was not a trait either of us tolerated.

“There’s blood in the streets, it’s up to my ankles. Blood in the streets, it’s up to my knee. Blood in the streets in the town of Chicago. Blood on the rise, and it’s following me” (“Peace Frog,” the Doors).

The events are so crazy, so exaggerated, I laughed and wondered how he dared to go there. And then I’d watch the news of people doing similarly absurd things and listen to commentators describing the wide gap in American beliefs about what would make us “great” again, and it sounded hauntingly familiar. I’m not sure if this is comedy or horror, but it seems to me this book predicts the Trump phenomenon. It also says that as crazy as our new era may feel, tighten your seatbelts because it’s bound to get worse. Hope will continually be turned around.

There never was a jig, he cried into the receiver. The American Experiment is over. It’s failed worse than a middle-schooler’s tinkerings. Come and witness me sour my liver, he said. Come and watch me pickle.
(p. 65)

And then, like all good things, it has to end. The last piece, called “Everything That Blossoms,” is a nice philosophical wrap-up on the endings of stories and also hints a way to navigate the world of I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World.

You always said I had a problem with happy endings. That whenever my narratives got near the end they started to spoil like curdled milk. You were the optimist, the one who looked at the uneven and crooked pictures on the wall and said their imperfections gave you something to do tomorrow, something to live for.
(p. 173)

This unnamed couple shares the most peaceful, intimate, insightful and sane moments of the entire book. They briefly exchange differing opinions on endings that also speak volumes to beginnings and middles, as well. While their dog looks for the perfect napping spots, he becomes a symbol that allows the couple to synthesize their views into a mutually satisfying ending.

“Can you picture what will be, so limitless and free? Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand, in a desperate land” (“The End,” the Doors).

Al Kratz is a Fiction Reviewer for The Volt. He is a writer from Des Moines, Iowa, a reader for Wyvern Lit, and is currently working on a novel and a short story collection. He has had work featured in Red Savina Review, Wyvern Lit, Third Point Press, Daily Palette, Apeiron Review, Corvus Review, Gravel, 1000words, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere, and he is the winner of the 2013 British Fantasy Society Flash Fiction Competition.

• This book was sent to the reviewer by the publisher. The reviewer has had brief interactions with the author and publisher online and at AWP. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sat, 21 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Hatnote: Listen to Wikipedia Being Updated
LORI SAMBOL BRODY

Hatnote, a project formed to promote Wikipedia, developed a program that turns every change made on Wikipedia into sound. The sound of bells represents additions, and the sound of string plucks represents deletions. The pitch indicates the size of the edits—the lower the note, the larger the edit made. On the website, as Wikipedia is edited, circles rise like ripples on a pond when a stone is thrown in, identifying the page being edited and whether the contributor is unregistered or an automated bot.

Listen here.

The sound is ambient, spellbinding. Wouldn’t you like the soundtrack for your editing to be as melodic? You can read more about this project here.

LORI SAMBOL BRODY lives in the mountains of Southern California with her husband and two daughters. Her short fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Little Fiction, The Rumpus, Tin House Flash Fridays, New Orleans Review, WhiskeyPaper, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter at @LoriSambolBrody, and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.

• Post contributors receive ~80% of your tip, after necessary transaction and administrative fees. Even small change makes a difference. • Permalink • Tag: The Frequency

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Fri, 20 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000

The Ghost Network
CATIE DISABATO

Fiction | Novel
288 pages
5½” x 7½” perfect-bound trade paperback
eBook formats available
ISBN 978-1612194349
First Edition
Melville House
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Available HERE
$9.99-$13.56
Review by Leland Cheuk

Why are works about pop ephemera not considered literary? Perhaps MFA programs are brainwashing writers into tackling only what is ‘timeless,’ for the fear that work will become dated and easily forgotten. But what if a work is actually about one’s love of pop ephemera? Isn’t love timeless?

Catie Disabato’s novel, The Ghost Network, doesn’t shy away from peppering the reader with many, many pop culture references that conjure what it’s like to live in the 21st century in all its social-media-saturated, Pitchfork-reading glory. Famous pop singer Molly Metropolis (think: Lady Gaga, M.I.A., Sia) disappears, and a journalist named Cyrus Archer pens a manuscript about the search for her, only to disappear himself. Enter the narrator, Catie Disabato, who presents us Archer’s manuscript with her footnotes. What follows is layers upon layers of love triangles, an incredible soundtrack of EDM, synth-pop, and indie rock favorites from the past ten years, and an avant-garde urban planning group with an “aesthetics-based approach to social change” (whatever that means), and all of this somehow involves cartography and Chicago’s labyrinthine subway system.

The nesting-dolls structure of the narration distances the reader from the novel’s characters enough to blunt our emotional attachment to the story. Most of the narrative is told and not shown.

Eventually, Taer turned the conversation to Nix’s relationship with Molly Metropolis and the fallout from her disappearance. Taer recorded the discussion,* even though Nix asked for their chat to be off the record. Taer assured Nix that she wouldn’t give the Tribune her quotes “but if they ask me to get something specific for you, and I already have it, I can just ask you about it. Plus, there are laws to protect anonymous sources, if you want to become an anonymous source.”

This is Archer’s account of what Taer said about a discussion with Molly Metropolis’ boyfriend about his relationship to the pop star. To further separate you from what actually happens in the scene, the footnote by Disabato comments at length on Taer’s fascination with recording devices. The reader has to be willing to sift through these constant and intentional obfuscations to buy into the story.

I enjoyed The Ghost Network most when we romped through the pop culture of the aughts. In the passage below, four decades of artists are referenced in one paragraph:

To begin realizing her Situationist goals, Molly Metropolis first had to make herself a star. She began working with a producer named Davin Karl, who had written and produced songs for Britney Spears and Kelly Rowland. Karl suggested she change her persona from a Fiona Apple disciple to a dance-pop artist […] To build an identity authentic in its artifice, she developed part-Britney coquettishness, combined with what Molly called a “dirty Outrun Electro synthesizers” aesthetic, combined with Freddie Mercury, combined with Holly Golightly.

Disabato the Author lightly skewers our obsession with celebrities, as well as the highbrow, jargon-filled manner with which journalists write about those obsessions. While Disabato may be making fun of that type of writing, she’s also exhibiting a deep knowledge and love for all the music and art she references. Furthermore, Disabato deserves credit for creating a credible, contemporary urban environment populated by characters of fluid ethnicity and sexuality. Molly Metropolis is mixed-race, and straight folks are the minority in Molly’s universe.

I enjoyed the novel’s Pynchonesque conspiracy theories even though they made me wonder more than once: why urban planning, of all things? But the joy of reading The Ghost Network is in watching all these seemingly disparate compartments of Molly Metropolis’ life find their way back together into a cohesive whole. I was made strangely nostalgic for the music of the previous decade, and while the twists and turns of the plot don’t hit the reader in the gut, The Ghost Network is, in its own weedy way, a love letter to subwaying through Chicago while listening to the post-grunge indie-fication of dance, pop, R&B, and rock, while reading Gawker on your iPhone.

Four out of five stars.

LELAND CHEUK is the author of the novel, The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong (CCLaP Publishing, 2015). He is a MacDowell Colony fellow, and his work has appeared in The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, Pank Magazine, and others. His story collection, Letters from Dinosaurs, is forthcoming in 2017. He lives in Brooklyn.

• The reviewer purchased this book at an indie bookstore and does not know the author or publisher personally. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Wed, 18 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000

A Conversation with Danny Judge
INTERVIEW BY LORI SAMBOL BRODY

DANNY JUDGE’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Twisted Vine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Burningword, and The Portland Review, among many others. He is the founding Editor of The Indianola Review, a quarterly print journal, and lives in Indianola, Iowa (go figure), with his wife and son. Find him on Twitter at @dnyjudge.

Lori Sambol Brody talks to Danny Judge, writer and founder/Editor-in-Chief of The Indianola Review, for which Lori is also an assistant fiction editor.

LORI SAMBOL BRODY: Before we talk specifically about The Indianola Review, tell me a little bit about your background.

DANNY JUDGE: I guess everybody who finds his way into this business has to love literature, first and foremost. I’m one of those folks who went a different path after high school, installing furnaces for a few years before joining the Marine Corps in 2007, but I never lost the itch to write, or the love of reading. Finally, after marrying and having a son, I made the leap in 2013 and devoted myself wholeheartedly to writing. I was lucky to have the opportunity—not everyone has the G.I. Bill to pay for schooling or a wife with a nursing job to pick up the slack, I know. It was a challenge, especially starting a little later in life than most, but I devoted myself to the toughest and most demanding material I could find. I started with the classics and worked my way through them until I found Faulkner, who pulled me into this whole other world of literary possibilities—from there, I devoured Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Kafka, Nabokov, and Morrison. I was hooked from the beginning, and spent a possibly unhealthy amount of time reading, which has remained, to a lesser extent, a critical part of what I do with both my writing, and with the direction of The Indianola Review.

When and why did you say, “I’m going to start a literary journal”?

I’m one of those writers who always reads the guidelines and takes a long look at the websites of the journals to which I’m considering submitting. I quickly learned there are a ton of journals out there, and not all of them are doing things the way they should. So when the idea occurred to me in 2015, one of those “wait a second, why not?” moments, I realized I had a wealth of information on the market already. I’d reviewed thousands of websites, read every variation of submission guidelines out there, had good and bad experiences with editors, and I knew right away how I wanted to do things. My obsessive investment of my time, the hours spent writing, reading, and researching, really started to pay dividends in the early stages of The Indianola Review. I knew how important it was for a journal to treat its submitters well and, above all, to promote good literature in all its myriad manifestations, and these two ideas really guided my hand through the early stages. Ultimately, I viewed the journal as a way to tender a positive contribution to the industry and add to the stellar community of literary journals out there doing things the right way.

Does being an ex-Marine influence your writing or your management style as Editor-in-Chief of The Indianola Review?

Actually, I really try to keep that part of my life from infringing too much upon my writing. I view it as experience from which I can draw, if the story calls for it, but which must otherwise remain just that—a source—if I can expect to explore a meaningful range of ideas and perspectives. I don’t write military-themed stories, either, focusing instead on challenging points-of-view and unfamiliar territory. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but looking back, it could have started as a way to avoid being pigeonholed as a “veteran writer.” If so, that’s not on my mind anymore. I’ve fallen in love with the challenge of exploring diverse landscapes and characters, and if I draw from personal experience, it’s likely to have little to do with the military, which only spans four years of my entire life. I’ve always considered myself a writer, and the fact that I was a Marine as a part of my experience in the same way my marriage, the birth of my son, and my work before the military make up my collective experience.

Now, that’s not to say it doesn’t influence my philosophy or behavior in other areas—I’d be naïve to think I don’t approach the journal a little differently with that in my background. One thing most new editors will learn when they step into the role is that the administrative side really takes over your life, and you end up much less involved with the creative side than you expected to be. So, I’d say that the Marine Corps has influenced that side of things, sure—the organization and workflow of the staff. But again, this a completely different beast than the military, complete with its own set of challenges and expectations, and I try to approach it with that in mind.

There’s so many literary journals now, but most are starting online. We think of the Internet being more accessible to readers and having a sort of immediacy (as well as less expensive production)—so why did you decide to start a print journal?

That’s certainly a drawback to the print medium—when a contributor wants to share his work on social media and have it immediately available for his friends and family. However, I really believe that print is and will remain a vital and important medium for literature, and I wanted to contribute to the diminishing number of journals out there still publishing the old-fashioned way. Plus, come on, seeing your byline in a print journal and having the ability to shelve it with your collection of real, tangible printed matter, that just beats online publication any day. It’s a headache sometimes, but I really believe in it, and we’ll be printing on paper as long we can stay in business.

What makes The Indianola Review stand out from all the other literary journals?

That’s a tough one, because there are just so many wonderful journals out there. But I’d say our commitment to submitters really sets us apart. First of all, we pay our contributors. It was a token payment at first, but we’ve since raised our rates and will continue to do so. We aim to respond quickly and will never charge submission fees. In fact, I don’t ask for donations, and I’ve done away with our “tip jar” category. We run one premium category, entirely optional, offering “front-of-the-line” consideration, which results in exponentially expedited responses. I feel that if someone decides to support our journal and help us pay contributors and advertise, they should get more than a warm-and-fuzzy. As a small journal in a sea of other small journals, we’re more than prepared to work for the generous support of the community we serve.

Also, we’ve worked very hard to produce a beautifully clean aesthetic in our print issues, one that I feel really stands up to the eye test with some of the upper echelon journals out there. Presentation is an extremely important part of the publishing process, and it’s another way we honor the hard work of the contributors we publish, by giving their work a home they can be proud of.

Writers love metaphors. If you could compare editing The Indianola Review and the process of putting together an issue to anything else, what would that be?

The whole process is a labor of love. I think it really compares well to the creative process, which any artist will understand. You drive through the ideas and concepts so fast, working through the meat and potatoes of it, then comes the revising, the formatting, the preparation to send your work out in the world—all the administrative things that go hand-in-hand with any creative undertaking. With a journal, you guide the issue through the process of assembling all these stunning individual parts, but then comes the real work: preparing the sum of these parts for print, which is no small task. It’s like the process a short story takes from idea to publication, only on a much larger scale. It’s a lot of work, but I love it.

What is your favorite emotion evoked by a piece of writing?

Honestly, I love uncertainty—ambivalence, that feeling like treading water in a lazy river, just knowing there’s an undercurrent you can’t quite touch with your toes, one that’s palpable and a little dangerous, even. A lot is said about Raymond Carver’s technique and minimalist style, his working class milieus, but the real reason I love Carver is that you’re in his world, and he doesn’t have to show you the riverbed if he doesn’t think you need to see it. He gives you something ethereal, something intangible but forceful, an emotion that destabilizes beautifully the sum of his technical parts. I love the uncertainty of powerful fiction, of knowing the undercurrent is there, that it’s deeper than you swim—deeper, maybe, than you want to.

It seems like you and The Indianola Review are doing more than merely publishing a literary journal, but building a writing community. Is that true, and what are you doing?

We just don’t let ourselves lose sight of the fact that we’re part of a community of individuals passionate about reading and writing. We stay connected on social media and encourage workshop participants to stay connected through the private Facebook page dedicated to them, encouraging a growing community and fostering access to our editorial team long after our workshops end. We love talking to writers, and they are a big part of our decision-making process.

How has being an editor of The Indianola Review influenced your own writing?

That’s a good question, because I think this is an underrated benefit to working on a staff of a good-sized literary journal, no matter if you’re a first reader or an editor. Having the ability to review work from other artists, to see what’s out there and, most importantly, what’s working and what isn’t, can really help a writer when evaluating his own fiction. Personally, I’ve made adjustments based off patterns in our submissions, although, again, I just don’t have the time to dive in anymore as much as I would like.

What would you like to see more of in submissions?

I’d love to see more creative nonfiction and artwork. We really love reading powerful nonfiction, but it’s our least consistent category. We’re always in the market for cover art, as well. As far as content, I’d really like to see more genre work. We’re open to any genre, provided it is well-crafted and compelling.

What has been the most surprising thing you’ve learned from running The Indianola Review?

It’s amazed me from day one how relatively small and dedicated the literary community is. The power and usefulness of social media has blown me away: the ideas being shared and the questions being raised each and every day are extraordinary, and contributing to this community—connecting with and supporting writers—has been the most rewarding part of this journey.

What should we expect next from The Indianola Review?

We are currently reading submissions through the end of the year for our next four issues. We’re looking for fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and cover artwork, and our miscellaneous category is a great place for those hard-to-define creations nesting in your hard drive, waiting for a home.

Our online fiction workshops (poetry forthcoming) offer a great inside look at the guts of the industry, as well a wide range of feedback from our staff and participants. We’re keeping the cost low and striving to provide a unique experience with these workshops, something you can’t get in many programs. We “hire” participants for the duration for workshop, giving them a staff slot in Submittable and introducing them to the behind-the-scenes circuitry of the “machine.” We focus on providing pragmatic guidance to bolster participants’ chances of success with literary journals, even focusing on details like the cover letter and formatting. Together with the intensive, craft-focused commentary on participants’ work, I think this model really packs a punch and does what we set out to accomplish with it. And, of course, we maintain these relationships in our private social media group, because we love hearing about writers’ successes.

Our long-term goals are to raise our rates to pro-level, take AWP by storm with a booth—and, who knows, somebody in a big giraffe costume handing out copies of the journal—and to continue promoting new and emerging writers alongside a roster of established artists. Our submission guidelines are available at indianolareview.com. For updates on our Twitter chats, contests, and giveaways, follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t encourage everyone to check out our latest issue on Amazon.

• Post contributors receive ~80% of your tip, after necessary transaction and administrative fees. Even small change makes a difference. • Permalink • Tag: The Inductor

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sun, 15 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Frottage & Even as We Speak
MONA HOUGHTON

Fiction | Two Novellas
172 pages
6” x 9” Perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN 978-0984578221
First Edition
Review Copy: Paperback
What Books Press
Los Angeles, California, USA
Available HERE
$14.00
Review by Laura Citino

After the First World War ripped the continent to shreds, the artist Wassily Kandinsky made what many consider to be his most important works: his Kleine Welten, or “little worlds.” I’ve looked at a few of these in person, scattered as they are among the museums of the globe; they’re something to see. These prints are so named for Kandinsky’s belief that art depicted self-contained worlds, expressions of the cosmos in miniature. The prints themselves are beautiful and, of course, small: strokes of black, stipples of blue, abstract symbols that your mind easily arranges into oxygen, carbon, tree, animal, landscape. So much complexity, messy on the surface but with an undeniable internal logic. All in a print the size of your palm.

Mona Houghton’s two novellas, Frottage and Even as We Speak, work a similar magic. Though ostensibly taking place in the real world, both leave no doubt that the laws of that reality are skewed. Traumatic abuse, sudden tragedy, and insidious addictions have rendered these characters incapable of living in the world as we know it. They navigate these brave new realities with careful steps, their kleine Welten illustrated in rich, complex interiority.

Frottage is an epistolary novella in which the narrator, Claire, corresponds with her therapist Paul in a series of letters that are at once hilarious, unsettling, and revealing. Claire struggles with sex addiction. Though it’s the driver of the story, her husband is rarely present in the narrative. Her life exists in a state of suspended animation brought on by years of sexual abuse by her oldest brother, Richard. He died from epilepsy around the age of 14, before Claire was able to receive intervention or counseling, and so she deals with the after-effects of both the abuse and the traumatic loss on her own as an adult. Much of the story revolves around her adult relationship with her living brother, George, who also suffered from this abuse, and the way they attempt to navigate a world they were taught the wrong rules for:

When I dream about the future I do not see John and me growing old together, I see me and George, gray and wrinkled, helping each other up the stairs, cooking each other soft-boiled eggs, changing each other’s hearing aide batteries, driving each other to heart specialists (the ventricles, the valves), kidney doctors, rheumatologists. By then, of course, I won’t need a psychiatrist. We will have a small vegetable garden, a chaise lounge each on our patch of green, Georgie will pickle himself each day in alcohol and me, I’ll take care of him, nag him about his drinking, make sure he gets to bed without cracking his head open, take him on walks around the block. Neighbors who know us will know we are siblings and the ones who don’t will think we are an old married couple, and everybody will be right.
(Frottage, pg. 76)

Claire doesn’t make the argument that she was somehow complicit in her own abuse, but she does admit something that, as she puts it, almost makes her vomit on the “pretty blue carpet” of her therapist’s office: she was groomed to like it, and she did like it, and she wanted it to continue, and Richard’s untimely death left a gaping lack in her life. Claire’s intense isolation combined with her sharp, crackling voice is perfect for this one-sided dialogue.

Dear Paul,
Please, pretty please, don’t be being reductive here. Attention. Acceptance. So clean. So easy to define and say and look at. Words that start with the clearest simplest sounds. Baby noises.
And I know what you’re trying to do, doctor. I know you think you can demystify this sex thing for me, uncomplicate it, uncontaminate it, pull it out into the day time and take away its power.
But it. Let’s look at it. It is the glue, all that murky hurt, a thick flannel blanket I love to wrap myself up in [...]
(Frottage, pg. 71)

Claire lets us in at all the right times. Her letters to her therapist are each a self-contained idea, poem, rant. Claire’s narrative voice oozes tangible female anger, accusatory and knowing. Her struggle is that she is seeking intimacy, of the sort she’ll never find again, because the kind she is seeking is what she was taught to seek by the damaging actions of her sick older brother. Her desire is steeped in a transgression she can’t approach as an adult. The epistolary format never feels manipulative; what Claire wants is not to lie further, but to tell the truth in such a way as to pull someone else into her kleiner Welt.

The second novella, Even as We Speak, takes another structural risk. Here, a handful of interconnected stories shows us characters taking grand actions or suffering through great changes. In one, an environmental activist kidnaps his daughter as his wife pursues a divorce. In another, a straight-A student finds herself orphaned by a love triangle beyond her understanding. The stories loosely weave together as the characters try to understand the internal logic of the strange, lonely new realities they find themselves inhabiting.

Most striking about the threads in Even as We Speak is how deep the isolation runs. Not that these characters never interact with others, but the interiority is written so richly and evocatively in each. The primary character fills our vision. We can’t see much that they can’t see or think much that they can’t think. Often we complain about not seeing around strange or idiosyncratic narrators, but here it is an evocative blindspot. Much like in Frottage, the grip on reality is tenuous. They know the center cannot hold; it is only a matter of time before someone tracks them down. After Kendra’s parents die in a dual murder of passion, she ignores all offers of care and support to drive through the American Southwest. She is unmoored. In the wake of her tragedy,

[…] it’s hard to feel like an astronaut making a space walk without that umbilical-like cord connected to the space ship. But still Kendra gives the lawyer nothing, won’t tell him where she is or where she’s going.
(Even as We Speak, pg. 134).

For her and many of these characters, isolation is the only place that makes sense.

These characters can appear to fit into neat stereotypes on the surface. Suzie’s thread, for example, starts out as that of a middle-aged housewife married to a drunk. However, she has a rich backstory that unfolds over the course of the novella. Her present moment is wonderfully bizarre: Suzie is searching for the edge of the finite universe. The writing of this thread is especially gorgeous, a highlight of the work.

Suzie notices the edges around what Suzie knows is Suzie and knows there is the part of Suzie that isn’t a body part (feelings, moods, intuitions), and she knows from other issues of Science News that these pieces of her that are not concrete and singular—the word “mother” makes 95% of the imaged brains turn blue in exactly the same area and men incarcerated for violent crimes, 95% of the time, have the same glowy red color lurking in the right frontal lobe—are as significant, as meaningful as any liver or heart or ovary. Suzie wants to re-find those pieces, the parts that must connect her, must connect each person, to this universe that is now finite.
(Even as We Speak, pg. 93)

Houghton’s work doesn’t leave you bereft. In both pieces, our characters are more or less content with their new alone status in the world; indeed, many of them immerse themselves further and further into their isolated worlds rather than attempt to swim to shore. They may struggle, but eventually indulge. This girl pushes harder. This man digs deeper. Suzie, the gambling addict, lays all her cards on the table and gets ready to double down. In the wake of a lifetime’s worth of disasters, Houghton illustrates what is sometimes the best way to cope: accept the fact that the world today is not how you left it yesterday. Get in your car, point it west, and drive.

LAURA CITINO is a Staff Book Reviewer for The Volt. She is a fiction writer and essayist from southeastern Michigan, and received her MFA in fiction from Eastern Washington University in 2013. Her work has appeared in numerous journals in print and online, including Passages North, Sou’wester, Gigantic Sequins, and cream city review. She is Fiction Editor for Sundog Lit and currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

• This book was purchased by an Alternating Current staffer at AWP. The reviewer does not know the publisher or the author and received the book from Alternating Current at random. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt, Frottage •

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sun, 01 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000

A Conversation with Lori Sambol Brody
SELF-INTERVIEW BY LORI SAMBOL BRODY

To usher in her stint as Monthly Guest Blog Editor on The Spark, a cranky LORI SAMBOL BRODY talks to a much nicer Lori Sambol Brody about writing. Lori lives in the mountains of Southern California with her husband and two daughters, and writes short stories, flash fiction, and sometimes creative nonfiction. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Little Fiction, The Rumpus, Tin House Flash Fridays, New Orleans Review, WhiskeyPaper, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on a collection of linked short stories that she may finish ten years from now.

LORI SAMBOL BRODY: Why do you write so slowly?

LORI SAMBOL BRODY: This really frustrates me, also. Writing is third in importance, after family and the job that helps support us. I have two kids, a twelve-year old and a ten-year old, and a full time job (that sometimes is all-encompassing), so it’s hard for me to get time to write. Writing flash fiction is actually the savior here, since I can write a first draft in an afternoon—but this is after using my long commute to “outline” the story in my head, or to come up with a first line or image from which I can unspool the story. Longer short stories are a longer slog. Also, sometimes I have to put a story away for months—if not years—to get an objective distance from the story so I can actually revise it. So, yeah, it’s a long process sometimes.

A lot of your stories are about teenagers or tweens. Aren’t you too old to write about them?

I’ve always had a theory that, at least at times (the bad times), our image of ourselves is the same as the image we have in junior high or high school. So, in a way, I’m still writing about my present self. And I’m also reliving some of the issues of teenagers through my daughters, who are about to be teenagers. In my writing, I’m examining the idea of friendship, shifting alliances, and pecking orders now, which of course comes to the forefront in junior high. I think these issues continue as you get older, although people may be more polite and the issues submerged. As I write about this, I wonder: Am I a good friend? Can I be a better friend? Where do I fit in?

Why can’t you set any stories in the United States?

Being in a foreign place automatically creates conflict. One of my pretty pretentious characters said that “he became truly himself when he traveled” (That line was cut in the final version!), but in a way it’s true, because the characters can’t rely on the familiar under stress. It’s fun to throw characters somewhere unfamiliar, so they are destabilized or put in danger, and see what happens. I’ve done things when I’ve traveled that I would never do at home (like get into an unmarked taxi)! Lately, though, I’ve been working on linked short stories that are set in Los Angeles, my hometown, and the community I live in in the Santa Monica Mountains, right outside of L.A.

On your website, you say: “I write short stories. All are true. And all are false.” What the heck does that mean?

I was playing with the idea that readers always think that fiction is based on the writer’s real experiences, confuse the life on the page with the life of the person sitting in front of the computer. But it’s fiction. However, the boundaries are not always so clear. Something from real life always jogs my imagination or informs my writing, whether it’s the setting, a phrase of dialogue, or emotions. So, the stories really are true and false at the same time. For example, I worked during summers in college for a defense contractor that made the M1 Abrams tank. I spun off that experience to write “Tuberose.” “Dress Rehearsal” (which has the same narrator as “Tuberose,” but purportedly grown-up) evolved from one line of dialogue actually said to me (“Every cowboy worth his salt can braid.”). Like the main character, I danced in a local production of The Nutcracker for a couple of years, with my entire family. No, you cannot see photos.

• Post contributors receive ~80% of your tip, after necessary transaction and administrative fees. Even small change makes a difference. • Permalink • Tag: The Inductor

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Roleplaying as Live-Action Fan Fiction
MATT MAGELSSEN-GREEN

Roleplaying games are the result of authors trying to convince you to do live-action fan fiction for them. A group of friends gets together and acts out characters in a universe and setting that someone else created, but interpreted for their purposes. It’s a process that is so seemingly simple that it’s easy to ignore all the transformations that occur when half a dozen people sit down to kill some Orks. These transformations are powerful enough that some argue they transcend fan fiction and become something else, as Jennifer Grouling Cover does in her book, The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games.

The manual for a roleplaying game is an extremely complex piece of fiction. It’s a manual, a setting bible, an art book, and an anthology of short stories. All of these pieces must support and enhance the others in a way that is easy and entertaining to follow. In much the same way, the process of creating the manual is often the result of several (sometimes very different) people working together to realize a vision.

As with all stories, you begin with the developer. The roleplaying developer has an idea. Like any author, the developer has done some research, has taken some liberties, and has fragments of characters and themes that s/he wants the players to build into living, breathing fiction. Developers have ideas for what the manual will look like, and ideas for what a game using the manual will look like. That is, at the end of the day, there is a kind of game the developer envisions that you will play with his book.

They put together a collection of material they’ll want to refer to or use. They write outlines or some other form of initial treatment. Then they put out a call for help.

Many fiction authors write by themselves, but in this case the developer needs to parcel out his vision. He’s got some rules, an idea of what he’s looking for, and samples from hopeful freelancers. He builds a team. The team knocks heads. By virtue of including other people, the vision changes. It may be slight; it may be better; it may be worse; but you can’t add eyes without changing what you see. We are given a singular vision; we give back a collective one.

Chapters are written. Red lines go down. Mistakes are corrected. Deviations from the collective dream are scrubbed or built upon. Rules are expanded, compared to the fiction, revised. Calls for artists go out. Visual art comes back and is carefully placed where it best supports the text. The dream becomes a thing.

The thing is not the dream, though. It’s an interpretation of the dream. The intention of one person has become the intention of many, and that intention has been realized as a book. Many of the assumptions, the history, much of the context has been cut away: for clarity, for consistency, for page space. What the first author wanted has been mediated by a group, and then further transformed into a book.

This book serves as the refined instrument to define how the roleplaying game should work. This would be the end of it … if we were writing it for robots. We’re not. Not yet.

The person who actually wants to run this game, to enforce the rules, becomes a new arbiter. Beyond new characters or circumstances, beyond new continents added wholesale, the new arbiter makes changes. He shapes mechanics: that desert setting doesn’t have rules for sailing, but you want to feature a group of sandsail nomads, so you need to add those rules. You need to see how they balance within the system, predict how they will influence the choices of your players and their characters. The book has inspired an idea of what this story should look like, but the game master only uses that as a part. The fiction that has been offered is changed to suit the reader’s purposes.

This person running the game—this game master—his players have their own ideas, though. This is a collaborative game, and the stories they want to play and experience will differ between each other and the game master. The story changes again. What the game master built, the players furnish.

The authors have framed the most persuasive narratives and setting that they can with the hope that some will survive to be acted upon. They support their arguments with mechanics they hope are compelling. But that’s all it is: an argument. Please play me. Please play me this way. The game master must make the same case to his players, and the players right back and in between. You can’t just ask a player to read: you have to ask him to participate. It’s a kind of negotiation that authors typically don’t have to do with their readers, but that makes it the most collaborative—and for some, the most compelling—kind of storytelling there is.

MATT MAGELSSEN-GREEN is a writer and aspiring scholar from Alexandria, Virginia. Previously published in the late and lamented Steampunk Tales, Matt is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University. He also leads the Games Engagement and Research (GEAR) student group and is vice president of the Mason chapter of the Society for Technical Writers. His current research interests include tabletop roleplaying games, augmented reality, communication and organization of creative/entertainment organizations, and how creativity is fostered by context.

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noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sun, 24 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

On the Road with Del & Louise
AUDIO CLIP BY ART TAYLOR

ART TAYLOR shares with us a snippet of the first story, “Rearview Mirror,” from his book, On the Road with Del & Louise: A Novel in Stories, currently a finalist for the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Art has won two Agatha Awards, the Anthony Award, the Macavity Award, and three consecutive Derringer Awards for his short fiction. Stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, in the Chesapeake Crime anthologies This Job Is Murder and Homicidal Holidays, and in other journals and anthologies. He teaches at George Mason University and contributes frequently to The Washington Post, The Washington Independent Review of Books, and Mystery Scene. Take a listen to Art reading from his debut novel-in-stories!

Your browser does not support the audio element.

• Photo by Evan Michio. • Help us pay our authors. Authors receive ~80% of your tip, after necessary transaction and administrative fees. Even small change makes a difference. • Permalink • Tag: The Frequency

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Four Fathers
DAVE HOUSLEY, BL PAWELEK, BEN TANZER, & TOM WILLIAMS

Fiction | Poetry
145 pages
8” x 8.8” perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN 978-1-941462-00-3
First Edition
Cobalt Press
Baltimore, Maryland
Available HERE
$15.00
Review by Al Kratz

Four Fathers is an enjoyable collaboration of four writers: Dave Housley, BL Pawelek, Ben Tanzer, and Tom Williams. Each lends his unique voice to themes of fatherhood covering both the aspects of having a father and of being a father.

The collection has a couple of other unique design elements. It combines a variety of forms: Two conventionally sized short stories by Tom Williams, Ben Tanzer’s flash collection, a poetry collection by BL Pawelek, and Dave Housley’s piece is a novella. Other than the novella, all of the pieces were told through second-person point of view.

Tom Williams’ short stories bookend the collection. The leadoff story takes a troubled character alienated from his father and adds an extra level of in-between-ness as he deals with the impact on self from having a father who is black and a mother who is white. His friends enjoy a joke about an aging man who “sees” his father in the mirror. For the light-skinned James, who is the “you” in “Where You Should Be,” this joke only demonstrates his conflict. He doesn’t see his father in the mirror, but he begins to see him in the faces of strangers about town. It’s a powerful statement on the impact a father can have on his son’s life, even when he is not present.

For only one moment, you are a little oblique—a five-second fugue where you contemplate the features of your father’s face, hazily superimposed over the massive clock. But two blinks later, you can see straight again.
(“Where You Should Be,” Williams, p. 10)

Williams effectively uses the second-person voice in each of his stories. It smooths James’ flaws more than they would come across in first person or even third. The writer’s voice gets to be the voice of reason, checking and keeping James in place. The separation from James’ voice doesn’t position the reader close to the character, but it makes him more sympathetic.

His last story, “What It Means to Be,” was one my favorites of the collection. James is now older and back in touch with his father. He has quit drugs and alcohol and is living the benefits of that clean life, but he has further to go on rebuilding his self. He is learning what it means to give himself to the people he loves. How to listen to them, how to speak to them, how to be real.

The soft snores from the back sound to your ears louder than they probably are. And in the rear view, you can see that Buddy’s eyelids do not flutter. Only the most alarming of noises could disturb him, certainly not the sound of his father’s voice, his dad’s own voice, finding itself in the telling.
(“What It Means to Be,” Williams, p. 144)

The effect of second person in this part was that James is able to receive his lessons rather than to preach to us about them.

Ben Tanzer’s collection of flash pieces, titled “Puzzles,” is the second section of Four Fathers. He focuses his themes more on aspects of being a father and shows how serious the stakes may feel for a father even when nothing is tangibly at risk. In “Consumption,” the narrator at first thinks it’s entertaining and dark when his friend told him that he wanted to eat his baby daughter’s fingers, but then reaches a turning point when he becomes a father, too, and learns what that kind of love is

[…] how all-consuming and overwhelming it can feel. How hard it is to not want to merge with them in every possible way, because to not merge is to not live.
(“Consumption,” Tanzer, p. 28)

In “Fingernails,” a young father tackles the guilt of overcutting his baby’s fingernails, unleashing a loud cry that is more traumatizing for the father than the child.

Tanzer has such a strong and unique voice, I was disappointed to see all of his flash pieces in second person. The narration was instrumented so much with his voice that keeping it away from the characters felt choppy. I would’ve preferred to see them soar with an “I” that owns the voice rather than a “You” that tries to assign it to me, the reader.

BL Pawelek’s poetry collection follows “Puzzles.” As someone who doesn’t read a lot of poetry, the nine pages of poetry was a nice interlude between prose sections. The themes of fatherhood seems more under the surface, waiting for the reader to dig in and find their meaning. The second person in this makes more sense even when it was more ambiguous. There was a conversation between the writer and some specific you.

battle lake does not fight you
It holds and loves
and you stay with me
along the peninsula
and back to the woods
back to the shade and paths
to your water dreams on dry land.
(Pawelek, p. 73)

Dave Housley’s 41-page story, called “Everything Is Getting Worse,” uses comedy to insulate some of the emotional parts of fatherhood it explored. His character has flaws in common with Williams’ James—he snorts Adderall; he drinks; he gives and receives minimal attention to and from his pregnant wife. He’s a mess, but his story, told in third person close, has the intimacy and power of a confession or an honest self-discovery.

The boy is smart enough, aware enough to understand that he is in some way, letting his father down. Burns does not want to be that kind of father—the one who earns respect but not love. The kid is a good kid. Sweet. If he has terrible taste in music, if he is a little obsessed with the latest pop sensation—if he does, in fact, have Bieber Fever—then the best Burns can do is wait it out and let the kid follow his own nine-year-old heart. He closes the door, walks toward the kitchen.
(“Everything Is Getting Worse,” Housley, p. 87)

The comedic drive of the plot, reminiscent of Sam Lipsyte, ramps up when the father’s epiphany is short-lived. He can’t wait it out. He wants to do everything he can to break his son’s Bieber Fever. The eventual resolution of this battle, as it is weaved in with his marital issues and career struggles, nails the book’s themes of modern fatherhood.

Such themes are endless. It would be impossible to cover them all, but if anything was missing the most, it was female perspective. Maybe a group of women writers could provide an answer in a follow-up collection exploring the concepts of mother and daughter or even father and daughter. In the meantime, Four Fathers and its exploration of modern fatherhood is a good place to start for the male’s view.

• This book was sent to Alternating Current by the publisher as reward for a Kickstarter campaign. The reviewer does not know the publisher and received the book from Alternating Current at random. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

LinkedIn Thought You Might Be Interested in This Post-Climate Impact Job: Environmental Migrant Management and Soil-Free Solutions
ASHLEY SHELBY

In June 2024, due to the nationalization of the Post-Climate Impact agriculture sector, LivingSystems, Inc., and Aeroponic Farm Cooperatives merged, creating a new company with a global presence. Hydroponic Nutrient Solutions (HNS) is now drawing a combined $2 billion in revenue and boasts more than 13,000 employees. Over the next year, we’ll be working to make HNS the industry leader in vertical farming and soil-free solutions. In addition to its commercial activities supplying vertically farmed produce to Non-Impacted American citizens, HNS deploys all over the world to assist in climate events and to ensure that environmental migrants receive necessary nutrition during migrations.

Sound exciting? HNS is currently able to offer job candidates a wide array of employment opportunities and benefits that are among the most competitive in the Post-Climate Impact Agriculture and Refugee Management industries. We are currently seeking to fill the following position:

Position: Director of Disaster Resilience and Refugee Feeding Programs

Reports to:
Vice President of Climate-Impact Strategics

FLSA Status
Salaried (Exempt)

Position Summary
Director of Disaster Resilience and Refugee Feeding Programs is responsible for managing the performance of all matters related to agronomic stockpiling and government-regulated refugee nutrition programs (per the Nutrition Standards for Environmental Migrants Act of 2023). Director will also serve as an agronomic project consultant on all implemented Disaster Resilience projects, as well as on an as-needed basis during Large-Scale Refugee Events (LSRE). Director will also be expected to deliver a TED Talk.

Minimum Requirements – Education and Experience

• 5+ years of Climate-Impact Agriculture industry experience

• Familiarity with pre-Impact agricultural and social conventions

• Master’s degree in related technical area (e.g., agronomy, crisis management, migrant services, etc.); PhD preferred

• Strong knowledge of:

• Implementation of risk solution strategies in high-pressure environments, often prior to or during Climate Events

• Financial Analysis related to operational support and government regulation, particularly in balancing compulsory international aid and commercial activities

• Management of Environmental Migrant Nutrition Disbursement during Climate Events

• Fluency with diverse modalities of emergency and development aid

• Firearms training

Key Accountabilities:
Regulatory Compliance

• Provide support and guidance on all assigned activities governed by the U.S. Agriculture Nationalization Act of 2019

• Ensure all stockpiling operations and storage procedures adhere to local and federal regulations

Environmental Migrant Program Design and Execution

• Ensure HNS’s Environmental Migrant Program (EMP) modality in all assigned regions is up-to-date and geared toward industry and government best practices

• Monitor Nutrient Disbursement during Climate Events and ensure execution is carried out at high level of quality and cost-effectiveness

• Work closely with the technical team and operational leadership to ensure complete compliance with federal Environmental Migrant Nutrition programs, while also boosting HNS’s commercial capacity to support company’s fiscal health

• Occasionally meet with leaders of hostile Impacted areas for coffee/tea/culturally appropriate libation

Disaster Resilience Planning

• Perform in the capacity of subject matter expert and authority on all agronomic and emergency management in assigned regions, including severely impacted areas, such as Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Los Angeles.

• Develop short- and long-term climate resiliency plans for HNS that take into account a rapidly changing environmental context and quickly evolving Client Needs

• Leverage existing plans for hydroponic and aeroponic inventories, including commercial stock and Refugee stock, to reach maximum output

• Work closely with horticulture and soil teams to analyze forecasts, anticipate industry shortages, and develop larger yields in order to keep pace with ballooning demand since the collapse of California’s agriculture industry

• Be adept at operating in a non-panicked mode

Desired Attributes
General

• Good at “real-time” problem solving

• A stable residence, survival retreat preferred, if access to satellite communication is reliable, and adequate personal emergency preparedness resources on hand

• No active or pending tax liens or penalties (e.g. Federal Obesity Tax, Conspicuous Consumption Fine, Obsolete or Inefficient Vehicle Penalty, etc.)

• Emotional intelligence in situations involving catastrophic human impacts

• Familiarity with the work of Norman Vincent Peale

• Willingness to travel to Florida

Teamwork

• Collaborate with all agencies operating within the U.S. Department of Displaced Citizens (DDC), as well as relevant federal emergency response teams, including Environmental Migrant Rapid Response (EMRR), California Wildfire Tactical Corps, and others

• Interface with heads of foreign governments, particularly in Impact areas, and work with global aid organizations to disburse Refugee Nutrition

• Commit to eliminating entrenched organizational and governmental barriers while maintaining necessary synergy and employee morale

• Be a “team player” and take part in office events, such as birthdays, retirement parties, and flu-shot clinics

Physical Demands and Work Environment
Due to the unprecedented nature of current and future Post-Climate Impact weather events, travel needs will be unpredictable but constant. Below is an incomplete aggregation of physical requirements:

• Work outside in variable weather conditions including heat (wildfire and drought), rain (typically torrential), and wind (up to hurricane-force)

• Travel throughout assigned regions (50-60%), often in areas where critical infrastructure has been heavily damaged or destroyed

• Travel for team meetings, trainings, etc. (2-3 times/year)

• Willingness to participate in mandatory therapy sessions once a week with your assigned psychologist

Benefits
Hydroponic Nutrient Solutions offers a competitive benefits package that strives to meet the needs of its employees in a challenging post-currency economy. All HNS employees, exempt and non-exempt alike, receive a baseline salary of 25/lb of mixed HNS produce¹ a week, which can be consumed or bartered, depending on the employee’s needs. Salary bands 8A through 10C receive additional poundage, determined by job title, as well as seeds for use or bartering. Exempt employees receive an additional 30/lb of mixed produce a week, as well as biannual allotments of hard red wheat.

In addition to a competitive salary, HNS offers its employees an array of world-class benefits, including:

• State-of-the-Art Hygiene Facilities and Private Shower Pods with generous weekly water ration

• Individually assigned mental health therapist

• Share of HNS Carbon Credits awarded based on yearly performance

• Daily shuttle services

• Generous yearly cloth allotment

• Access to HNS’s large archive of Sheltering-in-Place supplies, and discounts on company-owned generators, quicklime, siphon pumps, and other emergency goods

• Tuition reimbursement for basic skills training, including welding, carpentry, applied foraging, and post-media technologies

• Pre-tax personal stockpiling program, with company match

Hydroponic Nutrient Solutions is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

¹ Excludes Tier 1 produce, such as apples, grapes, almonds, pistachios, all citrus excluding kumquats, and all berries

The 2016 Luminaire Award for Best Prose
NOTABLE MENTION

ASHLEY SHELBY’s writing has been published in The Seattle Review, Post Road, The Portland Review, J Journal: New Writings on Social Justice, Sonora Review, Carve, Third Coast, Southeast Review, and other literary outlets. She has a short story forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review, which won the Red Hen Press Short Fiction Award. Her debut novel, set at South Pole Station, will be published by Picador USA in 2017. She lives in Minneapolis with her family. Find her at ashleyshelby.com.

• Help us pay our authors. Authors receive ~80% of your tip, after necessary transaction and administrative fees. Even small change makes a difference. • Permalink • Tag: The Current

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Condominium
DANIEL FALATKO

Fiction | Novel
264 pages
5½” x 8½” perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN: 978-1939987365
First Edition
Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Available HERE
$14.99
Review by Al Kratz

Condominium, by Daniel Falatko, is a partly comedic and lighthearted, somewhat existential and dramatic, novel about a week in the life of a couple who move into their dream million-dollar high-rise condominium with its Brooklyn skyline view over the East River. The story alternates points of view and experience between Charles and Sarah as they navigate multiple issues with their new lifestyle, including struggles in their career, a strange new neighbor, challenging relationships with friends, and recreational drug usage.

The alternating points of view work well for this story as a way for us to learn more about the protagonists, especially things they may not share with each other or with the reader in first-person point of view. They begin with voices in common, but the more their plotlines unfold, the more they definitely develop different experiences with the condo. Giving voice to each of them also allows the story to show the difficulty for couples in developing the “us” and allows the individuals to be more complex, as well.

Life at their new dream condo is never not weird. They quickly meet a strange neighbor who seems to be observing them a little too much. His lack of boundaries makes them uncomfortable, adds mystery to the story, and drives a lot of the tension, addressing the question of just what did they get themselves into? Every time I thought the Creepy Neighbor storyline might fall into the trap of cliché, it went in an unexpected direction that gave this book its unique signature.

Although a lot of the story addresses the Money Can’t Buy Happiness idea, more is happening here.

I guess you start to think of all this luxury, assuming it will seep its way into your marrow, make your life luxurious, but really it’s a bummer to find you still don’t get enough sleep and cobwebs still form on ceilings and your face still breaks out and your man still smells up the bathroom and you still need to get super stoned just to relax for an hour on the couch and not think about anything.

If the condo doesn’t bring them happiness, it leaves the question what will the condo bring? What will bring happiness?

The adjustment to the new life puts them all out of sorts. Charles finds he is too scared of heights to enjoy his expensive balcony. Sarah has problems getting comfortable in any of the other rooms. They have contradictory emotions about the view. For Charles,

Now that he had seen a view from the highest precipice, the pinnacle, he was disappointed to find that all other views were rendered limp and detached. He now owned a better view than all of this. It had blotted out his world.

This is while Sarah

[…] thought of someone watching them from over in Manhattan, from Stuy Town with a high-powered telescope, entangled stick figures swallowed up in the massiveness of a waterfront tower. She wondered if perhaps that person would enjoy this more than she did.

They find that location change doesn’t equate to life change. This would be true regardless of whether the move were ‘moving on up’—They are the same people wherever they move.

Monday brought things crashing down, as always. It doesn’t matter if you’re heading to work from a luxury high-rise or a trailer park, you are still heading to work.

A common idea in all of this is how difficult it is for them to shed skins. Charles has an occasional drug habit he can’t quite shake. In fact, Sarah alternates between wanting him to quit and thinking it’s the thing that keeps him interesting. He has an obsession with a rockstar who died years earlier. This is similar to folks stopping their lives every April 5th to mourn the death of Kurt Cobain. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

During a comedic peak of the novel, at a party unlike any others, an outsider challenges them:

“Aren’t you people in your thirties?” she hissed to him, a crossing guard scolding a proud jaywalker.
“Late twenties,” he corrected. “This is the demographic you shoot for here at Waterfront Tower(s), no? Young moneyed, edgy, hip. Ready for action on the Williamsburg frontier. Well, here it is. Sorry if you can’t handle it.”

They are on a tricky aging line. They just can’t quite shed their twenties and embrace a thirties slowdown, regardless of the troubles it gives them. It’s their driving question: When do we give up the kicking and screaming, and just go quietly? Not yet, they answer.

There are aspects of this that are lighthearted. It uses hyperbole and humor, and although the stakes may be emotionally serious for Charles and Sarah, nothing that large or permanent is happening. That’s fine. The novel is intentionally interested in smaller issues rather than larger ones, and does so with an effective touch where scope is not a positive or negative quality. One thing that it risks, however, is conjuring but mostly ignoring the specter of privilege. There are moments when the characters observe the geographical lines between rich and poor. There are some comedic situations with a food cart vendor and with a Mexican man who Sarah invites to the climactic party, but they stay on the comedic surface. Is Monday truly the same regardless of whether you are leaving a luxury high-rise or a trailer park? Although certainly never told from anything but an honest voice of its characters, it ends up making the story occasionally sound like the First World Problems meme. The characters grow from certain realities about their dream condo; they may learn the limitations of money in the pursuit of happiness, but I’m not sure they ever leave the context of their privilege. Maybe that’s a missed opportunity. Maybe that’s just a different story. If we stay in their perspective, it’s a great read.

Al Kratz is our Fiction Reviewer for The Volt. He is a writer from Des Moines, Iowa, an Assistant Fiction Editor at Pithead Chapel, and is currently working on a novel and a short story collection. He has had work featured in Red Savina Review, Wyvern Lit, Flash Flood, Daily Palette, Apeiron Review, Ardor Flash Fiction, 1000words, Gravel, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere, and he is the winner of the 2013 British Fantasy Society Flash Fiction Competition.

• This book was submitted by the publicist to Alternating Current for a book blog tour. The reviewer does not know the author or publicist and received the book from Alternating Current at random. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

How I Became a Panda
CHERI CHAMPAGNE ON PANDAMOON PUBLISHING

My publishing journey began the moment I’d finished writing and editing my novel. As ecstatic as I was for having completed such a feat, I had a moment of “Now what?” I did what any author would do, and I researched agents and publishers until my eyes could no longer focus on my computer screen. My list compiled, I sent out queries, each of which received a rejection, though most companies hadn’t even read my synopsis. My spirits low, I decided to go the route of self-publishing. I went with Amazon/Createspace and eBookIt, and had some success. What I lacked was the know-how and wherewithal to market my books.

Signing with Pandamoon as an author started with something as simple as the CEO, Zara Kramer, following me on Twitter. I saw the company’s name and was intrigued so, again, I did my research; I read about the company and what they stood for, and I simply couldn’t resist contacting them. I submitted a query and quickly received interest. Heart thumping with anticipation, I submitted my six completed manuscripts. Then, I waited. Any author who has submitted a manuscript to a publisher or agent knows that the process is long and nerve-racking. I was ecstatic when I received an offer for publication and, after reading carefully through each document, gratefully accepted. The Pandamoon family welcomed me with open arms.

Several months after becoming a Panda, I saw that Zara Kramer was gearing up for a Twitter pitch event, so I volunteered to participate and read some submissions. I absolutely loved the process and was eager for more. Zara Kramer saw how much I adored acquisitions and knew how dedicated I was, so she offered me the position of Acquisitions Manager. I accepted without a single ounce of hesitation, excited for what was to come. It’s been almost a year since I got into Acquisitions, and I couldn’t be happier! .

CHERI CHAMPAGNE started writing as a child, and began reading historical romance novels at the age of fifteen. Finally, she combined her two passions and began writing sizzling romances. She lives in British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, four young children, and their dog.

• Authors receive ~80% of your tip, after necessary transaction and administrative fees. Even small change makes a difference. • Permalink • Tag: The Beam

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Shelfie: An Ongoing Exploration of Bookshelves
TODD TAVOLAZZI

This Shelfie represents a few of the influences both before and after I began to write for publication.

Moby Dick: It may seem unbelievable, but I just read Moby Dick cover to cover in January 2016. I’m so glad I finally did. As you can see from the picture, it is no longer just one of those books looking pretty on my shelf. It’s one I’ve actually read!

Inside the Aquarium: I actually drove from San Diego to Newport Beach, California (90 miles), in the days before Amazon.com. I began reading this book at a distant relative’s house and couldn’t put it down … but he wouldn’t let me borrow it. So, I had to hunt it down and drive a three-hour round trip to get it at a used bookstore because it was out of print. The title is deceiving; it was not about how to take care of fish at home, but about the super secret Soviet GRU or Russian Military Intelligence from a Russian defector. It was one of the books that gave me curiosity to begin learning all I could about military subjects.

The Hunt for Red October: This one was a popular choice for a lot of people in the 1980s, but I was only 14 years old when I read it for the first time, not really understanding what it all meant. But it felt like I was reading classified material and getting a glimpse into a world that not many got to see or understand. In a way, I was right, but it would be a long time before I would really understand the things in that book. At the time, all I really needed to know is that it was cool and I knew I was hooked!

Flight of the Intruder: This book was the second novel the Naval Institute Press published after the success of their first foray into fiction with The Hunt for Red October. Of course, they both did well. I read Stephen Coonts’ book when I was in the eighth grade. I remember my history teacher having it on his desk. I told him I thought it was cool that he was reading it and he said, “Of course, it’s a bestseller. But I question you reading it.” I answered him with a shrug in his own words, “… It’s a bestseller,” I said. I realize now that I was, indeed, much too young to be reading it, but it reinforced a passion for the military and writing. I was so swept up in learning the nuances of naval aviation through this novel that it proved to me that these stories could not only entertain but teach and enlighten.

Contact: I am a huge Carl Sagan fan. I admire his brilliance as a scientist and his versatile intellect. He has inspired me to think deeply and write about those deep subjects we hold dear, and he certainly does that in this book.

The Dark Fields: This novel was adapted into the film Limitless with Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro. When I first saw the film, I was blown away. It was such a cool concept that reinforced the will in me to write. Even now, when I sit down to write, I think of the clarity that the main character gets when he is on the wonder drug, and I act like that same thing is happening to me—that I have super clarity and focus to tap into the deepest depths of my mind and pull out as much good stuff as I can find in there. When I learned the film was adapted from a novel, I HAD to read it. The book is as good if not better than the movie, and the movie is fantastic! Hats off to Alan Glynn.

The Fourth Protocol: This book was also adapted into a film with Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan. A fantastic spy thriller. This book served a double purpose for me, in that, I wanted to read the book that became a great movie, but I also wanted to read the authors who influenced Tom Clancy’s work. Tom Clancy once shared in an interview that he admired Frederick Forsyth’s writing and wanted to be like him. I figured if Frederick Forsyth had a hand in shaping Tom Clancy, I should study his work, as well.

Dead or Alive: I had read many Tom Clancy novels (not all of them, but many), but I chose this one because a fantastic author named Grant Blackwood co-wrote it with Tom Clancy. It was every bit as good a book as if Mr. Clancy had written it alone, which made me think how difficult that undertaking must have been for Mr. Blackwood. Developing your own writing style is difficult enough without trying to emulate another fantastic writer. But Grant pulls it off, which is a testament to his mastery of the craft. I also love looking at this book because I remember reading it, and only two years after I read it, Mr. Blackwood agreed to blurb my debut novel, Looking into the Sun, about the Syrian conflict. A wonderful gesture from a fantastic writer to a new writer just starting out.

The Aviators: The same time I was reading Tom Clancy, I was reading W. E. B. Griffin’s The Corps series, as well as his Brotherhood of War series. His no-nonsense, cut-and-dry style appealed to me as a reader and is very difficult to accomplish as a writer. Just seeing his name on my shelf makes me relax and try to emulate his style so my readers will feel the same way about my books … not likely, but I at least have a frame of reference to shoot for as I write. And I’m a naval aviator, so I love everything about aviation. I learned a tremendous amount about Army aviation that I didn’t know before.

Here I Am: This is a biography of freelance photojournalist Tim Hetherington who was killed in Libya while reporting on the fighting there in 2011. Sebastian Junger and he produced Restrepo and Korengal, which documented the war in Afghanistan alongside U.S. Army soldiers at a remote Forward Operating Base (FOB). They risked their lives every day reporting on the brave soldiers serving their country and dying in a foreign war. Their dedication to journalism and to the soldiers themselves is epic and inspiring. I read this as part of my research on freelance journalists in war zones for my novel, Looking into the Sun.

War: This is Sebastian Junger’s book on his experiences while covering the war in Afghanistan with Tim Hetherington. Again, great research material for me that showed the heart of a dedicated war journalist. I have been in the military for 24 years and deployed to the Middle East but have not experienced the combat that Sebastian Junger or the soldiers he lived with had. I am humbled by them and extremely proud that we have people in our country with truckloads of courage to stand up for us all on the front lines when their country calls and humbled by journalists like Sebastian Junger who did not have to be there but chose to, so we could see their sacrifices and be awed by it, as well.

Looking into the Sun: This is my book. It’s a novel of the Syrian conflict. I just wanted to see how it looked among the books I admire.

Fingerprints of God: This book is a nonfiction book about the brain. The reason it is there is more to remind me that I should be writing. When I first began putting down words with the goal of finishing a novel, I was deployed on a U.S. Navy ship in the Arabian Gulf. I was far from any well-stocked library (Our library on the ship was very sparse.), but the ship did get shipments of books delivered when we pulled into port. One day, I needed a book on the brain and decided to see if there was anything close to that in the ship’s library. When I got there, they had just received a couple boxes of brand new books that day. I went through them and happened to find this book, the exact book I needed for my obscure research in a Middle Eastern port. This was a loud and clear signal to me that I needed to keep writing.

Fahrenheit 451: I read a writing book called Ray Bradbury on Zen in the Art of Writing that was excellent. It made me want to read more of his writing, and I had to start with a book that I’d been meaning to get around to for so many years. I finished it in a couple days—Needless to say, it was excellent.

2001: A Space Odyssey: I had seen the movie many years ago, but now that I am honing my writing, I felt the need to delve into genres I don’t write in, like science fiction. It was a great book to introduce Arthur C. Clarke. His short stories are also very good if you don’t want to break off a whole lot of science fiction all at once.

A Sailor’s History of the U.S. Navy: As a U.S. Naval Academy graduate with a History degree, this book was fun for me to read to brush up on my naval history. I wish I could write history [nonfiction], but there is so much research that has to be right; I find that fiction is much easier for me to write. I still do a lot of research for my fiction (which I enjoy) because you have to get things right, too, but in the end, I can tell the story I want rather than worrying about how things actually went down.

On Writing: Stephen King delivers, hands down, the best book on writing out there.

Fight Club: I love Chuck Palahniuk and have read several of his books, but Fight Club, for me, is the favorite. Absolutely read the whole book, but if you want to do something cool, only read chapter six. It is the core of a short story that he eventually expanded into the novel. Everything he wants to say is boiled down in chapter six … Really cool.

1984: I like conspiracy theories, and reading the original “Big Brother” story was very interesting and scary when seen in the context of our modern life.

Brave New World: This book was a bit more abstract in its theme about how messed up the world could get, but we are slowly creeping up on this as a new normal, as well. Excellent cautionary tale and thought-provoking as we sit down to communicate with our fellow human beings as writers.

The Old Man and the Sea: I actually read this copy of Ernest Hemingway’s short novel on a sailboat off the coast of Key West relatively close to where it took place in the story (off the coast of Cuba).

A Moveable Feast: I bought this copy at Shakespeare and Company in Paris along with Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. I devoured it while I was in Paris and visited a few of his haunts while I was there. A very cool book to read in Paris.

Against All Enemies: I included this book for the same reason I included Dead or Alive above. I had no idea that, after reading this book, Peter Telep, another Tom Clancy co-author, would be nice enough to blurb my debut novel, as well. Both Grant Blackwood and he remembered how it was for them as new writers and wanted to support other new writers on projects that moved them. I am grateful for their generous support.

TODD TAVOLAZZI earned a B.S. in History from the U.S. Naval Academy and an M.A. in International Relations from Norwich University, where he studied Europe and the Middle East extensively. He flew the MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopter while based in Italy and the MH-60S Knighthawk helicopter while based in Norfolk, Virginia, and has deployed throughout Europe and the Middle East. His short fiction has appeared in Potluck and The Subtopian online magazines. His debut novel, Looking into the Sun: A Novel of the Syrian Conflict, was released in February 2016. He is still an active duty Naval Officer and lives in Virginia with his wife and two children.

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noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

A Conversation with Deek & Erin Rhew
MINDSOAK PODCAST INTERVIEW

The Mindsoak Project sat down with Erin and Deek Rhew, a husband and wife writing team looking forward to the “Rhewnation” of the civilized world. Erin is the author of the YA trilogy, The Fulfillment Series, and Deek is the author of Birth of an American Gigolo and 122 Rules.

Erin and Deek talk about how they met one another from across country, what it’s like to be married, and working with each other as writing partners; and they both give us insight into their writing style, their works of fiction, and their characters.

DEEK RHEW did not set out to be a writer. Originally, he wanted to follow his father’s path as a career military man and fly for the Air Force. So, Deek spent two years in high school preparing for the ROTC. During a routine check-in, his recruiter asked about any handicaps, to which Deek jokingly replied he was colorblind. The recruiter got a funny look on his face and informed Deek that the closest he’d ever get to the pilot’s seat was from the scheduling office. Um, no.

After that, Deek focused on his love for music—touring with a local rock band and majoring in the art in college. Unfortunately, he didn’t enjoy the life of a pauper, so he started secondary school over. Ten years later, he walked across the stage with a computer science degree. He now slings web code for a major electronics company in his hometown.

Though he loves his job and the people he works with, Deek has been enthralled by the written word and storytelling since he picked up his first Stephen King novel, It. On his way to work one day, a scene so vivid flashed through his mind that he felt compelled to pull over and put it to paper. Having neither quill nor parchment in which to document the image, he laboriously pecked out the first chapter of 122 Rules on his phone.

Deek lives in a rainy pocket in the Pacific Northwest with his stunning YA author bride, Erin Rhew, and their writing assistant, a fat tabby named Trinity. They enjoy lingering in the mornings, and often late into the night, caught up in Erin’s fantastic fantasy worlds of noble princes and knights and entwined in Deek’s dark underworld of the FBI and drug lords.

He and Erin love to share books by reading aloud to one another. In addition, they enjoy spending time with friends, running, boxing, lifting weights, and exploring the little town—with antique shops and bakeries—they call home. Find him at DeekRhewBooks.com.

ERIN RHEW is an editor, a running coach, and the author of The Fulfillment Series. Since she picked up Morris the Moose Goes to School at age four, she has been infatuated with the written word. She went on to work as a grammar and writing tutor in college and is still teased by her family and friends for being a member of the ‘Grammar Police.’

A Southern girl by blood and birth, Erin now lives in a rainy pocket of the Pacific Northwest with her amazingly talented (and totally handsome) author husband, Deek Rhew, and their patient-as-a-saint writing assistant, a tabby cat named Trinity. Deek and she enjoy reading aloud to one another, running, lifting, boxing, eating chocolate, and writing side-by-side. Find her at ErinRhewBooks.com.

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noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Autoplay
JULIE BABCOCK

Poetry
82 pages
5” x 8” perfect-bound trade paperback
First Edition
ISBN 978-0988201347
Review Copy: PDF
MG Press
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Available HERE
$12
Review by Julia Hy

I wish you could place an ear to a shell
inside an ocean that never spills
and hear me.
(“Being Right,” p. 18)

Julie Babcock delivers an intense range of depth throughout her poetry collection, Autoplay. You feel the need to revisit each poem as it seems like there is always another meaning hidden in its pauses and punctuation that you may have missed. In poems such as “Music Lesson Ohio,” she relates the state to a young girl practicing for her first violin recital. You can read this either as an homage to Ohio itself and her experiences growing up there, or as the tenseness and perseverance of a young girl. You may even read further into it and find yourself focusing on the theme of discipline and strength found in femininity. Each poem offers so much more than what you see at your first glance.

In poems such as “Being Right,” we see an outright focus on Babcock’s inner emotions, her longing to be heard and recognized, a common product of life in the Midwest. It seems that her shorter poems in this collection carry even more weight than her lengthy ones.

“Trust me,”
Mother whispers to her daughter

as she positions the plastic comb teeth.
A tug, an ouch.

Her daughter.
There are more.

Mother throws a mangled tail on the floor,
goes back to the soft, pink flesh.

A twitch, a claw.
Another squealing nest.
(“Rats,” p. 12)

This intimate moment between a mother and a daughter not only describes a daily scene of combing the knots and snarls out of her daughter’s hair, but goes deeper to reveal the complicated relationship between them. The mother removing the unwanted “vermin” from her daughter, combing out the parts of her she doesn’t approve of; the daughter sitting patiently and accepting her mother’s actions against her. Being the complacent daughter and allowing these parts of herself to be removed. Nate Pritts was not wrong in his review of her work when he said, “Julie Babcock writes with a compass and a diary close at hand, expertly guiding us to emotional ground again and again.”

From “Replacement” to the titular poem, “Autoplay,” Babcock’s depth of her themes and eloquence in the execution of her writing make you yearn for more. She expertly tugs your emotions and maneuvers them along a path that covers her childhood through adulthood. Whether depicting this outright or using Ohio as a means to convey her messages, this collection leaves you, in that good, sorrowful way, with a craving that cannot be filled, a hunger for closure, much the way the Midwest leaves you when you pass through it.

Julia Hy is Alternating Current’s Customer Relations Director and a Staff Book Reviewer for The Volt. She lives in Buffalo, New York, in a small house with two large dogs and a mischievous kitten. Returning to school to complete a major in Creative Writing and Illustration, she fills her time with painting and arts of all sorts, writing, editing, and reviewing fantastic works of literature.

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noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

A Conversation with Jonathan Corcoran
INTERVIEW BY KEVIN CATALANO

JONATHAN CORCORAN is the author of The Rope Swing: Stories (West Virginia University Press, 2016). He received a BA in Literary Arts from Brown University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Rutgers University-Newark. He was born and raised in a small town in West Virginia and currently resides in Brooklyn.

KEVIN CATALANO: Let’s dig right in. Could you describe your writing desk? Is it messy, tidy, sweaty, bloody?

JONATHAN CORCORAN: A desk! I have one! Finally. I live in a ~400-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn with my husband. Until very recently, I wrote on the couch, the table, or the bathroom floor (seriously). When my book was accepted for publication, I finally made the husband throw out the exercise bike that was getting very little use and took up the only free corner we had left. The desk is small, stacked with various owl totems (not sure how that became “a thing”), and has a corkboard where I pin up ideas and notes to self. But it’s a desk, nonetheless, and I promised myself that the next book will not be written next to the toilet.

What is the correct pronunciation for ‘Appalachian’? I’ve heard it said a couple different ways.

Good question. There isn’t a correct pronunciation, I think, but how you say it lets people know where you are from and possibly your relationship to the area. In my hometown in rural West Virginia, they say “app (as in the iPhone version)-uh-latch-uhn.” In New England and the Northeast, I’ve heard “app-uh-lay-shun” with a slightly aristocratic ring. These pronunciations roughly correspond to deer meat and caviar—one comes down with a plop in the back of a pickup truck, and the other is spooned gently onto a plate.

“Appalachian Swan Song,” a story in your new book, The Rope Swing, is such a beautiful, nostalgic version of rural West Virginia. However, the stories thereafter move way beyond that romanticized depiction. How did writing The Rope Swing change or complicate your personal relationship with your hometown?

I had and have a complicated relationship with my family. When I was twenty years old, my mother found out that I was gay and cut me out of her life. We didn’t speak for many years. We’ve been hot and cold for a decade, though recent events suggest we’re in a thawing period. One tangible effect of our separation was that I stopped going home. If I was lucky, I would make it back once a year, staying clandestinely in the home of a childhood friend. West Virginia—the nostalgic one, the one in which I grew up—loomed large in my imagination. It was all I had, a little town frozen in my memory, stuck in a particular point in time. I wrote “Appalachian Swan Song” as a way to house my memories, to make peace with the past.

In recent years, I’ve been able to go back home more frequently. West Virginia and Appalachia are changing, and there’s a lot of sorrow but also a lot of hope. There’s a building in my old downtown called the Tygart Hotel. It must be the tallest structure in town, some six or seven stories high. It was built during the boom days of timber and coal and railroads. It was grand at the time, with marble lobbies and sweeping staircases. Now it’s an apartment building that primarily houses low-income tenants. It’s become known as a drug den, and I’ve heard of a bedbug infestation. It’s only a couple blocks away from the train depot, which is now being used to ferry tourists on a train that goes back and forth through the mountains. If you were to walk by the building, you’d know it was special. But if you were to walk inside, you’d see the last century unfold right before your eyes.

The Rope Swing is a collection of linked stories. Did you write them in chronological order, or did you decide on (or discover) the “link” after having written a few?

Yes! I didn’t plan on having a linked collection, but then I realized I had been writing around the same subjects, the same places, showing a little progression with certain stories and certain themes. I had probably written about six of the ten stories when it became clear what was going on. At that point, I spread the printed stories across the floor of my apartment and arranged them in a way that made sense. I found the holes and made a plan to fill them in. “Appalachian Swan Song” was one of the last stories I wrote. It became the first story of the collection and the glue that held the rest of the stories together. Each story can definitely be read individually, but I do think there is something to be gained from reading each story in order.

My favorite story in the collection is the last one, “A Touch.” For those who don’t know, this story depicts a narrator-in-crisis who stalks a young gay man whose face has been mutilated as a result of a brutal hate crime. The ending of this story is so surprising and, as I read it, optimistic. Was it a conscious decision to leave the reader with a feeling of hope, not just at the end of this story, but at the end of the collection?

I’m glad you liked that one. It’s my favorite, too. Writing that story was like expelling a thousand demons. It came out in such a fevered few sessions. All my fears and anger and hate and sadness came boiling out onto the page. I was thinking about homophobia, about violence, about hate crimes—and of course, about unrequited love. By the time I had reached the last act of the story, I was exhausted and empty. It takes a good scream, sometimes, to recenter yourself. And so, yes, it was a very conscious choice to end the story and the book as a whole on a hopeful note, because a body can only take so much in this world before collapsing.

The Lit Hub had a great list that came out in early March, “Books I Wish I’d Read as an LGBTQ Teenager: Queer Writers on What They’d Recommend to Their Past Selves.” First, I’m curious about what books you’d recommend to your teenage self; but second, I wondered if The Rope Swing was in some way the book you were writing to your past self.

That was such a good list! I do wish I’d had something like that when I was a kid. I was a voracious reader as a kid, but I didn’t even know that queer books existed. I’ve been talking with a few fellow writers about the lack of queer books set in rural spaces. There are many good ones, but there should be more. I’ve been thinking about how much I enjoyed Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. More recently, Megan Kruse’s Call Me Home punctured my heart. I think Jim Grimsley’s Dream Boy was the first queer book I ever read that could have been a roadmap for my younger self. It was so full of love and passion and sorrow.

The Rope Swing was definitely a book that was written with an eye toward my past self. In a way, I think the book is a note to the alternate-reality version of me that stayed behind in West Virginia. I built up a whole world in my head based on that doppelgänger. It’s not easy growing up gay in a place like West Virginia, and it’s not the easiest being an adult there, either. I know it’s changing, but you have to remember that change comes slow to a place like the one in which I grew up—a little town surrounded on all sides by mountains, a three-hour drive from the nearest major city. I hope this doesn’t sound too risqué, but I think it’s extremely important that teenagers read about relationships and love, both sloppy and pure. That also means reading about sex and desire. I spent most of my youth in the closet. I didn’t have any examples—hardly a one, in books or on television. I took all the feelings I had inside of me and ended up in a lot of dark places, both physically and in my head. I put myself in dangerous situations and, really, am lucky to have come out relatively unscathed. The next generation of queer kids is going to come out less damaged than the last, and it’s in large part because we see people like ourselves in books and movies and on the Internet. This is all doubly important for kids who don’t live in cities, who might not have the resources and support networks that cities offer.

This is your first published book (but surely not your last!), and I know many aspiring writers, who are trying to publish their own manuscripts, are always hungry for success stories. Would you mind telling the story of how The Rope Swing found its home with Vandalia Press?

I love my press. Vandalia is the fiction imprint of West Virginia University Press. I think publishing, as it’s been said before, all comes down to finding the right place at the right time. I’d been entering my unpublished collection in first book contests for two years (story collections are a hard sell to agents). I had been a finalist or semifinalist on a few occasions, but never crossed that all-important threshold. I was ready to give up when I saw something online about WVU/Vandalia seeking submissions. I wrote an email of introduction to the editor, sent off my collection by mail, and received a contract six months later. My advice is this: If you don’t think your book is a good fit for an agent or one of the big houses (or if you’re not having any luck in those venues), think strategically about small and university presses. Think about style and subject matter. I had a book about queer Appalachians, and I’d been sending my manuscript to presses in New York and California. WVU Press loved my book, both for the writing and for the subject matter. As a university press, they’re a nonprofit with a mission to the state’s and region’s people. It made perfect sense for them to publish me, to put out a book about a different kind of West Virginia. And it turns out they’re fantastic—They have the same distribution as the big houses, and we’re collaborating on a 15-stop book tour. They only publish a handful of fiction books each year, so they’re giving me a lot of attention and pouring resources into promoting my book. Your book has a home—You just have to find it.

In a somewhat recent Facebook post, you announced your decision to (*gasp*) quit your full-time job and (*double gasp*) take up writing full-time. Seriously though, I commend your bravery. Was this a difficult decision? How is the full-time writing life going so far?

(*triple gasp* )
I don’t think this will last forever, but it sure feels nice right now. I came from a blue-collar background, and I’ve been working more or less since I was sixteen years old. I’m very goal-oriented, and I knew that someday I wanted to gift myself the time to write. I’m not getting rich off of this book (Trust me.), but it gave me a good excuse to really put myself out there and to try for something bigger. I’ve spent the last years working administrative jobs and putting money into savings (Note to writers: day jobs are important—Make sure you develop a skill of some sort.). I’ve been preparing for this moment. If I don’t have another book finished in a year from today, I’ll feel like I’ve failed myself. I’ve started a novel that feels like the spiritual successor to my story collection. There. I’ve said it publicly. Now feel free to keep me on my toes.

What are you reading right now?

I just picked up a copy of Ann Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been. She’s another writer from West Virginia, who I believe lives in Seattle now. Up next is Garth Greenwell’s big debut, What Belongs to You, which I’ve heard is stellar. I keep reading all of his interviews, and he speaks so eloquently and forcefully about queer life and literature. I’m going to drag myself to one of his events soon and make him become my friend (Hi, Garth!).

What album have you been listening to?

I dove in hard and overdosed on Sleater-Kinney’s new album this year, so they’re off my rotation for a while. It was a good run. I’m a big, big fan of this indie band out of North Carolina—Mount Moriah. Their last album, Miracle Temple, was a country, blues-infused wonder. The lead singer sounds like a rock version of Dolly Parton. Their new album, How to Dance, just came out, so I’m giving that a spin as we speak. For a taste of West Virginia, check out my super-talented friends, Emily Miller and Jesse Milnes, who reside near my old town and run around the country playing fiddle and guitar and singing their hearts out. There’s a great little session with them online here.

What’s the best thing you’ve been watching on TV/cable/Netflix?

I don’t know if it’s the best show on TV right now, but I’m addicted to The Walking Dead. I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic entertainment, which, in its best form, reveals something deep about our humanity. I just spent two weeks binge-watching the original Twin Peaks. How did I miss that show? Watching David Lynch do his TV thing opened some new sphere in my brain that has been helping my writing. I’m a pretty modern, realism-centered writer, but I draw inspiration from people who push the boundaries of narrative convention.

Kevin Catalano is our Assistant Staff Interviewer for The Inductor. He was born and raised in Chittenango, New York, a small village that celebrates the birthplace of Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum. He later moved to North Carolina, and proudly attended University of North Carolina-Greensboro, where he earned his B.A. in English, then followed that with an M.A. and MFA in Fiction from Rutgers-Newark University in New Jersey. He is the author of The Word Made Flesh, a collection of dark flash fiction and short stories from firthFORTH Books. Other stories have appeared in [PANK], Booth, Pear Noir!, Atticus Review, Gargoyle Magazine, FRiGG, and many other journals. His stories have also been anthologized in Press 53’s Surreal South ’13, Fiddleblack Annuals #1 and #2, and Dark House Press’ Exigencies. He teaches composition and literature at Rutgers-Newark University and lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children.

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noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sun, 03 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

The Death & Birth of Jesse James on April 3, 1882
GENNAROSE NETHERCOTT

When the bullet rippled through his forehead
to a picture frame on the opposite wall,
Jesse James did not die.

His body wilted to the ground
like a plucked & thirsty violet
while his horses scuffed hooves & rattled

teeth against bit—One may think those mares
would be fluent in the air of last breaths,
but when Jesse’s final lungful broke

from him & the horses pulled it as steam
through their muzzles, they tore from their hitching posts.
Black mane & muscle river-ran

across the plain, raising murders
of crows as they rioted through cornfields
until they shot straight out of Missouri.

Those crows, shaken from their feast
by the sprint of death, hung in the sky
for three full days & nights before returning

to earth. Yes, a bullet sounded,
& the outlaw Jesse James spread across the floor
both piercing & soft like morning snow.

But if the highway robber were truly killed, the way
his body was killed, the way only bodies can be killed,
we would not have these stories.

While Jesse James survived, Jesse Woodson James did not:
Confederate guerrilla, murderer of Union-supporters,
crooner of Confederate pride through public letters

& political burglary, cog in the great wheel
of abolitionist massacre. This namesake met death
for his head’s price, & he died there in the dust—

but from Jesse Woodson James rose Jesse James:
bandit, folk-villain, whisper, immortal
in the telling & retelling of his name.

Before the pistol cooled, James shuddered
into thousands of seeds, winged silver maple
that took to wind. Twisted across the land

until they spun downward, driving like screws
into the soil. There, they rooted, sprouted,
stretched skyward into thick-trunked legends.

Soon, Jesse James, once just a thief,
became a forest. What Bob Ford,
that trigger-happy fool didn’t know

is that the quickest way to make a myth
is to kill a man.

The 2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical
5TH PLACE

We are pleased to announce this piece as a Finalist for The 2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical, honoring the independent press’ best writing on themes of historical people, places, events, objects, or ideas. The winners are selected by an external panel that judges all pieces blindly and selects the full list of 12 finalists from hundreds of entries. Alternating Current does not determine the final outcome for the judging; the external judges’ decisions are final.

GENNAROSE NETHERCOTT is a poet, performer, and folklorist from the woodlands of Vermont, currently residing in Boston. Her recent work has appeared in The Offing, Rust + Moth, Cleaver, and Maudlin House, among others. She was named the grand prize winner of Spark Creative Anthology’s poetry contest and the Lindenwood Review’s flash fiction contest. She writes poems-to-order for passersby on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter, a collection of which was released by Honeybee Press in 2015.

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noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Being Trans Is a Lot like Being a Book
AUSTIN CHANT

Some of the best stories happen back to front. Your understanding grows as you read, and your mind jumps back to previous events filled with new significance—sudden realizations about what the characters were doing in that place, how the murder weapon was chosen, why she said that in the heat of the moment. There are plot twists that make you want to start the book over, to reread it with new knowledge in your mind. Diana Wynne Jones is one of my favorite authors for this kind of twist. She had a way of building a dozen different mysteries simultaneously, only to reveal them all at once with amazing simplicity. When you reread these stories, it’s astounding to find how clearly they point to the twists you never saw coming.

Coming to terms with being trans was, for me, remarkably similar. Once I came to understand that I was trans, my life suddenly began to paint an obvious picture. The mysteries of my adolescence resolved, and the discordant scenes of gender confusion became legible as such. The explanation I had been struggling to accept all along, that I was just a strange and unhappy person, was replaced with the understanding that I had been experiencing something that most trans people experience. And where before I had been limited to understanding my experiences as “inexplicable but deep and lifelong discomfort,” now I had a lexicon; I had the language of dysphoria to explain my unhappiness, “gender euphoria” to explain the delight I felt at finally tossing off my assigned gender.

But all that might never have happened if not for what I was reading.

For years I had been dipping my toes into trans narratives. I had long considered myself an ally who had an odd amount of common experiences with out-and-proud trans people, who cried too hard at Ma Vie en Rose. I’m deeply grateful to those trans storytellers who laid out their own narratives so that I could see where our experiences overlapped. Most of them were, like me, terrified young millennials posting on their blogs. Few of them could relate to the depictions of trans people we had grown up seeing in the media: classic portrayals of gender-nonconformity as disturbed, sexualized, and freakish. But in their shared experiences, a set of narrative tropes began to emerge—the beats of stories utterly different and far more human than the ones being told in the mainstream.

I finally applied the lens of those real trans experiences to my own life, and that was when my life began to make sense.

This still happens every time I speak about my trans identity with other trans folk. One of us relates an experience, and the rest of us pour out in solidarity or dissent. We begin to make sense of the world, to map out what defines our personal transness, what we share with others. The broader trans community feels to me like a second family, and like all families, it has an intimate history filled with stories. Which is why I feel their absence strongly in the place where people most commonly search for stories—in fiction.

It wasn’t until I was twenty that I first saw a book about a trans person who was over thirty, in a healthy relationship, and not on the verge of suicide. Until then, the books I was reading had hardly presented that as a possibility. Other things I failed to see in literature include trans people being loved and desired as people, not as objects; stories set after coming out, where the protagonists deal with actually living as trans; stories about the many different ways that people experience dysphoria, many of which cannot be summarized as “trapped in the wrong body”; stories about trans people who have happy endings; stories where non-binary people exist at all; stories where trans people just get to exist, unmarked as others, and make all the mistakes and swing all the swords and pilot all the spaceships that cisgender people get to. In short, stories where trans people are not just seen, acknowledged, and studied, but are actually explored, developed, and allowed to express the whole spectrum of trans experiences.

The trans community is filled with stories, both those imposed upon us from outside and the stories we tell each other to motivate and validate ourselves and others. Coming out as trans always seems to involve a narrative of some kind: stories of self-realization, growth, and transition. Being trans fundamentally involves a certain amount of language and narrative transformation, from the obvious changing names and pronouns to deeper and more complicated shifts in how we understand and express the concepts of gender, bodies, power, and relationships.

But the stories that get told about trans people are, generally, shockingly basic—if not outright offensive. The sensationalized “before and after” transformation story; the tragic and agonizing coming-out story; the story of the hardships faced by a trans person’s cisgender partner, parent, or child; the story of a trans murder victim being investigated and dissected by cisgender people. These are popcorn stories, meant for easy consumption by a broad audience. They don’t serve to advance transgender equality because they aren’t really about trans people; they’re about the rough idea of trans people, packaged up to be fascinating and scandalizing. And there are so many other, better, truer stories to be told.

I look back on my childhood and find narratives I never recognized running through my life, often disguised or dismissed in the moment but glaringly obvious now. I can only imagine how much easier my own process might have been if I had encountered people like myself in the books and films I devoured as a child. We use stories to make sense of our experiences when we lack representation, when our culture as a whole lacks narratives that explain us. We link together moments in our lives so that they tell a recognizable tale. And we, trans folks, need more of them.

March 31st, 2016, was the seventh annual Transgender Day of Visibility, a day of recognition and awareness-building for the transgender community. Each year, I see my timelines flooded on March 31st with the stories of friends and strangers alike, all of them taking the incredibly bold stance of being open and out in a world that demands invisibility, conformity, and silence from transgender people. This year, I suggest that we honor them by telling more and better stories, by not relegating trans visibility to just one day, and by holding the media accountable for our inclusion, or lack thereof.

The theme of this year’s Transgender Day of Visibility is #MoreThanVisibility, which points to the fact that acknowledgment of the existence of trans people isn’t enough. Visibility alone is simply dangerous. We need action that moves to combat transphobic violence, whether it manifests as hateful legislation or violent crime or the many daily microaggressions and dangers that most trans people experience.

And for those of us who consume and create fiction, we need to move beyond basic trans narratives. We don’t need any more stories written by cisgender people that read like scientific exposés or academic studies on the strange and tragic existence of trans people, like astronauts encountering a new and fascinating kind of Martian; we don’t need stories that cast us as outsiders, martyrs, and freaks. We need stories that will reach out to a vulnerable but resilient community, especially those of us who have not or cannot come out. We need stories that will hold our hands through every step of our lives. We need stories that will promise us a future. We need stories that will show us the way. And not just for one designated day, but every day.

AUSTIN CHANT is a bitter millennial, avid gamer, and a queer, trans romance writer. He is the co-host of The Hopeless Romantic, an LGBTQIA+ romance fiction podcast. He lives in Seattle with his partners in crime, a pleasant collection of game consoles, and an abundance of tea. Find him on Twitter @austinchanted and online at austinchanted.weebly.com.

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noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 12:00:00 +0000

That the true owner may have it again
HOLLY M. WENDT

From Boston News-Letter, March 26, 1716: A Certain Person some time since, Lent Dryden’s Virgil in Folio with Cuts, but has forgot to whom, and the Person that Borrow’d it is hereby desired to send it to the Post-Office in Boston, that the true owner may have it again; who will be very thankful to the Borrower.

1.

but to think nothing of the Borrower

who desires

that she should keep it

who knows

that no reader there will think to think she

2.
The book makes a good bedfellow, much unlike a Certain Person whose throat grows thick in midnight cool, all curdled moisture and barking coughs. She can turn a page silently and cross a room with no candle. She can leave by door or window, and she swears she must always face one or the other, never the bolster or ceiling, for how can either help her?

3.

gloves
shoes
stockings
pocket
apron
dress
shift

as though

cloves
mace
ginger
pitch
soap
indigo
fustic

to be unladen, here crated on a gentleman’s chair, a room Jamaica-warm. She has blued and yellowed her hands, blacked and lathered them, too, and sweetened her breath with spices. She exhales perfume and a bird’s sigh over Procne and Philomel, perched on a chimney much like the one attached to this house.

Each subscription being five guineas:

a book or two barrels beef and

candles or
two barrels fine biscuit and
pimento or
some Madiera, not too much

Each verse being its own transaction:

a page for a dish of tea and

agreeable conversation or
a song at the spinet and
kissing or
promises, very specific

This is not very pastoral but she fares better than Dido. She is too enraptured to fall in love.

5.
He says he’s read the book but he will not talk about it. When she asks after a word—for when should she encounter assuage or doric or such passages in Latin?—he draws her near. When she asks again, he says this and the lamp is dimmed or it isn’t and he reads aloud her body and not the answer to her question. The bunch and spring of the loins is not every word. Some, she will allow, certain some. But while she wets the cloth and rubs herself clean, she doubts that he’s read it at all.

6.

She should allow that the book was not borrowed in the strictest sense.

The door and the man let her pass freely without knowing her burden.

But he sleeps soundly, like a fool loved by God. She could put it back.

This is why he can never claim she is a thief.

7.
Queen Anne has been dead for more than a year, and the King had been in mourning. The same week the news arrived in Boston, a man in Rhode Island slew his wife and her sister, and he cut his own throat in gaol. He will be healed so he might die in service to justice, insomuch as justice exists for the mad.

His skin will re-seal, and his wife’s and her sister’s will not. The Queen’s skin admitted illness, and there was nothing to be done. Her own skin lingers on the calfskin binding pages and Æneas to his quest. She thinks of the calf. The leather is good, smooth and uniform and embossed richly; the calf must have been good, ruddy and fat and robust at the teat, and of a uniform coat, the hair of which was scraped away, gathered elsewhere to fill bolsters or a divan. Perhaps she has knelt or reclined or refused on this calf’s cushions, even this one.

8.
The news travels only as quickly as wind and sail and an easy sea admits, and her hair and the pages have curled in Kingston’s tropical air by the time his notice comes to hers. The advertisement says forgot. She allows the word; to be certain, she remembers more the drawn curtains, russet and gold, than the shape or weight of him, a knotted thread in the linen’s weave that catches the nail but not the skin.

9.

For uneven numbers please the gods
and she has plucked free the engraving of Æneas
receiving the Sybil’s prophecy and folded it boatwise
into the bay. She hopes it carries past the Palisadoes,
is swept north and north and arrives in Boston
to answer who owns what in true.

The 2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical
NOTABLE MENTION

We are pleased to announce this piece as a Notable Mention for The 2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical, honoring the independent press’ best writing on themes of historical people, places, events, objects, or ideas. The winners are selected by an external panel that judges all pieces blindly and selects the full list of 12 finalists from hundreds of entries. Alternating Current does not determine the final outcome for the judging; the external judges’ decisions are final.

HOLLY M. WENDT is an Assistant Professor of English at Lebanon Valley College. Her prose and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming from Barrelhouse, Memorious, Gulf Stream, Gray's Sporting Journal, WhiskeyPaper, and others. She received a Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowship for Creative and Performing Artists from the American Antiquarian Society and was a fellow at the Jentel Foundation.

noreply@blogger.com (open your mind.) — Sun, 20 Mar 2016 12:00:00 +0000

AWP 2016 in Los Angeles
ALTERNATING CURRENT HAPPENINGS

AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) is one of the most widely frequented writers’ and presses’ conferences in existence, and Alternating Current is headed there again this year. We’ve joined up with the awesome Juked at TABLE 1234 (You can remember that, right?), so come find us and get autographed, discounted copies of Eric Shonkwiler’s Above All Men and Moon Up, Past Full, as well as select discounted Alternating Current titles, including Carmen Lau’s The Girl Wakes, Footnote #1: A Literary Journal of History, Schuler Benson’s Poor Man’s Guide to an Affordable, Painless Suicide, and more. And of course, FREE SWAG!

Then join us for this awesomely awesome offsite reading event on Saturday night as our troupe of talented readers pairs up with other great presses to bring you incredible readings, booze, and snacks, and to party the AWP way.

Books & Booze
SATURDAY, APRIL 2ND

We’re bringing you twelve fantastic authors: Matt Bell, Eric Shonkwiler, Sunil Yapa, Will Chancellor, Kathy Fish, Ben Tanzer, Andrew F. Sullivan, Ashley Farmer, Ryan Ridge, Carmen Lau, Tabitha Blankenbiller, and A. Jay Adler. $3 beer, wine, and liquor, and free snacks! Books will be available for purchase, and authors will sign. Find out more and join us via the Facebook event page.

Help us get there! Your support, no matter how big or small, will help us buy beverages and snacks for the readers and audience, and will help defray the costs of hotels, gas, shipping, and membership ticket costs of Alternating Current authors and staff members. No amount is too small, and certainly no amount is too big. Please come out to the show, and if you can’t make it, pitch in to help our press be a success!

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