Erin McNellis received a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Irvine for her research on forms of attention in 20th-century American poetry.
She blogs about poetry, ethics, and pop culture at http://uncomplicatedly.wordpress.com.

You speak of “Wisdom” and how it affects us, its consequences, its light. In a few words, can you summarize your thoughts on this word, any why?

What’s always struck me about Richard Hugo’s poem “Morning Wisdom,” which I discuss in my book, is the way that it makes light of wisdom—which is supposedly one of the most serious and sacred things around. The whole poem is basically a joke on the name of a tiny Montana town called Wisdom, which seems to be a quaint tourist trap, but Hugo eventually decides that its “false fronts [are] really what they seem.” What does that even mean? Is he saying that “wisdom” is fake, or that it’s real? Maybe both. It’s probably always foolish to think that you’re wise.

What do you see as the threads connecting the various authors and thinkers you reference?

The two writers most central to the book are Simone Weil and Georges Batailles, and I became interested in their relationship because it blew my mind that it existed at all, that they actually knew each other. Weil was a strict moralist, giving charity to the point of self-deprivation, while Batailles was basically the poster boy for libertinism. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that their opposite life philosophies could be seen as very different solutions to the same set of philosophical problems. They’re both concerned with figuring out how deal with the fact that, as Batailles puts it in Theory of Religion, “between one being and another there is a gulf, a discontinuity.” I would describe this as the central problem of my book, too—I bring in other thinkers (such as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the poet David Antin, and Mark Greif, who is one of the founders of n+1) in order to explore a variety of theories about whether, how, and to what degree it is possible to bridge this gulf between people.

And what threads of thought and theory connect your essays?

The two main solutions to the problem of the “gulf” between people that I investigate in this book are attention and language. The essays on Bataille and Weil are mostly focused on the role of attention in ethics, and I argue that attention both to the self and to the other are necessary—that an awareness of the otherness of ourselves is an important counterpoint to the Biblical demand that we recognize others as ourselves. The last set of essays in the book explore the limits of language; they ask whether it’s a good idea to declare that certain thoughts or emotions are “beyond” language because of their complexity or sacredness.

What attracts you to the themes behind, within, these threads, and what larger tapestry do they paint for you?

I find attention to be a fascinating subject of intellectual inquiry because it brings together so many aspects of the human condition: it’s the filter through which the mind interacts with the outside world, and we think of it as being under our conscious control—but we also want to blame bodily things (such as neurobiology) and external things (such as the internet) when our attention breaks down. This book mostly focuses on attention’s role in ethics, but in the dissertation that I recently finished, I investigate how and why experimental poets in the 20th century explored states of attention and attentional dysfunction. The questions about the limits of language come partially out of my personal relationships, some of which I actually discuss in the book, and partially out of my experiences and frustrations as a writer.

Can you speak more on the “false fronts” of love and how they manifest themselves as real, or “the true Wisdom”, in our everyday lives?

In the poem by Richard Hugo, he realizes that although the town of Wisdom is made up of what he called “false fronts”—a tourist trap—these “false fronts” are nonetheless the reality of the town: “the true Wisdom.” I do see a connection between this and my essays about the limits of language, now that you point it out. Probably every genuinely loving relationship has a core that is to some degree “unspeakable”: it would be impossible to articulate exactly how much this person means to you. But the way you live that relationship every day, even if any given day doesn’t seem to live up to the depth of your feelings, is this truth.

You say of Simone Weil, “Weil has a gift for making counterintuitive statements that are strangely compelling, forcing you to change your habits of thinking.” The same could be said of you. What is it about Weil that intrigues you so and invites your many discussions of her?

I find Weil’s drive toward self-erasure fascinating: it’s both an act of attention and an act of self-sacrifice, and it shows what these things have to do with one another. Any act of attention is to some degree a self-erasure: your experience of yourself falls away as you attend to the external object or person. She also had an admirably unflinching moral code, giving away nearly all her wages to the poor and living in bare, unheated rooms. The popular images of that kind of sacrifice are people like Jesus and Mother Theresa, divinely-inspired and difficult to emulate. Weil, by contrast, was just a French-German intellectual living her Kantian morality to its logical conclusion. She shows us that anybody could do that if they had the fortitude.

For someone who hasn’t read your book, what’s the essence of the divide between possible and impossible love?

I define an “impossible” love as one that asks us to change or grow. The most obvious kinds of “impossible” love are those that are either unrequited or prevented by circumstances—and in those cases, the change we have to make may be abandoning the love altogether or learning to transmute it into something else. But the third and most interesting kind of “impossible” love is the love that we—impossibly—receive: love that is a miracle, and that we must work to deserve.

Do you align yourself with contemporary feminist theory? Where do you feel the movement is accurate and where does it stray?

Yes, feminist theory continues to be an absolutely necessary voice in literary and cultural conversations, though I would prefer to use the wider term “gender theory” in order to in¬clude queer studies, among other things. In one of my essays on Weil I argue that her desire to erase herself is not, as it might initially seem, antifeminist—but this is not at all meant as a critique of feminist theory.

Can you clarify your thoughts on the significance of “loving oneself as a stranger”?

Like “impossible loves,” this is another of Weil’s cryptic phrases that I have attempted to make sense of in this book. She writes that “to love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger.” She is talking, of course, about “love thy neighbor,” but the substitution of “stranger” seems to reflect the sense of the parable of the Good Samaritan: it shouldn’t matter whether you know or like a person in need; all that matters is their need. Weil doesn’t actually explain what she means by “to love oneself as a stranger,” but I think it suggests the need for the same unflinching love in our relationships with ourselves: an ethics of universal love means that in addition to loving others as ourselves, we need to recognize the otherness of ourselves. Nobody is perfectly good, honest, or consistent, and to think otherwise is to miss some of the most fascinating aspects of the human condition.

You speak in different ways and toward different ends on the divide between personal responsibility and escape from it. You also discuss the practicality of this divide in religious dogma. What do you see as the church’s role in the ethics of responsibility and if it succeeds in its promise?

I actually don’t feel qualified to answer this question—despite my great academic interest in religion, I am not very traditionally religious and I really can’t pronounce on what “the church” is doing or not doing. I do think that organized religion has the potential to make very positive interventions in the world as a force for organizing volunteers, donations, and goodwill. But in American politics, “the church” seems almost exclusively to mobilize itself as a force for diminishing the personhood of gay people and limiting the agency of women, which it’s hard for me to see as anything other than conservative in the most literal sense of the word: clinging to outdated and unjust values and power structures.

Turning a critical eye to poetry, you discuss the School of Quietude and the price of vision and full human consciousness poetry pays when practicing this school. Can you say a few words on this school, or trend, and its failings?

The term “School of Quietude” is Ron Silliman’s, and he uses it to remind people that what we tend to think of as “normal” as opposed to “experimental” poetry is in fact just one of many aesthetic possibilities. Another word for it is “workshop lyric,” because this is the style taught in most creative writing programs today. These are quiet poems of modest epiphany, written in a “natural” voice, often occurring in nature. But the range of human experience is so much broader than that, and poetry can take so many different forms.

What contemporary poets do you think successfully buck this trend?
One of my favorites is Rosmarie Waldrop, whose poetry manages to be beautiful while also being very weird and thought-provoking. Charles Bernstein and the other Language poets—Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, etc—are also wonderfully playful and interesting. And I find Susan Howe’s archival-collage work fascinating. I’d also like to mention some of my friends who are doing brilliant work: Jen Tynes takes the weight and measure of words like a pastoral Gertrude Stein, and Mike Young’s manic imagination is always delightful.

When do you think people are most themselves: when turning a critical eye inward or outward, or is it a bit of both?

Absolutely both; it’s important to have a realistic understanding of both yourself and others. Loving a fantasy, whether it’s a fantasy of yourself or somebody else, robs your love of its genuinely transformative power: its generosity.

You grew up in Atlantic City?

Yeah, a strange place and a strange upbringing. When I was growing up, Atlantic City was becoming a ghost town. Tourists were traveling farther, to newer trendier places. The summer season in AC got shorter and shorter. And there wasn’t much to do after the summer. Guys played ball, hung out, got high, got into trouble, looked for girls, and if they couldn’t find them they started fighting each other.

What got you started on Bloodnight?

I was a member of an illustrious high school fraternity. You pledged for weeks and got beaten mercilessly. But if you made it into this frat you achieved star status. You could never do today what the brothers did back then. Waterboarding may be shocking today, but at every meeting of this group, I assure you, there was an equivalent torture for pledges.

Also I’m attracted to the whole idea of a rite of passage, a bloodnight–the various trials a boy goes through in order to become a man. Of course it’s a metaphor as well for all the punishments we take in life or that we choose to take, believing we could become somebody different. Mostly I wanted to write a fictional account of my experiences growing up in AC, some of the wild people I knew, and this crazy-ass, notorious high school fraternity.

Do you have any idea what made you a writer?

The usual things: loneliness, sadness, trauma, curiosity, leading to imagining something better or something different; introspection, dislike of authority, the pressure to speak and become visible, and a love of, and an ability with, words.

Bloodnight is nostalgic, yet unsentimental. Was this a conscious choice or did the material dictate the tone?

Most of the time I write without sentimentality, and this seemed to be the right choice for Bloodnight. Though sentimentality at times is necessary to make a story work. The key is almost always what the story wants. Some writers too often avoid sentimentality, even when it’s what the story or the characters need to develop fully.

What is happening to these kids that makes them gravitate towards gangs and social groups away from their families and homes?

The homes are busted up because of economic conditions. Parents are unemployed, absent or divorced, drinking/drugging and pissed at themselves and their children. Parents punish their children for their own insufficiencies. So kids seek surrogate families, surrogate mentors, people who care or seem to care. It can happen that a kid gets attached to a person who cares for him/her, but who’s also dangerous for him/her. But a bad attachment is better than no attachment. My book is set circa 1970, but the conditions that push kids into gangs are no different today.

There is a great struggle for the boys in these stories to become men or be manly and, more than not, violence seems to play a part in that transition. Why is taking punishment or dealing with pain so important to these characters?

It may be genetic, evolutionary. Or boys may unconsciously sense that taking responsibility for themselves and others requires a lot of guts and that they’d better prepare themselves, toughen themselves somehow. Every man, whether he’s a doctor, dancer, or hard-rock miner knows what it means, at some level, to kick somebody’s ass or get his ass kicked. Then it’s forever scored in the ganglia.

You founded a long running workshop in Philadelphia. What effect has that had on your writing?

The Rittenhouse Writers’ Group, which I started in 1988, may be the longest-running independent fiction workshop in America. We’ll reach our 25th anniversary this October. Members who continued their schooling after leaving the group have told me that RWG may be better–perhaps more enriching–than many MFA writing programs, and in number of publications we compare well. The group has kept my writing sharp because there are so many smart, articulate people there. But being the facilitator has cut into my output over the years. Teaching and editing can drain your productivity. It’s important to be conscious of this as a teacher, and to make sure that every day you socket your spine in the chair and spin the little words.

Read an excerpt from Bloodnight.

Bloodnight is available through Amazon and B&N.

About the author:

James Rahn taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania for fifteen years and has an MFA from Columbia University. His stories and articles have appeared in several magazines. In 1988 he started the Rittenhouse Writers’ Group in Philadelphia. He is the author of Bloodnight, a collection of linked stories.

I phoned my lover from the bar,
and discovered he was in Mexico
and cutting off his hair
to which I said Please, no like I was
begging in the negative for my own life
and I asked him Is anxiety a sin? and he said,
For you probably.
Luck?
I can’t hear you, he said. There is an ocean outside.
I press, What are you doing to yourself down there?
Are you going to come back looking weird?
Camero! he yelled. I decided to wear my earring again.

                                                My heartbeat was providence at birth, its cessation
                                                will be a popping, instant deflation of all my luck and
                                                lucklessness, a collapse of all fortunes.
                                                Why do I have no friends I whispered to him
                                                because I couldn’t keep from thinking of death
                                                even when he was driving a rental car in the sun
                                                brightly telling me to relax.

About the author:

Julia Whicker was born in North Carolina and lives in Iowa City. She is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and works for the athletic department at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in publications like Unstuck and Lurve Magazine.

Some trees may go witty, selling their
complexions for pennies to survive.

The surviving trees will give birth to doves which
will lay green eggs into snowy nests, crooning.

The dead trees will reincarnate in charcoal, and
burn every anus of retrogression to dark ashes.

The non-surviving-non-dying trees will build a cult
where saboteurs like them worship faceless gods.

About the author:

Jekwu Anyaegbuna is an alumnus of the Farafina Trust International Creative Writers’ Programme, facilitated by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Nigeria. He graduated from the University of Ilorin, and his work has been widely published, or will be published, in literary journals in the United States and the UK including Ambit, Orbis, Other Poetry, The Journal, Bow-Wow Shop, Eclectica Magazine, Atticus Review, Yuan Yang Journal, The Talon Magazine, Dark Lady Poetry, Asinine Poetry, Vox Poetica, Breadcrumb Scabs, Haggard and Halloo, New Black Magazine, Pattaya Poetry Review, dcomP MagazinE, Tipton Poetry Journal, Obsession, Black Heart Magazine and elsewhere. Jekwu lives, works and writes in Lagos.

About the author:

Anne Butler is a Virginia-born, Los Angeles-based poet and actor/singer. Several of her poems will appear this summer in Illuminations, Spillway Magazine, and Constellations. Currently, she is working up a set of vocal jazz standards for cafe gigs and also playing the ghost of Emily Dickinson in the bizarre and wonderful play, The Psychic Life of Savages. When not performing or agonizing in front of a computer screen, Anne enjoys tea lattes, pop psychology, and the more than occasional X-Files re-run.

About the author:

Jesse Cheng remains on hiatus from pretending to practice law. His website is jesse-cheng.com.

With each step, red felt rolls out
behind you; everything becomes
a kneel bar.

I’m playing hang man with your name
on this napkin.

Child, where’d you get those boots.

Chloe rolls her eyes.

Telan says They were my sister’s.

He nods. Grab a shot?

Okay. Telan puts her feet up on the table. Papa crouches, fires away. You got a buckle broke.

The sun’s in Telan’s eyes. I know, she says. They’re beat.

He shakes his head. Just need a little work. I know your sister.

Everything stops. Telan’s hands are someone else’s. They slip her shades on, bring her beer.

He’s still shooting. Saw you Parents Weekend. Hadda be her, looks just like you, right?

Chloe makes a noise. Telan’s beer is warm. She drinks anyway.

Papa straightens, lowers his camera, studies her. Hope you don’t mind my askin’, but the way you were sittin’, nobody talkin’— made me wonder.

Chloe says What?

His eyes are pale blue, watery, misaligned. Telan says carefully, She’s on your card?

Chloe’s staring at her. Papa looks pained. It ain’t big enough, I got to clean it off, nights. I got her on my hard drive, though. I do.

Some detached part of her makes a decision. Digs in her moneypocket, finds a crumpled ten.

Next time bring me an 8 x 10. Okay?

Telan, Chloe says. Telan waves her off.

He squints at the ten. Twenty I can do staples.

She doesn’t understand. Oh: Staples.

He nods. It’s farther, I gotta catch a bus. But Kinko’s sucks.

Halfway across the bridge, Chloe can’t stand it anymore. The fuck was that?

Telan shrugs. He’ll leave us alone now.

Chloe stops, grabs Telan’s arm. An Asian kid bumps into them. Sorry.

Chloe says Wait. So—

We won’t see him again. And twenty’s cheap.

Chloe stares at her. So no sister?

Just you, roomie, Telan says. Just you.

Chloe’s not buying it, pulls her to the rail. You were crying. And you cry in your sleep. She lets go Telan’s arm. You can tell me, you know?

For a moment Telan wants to. Really does. But if she does, she’s not Telan anymore, she’s the girl whose crazy sister killed herself, who’s crazy now too.

A line of bikes sail by. An auburn-haired girl’s keeping up on an old mountain-bike, a blue one, like Caitlin had. Chloe says Telan but she needs to see, steps down off the curb: Caitlin? And Caitlin looks up, and it is her, and she’s smiling. Lifting one finger to her lips: Shh…

A horn honks, brakes squeal, Chloe’s screaming, pulling at her. She’s lying on the sidewalk. Her shin hurts. Her knee. Chloe kneels beside her. Ring of kids staring. I’m good, she says. I’m good. Her head’s ringing.

I’m sorry, Chloe says. I get pushy. I’m sorry.

They’re resting on the Harmon Museum’s steps. Telan’s shin throbs. It’ll be an ugly bruise.

Not your fault. I thought—

(Caitlin smiling: Shh.)

What? Chloe says.

Telan shakes her head. Doesn’t matter.

Chloe sighs. Scooches over, puts her arm around Telan. No. It doesn’t. Just–pay fucking attention. Okay?

Nobody’s held her in forever. Telan wants to say something funny, wants to say Thank you, but can’t.

About the author:

Mark Reep is an artist and writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Art Collector, Endicott Journal, Metazen, cur.ren.cy, A-Minor, Right Hand Pointing, Blue Fifth Review, Prick of the Spindle, Moon Milk Review, Camel Saloon, Big City Lit, Fictionaut Selects, and Word Riot’s 10th Anniversary Anthology. He is the former editor of Ramshackle Review, and is represented by West End Gallery, Corning, New York; and Jardine Gallery, Perth, Scotland. Visit his website and blog.

His first book, A Million Versions of Right, was released in 2009 by LegumeMan and earned a Wonderland Book award nomination. It has garnered a strong following amongst the mustard set and has received praise for its width. In 2010, stories from A Million Versions of Right (as well as new work) appeared in the Bizarro Starter Kit (purple).

His second book, The Tumours Made Me Interesting, was released in 2011 by Legumeman Books.

Matthew resides in Melbourne, Australia, which makes him Australian. Outside of writing, he works as a graphic designer. He is also in charge of the Spontaneous Vox Pop Society, having just completed a successful season of trouser-related questions.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently finishing up my third book, ‘How To Avoid Sex’, which is a short story collection compiling some previously published work as well a new material. It should be out very soon via Copeland Valley Press.

When and why did you begin writing?

Writing started out as a means of venting frustration in the face of my lack of music ability. I was quite serious about my desire to pursue music, but I could never shake the fact I wasn’t very good at it. There was no innate ability and the best I could come up with was passable music. Occasionally the reality of my musical lack would lead to bouts of depression, but due to being programmed to ‘create’, I had to do something. So I would write little stories and circulate them among a small group of friends. Eventually I had to concede that writing was something in which I possessed ability, and now it’s hard to believe that I haven’t always been writing.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

This is a difficult question because the minute you consider yourself something, you risk falling victim to certain identity traps. In an empirical sense, I became a writer upon writing my first word, but in a grandiloquent sense, I may never consider myself a ‘writer’ because I don’t want to base my sense of identity upon something that I do.

What inspired you to write your first book?

The realisation that I had something to say that, as far as I could ascertain, wasn’t already being said. Most of the stories in my first book, ‘A Million Versions of Right’, were written before I had any desire to have anything published. Ultimately these stories were written because they were something I wanted to read. I’m still not sure that I ‘deserve’ to have anything published, but as long as I’m lucky enough to have people interested in reading my work, I shall continue.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

In terms of writing, my influences stem largely from classic absurdist fiction, typically of the Russian tradition. Authors like Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, Nikolay Zabolotsky and Konstantin Vaginov embody the classical style of Russian absurdism that I have found most interesting. Nikolai Gogol’s short story ‘The Nose’ changed my life, opening me up to a whole world of possibilities. It would be remiss of me not to mention authors such as Franz Kafka, Flann O’Brien, Jorge Luis Borges, Jane Auer Bowles among many, many others too numerous to list. Beyond this, I am also heavily influenced by the absurdist television and radio that has come out of the UK, exemplified by the likes of Chris Morris, Steve Coogan, Armando Iannucci, Peter Serafinowicz, Robert Popper, Peter Cook and many others. There is something very unique about the UK, which somehow allows them to truly understand the absurd – no other country comes close.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

I grew up very poor in a country town. It’s hard to know exactly how this has coloured my writing – perhaps it has allowed me to grasp a better understanding of the absurdity that exists in everything.

Do you have a specific writing style?

As has become apparent, absurdism informs much of my work. In a sense, my writing exists in an effort to ask what comes after postmodernism. Postmodernism was an understandable response to the modernist hangover that hit in the 50s and gained momentum in the 60s. I think it’s safe to say that postmodernism has served its purpose and can now retire. It’s time to ask, ‘what’s next?’ So if I have a style, it exists in the confrontation of this question via absurdist means.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

Well… yes and no. I populate my books with messages, but I have no interest in forcing others to grasp them. I hope that my work operates on a level wherein, if you chose, you can read into it, but if that’s not what moves you, you can enjoy the work anyway. I think the humour that encases my writing helps the reader swallow a little easier.

What book are you reading now?
At the moment, the bulk of my current reading is of a philosophical and/or psychoanalytic nature. I’m also re-reading a lot of Kafka. In a fiction sense, I just started reading Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s ‘Running Away’, which I’m finding very exciting.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

That my work is purely toilet humour. I am complicit in this misunderstanding in that I have been guilty of obfuscating what my work was saying behind a certain lowbrow sheen. I have no issue with people reading my work for the lowbrow elements, but I’m not necessarily the body function-obsessed person many believe me to be.

Any memories of particular works: the writing of, feedback, the thought behind…etc.

I have vivid, horrifying memories of the editing process of my story, ‘Meeting Max’ in ‘A Million Versions of Right’. I really punished my poor editor, Brooke Walters during that process, but (at the time) I believed I was also being punished and acted like an emo about the whole thing. The re-writes were significant, but the deadlines were tight, and it was a harrowing experience. Now I’m enormously happy that I had to endure this, because it taught me a lot about writing. A recent conversation with Brooke revealed that, although equally painful for her at the time, it was a valuable experience for her also. Now I look back upon that story with equal part pride and terror.

a poem on hibiscus.

Only vulgar words

rhyme with it as such.

A demure red hibiscus is

born as a pink bubble

on a green cup.

Like an exaggerated rose or

Indifferent prose.

If you look into the hundred yellow eyes

it blushes deep inside.

It is an eccentric botanist’s pride.

There is now way to work

with it in love or life.

It is just hibiscus-

no rhyme, no reason

No fuss.

About the author:

Deepa Kylasam Iyer is a Writer, Researcher, Playwright and a Published Poet. She has published in Kritya, Muse India, Cyclamens and Swords, Voicesnet Poetry, Yojana, Kurukshetra, The HINDU and the New Indian Express. Her play Metaphor was longlisted for the HINDU Metroplus Playwright Award 2012.Her poem ‘Tryst with Destiny’ was included in the Anthology of poems ‘Journeys’ that was released at the Birmingham Book Fair U.K in October 2010. Deepa has University degrees in English Literature, Sociology and French Language and Civilization from University of Madras, Alliance Française, India and Eurocentres, La Rochelle, France. She blogs at www.franciskuriakose.blogspot.com

It was September and the garage was on fire. Two trucks of firemen spilled onto Celia’s lawn. They trampled her marigolds, and smashed windows with dull axes. The flames spread across the roof of the garage. The firemen aimed a steady stream of water.

     The sound of the water brought back a memory, laundry day—the one-inch burn hole in the chest of Terry’s uniform. She put her pinky through where the khaki was singed, asked him how he got it. He didn’t remember, he said. His way of not talking about it. That night she overcooked the meatloaf, something insignificant, but they fought. Terry went out with his Army buddies, came home reeking of pot and gun powder. She pretended to sleep as he climbed into bed.

     He asked her to marry him, again, on Christmas Eve; she with eggnog in hand, him on bended knee. She told him she’d think about it, but the timing wasn’t right; it never was.

     Men on active duty don’t need to hear about drama at home. She’d overheard that comment from one of the military wives who’d gotten into a car accident. Those women were tough. They raised their kids together like a pack of lionesses, and mowed their own lawns. Celia hadn’t committed to the military lifestyle as they had. They saw plenty of girls like her come and go, between pregnancies and funerals. They had no patience for part-timers. Her eyes, glancing at the door during their pot-luck suppers, told them what they needed to know.

     The outer wall of the garage crumbled. She wished the flames would barbeque the past.

     He had taught her how to grow things; his hands spoke, pressing seeds into dirt. Each greenhouse tray was a clock—tender shoots marked time by poking above the soil. Terry told her life was persistent, he just never used the words.

     The firemen fed more water. Flames shot across the drapery, infected the couch and chairs. The spines of books became torches in a bookcase coffin. Photo albums smoked with darkroom chemicals, undoing the alchemy of an image of her holding tomatoes in the garden, smiling at Terry behind the camera.

     When she got the call, all she could think of was eggnog and refusal. She wanted to go where people wouldn’t expect her to mourn him. It was surprising, how flammable fertilizer was, how it ignited the feeling that she could run away from his loss.

About the author:

Carol Deminski’s stories appear or are forthcoming in PANK, Dogzplot, Metazen, Foundling Review, The Northville Review and elsewhere. She’s on the web at http://cdeminski.wordpress.com. She lives and writes in Jersey City, NJ although not always in that order.

Ermine, Honey,

tufts of ermine.

Every one over the falls,

onto the banks. I can afford

Ace bandages. I demand

these weasels mummify me.

Your shawl and gloves

clinging to my thigh.

Don’t tell the guys

I’m trying on your coat.

Let my legacy be a queen

sheet set of chest hair,

these hands.

About the author:

Francesco Grisanzio is currently working on his MFA in poetry at The New School. He earned his BA in English from UMass Amherst. His work has appeared in Fawlt, Why I Am Not a Painter, Strange Machine, and Interrobang!? Magazine.

On seeing a parasol skimming the obsidian against a bank of water, in
September of 2004, I wrote,

of umbrellas & pianos, boats & birds—eyes that hear, unwound are ears.
Ergo,

the umbrella is a swan, was a, or.

I understand what I saw—was’d—sawed a sailboat from a piano aslant, or
this “boat from afar is.” Ergo,

this image of piano was a “isthmus my lips is” in the spiral of explaining
my memory to you: wind scoring woodgrain on an otherwise still pond
wings the emergence of tree rings from the aqua, a drowsy

orchestra of coordinates. But you looking behind you is suddenly a was a,
not a swan—but a buoy of was,

a way to, there

About the author:

Jake Syersak is an MFA candidate in poetry at Florida Atlantic University. His work has most recently appeared in Kill Author, elimae, and Birdfeast.

            happy to see me?)
Death
by making up words like “quotidium.”

Hurry! it’s a foot race

to make up as many words as you can
as fast as you can
to describe what we think we see
in all our closest associates.

The hard part about being a human is
you have to move around and say things.

About the author:

Phillip R. Polefrone’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from: The Smoking Poet; A Clean, Well-Lighted Place; Counterexample Poetics; Quantum Poetry Magazine; Yes, Poetry; and The Broome Street Review. His essays have been featured in Mercer Street. He lives in Brooklyn, by the river.

Sarah and I are far from love, but we’re sneaking up on sex, which is fine by me. As we pause before the door of room 316, Sarah is fishing through her handbag for the key card. She glances over. “Let me see that shirt,” she says.
     I turn, tent out the front of my t-shirt in the light. It’s a donor gift from an independent radio station: black, dominated by the ghostly graphic of a Man-O-War jellyfish dangling a long knot of tentacles below the assassin’s hood of its body. It drifts through the darkness, and the edges of the image are blurred, melting into the infinite murk of a deep and predatory sea.
     Sarah presses her index finger into my chest. “I like this.” She lingers there, and the dot of pressure on my chest slowly traces the jellyfish, then stops. Sarah taps my chest once more. She zeroes in with dark eyes.
     Kiss her. Do it.
     “How old are you, anyway?” she asks.
     My stomach drops.
     “Thirty-seven,” I tell her.
     She gasps. I’m eleven years older than she is. I know this.
     “You sure don’t act like it, mister.”
     She’s farther away now. She’s thinking.
     “True, but that trend started a long time ago.”
     “When?”
     “When what?”
     I nudge her shoulder with my own. She looks up. I wink. She smiles.
     That was close.

Lightning cracks the slate of dawn, then the thunder finally explodes in a grand godly break. It’s a good one, loud enough to startle, and the hotel shakes. Raindrops the size of fava beans wallop the third floor window. I place my hand on the silky span of panties stretching across the rolling horizon of Sarah’s warm butt. I don’t know exactly what to do with it just yet.
     Lightning flashes again and we’re ions in a spark. More thunder rolls through. I’m an ass man and this is the negative zone.
     She’s on her side, has pushed her bottom against me, and begins a slow squirming that sways under the covers like an intruder is rooting around for my wallet beneath the sheets. She may or may not be falling asleep, and protean and base impulses swell within the racetrack of my blood.
     But in the other bed lies Sarah’s friend, Kim, who shares the hotel room but not our sentiments. Kim is in the National Guard, and her shoulders hold the swollen determination that comes from lugging about overstuffed backpacks and heavy metallic things, which is not to say she’s entirely manly. She has a northern-tier or Queen of the Corn Festival prettiness going on, but it’s combined with the lumbering racket of a coal truck that has lost its brakes on a downhill curve.
     For example, Kim rolls about heavily in the other bed, and a point has been made — a point has been made — to regularly remind us she is still awake with a flopping turn, a huffy pillow adjustment, a sudden trip to the bathroom, a subtextual clearing of the throat, and I determine that in all likelihood she intends to remain awake at least as long as Sarah and I. This disrupts what I had assumed to be our coital machinations, but short of requesting a three-way with the coal truck, our options are limited.
     So we wait. And waiting does what it does best — makes us sleepy.
     Sarah eventually slows her incognito hips beneath the covers, and then she stops wriggling altogether. I divert my creeping hand from her bottom to the small of her back. The skin there is cool and smooth and my elbow is on my side and I trace gentle circles with my fingertips. Soft humming noises sing from her throat. She sighs. With one last heave, she slithers her small body into the curve of my big one and I breathe from the perfumed nimbus that hovers at the back of Sarah’s neck. I’m hungry for her air.
     My fingers move to her hip, slow their creeping tendencies. It stops. It starts. We slip away and forget one another. We awaken and remember. This goes on. As I push my boundaries against the edge of her panties, I feel oddly foolish, and I’m acutely aware that all hopeful boys are fools when they are plotting in the dark. Sarah rolls over on her stomach and I’m on my back, resting my hand on her rear like it’s a game show buzzer and my lucky break lies on the other side of this brief commercial interruption.
     It does not, and Sarah and I fall asleep for the night only to wake in fits each time the thunder shakes the bed and shocks us into the electric blue, shade-drawn now.

Room service for two (not me) wakes us up at 8:55 in the morning and there is something of a scramble. I experience the dissociative hiccup that occurs when you wake up and have no idea where you are or how you got there as Kim from bed two curses, livid with her breakfast’s insolence. She swings out of bed, stomps to the door, and accepts the delivery of two plates with polished steel covers, a plastic pot of coffee, two mugs, and two glasses of orange juice covered with plastic film. The breakfast cart is cast aside while the three of us rustle ourselves awake like our dreams have covered us in dust and chicken feathers.
     We make small talk and take turns in the bathroom. The ladies go first.
     Once I’m out of the bathroom, I collect my things from the nightstand: one empty billfold, four crumpled dollars, one lighter, one cellular phone, a ring of keys, a pair of sandals, and a half-eaten bag of sunflower seeds that keeps my nicotine cravings at-bay. Sarah and Kim are back in bed, slumping against their wall-mounted headboards with the blankets pulled over their laps while they watch me gather my detritus. Then, caught in the alleyway between the beds while I make an exit, I cite my office hours in the forecast and insist they should eat before their breakfasts get cold. Sarah says I can fix a plate. I say feeding gatecrashers is a bad idea, then bring up the idea of exchanging phone numbers, but never quite get the chance to ask Sarah directly.
     Kim’s uncharacteristically silent, and I assume she’s still sizing me up, figuring out what kind of sleazeball I am exactly. Or maybe that’s just how it feels after sharing a hotel room with women who seem much more like strangers in the morning than they did over shots of bourbon the evening before. Instead of exchanging numbers, Sarah and I agree on our mutual friends, in a misdirected faith that someday we’ll bump into one another along the busy midway of life’s carnival.
     It’s quiet now.
     I’m still standing and they’re still slumping with their sheets across their laps and no one is wearing a bra. It’s not just an ending, but a hopelessly awkward one; the tackiness of my exit is inescapable.
     “Well,” I finally say, “enjoy your breakfasts.”
     They say goodbye.
     I say it was a pleasure.
     I leave.
     The hallway smells like burnt coffee and freshly installed carpeting, the elevator like wet dogs, the lobby like Pine Sol.
     I exit the hotel and step back into the slow, misting rain that framed the previous evening. The familiar potpourri of cigarette smoke and stale beer marks a night spent in a dive bar on my clothing.
     As I cut through an alley towards campus, my toes grow wet with pavement water and my mind skips through fuzzy flash-card images of Sarah from the evening before. How did a connection that flowed so naturally between us in the night end so gauche in the morning? Laughing, I blurt regrets to myself like a casual madman as I limp my way to work. Crossing the street, I zigzag between the idling moguls of traffic-tied cars.
     Everything seems loud.
     I am talking to myself and people are noticing.
     I can’t believe I didn’t get her number.

Twenty minutes later I’m in my office, doing the hours, trying not to think about the fugue effects of 180 minutes of sleep in a twenty-four hour time period on the human brain while I stare at my monitor, mystified by the BBC website’s front page. I swear I can see the matrix. Everything is webbed in cotton, and when I speak to my office-mate, Casey, my voice creaks from a vestigial hollow deep within my skull. The only worthwhile thing I accomplish over the next hour-and-a-half happens within the first two minutes when I turn on some music.
     When “Ooh-La-La” comes on, I turn it up at the risk of offending both the hallway neighbors and my prophylactic tendencies towards sentimentality. I do indeed wish I knew what I know now when I was younger, but while stewing over a failed coupling with a hangover, I feel the sentiment more acutely than usual.

“The can can’s such a pretty show
They’ll steal your heart away.
But backstage, back on earth again
The dressing rooms are gray.”

     Damn you, Ronnie Wood.
     I lean back in my chair and put my feet on the desk. I feel how mashed potatoes look. I sing softly and pick up a book of short stories. After reading a story featuring regrets, power drill brain surgery and vacuum cleaners, I set the book face-down on my desk.
     I text Alice.
     “How’s the hangover? So, I pretty much botched it with your hot/cool friend — hotel room logistics. If you talk to her, talk me up. Tell her my exit made the same noise in my head as an orchestra falling down a stairwell and I apologize. Feel that out for me, homey.”
     Hours pass. Each one of them smells like the back of Sarah’s neck: fresh, vaguely floral and lightly spiced. Her scent stirs my wits the way a sniff of chai tea excites something in the back of my throat.
     More hours pass.
     “What do you mean? I’m confused,” Alice eventually returns. Alice does most things eventually, and confusion is her natural habitat.
     By this time I have abandoned the office for home, where I am attempting to take a nap while my neighbor mows his semi-wet grass during a break in the weather. Muted sunlight glows over my hometown valley, diffused by a thick blanket of clouds. My neighbor’s lawnmower coughs, growls and farts smoke.
     I tell Alice about sharing the bed with Sarah, about the light petting, about Kim, about not knowing how to go about getting Sarah’s phone number in the morning.
     There’s a short wait and my phone chirps.
     “Ha ha ha. Sarah is an interesting…” and Alice’s message stops.
     I wait. Alice texts again.
     “She is married, you know.”
     My neighbor walks his mower past my window and runs over a stick. With a bang, the stick clangs off of the blade and knocks around the steel skirt for a few seconds. I smell burning oil. I read the message again, then stare at the empty glow of my phone’s reply screen for a harsh minute. The screen goes black. I turn it on again. When in doubt, make a joke.
     “Haha. Baba Yaga! Well, that didn’t come up.”
     “Ha. Well, she is.”
     “So you’re saying there’s a chance…”
     “She hates her husband. They sleep in separate beds and she says she’s saving up for a lawyer.”
     She says she’s saving up. It’s for a lawyer.

The rain clears in the afternoon, but fast moving cirrus clouds range high in the firmament, pledging their bad intentions while they flee Hurricane Irene as it presses up a distant coast five states away. I take advantage of the troubled tangerine sunset and smoke a joint while I walk to the grocery store. Halfway there, I see a young couple walking the sidewalk towards me. The boyfriend is an Asian Buddy Holly with black hair he’s pulled into spikes. His girlfriend marches with small steps at his side in a fluffed skirt, looking at her frilly white socks and shiny black shoes as if she’s pacing something off.
     As we near one another, I palm the joint and see the girl is fixated on her phone. They are holding hands tightly, arms straightened and elbows levered against one another. When we pass, the boyfriend pulls his girlfriend close, as if she were filled with hydrogen and in danger of floating away at the slightest nudge, then bobbing her way across an eternity of sky that stretches longer than even the idea of string.
     They are young and they are Buddy Holly and they are Patsy Cline and the electric sky is splashed with clouds that the sunset has set on fire. Everything looks beautiful and I can’t tell if any of this makes me sad or if it makes me happy.
     I feel lousy. I still feel asleep.
     The clouds are on fire.
     There was a young Buddy Holly.
     There was a floating Patsy Cline.
     Gravity reigns, but for the idea of string.

I never talk to Sarah again, but I think about her for weeks, usually with a squirmy combination of chagrin and gaiety. Then, a week before Thanksgiving — just as memories of that night and the resulting morning are beginning to fade — I find out that Sarah hasn’t quite forgotten about me either, or at least about what I was wearing.
     “Hey, check this out,” Alice says. She extends her phone across the bar, and on its screen is a picture of a white glowing blob. I grab the phone and look closer. It’s a boy in a jellyfish costume, with a translucent umbrella for the hood and strings of lights hanging from the canopy for the tentacles. It’s glowing in the night and the child has virtually disappeared, save for the eerie reflection of blue light on his pale cheeks.
     “Whoa, nice Halloween costume. Who is it?”
     “Sarah made it for her son. She says she got the idea from your shirt. It’s so fucking cool. Isn’t she awesome?”
     “Yep.”
     Yes, I’m sure to bump into Sarah again, one day, sometime, along the midway, and this will make for a good time. We’ll hug, have a laugh. I’ll do something ineffectual like punch her playfully on the shoulder and call her “kiddo.” I’ll ask her how her son is doing. I’ll make an inappropriate joke about her husband. Maybe we’ll even raise a glass in Kim’s honor.
     I’ll tell Sarah I wrote a story about her; we’ll have a real nice chat about it.
     And then you know what we’ll do?
     Close the fucking deal.

About the author:

Matthew D. Perez is a writer living beyond his means in central Pennsylvania. His other decent writing has appeared in Barrelhouse, a magazine that was nice enough to hire him on as an Assistant Editor. (He swears this happened after publication.) Matt teaches whatever sort of English they tell him to teach at Penn State, where he earned his M.F.A. in 2004. He is trying to get his shit together, assuming that such a state-of-affairs is possible.

About the author:

Carleen Tibbetts received her M.A. from CSU Northridge and lives in Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in BluePrint Review, Redheaded Stepchild Magazine, Zocalo Public Square, Ancora Imparo, and other journals.

This week, in Paris Review archives: This 1992 interview with Grace Paley.

INTERVIEWER

What is the relationship between writing and money?

PALEY

It’s helpful to have money. I don’t think writers have to suffer to starve to death. One of the first things I tell my classes is, If you want to write, keep a low overhead. If you want to live expansively, you’re going to be in trouble because then you have to start thinking very hard about whom you’re writing to, who your audience is, who the editor thinks your audience is, who he wants your audience to be.

In other good interview archives, here’s Rick Moody in a 1994 interview in BOMB Magazine with Jill Eisenstadt:

JE You won the Pushcart Prize for Garden State, is that why you quit?

RM I didn’t quit. I got fired. I have a very bad commercial sensibility. I think the fact that I won the prize made it possible for FSG to feel that they could fire me without devastating me. And I wasn’t devastated.

JE Hey, what did you do the day you found out your first novel was accepted for publication?

JE Oh, man, I was so happy. My first offer…I got a call at work, it was during the summer, during graduate school, working in a P.R. office on their frozen foods and plywood paneling accounts. Horrible midtown office building right across from Cats. An editor at Simon and Schuster called me there to make the offer, and luckily I knew enough not to say “Yes, Yes, Yes” without getting an agent. I told my boss I had a family emergency and ran out of there and down the street so happy. Of course, I was wearing stupid work clothes and running to the pay phone my shoe flew off and hit a man. He just laughed and gave it back. It was a very friendly New York kind of moment.

Roxane Gay over at the Rumpus: “My amusement with Fifty Shades of Grey only goes so far. The books are, essentially, a detailed primer for how to successfully engage in a controlling, abusive relationship. The trilogy represents the darkest kind of fairy tale, one where controlling, obsessive, and borderline abusive tendencies are made to seem intensely desirable by offering the reader big heaping spoonfuls of sweet, sweet sex sugar to make the medicine go down.”

Honestly, just go poke around everything new-ish lately at the Rumpus. They’ve had a ton of great stuff up lately.

Bradley Warshauer has a new project called Storyfront, a collection of micro-reviews and links to short fiction available online.

If you’re in need of a little editorial help, fiction or non-, Shadra Beesley is taking questions over at her blog, The Apostrophist.

And when you need a moment of intoxicated literary celebration or despair, perhaps try one (or more) of these writers’ favorite cocktails.

Did you know the first moveable type was invented in Asia, not Europe? Check out some interesting Japanese moveable type metal sets here.

Need some bookshelf inspiration? I’d totally take the whale shelf.

Finally, here’s Cheryl Strayed‘s great TEDx talk at Concordia University Portland:

Have you all heard of the lit mag Five Dials? I don’t remember how I first ran across it, but it’s good stuff. Entirely free to read, it’s a PDF-based publication that the editors say, “is best downloaded, printed out and enjoyed (we hope) away from the computer.” Not that it should stop you from reading on an e-device, but it’s still nice to see a magazine giving a nod to the printed page while keeping their overhead low. Their 23rd issue just came out earlier this week.

Here’s a great interview with writer Roxane Gay over at Paper Darts. I love what she has to say about genre books and teaching, and then there’s this gem:

Hypothetical teaching scenario: You have a student in a workshop who wants to be a writer. It’s all they want to do in life. They dream of topping the bestseller list. And…their writing sucks. Completely. Now they’re in your office asking for advice. You say to them…?

50 Shades of Grey is a bestseller. So are Dan Brown’s books. Bad writing has never been a deterrent to commercial success. I’d offer the student an honest, constructive critique of their writing. I’d tell them about the realities of publishing and I would wish them luck. I never want to be the person who tells a student they can’t have their dreams. Pragmatism is important, but so is hope. Without hope, students cannot thrive. My job is to encourage ambition.

Hear, hear.

Speaking of what constitutes “bad writing,” Constance Hale defends the appropriate usage of the passive voice over at The New York Times with “The Pleasures and Perils of the Passive.” Knowing the rules well means you get to break them well, after all.

What about another Paris Review interview? Of course you want one. I love David Mitchell‘s work wholeheartedly, so that’s who you’re getting this week. “Arguably, the act of memory is an act of fiction—and much in the act of fiction draws on acts of memory,” he says. Read the rest here.

Allow me to be indulgent and promote something in my own neck of the woods: There’s a writing group in Great Falls, Montana, called Writing Our Way. In April, they decided to be punny and created a “Poet-Tree” to celebrate National Poetry Month. The tree has since traveled around the city, inviting people to add their own work, with the potential for the work to be compiled into a book.

Besides public art projects, I’m also fascinated with creative couples and their working dynamic. Neil Gaiman and musician Amanda Palmer were married a little over a year ago, and though they occasionally collaborate, they mostly do their own thing. Here’s Gaiman talking about his reading habits for the Times.

What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

I don’t know if any single book made me want to write. C. S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading — these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader. I would think: “When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen?”

Yes, how does one denote italics on a typewriter? I’ve never thought to ask.

Palmer, meanwhile, is busy wielding the magic of the internet and has raised (as of this minute) $491,168 on Kickstarter to fund her new album/art book/tour extravaganza with her new band The Grand Theft Orchestra. One other thing? The project has only been on Kickstarter for three days. Wow.

I’m behind in my online reading travels, so I’m afraid that’s all I have for you this week. Let’s end this by pouring one out for Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch:

RIP, man.

“If you are like me, you must always have something to read in the bathroom. Anything will do,” Charles Simic writes in this New York Review of Books essay, “The Bathroom Muse.” Are you like him?

Here’s some reading material, then: Elissa Bassist has a great Modern Love essay called “The Never-to-Be Bride.”

Love and Fatigue in America is the latest offering from Roger King, an autobiographical novel dealing myalgic encephalopathy (ME), also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. “It’s one of those invisible illnesses, like MS, that can engender impatience and disbelief rather than compassion or nurturing behavior from others,” this article says. As someone who has the condition, I do appreciate literary attempts to make sense of it. The book was also briefly noted in the New Yorker.

If you need another long, satisfying read, might I suggest this Paris Review interview with Pablo Neruda? It’s full of great gems, but here’s one thing I can wholeheartedly agree with: “It’s hard to drink bad wine in Chile because almost all the wine in Chile is good.”

Ah, but what about your own writing? I haven’t poked around here much, but I’ve stumbled across Archetype: The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Psychology. It could be useful for research purposes.

In a similar vein, at the Independent, Laurie Penny interviews men on what “masculinity” means to them. “There were answers that made my heart flutter – ‘To me, being a man is about outrageously loving my wife’ – and others that made me giggle alone in my bedroom,” she says,  ”like when one young man confessed that he never feels more masculine than when he’s asked to remove a difficult lid.”

After all the research and then writing the damn thing, what goes into putting a book out into the world? John B. Thompson decided to find out, with everything from acceptance/rejection reasoning, to advances, and anything else that makes the major publishing world “alien and mysterious.” At the Penguin blog, he talks about his findings, and his book, Merchants of Culture.

And once a book exists, some of us really like having fancy editions. Flavorwire rounds up 10 Beautiful Literary Box Sets. Even though I have most of the original paperbacks, I wish I had that hardcover Calvin & Hobbes collection.

Leesa Cross-Smith, whose “Russian Women Stuff” appeared here this past January, has two new pieces of flash fiction published: “Three Ways to Say No” over at DOGZPLOT and “A Modest Guide to Truculence/Survival: Girls” at Treehouse.

Stefanie Freele, whose flash fiction appeared twice here, has a collection of stories out now: Surrounded by Water is available from Press 53.

The Academy of American Poets  is once again celebrating National Poetry Month with “30 Days, 30 Poets.”

In “You’ve Heard A Lot About This Already” News: Pulitzer Prize jurors Susan Larson and Maureen Corrigan  react to the absence of a fiction award this year.

Still, voracious readers will always find ways to promote books to the general public. Say, how about giving away 500,000 books on April 23rd? World Book Night is this coming Monday, and “givers” all across the country will participate.  Me, I’ll be armed with Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a book I recommend wholeheartedly to just about anyone.

And shouldn’t we be looking for reasons to celebrate books, rather than dismiss them? Apparently not, if you’re Jonathan Franzen. “There’s so much to read and so little time. I’m always looking for a reason to put a book down and not pick it up again, and one of the best reasons a writer can give me is to use the word then as a conjunction without a subject following it,” he says in a recent essay.

Call me overly optimistic, but I’d rather give a book a fair shake, rather than search for reasons to hate it. Does he now only make public comments when he wants to dismiss any literary practice that differs from his own?

In less publicly cranky news, Chloe Caldwell talks about the wonderful, somewhat serendipitous relationships writers can have with one another at Northwest Book Lovers: “On Mothers, Mentors and Housesitting for Cheryl Strayed.”

Writing isn’t all about comma-related stress, Franzen — Sometimes, it’s about relearning how to tell a story when our brains no longer work like they used to. Floyd Skloot, a former novelist and poet, now writes memoir. For the past 20 years, virus-related neurological difficulties have changed how he approaches writing. Read more about his latest, The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life, over at Psychology Today.

If you think art and design have nothing to do with literature, try telling that to the readers of McSweeney’s. Books can be their own works of art, of course, and Flavorpill has rounded up “10 Crazy and Unusual Book Designs” that might inspire you to create something unusual on your own.

In the same vein, author Menena Cottin and illustrator Rosana Faria bring us The Black Book of Colors. Brain Pickings reviews the book and offers several photos: “The book is designed as an empathy tool that allows a sighted person to step inside the world of the blind, who experience the world through their fingers rather than their eyes.” Interesting, lovely stuff.

I don’t know about you, but I love collecting notebooks. Anything with an interesting cover, decent paper, or the ability to withstand being tossed around inside my bag — I love them all. Naturally, I enjoyed this collection of vintage memo books given to farmers by seed, tractor, and other agricultural companies.

Finally, if you haven’t poked around the Google Art Project, get to it. Not only is there a ton to look at, but it could prove useful for all sorts of writing-related research. I’ve already used it to talk about one of the Vincent Van Gogh paintings featured in an episode of Doctor Who.

Until next week…

REVIEWS
Body of a Dancer by Renée E. D’Aoust
Damascus by Joshua Mohr
Compartments: Poems on Nature, Femininity and Other Realms by Carol Smallwood
Small Press Shout-Outs, Tiny Hardcore Edition: So You Know It’s Me + Steal Me For Your Stories

FLASH FICTION
Groceries by Amy Abig
Solo by Sacha Siskonen
Voltage by Meg Tuite

NOVEL EXCERPTS
Flatscreen by Adam Wilson

SHORT STORIES
Well Baby by Kristin Matly Dennis

POETRY
Crow by Michael Bazzett
Four Poems by Alyse Bensel
DREAM AND DUST OFFERING by Dusan Colovic
Affinity: An Actual English Sonnet by Jeanine Deibel
Your Orthodoxy by Brett Fogarty
The Naming of Main Courses by Shannon Hozinec
Syllogism by Nicholas Komodore
february 14th by M.G. Martin
Dead Man by Richard Prins
How Bout Them Apples by Nikki Wallschlaeger

If a Friday brings a sprig of Whitman lilac to you,
keep it. But remembering his political about-face song
of myself tickles bellies in a David Duke flash-mob

as you wait on the would-be rocker exchanging what’s
left of you with tin Christmas trees on the boulevard.
Puddles of tangerines, of nervous sleep, of 12 finches
the amnesiac & the bear. Each the chase, miscalculated
wooden nickels, the worldly, porcupine quills of the century

Shuttering, fluttering guides of unwashed glowing skin
my one spare hair leaving via breath. I wanted you
to reclaim leaves, earwigs, truffles, winged mary janes,

to admit you own at least one toddler tiara of impatience
to really sundry our clichés in the rows of flowers built for war
in order to snatch the streetcar blowing along on a cable.
This is a laughing stick of dynamite again. A candycane

putting the moves on for every red tugboat in the harbor
not skipping over the freshwater seals. Oh yes.
This is meat without a killing. A city built for silverfish
The woman sailor going in and out of her mouth.

About the author:

Nikki Wallschlaeger lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is the author of one chapbook, Head Theatre (2007) which etched itself out of her palms unexpectedly. Her hands continue to talk, which is why she writes. Publications include Nervehouse, Esque, The Smoking Poet, and Pirene’s Poetry Fountain. (forthcoming). When she’s not writing, she plays the djembe drum in a radical community marching band, The Milwaukee Molotov Marchers, with her partner and son as a form of symbiotic exercise.

Review by Peter Grandbois

When memoir works, it gives the reader a razor thin slice of life, serves it up on a prepared slide and examines it through the microscope of the memoirist’s eye. Renée E. D’Aoust’s memoir, Body of a Dancer, not only works but gives the reader an unfalteringly honest and brutally clear-sighted vision of the nature of an artist’s passion. From the opening pages, D’Aoust establishes that the dancer is not after beauty: “The body of a dancer is tired before it is worn out…The body of a dancer has an ache in her abdomen…The body of a dancer has shin splints up the front leg…” (5-6). In short, the dancer courts pain.

When D’Aoust talks about entering “Martha’s House of Pelvic Truth” she is talking about the literal truth any athlete or artist understands that to achieve greatness, to achieve beauty, the body must suffer. In chronicling that suffering, the book ranges from personal accounts on the author’s own life in dance to essays such as “Ballerina Blunders & a Few Male Danseurs” that provide insight into the history of modern dance.

Three of the essays were cited as “notable” by Best American Essays, including one of my favorites: “Graham Crackers.” Here, we are introduced to one of the choreographers in Martha Graham’s studio, a woman named Pearl: “Pearl speaks kindly because, usually the girl has no talent. Pearl does not speak kindly to those with talent” (14). Pearl’s strategy provides an apt metaphor for the dancer’s experience. The more talent you have, the more passion to create art, the more suffering you will endure. The chapter begins with an image of a bloodstain on the floor: “Advanced dancers doing sparkles on the diagonal across the floor jump before the blood and land afterward” (13). The image says volumes. The spilling of blood in the service of art is a fact. Unadorned and un-explicated. Serious dancers deal with it. They do what is asked of them: “Don’t think because you haven’t been taught to think. Do it. Whatever they want. Again and again. All art is the act of showing up….Movement to a dancer is like breathing to mortal souls. You must bleed. Bleed now!” (20)

The memoir is refreshingly void of self-reflection, never descending to bathos as so many lesser memoirs do. Instead, it simply presents image after image of discipline, the kind of discipline that erases self-pity because there is no room for it. “There is no tomorrow in the world of dance because goals are too far out of reach, so use up everything” (20).

The end result is a true portrait of the artist, the dancer as one who “shows up,” one who denies his or her body, his or her desires, in the service of an art that most of society will fail to appreciate. These artists do it because they have to, because they must. D’Aoust’s point is that we are the worse for it if we romanticize the sacrifice of the artist/athlete. Too often as a society we focus on the rewards: the gold medal in the Olympics or the rave review after the performance. Renée E. D’Aoust reminds us that for the true artist/athlete it was never about those surface rewards, but all about the discipline, the sacrifice.

About the reviewer:

Peter Grandbois is the author of The Gravedigger, The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, and Nahoonkara. His essays and short fiction have been shortlisted for both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. He teaches at Denison University in Ohio and can be reached at www.brothersgrandbois.com.

We smile across scented melons, grapes that dangle, berries blushing, smooth nectarines.

I ask why you’re buying so much soda; I’m caffeine free. You say it’s something she needs for migraines. She throws up, you justify. That’s too bad, I offer false sympathy. She calls wondering what’s taking so long, adds more to the list. He sends a text wondering where the cupcake went, the one with green icing leftover from last night’s party. I write back, I don’t know.

He’s afraid it’s gone to my ass. You can’t keep your hands off my ass.

At the checkout, I go first. The cashier takes in our separate carts and separate checks, and wonders what our story is. I lean against you and forget where we are.

Amy Abig

The love of my first life wheeled her art crush down St. Mark’s Place in a shopping cart. They almost ran over Jim Jarmusch. Silver hairs were tincturing the sky, feathers after a pillowfight. I pawned them all to recuperate expenses.

What I need now is a slender canoe, brown lightning on my cheeks and a knifelooking moon that arrives on time to see its own gallows. All this to look good on my wanted poster. His characters are hunting me. They have wasp nests in their sleeves. My asshole of a pawnbroker sold them whiteman’s metal; here they gallop snappy as a croc’s green jaw.

My spear talks to me: We’ll turn you into the tallest totem if you come into our skull tree house.

Their horses wear hoods of night. I have the trees call them limpdicked. Only to find my last kidney flung across skies of hell, scrubbing its wings, buttery as wine that’s too thick. My other kidney’s already in hock. I’m all out of hooch and the hooch is all out of me.

Richard Prins

Richard Prins is a lifelong New Yorker who also spends time in Dar es Salaam. He’s underway with his MFA degree in poetry at New York University, where he’s a 2011-2012 Goldwater Fellow and Adjunct Instructor in Creative Writing. His interests include platypusses and the blues; his work appears in such publications as The Los Angeles Review, elimae, kill author, decomP Magazine and Night Train.

i am a subway car
without a tunnel or track
but i have a destination
that can’t be met
because you can’t
stop moving in
wonderful squiggly
lines. also, the conductor
is blind.

i did not shave off
my facial hair
because it looked stupid
but because you said
it looked stupid
with your eyes
& i want to be better.

when you sleep
i am a refrigerator
without a door.
when you awake
i am the words
sitting beside
an empty book
with so many pages.

look, this is not
a televised event
this is my body
where i will be
when we become
extinct.

how strange
to be a subway car
without a tunnel or track
or facial hair
when i just want
a wife.

M.G. Martin

M.G. Martin is the author of One For None (Ink) & the chapbook Fall Out Of Your Skin (Pangur Ban Party). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in ZYZZYVA, Explosion Proof, PANK, Requited & >kill author, among others. M.G. lives in Brooklyn where he cooks Hawaiian food as often as possible. Find him online: here & here.

You say my eyes remind you of Jean-Pierre
Leaud, the early years, in Nineteen Sixty
La Nouvelle Vague films, with a forcible stare.
I say that’s unfamiliar French to me,
and you begin to speak with your hands. We watch
footage in black and white of a taut-jawed
young man, a master of subtlety, who capt-
ures us in every frame, whether with a bawd,
or maid, or a man, it’s all the same, because
his eyes are an invitation without an exit.
Is it the mood, then – the square shape of his face –
what resemblance? I ask of your disappointment.
A simple way of being – Intensity,
you say, a brow without apology.

Jeanine Deibel

Jeanine Deibel is an MFA Candidate at NMSU where she teaches Creative Writing and works as Managing Editor for Puerto del Sol. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Parabola, Matter Press: The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and Short, Fast, and Deadly among others. For more information, visit: jeaninedeibel.weebly.com

as they do across the sea.
Try to think of another

word for caw.

When I took my
crow to Estonia

he was immediately conversant
and took up

with a polished set
leaving me

alone at the hotel
with the inexpensive

whores, circling.
It stuck in my craw.

No matter how long we
sat upon a branch

when the dark cloak
spread and we

leapt into flight—
it felt abrupt.

Nothing to really
crow about—

stitching the ragged
wood together

with flown thread and cawing
that one word

that means everything.

About the author:

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in West Branch, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Green Mountains Review, DIAGRAM, and Guernica, among others, and his work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. New poems are forthcoming in Carolina Quarterly, Pleiades, Smartish Pace and The Literary Review. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.

Steal Me For Your Stories

Review by Sara Habein

Despite having 20+ books in my physical to-read pile, when I have a little extra cash, it’s hard to avoid blowing more money on books. It’s not an uncommon problem, of course, and obsessive readers will find all sorts of ways to justify their love. How did I justify buying two books from Tiny Hardcore? Easy. They’re tiny. “I will read them in no time!” I thought. “It’s hardly adding to my pile, really. It’s, like, concentrated reading that also supports a small press. How can I not?”

Trouble was, how to decide which books to pick? I will admit, I picked somewhat superficially, won over by a 2-for-$16 deal, and went with my favorite title and my favorite concept — Robb Todd’s Steal Me For Your Stories and Brian Oliu’s So You Know It’s Me.

Steal Me For Your Stories is full of passion, loneliness, and intoxicated philosophy. It is a series of fucked up small moments that may or may not be true — despite the frequent “Hand to God” insistence — but it doesn’t really matter. They feel true, and that’s good enough. Every person I’ve ever met or internet-known is a potential source for material, stories to be mined, details to be amalgamated into larger material. Todd’s short chapters, with titles like “Why Are You Telling Me This?” and “And Her Eyes Said Something I Did Not Understand,” are brief moments that could come from anyone’s life.

Boots clomp, purse swings up the stairs. The one who is gone used to wear boots like that, but better. I used to pinch her butt as she climbed to the platform and she would pretend to mind. It is harder to pretend not to mind. It flexes and sways, a nose away from my nose. It is all I can do not to plunge in and never come out, but I just suck it with my eyes. What is that, cotton?
— from “Flex Baby Flex Baby One Two”

It is 160 perfect little pages, and I’m so glad that the pages lived up to its excellent title.

So You Know It's Me

So You Know It’s Meby Brian Oliu is a title where I keep accidentally mixing up the pronouns when referring to it, as well as misspelling the author’s last name, unless I have the book right in front of me. From one frequently misspelled name to another, I imagine that Oliu is somewhat used to this, but dammit, I’m going to try valiantly to improve. Just throwing that out there, since if it’s said on the internet, it must be true.

And is that true? What if one day you were perusing your local Craigslist’s ‘Missed Connections’ and noticed the following entry:

Reading – Barnes & Noble M4W

If you know who I am, tell me what I was reading. The clothes, certainly, you will get correct, as I don’t bother with color — grey shirt, grey shorts, grey shoes — an ensemble that might remind you of your grandmother’s silver collection: the one that she would bring out for special occasions — Easter, of course, Thanksgiving, once every few years. I know what I was wearing. I know where I was standing: amongst the magazines, the eyes on the covers paying me no attention. [...]

In the acknowledgments, it says, “All pieces originally appeared on the Tuscaloosa Craigslist Missed Connection board from September until November 2010.” The 45 different lyric essays were posted and allowed to run the full 45 day course before they started erasing themselves. One has to wonder about the reaction they originally received, whether Oliu received strange emails, or emails legitimately convinced that they were the person to whom he wrote. And who knows, maybe sometimes he had a fragment of a person in mind — that girl he passed in the mall, or that friend from high school whose whereabouts he forgot, or the woman who would “always bring the tonic” and “would make jokes about how we would never die from malaria.”

I make that joke, every time I have a gin and tonic. And I have only managed to play the word in Scrabble once. Oliu’s missed connections could be any person out there, a person receiving attention from someone who over-thinks a little too often and sometimes wonders if he remembers too much. The tone of each essay is slightly obsessive and sad, yet beautiful in their moments of sincere flattery. I enjoyed the book a lot, and though I appreciate the structure, I thought by the end, Ah, just let us have one more…

About the author:

Sara Habein is the author of Infinite Disposable, whose work has also appeared in The Rumpus, Pajiba, Persephone Magazine, and Used Furniture Review, among others.

She is the editor of Electric City Creative, an online arts magazine based out of the Great Falls, MT area. Her book reviews, music commentary, and various other things appear at Glorified Love Letters.

About the author:

Kristin Matly Dennis has an MFA from Spalding University. She lives in Louisville, KY with her husband and daughter. “Well Baby” is her first published short story.

“Syllogism” is part of the series “Amphoteric Poems.”

Nicholas Komodore

Nicholas Komodore is a Greek poet, filmmaker and photographer.
He is the author of Moon Contours and the forthcoming Amphoteric Poems.

Nico is also the artist behind Mayakov+sky, a polemical, collaborative platform where he fuses his compositions in music, poetics, cinema and photography. In the fall of 2012 he plans to publish the synaesthetic, political poetry journal /e/VRIS AKATAPàFSTOS (Hubris Restlessly). He lives and works in Oakland.

When we were children – do you remember – I did not know the price of sea remains. I would take your wrinkled fins and torn tentacles and treat them like prizes, dangling each from silver hooks in my bedroom, framing my mirror, glistening in the harsh light of my bedlamp as I combed my hair. I kissed the dry scales of your palms, believed you when you said my eyes were bright, treasured each mottled mollusk and piece of waterlogged debris, but my measurements of worth are different now.

Come, namebreaker, and enter through the door, or window, or hole in the wall, after I divest you of the weight that drags your shoulders. Climb the wooden steps that lead upstairs. My limp should not cause you worry – uneven steps are still progress, and the path to my destination is well-treaded.

My bedroom has since been draped in black netting, the mirror tilted against the northmost wall. My trophies have rotted, and I have tossed them out the window, let them soak and digest the dirt below.

Sit, namebreaker, and let me divest you of other things. Let me drape the skins of eels around your neck, let me trace your lips with fish blood. Sit and do not stir, let me dress you in pearls and rubies. Let me prepare you for dinner.

Shannon Hozinec

Shannon Hozinec lives in Pittsburgh, PA and has too much hair; her work has appeared or is forthcoming in >kill author, Birdfeast, and The Adroit Journal.

Review by Art Edwards

I avoided Joshua Mohr’s novel Termite Parade because I’d read a blurb that said one of its characters’ bodies was infested with termites, an image reinforced by the cover of the book, which depicts a man with termites ravaging his gums. This avoidance came with some regret. The author and I are both West Coast novelists–a group I like to support–and we’re both graduates of the University of San Francisco’s graduate writing program (go, Dons). Moreover, Termite Parade was released by the indie press Two Dollar Radio, an outfit I’d been curious about for a while. Still, I don’t need gum-eating termites swimming around in my head when I’m trying to go to sleep.
You can imagine my relief when I came upon Damascus, Mohr’s more deceptively unconventional third novel and his second on Two Dollar Radio. The novel’s Ground Zero is a bar named Damascus in San Francisco’s rough-and-tumble Mission district. Set during the Iraq War, the principle drama centers around an art show/protest put on at the bar that involves nailing live fish to paintings of perished American soldiers. (Hey, at least the cover looked conventional.) The cultural divide that was exacerbated in our country during this time is played out in the microcosm of Damascus, pro-war and anti-war each coming there to head off the other.
Mohr is skilled at making his characters memorable with one distinguishing characteristic. Damascus’s owner, Owen, has a birthmark in the lip area that makes him look like Adolf Hitler; Owen’s niece Daphne is a lesbian who sleeps around; Shambles is a prostitute who specializes in hand jobs; No Eyebrows, dying of cancer, has–you guessed it–no eyebrows. At the point we come across the scientist with itchy skin, I was a little tired of this hiccup, but it does keep Mohr’s characters away from a far worse fallacy: we can easily distinguish one from another.
It’s Mohr’s deft use of language that separates his prose from the pack and brings his characters to life. Of Shambles, the hand job expert, he writes, “The night was young and full of fisted opportunities.” No Eyebrows’s cancer is described as “tumors stuck to his lungs like poisonous barnacles.” When Owen, who takes to wearing a Santa Claus suit year round (the beard covering his Hilter birthmark), is questioned about his attire, he quips, “I’m known for my perversions around the North Pole. Never leave me alone with a reindeer.” Mohr knows how to bring a character into relief quickly, and with a flare for humor and trope.
And Mohr utilizes his characters’ quirks to convincingly unfold the drama in Damascus. Byron Settles, an Iraq War veteran who was honorably discharged after injuring his leg, gets the tension rolling by overcompensating for his–to his mind–shameful failures during wartime. Here are his thoughts when he first views the offending exhibit:
She’d turned veterans into an art project. Ripped them from the context of being heroes. She wasn’t allowed to rape their memory. Hell, no. He wouldn’t let them get turned into advertisements, some bullshit propaganda…
Maybe this was his Honorable part of his discharge. Maybe he was supposed to confront dishonor. Maybe his landing zone was here—behind enemy lines he hadn’t even known about.

Seeing plot and character converge so seamlessly is a rare treat in contemporary fiction, where “masterworks” often seem dashed off too quickly to really explore a character’s integral relationship to the story.
There’s all this great plot and character development, and then there’s the stink.
It’s not hard to imagine the smell of a month-long art exhibition that incorporates the nailing live fish to paintings. I found myself a little too focused on the stench throughout, even during the scenes that aren’t set in Damascus. The smell isn’t even a factor for three-fourths of the novel–when the first real shots of the culture war are fired–but I was worried about it much sooner than that, and it kept pulling me out of the drama. No doubt this is intentional by the author–as Revv, a bartender at Damascus, says, “Art should stir shit”–but I admit it made me sad that Mohr needs such a pungent element to make his work cut through, that his well-tuned story and finely wrought prose–and splendid ending–aren’t loud enough on their own. If that’s what it takes for Damascus to be heard above the din, then we may have a entirely different culture war on our hands.

About the reviewer:

ART EDWARDS’s third novel, Badge (unpublished), was named a finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association’s Literary Contest for 2011 in the Mainstream category. His second novel, Ghost Notes, released on his own imprint Defunct Press in 2008, won the 2009 PODBRAM Award for best work of contemporary fiction. His first novel, Stuck Outside of Phoenix, is being made into a feature film. His writing has or will appear in The Writer, Writers’ Journal and Pear Noir!, and online at The Collagist, elimae, PANK, JMWW, The Rumpus, Girls with Insurance and writersdojo.org.

About the author:

Adam Wilson is the author of the novel Flatscreen (Harper Perennial, 2012). His writing appears in many publications including The Paris Review, Bookforum, The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Literary Review, Washington Square Review, and The New York Tyrant. He is the 2012 recipient of the Terry Southern Prize, and his short story, “What’s Important Is Feeling,” was recently chosen for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2102. He teaches creative writing at NYU, and lives in Brooklyn.

His life was little more than a vignette—the view from the window, time spent with the cat.
     The Japanese had an entire literary movement devoted to living in isolation: soan bungaku, recluse literature.
     Perhaps he should start writing.
     First they send a scout. A Gap Outlet. If the outlet survives, maybe an actual Gap will be built. Years off. He goes to sleep to the soft yellow glow of a bodega on the corner. When he wakes it’s a Foot Locker. Blindingly white and zebra striped.
     Three swings, a slide, a manual merry-go-round that squawked and wobbled. A tree that was good for climbing and another that wasn’t. Above the courtyard, a patch of sky. A rectangle of blue with white clouds, or gray with the threat of rain, or smog with a chance of asthma. An ice-cream truck jingled down the street in summer.
     The city was not too far. Just a train ride, just a gypsy cab weaving through traffic. Boxed, air-conditioned offices swaying in skyscrapers.
     Bernard put on the news to hear a voice. He could count on the news not changing. He didn’t have to listen. Everything repeated. Eternal return. The afternoon bassoon solo began, up a scale, down a scale. Bernard considered moving. The neighbor hit a bad note; Bernard smiled at the dissonance.

Sacha Siskonen

Sacha Siskonen lives in Chicago where she attends the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. When she’s not teaching or studying, she’s usually thinking up new ways to avoid teaching and/or studying. Her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Word Riot (obviously), Fast Forward Press, the Mississippi Review Online, Qwerty, and Hugging the Road.

About the author:

Brett Fogarty is a writer and teacher living in or around Boston. His work has appeared in Dozplot, The Legendary, and the 1AM and 2AM Projects. He recently quit smoking for good and loves Black Flack- The First Four Years.

Halvor Aakhus

The first decade of the new millennium is a blur. Despite himself, Aakhus earned a B.A. in Mathematics (2006) and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Florida (2011). Aakhus’ debut novel Book of Knut: A Novel by Knut Knudson has been turned into a math textbook. It contains musical scores and oil paintings, as well as homework problems. (Forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press, October 2012.)

Aakhus currently lives in Pennsylvania, where he teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

What projects are you currently working on?

Book #2.

Book #1 is coming out this October from Jaded Ibis Press. It’s a novel called Book of Knut: A Novel by Knut Knudson (by Halvor Aakhus). Here’s the premise: A mathematician finds a novel (Book) written by her dead lover (Knut Knudson) and subsequently transforms it into an annotated mathematical textbook, complete with homework problems. Aside from oil paintings, musical scores, mathematical graphs, etc., it’s got 216 footnotes.

Anyway, Book #2 is the sequel. Also a novel, but more of a painting. It’s called Knut in Hell: An Oil Painting by Knut Knudson (by Halvor Aakhus): As a proactive guide to self-punishment, it adopts the structure of Dante’s Inferno.

If all goes well, Book #3 will be a string quartet. Or an opera. Possibly a requiem. Perhaps all three?

When and why did you begin writing?

I learned to read, and thus I wrote.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

To consider yourself a writer is a lot of pressure. Knut prefers to be unaware of self. Blind is his point of view.

What inspired you to write your first book?

Got a degree in math and chemistry. What else was I supposed to do?

Who or what has influenced your writing?

Practicing piano for the first two decades of my life certainly played a role. I also spent several years copying math textbooks into notebooks. But shit like flipping burgers, tending bar, and sleeping behind a Dumpster probably made the biggest impact. And then there’s love and death.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

From a very early age, as the son of two artistic academics, Knut vowed to never become a writer, nor a painter. And certainly not a teacher. (Knut failed there, utterly, on all counts.)

Do you have a specific writing style?

Only when I revise.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

Given genre, I am most comfortable subverting its conventions. This is the game of art I’ve learned to play. Follow the rules enough to make sense, but break them enough to keep shit interesting. Genre is the box: my job is to show my audience the box, and help them step outside it.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

No. I prefer books that raise questions, not answer them.

What book are you reading now?

Just finished Padgett Powell’s You & I. As dialogue, it raises the stakes of his “monologic” Interrogative Mood. You know, like fucking Plato. Just as Plato adopts elderly Socrates as his grand inquisitor, Powell champions a pair of horny old men to achieve the same effect.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

Probably the math.

The doctor studies the body as a bee does a flower. His voice, a creaking door, calls for such and such. Nurses flit around each other, economy in motion. They adjust straps—one here, one there, just enough slack for trauma.
     One nurse swabs the patient’s temples with conductant; she secures the electrodes. She thinks she smells adrenaline, banking the body’s walls in frantic pursuit of escape.
     The truth of the matter is that this entire menagerie marching through our brains is no more stable than a tottering cabinet of ceramic cows.
     The doctor maneuvers knobs. He pushes a button with the precise assurance that comes from many years’ university training. It’s a learned touch, and the body jerks and spasms.

Meg Tuite

Meg Tuite’s writing has appeared in numerous journals. She is the fiction editor of Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press. She has a novel “Domestic Apparition” (2011) available through San Francisco Bay Press and her chapbook, “Disparate Pathos,” (2012) through Monkey Puzzle Press. She has a monthly column “Exquisite Quartet” up at Used Furniture Review and the 2011 Anthology is available. Her blog: http://megtuite.wordpress.com

Review by Aline Soules

In our modern world and complex lives, we live in “compartments”-home, school, town, nature-the kind of compartments and realms Carol Smallwood explores, giving us what we know and questioning what we don’t. “The Morning Warbler” may be seen “if one walks the bogs,” she writes, “but does it sing in the morning?” What do we really know? Smallwood raises questions even as she leads us into a consideration of our own world with a direct, matter-of-fact approach. “Why Do Women Ask First about their children / when meeting other / women?” or “After a / hysterectomy did they package your remains in a / paper sack like the gizzard, heart, liver, neck, / inside a roasting chicken?

Everything is delightfully jumbled, but beautifully detailed. “The Sewing Box,” just like Smallwood’s compartments, is filled with its own sub-compartments-thread bag, needle assortment, tray, and others-each, in turn, filled with its own details, whether a “myriad of spools,” “potholder loops,” or “a ring of white crocheted pineapples.” She ties these objects together in the poem and also from poem to poem. For example, she sews the ring of pineapples on a “new J. C. Penney’s case”; later, in the “Town” section, she gives us a poem called “J. C. Penney litany” with its “Flannel, Poplin, Wool, Cotton, Chambray, Chamois, Corduroy, Micro-suede” shirts and its “Amber, Indigo, Basil, Blue Abyss, Oatmeal, Olive, Espresso, Mushroom” colors, all in the “men’s section” with “not a man in sight.”

The joy of these compartments is that they are all linked: the women’s objects from “The Sewing Box” and the array in the men’s section of the “J.C. Penney Litany”; the ants and spiders from the “Nature” section and the “Black Holes” from the “Science” section; and the questions that range through the book from “What’d happened to the Chinese damask / robe Nicolet had worn greeting the Winnebago’s at Green Bay?” to all the answers the poet would “like to know”–”why snow’s white” or “Why we know more of / the surface of the / Moon than ourselves.”

Everything builds on her prologue-how we live between “the highest mountain / and the deepest ocean” and how we are all these compartments rolled into one. In this collection, the reader can experience a journey through our shared world, a journey beautifully guided by this skilled and generous poet.

About the reviewer:

Aline Soules, California State University, East Bay faculty member, has appeared in journals such as Kenyon Review and The Houston Literary Review.

Paper lantern lights spill
a faint glow down the walkway, ivy

climbs the holly trees. Our breaths—
heavy with flavored rum and cigarettes—

reinvent and slur words
when we attempt to produce sound,

form our heated arguments. I’ve returned
for the weekend, for a few nights.

Sex on a picnic table comes later.
I glance sideways to the coals of a dying fire.

Make Do and Mend
           The story is written on my skin

After the army discharged me,
I crashed the motorcycle, totaled it.
At the hospital, grandma took a picture.
I used my smile muscles even with a busted
chin. The neck brace was hard to move
in, so I couldn’t pose right for the camera.
I called it gettin’ raw. Those red marks
blackened to scabs. They looked like holes
blotting out my face. They healed. But my back
still won’t bend right, making the job search
impossible. I can’t lift, can’t stand straight,
always stuck in between, an odd angle.

Pin-Up Girls

In the girls’ bathroom, I outline my eyes
with Sharpie, same pen I use to write parts
of stories the girls and I pass back
between us, before the bell rings.
Now my eyes and hair match, jet black.
I adjust my corset. It gives me the shape of pin-
up girls. I’ve memorized the drawings in my shared
room, grandma’s attic, — Vargas flirts, Elvgren beauties
that plaster wallpaper yellowed by cigarette
smoke. Outside, I know the boys, shaded,
inhaling drags all afternoon, will slip back
unnoticed, to shop class. I’m an hourglass. My hips
sway in tight jeans, tight shirt. Time to stop
eating. Dream that waist. Make it disappear.

Two Years Until I See Him Again

He makes fists in his pockets as we walk
past neon Yuengling signs into the dim bar.
He takes a drag from his cigarette.

The smoke hides his scars
left by car and motorcycle accidents.
He fumbles with his lighter,

places it beside the ashtray. His hands trace
marks on his chin and cheeks.
He asks about poetry

and takes a long drag from his cigarette.
While we cradle our lagers, I ramble on,
light a Camel and exhale.

After, we throw back a round of Jagerbombs.
He says the way I talk is poetic,
that with memory loss he can’t find

words anymore. We don’t look
at each other’s faces. He leans in close.
I turn and blow smoke,

obscure his unfocused and wavering eyes.

Alyse Bensel

Alyse Bensel is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at Penn State. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in MAYDAY Magazine, Cider Press Review, and Foothill Poetry, among others. When not engaged in her teaching and studies, she volunteers for a cat rescue and participates in a work-share program at a local CSA farm.

James Arthur

James Arthur’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, and a residency at the Amy Clampitt House. During 2012-2013, he will be a Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts in Princeton. His first book, Charms against Lightning, will be published this fall by Copper Canyon Press.

In the small press world, a little funding can make the world of difference in a project’s success. Word Riot Inc. travel grants help offset the costs a writer incurs participating in readings and literary events around the country. Grants are made on a quarterly basis.

Word Riot Inc. is currently accepting applications for the third quarter of 2012.

About Word Riot Inc.

Word Riot Inc. is a nonprofit dedicated to promoting independent literature and supporting emerging writers. Incorporated in July 2011, Word Riot Inc. is currently in the process of seeking tax-exempt status as a 501(c)3 charitable organization. If you would like to support Word Riot Inc. in its mission, you can make a contribution using the PayPal button below.

Nick Antosca, whose Word Riot-published book Midnight Picnic came out in 2009, has a new book out, The Obese. He’s also writing for the show Teen Wolf, and his first novel, Fires, was just reissued. Here’s an interview with him over at Vol. I Brooklyn.

“Whenever someone asks me for writing advice I always feel at a loss,” Jami Attenberg said on her site recently. “Just sit down and write, is what I say. Books do not write themselves.” Hear, hear.

And if you feel like you’ve waited too long to just sit down and write, have no fear — There are plenty of writers who started producing quality work later in life. Here’s a nice roundup of the “Conspicuously Old” over at The Rumpus.

Caught By The River, a site dedicated to “angling, music, books, films, nature and pubs,” is taking pre-orders for A Collection of Words on Water. Featuring essays by Jarvis Cocker and Irvine Welsh, among others, it is a “word-map of Britain’s waterways.” I feel like not enough people in the US know about this site, so do take a gander.

Have you ever found one of those old hardbound Reader’s Digest anthologies and thought that it’s a shame such nice binding went into oddly abbreviating stories? How about making that book into a clock?

In other news of creative efforts overlapping, check out the new paintings on the Strand Bookstore by street artist Toofly.

I don’t know about you, but I like hearing about what other writers carry around with them. Here’s what’s in Warren Ellis‘ bag, and also what apps he’s found useful/productive. (Hint: Back that shit up on Dropbox. Do it now.)

I recently stumbled across The Writer’s [Inner] Journey. Recent interviews include Steve Almond and Lidia Yuknavitch. “I’d do just about anything to write a novel — doesn’t even have to be great. A good novel would be enough.,” Almond says. “But I won’t let myself, at least not yet.”

Jess Walter has a 99 cent single story out now, “Don’t Eat Cat.” I know I read this somewhere a long time ago, but can’t recall where. I do remember enjoying it and finding it funny, so I recommend checking it out. Or any of his work, really.

Finally, a bit of silliness: Jenny Lawson, aka “The Bloggess,” has a memoir coming out later this month, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. Her book trailer is hilarious. Wil Wheton, Soleil Moon-Frye, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman, Felicia Day, Jeri Ryan, and Mary Lynn Rajskub all make appeareances. Oh, and Bigfoot. Get in.

Until next time…

Grant Faulkner, whose story “Heat” appeared here in November 2010, is the new executive director at the Office of Letters and Light. OLL is the organization that puts on National Novel Writing Month each November, and also its lesser-known sibling, Script Frenzy. Script Frenzy starts again April 1, when participants will aim for 100 pages of scripted material in 30 days. Grant will also have a new story, “Theories,” appearing in the forthcoming Word Riot Anthology, in addition to being an editor at the newly-formed  100 Words.

Roger Pincus, whose story “Reaching Aushak” appeared here in October 2007, has been named a finalist in the 2011 St. Lawrence Book Award contest for his short story collection, Waking up in the Dark.  “Reaching Aushak” is the first story in that collection.

Misti Rainwater-Lites, who had three poems appear here last year, has a new book out, Bullshit Rodeo. The Kindle edition appears here, or you can see her blog for more information.

In other news…

It may not be as large or as well-known as AWP, but the 2012 Get Lit! Festival runs April 10-15th in Spokane, WA. This year’s featured authors include Steve Almond, Jess Walter, Lois Lowry, Colson Whitehead, Susan Orlean, Julian Smith, Ted Kooser, among others. Also, there’s a reading revolving entirely around whiskey and pie, and how can you go wrong with that?

Do you love David Mitchell as much as I love David Mitchell? From a recent interview with him in the Galway Advertiser: “The big question I ask artistically is ‘How am I going to get the damn book written?’ Anything beyond that and where I fit into [adopts deliberately pompous toffee nosed voice] ‘English literature!’ is not my job. It’s a bit like asking a duck billed platypus if it should be considered a mammal or a bird. A duck billed platypus is just interested in being a duck billed platypus.”

Images from 15 Writers’ Bedrooms over at Apartment Therapy should scratch that historical voyeur itch you might have.

And as if your to-read pile wasn’t large enough, HTML Giant has a roundup of readers’ favorite short stories from the past 10 years, with many links to the stories included.

Fall in love with poetry again by reading this poem by Matthew Dickman.

Illustrators often don’t receive enough love in these literary link-fests, so here’s Oliver Jeffers, author of Lost and Found and The Incredible Book Eating Boy, showing you how to draw a penguin over at The Guardian. (Step 1: Borrow a penguin.)

The always fantastic Wendy MacNaughton is selling limited edition prints of her illustration, “To Do” over at 20×200. Best move quickly though, as the 10″x8″ are already sold out. Writers, you know her words are true.

Finally, the fantastic ways that certain people can turn books into works of art is amazing. For major print love, check out Fuck Yeah, Book Arts! 

We had no idea what the hell we were doing. (Word Riot’s name, for example, has no interesting origin story other than 19-year-old me thinking it sounded punk rock.)

The music magazine slowly faded out, but Word Riot survived. By March 2003 we launched our publishing imprint. In the years that followed, we released books by fantastic writers like Kevin Sampsell, Paula Bomer, Nick Antosca, David Barringer, Mike Young, Timmy Waldron, David Gianatasio and Scott Bateman, among others. All the while, we kept up monthly publication of the online literary magazine.

To celebrate our 10th anniversary, I put a call out last month on Twitter asking Word Riot readers to send in their 140-character bios for their past decade of life. The tweets were much more fascinating than I anticipated:

OH, DC, OH. Broke up. NYC. MFA. Wrong Men. Wrong Job. Walking/Thinking. Writing. Teaching. A little lost. Found. Engaged. Novel.

Was 16. Knew everything. Got older. Wrote stories. Drank. A lot. Turned 26. Knew less than before. Wrote everything.

Won & lost dotcom millions, got sober, Katrina blew me home to NOLA & taught me how to write, divorce sent me into exile in TX.

San Francisco: naked pagan hot tubbing; Sacramento: married, baby, college, Autism; East Coast: university, divorce, writing, love.

Hearing our readers and authors give their often profound mini-bios certainly gave me pause. And because I’m turning 30 this year, the Word Riot anniversary creates more of an impetus for me to take stock of the past 10 years and see what they add up to. A couple relationships, a couple funerals, a couple moves. A book published, a novel unsold, another novel currently being beaten out of me. Life in numbers is too flat, though. It’s the movement around the edges of those numbers where life happens. And there’s been plenty of movement and experience for me, much of which I owe to Word Riot.

There have certainly been some missteps over the years. I’m notoriously slow at reading manuscripts for the press and getting the wheels turning with the process of launching our books. And while I relentlessly promote our books, I don’t think I’ve taken opportunities to fully market the magazine and I regret that my ineptitude has resulted in our editors and authors not getting the attention they deserve.

But enough of that. It’s been a kick ass 10 years.

The ever-changing landscape of the indie literary scene fascinates me, mostly because it actually is a scene now and not a loose collective of us off-kilter, artsy types puttering around the Internet. There’s ambition and careers. Challenging and entertaining books by a crop of talented indie scene writers have been publish (and I have no modesty and proudly proclaim the work of Word Riot Press authors among them). I mourn the fantastic magazines and small presses that brought many of these indie writers to the public’s attention and aren’t mucking about anymore.

Long live Pindeldyboz. Long live Eyeshot. Small Spiral Notebook. So New Publishing. Impetus Press. Long live ‘em all.

They inspired me and countless other editors and literary types to dedicate hours and weeks and years to small presses, lit mags, blogs and other projects supporting writers and artists.
Long live Pank and The Collagist and Hobart and Monkeybicycle. Long live Dzanc and Melville House and Two Dollar Radio. Long live The Rumpus and HTMLGIANT and The Faster Times.

And, if you’ll permit me this one (more) indulgence, long live Word Riot. Let’s have another 10 years and 10 more.

We’ve got exciting things on the horizon: a short story collection from Nick Antosca, the 10-year anniversary anthology, the founding and growth of nonprofit Word Riot Inc. It’s all happening. Life keeps happening–around the edges of numbers and elsewhere. Thank you for that. Thank you for reading. Thank you for writing.

Jackie Corley

About the author:

Jackie Corley is the co-founder and publisher of Word Riot, an online literary magazine and small press. She is the author of a short story collection, The Suburban Swindle, and received her MFA from Bennington College. Her writing and photography has appeared in 14 Hills, 3AM Magazine and a Trenton McDonald’s, among others.

E. Manning-Poge

E. Manning-Pogé lives in New York City with her wife, PJ (a half-elf gypsy expat), Razzle (an enchanted puggle), and a menagerie of crickets, mushrooms and succubae. They reside aboard the Manning family dirigible, The Cheshire Moon, which has stood anchored to the west pylon of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for generations, is fashioned entirely of saltwater taffy, and must be filled weekly with kitten sneezes to keep her aloft. The author has been published in various places, including Blithe House Quarterly and Big Pulp, and is currently writing a novel which can best be described as what would have happened if Mickey Spillane had penned “The Exorcist” while listening to “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” When not writing, the author enjoys chemistry.

sparrow dance on blade

sheathed or unsheathed

something to cut the silence
something to cut the bullshit
something to cut something

irrevocably iridescent to be held

by hero
by me

so I could say “Those of you lucky enough
to have your lives, take them
with you.”

Liz Grear

Liz Grear is a recent Columbia College Chicago graduate where she received her B.A. in Creative Writing. She has a story in the process of being published in The Story Week Reader, Columbia College Chicago’s annual journal of flash fiction. When she is not writing, you can usually find Liz coaching cheerleading, choreographing cheerleading, or doing anything that involves cheerleading or dancing.

Michael K. Meyers

Fiction appears in Quick Fiction, Work Riot, SmokeLong, Alice Blue, Eclectica, NANO, Spork, Bound Off, 2River, The 2nd Hand Journal, Chicago Noir, Chelsea, Fiction, The New Yorker, Requited Journal and Word Riot’s 10th Anniversary Anthology. Audio works can he heard in Fringe deClassified, 2River, Mad Hatter’s Review, Drunken Boat, sound/text & Bound Off. Videos can be viewed on Ninth Letter, apt, Studio Literary Journal and his website, michaelkmeyers.com. He teaches in the graduate writing program at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.