Guest Post, Lee Martin: In the Land of “If’s” and “Buts”

In the Land of “If’s” and “Buts”:The Art of Empathy

Model AirplaneWhen I was five years old, I told Santa Claus I wanted a model airplane for Christmas. I meant the gas-powered kind that would actually fly. To my disappointment, what Santa, aka my parents, left for me on Christmas morning was a metal toy plane that I could push along on its rubber tires, and lift into the air, and fly along with my hand while making the engine noises. Not what I had in mind at all. I whined and pouted and had a little tantrum, and my father said to me, as he so often did in those days, but perhaps never quite as appropriately, “If ‘if’s’ and ‘buts’ were candies and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.”

His point was, of course, that sometimes we don’t get what we want. Sometimes life disappoints us. Sometimes our loved ones do, too—our parents, our spouses, our friends, our siblings. The world has a way of diminishing joy, of threatening or harming, of leaving us fearful and angry. Life often falls short of what we want it to be.

Perhaps this has never been so true as now. It’s November when I write this, nearly two weeks past the election. Many of us are trying to make our way through a world that has drastically changed. Here at Ohio State University, where I teach, more than a thousand students—Muslim, Black, Latino, White, LGBT, and Asian—gathered at our multicultural center last night to express their fears and to share their stories of the threats they’ve endured since the election. Here on our campus, students have faced acts of racial, religious, cultural, and homophobic terrorism. They’ve been taunted with calls of “Build the wall,” and “Go back to Mexico.” They’ve been physically assaulted, threatened, and intimidated, even in their classrooms. A Black female student told the story of expressing a point in a class, and a White student responding to her by saying “It’s n—ers like you that are the problem in this country.” And the professor said nothing. At another university here in Columbus, a female student, out for an early-morning walk, was beaten by two young men wearing Trump shirts and hats. Needless to say, these are scary times. We woke up on November 9 with the stark realization that our world was going to be very different from the one in which we thought we were living.

I’ve seen the effects on the students in our MFA program. In fact, in my creative nonfiction workshop this week, a student-led writing activity brought up questions of the efficacy of our words. A number of students talked about not being able to write in the days after the election and questioning the purpose of their writing. One student said she wanted to be a writer so she could have an effect on the world. Don’t we all write because we want to make readers feel and/or think something? I told my students I’d hate to see what happened with the election silence them. I told them that we need all their voices, especially now.

It’s times like these that challenge us—times of uncertainty, times of struggle, times of fear. I’ve always believed that the act of writing is essentially an act of empathy. We do our best to understand the sources of others’ behaviors, to imagine what it’s like to be inside someone else’s skin, to see the world from their perspective. When someone or something comes along that’s so distant from our own experience, our own viewpoint, we find ourselves sorely challenged indeed. We need to use that challenge to ask ourselves whether the people we are match up with the writers we are. Do we only empathize on the page, or do we empathize in real life?

I grew up in the rural Midwest. An examination of the election returns from the precincts in my native county shows me what I suspected. Not a single precinct went for Hillary Clinton in the recent election. Worse than that, Donald Trump won by huge margins in every single precinct. This grieves me, not only because I don’t agree with the result of the election, but also because it places me on the divide between my values and the values of the people in the place I still consider home. Here’s a truth we may not want to accept right now. There are good people everywhere, even people who voted for Donald Trump. Do I think they’re complicit in Trump’s racism, classism, misogyny? Yes, I do. After all, they empowered him. But I also know the good hearts of people, who for a variety of reasons, truly believed, when they cast their votes, they were doing the right thing.

I grew up among them. My father, a life-long Democrat, was a farmer. My mother, a Republican, was a grade-school teacher. I grew up in the lower middle class. I grew up in the flyover zone. When I was a boy, I stood in line with my parents on Saturdays to receive government commodities: powered milk, sorghum, flour. I knew early on that we had little privilege in the world. Yes, we were White, and I was male, and that was something, but we had no status when it came to our soico-economic class, or the place where we lived, or the jobs that we held, or the schools we attended. I was one of the lucky ones. I had parents who believed in education, and I had a mother who loved books, and who taught me to love them, too. The one privilege I had came from the power of language.

Which brings me to the question of how we’re to use that power. My students wonder if words can make a difference. Here’s what we learn as we age. The tough times will come. We won’t always get what we want. But we’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other, and no matter how dark things get, there will always be some measure of joy in the world. We may have to look for it in the small blessings of our everyday lives, but trust me, it’s there. And whether from the darkness or the light, we’ll keep making art. We have no choice. We’ve been called. We’ll keep telling our stories, writing our poems, our novels, our essays. Words matter. We know this better than anyone. In the land of “if’s” and “buts,” we can never have enough voices. Let the chorus rise up. Let it start now.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Lee Martin

 

leemartinWe’re proud to feature Lee Martin as our first Authors Talk series contributor, with his podcast “Here in the Heartland.”

“Here in the Heartland” is the very phrase that opens this short and poignant talk, and the “Heartland” here refers to the Midwest. It’s a bold descriptor that counters an all-too-familiar perception of the region as flyover country, while simultaneously positioning the Midwest as the crucial element in a discussion about the complexities of character. As a Michigan native myself, it’s refreshing – and pleasantly surprising – to consider home as a crucial element of anything.

The podcast seems almost a reflective microcosm of its author: Lee grew up in rural Illinois, his novel River of Heaven is set in Illinois, The Bright Forever in Indiana, and his thoughtfulness towards the hues of character recall any one of his published work; the fictional novel Break the Skin is even dedicated to one of its main characters.

In the podcast, Lee likens teasing out the beauty of the perpetually-unappreciated Midwest to finding the same subtle texture in a writer’s characters. It’s interesting, useful – and also quite beautiful. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can also read Lee’s past work in Superstition Review.

 

More About the Author:

Lee Martin is the author of the novels The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; River of Heaven; Quakertown; and Break the Skin. He has also published three memoirs, From Our HouseTurning Bones, and Such a Life. His first book was the short story collection, The Least You Need To Know. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University.

 

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

 

Guest Post, Letitia Trent: The New Online Chapbooks

Letitia Trent

Since I first heard about chapbooks (probably my first year of graduate school, where I learned just how little I knew about publishing in general), I’ve loved the form: what better way to consume a text, be it poetry, nonfiction, or prose, than in small, carefully curated bites? Most chapbooks contain thematically or formally related work, which gives them a sense of cohesion that larger books often lack: there is, at least in my experience, a great deal of “filler” in many poetry, short story, or nonfiction collections. The chapbook makes a writer really consider what pieces work when pressed against each other, which usually results in a stronger, more potent little book.

The chapbook also provides an opportunity for taking chances with design in print publishing. Publishers such as Dancing Girl Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Tarpaulin Sky Press put a great deal of attention into design and the tactile quality of the book—some presses even hand-make each book, something that it is impossible to do with a more mass-produced full-length collection due to cost and time prohibitions. Buying a chapbook is one of the last ways to feel that a book has actually been lovingly assembled by a person. The downside is the limited nature of the books: once they are gone, they are often gone for good. But maybe that is part of the beauty of the form—it is limited, unlike many things in our very virtual world.

What to do, then, with online chapbooks? The form itself is perfect for the internet: it isn’t too long, which can be a problem for readers who get eye strain, and the way that we consume media online—often in not more than two or three page articles at a time—seems to fit the chapbook model. Many online chapbook publishers go with a very basic, easy-to-read and easy to access PDF model. Beard of Bees, for example, has been publishing PDF chapbooks with a clean, simple, and consistent design since 2001. Some newer publishers, though, are paying as much attention to the design of the chapbook in an online space as print publishers.

Blue Hour Press (who published my chapbook, Splice, in 2011), create beautifully designed chapbooks using Issu, which allows for a more easily navigable, two-page design. Blue Hour Press chapbooks often incorporate visual elements such as photography or drawing, which can be cumbersome in PDF form and economically difficult in print form. Floating Wolf Quarterly publishes chapbooks right from the website using an extremely easy paging format. Unlike more old-fashioned click-through poetry chapbooks, Floating Wolf Quarterly’s format makes paging through their chapbooks feel like reading a physical book.

Online chapbooks are unlikely to completely replace the traditional print chapbook (and for those who lament the death of the book, I can only roll my eyes—I buy both electronic and print books, and always will), but they do provide a kind of access to poetry that was not possible 20 years ago: a small print run of a chapbook would be unlikely to reach readers living in rural Oklahoma (where I grew up) in 1994, but a Google search of “online chapbooks” can easily get a reader in 2012 to one of these websites. Now that publishers are putting as much attention into the craft of creating a book as the author did into creating the work to go inside it, online chapbooks have become an art form of their own.

Letitia Trent’s first full-length collection, “One Perfect Bird,” is available from Sundress publications. Her work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, The Black Warrior Review, Fence, Folio, The Journal, Mipoesias, Ootoliths, Blazevox, and many others. Her chapbooks are Splice (Blue Hour Press) and The Medical Diaries (Scantily Clad Press). She was the 2010 winner of the Alumni Flash Writing Award from the Ohio State University’s The Journal and has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony.