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Julie Matsen: Why I Hate Writing Declines

Julie Matsen

RejectedI don’t often use the word, but I hate writing rejection letters.

You’d think they’d be easy enough: Offer some constructive criticism and some words of encouragement, then hit send. Lather, rinse, repeat. On to the next in the pile.

The problem, as it often is, is the human element. It is all too easy to forget that there are people on both sides of this process.

Now, I’m not implying that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. I don’t want to insinuate that an editor’s job is to smirk behind an IP address, gleefully ticking away at their keyboards while picking an essay apart in their decline letter. Nor should we cower behind prewritten rejection letters, sending email after email of the same exact words, the literary equivalent of breaking up via text message.

I read somewhere that there is a word for being a background character in someone else’s story—a name on a cardboard coffee cup, a car on the freeway, an umbrella in the rain, a whiff of perfume exiting an elevator in a crowded mall—and that such a word affects lives only tangentially, for a few seconds. I cannot recall what the word itself is, and I try to find it in online dictionaries, a hail-Mary effort to procrastinate that next rejection letter.

Whatever the word is, I hope it describes the letters I write. I hope that it ends up in a bulging email inbox, surrounded by rejections and acceptances from other magazines, from publishers, from fans. I hope that this decline letter that I have drafted and sent will be marked as read and left to rot in cyberspace.

The alternative, you see, is that what I write is important. Every decline letter could be some writer’s first, someone’s last. There is some pressure in knowing that I have a long memory of criticism from strangers, and that you probably do, too.

I read slowly and write swiftly, like ripping cooled wax from leg hair. I leave the letter alone, come back to the computer to read it one last time before hitting “Send.” The computer asks if I’m sure, and I wince.

s[r] Goodreads #FridayReads

Superstition Review

Enjoy this recent review on our Goodreads.com page from s[r] staff, Julie Matsen.

QuakertownQuakertown by Lee Martin

The unfortunately true story of an African American community’s upheaval in 1920s Texas focuses on the reactions of two quasi-fictional families, one white and one black, who are integral in the town’s shift toward further segregation and its fiery aftermath. Little Washington Jones, a talented gardener, has to adapt to changing attitudes towards people of color, making a life for himself in a white man’s world while trying to protect his daughter Camellia. Andrew Bell, a banker, tries to make life in nearby Denton more palatable for his fellow townspeople while taking care of his alcoholic wife Tibby and crippled son Kizer. When the demands become too great after a public shooting, both men have to choose between their families and the town they hold so dear. Their children must also live with the often-heartbreaking consequences of their own actions as well as those of their parents.

Though it may be billed as nonfiction, Lee Martin’s Quakertown reads as what it is–an engaging novel from a talented translator of the past.

You can read The Last Words of Boneheads and Fraidy Cats by Martin in s[r] Issue 8.

Kaitlin Johnson: Fighting Perfection

Kaitlin Johnson

I have a confession: I am a perfectionist. I know, I know. That has become a generic answer in job interviews all around the world. It isn’t exactly an uncommon trait when questions such as, “What is your greatest weakness?” arise. You know, turning your negative quirks into positive attributes and all that. But trust me, being a perfectionist can be crippling given the right setting.

Take writing for example. I first signed up for a writing course my sophomore year of college. I chose it on a whim as an elective to fill up space. There I was sitting in the very first row. I had my special notepad out, quotes written on it to keep myself motivated. My pen was freshly filled with never before used ink. I was wearing a sunny disposition and a go get ‘em attitude not yet sequestered by workshops with my peers.

I remember my professor’s one and only advice that semester: just write. I could not put it together. Just write… anything? I needed a plan, a prompt. I needed to stick to a guideline and follow the rules. Writing whatever came to mind was messy and unorganized. My thoughts were incoherent and I began rambling all over the place.

Fighiting Perfection

I remember writing about writing. I remember writing about not having anything to write. I remember writing about how I could not wait to get home and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But in between the frustration and the hunger, I began to come across an epiphany. Writing for the sake of writing un-jumbles your mind. Writing down your current thoughts removes them to make way for the deeper, more intimate and meaningful material.

As soon as I got over my fear of being messy, I wrote anything and everything. Sometimes the material was useful and I was proud to hand it in. Other times my writing was awful, and I sheepishly handed it over without making eye contact. The difference in myself was that I learned that it was okay to write something bad, as long as I was writing.

With this newfound euphoria for writing, peer workshops were my kryptonite. You see, another side to my perfectionism declares that once I deem something complete, it’s done forever. The end. Send it off to the publishing company. My thought process was that I had worked hard on my project and it had become my masterpiece. I wanted to protect it.

I walked into the peer workshop with doe eyes, clutching my story to my chest like a child protecting their candy on Halloween. My heart was racing and I could not wait to share my art with my classmates. We sat in a circle, because it’s not enough to hear them tear apart your story, they also look you in the eyes when they’re destroying your hopes and dreams.

Peer workshop was brutal. I could not comprehend why everyone was focusing on the things in my story that needed improvement instead of patting me on my back and giving me a “good job” sticker. But then it hit me; these kids were not my mother. These kids were not here to tell me how great my writing was. I was looking for affirmation in something that was complete; I was not looking to change it.

That’s when another epiphany hit me; my story was not art. It was a rough draft, something that needed time and care, changes and revisions in order to become something better. I had to open myself up to criticism and more messiness in order to become something great.

Striving to be perfect when writing was difficult. But once I got past that, I learned it was okay to be terrible. It was okay to crash and burn. It only makes you better.

Guest Post, William Black: Upon Re-Reading “The Literature of Exhaustion”

William Black

John Barth, in his famous essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), tells us that for artists of all kinds “to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect.”  At the time of his writing, the urgent question put to himself and his peers, as Barth understood it, was not how to follow Kafka and Joyce, the most technically up to date writers of the early twentieth century, “but how to succeed those who succeeded Kafka and Joyce.”  By Barth’s lights, Nabokov, Beckett, and Borges had done the most to keep the modes of fiction in touch with the middle decades of the century, but even in the mid-1960s, as those master innovators had reached the twilight of their careers, “a good many current novelists write turn-of-the-(20th-) century novels, only in more or less twentieth century language and about contemporary people and topics.”

Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov, Borges, John Barth and (good lord!) metafiction—I have the feeling that maybe this may not be the most auspicious opening for a guest post at S[r], a lively online journal not without its exciting examples of literary innovation, and certainly not without a long roster of writers I admire, but nonetheless a publisher of a great many poems, essays, and short stories (including my own) that Barth would surely have recognized as technically out of date.  And what’s wrong with that?  Beauty can be reached by way of many avenues, some of them comfortably timeworn.  We don’t all have to be, as my students sometimes groan (in the very classrooms where Barth once lectured), so “esoteric” and “elitist” and “academic” as Barth.

But Barth’s question is not an academic one.  Moreover, it’s one I think we all ought to wrestle with, continually, regardless of our individual aesthetic inclinations.  In the end, Barth’s is a question of how writers engage, or choose not to engage, with the world they live in.

When the Barth of “Exhaustion” looked out his window, he saw a world in near-apocalyptic upheaval.  President Kennedy had been murdered, The Cold War was raging, the Vietnam War was quickly escalating, Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society were promoting the use of atomic bombs in Asia, the Civil Rights Movement was meeting violent resistance, and looming over every crisis was the relatively new fact that hostile superpowers had amassed nuclear weapons in numbers capable of destroying civilization many times over.  Meanwhile, Madison Avenue advertisers had honed their ability to create persuasive alternate realities free from the anxieties of history.

Barth describes the ethos in terms of “ultimacies—in everything from weaponry to theology” and wonders how out-of-date techniques could manage the task of making art of a world on the verge of extinction.  The current conditions required new techniques that acknowledged and made use of what the 19th century could not have imagined.  Most of “The Literature of Exhaustion” is dedicated to delineating and praising the artistry of ultimacy in Beckett and, especially, Borges, whose stories tend to begin after everything has already been written and proceed to comment in the form of literary criticism—a literature of the end of things if ever there was one.

Barth the writer of fiction took his greatest, most profitable lessons from Borges.  In “Exhaustion,” he praises Borges for his metafictions that “disturb us metaphysically” because “[w]hen characters in a work of fiction become readers or authors of the fiction they’re in, we’re reminded of the fictitious aspect of our own existence.”  This description of Borges’s stories serves as an equally apt description of Barth’s own Lost in the Funhouse, which features the famous cut out-able Mobius strip that reads ONCE UPON A TIME THERE on one side and WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN on the other, so that regardless of the techniques Barth employs story by story, the metaphysically disturbing fictive aspect of existence stands always and vividly in the foreground.

Consider the fictitious aspect of our national life as Barth worked on Lost in the Funhouse.  Seen in its light, could there be a set of more up-to-date techniques than those displayed in Funhouse?  Nearly every story is an imitation of a story which is itself, if you believe Aristotle, as Barth does, an imitation of human action, and this at a time when human action, on both the consumer and political levels anyway, were imitations of fictions.

So I beg the question:  who are the technically up-to-date writers of our time?  What techniques are so of our time that they speak to and for the world we share?

First and foremost, what should our criteria be?

Our criteria would, of course, have to begin with a sense of the current condition of the world, and it’s seems that the current state of affairs shares a good deal with the world Barth saw.  Substitute Iraq for Vietnam, for example, and we once again see geopolitics and many, many actual lives being frankly determined by the fictions of state.  That said, one of the most significant distinctions between American life in the first and second decades of the 21st century and that of Barth’s 1960s is that we, like those who trusted the Mayan sages and their apocalyptic calendar, have lived through more than our share of doomsday predictions, enough that they no longer make us jumpy.  Most of our population has been fully informed of the once-terrifying nuclear threats since childhood.  Even the very real possibility of midtown dirty bombs doesn’t keep us awake at night.  For that matter, seeing as we may witness ice-free Arctic summers within a decade, there’s an equally strong chance that we’ll see our species wiped out a lot less suddenly than our parents’ once expected, but even in that case there are no NO NUKES-styled marches or star-studded rock concerts in favor of cap-and-trade.  We seem content to roll our eyes at Fox News’ line-up of global warming deniers the same I way I never tire of the story of my former landlord, a third grade teacher in Brooklyn who was stockpiling guns and ammo (I kid you not) with which to combat Bill Clinton’s Y2K conspiracy to takeover the country (yes, the country he was already president of).

So by themselves, the techniques of ultimacy won’t do.  Our technique must also express our boredom of threats of ultimacy.  Regardless, to whatever degree we’re interested in charting a path forward, we would do well to look back at the best examples of 1960s-styled metafiction.  They almost necessarily provide the building blocks for whatever the currently up-to-date will invent.

I say this primarily for reasons “Exhaustion” does not address, namely that Barth’s metafiction represents an inflection point in the development of the most radical, most modern, most self-aware set of techniques yet invented, those of the English Romantics.  And almost everything we (especially those of us in the creative writing industry, leading or attending workshops, etc.) call postmodern or experimental has deep roots in the techniques of Romanticism.  It was Coleridge and Wordsworth who first understood that the concurrent rising tides of democracy and consumer capitalism robbed European and American culture of a single received Christian teleology and left in its place as many teleologies as there are individual people, each with a consciousness that continually mediates experience by, among other things, comparing it to received stories or narratives of social convention, just as Ambrose in “Lost in the Funhouse” cannot fully participate in his first erotic experience, distracted as he is by the recognition that he’s having an “erotic” experience.

The result is that our once reliable metaphysics was disturbingly de destabilized, just as Barth describes.  We became both the readers of the fiction of our lives, recognizing which juncture of the plot we’ve reached and how we can expect to proceed, and the writers of them, in that we are in a continual process of producing and consuming our own self-image.   It’s important, I think, to understand that this insight about our being the characters, readers, and authors of our own lives does not originate with Borges or, for that matter, the 20th century, and that the techniques required to make art of the modern condition do wait for the 20th century to find employment.  Lord Byron, especially, and John Keats interrupted their own compositions to comment upon the characters and action and language, i.e., the making of the very work we’re reading, as we’re reading, and thereby shattering the fictional dream most of us work terribly hard to keep undisturbed.  When referring to 18th and 19th century authorial intrusions, we speak of “romantic irony.”  Dr. Anne Mellor, who is brilliant on the matter, describes it thus:  “Romantic irony grew out of philosophical skepticism and the social turbulence of the French Revolution and American War of Independence; it posits a universe founded in chaos and incomprehensibility rather than in a divinely ordered teleology.”  But one could also say that the point is to “disturb us metaphysically” because when the author becomes a reader of and a character within the fiction they’re composing, we’re reminded of the fictitious aspect of our existence.

What’s disturbing about this reminder is that it calls into question our authenticity as selves.  Calling the self into question is largely what Wordsworth’s Prelude is about—a long, never finished, continually revised introduction to the wholesale revelation of self Wordsworth had intended to write but could never properly begin because the introduction could never be completed.  Autobiography can never be started, because each possible starting point is so ramified, and the self is so bottomless and unknowable, that only the haze of unknowability can be fixed to the page—such is the Romantic epistemology of self.  To transmit to us the feeling of a unknowability, indeed the constant erosion of presumed knowledge, the Prelude gives us sentences so long and so complex that we often lose our way in the middle of them, forgetting where we started.

Keats may give us a different set of techniques, but they bring us to the same end, most obviously and powerfully in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and its ditties of no tune.

I could go on—and on.  But for your sake I’ll point in the direction of just one more pertinent example.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, along with Edgar Allan Poe, was Borges’ favorite writer.  In fact, and just to complete the circle, Borges tells us that Hawthorne prefigured Kafka, who John Barth sees as Borges’ precursor before choosing to build on Borges’ Hawthorne- and Kafka-infused techniques, the most up-to-date techniques, still, in the late 1960s.

Borges’ favorite Hawthorne story is “Wakefield,” about which he writes very beautifully and very persuasively, so I’ll limit my notes here to a different story, “Young Goodman Brown.”

As the story opens, Goodman Brown is leaving his wife to set off into the woods, not because he is motivated by some personal need or sense of mission but because “tonight of all nights” he must.  Brown appears to be a character in a Medieval parable, less a person than human shape plugged into an archetypal plot whose operations will bring us to some Christian lesson, and for the most part, the story’s proceedings are consistent with this expectation.  In the woods, Brown meets a man who seems to be or represent the Devil himself, and the woods and its environs take on familiar symbolic dimensions.  Further, the Devil figure’s walking stick, when dropped to the forest floor, transforms into a writhing snake.

Or does it?

The apparent parable is regularly punctured by the intrusion of an authorial voice that disturbs the apparently clear and stable metaphysics of “Young Goodman Brown’s” world.  In the case of the staff-turned-snake, the authorial voice adds the possibility that what Brown is witnessing is nothing more than an “ocular illusion.”  We’re invited to think that maybe what we’re reading isn’t in fact the case.  Maybe there’s something less parabolic and more psychological, less archetypal and more characterological, taking place, and we adjust our reading accordingly, aligning ourselves to the story’s foundation of doubt.  Maybe, despite Brown and despite the intrusive authorial voice, we’re still operating within a Christian metaphysics, or maybe, despite the parabolic structure and archetypal trappings, we’re encountering a highly defined subjectivity.  Either way, we can’t be sure, and the uncertainty, just as Barth suggests, is highly disturbing.  We read on in hopes of a conclusive ending, but what we find is that the opposed possibilities remain intact: Brown might have in fact experienced things just as the story describes them, or the events of the story were merely dreamed, in which case we’ve been reading the operations of Brown’s subconscious, that is, the greatest depths of his subjectivity.

All we can say with confidence is that we and Brown are both forever changed.  The nature of the change is upsettingly modern: appearances deceive; people maybe or may not be what they seem; there may or may not be a God and a Devil; our experiences may be the product of divine order or, just as easily, the manifestations of indifferent natural forces.  If we wish, we can choose one explanation at the expense of the other, but either way we’re supplying cause and effect where none may exists, which is to say we’re creating fictions with the power to shape our lives.

What I hope to have done is trace a reasonably straight line from the radical revolt signaled by Romanticism to some of the fullest expressions of postmodernism.  The point of such a line is to suggest that despite the insistence of the creative writing industry—founded by people who rejected the modernism in flourishing upheaval all around them in favor of a far more stable and rational poetics—we have lived for more than 200 years amidst a radical, thoroughly modern, and not yet fully acknowledged literary tradition, one that, even in its 1790s incarnation, is more technically up-to-date than most of us are.  This is worth some thought, even if we choose, as most of us will, not to embrace these techniques completely or ever to strive to be technically up-to-date.  The worst that can happen is that we affirm our out-of-date, perhaps even nostalgic inclinations, and that affirmation will help us become both more fully ourselves and more aware of our art’s relationship to the world.

 

Feel free to check out my related essay in World Literature Today.

S[R] Interns Attend UMOM Read-To-Me Night

Kevin Hanlon

SR at UMOMThis semester, a handful of the Superstition Review interns attended one of UMOM’s weekly Read-To-Me nights, and I was lucky enough to be there.

UMOM is the largest homeless shelter in Arizona, located in our very own downtown Phoenix. Their mission is to provide homeless families and individuals with safe shelter and supportive services including classes and daycare in an effort to assist the residents in reaching their greatest potential. UMOM aims to break the cycle of homelessness by teaching their residents how to grow as members of society. The Read-To-Me night that we attended is a program that they’ve designed to break the cycle of illiteracy among the children of these families.

We walked in not knowing what to expect. A then vacant room would soon be filled with tables of books for volunteers to read to the children living at the UMOM center, an old hotel in Phoenix that has been reverted into housing for families in need of assistance and guidance. Every Tuesday night the recreation room at UMOM is converted into a makeshift library where children can come pick out books for volunteers to read to them. There are picture books and storybooks for the beginning reader to about the middle school aged reading level. At the end of the night the children are allowed to take three books with them to help build their own personal libraries and reading habits.

Before the children came, the program director went over a few helpful tips for the night. “Don’t be let down if you get dumped,” she said, “It’s nothing personal.” We all laughed and before we knew it there were children everywhere picking up books and partnering with readers. Some wanted to read, and others wanted to be read to; other children simply went around collecting books from different series for their collections of Goosebumps or The Magic Tree House.

I tried more than a few times to sit one of the children down to be read to, but it seemed like most of them had other plans. As I waited for a child to ask me to read to him, I marveled over the spectacle in front of me. The room that had once been empty and silent was now alive with people picking through books and turning through pages. Even though most of us had stock piled the books we remembered and loved from our own childhoods, the children presented us with the books that they wanted to explore. Obviously, this was not the first rodeo for many of the children. It was they who held the reins in the literary roundabout. Friends were made over books and memories, and the shared smiles on the faces of the volunteers and children alike showed the true magic that can only be found with one’s nose stuck in a book.

After about fifteen minutes of waiting, one of the directors asked if I had any experience with young children and if I would mind going into the nursery. “Sure, I guess,” I told him. No, I did not have any experience with young children, and no, I had no idea what I was doing, but I figured I would help in any way they needed. They were the experts after all.

I left the recreation room and went back to the nursery where about eight young children under the age of five sat playing with three older women. I was apprehensive at first, but as soon as I entered the tiny room a young boy greeted me with a toy fire truck ready to play. I sat on the floor and pushed the truck around with him and tried my best to keep his attention, but sure enough he soon got bored with me and another child was ready to play.

After a while I found myself at the table coloring with a young girl. She was not rowdy or unruly like the boys, but rather she was calm and sure of herself. “Why don’t you sit here,” she said patting the small chair next to her. I was sure that if I sat down I would break the chair, but I more or less crouched down steadily next to her. She was playing with an ancient toy, a blue, plastic turntable that you tape paper plates to and hold markers over as it turns. Most of the plates were what you would expect from a child aged four or younger, but this young girl kept a steady hand and drew solid circles with many different colors. To say the least, I was quite impressed. We were having a full conversation on colors that led to the ocean. She moved the turntable away and grabbed a piece of paper. “Let me show you,” she said. She proceeded to draw a seal, as she told me, and I colored in the waves above its head.

It was at that moment, thinking about how smart this girl seemed to be, that I realized how truly sorry I felt. I was born into a family that was able to send me to a private elementary school that I by no means deserved. I was told that I could be anything I wanted, and encouraged to dream. I had a backyard in a safe neighborhood that bordered the forest, and I was able to play everyday, and grow and dream. It was all I knew at her age, but here she was, this little girl, smart as could be, funny and sociable. Surely she was smarter than I was at that same age. But who was telling her to dream, and where were those dreams allowed to grow? She was four years old and growing up in a shelter, and this was not a life with which I was familiar. Here I had been given most everything in my life, and I knew that she was going to have to work much harder for it all.

When I said goodbye, I knew that it was going to be the first and last time I would ever see her, and I wished her the best. I wished that she’d find her way and someone would tell her that she was smart and could do anything she ever wanted, just like all those people that told me when I was young. And then I was happy to know that at least she was safe and had a roof over her head, and that the people of UMOM were taking steps towards the betterment of the lives of these children and their parents.

So, reader, if you ever get the chance, I highly recommend volunteering at a Read-To-Me night, and if you are not able, please visit their website to learn more ways that you can help. They are always in need of donations, and since the children are allowed to take three books home each week, UMOM is always in need of more books for the children to read.

I want to thank the people of UMOM for giving me and the other interns of Superstition Review the opportunity to volunteer with them, and I wish them a wonderful holiday season.

s[r] Goodreads #FridayReads

Superstition Review

Superstition Review staff member Abner Porzio submitted his review of Dorianne Laux’s Facts About the Moon for our Goodreads.com page in December.

FactsAboutTheMoonFacts About the Moon by Dorianne Laux

This is one of those books that can be read over and over again to reach the same or different understandings of how it feels to be alive. This fantastic collection of poems is one that has the potential to never cease to resonate with its readers. Readers can feel its charged energy. Without a doubt, this collection will continue again and again to be cherished. The body of shared experience can become part of the reader. Throughout Laux’s work, the question of purpose juxtaposes with desire. Human nature is made by Laux to be majestic, raw, visceral, and magical all at the same time. It’s rare if readers do not admire her title poem, “FACTS ABOUT THE MOON.”  Respect for Laux’s lines: “her eyes/ two craters, and then you can’t help it/ either, you know love when you see it,/ you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull,” this indefinable moment of realization is yet a written snapshot of the poet’s capability of capturing such emotional weight.

Yes, these poems are true to the characters and speaker on the page. For example, in Laux’s poem “THE IDEA OF HOUSEWORK,” she takes the banal activity of cleaning, of doing domestic chores and she renders this experience into the universal question of what’s the point. Laux’s poems become sort of facts of themselves, they can be seen as testaments of fully experienced realities.

Laux successfully poetizes exotic events worth preserving. The poem titled “MORNING SONG” shows the fresh glimpse of what a “sleep-repaired morning” entails, along with the subjective perception that is shown perfect for its causality, forged with aligned imagery: “that for each of use there is/ some small sound like an unseen bird or/ a red bike grinding along the gravel path/ that could wake us, and take us home.” Laux’s poems contain the most incredible imagery.

Some lines that I enjoyed:

“Why should the things of this world/ shine so? Tell me if you know.”

“This walk in the park is no/ walk in the park.”

“Even sinus infections and rusty rake tines sunk/ in rank earth near the shed.  Mushroom spores.”

“I never wondered. I read. Dark signs/ that crawled toward the edge of the page.”

“Go on, he beseeches, Get going, but the lone elk/ stands her ground, their noses less than a yard apart./ One stubborn creature staring down another./ This is how I know the marriage will last.”

You can read Laux’s poem On The Edge in s[r] Issue 8.

Guest Post, David Roberts: One True Sentence

David Roberts

Writing

When I begin writing, I usually start with a sentence.

Every now and then, I’ll be sitting at work, driving to or from school, spending time with my daughter, etc. etc., and suddenly, this small little flash of an idea jolts into my brain. Constantly nagging at me. Gnawing away at my every thought.

Suddenly, I find myself daydreaming, pushing out other, more pressing matters to focus on this one idea. It forms, shapes itself in my brain, until I get to a point where I feel like I’ve got the germ of a neat idea. A sentence to start a rush of words and phrases.

But then I sit on it. Call it laziness, call it procrastination, call it whatever, but most of the time when I have this idea trying to burst out from the edges of my brain, I reel it back in, try to control it.

I tell my sentence to calm down. This can wait. Please, I’m trying to watch Frasier reruns on Netflix with my girlfriend.

“Hey. Hey. HEY!” it shouts, waiting for the moment that I will relent to its demands and allow it to escape from my mind and onto the page.

Bedtime rolls around. The lights are off. My girlfriend is asleep next to me, my daughter is asleep in the room across from me. I’m wide awake, staring at the ceiling, waiting for this sentence to shut up and let me get some much needed shut-eye.

Finally, at eleven-thirty at night, I give in. I tell my girlfriend that I can’t sleep, and I’m going to go write. “Mrrmph,” she replies, half-aware of my affliction.

I plop myself in front of my computer, and I pound away at the keys. I start with the one sentence. It’s so excited to get out that it begins another, and another. I’m on a roll here, the ideas flowing out like water, the mere thought of sleep is the furthest thing from my mind.

The clock reads 2:53. I’ve got my thoughts on the page. I’m about to pass out from exhaustion. Edits will come later. For now, sleep. My sentence thanks me for freeing it before floating away.

Hemingway once said, ”All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” There’s really nothing “truer” than this. All you need is one sentence to spark a flow of ideas that you never thought were possible before. But you have to put that sentence down, and you have to follow through with it. Otherwise, it’ll keep eating away at you, until it decides it’s bored and goes and bothers someone else.

Hell, this entire post was started because of that one, tiny little bit of inspiration at the start of this whole thing. You don’t know where the words will take you until you let them, and the only way you can do that is by starting at the beginning. Because that one sentence can take you anywhere you need to go.

So, thank you, sentence. You stupid, nagging, bossy little sentence.

Guest Post, Heather Jovanelli: Shrinking House

Heather Jovanelli

I came across an elderly man at the local sandwich store. He had swollen ankles and thin gray hair. His skin was white like paper, with the occasional splotch on his face. I made eye contact with him and smiled somewhat kindly, motioning for him to come sit at my table. He didn’t smile but nodded and came over. I asked him if he lived around here, and he said he lived off of MacArthur Boulevard, near the cross section of High Street. I knew this area well. I took casual carpool every day at that corner, and had been to a dinner recently at a house just down the street. Anyways, I asked the elderly man what his name was. He said “Harold” and I introduced myself. He asked me what I did, and I told him I worked with mentally disabled children at a school in the hills. He could tell I hated it. I explained to him it wasn’t the children who bothered me, but the administration and the way the teachers were treated. Regardless, Harold listened. He told me he enjoyed taking photographs and had taken up his own venture into landscape and garden photography after he retired. Being a painter myself, I was interested in seeing his photographs. He invited me to visit and have coffee at his house in a neighborhood known as Maxwell Park the following weekend. I agreed haphazardly, but was pretty sure about being there.

I arrived at Harold’s house on Saturday, and his house was a large white New England-style colonial appearing out of place within a row of Spanish-style, one-story houses lining the street. Because it was late rain season when I first saw the house, the small front yard was muddy with puddles and soaked grass. The house met tall fir trees on its left, and to its right was a small patch of grass sloping down to a ravine. Harold knew what time I was arriving and walked out a door near the back. Jade plants were scattered to the left and right of the dirt driveway. The back porch was where Harold usually entered the house, it seemed, so he gestured with his hand to follow him in. We went inside and, while in the kitchen, he showed me some photographs he had taken on the walls. They were portrait-sized photographs of dried flowers, in sepia and dark violet. One particularly stuck out to me. It was of a dried jasmine and wild rose bouquet. They had been framed by wood panels which were starting to lose its varnish. The light in the room was too dull to make the photograph have any bright character, which I liked. While I was roaming around the corridor of photographs, I opened up a door that led to the closet in the kitchen. The door was dressed in an old coat of paint.  On the side of the door, markings had been scrawled. Upon closer examination, I noticed they were markings that denoted the height of Harold. The first marking said “6’2 / 3-15-1971” and the one right below it said “6’0  / 8-14-1976”; upon further looking, I noticed how the scrawl continued to descend down in date until there were no more markings. It stopped somewhere around 5’6”.

I glanced over at him and noticed he was looking out his living room window towards his garden. Something about the appearance of his self cast against the glass struck me peculiarly. The longer he stood there the more apparent something became. His body was vacant from the living room. His reflection, which had been faint before began to color in more deeply. His skin became pink in the face, his hair a darker, but still grey, grey. Around his shoulder glowed a green line, which seemed to trace the rows of hedges outside in the driveway. His ear began taking on the contour of the lilies hanging outside, which appeared just ready to drop. It was then that I realized he was no longer measurable in terms of feet and inches, but to where his body ended and other forms began.

 

Guest Post, Jim Daniels: Poetry Hickie

Jim Daniels

Jim DanielsI am currently working on my fourth screenplay—wait, wait, I’m not going to try and sell it to you. Everybody’s got a screenplay in the freezer these days, to protect it from fire. The house can burn down, but they’ll be rich once they sell that screenplay.

My screenplays result in no-budget independent films with odd lengths like 38 minutes or 64 minutes. Our movies are like scavenger hunts where the prize is going into debt.  When I wrote the first one, “No Pets,” back in 1994, an adaptation of my own title short story from my first collection (book still available!), I thought that film could maybe be a gateway drug to poetry sales.

Yeah, I know, that’s pretty naïve, looking back on it. While I’ve continued to write screenplays, I do so with the full knowledge—no, certainty—that these little films will result in zero additional sales of my books of poetry and fiction.

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I wonder how many copies celebrity poets like Jewel, Leonard Nimoy, Suzanne Somers, John Boy Thomas, Jimmy Stewart sold. Maybe I don’t want to know.

We sold out the “world premiere” of “No Pets” at the Fulton Theater (now the Byham) in downtown Pittsburgh, seating capacity 1300, at $10 a ticket (including reception with food, live music, and many cookies cooked by director Tony Buba’s aunts and cousins), I stood in front of the theater under the marquee and said to Tony, “If this was a poetry reading and we were handing out $10 bills instead of taking them, we still wouldn’t be able to fill this place.”

I asked my poetry publisher then, the University of Pittsburgh Press, to set up a table at the reception to sell my latest book, M-80. I believe we sold zero copies, though someone might have felt sorry for me and purchased one before the end of the night. 1300 people who came out to see a movie, and none of them curious about the poetry of the guy who penned the script? Hmmph.

As this, and later films, “Dumpster” and Mr. Pleasant,” made the rounds of minor film festivals, I took fewer and fewer books with me until I stopped taking them all together.

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Last summer, my wife Kristin and I were in Montreal, staying at a B&B on the outskirts of the city near a lovely park when we noticed as twilight descended that people were beginning to gather near a small outdoor theater. It was free movie night in the park! We entered, following the flow of the crowd. Of course, the program was in French, so I wondered if I was misreading it—it said something about a poet reading before the movie.

Sure enough, a very polite older man walked out onto the stage in a flowing white robe to polite applause and read about a half dozen poems. I heard a line that I translated as “the bowling ball of death,” but I suspect I was wrong.  He didn’t look like a bowler.  He exited the stage to the same level of polite applause, then they turned out the light on the stage and started the film, a gripping story of a civil war in some faraway land.

How cool is that, I thought. Maybe we should start having poetry readings before films in the U. S. of A. A park near our home in Pittsburgh shows films on the hillside during the summer. They often have a local rock band play until it gets dark and the film starts. But somehow poetry doesn’t seem to go with Frisbees and dogs. The old hippies who seem to appear at every free outdoor concert in Pittsburgh might have trouble dancing to most poems, despite how rhythmically we read them, despite when we sweep up our voices at the ends of lines in the patented poetry voice.

Maybe it’s a Canadian thing.

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I think I’m trying to write about my frustrations with the limited poetry audience in this country. I know, I know, some people like it small, but I’m not one of them. I’m still stewing over my mother-in-law’s recent comment that she likes my new book better than the last one because she didn’t understand that one at all. That’s what I get for trying to be “experimental” in my fifties. I want her to understand my writing, despite her being my mother-in-law and all.

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Ask a friend, “Hey, you wanna go to the movies?”

Friend: “Sure.”

Ask that same friend, “Hey, you wanna go hear a poetry reading?”

 See the look your friend just gave you. Your friend doesn’t have to say a word with a look like that. If it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, this picture might be worth a thousand and one.

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I love movies, and I love getting my words up there on the BIG SCREEN spoken by people much more talented than me in speaking. I believe we call them actors. I love sitting in the dark. I think more poetry readings should be held in the dark. Wouldn’t it be great to make out in the back of a dark room while someone is up front reading poetry?

“Oh, this hickie? I got it in the back row at the poetry reading the other night.”

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The problem is that I have a permanent poetry hickie.

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We can’t all be polite Canadians. When I lived in Detroit, we used to drive across the border—over the bridge or through the tunnel—just to meet some polite people and exchange pleasantries with customs inspectors about our Canadian plans.

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Everyone’s a critic. At the sold-out Byham nee Fulton, one of my university colleagues came up and said, “Nice crowd.” Not nice script, or nice film, not great dialogue, memorable characters, not four stars or even three. “Nice crowd.” It’s now a catch-phrase with my wife when we’ve attended some dull event that we need to be polite about.

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Canada has the best national anthem. I used to sing it as a lullaby to my children when they were younger. I even looked up the words so I could sing the whole thing. If you run into me on the street, ask me to sing “O Canada,” and I will, at the drop of a hat, at the drop of a coin, and, once I start, it will get so quiet that you can hear that hat or that coin drop. In the distance, dogs will begin to howl. And you will say, “Great crowd.” And I’ll say “The bowling ball of death.” And you will say, “Is that a hickie on your neck.” And I will say, “Wanna buy a copy of my new book of poems?” And you’ll say, “I’ve got a movie to catch.”

Roll the credits.

s[r] Goodreads #FridayReads

Superstition Review

We hope you enjoy this recent book review from our Goodreads page. S[R]’s own Julie Matsen read My Life as a Boy: A Woman’s Story by Kim Chernin, and had this to say:

My Life as a BoyBoys, in a patriarchal society like the Western world, are conditioned to act a certain way in certain situations. As are girls, as are men, as are women. What happens when a person molts their gender to become something new?

With this concept in mind, we are introduced to Kim Chernin, a born woman who is becoming a born-again boy. To the chagrin of her longtime husband Max, Kim uses her budding relationship with Hadamar, a stunning woman, to facilitate her metamorphosis.

Women here seem to be damsels who go from distress to distress, from rescuer to rescuer. Boys, on the other hand, are impetuous rogues who can pursue whom they please without too much reprisal or reprimand. (Oddly, girls and men are almost never mentioned as personality types.) Boys and women are not simply genders to Chernin, but archetypes, colored bits of glass that shift in the kaleidoscope of what it means to be in love.

Eloquent and open, Chernin gives us a modern reversal on Orlando for American readers.

You can read Chernin’s My First Year in the Country in s[r]’s Issue 6.