Guest Post, Michael Berberich: Ernie and Abe

America loves Hemingway. I love Hemingway. But I cannot write like Hemingway. When I try to write like Hemingway, my words ring with all the hollowness of a tin gong.

Michael BerberichThe voices that pulse through my literary being are the voices of the American West. They are the voices that celebrate tall tales and oral traditions. They are voices rural, voices plural, voices discursive, meandering, exploratory. They are voices at play, voices that sing. Think of the boisterous sounds at a Thanksgiving dinner table where tales are told, interjections are bold, and laughter abounds. Place names echo Español. Libations flow and, best of all, the night might run til the first cock crows. No one’s in a hurry. Why should they be? Efficiency is not the name of the game. The raconteur reigns.

I was once in a serious relationship where everything seemed to be going right yet ultimately fell apart. There was no centripetal hold. The feeble best I could offer about the breakup to friends who cared for us both was to say that she loved forests, I loved deserts. That worked. It was art, or at least artful. While the words function at a literal level, the force and weight of their meaning loom beneath the surface. The image appeals to our experiences more so than to our logic.

Please read these words aloud: “What is it the wind seeks, sweeping among the leaves, prowling round and round this house, knocking at the doors and wailing in the shutters? O Charity! Every frozen morning for awhile in winter you had a thin little winter moon slung like a slice of a silver Rocky Ford cantaloupe over the sawmill; and then I would go out to the well in the yard and snap off the silver thorns of ice from the pump muzzle and jack up the morning water and stand and look over across the fairy fields at you where you lay like a storybook town, and know that on all the little wooden roofs of houses there was a delicate trail of lacelike rime on the shingles. Then all the chickens and guineas of Charity would be crowing and calling and all the cattle lowing, and the Charity dogs barking (all with a sound that china animals might make if they could crow or call or low), and in that crystal and moonhaunted moment I would stand, dazzling in the first sunray of morning, and wonder what would ever happen to us all.”

The passage opens the second chapter of Texas writer William Goyen’s lyrical novel The House of Breath. The novel, with prose that sings, stands as an exemplar of American belles lettres. Hemingway this ain’t. Often praised by his contemporaries yet overlooked by the broad public, Goyen is mostly forgotten now. He shouldn’t be. His writing, redolent of uniquely American voices, stands outside the mainstream of American prose, the tonal center of which still remains in what Perry Miller once labeled “the Puritan plain style.” In other words say it straight, say it true, and find beauty in simplicity. At its most eloquent best, we get Abraham Lincoln.

Yet it is, as Goyen’s passage illustrates, a limited aesthetic. The admonishments of decades of eighth grade schoolmarms aside, we don’t all need to write like Ernie and Abe. There is a certain irony in the general exclusion of the discursive voices of the oral traditions. Voices quintessentially American find themselves outside of the plain style tonal center of American literature. To shift metaphors, there have been occasional cracks in the concrete, places where orality and discursiveness poke through, a nimble weed here and there sets root, takes hold, and pushes apart a jagged break in the sidewalk. Twain and Whitman come first to mind as writers who have written discursively (Roughing It, anyone?) and celebrated the vernacular. Yet even Twain gets nudged to the margin as a “regional” writer, i.e., as one writing in a voice that comes from those places (“out West”) never quite reached by the Puritans.

So where today are those whose taproots push apart the sidewalks? Some writers that accomplish this today are actually discoveries from the neglected past, e.g., Zora Neale Hurston. Others are recognized as great writers of voice. Sandra Cisneros, for example, is that skinny tree who displaced concrete to grow tall and sturdy. Her wonderfully plotless (wonderful because it is plotless) House on Mango Street carries itself as a tour-de-force of voice. Listen: “But my mother’s hair, my mother’s hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama’s hair that smells like bread.”

Cisneros’ lilting rhythms find kinship in Goyen. Her aesthetic is the aesthetic of Mexican flower pots lining the porch, pots adorned with stylized birds in shiny bold primary colors. No plain style here!

I like to count myself as writing against the predominant tradition as well. My successes as a writer have been modestly steady, if limited. I attribute that more to teaching 5 and 6 classes per semester for 30 years than to the fact that I write against a 400-year-deep current of tradition. But writing against tradition does make demands of readers accustomed to the literary comfort food of reading within a predominant tradition and that fact alone will limit publication. The feeble best I can offer in explanation of that condition is to say that in a culture of readers that love dense forests, I write from a love of sere deserts. It’s a much smaller audience.

Guest Blog Post, Jacob Appel: Literary Love: Where the Magnet Meets the Metal

Jacob M AppelMy favorite moment in western literature occurs several hundred miles south of Moscow, on Constantin Levin’s country estate at Pokrovsky, during the heyday of the Tsars:  Celebrated intellectual Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev, Levin’s half-brother, has agreed to go mushroom picking with an orphaned young woman, Varenka, who has befriended Levin’s wife. Everyone in the household anticipates that Koznyshev will make a marriage proposal during the excursion—including Varenka and Koznyshev themselves. In fact, Varenka’s suitor has already rehearsed his proposal in his head as he approaches her: “Vavara Andreyevna, when I was very young, I formed for myself an ideal of the woman whom I should love and whom I should be happy to call my wife. I have lived a long life, and now for the first time I find in you all that I was seeking. I love you and I offer you my hand.” What happens, instead, proves one of the most heart-shattering in the Tolstoy canon, far more so than when Anna jumps onto the railroad tracks:

 “They proceeded a few steps in silence. Varenka saw that he wanted to speak; she suspected what he had in mind, and felt stifled with the emotions of joy and terror.  They had now gone so far from the rest that no one could have heard them, yet he had not opened his mouth to speak.  Varenka would have done better not to say a word. After a silence it would have been easier to say what they wanted to say than after any casual words. But against her own will, as it were unexpectedly, Varenka broke out: — “And so you did not find any. But there are never so many mushrooms in the woods as along the edge.”

Koznyshev finds himself distracted by her exclamation. He replies with a remark about mushrooms, rather than about marriage, and the moment is lost forever. Rather than a happy and devoted couple, the two part as disappointed acquaintances.

This “mushroom moment” is not unfamiliar to the twenty-first century. Except for the rare few of us who have had the good fortune to marry our high school sweethearts and to live in perpetual nuptial bliss, most mortals have experienced our share of romances that weren’t, but that almost were. Love is not a matter of timing or chemistry, although both can help grease the gears of affection and lust; principally, love is a matter of decision and sheer will-power.  Daisy chooses Tom Buchanan over Gatsby. Madeline Fox storms out on Martin Arrowsmith while Leora Tozer embraces his faults.  A few “mushroom moments” do turn out to be reversible: Elizabeth Bennett rejects Darcy’s first proposal and is fortunate enough to receive a second offer. Many more such moments are like the fleeting connection between Koznyshev and Varenka—or between me and an attractive-yet-childless co-worker who once asked me to have a baby with her, then changed her mind as soon as I agreed—are carved forever in the stone of lost opportunity. In life, of course, all relationships do not actually stem from “mushroom moments” gone right. Plenty of couples fall in love as Hemingway says they go bankrupt: first gradually and then suddenly. In literature, however, all great loves do arise from mushroom magic.

Every young child who has ever held a magnet recognizes that strange, miraculous instant when a metal object—a nail or a paperclip or a thimble—first approaches close enough to exert magnetic tension. There is a small—possibly infinitely small—space where the metal can go either way:  one nanometer nearer and it will be drawn to the magnet, one farther away and it will fall limp to the ground. It is that transitional moment when the solution in the refrigerator is no longer colored water but not yet Jell-O, that spark of dawn that is neither darkness nor day. Relationships, in literature, require such a moment: A possibility that love may yet either triumph or fail. That absolutely nothing is certain.

In my introductory writing classes, more than half of my students are usually crafting some variety of love story. This pleases me greatly: While not all love stories are inherently interesting, many of life’s most interesting stories are love stories. I would much rather read about how Clyde Griffiths’ yearning for Sondra Finchey leads him to murder, or of the feral passion between Laurent LeClaire and Thérèse Raquin, or even an inept account of a student’s first date, than about corporate scandals or deer hunting brothers or suicidal truck drivers seeking employment. Unfortunately, the pitfall that traps many a well-intentioned novice is the creation of lovers whose fates are inevitable. In one version of this narrative, a woman finds herself in a relationship with a man so detached or abusive or treacherous that separation appears a foregone conclusion; often, we cannot figure out why she married Mr. Wrong in the first place. In the other version, a woman finds herself seduced by a man of great wit and charm and generosity, who also happens to be a thoracic surgeon and a part-time Italian film star, and she falls madly in love with him and then announces to the reader that she is glad she waited for Mr. Right. Both of those stories grow tiresome rather quickly. The key to writing relationships is that they must remain ambiguous up to the point of consummation.  Mr. Wrong needs enough going for him to keep us uncertain of his fate until the very moment the protagonist walks out on him—or until, in a moment of reconsideration, motivated by loneliness or nostalgia or pity, she decides to stay. Mr. Right demands sufficient shortcomings to leave us wondering whether the protagonist will say “I do” until the instant that she does.

The best dating wisdom I have ever received came from a friend who thought of all romantic interactions through fishing metaphors. Get your hook in, he urged—and then run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. While I am not sure those are words to live by, and I have not implemented them in my personal life, they offer as surefire method of holding a literary reader’s attention. In other words, raise the prospect of love…and then keep us waiting, page after page, for the payoff. (Tolstoy, a man who managed to sire thirteen children and yet to keep Varenka and Koznyshev apart—albeit only nanometers apart—may have mastered this skill both personally and professionally.) My goal as a writer is to keep the metal in that liminal band for as long as possible before it is swallowed by the inexorable force of magnetism.

Meet the Review Crew: Caitlin Demo

Each week we will be featuring one of our many talented interns here at Superstition Review.

Caitlin Demo is a Nonfiction editor at Superstition Review and a senior at Arizona State University. She will be graduating in May with a major in Creative Writing (with a specialization in Fiction) and two minors in French and Political Science. She is hoping to be accepted into the MFA program at Arizona State and then to escape the heat of Arizona summers.

Caitlin has lived most of her life in Arizona, but the allure of big city life has been calling her name. Living in the beautiful San Francisco bay or the bustling streets of New York City has been a constant dream of hers. After school, Caitlin is packing her bags and plans to become a well-seasoned traveler, especially abroad.

Caitlin’s intimacy with literary magazines and the world of short fiction has been instructed both at Arizona State and particularly at Superstition Review. She has limited knowledge about individual magazines, but through these two avenues she has come to realize that it is a wide and ever-expanding field. Her interest in writing is mainly focused around prose, but in reading she is drawn to flash fiction and poetry.

If she had to live the rest of her life with only a handful of books, she would need Augusten Burroughs’ memoirs, Jane Austen’s collected works, Hemingway’s short stories, Fitzgerald’s novels and Allen Ginsberg’s poetry.

This is her first semester with Superstition Review, but she looks forward to plunging further into the literary publishing world. She’ll be the girl in high heels.