Month: September 2014

The Lightning Room with Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

August author (and august author) Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson talks about pregnancy , palimpsests, and her story, “A Modern Girl’s Guide to Childbirth.”

 

Going by the title of the piece, I expected “A Modern Girl’s Guide to Childbirth” to be a lot snarkier, since most guides titled similarly are so breezy, pragmatic, and of the moment. (Guides to bible study, life, and personal finance were my first three Google hits.) How did you choose instead to place your girl’s modernity in conversation with history—ancient Greece, 17th-century China, 18th-century France, the view of the cemetery?

That juxtaposition between the present and the past came out of a writing prompt. I had the great fortune of being in Lee K. Abbott’s fiction group at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop back in 2013. The writer EJ Levy was Lee’s fellow that year and she challenged us to write a piece with a point of view that we rarely used. We discussed second person, and read short stories like Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie).” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] How to Catch a Coyote, by Christy Crutchfield

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coyote

Publishing Genius Press

208 pages, $14.95

 

Review by Michelle Dove

 

The multi-perspective novel isn’t new. Think Middlemarch and To the Lighthouse, for starters. But multi-perspective novels have populated the literary mainstream in recent years, some with shifts as complimentary to the text as Juno Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or as gimmicky as Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. For better or worse, multiple perspectives are marketable in today’s attention-waning culture, where the worse often sacrifices an engaging form for mediocre content. In truth, authentic narrative switches within a novel aren’t so easily pulled off. Perspectives must be similar enough in intent and content for cohesion, but also distinct enough to warrant their inclusion. And while I don’t know if Christy Crutchfield initially set out to write How to Catch a Coyote from multiple perspectives, I know that the narrative shifts in her debut novel feel as natural and necessary as the setting in Lafayette, North Carolina. And place in Crutchfield’s novel is crucial.

As the novel unfolds, I find myself in an increasingly recognizable world of my youth: a small American town where waitresses “rolled silver and complained about customers asking for their numbers,” where “two-thirds of these girls dye, highlight, Sun-In their hair,” where teenagers “pass around a water bottle filled with Aristocrat and orange juice” in the town square. Crutchfield brings this contemporary south to life in succinct, potent details, and the tone here is anything but judgmental. There’s a tenderness given to the scenery and townspeople, one so delicately rendered it’s evident Crutchfield knows both the trappings and blessings of rural life. The result is an authentic account of an American family whose trials of divorce, parenting, and sibling rivalry/affection surfaces through each family member’s narrative. The imagination of How to Catch a Coyote thus resides less in the characters or story, both of which ebb alongside a sadness that’s neither melodramatic nor escapable, and more in the story’s telling. Beyond the measured reveal of each character, it’s Crutchfield’s precision in language that enlivens this world and challenges us to look carefully, interrogate farther. Continue reading →

Virtual Book Tour: The Amado Women, by Désirée Zamorano

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Today is the third stop of Désirée Zamorano’s virtual book tour celebrating her new novel. Mercy Amado has raised three girls, protecting them from their cheating father by leaving him. But Mercy’s love can only reach so far when her children are adults, as Sylvia, Celeste, and Nataly must make their own choices to fight or succumb, leave or return, to love or pay penance. When tragedy strikes in Sylvia’s life, Mercy, Celeste, and Nataly gather support her, but their familial love may not be enough for them to remain close as the secrets in their histories surface. Forgiveness may not be accepted. Fiercely independent, intelligent, they are The Amado Women.

 

Melanie Page: Did you at any time feel like the characters’ jobs defined who they are?

Désirée Zamorano: I certainly feel that their jobs are an expression of who they are, the pressures they face, and the dreams they hold. I particularly enjoy the contrast between Mercy’s teaching experience and that of Sylvia’s. So many people think, either because they’ve gone to school all their lives or that there are so many teachers, that teaching is an easy job. It is actually probably one of the hardest unsung ones, equivalent to parenting. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Truth About Everything, by Brianna Wiest

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truth

Thought Catalog

96 pages, $3.99

 

Review by Elisabeth Wilkes

 

Did you ever wonder what a philosopher’s blog would look like? Answer: Brianna Wiest’s book, The Truth About Everything. It sounds like a big claim to make, but Wiest delivers by focusing on the universal themes of everyday living. No, it does not gives the reader intricate details about every nook and cranny of existence. It does, however, talk about the hardships humans face no matter what class, race, or gender they may be. The main theme is suffering and how a person must explore pain for its transformative properties. Wiest writes about truths she has learned that are transferable to anyone. In this way she goes beyond the traditional motivational book by giving her readers insightful advice, but does not take the full step of making a “systematic” approach to self-improvement as a self-help book does. It resembles the philosophy discussions of old with its complexity and richness of ideas, but explains them in the straightforward language of blogging.

I found Brianna Wiest, and eventually this book, through Thought Catalog. Thought Catalog is the Buzzfeed of practical advice and features countless talented writers. Once I began to explore the website, I always found myself unconsciously clicking on Wiest’s posts. I enjoyed that her topics and her advice went beyond the “well, duh” statements I was used to reading from blogs. When I saw that she had a book and that it was under four dollars for the Kindle version, I was excited to give it a chance. It certainly did not disappoint. Continue reading →

Work: Surviving the Arts

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Exploring issues of sustainability in the arts.  

–by Scott Pinkmountain  

Practice

Part 1: Do

 

The most important thing is that you do. Everything will evolve from the doing. When you start, maybe there’s one question. It doesn’t have to be too big – an “Is there a god?” type thing. In fact, it’s better if it’s not too big, though of course it needs to be big enough. Open. Flexible. Most of all, genuine. You have to not know the answer, or sincerely believe you don’t. If you have one good question, it will generate others, but only if you do.

It’s also important that you not worry about doing well. Quality will suffer from overt desire. What will enable quality is the parallel development of two functional identity states. One is the generator, the maker, the improviser. The other is the critic, the editor, the composer. In order to achieve quality, they must be kept distinct. Their separation is what makes this path so difficult. But without the separation in place, you’ll either become paralyzed as a perfectionist, unable to release into the world, or you won’t be able to see anything through to the end because you’ll become over-enamored with the generative process. Continue reading →

Behind The Fictive Veil: An Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz

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–Interview by Brian Kornell

 

Wendy C. Ortiz’s story “Interiors” appeared in April 2012 issue of PANK. She is the author of Excavation, a recently released memoir from Future Tense Books, about family, secrets, sex, and coming to terms with her queer identity. It is a book that spoke to me in a way that very few books have before. Ortiz writes with emotional frankness about difficult subjects, while maintaining the lyric beauty of the world around her. I had the opportunity to talk to her about the book and the process of writing it.

 

Brian Kornell: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about stories that demand to be told or ones, especially when it’s memoir, that a writer cannot ignore despite their best efforts to do so. Was this book like that for you? Did you have any hesitation in writing it? If you did, how did you work past that to write it?

Wendy C. Ortiz: This book spent some time being ignored (I always imagined it sitting in a corner, sulking) but when I look back at this time, I recognize now that it was steeping. My hesitations have always been about how I might be perceived once the story was out. I got some practice when “Mix Tape” was published by The Nervous Breakdown last year and in the first 24 hours of it being on the web I went through physical reactions that were all about the hesitation. Then the physical reactions passed and I was fortunate to get good feedback on the piece and knew I was heading in the right direction. That was a good way of working past any recent hesitation I might have had. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] How I Went Red by Maggie Glover

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red

Carnegie Mellon Press

73 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Molly Sutton Kiefer

 

The narrator in How I Went Red by Maggie Glover is fierce and unafraid to break wide open, share her intimacies, her scuffed-up linoleum, her junk drawers, her bank bills.  This voice comes from the kind of friend you’d crack open a beer with at a late-night kitchen countertop, lean over and tell the secrets of your worst day.  This kind of honesty builds a kind of trust for the reader, a take-off-your-coat-and-stay-a-while feeling.

So much of How I Went Red is yearning towards a new start, another envisioning of the self.  The poem “In West Virginia” begins:  “Each morning was a fresh, blue breakdown.”  In “A 350-Pound Man Receives Liposuction on Channel 43,” we observe the gruesome surgical transformation of not only the observed but the observer, ending, “I / was inside / my own skin, upon another bed // of record loss, a home I / made myself of blow-back and skin, inside— / how many hands to make a bed?”  Even dreams can refresh the narrator; in “Poem for a Night Shift”:  “I fall back into the dream / where I am among the red mountains, / a purple storm flashing:  an indulgent ordeal / of color and noise.  I awake with the dull impression / that something has happened, somewhere, again—” And then Glover gives us the Amnesia sequence, poems about forgetting to remember again. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

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Handmaid

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
311 pages

 

Review by Corey Pentoney

 

 

When I first picked up A Handmaid’s Tale a few years ago—I know, I’m behind the times, here—I did so because it was a classic and had been recommended to me time and time again. As the familiar story goes, I fell in love with it, and have read it every year since, my already slightly ragged copy all the worse for wear for it.

The first time I read the book, the craft of Atwood’s writing was what kept me going, her ability to get into the head of her character, Offred, and stay glued there, is impeccable. With very little else to do as a woman in the Republic of Gilead, Offred spends much of her time scrutinizing every detail of her surroundings and remembering what she can of the past. “A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the center of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place a in a face where the eye has been taken out.” So she describes her living quarters with Fred, from whom she takes her name. Offred’s attention to detail is second to none, and the way she fleshes out the world for the reader keeps you hooked from page to page. Continue reading →