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Author Interview with Melissa Ragsly of We Know This Will All Disappear

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Order WE KNOW THIS WILL ALL DISAPPEAR HERE

PANK Team Member Emily McLaughlin sat down with our 2019 Fiction Contest Winner (as selected by Gabino Iglesias) and 2020 PANK Books Fiction Contest Judge Melissa Ragsly to discuss the incredible stories in her debut collection We Know This Will All Disappear.

Emily McLaughlin: A strange time to have your book come out . . . What has the book launch during a quarantine experience been like so far?

Melissa Ragsly: Honestly, I have nothing to compare it to, but it’s definitely felt restrained, happy to have it out in the world and a network of friends and writers to share it with. I don’t think it can replace some of the traditional elements of a book launch. A launch in quarantine might be less expensive, no traveling required, but I think it’s limiting in terms of who has access to a book. If you are promoting through your own social media, there is less chance of breaking through to someone new. I’ve done some virtual readings and some more are coming down the pike, but I’m also imagining next summer, I’d be able to do more in-person readings in bookstores and bars. The intimacy of what I write seems best experienced in dark rooms, not screens. Maybe it would be best if I recorded bits of stories in sound files instead of Zoom events. I’d rather you hear these stories in that context. It’s been a challenge to think creatively in any context as our lives have changed so much in the past few months. Adding to that pile by coming up with solutions to creatively market a small press book? It’s surreal.

EM: When you read “Bio Baby” for the book’s launch at AWP, does feel of another lifetime. That story is even more moving read aloud. Since then, the more time I have spent pouring over the sixteen stories here, the more I am floored by how perfectly crafted and polished each one is, how you pack so many exquisite details into short spaces, how each one performs the tricks only stories are capable of. I could bring each story into my creative writing class and hold up as an example to students: “this is how you write a short story” and then point out, and this is how much work you can expect it to be. Can you walk us through your drafting and revision process, maybe how much time you spent on revising one story versus another?

MR: I’m not one of those people that writes a whole draft through knowing I need to go back and fix everything. I like avoiding the fixing. I start a story with an idea or an image, a feeling really, so I don’t really know what it’s about or where it’s going. I write a page, print it out, edit it for voice and in doing so, usually find the next beat. Write that, repeat until I get to the conclusion. For flash, sometimes, that conclusion or the point of it is hiding in the first draft, but I still try to coax it using the same process. Drafting feels very back and forth, like playing an accordion.

EM: And how do you decide that the story is complete, ready to send to journals?

It’s difficult to write a story and think it’s perfect and it being done is not the same as being perfect. So you just have to accept it’s done when it feels done. When I put it down and pick it up again and it still feels done. It can try to fool you into thinking it’s complete, fake you out a bit, or maybe that’s something that happens to me because I’m lazy and I just desperately want it to be over. You write it and then you have to sneak up on it again after a few days. It would terrify me to write straight through and then go back to the beginning and tackle all its mistakes from the first paragraph. I need to know some of that work is done so that when I am done with it, it’s ready to go out on submission. 

EM: I love so many of your lines. This one, in “Napkin of Death Metal” is amazing: “Sometimes just sitting in a bar makes men think girls are waiting for them to come. A girl is a frozen toy mouse marking time until a paw bats them across the floor.” This seems like the kind of line a writer gets in her head and thinks, I have to put this in a story. But maybe not?

MR: That line was added on the last pass through. To go back to the earlier question, how do you know when a story is ready to send—without that line it wasn’t ready. Sometimes a line can only come out once you know better what the story is about and you can either say it straight out, or you can try to allude to it. A line like that is almost for me as much as for a reader, I’m telling us both what it’s about.

I think that the only time I came up with a line first before the story was the opening line of Bio-Baby. “On the morning of my abortion I watched a Teen Mom 2 marathon.” That was going to be a completely different story. More essayistic, more personal and it turned out the complete opposite. But I kept the line.

EM: Each story seems to do its own thing, invent its own way of how it’s going to tell the story, and compiled together, this gives the collection a sense of unpredictability, excitement. Yet there’s a feeling of stability reading them, in that you know each one is going to deliver some kind of feeling of peace. How did you assemble the stories, or envision the structure for the book?

MR: In ordering the collection, I went with intuition, all feel, but the specific feeling I tried to create was something like a wave, so in and of itself, something peaceful, yet unpredictable; delightful, yet destructive. Something whose strength can surprise you. Having both longer stories and flashes, you just want the pattern of them to make sense. You want some pieces to feel like a breath, some like an anchor. A table of contents is like this puzzle you get to play with, shuffle around the order. I did that until I felt I’d translated that feeling of tides.

EM: The majority of the collection uses first person narration versus the five stories told in third. Did you ever feel pressure to write in third for variety’s sake? Does one seem more natural to you than the other, and what do you notice changes about the story when you write about the character in third? For example, in “No One’s Watching” why did you ultimately decide to approach the character from third, not first, as opposed to a story such as “Bio Baby?”

MR: I can full-throatedly say I prefer first person. Writing it and reading it. I want the intimacy of it. When I hear criticism of it, that its navel gazing or self-indulgent, I don’t get that at all because it’s like criticism of first person seems to come from people thinking it’s someone talking to themselves in their own head when to me it’s someone talking to someone else, it’s like a one-on-one confession. It feels like the only way a writer and a reader can bond. I’m also just a very one-on-one person. Third person feels so group to me. Like no one is being honest here, it feels polite, like as if not to offend. I tend to think of third as more appropriate for longer, more traditional stories, almost as a default.  

“No One’s Watching” was very different on the first draft. The story as it is now was the flashback in a longer story, so third made it feel distant from the rest of the story. I kept that, I think, because the story itself, emotionally deals with distance that isn’t quite understood by the characters yet. It’s almost like an origin story, maybe you’ll find that character again later in a first person story dealing with the ramifications of those feeling and events in this one.

EM: All of your stories have these meditative poetic lines buried in the paragraphs, as if you or the characters are humble, trying to hide them.  Just one example, I could pull so many out as examples: “I wanted to know I had a place that I wouldn’t have to exist for anyone but myself.” Is this intentional to not draw attention to the writing? Does more self-congratulatory writing bother you?

MR: I think if you reveal something vulnerable, or a truth that you realize, you do it in a non-calculated way. Your body just opens up to the truth and it’s a portal that can slam shut quickly. Most people stumble on the truth and then can turn their backs to it without realizing it or wanting to, because it appears randomly in a moment. It makes sense to have those moments appear and then the characters move on. It’s not conscious on a writer level, but more on a character level. I think I write about the types of person that thinks this way. Like, there it is, I see it, and I’m going to blink and it might not be there when I look again.

EM: That’s a very nice way to put that. So what was the first story you wrote here?

MR: “Tattoo”. That was started probably in 2014? 2015? And then most of the longer short stories after that. In the last year, it’s been mostly flash. Flash really opened me up in a way longer stories didn’t. They feel rule-less or more freeing in their containment.

EM: Is there a story you feel closest to?

MR: It changes. At the moment, I feel a connection to “Napkin of Death Metal” and “All You’ve Heard is True.” It goes back to the idea of flash. I think there’s so much of me in both of them and if I tried to write these as longer pieces, they would feel diluted. I feel like these are four-dimensional. I like to joke my favorite is writing in the fourth person and I think this is what I mean. I think!

EM: So obviously you are writing a novel in fourth person.

MR: I am writing a novel and I have been for many years and I haven’t quite cracked how to do it. I know people have opinions on how to do it. And many people have done it, so I know it’s possible. But I haven’t yet!

EM: How do you approach keeping your character’s level of perception of her world consistent in a novel versus in a story? (to clarify: do you struggle with interiority in the form of novel versus in the story?)

MR: I actually started writing this novel in third person and it never quite worked. I switched to first but then it wasn’t working then because it was about more than one person, so I found the groove using several different POVs. And while I have not completed this one, of course I have already started formulating the next and I also am thinking of it as several different POVs. I feel comfortable with telling the story that way. Multiple POVs feels like you’re telling an oral history and I’m obsessed with them. Like reading a documentary. And yes, I do think that is also a way for me to keep handle on the character’s interiority, because I’m finding ways to use different character’s thoughts and happenings as companions and comparisons to others. In a way, it feels a little like trying to formulate that collection order. Finding ways for the story as a whole to feel like teeth on a zipper gnashing together. And again, it’s not always about interiority for me, so much as the conversation between the character/writer and the reader. The characters are not talking to themselves so it’s more like an open interiority. Like the roof’s off the room.

As far as being productive, lock-down with children has made me feel like my hands are tied. But the goal is to have it finished this year. 

EM: That’s ambitious — even for a writer not locked down with children!

I was trying to figure out how you wove such suspense into the story “Lilith,” when we already know the ending at the start – Lilith is not coming back. Can you tell me your secret? When writing this one, did you find yourself not wanting to conform to tropes about missing women? Is this why the character thinks in terms of time tables, lists of facts, even math equations here?

MR: I wanted there to be an element of logic as a way of containing your feelings. Some people don’t know how to feel. But they do anyway, so what are ways that feeling emerge? I was obsessed with thinking about those crime solving brainstorm boards. Pictures of people and places connected by strings. I wanted to play with how logic and feelings can work together.

This story came together on one of those days where I just felt depressed and like I couldn’t think and I just felt like watching Dateline which is like a once a year, falling into a depression, brain-clean. Just sit there and watch stories about murder and crime and how people figure out these puzzles. I saw one about a missing woman. She was never found. It’s a pretty famous one, although I can’t remember her name. You didn’t get the benefit of the arrest at the end. A question you don’t get the answer to. It was frustrating for me, sitting there depressed on the couch, not knowing what happened to her. How is it going to feel for someone who is actually invested. I just wanted to try to understand how that felt. I felt like there were so many questions within my family that were never answered. Or answered much later. So I also wanted to think about how sometimes you can’t have an answer, you can’t solve something and so how do you move on? Do you make up an answer and accept it or do you keep trying to solve it? Or do you just get stuck?

EM: Do you want to tell us about the book’s cover and your vision for how this melancholy image correlates to your title?

MR: The cover is a picture I took that is actually larger. You don’t get to see the whole image and the whole one is actually more hopeful. That hooded man — that’s my husband and that’s a park in our town and one of our kids was in the swing. So, the sort of gloomy hood of death is next to a kid in the swing, but turned away. So it’s actually kind of funny.

The black and white, the hunch, yes, it’s melancholy as I think my stories are, but I do think that the title also reflects an acceptance. Everything will disappear in time, but that means the bad things too. Any pain or crisis, lockdown. All that will be over at some point. The effects of all the things we live through, good or bad, remain. That’s what stories feel like—the stubborn invisible.

EM: How did you maintain confidence or stop yourself from succumbing to self-doubt when working on this project, or maybe your next project? Any special powers you tap into in order to dig your feet in?

MR: I don’t have self-doubt about my ability, but I am so lazy when it comes to time and I’m absolutely a late bloomer so it doesn’t bother me to take a long time to get a project done. I feel like if it’s worthy and meant to be in the world, I will finish it.

Any writer’s special power is reading. But I’m a bumble bee reader. Maybe because my name means “honey bee” or I feel like I’m missing out if I don’t, I have to be reading like 15 books at once. The best thing is to have a big pile of them and read 10 pages in each until you cycle thorough and start over again. It’s kind of like flipping through channels. I look for similarities and connections and see if the different books speak to each other in some way. Yesterday, 2 things I read mentioned Zeno’s Paradox. I’d never heard of it before and then twice in one day, Zeno and his philosophies come into my hands. Reading and thinking give me the confidence to write because I want to be that brain exercise for someone else. Just a link in the chain.

ORDER WE KNOW THIS WILL ALL DISAPPEAR HERE

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Melissa Ragsly is a writer living in the Hudson Valley. Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best Small Fictions, Iowa Review, Hobart, and other journals. More can be found at melissaragsly.com.

“Instead of closing venues, we wanted to open up new windows”: An Interview with Tommaso Cartia and Daniela Pavan, co-founders of Creative Pois-on

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INTERVIEW BY HAYDEN BERGMAN

#CreativityWillSaveUs is the latest project from the New York-based storytelling platform Creative Pois-On, bringing together artists from around the world to reflect on art and creative practice during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Among the contributors are actors, musicians, visual artists, songwriters, dancers, digital artists, and more. The project is manifested in social media, podcasts, and video form, the last of which is a particularly affecting anthology series in which artists reflect, encourage, and offer performances in their various disciplines.

Hayden Bergman (HB): Marco Calvani made an interesting point in Episode 2 about how the pandemic seemed to force us all to be more aware of our (the) present, and unable or unwilling to imagine the future or our future selves. To what extent did your experience of pandemic-time figure into this project?

Tommaso Cartia (TC): When the pandemic hit, we at Creative Pois-On, were working on a series of our Podcast Show entitled “On Stage,” exploring the performing arts through interviews with actors, writers, directors, and producers, like for example, actress and singer Kayla Davion who plays Tina Turner in “Tina: The Musical” on Broadway. During that month the theaters shut down completely because the COVID-19 started becoming a realistic threat. So we thought that we should have done something concrete for the global community of artists who all of a sudden saw their shows cancelled and their livelihoods in danger. Instead of closing venues, we wanted to open up new windows, even though just virtual ones, to these artists and human beings, thinking that these people truly are always significant thermometers of the times we are living in. Our mission as a storytelling platform and multimedia productions boutique is to make the powers of creativity and imagination available to all of us once again, through the enchanting channel of storytelling. And so we thought to explore how creativity can actually help us navigate these very challenging times by asking prominent figures from the world of art, culture, and entertainment to join their voice in support of our global community of artists who are seeing all of their venues temporarily shutting down to face the pandemic emergency. All together they raise a voice that could break through these walls of isolation sending everybody a positive message that #CreativityWillSaveUs and #TheShowWillGoOn, and that we can spend this time making the most out of our creative powers.

Daniela Pavan (DP): The pandemic emergency generated an unprecedented scenario that forced all of us to stop for a while and reflect. This stop generated many changes in our lives that were completely unexpected and that left many of us disoriented about the future. #CreativityWillSaveUs at the beginning was thought and designed to give voice to artists who work in the theater industry, to share their talent as well as vision in a time where they had to stop working and had no ideas about how their future would have looked like. We received so many contributions that we decided to open up to artists from different disciplines. Listening to their contributions, I believe that I personally was inspired by all the artists who have been part of the project, mainly by two traits that I believe we should all think about: resilience and adaptability. These two traits appear to be very natural to many creative minds, and I believe are also the main traits that will help us all go through the post-pandemic time.

Tommaso Cartia

HB: COVID-19 caused much unrest and debate in the U.S. and abroad, and the murder of George Floyd even more so. I’m curious, what role does the idea of the nation play in this project? I’m thinking specifically of the phrase “imagine nations” that appears at the beginning of each episode, followed by, “imagine nations coming together.”

TC: We start from the central concept that art and creativity unify all people, genders, and nations. Also, we are both from Italian origins, living in a country, the U.S., a dream which we chased, believed in, and are still believing in. The states in America should be “united” by definition, and I know that in a way they still are despite any divisions. In our project #CreativityWillSaveUs as well as in all of our productions, we promote unity and togetherness always and we give voice to these feelings. We had the chance to unite in one format creatives from all over the world, Americans, Europeans, Italians, and their sentiment is a global one. When something as profoundly disruptive as a pandemic hits, we can’t help but think, even more strongly, that we are one single organism and we should work and live in unison to really navigate this situation as we should do in every circumstance in our life. #CreativityWillSaveUs brings imaginations and nations together. I want also to say thank you to our Editor, Author, Playwright, and contributor at Creative Pois-On, David James Parr, who came up with the clever tagline “Imagine nations, Imaginations.”

DP: In a moment where the whole world had to stop and where travel has been forbidden for a while, where governments asked people to stay home and to keep social distancing, #CreativityWillSaveUs shows how important the role of Creativity is in our lives, as a bridge-builder among nations and cultures. It doesn’t matter where you come from or what background you have, creativity connects people and opens up minds to explore ideas together. This to say that in a moment that is politically very complicated worldwide, in the U.S. in particular, considering also the elections next November, creativity can be a driver to connect people and to help our society evolve, following the examples of artists and their ability to adapt also to difficult times and unprecedented scenarios…this is also the meaning of the theory of evolution by Darwin, after all…it’s not the strongest or the quickest one who survives. It is the one who can adapt to change.

HB: The anthology came to mind when watching each episode — how did you come to choose these pieces from each contributor, and what factors did you consider when putting them together?

TC + DP: When we were brainstorming about the artists that we wanted to include in the project, we started from the ones that we’ve already had the chance to interview both on our Podcast Show and Storytelier – our editorial project. Our first reach contemplated NYC’s performing artists but then we soon felt that we wanted to enlarge our reach and circle the world with our episodes and explore all different types of creative disciplines. We wanted each episode to represent this diversity as much as possible, from the different nations or states where the artists were sheltering to the different disciplines, including visual arts, digital and media arts, dancers, singers, musicians, even make-up artists. This diversity was also one of the factors that grabbed the attention of the United Nations that contacted us to be part of their SDG Impact Awards – The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are a call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people live in a culture of peace and economic prosperity. Our artists as mentors are natural drivers who can help us redesign the world of tomorrow by letting us discover how powerful our creativity and imaginations are. To vote for us this is the link: https://www.sdgimpactawards.org/projects/creativitywillsaveus/?fbclid=IwAR0ccwBCVlI4ZDt5miRGpaeKIq-es2BkLGUIeNGz7rGmTwPZcxEJkrugiOs

HB: As Daniela mentioned, the artists in each episode exhibit incredible adaptability. In what ways have you seen their creative processes change, and what impact do you think those changes have on the creative product?

DP: Even though the quarantine has had a very strong impact on many of us, the majority of the artists who contributed to our project let their creative juices flow no matter what. All of them were worried about the future of live performances, but no matter what, they shared their talents and thoughts with us. Quarantine gave them time to think and to create, a great opportunity to find new ways to express themselves and new stories and perspectives. A big lesson for all of us. A lot of people found themselves suddenly unemployed during the past months or saw their income drop because of the COVID-19, and many of them reacted by watching TV all day and just feeling depressed. The difference is in the attitude you have while facing difficulties. Artists didn’t give up their creativity, they kept believing in it and in their creative sparks and gave it the chance to flow through their artworks. This has been the same for painters and actors, for musicians and dancers, for writers and illustrators. This is a huge lesson about resilience and I believe that we will have a lot of artistic output to explore soon.

Daniela Pavan

HB: What’s your plan for the project as we all come out of quarantine? 

TC: We just published Episode 10 of #CreativityWillSaveUS. That’s amazing thinking that at the beginning of this journey we thought we had material for just a couple of episodes. We really want to thank all of the artists who believed in this project and trusted us to be the recipient of their emotions during this harsh lockdown. That’s why we decided to pay tribute to all of them in the coda of Episode 10 with a special slideshow dedicated to their contribution. Also, being that June is Pride Month, we are preparing a special episode featuring all LGBTQ+ artists.

Now we wish to take our series to the next level proposing it to big networks and possibly TVs on-demand in the docuseries format. We really want this material to be a testimony to this epochal historical moment, looking at the COVID-19 emergency through the eyes of the creatives of our time. These 10 episodes are what we symbolically call the “Phase 1” of this project, and we are developing now the so-called “Phase 2”. During Phase 2 we will continue to explore how people are utilizing the power of their creativity to rebuild new cultural, social, and business models, and so we want to dive in also to understanding how professionals who are not necessarily artists are envisioning the world of tomorrow. And we will touch base again with our artists, through some Instagram/Facebook live interviews to see how are they doing as we slowly reemerge out of the pandemic.

HB: What else would you like to share with [PANK] readers?

DP:  I would love to add a couple of words about Creative Pois-On and the team behind #CreativityWillSaveUs. We are a storytelling platform and multimedia productions boutique with the mission to connect people (individual pois (polka dots in French) in this big world, on an emotional level, through stories. We do this through podcasting: we also have our own podcast show, the Creative Pois-On podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, i-Heart Radio, Spreaker, and Stitcher, among other platforms, and we do podcasting consulting, production and postproduction for brands as well as for cultural institutions. And we have our editorial project, Storytelier, that has the goal to share stories (fictional and non) to explore powerful narratives to emotionalize information. 

TC: First of all I would love to thank [PANK] magazine and the editor Chris Campanioni for their interest in our project, and the journalist Hayden Bergman for his very thoughtful questions! Thank you for helping us share our mission to inspire the people out there to feel empowered by the thought that we are all co-creators of this world and of our collective future. And please follow our journey through creativity on our official channels. And, as we love to say, Ready, Set, Imagine!

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Website www.creativepoisn.com 

Official Youtube (#CreativityWillSaveUs series ): https://bit.ly/CreativityWillSaveUsSeries-Playlist

Facebook: @CreativePoison

Instagram: @Creativepois_on

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Hayden Bergman is a poet and translator. His work has appeared in Gravel, the story collection What Doesn’t Kill You and is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review. He serves as the Books Editor at The Literary Review. You can reach him at hayden@theliteraryreview.org.

[REVIEW] Luster by Raven Leilani

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FSG, 2020

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REVIEW BY CARISSA CHESANEK

Raven Leilani’s Luster is a smart and bold exploration of self-worth and self-appreciation wriggled from a love triangle gone strange and a sense of urgency to understand the world around us. This short book is both sexy and sad, angry but funny, with impressive literary prose that is blunt and mischievous, luring you with little intention to let go. In Luster, there are vital essences buried deep within the core, more visible as you peel back the droves of sticky layers. And once the characters and their world are slowly revealed, we find there is very little that’s different from our own. These themes and revelations allows us to understand the impact of those around us and the startling influences that make us who we become.  

Edith, who goes by Edie, is a black woman in her twenties working as a managing editorial coordinator in publishing and living in a run down Brooklyn apartment with a roommate she shares very little connection. Much of Edie’s lackluster in life can be credited to the art she no longer creates, not after her last chilling portrait of her dead mother sprawled on the floor wearing only one shoe. Her desire to create is still there, but so is the distraction of sex, which she falls victim to, often tittering oversexed, and later categorized as “sexually inappropriate” in the office. Her escapades or escapes can be hard to endure with constant displays of demeaning ridicule and unsettling exploitation. With Eric, an older white man she met online, it’s no different, comparably worse with his blatant confessions of violent fantasies that lead to aggressive behavior. It’s clear that Eric and his chauvinistic demeanor dominates Edie, guiding her through this destructive manipulation of class and sex. But this story is not tired or trite, because there is also Eric’s wife, Rebecca, the master with all the rules, who takes us on an unexpected path.

Leilani shifts from past to present with assertiveness, giving us valid insight to Edie’s childhood and her relationships with men at an early age. What’s interesting about Edie is her self-awareness, her revelation of bad relationships that stem from the nonexistent one with her father: “This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man.” We then learn of Clay, the mixed race older man who played off Edie’s innocence and grief with carefully fine-tuned tactics of a chronic abuser.

Rebecca, a medical examiner for the VA, is as interesting and complex as they come. She’s agreed to an open marriage but seems less than keen on the idea, and yet, she invites Edie to stay in the home without Eric’s knowing. There is something sinister here, the appeal of shock value toward her husband perhaps, but there’s also Akila, the adopted twelve year-old black daughter, who paves more questions into Edie’s appearance: Why is she really invited here? The prolonged uncertainty and swaying companionship between Rebecca and Evie is complicated but not all obstructive. It is because of Rebecca’s unusual hospitality that Edie has a new and inspiring space to start creating once again.

Leilani has given us a novel of our times with prevalent topics circling social movements of Me Too and Black Lives Matter. Discrimination based on gender and race are transparent with pay gaps and sexual abuse, socioeconomic status, and racial profiling. The lives of Eric and Edie are parallel in their social and economical differences which are as alarming as they are informative. We can learn when we are aware. This book paints an accurate portrait of society’s many weaknesses while also spotlights potential hope. In a world where we’re actively searching for that one great muse, often times we can find it staring back at us in the mirror.

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Carissa Chesanek is a New York City-based writer. She holds an MFA from The New School. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Cagibi, BookTrib, CrimeReads, Booklist, among others. She is a non-fiction reader for Guernica magazine, a member of PEN America’s Prison Writing Committee, and volunteer at Center for Fiction.

[REVIEW] In the Key of New York City: a memoir in essays by Rebecca McClanahan

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Red Hen Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY CATE HODOROWICZ

I’ve never lived in New York City, though I’ve always loved it from afar. Visits to friends in Brooklyn, a few work jaunts into Manhattan, a research trip one summer to the UN. The subway and sidewalks were always crowded, the department stores a wreck of frenzied humanity, and the streets in August reeked of garbage, sewage, sweat, relentless sunshine, and the peculiar humidity that rises from concrete. My young daughters once saw rats the size of large housecats running along the subway tracks, and in that same afternoon, they tasted Korean food for the first time, ran through rain puddles at Rockefeller Center, and asked the whys and hows of people who slept on park benches.

New York is a place of both/and if ever there was one. I’ve heard stories this March and April that suggest the same: emergency rooms overflow; not enough masks, gloves, or gowns for hospital workers; not enough respirators; not enough anything at the grocery store; friends and lovers and coworkers and strangers dying alone, alone, alone. Streets and shops closed down, people closed up in apartments. Yet at 7 pm, windows open and all the quarantined bang pots and pans to thank the front-line workers. When hospitals discharge a COVID patient, or when someone makes it off the respirator alive, music fills the hallways: Journey, The Beatles, Jay-Z, and Alicia Keys.

New York is the heart of the publishing industry, and this season—the rest of this year, really—is a terrible time to release a book: bookstores have closed except for online orders; authors can’t travel to promote their titles; it’s been said we’re heading into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And some might say it’s an awful moment to publish a book about New York since this latest crisis will leave awful scars, and the New York in a book about bygone days will be unrecognizable, a place of the past. The book, those same critics might say, won’t do anything to help us come to terms with the New York of now.

I humbly disagree.

Rebecca McClanahan’s In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays from Red Hen Press, offers a timeless portrait of New York’s contradictions, which is to say, it provides a salve to the upheaval of now and acts as a reminder of the city’s constancy throughout tribulations. The book hinges on what seems a familiar premise: a writer fulfills a dream when she moves to Manhattan in the late 1990s. But this story is different: the writer and her husband arrive in the city not as starry-eyed young adults, but as a middle-aged couple. They plan to stay for just two years, but they remain for eleven, only moving away when family needs require the change.

One might think McClanahan’s experience of New York is idyllic, or perhaps a deep love affair, given how long she stays. But it’s quite the opposite. McClanahan, “a long-married woman who spends her mornings with the Oxford English Dictionary, looking up words like squirrel,” chronicles the specific loneliness of living among millions on a tiny island. It’s not loneliness she enjoys: neighbors keep to themselves even as their most private sounds permeate the walls of McClanahan’s sublet; she and her husband struggle to find employment and friendship; and as a writer, her work keeps her mostly at home.

Perhaps because the glamor of youth has slipped from McClanahan, her narrator is reliable, reflective, and curious. As a result, this is a book without guile, conspicuous consumption, or name dropping. In the Key of New York City sings a song of loneliness that is also the song of middle age, a time when many of us realize that embracing seclusion, rather than fighting its pain, frees us to live more fully. McClanahan doesn’t come to this easily, however: “so be it—is [a phrase] I’ve never actually spoken aloud, but I’m trying to practice thinking it, in hopes of entering a state of acceptance about the daily and nightly occurrences that are out of my control. Which is to say, nearly everything.”

It takes years of struggle to combat her discomfort. In an effort to ease that grief, McClanahan notices the lives of those around her—she strikes up conversions with homeless people who live in the parks; she meditates on the lives of hospital workers and the working class. She revels in her next-door neighbor’s daily opera practice. Notices the sheen of pigeon feathers. Saves a squirrel in the days leading up to 9/11. McClanahan is quite aware of what she’s doing: “Even as my reasonable mind is having its say . . . my other self is leaving on its own journey.” Tenderness isn’t a word one usually associates with New York, but it’s because of this that McClanahan’s empathy resonates, even as the speaker is better with tenderness for others than tenderness for herself. In some ways, McClanahan’s speaker is like the city itself – engaged in a push-and-pull between a tough exterior and a soft inner core.

New York’s literary bones would appreciate this book’s structure, which mirrors McClanahan’s existence: larger, contemplative essays intersperse with brief, interstitial studies of people, moments, and objects, just as her long stretches alone are punctuated by walks in the park or rides on the subway. The first half of the book pulls the reader into a portrait of the city, but then come two deeply personal and painful essays—one about marriage, one about cancer—that wracked me more deeply than the two pieces about 9/11 and its wake. I wasn’t there when the towers fell; like most of the country, I watched from afar, stupefied and confused. I have, however, been deep into marriage trouble and a shattering health diagnosis and the honesty of those two essays brought me to tears this morning as I re-read them.

Personal reactions aside, the true physical and metaphorical center of the book, “Tears, Silence, Song,” unlocks the book’s preoccupation with music as a salve for pain. Yes, the kind of music that belongs to opera and Broadway, as well as McClanahan’s back story as a serious student of choral music, but also the music of words, which McClanahan plays to great effect throughout the book. In one of my favorites, “Sublet,” the cadence and sounds of prose become poetry:

“Enjoy for the moment, then let it go—the fiery carp, the brilliant day, the black-eyed children with the dimpled hands, the coins on the ginkgo trees swirling down, down. Our lives are sublets anyway, and too quickly gone at that. And what better place to live out our leases. Curb your dog, your dogma, love your neighbor, your neighbor’s dog. We’re at the peak of our lives. O Sole Wio [sic]. Catch and release.”

But McClanahan learns her most important lesson about music from a choral director in her childhood. When she sings a lament too sweetly, he tells her, “’The important thing to remember . . .  is that it is doloroso. Rachel is mourning. She is in pain. Don’t make it pretty.’”

This approach might be just the tonic New York needs. McClanahan’s essays make very little about any kind of hardship pretty. Instead, they give us the truth: the loneliness of sorrow is a shared condition. She asks,

“If we all voiced our deepest selves to one another, what would become of us? I imagine first a vibration, then a distant hum that approaches slowly, indistinctly, as each of our voices finds its pitch, its timbre, culminating in one unearthly, communal roar—all the world’s love, hate, terror, joy, and fear gather in momentum until our ancestors, sensing the vibration, rise from their graves and join in.”

Far be it from me to announce anything definitive about a place like New York that defies categories. But there is this: no matter where we live, we are all, in our own ways, students of loneliness and suffering. But we are also students of beauty and imagination. In the Key of New York City tells us that both songs, sung at the same time, define what it is to be human. To drag our hearts through yet another crisis. New York is just a foil, really. We’re all this lonely and alone. It’s just that we notice it more when we’re in a crowded place with no friends or family. Even so, McClanahan suggests, we can live well among strangers, in our imaginations, in the tiny sublets of our lives.

At the end of the years in her real sublet, McClanahan refuses to say Goodbye to all that. Now that New Yorkers are sequestered in their homes, terrified of the virus that has spread across its vast surfaces, there is an important strength in this book’s refusal to join the literary trend of abandoning New York, that dear glittering, lonely, cheek-by-jowl city. For if those who love it abandon it, who will be left to chronicle its glories and terrors?

In the Key of New York City was originally slated for May 1 publication; as I write this in early May, the world is full of uncertainty. No one is sure when or how we’ll be able to approach normalcy. Red Hen Press, the book’s publisher, delayed-release until September. By September, that month we remember as one of destruction, I hope fortune changes: that the city’s hospitals are less full and some life has returned to its avenues. I hope we all continue to beat those pots and pans until, as McClanahan says, the “ancestors … rise from their graves and join in.”

—

CATE HODOROWICZ’S essays and reviews have appeared in The Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Gettysburg Review, The Rumpus,  Hippocampus, and elsewhere. Her work has earned a Pushcart Prize and notable mentions in Best American Essays.

Animal Years, an excerpt

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Lion by Jean Bernard (1775-1883). Original from The Rijksmuseum

BY LORI GREEN

—

Before Hal was the beginning. And the lions, still fresh. There were seven of them, each as big as a bedroom and the color of the sun. I was six-years-old and too happy to try being a novelist. Our family had a backyard with shade and acreage and its own stone bench. The maple by the door was devoted to me, and once a year the lilacs bloomed.

Then for Christmas, my parents decided to teach me about responsibility and placed the job of feeding the Pride squarely on my shoulders. I don’t know how they thought it would work long-term when I wasn’t allowed to handle raw meat. Once my maned and tawny darlings had weakened from hunger, they were checked into one of those chimpanzee retirement communities where fur becomes glossy and grabbable again. They thrived and plumped up and made new friends. I sent them postcards and they wrote back but, as my handwriting improved, theirs plateaued.

I mourned. My parents bought me five Goldfish and an indestructible tank. Thinking they deserved better food than brown clumps from a bottle, I fed them the best our pantry had to offer until they died of salted pretzels and sour candy. I mourned again, but less. The fish had been pretty boring. I missed spending summer afternoons with my lions, falling asleep inside the fuzz of their choral purr.

For my seventh birthday, I asked for a notebook instead of another animal. My parents warned This is your last chance! and bought me a spiral-bound soft-cover. That year I completed my first short-story, The Missing Bird, a highly effective series of cliff-hangers resolved sentence by sentence. I knew I’d never top it so I moved on to novels and churned them out, a prolific kid. It was 1998 and by 2000 I’d begun twelve and finished none.

Now it’s 2020 and I spent over a year filling my last Moleskine. Clearly, it’s time for humility don’t forget, a child can write a novel as well as any adult and is probably better at diagramming sentences so I get down on my knees and beg my kid self for direction. She’s lounging under her maple tree flipping through old correspondences, four feet tall and intimidating as hell. I was never that intimidating girl. She tells me, We’ve been starting novels as hiding places. We think we can store faces behind paragraphs, sneak fictions into immortality. We call it stone-soup, believing stone-soup is about the stone.

This seven-year-old is too clever for me by half. I get humble. Patting my shoulder, she says, Just find a store and buy a copy of The Address Book. Better yet, call Hal. She leaves me with a copy of our original story for guidance.

January 27, 1999 / The Missing Bird

Once upon a time, I had a bird; it could talk. The bird was a big help to the family. He was the only pet we had. One day when everybody was out of the house a thief came. The thief stole my talking bird. When I got home I said, “I’m back from school Mad.” Then my mom and dad told me he was gone.

When Mad was about to be choked because the thief was holding his neck, he kept getting closer and closer to a strange mansion. When he got inside he thought to himself, “I got to get out and find a phone to call Lori.” Mad got out by smashing the door down. He had trouble finding a phone. He finally found a phone he called 536-[xxxx]. I answered the phone. “Mad where are you?” “I don’t know, let’s meet at the park.” The next morning I went to the train station. When I got there I saw Mad. We went home and had a great feast!

—

LORI GREEN studied across genre at the New School’s Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy. Her work has appeared in Silver Needle Press, 12th Street Journal, and Whitevines Review. She lives, writes, and paints with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

An Interview with Elvira Basevich, author of HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD

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Pank Books, 2020

Set just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD is at once a condemnation of the world, a daydream of America, and an unsent love letter—written and rewritten over the course of ten years—to a dead family. A meditation on intergenerational trauma, resilience, and hope, HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD is written in the tradition of epic poetry and follows the author as she retraces her mother’s journey to New York City in the summer of ‘89.

PANK: One line from the poem “A Universal Map of the Womb” stuck with me—there’s a moment where the speaker and her mother are waiting in line for a fast-food lunch in Brooklyn. As she pays for their cheeseburgers, she says, “Now, let’s be like normal people.” What’s the normal that these two figures are reaching for in this book?

ELVIRA BASEVICH (EB): That is a verbatim quote. My mom would often say it when I was a kid. I thought I understood what she meant, but the more I tried to do “normal” things with her and express “normal” feelings, the more I felt like we were drifting away from other families, as I was trying to understand how to build intimacy with someone so traumatized by their past. Is it normal to write a long goodbye to a loved one in the form of a book of poetry? It is for me, I don’t know about other people.

I do know that the most normal thing is also often the most extraordinary if we really take the time to understand what motivates us. To love someone fully—in the light of the specificity of their character and yours, of their past and yours—is the most demanding project that you can ask of yourself, one that can require extraordinary creativity and grit. And if each person faithfully applies themselves to the project of loving (and living) fully, I am not sure how much convergence there will be to recast our collective conception of normalcy.

It can be liberating to let go of conventional ideas. In that sense, quoting my mother was meant ironically in that we would never accomplish normalcy, at least not according to external standards, even if we also eat at McDonald’s, watch sitcoms, and I send her flowers on her birthday. We would never be or think or act like other people. And that’s OK too. Often being different for us felt like a sign of failure or weakness. It is gratifying and sometimes simply necessary to let external standards go. Individuality can then flourish.

PANK: How has Nabokov influenced your work? I found myself struck by references and lines throughout the How to Love the World that called to mind Speak, Memory— the opening poem, for instance, declares ‘I am your baby girl, Mnemosyne’– and the text fluidly incorporates Russian epigraphs and phrases. 

EB: You are an extremely careful reader of the book! I had finished Nabokov’s Speak, Memory just a year or two before completing How to Love the World and was referencing it in the opening poem, “Invocation of the Muses.” Nabokov is a genius.

This project, as well as my next poetry book, is in conversation with Soviet and modern pre-Soviet Russian literature, art, and culture, particularly Pushkin and the poets of the Silver Age popular before the Bolshevik Revolution. I am also consciously situating my work among writers of the Jewish diaspora, both living and dead. This is the context where I feel most at home—my literary imagination lights up. I still have so much I want to say, even as I keep returning to the same themes of family, exile, memory, religion, and loss.

I should add that what particularly resonates with me about Russian modern literature that I admire is the robust role of ancient Greek and Roman poetry. I have been fascinated by the idea of “updating” the genre of epic poetry for the contemporary world, told from the point of view of the most powerless and underrepresented voices, such as refugee women and girls, rather than blood-hungry, violent male “heroes” who through the passage of historical time still seem to have a pantheon of pagan gods on their side.

I remember that when I was a freshman at Hunter College, CUNY, I took an introductory class on Greek and Roman mythology. My brilliant professor said, almost in passing, that there have not been any women who have written epic poetry. I took it as a call to action. I decided then and there as a seventeen-year-old that I will be that woman. It is extremely gratifying to know that I kept that promise to myself.

PANK: How to Love the World builds a picture of American experience that’s filtered through refugee and first-generation lenses–arguably the most American identity out there. What’s the most American day you can remember having? Where did you go / who did you see / what did you eat? Who would you invite to re-enact it with you if you could?

My partner recently hosted a Super Bowl party. He is from Hudson, Ohio, and is a huge sports fan, which I find really endearing. I told him that I’d never been to a Super Bowl party before and had always wanted to go! He asked me what I expected it to be like. In response, I said jokingly that I always imagined orange food. And so, he bought Cheetos, cheddar crackers, and cheese dips. Nothing quite makes you feel American like eating orange food while watching the Super Bowl. It was amazing.

I have started writing my next poetry book. It is tentatively titled Cars. In it, I play with the juxtaposition of Soviet and American highways, manufacturing processes and labor rights, the funny names for car parts and types and models, and the values associated with the commodities that define the ideals of a people and a place. For “research,” I have been talking to my partner about that a recent trip he took with his dad to see the Daytona 500 NASCAR race in Daytona Beach, Florida. It’s been really fun—a very different writing process, compared to my first book! I feel like somehow the writing is bringing me closer to America, even as I continue to think about the idea of “cars” in the Soviet Union.

PANK: How to Love the World functions as something of a palimpsest: personal history overwritten with family history, refugee experience, the long slog through trauma, a fraught relationship with a mother. The book is even broken into Book I and Book II– there’s a distinct before & after that placed the emotional journey of reading as a mirror to the physical journey of the emigre. There is a lot of narrative meat here. Why poetry? What did poetry allow you to accomplish with this book that, say, memoir could not?

I will eventually write a memoir, I know, as well as a historical novel loosely based on the life of my paternal grandmother. But save for Angela Davis and maybe Greta Thunberg, I cannot imagine a memoir written by a twenty-something-year-old having much value. I knew I had to undertake the project about my family and my past—I could not wait that long. My writing of How to Love the World was urgent, even though it took me a decade to write it. I have found that poetry is the most effective way to communicate—and transcend—one’s own experiences. And for that, I will always be grateful to poetry.

I am a voracious reader of novels and it reflects in my poetry. I also love poetry books that tell a story with a complex narrative structure. Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is an excellent recent example.

PANK: This book took ten years to write. What would you say to someone embarking on a similar course with a project? Any advice for the journey?

EB: Just. Keep. Writing. There is no other special trick to pull the white rabbit out of the top hat.

And have faith in your voice.

Know that you will finish the project and it will feel wonderful when you do. On a more practical level, as the project moves along, it is helpful to have a blueprint of where you are going and how you plan to get there in the literary execution. For example, which styles would you like to experiment with, whose voices would you like to engage and incorporate, what time of day is best for creative writing?

PANK: If you could upload one text into the brains of your readers Matrix-style before they opened your book, what would it be?

History: A Novel by Elsa Morante.

PANK: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK] about How to Love the World? [PANK] loves you!

Thank you for giving my first poetry book such a warm literary family—

—

ELVIRA BASEVICH is a poet and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Her poems have recently appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poached Hare, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, and Blackbird.

Future Fridays – Art & Poetry

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We’re thrilled to bring you the incredible work of two New York City Teens! An art portfolio by Lola Simon and the debut poetry of Carol Brahm-Robin.

  • When We Slumber
  • Sitting Form
  • We Are One
    We Are One
  • Pose
  • Clementine

“My artwork focuses on desexualizing the female form.
In high school, faced with dress codes, I often found myself being told to put on a jacket because I was wearing a tank top on a hot day, when the boys in my class weren’t asked to do the same. I became uncomfortable with aspects of myself I couldn’t change. My junior year of high school, I took my first figure drawing class. Drawing the models, I gained a new perspective: the female body is beautiful and natural. I began drawing colorful illustrations of the body in order to further explore this theme.” – Lola Simon

Lola Simon is a senior at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in New York City, where she majors in visual art. Her favorite color is yellow and her favorite artist is Yayoi Kusama. In addition to creating her own art, she enjoys museums, and has interned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum. She will attend Brown University in the fall.

Purple

 By Carol Brahm-Robin 

 I woke 
 sunken deep
 in a world of
 Purple
  
 What a nice
 dream
 swathed in mulberry hue  
  
 Nobody
 i could see
 Except for 
 Purple
  
 i was alone with it
 Lavender dream
  
 It wrapped its arms around me
 Pulling me further
 into plum
  
 I breathed it in
 orchid in my lungs
 Too deep now
 I Tried to inhale
 only Purple
  
 Only Purple now
 I was alone 
 in amethyst chains
  
 deep in a violet embrace
 Drowning in Purple

Carol Brahm-Robin is a young writer who lives in Brooklyn with her parents and two cats. She enjoys poetry and cartooning. “Purple” is her first publication.

Ask the author: Shira Dentz of SISYPHUSINA

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[PANK] Books, 2020

A new interview with Shira Dentz, author of SISYPHUSINA, as she elaborates on what poetry is and the intense collaborative process at work in her new book, available from [PANK] Books.

PANK: Your book opens with a letter to your readers about your formal
approach to these poems, including concerns like text weight, placement on the page, etc. One thing that jumped out to me was your note that “form is sculptural.” Do you approach your writing practice like visual art-making, with text standing in for a medium?

SHIRA DENTZ (SD): I do regard text as a visual stimulus that impacts one’s reading experience, whether or not this stimulus is foregrounded, though I don’t approach it as a stand-in for a medium; part of its medium is its visual nature. Along with referential meanings, written language has shapes and a surface that it’s shaped on. Before children learn to read, for instance, they respond to letter forms as characters or moods. Of course, as we grow and keep learning, we filter what we attend to, and for good reason, as we’d be overloaded otherwise. I understand, too, that one cannot look and read at the same time, just as one can’t see the “crone” and the “young beautiful woman” simultaneously in the famous optical illusion. So I know that I am playing with a multiplicity when I forefront the visual in writing, and also implicating the reading process.

As a writer, I like to be able to draw from all the elements of my medium—language—and this approach embodies my aesthetic commitment to give space to possibly overlooked details—both in the handed-down handling of my medium and subjects of focus. Also, as every language has a limited vocabulary with which to express the range of human experiences, I try to challenge “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein), and experiment with the visual components of my medium in an effort to make language where there is none. All this being said, I am a visual artist too and am sure this is partly responsible for my attention to the visual nature of written language.

[PANK] I’m curious about hybrid forms and how authors define their work when it doesn’t fit perfectly in jars like “poetry” or “prose.” SISYPHUSINA has sections that look like “traditional” lyric poetry, blocks of text that look like prose, marks, and lines like a drawing, sampled text like a collage. Do you define what you write one way or another?

SD: That’s a great question, thank you! This reminds me of the ongoing debate about how to define “prose poetry”—there are many ideas, and for the most part, I think we agree that it’s a generative question in its elusiveness. So I suppose this could apply here. I do feel that I’m mostly a poet, but my aesthetic involves questioning received forms of doing things—what is poetry—I think most writers are engaged with their own “what is poetry” or “what is a novel” or “what is a short story” etc etc. But clearly I’m interested in juxtaposition, both in stillness and movement. I could define it as hybrid or cross-genre. Maybe it’s a genre-in-progress, possibly in the spirit of Lyn Hejinian’s “Against Closure.”

[PANK] Throughout SISYPHUSINA, there are bodies– female bodies that are “imperfect” by some measure, and exhortations or examples of body/appearance modification. In ‘redshift’ an italicized line urges us to “try liposuction!”; earlier in the manuscript, there’s an extensive exploration of how ancient Egyptians shaved, dyed, and styled their hair to change their appearance and achieve an aesthetic ideal; the speaker repeatedly notes trying to lose weight; in “Units & Increments”, the speaker repeatedly states “I’m thinking of eating again.” Text throughout the book is recycled or referenced, making the world of these poems feel claustrophobic in a way that is distinctly female. Is this a moment when art imitates life?

SD: Wow, I guess so, though I hope cumulatively it resolves artistically and doesn’t fall into that caveat of “showing boredom by being boring.” Something that I undertake in this book too is juxtaposing a singular, autobiographical narrative with other narratives as they’ve been constructed both historically and in the present, in a range of realms including science, advertising, and the artistic (including literary) canon, along with collaborations with several female artists in different media. The thread of singularity that your question points to I suppose evokes a beating pulse.

There is something that I keep circling back to, a definitive point that is aging, and for women that includes fertility issues. The recurrences in text are a coming back to the origin point that I’m regarding from different angles. How to open up a new narrative

[PANK] If you could ask a reader to do a little homework before reading your new book, what would your reading list look like?

SD: Part of such a reading list like might look like—

Selected visual art and writing by visual artists Louise Bourgeois, Glenn Ligon, Cy Twombly, Robert Smithson, Jenny Holzer, Kay Rosen, and Erica Baum

Selected poems and texts by Stéphane Mallarmé, ee cummings, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Walser, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Weiner, Kathleen Fraser, Alice Notley, and from The Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry

Formally experimental collections by Barbara Guest,  Jen Bervin, M. NourbeSe Philip, Francis Ponge, Charles Olson (Maximus), Susan Howe, Douglas Kearney, Renee Gladman, Jenny Boully, Eleni Sikelianos, and Diana Khoi Nguyen

Liminal prose by Clarice Lispector, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rosmarie Waldrop

Journals/diaries by Anais Nin and May Sarton

Short films by Maya Deren And possibly critical writing on literary and visual conjunctions such as Tanya K. Rodrigue’s “PostSecret as Imagetext: The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences and Identity”

And possibly critical writing on literary and visual conjunctions such as Tanya K. Rodrigue’s “PostSecret as Imagetext: The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences and Identity”

[PANK] I want to return to the collage-like aspect of SISYPHUSINA and consider your process. How did this manuscript come together for you? Did you collect visuals or text samples as you went? Create them as needed?

SD: I began it as a project proposal for which I was extremely fortunate to receive a fellowship from the Tanner Center for the Humanities that enabled me to devote a bunch of time to it in its initial stage. This stage included researching literature centered on female aging in the life, physical, and social sciences, humanities, as well as its artistic expression, past and present, and in pop culture and in the news media. I took notes, but for the most part the pieces that I wrote during this time developed directly from the snippets of discoveries I was making through my research. Some of these snippets incubated in my mind for years before surfacing in a creative piece. In my conversations, while working on this project, I found that many younger women were very, very interested in reading about and giving voice to this aspect of their life. At the same time, I took up the challenge of writing about aging within the context of my own life. I gave myself freedom to use all types of media, and to play with the nuances of typography as part of my writing process. I worked for many years as a typesetter before working as a graphic artist before returning to school and teaching and brought my experience with the minute shades of type to bear in my expressive relationship to classical notions of beauty and prevailing structures of social hierarchy.

Besides what I culled from research and my personal life, I drew from encounters with art and literature that I had stored in my mind over time. The first “Sisyphusina” poem was born from a constraint experiment given to me by a fiction writer friend when I felt blocked. My initial aspiration was to make a plan for this book’s architecture, but this isn’t my natural way of working, and eventually I let it go—I’m interested in the evolution of structure rather than imposing it prematurely, though I value the generative potential of constraints.

The manuscript’s working title was Rose Secoming—I had already identified that the rose would be a central image in the book, since it’s been associated with ideals of feminine beauty in literature from early on, as in “Roman de la Rose” from the Middle Ages in which the beloved female is, in fact, a rose. I chose “secoming” as a blend of becoming and succumbing. In earlier work, I had begun experimenting with making new words where none existed to articulate female experiences (for instance, there are no female equivalents of emasculation and castration, yet sexual violation of females leaves equivalent scarring).

I continued working on the manuscript beyond the time of this fellowship, naturally, and pieces continued to grow organically from my encounters with others, myself, and the rest of my environment. In 2016, an excerpt of SISYPHUSINA was published as an e-chap, FLOUNDERS in Essay Press’ GROUNDLOOP Series, which “seeks to bring together authors exploring diverse subjects through loud, innovative architectures.”

As I continued to work on what was to become SISYPHUSINA, I moved around for jobs, and during my first year teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I was drawn to expanding what I knew about new media, having always been interested in being artistically responsive to the current zeitgeist and the emerging new. While looking for artistic camaraderie in my new environs, I met musical composer Pauline Oliveros and visual artist Kathy High, who also taught at RPI, and eventually invited each of them to collaborate with me on extensions to this book. By now I regarded this project as an ongoing one, and for parts of it to spread outside the physical space of my book’s pages seemed “right.” I like the “skin” of video as an element in juxtaposition with my text within the context of this project. Around the same time, YEW, a journal of innovative writing & images, accepted several new pieces and asked if I wanted to collaborate with an artist on images to be published along with them. I asked my friend, visual artist and writer Kathline Carr if she might be interested in creating images in response to my text, and she drew many more interesting images than could be included. When I finally decided to call it a day and to say the book was Ended!, I thought back to these images that Kate had drawn and again, it felt “right” to me to expand the collaborative dimension of this book, its “skin,” so to speak, and asked her for permission to include some of them. I also asked Pauline whether I could include the piece she had improvised for a piece that extended from this project, “Aging Music” with this book’s publication. She had recorded it while performing it in 2015 in a building that she wrote “became activated by the wind and the banging doors and windows became an engaging percussive part of the musical dialogue. The building as an instrument played by the wind seemed expressive too of aging.”

This past year I learned about QR codes and realized using one would be a seamless way to integrate “Aging Music” with the physical definition of the book. A video-poem, “Saidst,” that I collaborated on with Kathy High is accessible via a URL published in the book and online at my website, PANK’s website, and Kathy High’s Vimeo page. Poet and designer Aimee Harrison, with whom I worked on adapting the manuscript’s proportions to the printed book’s dimensions and designed the book’s exterior and its table of contents, was my last but not least collaborator.

In other words, assembling this book was a continuous process and developed along with encounters with new technologies, locations, people, and signs of time. One of the final touches was my choice for the cover art, a painting that I did many years ago, in which I wanted to capture the active dynamic of visible light and crumpled up a piece of foil to use as my model. The result looks impressionistically like a heart, aorta included, or a female sprite clapping, and now, years later, it was decided that this painting would be “Sisyphusina.”

[PANK] Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] loves you!

SD: Thank you so much for reading this, and I hope it spurs you to check the book out and to more conversation! And a shout-out of thanks to [PANK] and to you, reader, member of our writing and reading communities, for your support of newly published books during this challenging time. I’d like to share, too, my wishes for everyone’s wellness.

PANK’s note: You can read a selection of Shira’s work from Sisyphusina as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series here.

SHIRA DENTZ is the author of five books, including black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press), a cross-genre memoir, how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry), a National Poetry Series finalist, and the sun a blazing zero (Lavender Ink/Diálogos). She’s also the author of two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman) and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Her poetry, visual writing, and prose appear in many venues including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Denver Quarterly, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series (Poets.org), and National Public Radio, and interviews with her appear in journals such as Ploughshares, Rain Taxi, and The Rumpus. Shira is a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize. Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize, and Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award. Before returning to school to pursue graduate studies, she worked as a graphic artist in the music industry in NYC. A graduate of Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah, and is currently Tarpaulin Sky’s Special Features Editor and lives and teaches in upstate New York. More about her writing can be found at shiradentz.com.

[REVIEW] Later, My Life at the Edge of the World: A memoir of outliving AIDS and its shadows by Paul Lisicky

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Graywolf Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY DWAINE RIEVES

There are places we go to by choice and others where we simply wind up.  The far tip of Cape Cod is, in Paul Lisicky’s new memoir Later, one of those places where your presence may only seem a choice.  This captivating tale opens in the early 1990s, a time when the artists and writers in Provincetown, or “Town” as we come to know it, are constantly shadowed by AIDS.  It is AIDS and the risk of the disease that, once you’re in Town, seems the ultimate decider.  In the opening scene, we find a young writer arriving at the local arts center, his initial thoughts preoccupied with his family’s fears, especially his mother’s worry.  “She is afraid of my living among my kind, especially now that so many young men are dying of AIDS.  She is expecting me to die of AIDS.”  It seems one’s fate in Town is one with AIDS, and the choice to live here—even if only for a year or two as a developing writer—is no cause for celebration.

A major theme in the early literature of AIDS was urgency.  The poet Bill Becker titled his 1983 collection of poems An Immediate Desire to Survive.  Immediacy was a warning, lateness no poetic conclusion. The journalist Randy Shilts constructed And the Band Played On along a timeline that leaves one breathless, the need to do something about this situation far too critical for anyone to sit and ponder.  In Paul Monette’s memoir, Borrowed Time, the story races over only a few months.  From the 80s until the mid-90s, the years for gay men were summarized in body counts, time always too short, science always lagging.  Reflection, the ability to dwell in a place and contemplate this untimely world, was no unrushed option for a young gay man, that time-out simply inconceivable given the chase of the virus.

In Later, by contrast, we have a gift of time: a place for contemplation even as the shadow of AIDS still chases us.  Such is the magic of living among the artists trying to create an art of life itself “at the edge of the world.”  Lisicky writes, “Town moves on two tracks at once.”  There’s the typical forward time and also “lyric time, which has nothing to do with the clock.”  The residents of Town thrive on lyric time, this patchwork of images and actions they share with us in this luminous read.  “It’s time as enacted in a painting or a poem or a song.”  Lyric time is set up as the opponent of AIDS time.  Lyric time allows us to sit with ourselves and think, for “lyric time moves off to the side and stalls: lateral instead of linear.”  Lyric time in Later allows us to sit with the lives we’ve witnessed and will witness, including the lives within us.  We flit with the narrator from lover to lover because flitting is all that this brief world allows us.  We dwell with the one who seems to care.  He moves on, and another steps up from the shadows.  Or should, his arrival only a matter of time.  Time is the beautiful lover luxuriating in the heart of Later.

Later also carries us from the years when AIDS seems inevitable for many gay men to 2018, a time when the risk for AIDS can be profoundly lowered and the disease itself treated.  The narrative sweep in Later is linear, the inhabitants of Town faithful in trying to help the new arrivals find their own direction.  These new residents have, after all, chosen this place where time and risks constantly mirror the body’s urges.  Who we are, including our sexual nature, is a given, but where this nature might take us can be a choice.  In Town, life itself feels a choice, the shadows close but also understanding.

The forward push of Later allows for detours.  We are presented with the narrative in parcels, short sections that could be taken as patchy prose poems within each chapter with rich, challenging language.  The structure of such finely stitched sections may easily remind you of a quilt, a collection of carefully stitched life stories, people and legacies to contemplate, the risks and rewards in where we choose to live, love, and in our all-too truncated time, develop.  Not an AIDS quilt now in prose, not really.  More a comforter as people in Town might stitch it, more purpose than opinion.  In Later, we’re given the opportunity to feel deeply the places where we’ve been, the lives in which we now find ourselves, and the places where we must yet go.  Later gives us time to suffer and also create, a place to comfort ourselves in our choices.

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DWAINE RIEVES was born and raised in Monroe County, Mississippi. Following a career as a research pharmaceutical scientist and critical care physician, he completed an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University. His poetry has won the Tupelo Press Prize for Poetry and the River Styx International Poetry Prize. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review and other publications. 

[REVIEW] Skin Memory by John Sibley Williams

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Breakwaters Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ

I remember first reading Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo and feeling uneasy for the absence that pervades the novel. The story centers around Juan Preciado and his journey back to his deceased mother’s hometown of Comala, where he hopes to find his father but instead encounters a town populated by ghosts. The novel is surreal, and the way that Comala is described illuminates the tragedies of those who occupied the land. John Sibley William’s Skin Memory might not fall into the precise category of work that Juan Rulfo’s does, but the descriptions of absence in these poems succeed in the same manner, illuminating the consequences of loss, and revealing—if we weren’t aware before—how fragile the world around us truly is.

Skin Memory is a mixture of free verse and prose poems, but in many ways, the distinction between the two poetic forms is secondary to the content and to how much can be said with such concision. In “Sons of No One,” the topics of the poem range from suicide to extinction to the nature of creation:

So far all the suicides have been men

                   in my family. When I draw them

            close, it helps to remember the lake

                   beneath the desert the animals

            cannot taste but know exists.

                     It helps to draw them hungry

            clusters of light loping across the night

                     sky, such flames in their belies.

As the speaker goes on to discuss their naming of the stars, they feel, indirectly, that they had a role in the creation of the world—a feeling the speaker attempts unsuccessfully to achieve because of the lack of control they feel when one male family member after another takes their life. The speaker isn’t helpless as much as they are reflective, trying to understand what exactly is in their grasp and what isn’t. We see this in the next poem “Spectral”:

Each body is an outpost, populating, on its way to becoming a city. How the lights multiply, the surrounding darkness swell: how the moment speaks in future tense: if I’m being honest, how we miss what we never quite had, holding the light up to it- self, saying this is what we needed you to be.

There are certain things that will always live at a distance, and even though we may think that we know someone, and by extension know their body, we find, as Sibley Williams describes, moments where we don’t, and we realize at other moments that this understanding was never something we had a claim to.

This sentiment isn’t exclusive to family and those closest to us, but to the landscape as well, and when put under the microscope, we begin to question our role and purpose on this earth. In “Dear Nowhere,” a poem that traverses Montana, Alaska, and North Texas, we see this firsthand:

{Somewhere in North Texas}

Failing

to separate ground and sky, I’m complicit

in the steady collapse of clouds over barns.

Look—how red they rise from this dry

body of earth.

Is this only body placed on our tongues? Is this blood

we’re washing it all down with? I’m watching

bales of hay unfasten in the distance and wondering

if in another rendering of paradise we wouldn’t be

throwing stones to silence the owls at night.

A cathartic scene prompts the speaker to question their “complicity” in watching the course of events unfold (clouds collapsing, bales of hay unfastening), and in a larger sense, readers can’t help but wonder if the speaker is referring to complicity on more serious issues. After all, how often do we sit back and barely acknowledge the ways in which the world is collapsing all around us? Perhaps this interpretation is stretched, but poetry that engages its readers in this manner and allows such layers of meaning is poetry we need in such a flawed and complicated world.

As much as Skin Memory examines the world at large, it never fails to bring the focus back to the familial, and toward the end of the collection, Sibley Williams reminds us how necessary it is to cherish the small moments that might otherwise be lost to the grander scheme of things:

My son has not yet found a reason to love or hate    the silence     following us around the house. All he knows: something palpable is missing, not yet profound, not yet painting nightmares over his sleep, just a steady lack of arms where arms should be. The hundred nightingales trapped in my chest are chattering all at once. I don’t know which to speak from, if any voice is true, & if I’d recognize it. 

Although the son in “Absence Makes the Heart” is still innocent in a lot of ways, he knows something is not quite right. Sometimes it feels that when nothing wrong is happening then something must be wrong, and the son, almost instinctively, feels this too. But the speaker understands that as his father, and as someone who is still trying to figure out if “any voice is/ true,” he must guide his son in the best way possible, hoping that when the silence is no longer around, his son hears something akin to love.

Perhaps the best way to close out a poetry review for a collection as timely and important as Skin Memory is to let the work speak for itself, and the last poem “Forge” sums up what both the speaker and reader experience when they have reached the end, whatever that ending may be:

             We are here; this happened; a

simple  record.  If  we’re  lucky,  a  catalyst.  One door framed

within another. Even if closure is a construct, I cannot rule out

heaven entirely. Whatever finally breaks me, I cannot refuse it.

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ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press 2019), Crash Course (Saddle Road Press 2019), In Bloom (SFASU Press 2020), and (Dis)placement (Skull + Wind Press 2020). His poetry has appeared in Boulevard, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for [PANK] and Heavy Feather Review. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.