Contributor Spotlight

Contest Judge Spotlight – J’Lyn Chapman – Nonfiction/Hybrid

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” I am eager to read works that take risks and innovate narrative approaches within the capacious “creative nonfiction” genre.  “

As we near our contest deadline, we are thrilled to introduce you to last year’s winners — and this year’s judges! J’Lyn Chapman’s incredible collection of essays To Limn / Lying In won our Nonfiction/Hybrid Contest, as selected by Maya Sonenberg.

You can buy J’lyn’s book HERE

Taking its inspiration from the artist Uta Barth’s photographs of the sun as it enters her home and the poet Francis Ponge’s notebooks kept during the German occupation of France, this collection of lyric essays contemplates light as seen through the domestic space and its occupants, predominantly the author’s young children. Meditations on how through light the external world enters into and transforms the private spaces of self and home inextricably link to the author’s writing on life, or the giving of life. These vocabularies weave and tangle while the essays’ forms depict the staccato rhythms of thought and the estrangement of time one experiences when living with children. The essays can be read as standalone pieces, yet build on one another so that patterns emerge, like the obviation of how language serves to illuminate and veil meaning, the repetition of and ekphrastic approach to religious imagery, and the ineffable experience of depression. These essays continually return to the speaker’s admission that the life one gives another is ultimately unsustainable and that despite this catastrophe of living there is the resilience and bewilderment of being together. 

Read the most recent review of To Limn / Lying In in The Colorado Review.

Friday Feature: Author Interview with Trace DePass

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Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK] Author and Contest Judge Trace DePass to discuss Trace’s incredible work what he’s looking for in a winning manuscript!

From the poem “The Tesseract Tethers Rooms”

i tire of death, relative to me, not passing, in 3D. i need this divorce.
you go writ(h)e,
go anthropomorphize rot incessant all thru my body. look! there’s ceiling to this
passivity: dirt. here’s this room i’ve named —
me.
outside that room lives just my other room,
another empty tomb, maybe
a separate cube,
which, after peering at it for long enough, i too
on some days become. watch: i’ve lost

track of my own tesseract face

Buy Trace’s Book Here!

 

Erinn Batykefer: You’ve edited and juried several awards and anthologies, especially for works created by younger writers. What excites you most when you’re wading through the slush pile for those contests?

Trace DePass: I get the chance to witness the heart & mind of a young person at work. Hundreds, if not thousands of them, at the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, for instance. I watch how the world turns. There are usually always gems to find. For Scholastic’s “Best Teen Writing of 2017” I was really trying to amplify works that changed me if not perhaps the institutions these kids walk into, or see, daily—there was this essay, “On Ableism” which centers the voice of disabled & differently-abled bodies in intersectional justice & climate activism, which eventually led me to the work I do know (in 2019) with the Climate Museum. It mentions the cold war term “sacrifice zones” as lands designated for oblivion in case of nuclear fallout & disabled people as the “quintessential sacrifice people.” So much work by young people gets lost, whereas it could completely change discourse if we were to give it the space to do so. It’s exciting to be able to teach or reference the published work of young people to other young people. I feel like I’m doing participatory action research by spreading THEIR participatory action research & stories, curating an ongoing literary conversation in the culture of children (even if only for as long as I can hold that attention).

EB: What excites you about judging this contest for [PANK]?

TD: I enjoy reading poems in the conversations or arcs that the author curates for them. PANK will always get works that are experimental, whimsical, or playful. I’m glad to be a part of this kind of world-building. It’s probably going to be pretty intense so that’s exciting, lol.

 

EB: Your own Big Book, Self-Portrait as the Space between Us came out in 2018 from [PANK]Books, a collection that seeks to place a reader “befuddled in what befuddles me.” The poems here resist drawing neat conclusions and instead embrace nuance and contradiction. Is that the point of poetry?

TD: Nuance is one of the drives of my poems. I can’t speak for all poet motivations. I like acknowledging we don’t only live in 3 dimensions; once you pick up an object & literally move it you’re witnessing 4 dimensions (not including the sensory or psychic), then shifting to love or death or my father, a National Guard veteran who also created presets for Korg & Yamaha pianos from scratch. I think English can be confusing & often misinterpreted or sometimes collapsed or sullied by interpretation. There are poems that are nuanced to speak aloud & bring into conversation, even if the voice in our head doesn’t hear that on the first read of the work. I’m not trying to necessarily be undeniable. I’m trying to delineate or make non-linear & up to interpretation through image & sound up until I’m not. Then, the questions: is about consent? Is this consent? How many childhoods, generations, stories, layers, and things like entry points are here? Life doesn’t resolve itself in a simple, mathematical answer & you can say that is a poem, perhaps not all poems.

 

EB: What are you hoping to see in the submissions for this contest? What, in your opinion, should a book of poems do?

TD: I don’t have an absolute—probably not even a firm—stance on what exactly books of poems “should” do as an experimental, often described as musical + narrative + lyrical, poet. I believe there’s a stance taken for an author in how they want to be read or taught. I think a book of poems considers a lot of people & gives context, subtext, meta-text to those people. It’s completely up to the discernment of the author on how to tether or go about that. The book should have wants, drives, reckoning, character, among other things maybe. The poems will do what they want or need to do if you allow them to direct you. I hope to see what that looks like.

 

EB: One of the most striking iterative images in Self-Portrait is that of the speaker as Darwin’s Finch, scrabbling and transforming and evolving in his understanding of an absent father and his own identity. You’re also creating a fellowship program with the Climate Museum for high school students. Is science a triggering town for your creative work?

TD: The bird comes as goes like my father has for his own reasons. Some years I knew neither of my parents. Other years, I’m just like them. I see a lot of my own blackness in the migration of birds, yes. Leaving & loving for me are nuanced things.

I’ve worked with a climate scientist that has told me that there’s subjectivity & intention also behind science. I believe there is a nature to the questions we pose, experiment to answer, & thus a human behind the veil of “objectivity.” My book definitely dabbles with this idea. Given there is no absolute objectivity, what isn’t a little triggering sometimes? I question the nature of my own birth so I think I’m pretty strong-willed.

The kids as well as the staff I work with at the Climate Museum open me up to the idea of care & warmth in science, as much as scientific suggestion in the poems. One of our kids, Ota, has a poem that questions if love has a place in a world where we neglected it, this environmental predicament & man-made problem. I love that poem. All the poems in our program, Climate Speaks, feel nuanced in a similar. If you’re in NYC on the evening of June 14th, come check us out at the Apollo.

 

EB: If you could encourage the writers who will be submitting their books to [PANK] for this contest to keep one thing in mind, what would it be?

TD: You’re not completely alone. Give it time. Give ALL of it time. Play with the script everyday. Keep editing. Don’t just edit for a prize. It doesn’t stop here. You will have to live with what you write & the context that brings you to the page. They are not exclusive. Don’t be afraid to play with form. You may be an entirely different person at the end of editing, likely after publishing it, & so on. Feel everything you feel. You have the initial & final say. Put the poems in conversation in real life & see how you feel. Learn from the process. Think of how you want you & this book to be taught. Get to know some of the author’s work at [PANK] & beyond! Being an author, especially of a book of poems, will not make you rich & it takes a lot of life for poems to make you any kind of wealthy.

 

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] loves you.

TD: If you’re looking for a reader, teaching artist, drummer, beatboxer, playwright, or poet for the summertime, I’m available!!!

Author Interview – Max Brett – Nor Do These

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Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with author Max Brett to discuss his first book, Nor Do These. If you’re in New York, join us to hear Max read tonight, 7PM at Dixon Place.

Nor Do These came out of a tandem exercise that quickly shed participants. It aims to address a series of obsessions, including the eroticism of accountancy, honed corporate strategy, dangerous unicorn hunts, the lives, phobias and phobia-related injuries of arguably obscure baseball players, and age and aging, among other things.

Buy Nor Do These 

Erinn Batykefer: You’ve worked extensively in journalism– what’s the relationship between poetry and reportage?

Max Brett: Fourteen years in journalism isn’t so extensive.

Reportage in the alternate definition of a “factual presentation in a book” to me definitely applies to poetry by someone like Susan Howe, who is constantly excavating realities, constantly researching and presenting and curating, library cormorant that she is. I’m reading “The Bench-mark” now. The list could really go on and on but someone like Reinaldo Arenas is presenting his reality in Cuba through a poetry-reportage in a sort of essential way. It remains very difficult for nonfiction-y narratives like that to get out. Poetry can assume some techniques of reportage to whatever end.

EB: The Introduction to Nor Do These outlines a 30-day creative exercise that grew into this book. Is all of your creative work time-limited or deadline-driven?

MB: Keep in mind the exercise conceit might be made up.

In a very literal sense everyone is time-limited or deadline-driven, but in the sense I think is meant in the question, here, I do better when I’m given an assignment and constrained by a deadline. It has to do with a whole-body inability to decide on my own. Left to my own devices, I re-litigate and re-litigate decisions until the people around me lose their will to live. When I am alone, the hours fly by with the weighing of potential decisions. Constraints really come in handy. But this isn’t always the case.

EB: A number of theoretical physicists make cameos in Nor Do These. Do you have a favorite physicist story?

MB: One from “Bomb Power” by Garry Wills any other accounts isn’t a story or an anecdote so much as a brief idea about the sexual appeal of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He had blue, blue, blue eyes, devastatingly blue eyes, icy blue eyes that everyone found totally irresistible. A lot of people don’t know that “The Bluest Eye” is about Oppenheimer.

Theoretical physicists entered into the picture of the book much against my will, as theoretical physicists will do. They are a very transgressive bunch. I don’t agree with the old theoretical physicist maxim, “Only theoretical physicists like us are interesting.” This obviously excludes many other nodes of interest. Perhaps that perspective also comes from journalism.

EB: Why science + art?

MB: I had very (underscore very) minor cancerous growth on my temple and I went into surgery to remove it and Dr. Hooman Khorasani of Mount Sinai made a perfect small drawing of what he was going to cut out of my face first and the drawing developed as he cut and figured out what of the growth remained and after five passes under the knife he gave me the drawing and it’s one of my favorite drawings. Surgeons cut out that type of skin cancer bit by bit in progressively smaller bits and it’s reminiscent of an open-pit mine. Last year I had the opportunity to visit an open-pit mine in Belitung, Indonesia. This was after years of covering the mining sector, in which I visited no mines.

EB: “In a book of thirty-nine poems, the fortieth poem is the book.” How do you see Nor Do These as both collection and whole?

MB: Myopically.

My response might be straight from the amygdala because I don’t know enough and feel insecure I or might just restate the question in answer form, e.g., pieces deal with disparate subject matter like unicorn hunts and personified coffee makers, so they are different and stand on their own, but the conceit binds these pieces together, it was made too concurrently not to be linked, and thematically there are linkages.

EB: Is there a text you would want a reader to upload to their brain Matrix-style before reading Nor Do These?

MB: No. A Matrix-style upload is probably where reading is going and I don’t like the passive role that assigns the reader. And I don’t think any pre-reading is necessary for Nor Do These. Maybe some Adolfo Bioy Casares.

EB: If you could take [PANK] on a date where would you go? [PANK] loves you.

MB: I’ve been in love with [PANK] for months. It’s a lot of pressure—you only get one chance with [PANK]. Probably the Irish Hunger Memorial followed by a bottle of white wine in a public park, with lots of talking, followed by coffee and more talking, followed by more walking.

Max Brett covered policing and immigration with The Chicago Reporter and possible instances of wrongful conviction with the Medill Innocence Project. He helped launch an English-language newspaper in Mexico City. Max was the global sector head of mining with a subscription-based news service. At time of writing, Max works for a nongovernmental organization focused on corruption in resource-rich countries. Max studied journalism, visual art and religion at Northwestern University.

If This is Freedom, Enslave Me (a preface)

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BY BRIAN ALESSANDRO

—

If we can’t write with complexity and a jaundiced eye about ourselves, what good is representation? If we can’t discomfit our readers and compel contemplation, why endeavor any artistic or intellectual pursuit? These questions began to weigh on me after reading a 2017 New York Times interview with the literary luminary Edmund White about the state of homosexuality in literature and popular culture. In fact, I was so moved by White’s thoughts that I wrote a short story inspired by them called “Please,” which has just been published in PANK print issue #14.

White, author of the 1982 classic A Boy’s Own Story, the seminal biography of Jean Genet, and most recently, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading, is also a good friend. In the NYT article, he contemplated a question the journalist had put to him about what he’d like to see more of in queer fiction. His answer: bad gay guys! White’s concern centered on the newfound preciousness of homosexuals, that they have come to be treated with such PC delicacy that they are rarely written about as real people. We are permitted either hero status or victimhood, in effect reducing us to saints or sufferers.

The reductive tendency smacks of apologist condescension. For too long media, and in particular, cinema—the 20th century’s most popular and influential art form—has portrayed gay people as perverse, self-loathing, or flat out evil. The infractions range from Rodrigo Santoro’s swarthy queen Xerxes in Zak Snyder’s 2006 release 300 to Peter Hanly’s promiscuous ruler Prince Edward in Mel Gibson’s 1995 Braveheart to Ted Levine’s transgender-homosexual (a conflation?) fetishistic serial killer Jame Gumb in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence of The Lambs. There were also Matt Damon’s meek, brutal Tom Ripley in Anthony Minghella’s 1999 Patricia Highsmith adaptation The Talented Mr. Ripley and Sharon Stone’s sociopathic, calculating Catherine Tramell in Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 Basic Instinct. Hitchcock was perhaps guiltiest of the malevolent misrepresentation, his  Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951) both featured mincing, effeminate, cunning gay men executing sadistic agendas, while his sissy momma’s boy Norman Bates in 1960’s Psycho created dangerous fear and loathing of transgender people, confusing cross-dressing with gender identity and psychopathology. While these depictions were certainly bruising, we homo folk are now the sacred darlings of dishonest, frightened writers. I’m not entirely sure which is worse.

Farley Granger and John Dall in Hitchcock’s Rope
(1948)

I’m not suggesting we make a full return to the queer-as-subversive-revolutionary themes extolled by Genet or Pasolini (Genet’s 1943 novel Our Lady of The Flowers and Pasolini’s 1975 film Salo were unapologetic in their celebratory sordidness), but a realistic and objective treatment, absenting social context and history, could be a productive change of pace. For the sake of challenging art that doesn’t feel neutered, if nothing else. But there is something else: developing homosexual characters, and by extension, homosexuals, themselves, into flesh-and-blood humans capable of flaws and cruelty and selfishness. We homos didn’t come all this way just to demand free morality passes. We are as capable of bad behavior as any nuanced, gray-zoned hetero.

“Please” is about a nameless gay man—young (early twenties), cynical, and troubled—from Chicago who finds on Craig’s List an affluent older (fifties) gay couple working as physicians in Tucson. Upon invitation and the promise of full-time rock climbing (his great Transcendentalist passion), the young man moves into the doctors’ outsized home in the desert. The couple soon take advantage of the young man in myriad ways, including shaming him into sexual favors, restricting allowance, curtailing career opportunities, impeding social outings, and what eventually amounts to indentured servitude. The young man doesn’t mind being kept as the lifestyle they afford him satisfies his pompous entitlement. But he turns the tables on them by the end anyway through blackmail. To the manner born, the student becomes the teacher—all idioms apply.

Owing to White’s admonishment of identity politics running amuck, “Please” is an attempt to refuse absolution to the marginalized. The historically oppressed get no free passes for their transgressions, no matter how disillusioned they may be. We have earned our rightful place in the bittersweet spectacle that is our gruesome, gorgeous humanity.

—

Brian Alessandro is the co-owner and editor-in-chief of The New Engagement (TNE), an online and print literary journal that has published original work by Edmund White (his first poem in sixteen years), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet, Richard Howard, Murzban F Shroff, MG Stephens, Seamus Scanlon, Nadia Ibrashi, and Sue Kaufman Award-winner, Michael Carroll, whose memoir explores his marriage to White. His debut novel, The Unmentionable Mann, was published by Cairn Press in September 2015, and received favorable reviews from the Huffington Post, Examiner.com, The Leaf, and was excerpted in Bloom, the Edmund White-advised LGBTQ literary journal. It was also featured at the 2016 Tucson Festival of Books and nominated for an Independent Book Publisher Association (IBPA) award for Best New Voice. Alessandro is also the writer and director of the feature film, Afghan Hound, which co-stars Matt McGorry, and has been screened at the Left Forum and The Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy as part of its trauma training series. Additionally, HiConcept Magazine recently nominated his short stories, Mandarin Slang and The Commands of Class and Carnage for Pushcart Prizes in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Alessandro holds a Master of Arts in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and has taught psychology, film, and literature classes at high schools in New York and at Pima Community College (affiliated with the University of Arizona) in Tucson. He is currently adapting White’s 1982 classic, A Boy’s Own Story, into a graphic novel for Top Shelf Productions with Carroll and teaching American Literature at a charter high school in the South Bronx.

Friday Feature: Dinah Cox’s The Canary Keeper

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The Canary Keeper

Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK] author Dinah Cox to discuss the ins and outs of her new book, The Canary Keeper.

The Canary Keeper himself is a failed actor, the kind of person no one wants to listen to at parties, but the eponymous play he stars in features characters eking out existence while in search of their own curtain calls, a chance to hear the applause before the silence sets in. Artist-citizens from the fictional Market Town look to the dimming spotlight and cannot decide its meaning: are they destined for burn-out or blinded by fantasies of themselves as small-town stars? They mark time by way of darkened, lonely highways, indifference from people in power, and the search for opportunity beyond the boredom of Oklahoma’s borders. They step forward, clear their throats, and laugh at their ability to wait in the wings forever, longing for escape to the green room and anticipating that fateful moment when the stage manager says Go.

Erin Batykefer: Names are slippery in these stories. I’m thinking of “Leo’s Peking Palace,” where friends sing Happy Birthday to Leo and half of them sing “Tiger” because they don’t know his real name, or the way Laura’s middle name, Ashley, is used as a slur in “Snowflake.” How so you see names relating to identities?

Dinah Cox: One of my favorite parts abot writing a story is the moment when a character lets me know her name. Her name tells me much about how other characters will perceive her. Rarely have I written nameless characters—though I think I have a story in which one of the characters is named “The Boss”—because a name is not just a marker but a fixture, a place where one’s origins and one’s future might converge. I’ve become accustomed to people messing up my own first name. In a way, that’s given me a kind of namelessness I sometimes resent and sometimes enjoy. But because my own name is somewhat unusual, perhaps I give more attention to names than I otherwise might.

EB: The stage and the idea of performance is a recurring theme in this collection: politics, plays, talk shows, ballet. Were you a theatre kid?

DC: My parents were very heavily involved in theatre; my father was a professor of theatre history, and my mother did a great deal of acting and directing. My sister, in addition to some other, juicer roles, had the honor of portraying one of the no-neck monsters in Oklahoma State University’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. At first, I resisted the family tradition in favor of “making my own way in the world,” but as an undergraduate at Earlham College I majored in theatre, and in my twenties I interned and then worked as a stage manager at an Equity theatre in Michigan. I also spent a memorable summer interning at the Peterborough Players in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

EB: In “Blackout,” I was struck by this line, when the narrator has a moment of panic while arranging props between scenes in a production, only to find the prop cake replaced by a real one: “Had he picked up the wrong cake by mistake–maybe someone working backstage, a real person with real feelings, was having an actual birthday?” There’s real anxiety over real-life consequence of staged performance. How blurry is the line between truth and story?

DC: I worked as an assistant stage manager in a production featuring a birthday cake made of cardboard. It was such a convincing fake, everyone who saw it wanted to eat a slice. So I wrote some version of that cake into a story. But to answer your question, the line between truth and story is blurred enough that, like spun sugar on a real/fake birthday cake, it’s delicious until it gives us a bellyache. Maybe all cakes are made of cardboard after all.

EB: There are a lot of birthdays in these stories–two 21st birthdays, a birthday party not on an actual birthday. What’s your ideal birthday celebration?

DC: I had a pretty nice birthday celebration last year. My partner and I drank elaborate cocktails and cooked an elaborate dinner, drank and ate, and were very merry, indeed. Because all comedies end with a party, I try to have as many parties—throughout the year—as I can; however my parties often include only two people and four dogs: the perfect way to celebrate.

EB: Market Town, where these stories take place, is fictional, but it’s state is real. Why Oklahoma?

DC: The short answer is because I was born in Oklahoma and live here, still. The slightly longer answer is that it’s a sad, haunted, strange, out-of-the-way place, worthy of storytelling.

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

DC: How about the American Heritage Dictionary? Or maybe a Post-It note that says, “read a book, robot.”

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK] about The Canary Keeper?

DC: [PANK] loves you.

Dinah Cox’s first book of stories, Remarkable, was published as the winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize in 2016. Her stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines and journals, including Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, Cream City Review, Copper Nickel, and Beloit Fiction Journal. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University, where she’s an Associate Editor at Cimarron Review.

[Contributor Spotlight] Denise Howard Long’s “Carnival Ride”

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Hear Denise read her flash fiction “Carnival Ride” from PANK 13 <3

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Denise Howard Long’s fiction has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, The Evansville Review, Blue Monday Review, and elsewhere. Her short story “Recuerdos Olvidados” was runner-up for the Larry Brown Short Story Award, and her story “Where It’s Buried” won Five on the Fifth’s Annual Short Story Contest. Denise lives in Nebraska, with her husband and two sons.