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Pictures of You: Jim Tomlinson

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” Seven Things I Know to be True,” by Jim Tomlinson

1. Red is the color my brother doesn’t see. If he were to look at this old photo, he’d think your blouse was a faded grey-green. When we were young, he’d insist on swapping golf tees with me, his reds for my whites or yellows. For years he didn’t say why.

2. Hammersmith Farm was the family cottage to which young Jackie Bouvier often came in summer. In a nearby Newport church, in fact, she married Jack Kennedy. His presidential helicopter sometimes landed on Hammersmith’s long west lawn, and the couple’s young daughter, arms outstretched, would race down that long grassy slope to greet her arriving father, the image captured by ready photographers.

3. It was fifteen years before the day you cartwheeled across Hammersmith’s sunlit lawn that I first met your mother, this at a Newport dance. We’d stay married thirteen years more.

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Pictures of You: Sara Lippmann

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“My Compliance,” by Sara Lippmann

That summer, we went to The Sagamore in Lake George. It was the first and only time my family, paternal grandparents, uncle, aunt, and cousin, took a vacation together outside of a mandatory, claustrophobic Passover hotel. Mostly, we saw each other on High Holidays. My father had a fraught relationship with his younger brother; my mother didn’t click with her in-laws, who shrank from the word “lobster” as if it were cancer while she couldn’t get enough. But there we were.

Here I am: on the left beside my first cousin. There is no date on the back of the photograph. I’m guessing August 1979. August 1980.Fullscreen capture 352015 82925 AM

35 years. How reliable is my memory, how good? A few isolated details break through the fog, but questions loom. New information passed along later has penetrated my consciousness, become subsumed as fact. Secrets persist. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Jennifer Pieroni

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“Jump,” by Jennifer Pieroni

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 Here I am at the age of four training a kitten.

If I could, I’d invite five kittens like this in today, just to watch what they do. I can’t. It’s unfortunate that in my late thirties, I’m suddenly allergic and also the responsibility of the litter box is a constant back and forth between my husband me, neither one of us eager to own the job of cleaning it. So we have just one cat.

 I have never thought about the earliest circumstances that led me to understand how little control I have of others. My current opinion is: I have none. It’s like if I could have all of the kittens in the world, I wouldn’t condescend to them. I wouldn’t expect them to oblige me, not in any way, because I know they probably won’t. I know they might not ever. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Deborah Jiang-Stein

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“The Fuel of Rejection,” by Deborah Jiang-Stein

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I love to roller-skate. It’s one of my favorite things to do, a place where risk is safe, most of the time, and where the smooth surface in the roller rink and good wheels and bearings make all the difference in the ride. A few derby leagues have invited me to guest skate, that’s how much I love it.

Skating feeds my appetite for risk, especially since I’ve removed the rubber toe stops. I skate without brakes because it’s also how I’ve lived in most ways. I’m still learning how to “brake” in life.

Writing Prison Baby, took my guts as a skater and the same threshold for risk. And, I had to learn what to filter, where to “brake.” Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Nadine Darling

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” Haircut,” by Nadine Darling

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I got the classic Mia Farrow “Rosemary’s Baby” haircut for my 35th birthday, at Vidal Sassoon in Boston. It was planned meticulously; I called the salon and asked for my hair to be cut by the director, a man named named Jacques. He had the most experience, they said, but he was also the most expensive. I assured them that that was fine. My mother was paying.

After donning my silky robe and having my hair washed by a tiny woman with several facial piercings and stomping Doc Martens, Jacques stood behind my chair and brushed my wet hair out with his fingers. His age seemed impossible to know. He had some kind of accent- not really French, but something. Chains that hung from his leather pants clinked like silverware with the slightest movement. We looked at me in the mirror. He asked me what I wanted and I told him. He was not surprised, but he smiled, his hands still in my hair. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Susan Henderson

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“Patrol Camp,” by Susan Henderson

I carry a very particular picture of myself in my head, the identity that stuck, or perhaps the identity that feels most true. Someone will tell me I’m pretty or sweet, and I’ll look in the mirror and see this kid:susan henderson.jpg

This is me having a big old time at patrol camp. This is back in the days when my dad still cut my hair on the kitchen stool, and obviously I did not bother to dry my hair for the photo. Maybe you can tell by the Billy Idol sneer how I take to dressing up in paper headbands and feathers.

I went to patrol camp the summer before sixth grade to become “an officer.” This selection means I was misunderstood to be a child who would not light her patrol post on fire or try to send the kids across the street when they were most likely to get run over. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Myfanwy Collins

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I remember the adults at the after-wake playing a tape recording of my dead father as he told stories. All the drunk people listening to the tape were laughing. I didn’t understand then that they were laughing because they were sad. It was right there. His voice. If I try really hard, I can catch bits of it at the tops of my ears, but then they blink away.

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After my mother died, I kept a voicemail from her on my phone for a long time. My husband tried to save it for me but now it’s long gone, too. Then I saw her in a video from years and years before, walking, alive, and there was her voice. Her voice. I never wanted to let go but the tape began unraveling and was lost.

The smell lingers on clothing, in bedding. This is probably what you first knew of the people who cared for you when you were newly born, their smell. Their voices were more muffled to your new ears. You were used to listening through fluid, through skin. Your eyes unfocused. You knew them by the scent that is so unmistakably their own. That scent that you only notice in their absence. A puff of smoke, like magic. My mother has been dead for fourteen years and I still have a scarf of hers that I take out and smell every once in a while if I am feeling like I must. It is a small torture. I am that baby again, reaching up to her. Continue reading →

Because of your fatal addiction to art: A Conversation with Chelsea Hodson

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–by Julie Hart

 

I met Chelsea Hodson last July when she read at The Book Report, a reading series at the HiFi on New York’s Lower East Side. She “reported” on Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth by reading an essay about the boys of her own youth. I bought her chapbook, an essay called Pity the Animal (Future Tense Books, 2014), and read it on the subway home. This line severed me: “I was writing everything down as if I knew what I was seeing.” I almost immediately began my own piece beginning with, “I was writing down my opinions and calling them poetry.” This is the highest form of flattery I know.

Chelsea agreed to come over to my Brooklyn studio and let me interview her. We talked about her recently completed project, Inventory, a Tumblr blog pairing short prose poems with photos of every single thing she owns—all 657 of them. We also discussed her writing practice, Marina Abramovic, her favorite poets, the Tin House summer workshop, and our minimalist aesthetic.

 

Julie: First, I wanted to ask you about Inventory. How did you keep going for 657 days?

C: Well, when I started it, I didn’t think anyone would read it. But I liked the idea of it being on the internet, a public document. Putting it out into the world helped me feel accountable, so the longer it went, the more I realized it had to be completed. When I started it, I thought, “I’ll do it for a while, but I probably won’t do everything.” The longer it went on, the more I realized, “No, I actually do need to finish it.” But I didn’t realize it was going to take nearly two years to do. I thought it would take maybe a year. I don’t know why. I just started making an inventory, and I started in the kitchen. When I decided to do the blog, I began a narrative and just did whichever object I felt would logically come next. Something in the kitchen would remind me of something in a book, so I would get that book and quote that part, so in that way it became somewhat random. I wasn’t doing it by room; I was doing it by instinct, intuition, what I thought would come naturally in the inventory. Conceptually, it would not be good if I didn’t actually do everything. I just felt, what’s the point if I don’t do the whole thing? Continue reading →

Men Writing Women: Why I’m Good at It. Am I Good at It? How to Be Better at It.

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–By Michael Gerhard Martin

 

 

When I was an undergraduate writer-boy, I thought myself a Hemingway scholar. I carried a valise, and tried to take up pipe smoking and hunting and tweed. I drank hard and thought existentially, and wished piously for wormwood visions.

The well-thumbed copy of Papa’s Complete Stories in my valise was the Finca Viggia edition, after all, and while I still don’t know what Finca Vigia is, I knew at the time that it meant authenticity. The book’s broken spine and worn pages affirmed my own authenticity. I was going to be a writer. I was a writer. Look, world, at my valise, my fountain pen, my Finca Viggia edition, and comprehend!

Those among us not embarrassed by our twenty-year-old selves are likely slaves to ridiculous nostalgia. Continue reading →

Virtual Book Tour: Man of Clay, by CL Bledsoe

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Today is the second day of CL Bledsoe’s virtual book tour celebrating Man of Clay, a novel with elements of magical realism and a dash of steampunk. This funny, engaging story redefines what Southern Literature is capable of being. Man of Clay can be pre-ordered today!

 

EXCERPT FROM MAN OF CLAY:

I [1] had recovered [2] nearly completely by the time Master John again decided to test his flying heated air sack. It was a massive thing. The sack itself was woven of the colors of the Arkansas flag. Master John had learned through trial and error that the sack needed to be closed at the top to contain the air, in order to fully capture the lifting pressure as the hot air rose. At the base of the balloon, a sort of modified lamp sat, which, when lit, shot a two-foot high tongue of flame up into the sack, heating the air. The basket was wicker, connected with thin ropes. The basket was lined with samples of plant life and various goods he intended to trade with the Andean [3] population. Because of the weight of these things, and of the two intended passengers, the amount of heated air needed was tremendous, necessitating the air sack to be massive. It towered, higher than four or even five men standing atop each other’s shoulders. It was, likewise, the width of greater than two men with arms outstretched. The bulk of the weight came from the oil needed to maintain the flame, until Master John devised a solution to this problem. It is well known that certain naturally occurring gases are quite flammable, and Master John had managed to capture a great quantity of this gas in thickly woven bags—woven so tightly that the gas could not escape. It was this gas which fueled the flame which created the buoyancy necessary for this trip.

For his test, Master John intended to pilot the contraption with Othello [4] along to simulate the weight of Zeno [5]. All of the slaves gathered, dismissed from their tasks for the occasion. Master John and Othello climbed into the basket, which was kept down with great lead weights. The ropes connecting these were loosened, though several longer ropes were still connected, the gas was set aflame, and the air sack began to rise. The slaves ‘oood’ and ‘ahhd,’ though the basket itself rose only a few inches at first. As the flame increased, and the heat of the air grew, the basket rose, higher and higher, until a man could walk between it and the ground, which one of Mr. Winfrey’s sons [6] did. The slaves applauded this, but Master John wasn’t finished. He increased the flame, and the balloon rose higher and higher, until it was as though he and Othello were atop a great mountain. Clara Bell [7] cried out in concern, but Master John continued to raise the heated air sack. Continue reading →