I’ve returned several times to the title of Michelle Reale’s new chapbook, If All They Had Were Their Bodies (Burning River, 2011), posing it as a question of its characters. What if these characters—these vulnerable, sometimes cruel, and often-mistreated children, women and men—had only their bodies? Often, thanks to the twists of trouble and human nature in these stories and to the harsh realities rendered, these characters would fare better in the world with only their bodies and without emotions and spirit—they wouldn’t be so susceptible and wouldn’t suffer so much. In the end, though, the collection reaffirms that it is better to risk our hearts than to deny them.

There’s a strange and aching loveliness to the thirteen short fictions and prose poems in this collection. The relationships in these domestic stories are fraught with complexities and the characters experience and/or inflict cruelties both small and large. To various degrees, the characters throughout these stories suffer afflictions of body and/or spirit that aren’t always easily understood by the reader, but are very much felt. The tensions between these characters are nuanced and layered and subject to imagination and interpretation. Each time I read these brief, powerful stories I took away more.

The language, subtleties, and subtext throughout are skillfully handled. The story “Some Cities” opens with a woman nursing her seriously ill lover. In a reversal of health, when he recovers, she declines: “He was flush with vigor, while she took to braiding her brittle hair, going barefoot and crying at the vulnerability of the common housefly.” This sentence and the image of ‘the vulnerability of the common housefly’ beautifully capture the essence and excellence of this chapbook. Michelle Reale’s story endings also repeatedly surprised and delighted and again speak to her gift. The last sentence from “Some Cities:” “She told herself she was as brave as someone in her position could be.”

Here’s a wonderful excerpt from the title story “If All They Had Were Their Bodies,” a story that centers on boys and girls and the ways we’re conditioned to value the superficial and are blind to so much beyond the body:

“[The skinny girls] hold the fragile scaffolding of their wraith-thin bones in their own arms, rocking gently as if they were their own babies. They are conclave and vulnerable, dressed in the colors of sickness.”

Here’s another:

“A fat girl on the wall crosses thick thighs, revealing a musical note tattooed on the puckered skin at the back of her knee. A skinny girl spots this, tracing the form. Her eyes become bright. She closes her eyes and sings the note aloud. She thinks of the possibilities there. She takes small, wobbly steps toward the fat girl, who is so surprised that she makes room for her on the wall. They sit silently, side by side.”

In “Bocartes,” a jaded, sometimes heartless father laments, “He just can’t seem to figure out the formula for thriving.” This is true of the many characters throughout this collection. “Bocartes” is an ironic story about gardening and what we can’t keep alive. This ending also slices and stays: “He lets her water the flowers and watches as she holds the hose over each one, letting the water beat the delicate petals down. He knows that later they will burn in the sun.”

In the second half of the collection, in “Chicken,” “Mercy,” “Picturesque,” “Swayed.” and more, Reale peoples her stories with larger families, harsher cruelties and more troubling transgressions. The stories chronicle how desperately we need family love and bonds and how often we fail at it. The final story in the collection “After He’d Gone” depicts just such yearning and failing with stunning brevity:

“She was looking at me like she did sometimes, like it was my fault, all of it, whatever. I never asked for this, she’d said once, and I knew she meant me and my brother. I said ‘I was just …’ I couldn’t think what. She patted the cot for her cigarettes. They were on the floor underneath and I got them for her. The pack was almost empty.”

Jen Michalski, author of Close Encounters and May-September captures something so apt and gorgeous in her praise of this collection:

“Michelle Reale’s stories are the tiny shards, glass birds, that lay around you, seemingly harmless, after an explosion. Glittery diamonds, impossible to resist, to fondle, they cut your skin deeper than you think possible when you take them in your hand. And then, without warning, they fly away.”

Glass birds that cut and then fly away. It’s a fabulous and fitting image for this collection.

Submissions for Specter Magazine’s first themed issue, The Hip-Hop Issue, are now open. We’re looking for fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art/photography which embodies a hip-hop aesthetic.

The Hip-Hop issue is scheduled for a June 4th, 2012 release (subject to change).

Submissions will be selected by guest editor Rion Amilcar Scott, who appeared in previous issues of Specter, including his Pushcart Prize nominated story, “A Friendly Game.” Rion has contributed to PANK, Fiction International and Confrontation, among others. Raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, he earned an MFA at George Mason University and presently teaches English at Bowie State University.

We are accepting submissions at our submission manager until April 30, 2012: http://spectermagazine.submishmash.com/submit

Periodic updates about the Hip-Hop issue can be found at Specter’s tumblr: http://www.spectercollective.com

You can’t miss Melissa Chadburn’s outstanding essay at The Rumpus.

Huzzah! Jason Jordan’s The Dying Horse, is now available from Main Street Rag.

More epitaphs from Matthew Vollmer in Fringe.

Jules Archer and Rose Hunter have work in A-Minor.

Lots of PANK contributors in Used Furniture Review including our superstor assistant editor Abby Koski and Tessa Fontaine.

Jen Bessemer has a new e-chapbook, Quiet Vertical Movements, that features her wonderful collage work.

At Everyday Genius, Carolyn Zaikowski.

William F. Buckley, the conservative writer from the right ruling class, owned a King Charles Spaniel named Rowley.  Eli Cash, the Western writer from the film, The Royal Tenenbaums, ran over a Beagle named Buckley.  Because the title character in that Wes Anderson film had a persona – insensitive, captivating, and slightly racist – similar to that of the writer named Buckley, I believe Anderson named the Beagle after the writer.  I also believe that he cast a Beagle in the role of Buckley rather than a King Charles Spaniel because film audiences don’t like seeing dogs die, but exceptions are made with Beagles since they’re more annoying than an unemployed roommate.

Does referencing Buckley, the conservative and slightly racist writer, make Anderson a supporter of the right ruling class? No it doesn’t: Anderson ended The Royal Tenenbaums with Cash murdering the Beagle named Buckley.  In your first viewing of the film, the murder may seem like an accident.  But if you pay attention, right before Cash uses his Austin-Healey 3000 to crush Buckley into the Tenenbaum House, he says, “Here I come,” proving that the murder was premeditated.

What did Cash have against Buckley the Beagle?  Many viewers of the film assume that he had nothing against the dog – that the murder was only a result of a Mescaline binge gone wrong.  The only binge gone wrong, though, is the inhalant binge that those viewers must have partaken in to come up with such an idiotic assumption.  Cash, whose literary career was starting to falter, murdered Buckley the Beagle for two reasons: one – the dog shared a name with a writer whose career never faltered, and – two – although a dog is a man’s best friend, it is a writer’s worst enemy.

I didn’t know a dog was a writer’s worst enemy until I read that Anderson modeled Cash off Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City. . . and childhood neighbor of Mama Forsley.  Among other interesting anecdotes, my Mama said, “The McInerenys had a habit of collecting dogs that would yap all day and night.”  My research indicates that the habit continued throughout McInereny’s life and was likely responsible for his other habit: snorting Cocaine.  Without the assistance of that expensive stimulant, I doubt he could have written, while his dogs assaulted his concentration, such a great debut novel.  But, like every trust-fund Williams College graduate I have ever met, McInereny eventually grew a tolerance to Cocaine, and his career never again reached the high that his first and best novel produced because his yapping dogs became his worst enemies.

If I had known that Anderson modeled Cash on McInerney and that Cash killed Buckley the Beagle because a dog is a writer’s worst enemy, I never would have brought home that flea-infested mutt I found roaming the factories of South San Francisco.  But, right before taking him home, I watched the SPCA commercial where Sarah McLachlan sings “Arms of an Angel” and my heart was bleeding. . . with the knowledge that many writers – more accomplished writers than I – owned dogs:  P.G. Wodehouse had a Dachshund named Jed. E.B. White had a West Highland Terrier named Susy. Robert Penn Warren had Cocker Spaniel named Frodo. Kurt Vonnegut had a Lhasa Apso named Pumpkin. Edward Albee had a Maltese named Poochi.  Stephen King had a Corgi named Marlowe. John Cheever had a Labrador Retriever named Flora. Dr. Seuss had an Irish Setter named Cluny.  Charles Dickens, at Gad’s Hill, had an entire colony of dogs – Newfoundlands, Saint Bernards, you name it. Stanislaw Lem had a German Shepard. Gertrud Stein had a Poodle.  Faulkner had Rat Terriers. Both Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad had Chihuahuas.  Franz Kafka, Eugene O’Neill, Jerome K Jerome, Blaise Cendrars – they all had dogs.  And I, Christopher Forsley, now had a flea infested mutt named Ren – alluding to the psychotic dog on The Ren & Stimpy Show and short for Renegade.

I thought Ren, in some unknown way, would improve my writing just as I thought all dogs improved the writing of their masters.  Dorothy Parker’s wit, I was convinced, was channeled through the intellect of her Poodles – C’est Tout, Cliché, and Poupée.  It couldn’t have been a coincidence that Anthony Burgess’s dog was just as horrifying and black as the scenes in A Clock Work Orange are.  I told myself that E.L. Doctorow’s prose is as fluid and fresh as the water in Gardiner’s Bay because of all the time he spent swimming there with Becky, his Weimaraner.  Donna Tartt’s incredibly ugly Pug, Pongo, must have inspired her to expose the human condition as an equally ugly ordeal in The Secret History.  If Amy Hempel’s Labrador Retriever, Wanita, was anything like the Labs I know, its constant begging for attention undoubtedly led to the author’s enchanting ‘minimalist’ style.  I bet J.K. Rowling’s retired racing champion of a Greyhound revealed to its owner how to race through novels without a thought and earn incredible amounts of money without a talent.  And Denis Johnson’s Bullmastiff, The Colonel, probably has a military mindset that demands the same kind of critical attention as its master’s short stories.

But I was wrong.  I made the mistake of trusting Arthur Schopenhauer, who said, “To anyone who needs lively entertainment for the purpose of banishing the dreariness of solitude, I recommend a dog, in whose moral and intellectual qualities he will almost always experience delight and satisfaction.”  Schopenhauer was an idiot.  He thought the human desire to write – or create anything for that matter – was futile, illogical, and purposeless.  And I’m an idiot for reading, studying, or trusting anything that pessimistic old German wrote.  Instead, I should have read, studied, and trusted the work of Joe Sacco, the cartoonist, who said that the dog “ranks next to the child as creativity’s greatest impediment.”

If I had listened to Sacco instead of Schopenhauer, this Forsley Feuilleton you are reading would be a lot better, or at least a lot less shitty.  Because of Ren, my dog, I had to rewrite it just before the deadline, leaving time for neither a proper revision nor a shit cleaning.  Actually, I had to rewrite it, from scratch, several times.

I finished the first draft in San Francisco’s Mission District on my laptop at a Café on 16^th & Valencia called Muddy Waters.  They serve really strong coffee that causes me to shit every hour.  While taking a shit in that cesspool of a bathroom I thought about Ren’s taking of shits – about how much time I’ll waste picking them up: a few minutes here, a few there, during every walk, and after every meal. . . add it up and that’s at least one great American novel, over the course of his fifteen year life span, that I won’t write.  When I returned from the bathroom, I found that Ren had chewed up my power adapter, causing my computer to shut down before I saved what I wrote.

I walked down the street, hoping, as William Styron said, the walk would simulate transactions in my head so when I sat down to rewrite everything I wouldn’t have to “face the first page of a cold blank paper with pitiful anxiety.”  But the only transactions the walk stimulated in my head were related to defensive tactics to use against the angry hipsters Ren humped and pissed on at every corner.  Then I bought a typewriter at an antique store called Viracocha, and, in emulation of McInereny – on stimulants more powerful than Muddy Waters’ coffee – I rewrote everything in a state of manic delight.  But those stimulants were so powerful and my focus was so intense that I didn’t realize Ren was eating my prose as the typewriter shit it out.

So another rewrite was required, and this time I did it, painstakingly, by hand. . . one letter at a time, one word after another.  I had a bag of Bacon Bits that I threw, one by one, into Ren’s open mouth every time he whined, which was between every word.  I quickly finished – both this piece and the bag of Bacon Bits – and was preparing to fax the papers to PANK for your reading pleasure when Ren came over and, encouraged by those Bacon Bits, shit on them.  I didn’t have it in me to do another rewrite and sent these shitty pages to PANK anyway. . . so forgive me for all the shit you had to read through in this Forsley Feuilleton.  I did what I could.

People who know about dogs, people who buy miniature sweaters and expensive pedicures for their canine companions, tell me that I could do more – that I could get Ren’s balls chopped off.  They say if I take his manhood, some of the problems he causes will cease: he’ll stop chewing on power adapters, stop humping and pissing on hipsters, and stop eating and shitting on my prose.  But I don’t have the money to take his manhood.  I spend all my money on Ren, that little bastard from a basket: flea protection for him to abuse, leashes for him to destroy, toys for him to choke on, bones to puke up, crates to piss in, dog food to shun, and human food to steal.  And any money I have left goes toward the horse tranquilizers I need to sleep through his all-night howls.

I’m eager to have his balls chopped off – for revenge more than anything else – but I don’t have the money that San Francisco’s sadomasochist veterinarians demand in order to perform their self-gratifying sexual act.  I don’t even have the money San Francisco’s left ruling class slumlords demand in order to keep a roof over my head.  The dollar-per-hundred words my SEO articles earn, the non-existent royalty checks my first book brings in, the ego points this PANK column gives me – they aren’t enough.  I have to write more, write better.  I guess this is why so many writers get dogs: financial desperation produces literary inspiration.

1.  Only 8 more days of waiting until the release of PANK 6! You can still pre-order your copy here.

2. If 8 days is too long to wait for some PANK goodness, order our iPhone app. Send us proof that you purchased along with your mailing address (awesome at pankmagazine dot com) and we’ll send you a free print copy of one of our LittleBooks.

3. We have 125 guests confirmed for our Convocation in Chicago this year at AWP, but we would love to see you there as well, RSVP here.

4. Our next Special Issue, focused on Parenting, is still open for submissions and will be until Mid-April.

Our January issue is up up and away! Oh this is a fine issue. It really is. Let’s start with the four short stories by Ashley Farmer where the writing evokes the surreal and fables. You also don’t want to miss the short story by Matthew Battles that is both future tale and cautionary tale with some Wikipedia thrown in for good measure. We included ten poems, written to a YOU, by Rose Hunter in this issue because she submitted ten and we couldn’t bear saying no to any of them because they are that good. You will also find work you won’t want to turn away from by Spencer Wise, Marcus Speh, Domi Shoemaker, Evelyn Somers, Gwen Mullins, Teresa Milbrodt, Gary McDowell, Sherri Hoffman, Sheila MacAvoy, Mika Seifert, Benjamin Rybeck, Jeffrey Kingman, Rose Hunter, Christian Harder, Matthew Gilbert, Nancy Flynn, Mike Dockins, and Kristiana Rae Colon whose two poems are, in a word, exquisite.

Antonia Crane’s The Moment is live in Smith Magazine.

You  can enjoy new fiction from xTx in Spork!

The new issue of NAP includes John Mortara, Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, Joseph Goosey, and more.

For the next six weeks, Kyle Minor’s fiction will be serialized online at Ninth Letter.

Flywheel Magazine’s second issue includes Court Merrigan, Erik Wennermark, and Laura LeHew (1, 2, 3, 4).

Great news! The wonderful chapbooks by xTx and Frank Hinton have been re-released by Safety Third Press. Get some.

Issue 30 of The Collagist includes Sarah Tourjee, Shena McAuliffe, and Matthew Vollmer.

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft has poetry in the January issue of Word Riot.

Chloe Caldwell’s Legs Get Let Astray is available for pre-order from Future Tense Books.

There is a new issue of Dark Sky Magazine with Rob Roensch, Jennifer Pieroni, Elaine Castillo, Nate Pritts and Matthew Vollmer.

J. Bradley has two poems in Fwriction Review.

You can enjoy a poem by Helen Vitoria in Referential, as well as two tiny pieces in Nailpolish Stories.

Barrelhouse Ten is now available and has awesome writing by Gabe Durham, Melissa Broder, Chad Simpson, Art Taylor, Tara Laskowski (an annotated story!), Paula Bomer, Randall Brown, Kimberly Ann Southwick, Daniela Olszewska, and more. Online, you can find a story by Bess Winter (scroll down).

Blue Girl by Emma Torzs is now live at Joyland.

Elizabeth Hildreth has some things out and about at Forklift Ohio (scroll down) and Unswept (1, 2). She is joined at Unswept by Chad Simpson (1, 2, 3), Brian Oliu (1, 2), Desmond Kon (1, 2, 3), and Kirsty Logan.

“Then the pinholes move and I can only see the wall, but I know he is still there …”
Sarah Rose Etter, Chicken Father.

Every now and then, the simplest lines mean the most to a reader. They pull memories from long ago, things forgotten but for some reason now mean something.

When I was younger, we travelled through the Arizona desert on the way to the coast. One of our back windows was busted out, cardboard taped in with cut slivers. Small views of the outside world. I had woke from a dream about an old Indian man who was tending wounds, his horse walking away. When I open my eyes, through the slits of the cardboard, I saw the Gakolik mountains after sunset. It looked like God had torn the sky, jagged and dead black.

I stared and stared, wondering if the sky was still there, wondering what would happen if we turned south and hit the gas.

Even though Woody Allen is still sticking his wrinkled pecker into Soon-Yi, his ex-girlfriend’s adopted daughter, I support the great filmmaker unconditionally.  It’s time to forget about his scandal and start shunning those writers that still use it as an opening for pieces of writing that have nothing to do with Allen, his flicks, or his personal affairs just to get the attention of our nation’s perverted, opinionated, gossip-loving readers.  Allen has been happily married to Soon-Yi for close to twenty years now, and as long as he continues making flicks I too am happy.  I’m especially happy about his newest flick, Midnight in Paris, and it’s not because I have a thing for Owen Wilson’s nose or because I wish I lived in 1920s Paris.  No, I don’t have any nose-job gift certificates for Wilson and my Paris in the 20s obsession ended years ago.  All it got me was a fifty-dollar bottle of fake absinthe that resulted in a month-long hangover, and a rash from a stripper in a San Francisco ‘cabaret’ that was nothing like the Moulin Rouge.

I’m happy about Midnight in Paris because in it Earnest Hemingway, under the command of Allen, gave me some life changing advice:  “If you’re a writer, declare yourself the best writer.”  I guess it wasn’t life changing, but it was good advice for this first Forsley Feuilleton.  Actually, it’s because of Hemingway’s advice that I narcissistically included my surname in the title of this highly regarded PANK blog. . . this is a column, not a blog.  It’s a column because I, Christopher Forsley, just as Hemingway advised, declare myself the best writer, and the best writer writes columns – as Dorothy Parker, Herb Caen, and Christopher Hitchens each did during their reign as the best – not blogs.  Blogs are what Perez Hilton writes, and I don’t want to be in league with a writer that exploits the personal lives of celebrities just to gain readers.

Then, immediately after advising me to declare myself the best writer, Hemingway said, “But you’re not as long as I’m around, unless you wanna put on the gloves and settle it.”  Lucky for us, Hemingway blew his brains out long ago.  Lucky for you because, if you’re a woman, he would offend your modern sensibilities, and, if you’re a man, he would kick your modern ass.  And lucky for me, since I’m a man to some degree, I can now declare myself the best writer without having to put on the gloves and settle it with Hemingway.  I still have to settle it with the other contemporary male writers who may try to declare themselves as the best, but at least Hemingway isn’t around to knock me out.

And I doubt any living male writer in possession of the talent to declare himself the best could knock me out.  Gore Vidal is too old.  Thomas Pynchon doesn’t exist.  George Saunders founded the PRKA (People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction). Gary Steyngart can’t walk straight due to his vodka intake. Stephen Elliot, if he’s anything like his father – whose rather disgraceful encounter with three punks in a Chicago park was documented in The Adderall Diaries – couldn’t hang with me, despite his intimidating Rumpus tattoo.  And Jonathan Ames, ‘The Herring Warrior,’ has, my sources at McSweeny’s tell me, a pitiful record in the ring of 1-4, so I’m sure I could whip him too.

Even if the more recent reports of Ames getting a win against Craig Davidson, that burly Canadian writer, are true, and even if he uses his newly established Bored To Death Hollywood connections to get some of Manny Ramirez’s steroids and Freddie Roach of the Wild Card Gym to train him and does the impossible – knock me out – I’m still a better writer than him because. . . because I declare it.  And why shouldn’t I?

If Hemingway could, then I can too.  That old woman hater – and young woman hater – was a failed journalist turned failed novelist. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, and a hack is a hack is a hack is a hack.  He thought replacing commas with ‘and’ was innovative, squeezing ‘damn’ into every paragraph was shocking, omitting important scenes added dimension, using short declarative sentences masked his lack of punctuation knowledge, and that writers should strangle their emotions.  He probably thought writers should strangle their emotions so that after they discover the works of Knut Hamsun and realized that he, Hemingway, stole whatever style he did have from that crazy old Nazi sympathizer that those emotionless writers would passively ignore the theft instead of writing an outraged analysis of it, disputing the drunkard’s literary reputation.

Hemingway’s reputation as a drunk, though, is indisputable, and like all drunks, he lied – to himself and his readers.  I believe he once claimed to have reeled in a marlin with one hand and beaten a bear in arm wrestling with the other, simultaneously.  That was a lie, just as his claims of boxing prowess were.  I call bullshit on all those stories of him getting paid to spar with professional prizefighters while living in Paris.  I bet the only fight he ever got into was against Gertrude Stein.  He probably started it after she called his writing, “inaccrochable,” and then he quit it after she both verbally and physically dismantled him.

I’ll take it further: Hemingway’s entire life was a lie – his writing ability, his fighting ability, and even his ability in bed with the opposite sex.  I agree with Truman Capote, who called him “The greatest old closet queen ever to come down the pike.”  To get a visual of Hemingway writing at his desk in that same dress his mother used to put on him while a dozen six-toed purring kittens crawl about and some half naked and completely unfulfilled lady visitor sobs in the corner, all you have to do is turn to a random page in The Old Man and the Sea.  I’m doing it right now. . .  and this, on page twelve of my edition, is what I found:

The Boy: “How old was I when you first took me in a boat?”

The Old Man: “Five and you nearly were killed when I brought the fish in too green and he nearly tore that boat to pieces. Can you remember?”

The Boy: “I can remember the tail slapping and banging and the thwart breaking and the noise of the clubbing. I can remember you throwing me into the bow where the wet coiled lines were and feeling the whole boat shiver and the noise of you clubbing him like chopping a tree down and the sweet blood smell all over me.”

The Old Man: “Can you really remember that or did I just tell it to you?”

The Boy: “I remember everything from when we first went together.”

Because I want my family to read this first Forsley Feuilleton, I won’t go into too much detail about the sexual symbolism found in the conversation quoted above.  The boat is the bed, and the fish is The Old Man’s pecker.  Use your imagination and figure out the rest on your own.  And if you doubt my simple yet profound symbolic translation, turn to the next page where you will find The Boy, no longer the five-year-old he was during his first encounter with The Old Man, asking, “But are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?”  And The Old Man responds: “I think so.  And there are many tricks.”

Competition is competition, and if “writers are competitive,” as Hemingway’s character in Midnight in Paris says, then you have to do whatever you can to beat the competition.  Hemingway had to lie about his sexual desires so he could write about manly pursuits without his peers dismissing him as a fairy.  He had to cheat on his many wives with many women so he could backup his lie.  And he had to steal Hamsun’s writing style so he could declare himself the best writer.

I can’t spell worth a damn, can’t create descriptive scenes, can’t write realistic dialogue, and can’t socialize at literary cocktail parties without getting so belligerently drunk that I have to stay in the corner chair. . .  so perhaps I too should start lying, cheating, and stealing if I’m going to beat the competition and be the best writer. But I’m too honest, and anyway, my writing speaks for itself – and a good thing it does because most of what it says is entirely unoriginal.

And I’ll prove it by selecting a passage at random from my first book, Bums of the Bay.  An unknown San Francisco publisher called Seven7h Tangent released it and it’s only stocked in a single store that I won’t reveal, so I don’t think the inclusion of this passage makes me an offender of PANK’s “no self promotion” rule, but if it does then I’ll be damned both literally and literarily.  Here’s the entirely unoriginal passage:

“Albert tried to get to the grave by hanging himself.  He used a dangling participle.  But having no idea how to use a dangling participle, death never came.  Death knew how to use a shotgun though, so he visited Kurt Cobain instead.”

That passage isn’t entirely unoriginal.  Only the dangling participle hanging joke is unoriginal.  It was stolen from a S.J. Perelman piece by my writing, not by me.  But give my writing a break.  Everyone in this game steals – like T.S. Elliot said in a totally different context, “Good writers borrow, great writers outright steal.” I even stole part of this column’s title from Perelman.  I don’t even know what a feuilleton is.  But Perelman is obscure enough that my writing and I might be able to pull off a literary heist on par with Hemingway’s ransacking of Hamsun’s style. . . and launch an entire career off Perelman plagiarism, just like Woody Allen did.

I was three when my biological mother left me. I don’t remember her leaving. I don’t recall a feeling of loss. I remember a book from my childhood, Are you My Mother? A baby bird hopped between animals asking, “Are you my mother?’ The baby bird finally ended up before a giant, mechanical crane. Gazing up at it the baby bird asked, “Are you my mother?” The impossibility of it. Naivete and wonder. She could have been anyone, my mother.

First there was my grandmother. After my biological mother left, and my father needed time and space to finish graduate school, I lived with my grandparents. I called my grandmother “Mama Bear.” She used to read me Goldilocks & the Three Bears. I referred to myself as the Baby Bear rather than Goldilocks who was an intruder.

Second was my beautiful stepmother, now a pilot and painter and always a kind and patient woman who endured my thirteen-to-twenty-five-year-old bullshit all those years, who’s still here. It took me too long to feel grateful to her because I was a selfish child who felt she hadn’t gained a mother but lost her father instead.

You know how we all take off on these ape-shit-go-wild journeys of self-exploration? My stepmother’s steadfast presence was the difference between me fucking up completely and me merely learning the hard way.

I was twenty-one when I landed my first modeling contract. My agent, Joni, was mother-like because she was protective; she insisted on poise. Hold your chin up.

My agent after that wasn’t exactly mother-like, but she guided my career as far as we could take it. She also set an example for me to follow later as a solo mother.

In strip clubs, various women came in and set up house in the locker room; we tipped them for their shoulder-to-cry-on, their food, their sewing skills and perfume.

In college, Renee Ruderman was like a mother to me. Before Anne Lamont, she taught me every first attempt was a shitty first draft, that it was necessary. Writing was messy. She tried to warn me, but I earned my MFA anyway and believed I’d make a living in academia. Still, her dedication to poetry, the process, tireless, instilled in me.

When teaching didn’t provide a livable salary and health insurance, my former boss Christi did. She wasn’t old enough to be my mother, but she provided an alternate path to follow professionally, and she used to give me her old clothes. I still wear her suede jacket.

My best friend, Judy, isn’t old enough to be my mother, more like an older sister to me. Know what I’ve learned from her? Laughter. Resilience. You should see her smile.

Roxane Gay isn’t old enough to be my mother either, but I refer to her as my “fairy godmother.” She’s making my wish come true.

When I was twenty-one, I went looking for my biological mother. What I found wasn’t what I wanted. You’re not my mother. Last year, she killed herself with meth. I hadn’t spoke to her in nine years. I learned from a stranger on Facebook she was dead. What was I supposed to do? She put drugs before everything. I was three when she left. To this day I can’t recall a feeling of loss. My mother’s gone. Still, I walked around with a metaphorical gunshot wound. It’s a hole a collective of women fill.

Jennifer, Ethel, Shanna, Brenda, Nikki, Pam, Antonia, Milcah, Emily, Heather, LaBecca.  Thank you.

Yesterday on Facebook, I linked the Literary Arts page in which The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch is listed as a finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Creative Non-Fiction. In the comment bar I wrote, “Lidia Yuknavitch must win . . . or I’ll chew my arm off.”

I wasn’t thinking about it but remembered. My son and I watched a movie, Soul Surfer, about a young woman who lost her arm. A shark bit her arm off. She was a surfer who had to learn to surf again minus an arm. My son said, “If I had to lose a limb, and could chose, I’d want to lose a leg, not an arm.” My son’s reason was he couldn’t draw as well with one arm. How would he be an architect, a graphic illustrator, an artist with one arm? That was his reasoning. So I imagined myself here typing missing an arm.

Lidia Yuknavitch is a metaphorical arm.

Women writers give other women permission to write. They tell us, write. Urge us, write. Show us how to do it.  The Chronology of Water empowered me the same way it empowered thousands of women writers. Lidia Yuknavitch loves women.  We know that. We’ve responded. We’ve joined the conversation. Carry on.

Last week, I wrote a letter to Marie Calloway.  A week later, Antonia Crane wrote her own letter to Marie. Then another woman contacted me and said she was writing a letter too. It’s as big as women can take it. The conversation, I mean, the writing. Echoes. Ripples. Butterfly effect.

Marie is a catalyst. I think that’s something. Here’s something too. Marie Calloway isn’t her real name. She could be anyone, right? Universal?

Last week, a young woman responded to my letter to Marie Calloway. She addressed it to me with a “Dear . . . ” and incorporated my first line. “I’m no angel either.”  Essentially, she threw it at me, the whole letter. Told me to stuff it. My sense is she wasn’t just speaking for herself. We never are. That same young woman referred to me as the “Mama Hen of the Indi-Lit Blogosphere.” Or maybe it was plural. I’m one in a hen house full of mama hens cluck-cluck-clucking.

Not a compliment, but I’ll keep it. Her letter, I mean.