Kids Say the Darndest Things & We Should Exploit Them After We Correct Them

hands up

My aunt looks like Justin Bieber.

 When I grow up I wanna be skinny. Not fat like my mom.

I have two really small toes like midgets do.

‡

These gems sparkle from the mouths of third grade students I’ve met this fall. I work with an afterschool health and literacy program that provides poetry workshops for elementary kids, and I am constantly reminded how people become diluted as they age. Children are natural poets—honest, succinct. Their unfiltered nature can be endearing and devastating.  But are they inherently cruel, or more like litmus paper strips, absorbing influence?

e.g. — This baby:

I imagine this baby reared its head through the birth canal with the stank eye.

Last week, an 8-year-old boy asked me if I was “grown.” I find it difficult to call myself a man, considering I still can’t grow a full beard. And yet when I told him I was 23, his reaction instilled in me the fear that  I must  appear as tired as most Wal-Mart shoppers. Today, while I was explaining metaphors, another boy blurted, “You got caterpillar eyebrows. Actually, you got a unibrow.” I froze and thanked him:

1.  It was the strongest metaphor of the day.

2.  I squared out because he hit a soft spot— I’ve worn two eyebrows since 1996 after my peers mistook me for Dracula when I was a magician for Halloween.

I can grow a bold unibrow, but I’m not as free as Frida Kahlo.

As my boyfriend grills salmon patties for dinner, I tweeze my unibrow in the mirror and wonder: Is there such a thing as original sin? Does electrolysis hurt? What is the appropriate age for a chemical peel?

Kids Say the Darndest Things & We Should Exploit Them After We Correct Them

hands up

My aunt looks like Justin Bieber.

 When I grow up I wanna be skinny. Not fat like my mom.

I have two really small toes like midgets do.

‡

These gems sparkle from the mouths of third grade students I’ve met this fall. I work with an afterschool health and literacy program that provides poetry workshops for elementary kids, and I am constantly reminded how people become diluted as they age. Children are natural poets—honest, succinct. Their unfiltered nature can be endearing and devastating.  But are they inherently cruel, or more like litmus paper strips, absorbing influence?

e.g. — This baby:

I imagine this baby reared its head through the birth canal with the stank eye.

Last week, an 8-year-old boy asked me if I was “grown.” I find it difficult to call myself a man, considering I still can’t grow a full beard. And yet when I told him I was 23, his reaction instilled in me the fear that  I must  appear as tired as most Wal-Mart shoppers. Today, while I was explaining metaphors, another boy blurted, “You got caterpillar eyebrows. Actually, you got a unibrow.” I froze and thanked him:

1.  It was the strongest metaphor of the day.

2.  I squared out because he hit a soft spot— I’ve worn two eyebrows since 1996 after my peers mistook me for Dracula when I was a magician for Halloween.

I can grow a bold unibrow, but I’m not as free as Frida Kahlo.

As my boyfriend grills salmon patties for dinner, I tweeze my unibrow in the mirror and wonder: Is there such a thing as original sin? Does electrolysis hurt? What is the appropriate age for a chemical peel?

We Give Thanks for November PANK

Another month is upon us and as always, we are thankful for the amazing writing that comes our way. We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again–the quality of our submission queue never ceases to impress us. The good in the queue is so very good and we have some of the finest examples of that goodness in the November issue. We know that the issue listing of names in an alphabetical list can be a bit daunting so we thought we would tell you a little something about each contributor or their piece so you might have a better sense of where to dive in to this cornucopia of words. (Did ya see what I did there?)

You will want to start with The Tongue Party by Sarah Rose Etter. I insist. When I first read this story, I thought, “What on earth?” Everything about the story made me feel tense, uneasy and I wanted to understand what was going on without ever quite getting the satisfaction. This is a story told in two parts and they complement each other in really elegant ways. The first part is surreal while the second part is sublime. You will not regret reading this story. You will not forget reading this story.

Mel Bosworth brings his usual charm, imagination and poignancy to Jonah is Clean and at the end of the story, there is rain, sweet rain. There are three short stories from Christy Crutchfield that will make you want to go out and find more of her wonderful writing. She is masterful in taking strange writing to the edge of absurdity but maintaining control of her stories, her characters, the little worlds she creates.

Cautionary Notes on a Blood Splashed Sneaker, Size 6 1/2 by  Matthew Burnside uses omission and that which is not there to reveal something sharp, intense and quite memorable.

In her cover letter, Jess Glass mentioned it was a goal of hers to have a story accepted by PANK. When I accepted her story The Baby in the Bedroom, I told her she better come up with a new goal. I hope it’s exciting. This is one of those stories that is beautiful and strange and a little heartbreaking and manages to be all those things without veering into the maudlin.

The Fan Dancers, by Molly Gaudry and Lily Hoang (the writing equivalent of a SuperGroup if ever there were one), is a unique blend of poetry and prose, the story told in five parts.

I enjoy when writers use footnotes and these excerpts from Faces have footnotes. The prose-poetry is also quite fascinating, so win win!

Wit is the order of the day in two poems by Matthew McBrearty who writes of werewolves, vespas, Larry McMurtry, and the Holiday Inn.

Nearsong by Joshua McKinney uses the waxing and waning of a day to bring shape to the poetry.

Letitia Moffitt is an amazing woman. In addition to being a lovely writer, she runs marathons. She willfully puts one foot in front of the other for 26 miles and change and then thinks simply finishing is nothing to brag about so I’m going to brag for her. She runs marathons. In this issue, her story Incognito is eminently relatable and a bit sorrowful as she tells the story of a girl hiding in plain sight with her yearning.

Three poems by Elizabeth O’Brien tackle so much. There is tenderness in her words and there is violence but most of all there is heart.

Salvatore Pane brings wit, technology, and modern romance together in a story you will want to read over and over again. This is damn good stuff.

The Orange Suitcase by Joseph Riippi will be released in 2011 by Ampersand Books. In the meantime, you can read a few excerpts from that book which is a novella of sorts, in this month’s issue.

There is an almost claustrophobic quality to the dense writing in Ben Segal’s A Room That Is or Is Not Past Tense.  The story builds and builds and closes in on you in a really satisfying way.

Two pieces by Feng Sun Chen defy description but I keep coming back to them, the word play, the imagery, the everything.

We are not afraid of publishing long writing online. We have faith that if you bring good writing to the Internet, length is but a small consideration. Conscious Knowledge by Rone Shavers is one of our longer pieces but it’s so engaging, political, aware of its own artifice, and one of those stories that makes me think, “Damn, that’s smart.”

JA Tyler’s The Rhinoceros, from his forthcoming collection The Zoo, A Going, was a finalist in our 2009 1,0001 Words contest.

While we’re not afraid of long work, we’re also not afraid of very short work. Vallie Lynn Watson’s Pocket is one of those stories that accomplishes  so much with so little. It’s a little sexy, a little angry, a lot good.

The November issue comes to a close with two pieces from Marcus Wicker that are connected yet can be read alone. The last line of Oblivious Spring, in particular, will make you oooh (or ahh, depending).

Insignificant Gestures—In Stores Now

Book cover JPEG

Jo   Cannon is a doctor and short story writer. Her debut collection, Insignificant Gestures, was published by Pewter Rose Press in November   2010. Purchasing information can be found here.

A refugee finds his face has disappeared from the mirror. Lost on a mountain, a fell runner puts her brain into reverse. A traumatised woman realises she can slip in and out of the minds of passersby. In a city where nothing is as it should be, a lone nurse plays peek-a-boo with an abandoned baby.

Twenty five stories about exile and belonging. This first collection by award winning writer Jo Cannon explores what it means to be an outsider. Sometimes surreal, always perceptive, these stories celebrate the unexpected interactions that alter lives.

‘To read Jo Cannon is to enter the world of the displaced, the dispossessed, and to emerge with a new understanding. She writes with integrity and compassion, and her stories resonate long after the final words have been read.’

Zoe King, editor of “Cadenza,” and Vice Chair Society of Women Writers and Journalists

“Jo Cannon’s writing is engaging and thought provoking, with a quirky gentleness in the prose. Her stories gradually reveal strong universal themes that continue to “Ëœsing”â„¢ long after the reader has put down the work.”â„¢

Vanessa Gebbie, editor of “ËœShort Circuit ““ a guide to the art of the short story”â„¢

Last Words: Manuel Ramos Otero, "The Exemplary Life of the Slave and the Master"

Last Words is a feature about the last words of a given work: story, novel, poem, essay, instruction manual. I find we often favor excerpting the beginning of a piece of writing; Great First Sentences, etc. Why not excerpt the ends, too (and not just the most well-known ends, Ulysses, I’m looking at you)? I am not really the sort of reader who always jumps to the end of a book, but neither am I the sort of reader who can’t stand for stories to be “ruined” (rather the opposite, it seems to me I read almost exclusively ruined writing).

My only motivation is that I like last words. I like the ends (and non-ends) of things, just as I’m often intrigued by, and favor, the last book of an author. Writing from extremity—-writing written just before death, writing written in prison, writing written in exile, writing written in deep sickness. Writing left unfinished, writing pulled from fire, writing covered in mold, failure. Writing nearest to silence; writing when it is almost, almost, almost over. With over as adjective, preposition and adverb all in one: over as the place “across a barrier or intervening space.” Last words being, then, that intervening space.

In any case, gentle reader: SPOILER ALERT!

(Since today is Friday, maybe this could also be called Pank’s G.O.O.D. Fridays, à la Kanye.)
Continue reading

Last Words: Manuel Ramos Otero, “The Exemplary Life of the Slave and the Master”

Last Words is a feature about the last words of a given work: story, novel, poem, essay, instruction manual. I find we often favor excerpting the beginning of a piece of writing; Great First Sentences, etc. Why not excerpt the ends, too (and not just the most well-known ends, Ulysses, I’m looking at you)? I am not really the sort of reader who always jumps to the end of a book, but neither am I the sort of reader who can’t stand for stories to be “ruined” (rather the opposite, it seems to me I read almost exclusively ruined writing).

My only motivation is that I like last words. I like the ends (and non-ends) of things, just as I’m often intrigued by, and favor, the last book of an author. Writing from extremity—-writing written just before death, writing written in prison, writing written in exile, writing written in deep sickness. Writing left unfinished, writing pulled from fire, writing covered in mold, failure. Writing nearest to silence; writing when it is almost, almost, almost over. With over as adjective, preposition and adverb all in one: over as the place “across a barrier or intervening space.” Last words being, then, that intervening space.

In any case, gentle reader: SPOILER ALERT!

(Since today is Friday, maybe this could also be called Pank’s G.O.O.D. Fridays, à la Kanye.)
Continue reading

Breeding and Writing: Psycho families are just more fun

 

–by Tracy Lucas

 

Thanksgiving’s closing in quickly. Enter the holiday season, with all the familial insanity it always brings.

I used to wish I had a normal family. You know, as a kid. Back when I thought there was such a thing. Cookies and group hugs and plush carpet and new pets and lame-o matching sweaters at Christmas. All that.

I didn’t think anyone else had drama at the house after school. I thought it was just us. I wanted to be  a sitcom.

Families are neurotic and slightly disassembled, even at best. Always. I’ve (and you’ve) learned that. No one’s immune. Everybody has plenty of baggage.

Comes with that whole “breathing” thing we do.

One thing that pisses me off the most in mass market, poorly-written fiction is the standard happy family trope.

Doesn’t exist. Maybe mom’s a great cook and loves her kids and remembers to show it. Okay, fine. But she also has to have a DUI on her record or a mystery high school boyfriend or a weird plant festish. SOMETHING.

Those plastic, Pleasant-Valley parents don’t exist. Period. They’re all human. We’re all human. Our kids, who we try our hardest for, will also be human and fuck up in whole new ways.

It’s life, y’know. It’s how families are. They arrive in this world as troubled networks to begin with. They always have.

So why write one-dimensional, shiny-shiny family non-drama into print?

Don’t you hate books and stories where they’re ideal and not real?

Sounds to me like a scared child reaching, authoring characters he’d like to have grown up with. It’s sad, really.

Face your crap. Own it. Write it down, if you’re a writer. That’s your job. You don’t have to pretty it up. Just go with it.

Reality is just so much more—interesting.

And we’ll probably still respect you in the morning.

Probably.

Ask the Author: Robert McDonald

Robert McDonald’s moving poem for Dorothy Allison is featured in the October issue. He talks to us about her influence, the stories that weigh him down, and the things he carries.

1. How has Dorothy Allison influenced you?

I had read Bastard Out of Carolina, or course, and her short fiction, and the essays in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, but Allison’s influence on this work came directly from her reading at the AWP Conference when it was in Chicago a couple of years ago. I was awe-struck by how funny she was, funny and charming and brave–she had this crowd of hipster academics in the palm of her hand and kept them (us) there, safe yet challenged. It was one of the best readings I’ve ever seen. At the same conference, I saw her several times in passing, and I could feel the buzz of her personality from across a room. But she also looked tired, and she was limping a bit, and I remember thinking, “This is a woman who has been through a lot.” This was not long after my sister killed herself, my sister who like Allison was a lesbian, who like Allison had been through a lot of extreme experiences, and who like Allison had a great sense of humor. I wondered what the key differences were–how one person can turn difficulty, heartbreak, and pain into brilliance, and another is weighted so far down by life that she cannot see any other option but death.

2. How does one balance eloquence and reverence and mourning in a praise poem?

That balance, if I achieved it, was accidental. I was going to give a reading at Scott Free’s Homolatte series here in Chicago. I was on the schedule just two or three weeks after my sister died, and I decided to go through with the reading. At first I was just going to read old work, because my heart was too broken and I thought I was too close to her suicide to write anything cogent about it. But Dorothy Allison’s reading was on my mind. I came back from her reading at the downtown hotel ballroom, opened my notebook, and the first draft of this poem poured out. I read it (a slightly less polished version than this) at Homolatte, and I felt very exposed and naked and brave in doing so.

If there’s a balance between these things it was in my determination to mourn my sister and say hallelujah for an art like Allison’s, and try to do these things nearly simultaneously. I think I was also trying to declare that my sister’s despair was not catching, that I would never chose the same way out of the world.

3. What stories have weighed you down?

Personally, of course, the story of my sister, a brilliant woman who was always angry at the world and its failures, at people and their failures, and who could never seem to buck up and get down to the work of making a life for herself, this weighs me down. The story behind that story is my guilt, a very heavy thing, my guilt that I could not ever find a way to convince her that she had options besides killing herself. My guilt that I could never convince her that she was loved, and that if she held on through the bad parts, she’d find even more love.

I think the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives often weigh us down: “If person X had not broken up with me, if my mother had been stronger, if my father had been there in my childhood, if I had chosen this career path, if if if, or because because because”–I think people often convince themselves (I sure do) that we are carrying a great weight, and we cannot see that we have a choice in taking up or laying down that burden.

In a way that is both hard and also thrilling, I do think that the best stories are also things we carry with us, whether that be the Paris of Stein and Hemingway, the world of Middle Earth, the voice of Holden Caulfield, the plot of Star Wars–there are so many stories that have come before ours, and trying to create a new story, whether fictional or just inventing a new path for yourself, has the burden and blessing of all these stories already in your head.

4. What else have you carried?

When I was in 10th grade I had both hermit crabs and chameleons, (actually anoles, but the pet shop called them chameleons) as pets. I thought it would make me cool of I brought them to school with me, and I went through a phase of always having a small live animal on my person. You can make leashes for chameleons out of soft yarn, and safety pin the leash to your shirt. A hermit crab can nestle in the pocket of a hoody. I must add, however, that this did not make me cool, it made me a geeky kid who wore live animals.

I carry a notebook nearly always. And hopefully a pen.

5. How would you teach someone to make emotional armor?

I’m not sure that I could teach that, or have taught it, except in how I have hurt people, intentionally or not. I think emotional armor is akin to a callous. You get hurt, or disappointed, or heartbroken, and so learn to cushion yourself from hurt, disappointment, or heartbreak. The trick really is to teach someone to take off their emotional armor when appropriate. I am much more cautious, defensive, and self-protecting in love than I was in my 20’s and 30’s. This is good because I don’t dwell on small emotional barbs, but I think it’s entirely possible to keep layers of armor between yourself and another. Never letting yourself be open to hurt means never being open to that amazing electric connectivity that can happen between two people. But I am veering into pop psychology.

6. Do you prefer digital photography over traditional photography?

I prefer traditional photography. I am sentimental about the darkroom and what goes on there, and the photographers who made me love the form are all old school: Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, Bernice Abbott, and Nan Goldin, among others.

That being said, I myself never took photos except on the rare vacation or family function until I got an I-phone, and now I reach for it often and love being able to easily snap a photo and through the zap of the Internet be able to share that image right away, and not wait for the film to come back from the developer to see how it all turned out.

We Are All Just Hanging On With These Words

A new issue of Barrelhouse rises from the mist and in it you will find stories from Amber Sparks, Aaron Burch,and  Brian Oliu.

In the new issue of Ghost Ocean Magazine, you can find poetry from Susan Slaviero and an interview with Christian Tebordo.

Memorious 15 features J.P. Dancing Bear and others.

Kyle Minor’s Where We Begin is online on the Gulf Coast website.

At Haggard and Halloo, Bury Me With It by J. Bradley.

Everyday Fiction features short fiction from Robert Swartwood.  Hey, he has a book he edited out now, Hint Fiction. Go buy it.

Poetry from Ricky Garni is up at LitSnack.

In the Red Review Review, work from David LaBounty.

The Medulla Review has a new issue with work from Alexandra Isacson, Laura LeHew, Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Eric Burke, Len Kuntz, Eric Beeny, Kyle Hemmings, and others.

Fiction from Mary Hamilton is included in Precipitate. She is joined by Caroline Klocksiem.

Check out these stories from Michelle Reale in the February issue. Sometimes we go through our archives and read things and think, man, we are so lucky to publish the writing we publish.

You can read fiction from Micah Dean Hicks in The Moon Milk Review.

Joseph Cassara writes a love letter to the doctor who performed his rectal exam at The Awl.

Poisonhorse by Brandi Wells is up at Double Shiny. She is joined by Adam Moorad.

Three poems by Megan Falley are featured at Crescent City Review.

New work from J. Bradley at This Zine Will Change Your Life, Six Sentences, and Metazen. Also at Metazen, writing from Joseph Riippi.

A fine triptych from JA Tyler is up at Knee Jerk.

Literary Los Angeles: The Big One

Like every hapless child that went to school in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I was terrified of The Big One.   The Big One, the big earthquake, the nine-point-something San Andreas Fault killer that was—that is—quietly sleeping beneath our city, waiting to rise up one fine ordinary day and destroy us all.

Starting in third grade, we were inculcated constantly with lessons about The Big One.   We filled out worksheets about water purification; we watched film visualizations of our city collapsing in flames.   Our teachers begged us to beg our parents to put away adequate provisions of canned food, medicine, water, bandages, radios, and flashlights, and beg I did. But my parents, like most parents, did a pretty half-hearted job of stockpiling—a few cans, two jugs of water.   I was furious at them for not taking this all more seriously, and frustrated with my own childish powerlessness in the face of the coming disaster.

More than anything else, we schoolchildren practiced hiding under our desks, our faces shielded by our arms, our backs to the glass window panes.   Much like the Cold War safety drills my parents experienced in the generation before, the Big One lesson plan said something like, “A horrible, deadly thing will happen more terrible than anything you have ever known, and nothing on earth can save you.   Now, let’s all get under our desks—

And of course, it’s not just the quaking of the earth itself, but of its attendant terrors.   Our teachers were quick to remind us that any of us left alive after the ground had stopped shaking and our school building had fallen down would then be prey to raging fires caused by burst gas mains, to looting and pillage, to dehydration and disease, and to slow starvation once our inadequate provisions of food and water ran out.   All the phone lines would be down; all our pets would run away.   In our teachers’ world the rest of the country would cease to exist, would fall away as surely as if Los Angeles had really split off from the rest of the state and drifted away to sea (a scenario that the more crackpot among them hinted was not an impossibility).   There would be no help coming in from the outside, no trucks of medical supplies and water.   We would have only what we had saved, what we could carry, and once the California Aqueduct burst then all 14 million of us would have only enough water to last for about three days.

In one lesson, the teacher explained the different types of damage that would be visited upon different parts of the city.   Perhaps to assuage our fears, she told us the places worst hit would be along the coast twenty miles west of Hollywood, places like Santa Monica and Malibu.

“But my father works in Santa Monica,” I said.

“Well,” she explained, “you better have an earthquake plan then, because if the Big One comes while he’s at work, you’ll have no way to contact him and he’ll have no way to get back home to you.”

She then added that he and his coastal coworkers would be susceptible to liquefaction, wherein Santa Monica’s sandy, sea-sogged sedimentary foundations would turn into a sort of quicksand and swallow them whole.

I have never experienced a tornado, flood, or hurricane and I am sure they hold their own particular terrors, worse in their way than an earthquake.   But as I understand it, with all of these other disasters there is some warning, at least a little something, even if it may only be a few minutes from the time you get the tornado alert to the time you need to be in the basement.   But earthquakes—and this is it, the thing you know but still can’t believe, the really amazing thing—have no notice at all.   You are simply going about your day—driving, sleeping, showering, shopping—and then suddenly, improbably, amazingly, the entire world starts falling apart.

It was to a fearful and impressionable child the perfect metaphor for any and all terrors, from the pop quiz to the fiery car crash”“ disaster just happens, there is nothing you can do, there is no place you can go, all you can do is watch and wait.   It was also a lesson that public schools in my day took great pains to hammer home.   Drug dealers, AIDS, kidnappers, car jackings, child molesters, school shootings, eating disorders, and teen pregnancy were just some of the many things against which we had to be constantly on guard.

In 1989 we watched on TV as the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco collapsed the Bay Bridge and we thought, “That’ll be us. Only worse.”

And then in 1994 there was the Northridge earthquake.   I have been in many other earthquakes before and since, but at 6.7 Northridge was the biggest.   It struck at 4:31am, literally shaking us from our beds.   My parents, grandparents, sister, and I stood outside in our apartment courtyard with all our neighbors through a series of significant aftershocks waiting for someone to tell us it was safe to go back inside.   “Only” 72 people died but thousands were injured and $20 billion worth of damage done.   It was momentous, awe-inspiring, shocking.   And The Big One would be—will be—about 100 times worse.

I heard some statistic the other day suggesting that there is a 99.7% chance of a major “Big One”-style earthquake in Los Angeles sometime in the next 30 years.   Any time—today, tomorrow.   When I’m driving my daughter to preschool next week or during her high school graduation in 2026.   Assuming any of us even live that long, because the sleeping earthquake is not the only thing waiting out there.   If there’s one thing I learned from public school in the 80s it’s that terror is always ready, always waiting to seize us unawares.   At least I have a flashlight.   Somewhere.