the unfirm line – MGMT

“It’s a heavy time but your,  your rhythm makes it light and explode
like a violent star keeps threatening the night.”

MGMT, Flash Delirium

I am more influenced by music than literature, especially musicians that can write without mimic, without cliche, with a semblance of imagination. I am a ponderer my nature, I like to think about other stars, other worlds crashing and exploding with no concern for me at all.

The PANK 5 Lineup

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[BUY PANK 5]

The Man Who Says Shhhhh by Deb Olin Unferth

A Dainty Network of Bones by Lucas Southworth

Last Dance at Poplar Ridge by Emily Kiernan

Caterwaul by xTx

Sacrifice for Higher Wisdom by Sheldon Lee Compton

When You Throw Your Particles at Me and He’d Leave Her Notes in Code by Kaitlin Dyer

A Back Piece by S.J. Fowler

My Heart Is Its Own Gristle Machine by Marcus Wicker

An Ouroboros by Christopher Phelps

All These the Violent Children (An Episode of Mutiny) by J.A. Tyler

How to Make Amends by Michelle Dove

Five Minutes in the Darkroom to Confirm All the Light Is Bound by Lindsey Drager

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2011 1,001 Awesome Words Contest Results

We received entries from 70 writers, many of whom sent in two or three pieces.  We read a great many stories, poems and work that truly defied categorization.  Our winner is a new-to-us writer but there are also familiar names among our runners up and on the short list.  Thank you, very much, to all who entered. Our decisions were difficult, but we fell in love with three stories in particular and even decided to grant a third place prize. Stay tuned for our next contest with a very special guest judge, coming in 2011!

Winner ($650, Publication in PANK 5)
Liana Jahan Imam, Mine Mine Mine

2nd Place ($150, Publication in PANK 5)
Lauren Becker, The Apple Dress

Third Place ($50, Publication in PANK 5)
Lauren Wheeler, Chinese Stores

The Shortlist (Publication in the March 2011 issue of PANK online)
Amber Sparks A Brief Fire to Light the World Clean
Desmond Kon Message in a Pointilist Bottle
Lydia Ship Rooftop Valkyrie
Tania Hershman That Small Small Inch
Kristina Born The Village Called Hurty
Robert Swartwood Crash Test Dummy
Robert Swartwood The Lonely Life of a Tertiary Character

Divinia is Divina by Jack Wiler

Jack Wiler’s collection of poetry “Divina is Divina” got me—I mean got my heart and made me cry good hot tears. Poems like “We Monsters,” “My Friend Asked Me to Write About Losing Things,” “Divina Is Divina,” “The Man with the Rotten Teeth,” and “The Truth about Lying” were so moving that I had to put the book down so I could mental and emotionally remain with the poem a little longer.

Jack Wiler provides us with a gift of Catharsis. He tells a story and that story reflects the anxiety, pain, and love that I think the average American encounters daily. The premise of the collection is this: a man who works at Acme Exterminating is dying from AIDS. He writes (what I would call) eulogies for the rodents and cockroaches he kills—but in essence, he is writing eulogies for himself. It’s the magic of Keats in our time. With an acute sense of death, this book is full of life.

I would like to help this book “live” as much as I can. I encourage those of you who love poetry to order a copy of Divina is Divina. Here is a sample from the collection:

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I would also ask that if this poem “got you” the way it “got me,” that we all do what we can to shout Divina’s name outside our doors—to post “Divina is Divina” on facebook, blogs, workspace, front doors–wherever posting happens to help celebrate Jack Wiler’s loving observations of life—to celebrate life.

KICKSTART THE RE:TELLING ANTHOLOGY

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Our friends at Ampersand Books are publishing a unique anthology entitled Re:Telling: An Anthology of Borrowed Premises, Stolen Settings, Purloined Plots, and Appropriated Characters. Consider contributing to this project which includes the work of several PANK contributors. Giving is good.

RE:TELLING is an anthology of stories, poetry, and art edited by William Walsh, built around recycled material: purloined plots, stolen settings, appropriated characters, and borrowed premises featuring work by some of the independent publishing world’s favourite, most talented writers. Michael Martone traces the traces of Borges in Indiana and Matt Bell wonders what Mario thinks between re-sets, Joseph Riippi takes German lit personally, and Kathleen Rooney & Lily Hoang spin a love triangle of Biblical proportions. Also featuring work from Michael Kimball, Jim Ruland, Samantha Hunt, and Pedro Ponce, RE:TELLING is an homage, a subversion where nothing is off-limits. Whether it’s Shakespeare or Law and Order, children’s stories or yesteryear’s sitcoms, each piece is a fresh ransacking of our cultural troves, recreated, and made new.

Breeding and Writing: Mortal fear combat tactics

 

–by Tracy Lucas

 

Today, I’m working on a heartbreaking article. I interviewed a woman who lost her perfectly-healthy, nine-month-old son to a freak infection just a couple of months ago.

I’m selling that piece elsewhere, so I can’t go into all the details here. But it’s been affecting me all day, and I can definitely tell you that. I even dreaded calling, despite the fact that I had the idea for the story in the first place. I wanted to talk to her, yet I found myself putting off having to think about it. Having to ask those questions. Having to know the answers.

It’s difficult, horrible stuff, and I don’t even know the family personally.

I remember when my own son was tiny. (Well, tinier. He’s two.) I was terrified for him every day. I checked his breathing every five minutes throughout the night, worried to death about SIDS or sheet entanglements or robbers or fires or—

You get the gist. You name it, I worried about it.

I was paralyzed with fear on a pretty regular basis.

I still kinda am. That doesn’t exactly go away. It lessens, once you move past the one year mark and once the psycho mama hormones stop pumping quite so insanely.

(You think I’m kidding, but I swear to God I would have shredded anyone who hurt my son in mere seconds. With my teeth. Gladly. I’m a little more human now. A little.)

But through those first few hundred days, everything scared me. I sweat through every car ride, every doctor’s tongue-click, every bath and every meal. I wondered for a while whether my child would ever be capable of chewing without choking on some piece of whatever-it-was, and whether I’d ever again know the feeling of being able to eat my own meal instead of militantly guarding each morsel of his from fork to stomach.

I couldn’t look away. He might die.

It was that big in my head; the possibility loomed with that likelihood.

I was going nuts.  I’d heard it was common to do so after delivering a new person onto the planet, but that didn’t help. Each niggling fear was eating me alive, and the terror just stacked, levels and levels deep.

There was no rest.

So what did I do?

I kept not resting. And I wrote. I wrote obsessively on all the things that might befall my little boy, all the horrors which I was sure awaited him just around every corner.

I had stories of his drowning in the bath, becoming the sole victim of a car accident, drifting away in his sleep and never coming back to me. Of waking him cold and blue-lipped, of discovering him upside-down in a bucket, of feeding him something and finding him allergic.

I couldn’t stop.

All of the nightmares came out of my head and into the most secret of my notebooks. I haven’t even submitted those stories anywhere yet. I can’t. They’re still too close. (That, and my family wouldn’t get it. I’d probably have child protection service staff on my doorstep in a second.)

So I hid them, the same as I’d done my fears. I tucked them away into a nook only I know about and I tried to forget.

I was extremely ashamed of myself. I couldn’t believe such awful, morbid thoughts came out of my head—and especially about my darling baby boy. I didn’t know how to take what I’d written, much less release it into the publishing wild.

Then I rediscovered David Erlewine’s blog. Most specifically, I remember, it was a short story called “Not Really” which completely scrambled my mommy-brain. His original blog is long gone, unfortunately, since he’s one of those folks who keeps committing to longer projects and pulling it down. (STOP IT ALREADY, DAVID!) The story, though, was also published at Keyhole, thank God, so I can show it to you here.

He wrote many, many pieces about the countless disasters that mentally befell his fictional children, and posted them right beside his profile photo which included his smiling kids on the couch. They’re cute, fine, and very much alive.

I tease him because so many of his stories revolve around children’s deaths.

But reading them helped me. It reminded me—because somehow, I’d yet again forgotten—that sometimes our  worst fears  make the best material.

Yeah, it’s hard as hell. And yeah, it’s raw to write them.

But we all have nightmares. It’s sharing them that releases the fear into the ether and strips its power over us, and of course, if we do it right, the fears belonging to our readers, too. Picking the scab is counterintuitive, but some things do have to be aired and left to dry. Ya gotta get the pus out or it festers.

(Eww. I know. Sorry.)

Me? I haven’t yet had the guts to dive back in and submit any of those stories of my own, but I do find that the older, longer-ago stories I’ve written that do the best are the things that scared me the most to write. In time, I know these twisted baby-fate stories will be that way, too.

In time.  Not yet.

Which leads me to my question, dear reader and writer.

What scares the hell out of you, and what do you do about it as an artist?

A Brief List of Important Cultural Artifacts

Jen Gann brings her considerable talent to Everyday Genius–a fitting match. She is joined by Elissa Gabbert.

Listen to xTx read in the  Orange Alert podcast #33. She is joined by Adam Moorad.

The Hint Fiction Anthology, edited by Robert Swartwood, was reviewed in the New Yorker. Very fancy. These are heady times.

There are two poems by Eric Burke for your reading enjoyment at Dark Sky Magazine.

Sean Lovelace writes of John McEnroe at Blip.

At Metazen, several of our favorite writers have had work recently including xTx whose story ends in such a beautiful, surprising way and Joseph Goosey.

The fall Lit n Image includes stories from Michelle Reale and Garrett Socol.

Jason Jordan’s Pestilence is now online at Acappella Zoo. He also has work in The Foundling Review where he is joined by Sheldon Lee Compton, Mel Bosworth, Ethel Rohan and others.

At Largehearted Boy, you can read Matt Bell’s Book Notes for How They Were Found.

Brian Oliu’s Ten Hoor Parking Deck is up at Abjective.

New poems from Eric Burke are available for your literary degustation at Dark Sky.

Anne Leigh Parrish has a new website. Stop by, take a look around.

Alexandra Isacson has work in Curbside Splendor, a magazine which is also having a contest you might want to enter.

The last (or last for a while) issue of Lamination Colony is massive and includes the writing of I. Fontana, Frank Hinton, Janey Smith, Tadd Adcox, M. Kitchell, Amber Sparks, Ryan Ridge, Melissa Broder, xTx, Adam Moorad, Lily Hoang, and others. Melissa also has work in the Huffington Post and H_NGM_N.

Also in the new issue of H_NGM_N are Tamiko Beyer, William Walsh, Amy McDaniel, Sutherland Douglass, and more.

The Fall 2010 issue of Frigg includes Kathy Fish.

Andrew Borgstrom makes an appearance at Everyday Genius.

Full of Crow flies again with Adam Moorad, Christina Murphy,  and others.

At the Roanoke Review you can read an interview with P. Scott Cunningham.

The lovely Jeanann Verlee is interviewed at Dark Sky.

You will find work from Eric Burke, Feng Sun Chen, Beth Thomas, and others in Weave Magazine #5. Order your copy now.

Mark Budman’s six word love story is featured at Smith Magazine.

the unfirm line – Ben Tanzer

“It is also clear to me that age brings fear, and there is no doubt that everything scares me more than it used to.”

Ben Tanzer, 99 Problems


Never been a scaredy cat, never been worried about what went bump next to me in the dark. However, Tanzer reaches a point of truth, albeit parental truth.

I have never known fear like I have as a parent. I am sure this is no grand epiphany. However it is pure.

Adam Ford's Heroes and Civilians: A Review by Thomas DeMary

heroescover2Novelty is relative. The newness of style, of language, in literature is wholly dependent on the reader’s exposure, limited or otherwise, to various texts. “If I haven’t seen it, it’s new to me,” so goes the mantra. While flash fiction isn’t a brand new form, it is still a rarity to see a flash fiction collection.

Heroes and Civilians by Adam Ford  is a swift read (forty-one pages), paced with a tempo which undulates between frenetic and saunter, briskly truncating the human condition with less-than-500-word vignettes, yet occasionally letting off the gas to allow a miniature story bloom into a larger work (still under 2000 words).

The stories are crafted with brevity in mind. Less room to write means less time to get to the point. Less time to let the language unfurl with a multisyllabic, metaphoric splay of carefully-chosen vernacular. With little dialogue, Ford achieves brevity with light, silly and entertaining narratives through Otherspace, monster attacks (which ruined first dates in the process) and an ode to a celebrated superhero from his lowly sidekick sibling.

Ford showcases an enjoyment of writing, allowing his imagination to roam free while the watchful eye of the craftsman, aware and wary of belaboring the point, chaperones the fantastic. Yet this is all conducted with literary aspirations in mind, as seen here in an excerpt of   “A Billion Tiny Lights,” told from the perspective of a spaceship suddenly self-aware:

When it happened it wasn’t like waking from a dream. It was like the dream had finally started. Ozone, steam and heat. That’s what I remember. Feeling heat for the first time. Not just monitoring it. Not just recording it. Feeling it. He told me he could tell that something had changed. Your control panel was warm, he said. Like the skin over someone’s heart.

Some of the stories come and go””the effect of brevity as opposed to poor storytelling. Compared individually, a few of Ford’s stories are filler, stop-gaps to the jewels of Heroes and Villains, such as “Exit The Raven,” the musings of a recently-retired superhero, and the title story, about a young man’s desire to meet the super-heroine of his dreams—and the lengths he’ll go to achieve this goal. Still, Ford delivers memorable characters and plots, amusing lines and otherworldly settings, all neatly packed into a volume as small as a poetry chapbook.

Flash fiction is a difficult form, demanding the elements of short stories within the page-space of poems. Adam Ford exudes a control of the flash form, as well as an adherence to the principles of fiction, in a way not seen before by this reviewer. Heroes and Villains is no masterwork, and sometimes falters by the very form it touts, but it nonetheless embodies the potential and possibility of flash fiction as a viable, powerful literary art form, doing so with imaginative, yet provocative prose that does its work with little clearing of the throat. It entertains. It conjures thought. It wastes no time.

Heroes and Civilians is available for free download.

Thomas DeMary currently hacks away at his prose somewhere in New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter @thomasdemary