Young Bright Things

Craig Sernotti’s Forked Tongue: A Review by Dan Holloway

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Craig Sernotti’s Forked Tongue (Blue Room Publishing) is a strange mix of the lyrical and the minimal, and reading it has made me think long and hard about what a collection of poetry is. Which is a good thing. And means it will linger in my mind long after many works that are, in theory, “better”.

Curation seems to be the elephant in the room in much of the literary world at the moment. There’s a whole mainstream mindset that bewails the lack of curation in the newfangled webwise alternative world. And there’s another bunch of indie hipsters that cross themselves (or make pentacles, or do something weird with their hands to make whatever symbol they DO find acceptable as a way of signifying sacre bleu) if you so much as mention the word. And yet the fact remains that a collection of poems is not just, well, a collection of poems.

Which is one of the problems with Forked Tongue. The poems feel like they’ve just been put there, but not in a way that tells any kind of story. I wonder as I read the likes of ‘Ideas’, the (programmatic?) opener —

Nothing’s out there, so stop looking.
Nothing’s inside, so stop retching.

— whether this isn’t, in fact, some comment about the lack of metanarrative. But I don’t think it is. Because the other problem with this collection is it needs a good edit. There are poems that shouldn’t be there at all, such as ‘Dream, 26 November 2008, early a.m.’, and there are some almost great poems, like ‘Waiting Room’. This —

The man sitting next to me does not look familiar.
He exhales mosquitoes

— is an incredible image, the kind that makes you stand up and shout “yes” then haunts you for days after. And then Sernotti slides into —

He is about as unattractive and uninteresting as a dead governor

— and the whole thing fizzles out.

There is such stylistic variety in Forked Tongue that it took me a while to get my head around what was right and what was wrong with the poems on show, and it’s nothing to do with the obsession with excretion and bodily dissection (there are many moments of Freud 101). The answer’s actually simple, and applies across the board. This is a collection that fails when it thinks it has something to say. Some of the poems, some of the lines almost spring to life and high five themselves they’re so smug. Which is a problem I have with whole chunks of contemporary poetry. And then there’s a nugget of brilliance, a rump of poems that forget to be clever and profound, and as a result actually are.

Take ‘Cheater’, a poem about mid-life crisis (“When I found a gray pubic hair–“), which ends with the lines:

I did it to feel young again
& if it’s any consolation
I don’t even remember their names

I thought for a long time whether the banality in these lines was ironic or not, but in the end whichever way it’s meant I don’t go for it — if it’s not banal, it’s glib. And I’m not sure which is worse. ‘Noah’, a really rather nice twist on the way we value the lives of children over the lives of adults is deflated with a similar glibness — its point is made with a one-liner at the end and you can almost hear the poet going “ba da boom” at you. There is banality also in the likes of ‘Many’, with its pretentious conclusion:

Your pillow is cold.
There are many ways to die

Well, yes, but the point is? It’s not profound. It’s obvious. But it thinks it’s profound, like the very worst kind of Tim Lott ladlit, and that’s not attractive in writing.

On the other hand — and it’s a very large other hand — there are many times when Sernotti stops himself before adding a last line that would deflate what went before. And these work incredibly well. Take ‘Prayers’, with its breathtaking central image:

We are bound and gagged and tied to trees.
The trees are cardboard cutouts of trees.

Or the blank brilliance of ‘Three Kinds of Sadness’, with its innocuous opening stanzas starting “I don’t feel worthy of life” and  “I’m used to disappointment”, slipping without comment into “They held him down & began cutting off his head.”

And I have to single out ‘On  the Floor’, which is the one poem that really touches greatness, with its breathtaking rhythms —

And no one attends
The service and you
And you
And you
And you open your eyes
And you are in class

— and its genuinely profound use of blankness; the description of “the woman to your left” who “is on her cell phone discussing her sex toy collection” is up there alongside the very best Brett Easton Ellis. The poem is a coruscating, searing, paranoid panorama of a masterpiece. Sadly it’s the only one, and after all the contemplatings on curation and smugness and the state of poetry and the satisfied one-liner and the great blank madness of the buzzing neon image, perhaps that’s it: this is a collection put together by a possibly great poet who just doesn’t have the material for a collection yet.

Shane Jones’ Light Boxes: A Review By Salvatore Pane

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It’s easy to see why Spike Jonze bought the film rights to Shane Jones‘  debut novel  Light Boxes. Jones is an image junkie and delivers  one imaginative set piece after another in this meta-fantasy about a town suffering through a year-long February. Readers are treated to visions of moss eating up horses, men wearing top hats and different colored bird masks, dual holes in the sky that lead somewhere sinister, an underground series of tunnels populated by children, and a host of other breathtaking images. It’s no hyperbole to say that Shane Jones has delivered one of the — if not the — most imaginative novels of the year.

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The plot of  Light Boxes is deceptively simple: a man named Thaddeus leads the town insurrection against February after his daughter is kidnapped by a mystical entity also known as February. The book packs a high concept twist that no reviewer should reveal (although already many have), and your take on said twist will greatly impact your opinion on the book. But Shane Jones is obviously more concerned with images and language than character and plot, and at the book’s very slim 145 pages, this lack doesn’t come off as a glaring omission. Light Boxes is not prose poetry but comes quite close in its lyricism. A thrown branch is described this way:

It flies up, much higher than I imagined, and, climbing higher and higher, it rips through a cloud’s leg, peaks in flight, then descends again, tearing another hole through the shoulder of the cloud.

A town-wide panic is described like this:

[a man] cut his wrists open in the middle of the street, and dead vines poured from his body, grew through the street and covered a cottage. Shopkeepers wept through the night. The beekeepers had their bees sting their necks in order to stop their crying. Snow mixed with ice and a sheet of lightning fell from the sky.

The language is beautiful and a deep sadness permeates the novel. If there’s any misstep, it’s the characters;  Light Boxes is fable-esque and its characters are appropriately undefined. I imagine we’re supposed to be very moved when Thaddeus, after seeing something disturbing, refuses to move for over a day. But I didn’t feel as much as I suspected I was supposed to, probably because I found it difficult to care about the characters. And that’s a small complaint when the obvious star of the show is Jones’ imagery and prose.

Light Boxes is not for every reader. It’s heavy on imagery, low on character, and ephemeral in the best possible sense. However, it’s definitely a good fit for the  PANK reader, and if you’re digging the work on this website, you absolutely owe to yourself to check out this book. Do yourself a favor and read it before the Spike Jonze flick comes out so you can seem all knowledgeable and shit.

Literary Los Angeles: Doing Theater in a Film Town

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L.A.’s Chalk Repertory Theatre has been one of my go-to choices for theater in Los Angeles ever since I saw their remarkable performance of “Three Sisters” last year.   After watching the original play “Full Disclosure” last month (starring founding member Amy Ellenberger), I tracked down playwright Ruth McKee (another founding company member) and gushed about her script until she agreed to be interviewed. We met late in the evening, after we’d both put our infants to bed, at a cozy all-night coffee shop in Sherman Oaks whose waiters boasted a level of beverage-refilling attentiveness bordering on the deranged.   We chatted about L.A. vs. New York, going to bed late vs. getting up early, and the pleasures and pains of doing theater in a film town.

Born in Ottawa, Ruth McKee lived in Bangladesh and Kenya before studying Dramatic Writing as an undergraduate at NYU.   She lived and worked in the New York theater scene before moving to California to get her MFA in Playwriting at UC San Diego.   After she graduated, she and her husband, comic book writer and screenwriter Brian Vaughan, debated whether to return to New York or head up to L.A.

“We made a pro and con list for New York and for L.A., and all our pros for New York were about familiarity — we knew people there, we had friends — but we also wanted to push ourselves.”

So it was in L.A. that McKee became the Literary Manager for the Black Dahlia Theatre and a founding member of Chalk Rep, a company best known for their site-specific work.   Instead of maintaining a fixed theater space, Chalk puts on shows in nontraditional spaces like the Hollywood Forever Cemetery (“Three Sisters”), or in the case of “Full Disclosure,” an extended riff on the psychic pull of real estate, empty private homes that are up for sale.

Though I usually try to avoid getting bogged down in the old New York vs. Los Angeles debate, I had to ask — what is the difference between theater there and theater here?

“When I first told people here that I had an MFA in playwriting, the most common response was “Why?” McKee laughs.   “Why do you write plays?”

Despite that, she found, “There are incredible opportunities for theater here because it’s not a theater town.   You get to make your own rules   . . . [and] there are so many incredibly talented people here just waiting and hoping to get a guest star role or to be in a commercial.   The most talented actors in the whole country are here and they’re waiting for someone to offer them a chance do Chekhov.   And that’s what we did.”

McKee adds, “What I’ve found is, actors want to act.   And a lot of what they’re doing in Hollywood may not be acting.   And of course, as an actor, you are very grateful for any opportunity, for modeling or commercial parts, but you also want to push yourself as an actor.”

More established film and television performers, too, often long for the opportunity to get back to live theater—actors like Ricardo Antonio Chavira (“Desperate Housewives”), a fellow graduate of McKee’s UC San Diego MFA Theater program who brought remarkable grace and gravity to the role of Vershinin in “Three Sisters.”

The fact remains, though, that L.A. will always be known more for television and movies than for the stage.

“You have to ask yourself, what does theater in a film town look like? Because you can’t compete with what film does,” she says, adding that she’s a film lover herself.   But no matter how gripping film and television can be, they do not take place in real time, not right out there in front of you, not happening an arm’s reach away.   That thrilling will-they-make-it? giddiness is part of what makes theater a unique — and uniquely harrowing — experience.   So McKee and Chalk Rep try to play to that strength, putting up small, intimate plays in small, interesting spaces.

“We’re doing plays that break down barriers between the artist and the audience.   We want it to be an immersive experience.”

Her husband has suggested taking a cue from the movie industry and billing the experience as “Theater in 3D.”

But Los Angeles has its limitations, too, McKee adds.   One thing L.A. does not have is Off-Broadway.

“There is no mid-size theater here,” McKee says.   Instead there are hundreds of 99-seat and fewer theaters, the equivalent of Off-Off, which run the range from community productions of stand-by musicals to highly-trained professionals creating cutting-edge new work.   And then there are mega-houses like the Geffen, the equivalent of Broadway.   But there’s not really anything in between.

“As a young theater professional, that in-between area is where you want to live.   In Los Angeles, there’s not a clear path.   There’s good work being done all over the city, but there’s no geographical center,” and so many theater professionals find themselves circulating around and around instead of moving forward with their careers.

So considering that, will McKee stay in L.A.?   She may.   For one thing, she likes the lifestyle.

“It’s a much better city to write in,” she says, joking that earlier closing hours and longer driving times mean “you have to go home; you don’t stay up late.   Then you get up in the morning and write. It’s a healthier environment; you get more sleep.”

More seriously, she adds, “My friends in New York are spending a lot of time playing the social game, or else just trying to make ends meet, and less time writing.”

Living in a more affordable city frees up a tremendous amount of time and energy for working.

“It’s much easier to make friends here,” she adds   “It’s like Sunny says in [“Full Disclosure”], this is a really transient place, but that also makes it really vibrant, and it makes people very open to meeting new people and accepting them into their community.   When I moved here, I knew hardly anyone and I met people really quickly.”

McKee concludes, “I think I really became an L.A. playwright after I had a play produced in New York [the play “Stray,” produced in the Cherry Lane Theatre’s Mentor Project].   That was a turning point for me. I realized I’m not missing any opportunities by being here.   My national presence is not at all diminished.”

Confirming what I’ve suspected all along: the best answer to “New York or Los Angeles?” is “Both.”

Breeding and Writing: Why nobody cares about your relevant crap

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–by Tracy Lucas

 

I pulled out a grey hair today. It’s not my first, but it made me think.

(And yes, “grey” with an E. I just like it better.)

I was sitting in the bathroom sink (I do that, I’m weird) when I happened to notice the aforementioned grey hair, and I suddenly found myself wondering whether to feel old.

At the moment I’m in my 30s, and not far into them at all. I had my first biological kid a couple of years ago, but in these days of fifteen-year-olds popping them out left and right, I suppose I’m an older mother. Blech.

Gained too much weight to be a MILF, even. Dammit.

But all that aside… let’s talk just about the numbers.

Like I said, I’m in my 30s. And now I’ve got grey hair. Now my stepkids think I’m too old to know any decent music (somehow Jackson Browne and Bon Jovi can’t compete with The Bieber) or to be worth listening to about clothing issues. They hate that I decorate the house in beige; they react to it the same way I did to my mother’s avocado fridge and orange countertops.

The rub? Ten years ago, I was in my 20s, and no one thought I was worth listening to because I was too young. I was just a kid who didn’t know shit and hadn’t experienced enough yet in life to have any advice that could be proven.

Ten years? That’s the span from “you don’t know anything because you’re too young” to “you don’t know anything because you’re too old”?

That’s practically nothing.

I mean, think about your grandmother. Within her lifetime, chances are, she saw the Berlin Wall go up, and the Berlin Wall come down. She might have seen the birth of movies, then TV, then cable channels, then VCRs, then the Internet. Even the Civil War was only two lifetimes ago, if you really think about it. That’s one generation removed from us, exactly. That was practically yesterday in the grand, ten-million-year scheme of things. That just happened.

Chances are equally good, regardless of whether your personal grandmother was alive for bits of the stuff mentioned above, that during the different stages of her life, no one understood her, either.

When she was fifteen, other people thought she was melodramatic. When she was twenty, they probably thought she was naive and idealistic. When she was forty or fifty, they may have thought she was a passed-up parent who wasn’t in touch with the times anymore. Now that she’s your grandmother, well, she’s a grandmother and all that the stereotype implies.

She probably likes music that was popular when she was a young adult. Probably picked the clothing she liked from some era or another and stuck with it, because she thought it worked for her. Probably doesn’t have the time to keep up with changing trends every decade, every two years, every season.

But aren’t we already on the same path, too?

As Thoreau said:

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

I have discs and downloads of the same songs I’ve loved since I was a teenager, and I play them loudly when I clean the house. I have a favorite shirt from my (albeit brief) college life that’s existed for ten or twelve years, and I still wear it occasionally—in public, without embarrassment.

I didn’t run out to see Twilight: Eclipse—and I probably won’t—but I watched The Blues Brothers for the millionth time the other day. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is next in the Netflix queue because my kids have never heard of it. I can’t believe they’ve never seen it. They can’t believe I’m going to make them watch it.

Thanks to an offhand comment from a teenage cousin, I just realized last week that boys’ shorts are supposed to be cotton, plaid, and below the knee now, and that I’ve been dressing my tyke in ’80s garb up till now. Oops. (Sorry, kiddo. I’ll hide the photos.)

I am already irrelevant.

We all are. We always have been. We always will be.

Know why?

It’s because, generally speaking, we’re naturally selfish creatures, and we only truly care about the people who are at our own exact level in life, be that age, social status, geographic location or whatever else we secretly measure people by.

It’s okay that Random Relative X doesn’t grok what I do for a living (or that reference.) She’s not a writer or much of a reader, so her opinion on publishing doesn’t matter to me.

Maybe some guy in Iowa disagrees strongly with what I wrote on a motherhood board the other day. He’s obviously not a mother, so his opinion doesn’t apply.

That random swoop-haired emo kid in the line behind me at Wal-Mart is an idiot. Why should I care if he hates my shirt?

However unfair and politically incorrect it may be, we only value the opinions of those we either see ourselves like or hope to become. Everyone else need not apply.

When you’re thirty, those younger than you don’t care because you’re not young. Those older than you don’t care because you’re not old. Those you are thirty with are your closest allies, your commiserators, your siblings through life.

The cruel reality of it is that when you’re seventy, then eighty, then ninety, there will be increasingly fewer of them left. The generational conspirators will die off and leave you in a swelling world of new children and younger-than-you adults who make no sense and don’t remember anything you do.

Right now, judging by the folks who usually comment here, I could say, “Hey, remember when moonwalking was such a big deal?”, and I could probably get a glowing, nostalgic response or three along the lines of, “Yeah, I know, right? I remember that! We used to practice it in gym and land on our asses because we had non-slip shoes on…”

I’d bet it’d be different if I wrote, “Weren’t sock-hops just fab?”

Nobody cares about sock-hops anymore. We didn’t have them, don’t remember them, and they don’t matter.

We’re past that.

But that’s the whole thing: everybody, at all times, is going to be past everything.

That sounds so weird and nonsensical, but really, it’s what I’m getting at.

You’re only living as the one person you’ve ever been, and it’s a new world every ten years or so anyway, not to mention a whole new “they” to contend with. So how do you write for a crowd of changing, aging, widely-varying people, who come from different backgrounds and don’t necessarily match a single characteristic or viewpoint you have?

You write truth.

It’s all about the underlying emotional truth.

You don’t have to like Bon Jovi or Jackson Browne to have read that sentence earlier, nodded to yourself and said, “Yeah, my kids hate Nirvana, I totally get that.”

The details don’t have to match. Sometimes it’s more fun if they don’t; I like borrowing an 18th century head to run around in when I’m reading a novel, or browsing a yellowed textbook that’s missing a few countries. But the spirit has to be there; the guts have to go in, or it’s all empty and wasted.

We all age yearly, and we’re moving in tandem, so we’ll never catch up with each other. Even so, we all have some of the same experiences, feelings and inadequacies as we move through. Bits of our lives have all been lived from start to finish before—just by other people.

If you write flashy, pop-culture stuff or humor that only one set of humans will find funny, more power to you, but it’s over as soon as that culture is, and it lasts for mere seconds.

But if you write The Great Gatsby, even despite all the highly-specific jazz age flavor, you’re writing the hard truth that sometimes the one you love wriggles permanently out of your grasp—and we’ve all been there, done that. That’s timeless.

It’s cotton candy versus steak.

Regardless of how cool of a parent I try to be or how many crazy “this one time” stories I can add up while I’m here, my kids are destined to think I’m a loser. Because they’re my kids. That’s what they do.

Right now, I am God to my son because I control the Cheerios and the Disney Channel. That’s a very limited gig, and I know it. Any day now, he’ll resent and/or be embarrassed of me for a good fifteen-year chunk, and sometime thereafter he’ll have a couple children or a grey hair of his own and realize the real scoop.

Does that mean I’ve changed in all the meantime?

Most likely, no. It’s only his perspective that’s changed—not the world itself. I’ve been sitting here happily listening to Sky Blue and Black and Bed of Roses in my beige room all along. After all, he’s just a twenty-something kid, what does he know?

So here’s my question:

How do you write to and for a world of readers who are not you, haven’t lived your life, and eventually will find you totally outdated? How do you matter when it’s all so impermanent?

I have my thoughts.

What are yours?

These Words Explode in Bright Showers of Light

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Do you want to read for PANK in Chicago on October 1 at The Book Cellar? We’re doing a joint reading with Artifice Magazine and are looking for a few good readers. E-mail roxane at pankmagazine dot com if you’re interested.

We’re excited to announce that Jen Percy won the American Short Fiction Short(er) Fiction contest. Her work will be in the next issue.

Let’s kick this week off with Joseph Goosey at Dark Sky Magazine where Even the Garbage Piled Up to the Ceiling.

In the second issue of New Dead Families, there is writing from Amber Sparks and I. Fontana. I. Fontana also has a magnificent story in Juked.

Diane Lockward’s Temptation by Water is now available.

At the Pedestal, Nick Kocz.

Enjoy some storytelling from Kirsty Logan.

The July Writer in Residence at Necessary Fiction will be the one and only and wonderful William Walsh. Meanwhile, my tenure at Necessary Fiction ends with Lauren Becker, Lily Hoang and Lily Hoang, Matthew Kirkpatrick, Jen Michalski, Mel Bosworth, and Amy McDaniel.

Field mouse poems at Robot Melon from Molly Gaudry and Ani Smith.

Troubador 21 features Home Burial by CL Bledsoe.

As always, Metazen is awesome and this week they are channeling that awesome through Johnsie Noel, who has two poems up. Also at Metazen, Proposal by Meg Pokrass. Meg also has Slices up at A-Minor.

Nicelle Davis Bought a Pack of Cigarettes Today at The Fertile Source.

The Summer 2010 issue of Contrary includes work from Laura McCullough and Amorak Huey.

All this week, the fiction of Tania Hershman is featured on BBC Radio 4’s Afternoon Reading program. Another bit of news is that  The White Road and Other Stories is now available as an eBook for the Kindle. Her stories will also shortly be available for the iPhone through a new app from  Ether Books.

Read this great Molly Gaudry interview at Dark Sky.

There are four more of Mark Cunningham’s specimens and a horoscope at Everyday Genius.

Kathleen Heil’s story “Night. Good. Pretty” has receieved First Prize in the fifth annual Moleskin Travel Short Story Competition in Spain, in colloboration with the publishing house Ediciones de Viento.  For more information, click here.

Bill Hicok has a new book of poetry, Words for Empty and Words for Full, and you can read a review at Corduroy Books.

Speaking of reviews Alec Niedenthal reviews the prose of Thomas Bernhard.

Issue 66 of New York Quarterly is available and includes work from Thomas Patrick Levy, Kris Bigalk, RA Allen, Patrick Carrington, Bruce Cohen and many, many others.


the unfirm line – Aaron Burch

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“But if you get this far. If you get it.”

danger mountain

Aaron Burch, How To Take Yourself Apart, How To Make Yourself Anew

I love optimism as it relates to distance and the next step. Hope tied to momentum and time. What will be the next step after you  have reached the height of the mountain?

Through the blood, the work, the prayer and sacrifice. If you make it. If all the hard work pays off … then.

Sasha Fletcher’s When All our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds: A Review By Troy Urquhart

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In the second chapter of Walden, the nineteenth-century naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau asserted that the ultimate creative act is, fundamentally, an act of self-creation, an act in which the artist shapes not objects in the world, but his own view of the world:

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.

Sasha Fletcher’s first book When All our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds takes this charge seriously. Its narrator constructs his own vision of the world, portraying it through a flexible lens of creative possibility. For Fletcher’s narrator, the line between imaginary and real is often a tenuous one — one that can be manipulated and crossed almost at will. He tells us, “I kept thinking about it until it was like I did it, which was great”.  This is, after all, what the artist, and especially the creative writer, does.

With When All our Days Are Numbered, Fletcher celebrates the creative act and explores the nature of art, searching for the boundary at which the imagined completely — or almost completely — consumes our experience, searching for the ways that art allows us to share our lives with others, but also for the ways in which art can threaten our connection to others, to the world. He demonstrates an intoxicating creative power, magically reconstructing everyday experience through association and metaphor, but in doing so, he also demonstrates the risk inherent in the creative act: that of becoming disconnected from the world. He recognizes the power of language, and he uses it here to find (or, perhaps, to create) a sense of wonder in the world, but he also recognizes that the artist risks losing touch with what is real, risks mistaking the symbol for what it represents.

The book opens with a warning from its unnamed female character to the narrator: “Don’t get carried away out here”. And in fact, the narrator is carried away almost immediately (and quite literally) “by a string of balloons”. Throughout the novella, this pair strikes a balance between the creative possibilities of art and the practical realities of everyday life. When the narrator muses, “Few things are probably outside of the realm of possibility,” she tells him, “Stop thinking about the realm of possibility”. When he creates something, like a pair of trees that form a hammock, and offers it as something magical, she is quick to point out, “You just made that. . . Out of brown paper”. And early in the book, when she reminds him that “There is . . . A world outside what you can build”, he is not so certain: “I wrote the word waterfall on the wall. I hoped for the best”.

It might not be going too far, here, to say that he trusts the written word waterfall more than he would an actual waterfall–that he trusts the symbol of the thing more than he would trust the thing itself, if it were there.

The narrator of this book is driven by his desire to create, and by the desire to share that creation with another person. He envisions a whale, unloved, and tells his female companion, “If I were the whale I would have hanged myself from that old dead tree over there”, and it doesn’t matter that a whale can’t really hang himself. What matters is the reason he would kill himself: the “Infinite sadness” of being alone.

The creative act offers a possibility for companionship, for connection between people, at least in as much as art allows the artist’s view of the world to be shared with another person. And this narrator wants to share his artistic vision absolutely. Holding his companion’s hand, he thinks “about how if I move my fingers right then we will trade fingers”, and this is his desire, to enter completely into another:  “I wanted to wear you like a skin.”

What he longs for is intersubjectivity: not merely to tell her his vision of the world, or for her to tell him hers, but to enter each other entirely, literally to experience the world as the other.

She, however, is not so certain. In the novella’s conclusion, he calls for her to join him on the roof, to see the world from his perspective, and she pleads for him to join her in reality, to “Come down from there,” promising him, “We’ll just sit & we’ll eat & we’ll be so close that we’re touching” (83). But he refuses, and his insistence that she join him comes at a cost: in joining him from his artistic vantage point, a place in the sky, she is “covered in bruises”, and she has to admit, ultimately, that “we all of us got a little carried away”.

There is a line here, a space that keeps people separate, a space that keeps what is imagined separate from what is real, a space which is damaging to cross completely but which must be narrowed, if art is to do its work. Fletcher envisions our lives as the intermediary tension of this space, a narrow band between the isolation of water and the expansiveness of clouds, between the dark reality of water and the electrical creative potential of clouds:

. . . & at that point the water will be right next to the clouds & they will be so close that they could kiss but they will not kiss, they will both just stand there looking at each other until forever.

It is important, here, that clouds and water are, elementally, the same. But the form they take is very different, and it is on the tense boundary of these two forms, the edge of the real and the imagined, that Fletcher’s artist tries to balance.

Ultimately, this book strikes me as enamored with creation, its narrator (and, I presume, its writer) very much in love with art and the way that art allows us to see meaning in the world. He recognizes the power of the artist to re-create or re-envision the world, but he also knows that like a balloon, he needs an anchor to the world, to the real. As much as art offers a new, higher perspective, as much as art offers an escape from reality among the clouds, he fears being lost entirely in that vision, in a world where there will be “no one [to] tell me when I was getting carried away”.

Ask the Author: Emily Howorth

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Emily Howorth’s whimsical Look Away, Dixieland is part of the June issue. She talks with us about letting Scarlett O’Hara burn, fact versus fiction, party mixes and more.

1. Would you have let Scarlett O’Hara burn? Why or why not?

A difficult question! It would be tempting. But no—if I let her burn in Atlanta, she’d never get back to Tara, and then we would never get to see her retch after eating a radish straight from the soil, and thus we would never get to the “I’ll Never Be Hungry” speech—one of the few parts of the book/movie where Scarlett seems genuinely strong.

2. What are your cues that would tell me to get out of your house?

Unlike the narrator of this story, I’m not subtle. I’d tell you that the party was over and I was going to bed, and if I liked you, I’d offer you the couch—or, if you were extra special, the air mattress. In the morning we’d get breakfast tacos at the taco trailer down my street.

3. Give us your party mix. Leave no Rolling Stone unturned?

I imagined Scarlett’s party starting off with “Psychedelic Shack.” Not the best Temptations song, but appropriate for the circumstances. We’d get to “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and “Masterpiece” for sure, and maybe David Ruffin’s “My Whole World Ended (the Moment You Left Me)” just because it’s the greatest song ever. At some point, we’d have to play some Stevie Nicks—because Scarlett and Stevie share that whole dresses-resembling-heavy-drapery penchant. As for the Stones? “Stupid Girl” might make the cut. Toward the end of the party, things have to get a bit more intense, a bit PJ Harvey “Rid of Me.”

4. How much of this story is non-fiction? How much of you is fictitious?

I do live in a duplex, and I own a feisty dog. But as far as fictional characters showing up—well, Scarlett hasn’t yet, thank god. What is true to me about this story is that we are all living with the past, literary or historical, all the time, and as someone who is by blood and circumstance a Southern woman (although I was reared primarily in the North), I often think about what it means to have the past lurking.

As far as being fictitious myself? Unfortunately, I’m probably less so than most people. 28%, I’d wager.

5. Frankly, my dear, do you give a damn? How much of a damn?

Yes, I do, although most days I try to just give a dang.

There’s So Much To Love; It’s All Because Of You

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Congratulations to Ocean Vuong who recently won the 2010 Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Memorial Poetry Contest for his poem 1967.

We’d also like to mention that Gabe Durham will be taking over as editor of Keyhole Magazine.

Another installment from Matthew Salesses Island of Epidemics is up at Everyday Genius. He is joined by Joseph Goosey and Joseph Riippi. This month of Everyday Genius, incidentally, is being edited by Alec Niedenthal.

Matt Bell is interviewed on the Metazen blog. Metazen, the magazine, hosts a deleted scene from Wolf parts.

Mike Meginnis’s Family Gibson, Summer 1891 is brilliant and live at Dark Sky Magazine.

At Staccato Fiction, Alexandra Isacson’s Haute Couture.

In the Orange Alert Podcast #16, the Smith-i-sode,, you can listen to xTx and Mel Bosworth read some song lyrics.

There’s a new issue of Prick of the Spindle and it includes writing from JA Tyler, Simon A. Smith, Sarah Harste, and much more. You’ll also find both nonfiction and drama from Garrett Socol.

Erin Fitzgerald’s wonderful The Year Away is up at Necessary Fiction. She is joined by Robb Todd and Kathy Fish.

Reynard Seifert, who is also a new contributor at HTMLGIANT, has work at New Wave Vomit.

Discover Discovery by RIcky Garni at Everyday Genius.

The Dirty Napkin includes a wonderful poem, Fundamentals, from Helen Vitoria.

There’s a new issue of Corium with writing from  Matthew Salesses, Sal Pane, BJ Hollars, Mary Miller twice, David Peak, Nicolle Elizabeth, Tim Tomlinson and many other fine writers. Mary also has a free e-book, Foxes, that you can download from Featherproof Books.

Jesse Bradley splits his wrists open at Black-Listed Magazine. His  Emphysema  appears at Girls With Insurance.

La Petite Zine debuts a new issue with poetry from Jac Jemc and Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.

xTx is hosting Zombie Summer at her blog. Check out zombie writing from Kirsty Logan, Kirsty also asks Who Do You Think You Are? She also talks about the words of Robb Todd, here.

In Requited, new work from James Tadd Adcox, where he is joined by Cami Park, Neil de la Flor, AD Jameson, Arlene Ang, and more. I like their design. Cami also has words at New Wave Vomit.

FYI: Weave Magazine has some open positions.

Jason Jordan’s The House of Ice is in the new issue of Precipitate. He also has a story a story called “House Arrest” (see?) forthcoming in  Main Street Rag‘s  A La Carte: Short Stories that Stir the Foodie in All of Us, which is now available for pre-order for the discounted price of $10. Edited by S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., this anthology also features Molly Gaudry. You can also find work from Molly in Turks Head Review here and here

The June issue of The Legendary includes poetry from Megan Falley.

This week’s Funny Woman at The Rumpus is Summer Block.

At LitSnack, a tasty treat from Ethel Rohan.

Paula Bomer has a story in the latest issue of the Green Mountain Review.