Gulf Coast Editor's Blog

Gulf Coast - A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts

Sara C. Rolater is a graduate of Rice University and an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where she is an assistant editor in fiction for Gulf Coast. She has been a fellow at the Writing Immersion Retreat in Bali. Her fiction has appeared in Ghost Town. Check out her Facebook status collage poetry at plagiarizemyface.com.		“That’s Called a Montage”: Ten Things Fiction Writers Can Take from South Park Friday, June 14. 2013 \| Posted by Sara C Rolater at 12:04 \| Comments (0) \| Trackbacks (0) Sara C. Rolater is a graduate of Rice University and an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where she is an assistant editor in fiction for Gulf Coast. She has been a fellow at the Writing Immersion Retreat in Bali. Her fiction has appeared in Ghost Town. Check out her Facebook status collage poetry at plagiarizemyface.com. At the end of the spring semester, after being inspired by a bit of Ellen Degeneres stand-up in which she concludes procrastination is the universe’s way of telling us to live in the moment (“Procrastinate now. Don’t put it off.”) I’ve attempted to render something productive from the hours (ahem, years) I have dedicated to a not-so-sleepy little Colorado town—one that is, in fact, quite animated. Humble folks without temptation! The ways we deploy the following tricks in our fiction may be a bit more understated, but don’t have to be. One advantage fiction and animation share is that they don’t impose a budget on special effects: anything can happen. (If you’ve mistakenly landed on this site and are getting your MBA instead of your MFA, South Park also has plenty of lessons to teach about business.) 1. Don’t be afraid to date yourself (you’re very good-looking). South Park proves that current events provide an endless stream of creative fodder. The news always has something worthy of mocking, something that inevitably unveils the hypocritical kernel of humanity. The show is about to enter its seventeenth season, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone have got a sustainable system of current critique and commentary down to a science. Each episode becomes a time capsule, likely a record of exactly what we’d like to forget. Season 16 episodes memorialize such illustrious 2012 subjects as Honey Boo Boo, the Lance Armstrong scandal, the sale of George Lucas’s film production company to Walt Disney, and, of course, the presidential election (it turns out Cartman determined the outcome by stealing voter ballots from the swing states). 2. Spare no one. Special Olympics contestants take steroids. Terrorists hide a nuke in Hillary Clinton’s snatch. Oprah’s vagina shoots a police officer. (Perhaps Parker and Stone are intimidated by powerful women?) “What they want to do being funny it’s just like, that’s it, that’s the priority, they don’t worry about anything else,” says staff writer Bill Hader, who, as an SNL cast member, has some insight into how the comedic treatment of celebrities can be political. Yes, these writers walk a fine line between cruelty and artistic integrity, but they are equal-opportunity haters, saying fuck you to everyone. Their Scientology episode (in which Tom Cruise is “Trapped in the Closet”) led to their parting ways with Isaac Hayes, who had been the voice of Chef for eight years. (I try to remember that every time I sit down and write another story about my mother.) But by ripping the band-aid off our hypocritical airs and delusions, these writers acknowledge our universal humanity. Even R. Kelly can't get Tom to come out of the closet. 3. Self-awareness leads to forgiveness. In episodes like “The Simpsons Already Did It” and musical numbers like “That’s Called a Montage," South Park has proven it’s capable of making fun of itself along the way (see #2). Like any television show, it is formulaic. Those who eschew genre fiction while espousing its literary counterpart might like to forget that the latter is also formulaic (and snobs of this sort warrant their own critique in “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs,” when Butters writes a novel hailed as a masterpiece but that is so vulgar no one can read more than a few lines without vomiting). Usually at the end of a show the boys wind up articulating the lesson they’ve learned from the string of preceding events in front of the entire town; these Aesop-like middle-ground morals are undermined or subverted in some way that itself becomes formulaic—cheesy music begins to play but cynicism rips the needle from the record; the lesson is dismissed. But they repeat on an endless loop, episode after episode, insisting that the ultimate lesson is that we flawed humans seem incapable of learning from history. What passes in passes right back out. In such a formulation Parker and Stone themselves might be seen as mere funnels, ingesting pop culture and current events (or the media’s mediation of said events) in mass sugary quantities and regurgitating their own versions. Hence the endless poop-and-puke gags. Every gratuity justifies itself. 4. Children are smarter than adults. Part of the greatness of South Park is that it is wedded to the eight-year-old-boy perspective. This often serves to expose the ways adults have made their lives needlessly complicated. In “Margaritaville,” Stan lugs the margarita-mixing blender his father purchased at Sur La Table on a payment plan from one payment-plan-purchasing party to another, until he finally winds up at the US Treasury, where he discovers that decisions are made by cutting off a chicken’s head and letting it run around a board labeled with various options (like “Bailout”). In “Cartman’s Silly Hate Crime,” the boys make a presentation to the governor on why hate crimes are “A Savage Hypocracy” and the governor comments that it makes more sense than anything he’s heard in three years. Other times, the simplicity of the children’s motivations underscores that the motivations of adults have not really evolved to a higher plane. The boys are only trying to spring Cartman from jail for his hate crime because they need his fat ass to beat the girls in a sled race. 5. Consistent characters can still be surprising, and mean characters sympathetic. Eric Cartman is the ultimate manifestation of pretty much every human shortcoming, seeking to please himself at the expense of any and all others. We delight in his cleverness, his ability to exploit and reappropriate whatever he’s presented with to his own ends—it is not what he does that surprises us, it is the way he does it. The writers are also adept at giving us periodic glimpses that his abuse of others is a preeminent lashing-out to prevent people from abusing him (note his violent response any time he is called fat). He is, when you break it down, a compendium of clichés, the type who can dish it out but can’t take it, to whom the writers like to give a taste of his own medicine because that’s what the audience (not to mention the other characters) want to see. [Editor's note: Sara's South Park observations are so trenchant and complex, we though it worthwhile to serve them up as a two-parter. Stay tuned for the second half next week—ample parking day or night!]

Nancy K. Pearson’s first book of poems, Two Minutes of Light won the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Before moving to Houston, Pearson completed two seven-month poetry fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is now an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Houston.		An Art of Failure Wednesday, May 15. 2013 \| Posted by Nancy K Pearson at 12:21 \| Comments (0) \| Trackbacks (0) Nancy K. Pearson’s first book of poems, Two Minutes of Light won the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Before moving to Houston, Pearson completed two seven-month poetry fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is now an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Houston. Recently I had an “acoustic experience of terrestrial relief.” The Art of Failure (the acoustic art website, not the band) recently featured a project called The Flat Earth Society, an acoustic experiment that allows you to hear the “hills and dales” of the earth’s surface on a record. The earth’s geophysical impressions are inscribed into the record’s vinyl and as the turntable spins, you can hear “peaks and valleys, spikes and wells, spires and troughs, aspirations and depressions.” The sounds are subtle; much of the record resembles static on a radio. Where the needle dips down into the Dead Sea, it gets very quiet. The Himalayas are noisier. Of course, these are mythical representations of topography, technology approximating the intangible. When concrete meets the imperceptible, sometimes we get static, sometimes we get Eno or Cage, sometimes we get Susan Howe. All the projects on the Art of Failure website are devoted to dealing “with issues of perceptible representations of digital data.” I’m looking for the space in my own writing where the concrete and the imperceptible create something like incursion. I’m thinking of poetry and memoir and plate tectonics all at once here. Where does this occur in my own writing, in my life? Is it a space, like a pause or a stutter, or a place, somewhere I’ve been, the book rack in the Goodwill, the bar at the Choo Choo, or somewhere I haven’t yet arrived, a 5:15 mile, serenity? Poet CD Wright once said “a sense of place” has no significance anymore. In an interview in Poetry Magazine she said: The mapping of the city is integral to the subject. But as markers of the art, “a sense of place” and “finding one’s voice” have no resonance left. I might read/read out of/skim/leaf 40 books or more when I am working on a project that attaches to a particular place. It is all just to situate myself so I can navigate the material more effectively, and with greater awareness of its affect. The places I write about move farther and farther away from actual locations. Often they exist on the internet (I Google my own hometown, “Chattanooga,” to remember the places of my youth) or, they exist in the space of the brain that holds autobiographical memory, the cushy cortical anatomy of the inexact. Neuro-images, PET scans of these spaces are used to prove that a person can have two selves, two places in the brain that house the mystery of identity. Imagine that! As a writer and a woman and a teacher and someone’s child, I don’t need PET scans to prove my brain has different activation patterns for different kinds of memory. But here’s the idea: perhaps the space I’m looking for is simply a place in my body. I write from the body. The place in the body I’m writing from right now (i.e., as you read this) isn’t actually writing anything. This blog will probably be posted while I’m listening to the sound of a heart monitor and pressing the bolus of a pain pump on the heart & vascular unit of a hospital. In fact, I’ve just lost a “sense of place” in my body; my first rib and a few neck muscles have been cut from my spine. The surgeons have opened my thoracic outlet so the blood in my arteries and veins can move to my heart and hands. Writing this now (a week before the surgery), I’m keenly aware that I’ll miss the lost rib, the muscles, the physical “obstructions” that have both fueled and hampered my writing. They represent struggle, three years, lost sleep and a lot of cliché. Where the unsaid and the concrete incur, where the story meets pure perception, I’ll say pain here, will never be insignificant. A sense of place, like the sound of the surface of the earth on an old fashioned record player, can be both illusory and textured. It exists, and not always on a map. If this is true, can you lose it? If writing is a space of erosion and resonance, a place where the lost rib on a metal tray and the IV’s drip meets some inexact expression of suffering (or joy, I dare say), I’d say much of my writing is an art of failure, the failure to capture or pin down anything that lasts forever. The failure to keep replicating the same thing day after day. Which is a good thing, when you’re in a hospital bed—which means, and I’ll need you, reader, to remind me of this now, that writing is a place of movement, a place made vulnerable as any remote landscape slipping off the continental shelf into the depths of phosphorescent display (from “My Inquietude Constrained Briefly” by Louise Bogan) Perhaps writing is that phosphorescent algae that lights up the sea. You can’t really hold it. But it's also so deep inside my body I won’t lose it as long as I’m breathing. Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that before my thoughts appear as words on the computer screen, perhaps they represent that “thing with feathers,” a hope located in the body even when the hand can’t grip a pencil or type on a keyboard. For a while, I might hear static where I once heard words, lines, and paragraphs. I might be stuck in the Flat Earth’s “bathymetric pauses of the Red Sea.” And then—the glyph, the incursion, the needle jumps from its valley and glides across the small surface of vinyl. It’s subtle, but you can feel it; you can hear the place of it, whatever it is, inside you, climbing towards the next thing.

Jameelah Lang is a nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast and a creative writing PhD student in fiction at the University of Houston. Her fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, and she has received awards and support from the HUB-BUB/Hub City Writers Project Artists Residency, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.		Three Tips For Breaking Someone’s Heart With Your Nonfiction Tuesday, May 7. 2013 \| Posted by Jameelah Lang at 21:38 \| Comments (0) \| Trackbacks (0) Jameelah Lang is a nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast and a creative writing PhD student in fiction at the University of Houston. Her fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, and she has received awards and support from the HUB-BUB/Hub City Writers Project Artists Residency, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Over at The Kenyon Review, the editors have been running a stellar series on their blog called “Why We Chose It.” And I admit: I’ve been stalking these posts. Not because the Kenyon Review’s website looks so good (which it does), or because it includes in-color, friendly-looking headshots of its editors (which it does)—not even solely because I love The Kenyon Review (which I do). But because these posts offer us—the readers, the writers—the rare chance to pick the brains of some of the most talented editors in the country. I have been part of Team Nonfiction at Gulf Coast for three years now, and the question I get the most—at literary festivals, readings, conferences, book fairs—is, “How do you choose?” The answer I give (and it’s the truth, believe me) is that we just want a good story. We try not to limit or rule out any style or aesthetic, any subject matter, any font or formatting choice. We want our hearts broken; we want to laugh uncontrollably and call our friends and tell them that they must, must read your piece. And you deliver. Each issue, we put out work that I wish I had written myself and that I’m proud and honored to edit. There are, though, a few hints that I wish I had had when I first started writing nonfiction. Some of these I’ve gleaned from writing myself; some of these are knowledge-kernels shared by our wonderful faculty here at Houston; some of these I’ve picked up from reading your work and trying to steal your tricks and talents. These hints also constitute some of the problem-areas that we here at the journal see most often among nonfiction pieces that don’t quite make it, and that—when attended to—will easily take a piece from leaves-a-sort-of-dull-ache-in-your-heart to full-on-undeniable-heart-breakage. 1. Wed Form and Content This might seem obvious, but it’s harder than it sounds. Do you want to use second person/numbered sections/fragmented narratives/poetic forms in your nonfiction? We like that kind of work, too. But, as we read submissions, we often find ourselves asking, Why this choice? Why this one? Why this? And we’re okay with the answers being difficult. But, and I’ll speak for myself here: I want to have a sense that these choices have something to do with the story itself and aren’t just bells and whistles, meant to get the reader’s attention quickly and easily or to disorient us when the content doesn’t share the same concerns. 2. Braid Your Structure It makes sense to me that, as writers, we are interested in taking two disparate themes/plot-lines/narratives and forcing them to interact, seeing what the results yield, and what that says about the world around us. However, it is important to me as an editor that if a writer chooses to have two or more disparate elements in a story, they should talk to each other in realizable and complex ways. This is especially important for me if a writer’s work includes academic research (bad example: the ways wolves howl) that is meant to reflect on a narrative from the writer’s life (bad example: losing my first tooth). Oftentimes, we get work that looks like this: But could work like this: Or this: If you want to see some writers who pull off this sort of structure flawlessly, check out Patricia Hampl’s piece “Montaigne’s Lute” or Melissa Landrigan’s “Monsters” in our Fall 2013 issue, due out in just a few months. 3. Don’t Disregard Small Moments and Themes Sometimes as writers we forget that we can arrive at larger conclusions or emotional moments by focusing on small, specific details and narratives. I think it’s natural to try to tackle a large, abstract idea through a large, abstract narrative; however, consider work like Becca Evanhoe’s “Approximately 36 Toilets,” which is about, well, toilets—but also grief and identity. Or, Jennifer Munro’s “Life Cycles” about the motorcycles she’s owned. Or, “Those Poor Drowned”—a piece by Matthew Gavin Frank due out this fall—that is, in part, about casseroles. That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t room for epiphanies, life-changers, or game-changers—just that sometimes, this is the stuff that life is made of: toilets, motorcycles, and casseroles.

Rachel Harmeyer is a Houston-based visual artist and graduate student in art history. She is currently a member of Frenetic Theater's Artist Board, and her first solo show The Bride Laid Bare will open to the public on June 30, 2013 at the Frenetic Theater. Rachel graduated with a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. She will receive her MA in art history from the University of Houston in May, and will continue her studies at Rice University, beginning a PhD in their art history program, in the fall of 2013.		Look But Don’t Touch Tuesday, May 7. 2013 \| Posted by Rachel Harmeyer at 21:07 \| Comments (0) \| Trackbacks (0) Rachel Harmeyer is a Houston-based visual artist and graduate student in art history. She is currently a member of Frenetic Theater's Artist Board, and her first solo show The Bride Laid Bare will open to the public on June 30, 2013 at the Frenetic Theater. Rachel graduated with a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. She will receive her MA in art history from the University of Houston in May, and will continue her studies at Rice University, beginning a PhD in their art history program, in the fall of 2013. When you enter the galleries at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, a conspicuously placed sign immediately admonishes you not to touch the art. Frequent visitors to art museums might find such an edict superfluous; but at the HCCC right now, this warning is necessary even to the most seasoned viewer because of the tactile qualities of the work on display. Craft calls to attention handmade details and processes, and the ghost of the artist’s hand sometimes seems to linger in the finished work. This is especially true in the case of Janice Jakielski’s Constructing Solitude (January 25–May 5, 2013). The viewer's desire to touch Jakielski’s incredibly detailed pieces meets her work’s invitation to consider other forms of sensory perception—especially sight, but also hearing. In Constructing Solitude, Jakielski has crafted a group of bonnets, each distinct, which she has displayed on mannequin busts suspended on the wall, in front of painted backgrounds in corresponding colors and patterns. The bonnets themselves are handmade assemblages, combining embroidered fabric, artificial flowers, and painted porcelain, which together create a boldly colored and expertly constructed reimagining of Jane Austen-era materiality. Eleven of these bonneted busts are presented frontally, directly facing the viewer, while two pairs of two busts are presented in profile, facing away from each other. One of these pairs, seemingly the centerpiece of the show, displays a conjoined double bonnet that eludes any possible utility as a fashionable accessory. The other pair of bonnets, filled with artificial flowers, formally resemble indigenous headdresses and indicate a deeper level of subtext. A bonnet simultaneously reminiscent of a World War I-era aviator’s cap and a wide-eyed insect confirms to the viewer that the work contains multiple meanings beneath the surface. These works, read as bonnets, which Jakielski refers to as headdresses, may invite the viewer to imagine the possibility of their use as wearable objects; but in truth, they were solely made to be looked at. In this sense, and in true nineteenth-century fashion, Jakielski’s work privileges the sense of sight. On a high wooden table in the center of the space, six sets of binoculars, positioned three to a side opposite each other and focused on three all-white porcelain and mixed media vignettes, depict what appears to be a cornfield, a pile of leaves, and another grouping of flowers. Many of the headdresses include masks that obscure the vision of the imagined wearer, such as one with meticulously embroidered birds covering the eyes of the mannequin. Here, one can look, but not touch: the presumably muffling properties of the headdresses, visually hinted at by the cup-like coverings over the mannequin’s ears in one of the pieces, can only be imagined, not directly experienced. Jakielski’s use of traditionally feminine materials and processes, polite nineteenth-century drawing room forms of making, is a subterfuge: the prettiness and ladylike appeal of these works is merely set dressing for what is ultimately a contemporary meditation on isolation and solitude. The silhouette of the mannequin with the obscured hearing has a familiar counterpart in the urban landscape: the commuter wearing headphones—and even the obscured vision seems reminiscent of the opacity of sunglasses. Jakielski’s Constructing Solitude is concerned with the unknowable, with subjective experience: ultimately her subjective experience. According to the literature provided in the gallery, Jakielski “carefully selects the floral imagery for each work using the language of flowers or floriography—a Victorian-era means of communicating with flowers to send messages,” and “similarly, her depiction of birds is a reference to auspicium, a form of divination that interprets signs from the gods through the flight or migration patterns of birds.” Unless one brings a naturalist and a floriographic dictionary into the gallery, however, the precise meaning of these works will remain elusive—as perhaps they should.

Aja Gabel's stories can be found in New England Review, New Ohio Review, Southeast Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She has won fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and has an MFA from the University of Virginia. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston and a fiction editor for Gulf Coast.

Tragedy and Art

Tuesday, May 7. 2013 | Posted by Aja Gabel at 20:35 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I am living on Cape Cod, at the very tip, where, on a clear day, at the top of Pilgrim Monument, you can see Boston in the distance, across the water. When the marathon bombing happened, it was a sunny, beautiful day, almost warm enough not to wear a coat, and I was the only patron in a souvenir shop on the main drag, and the man running the store said to me, suddenly, “Sorry,” as if he had done something wrong. “What?” I asked. And he said, pointing to his phone, “Something exploded at the marathon.” We looked at his phone together, reading the first confused reports from the finish line, and on the walk back home, I peered out at the horizon, trying to see something, but saw nothing.

Once back at home, I discovered the Internet had lost its mind. The TV was an even worse place to go. In that week, it was best to keep quiet, and wait, and watch, and listen, and not judge. Instead of Internet conspiracies, I wanted someone to make emotional sense of it all. Instead of hysterical TV anchor speculation, I wanted considered narrative, acknowledged inaccuracies, the unknowable observed. I wanted what can’t come until the ash has settled, until the horror has made a tiny, cobwebby home in our collective consciousness, until we stop being angry at whomever, and start being curious about our vulnerability. I wanted art.

I don’t know whom I’m saying it to, but I want to say sorry, too. Sorry, let’s try not to fuck this up. Sorry, let’s not get jingoistic and xenophobic. Sorry, Syria, that this happens in your country every day. Sorry, Boston, we see you.

Some people might say that without tragedy, there would be no art. I’m a big believer that without art, there would be no healing. There’s a lot of tragedy going around lately. I hope that means lots of really excellent art in the coming years.

In the meantime, here are a few contemporary stories that make art out of large-scale tragedy without taking advantage of it. I’m sure I’m missing lots of voices. Leave your own suggestions below.

Samantha Hunt: “Love Machine,” from This is Not Chick Lit, ed. Elizabeth Merrick

This story, which begins with the sentence, “Once upon a time two men lived down at the bottom of a nuclear-missle silo,” and ends with a sexy robot confronting the Unabomber, will knock your socks off with its audacity. It’s as much about war and the fear of violence as it is about the universality of loneliness and desire for love. Samantha Hunt can do anything. Also, this anthology is worth owning, ‘cause of all the cool chicks in it.

Martin Amis: “The Last Days of Muhammed Atta,” from the New Yorker

This was one of the first pieces of fiction I read about 9/11 after 9/11 happened. In my memory, I read it wincing, thinking it was too soon; but now I see it was published in 2006, a good five years after the date. It still felt fresh and raw, and it does now, too. It is an effort to imagine, based on research, the last few days of one of the hijackers. It is expertly empathetic, cautiously respectful, and endlessly interesting.

Anthony Marra: “Chechnya” from Narrative and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

I first read Tony Marra’s story, “Chechnya,” in the 2011 Pushcart Prize anthology and was stunned by its cutting pathos and careful execution. It follows Sonja, a surgeon in war-torn Chechnya, and the parallel flashback of what happened to her dead sister. The story (thankfully) grew into a novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which is coming out next month, and which Sarah Jessica Parker has called the “greatest book of 2013.” If it’s good enough for SJP, it’s good enough for me.

Jo Ann Beard: “The Fourth State of Matter,” from The Boys of My Youth

I came to this classic essay late, in a power outage in the middle of a blizzard this winter, reading by flashlight, and I couldn’t stop. I am wary of saying too much about this essay, in case you haven’t read it yet, but it starts with a dying collie and then takes you through a meditation on violence and blame and all different kinds of heartbreak.

Deborah Eisenberg: “Twilight of the Superheroes” from Twilight of the Superheroes

Deborah Eisenberg is the quintessential New Yorker—they don’t make them like her anymore—and the title story of her latest master collection follows a few groups of city-dwellers just after the 9/11 attacks. It’s fragmented and full of white space, an elegy for the sudden absence in Manhattan’s architecture, and resonant of the dislocation felt by a society suddenly set loose. I don’t really get how the story works yet—it’ll leave you breathless and bewildered in the best way—but I keep reading it, hoping to someday figure it out.

Ashley Wurzbacher is a second-year PhD student in fiction at the University of Houston and a fiction editor for Gulf Coast. Her stories have appeared in The Southeast Review, The Iowa Review, Barnstorm, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Eastern Washington University.

If I Weren't Here, I’d Want to Be: Reflections on a Successful Student Protest

Wednesday, May 1. 2013 | Posted by Ashley Wurzbacher at 11:35 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Last month my colleague Justine Post blogged about the early days of the protest that happened recently here at the University of Houston, in which graduate teaching fellows in the English department—many of us also students in the Creative Writing Program and editors for this journal—demanded that university administration take immediate action to adjust our unlivable wages, which had remained stagnant for twenty years.

As Justine pointed out, teaching fellows here at UH were earning well below the poverty line ($9,600 for MFAs and $11,200 for PhDs) for teaching two courses per semester—the same teaching load that many of our full-time professors carry—and were paying approximately 18% of their salaries straight back to the university in mandatory fees. With no wage adjustments in two decades, our salaries were not competitive with those offered by most other graduate writing programs.

TF salaries, unchanged since 1993 (click for larger image)

As teaching fellows, we are not assistants to other professors, but are the instructors of record for the courses we teach, most of which are part of the university’s core curriculum. Our contracts obligate us to work only for the university, so those of us who took on (inevitable) second and third jobs in order to be able to pay our bills were technically in violation of our contracts and were unable to devote to our students and our studies the attention they deserved. Our writing was suffering, our students were suffering, and—I think it’s fair to say—the well-being of our program was suffering.

So in early April, graduate students and faculty members in our Department, including many of the Gulf Coast editors, staged a four-day sit-in at University Chancellor Renu Khator’s office.

We plastered the campus with fliers and our signature highlighter-yellow ribbons, accumulated over a thousand Facebook followers, and received coverage in a number of local and national publications.

We collectively resolved not to back down until we received a concrete wage adjustment offer from the administration. Our faculty joined us on the Chancellor’s floor, brought us lunch at noon, and wrote about our efforts. And eventually, we succeeded.

Our sit-in ended with a meeting with the chancellor, provost, and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. At that meeting, Chancellor Khator proved herself a true Tier One administrator when she allocated one million dollars of the university’s student success budget to address the problem of Teaching Fellow salaries. Our dean later freed up another $250,000, and these funds were subsequently divided among departments within the college whose teaching fellows teach classes that are part of the university’s core curriculum. Since many of those classes are English classes, our department’s allocation was enough to raise our meager salaries by 55-60 percent, beginning in the next academic year.

It was mind-boggling being in that room when Chancellor Khator waved her metaphorical magic wand to make our problems—many of them, anyway—disappear. Our faculty had been advocating for our interests for years, but until we all joined forces and sat on that office floor, no one had been able to penetrate the upper echelons of the university; and yet once we were there, once we’d forced our way in, everything seemed so simple. It wasn’t, of course; but it seemed that way.

Department faculty sitting-in with English teaching fellows.

Yet in our meeting with the chancellor, she insisted that in spite of all we’d gained, we’d also lost a great deal in the process of gaining it. We’d made a scene, sitting on her floor, attracting media attention. We had, in her estimation, done six or seven years’ worth of damage to our program’s good name.

I’m not so sure that’s true.

Because the truth is that if I weren't here already, I’d want to be. When I think back to where I was at the time I applied to PhD programs, working as an adjunct at the University of Montana in Missoula, barely scraping by and facing many of the same problems and injustices that we've been fighting here at UH, I know that I’d want to go where the students pulled their noses out of their books and took collective and direct action to improve their working conditions. I’d want to go where the professors—some of the finest and most distinguished writers around—sat on the floor of the president’s office in solidarity with their students without a second thought. I’d want to go where activism is not a pose, but a reality. I can’t say it any better than Justine did in her past post:

For those of us who write, our voices are our art. We write loud and noisy prose. We write cutting poems. We write sentences that make you feel full of the world. We enjamb our hearts out in iambic pentameter. We say everything you ever wanted to say, but couldn’t or didn’t.

In the confines and safety of a piece of paper, we are revolutionary. So, why do we become quiet and humble and shy when it’s time to ask for what we need?

We refused to be quiet, humble, and shy. We were loud, proud, and bold, and in being so we changed the culture of our program and improved our own lives, the lives of graduate students in other departments who also benefitted from the new budget allocation, and the lives of our students, who will now be able to enjoy our full attention in ways that they couldn’t when we had to work two or three outside jobs just to survive.

Gulf Coast poetry editor Michelle Oakes grades papers at the sit-in.

And Justine is right to emphasize the connection that exists—or that should exist—between our art and our actions. The work that we do as writers, and indeed the very act of reading, requires us to put ourselves into others’ shoes, to imagine others’ experiences, to create worlds. It’s this unending project of imagination and identification that fuels us creatively. We shouldn’t let this sensibility limit itself to the words we put on the page. And we should not accept that the fact that we love what we do—sharing the power of the written word with our students—somehow means that we should do it as charity and not expect fair compensation.

I’m proud to be a part of the UH Creative Writing Program, and I’m more excited than ever before to be here. I’m incredibly proud of my fellow students/writers/teachers. I’m confident that in the wake of our movement we’ll all be able to do our very best work—and our very best work, I believe, is some of the very best work there is. I’m honored to be working with our brilliant and supportive faculty.

And I hope that other writers and other students in other programs with untenable working conditions will take heart from our success story. I hope that, far from damaging our program’s reputation, we have demonstrated once again that educators working together can make life a little more equitable, for themselves and for their students.

Erica Ciesielski Chaikin is currently an MFA student in graphic communications at the University of Houston, researching intersections of design and traditional hand-produced craft methodologies. She holds a BA in geography with an emphasis in studio arts and a master's in art education, and has taught at the middle school, community college, and university levels.		Pushing the Limits: Ceramic Arts Biennial Wednesday, April 24. 2013 \| Posted by Erica Ciesielski Chaikin at 12:54 \| Comments (0) \| Trackbacks (0) Erica Ciesielski Chaikin is currently an MFA student in graphic communications at the University of Houston, researching intersections of design and traditional hand-produced craft methodologies. She holds a BA in geography with an emphasis in studio arts and a master's in art education, and has taught at the middle school, community college, and university levels. From an overabundance of fruit (mixed with elegant china and random doll parts) to houses of “liberated” mugs, the 2013 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Biennial at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft has a little bit of everything. The exhibition (January 25–May 5, 2013) coincides with the NCECA conference this spring and offers a diverse look at contemporary ceramic work. With 39 works by 35 artists, the show, produced by NCECA Exhibitions Director Linda Ganstrom, showcases a vastness of manipulation of the medium. Diverse, unexpected sculptures range from conventional vases and mugs to contemporary interpretations of what ceramics is and can be. Two pieces well illustrate that diversity as soon as the viewer enters the exhibit. Beauty (2010) by Claudia Olds Goldie is a very traditional piece—a human figure with modern lines. Just next to this is The Harvester (2012), a whimsical mixed media exploration by Lisa Cecere. A large painted floral background lies flat against the wall, covering an area about two feet wide, with a small (approximately 4") Victorian–style boy figure. The folk–style painting paired with the black, tar-looking substance (on both the figure and shelf supporting it) makes one question the use of the material—what is this dark, shiny substance, and why is it used in this way? On the bright teal title wall nearby a roughly 20x30" gem-like piece hangs like a painting, not put on a shelf as most ceramic work is displayed. Sliced gold nugget, avacadonium, celadonium, bark spray matrix (2012) by Renee Brown is a distinct work made from media ranging from earthenware and other ceramic materials to acrylic paint, sand, epoxy, and micro beads. The variety of textures in this work draws the viewer in closer, begging to be touched. The Golden Cage 2011 by Shenny Cruces, another mixed media work made from slip-cast porcelain, luster, and many found objects, is a large cabinet filled with these found objects, some smashed against the front, almost beyond recognition. The single pieces in gold and the case as a whole provide a feeling of elegance and richness, but upon delving deeper into the pieces, disregarded doll heads, legs, and other childhood toys appear. This mix of embellishment and broken nostalgia creates an almost macabre scene, but again, one that draws the viewer closer. Even the more traditional-style vases contain details that demand close investigation. Iraq Memorial Vase #1 (2011) by Thomas Lane is a perfect example. A tall and simple white vessel, it is covered with tiny, almost illegible names of victims of the Iraq war. The accumulation of seemingly microscopic names magnifies the feeling of loss. Inch by Inch (to Laura Potter) (2012) by Du Chau is wall-mounted, though in an unexpected way. Each ceramic piece of slip-cast porcelain is hung on music wire embedded into the wall. It is visible either from the front, where a cascade of these pieces seem to quietly move in the nonexistent wind, or from the side, a waterfall of shapes and shadows that requires a more pensive consideration. The largest work in the show is the only participatory piece. Misfit Cup Liberation Project (2013) by Michael Strand is a work specifically created for this exhibition. Strand has mounted a series of simple wooden house-shaped cubbies on the wall, each containing a cup designed by the artist. During the opening, each cup was taken and replaced with one owned by the receiver of the new cup. No money exchanged hands—just an exchange of one cup for another. On a nearby podium, recipients can read about the project and share their own stories of their cups. Each new cup has its story posted with it, and reading why and how people gave these cups back to the project is compelling. Each story has its own little quirks, from the child’s sippy cup that the mother realized was leaking chemicals into her child’s drink to the gift given but never used. The overall feeling of the show is one of experimentation, exploration, and pushing the limits of media. This wonderful contemporary exhibit showcases the skills and passions of many ceramic artists working today.

Brennan K. Peel grew up on a ranch in central Texas and attended Southwestern University. A former newspaperman, he's now pursuing his MFA at the University of Houston and serves as an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. His prose looks like live oaks in an overgrown yard.

Do the Locomotion

Saturday, April 20. 2013 | Posted by Brennan K Peel at 21:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Writing may be tough work but rarely is it physically taxing. Sure, writers often suffer our own vocation-driven afflictions: carpal tunnel, bleary eyes, that idiosyncratic aversion to waking up early or using Microsoft Word that manifests in panting, moist palms, palpitations or worse:

But for the most part we don't have to sweat or bleed or carry heavy things or perform labor under a broiling sun. For the most part, as writers our task is to write; which for most of us means to sit in front of a keyboard—and for some, with paper and pen or typewriter or sidewalk and chalk—and think. That means, for the most part, writers's work is sedentary. The chief tasks are moving fingers—and really, when you're struggling to produce 500 words a day, how much typing are you actually doing?

As noted before, writers are people, and people have lots of selves within them. Indeed, writers aren't sedentary all the time. Lots of writers do things, fun things, exciting things, healthy things. But on the whole, writers have a track record of being a pretty unhealthy group. Among our most notable are alcoholics, addicts, manic-depressives, and just plain depressives.

Mrs. Torrance suddenly wishes she and Jack had gone hiking more often.

Lots of writers do things, fun things, exciting things when not writing. But what if we did things while writing?

This month, my goal has been to write while walking. Not sitting at a desk or in a coffee shop or on the floor in my underwear. Outside. En route. With pants. I had two aims with this goal:

(1) Get moving. Moving gets the blood flowing, which sometimes gets the writing muscle going. It's also healthier than staring at a blinking cursor for minutes on end; and

(2) Get writing. Writing does not exist in the vacuum of our apartments or our minds. It is borne from, and ultimately a gift to, the outside world, the place our friends and family and neighbors inhabit, those people populating the places passed through during a neighborhood stroll. Writing while walking is, I figured, a way to do and write at the same time, a simultaneous hybrid of researching and reporting.

Consider the health benefits of walk-writing. A typical person can burn about 100 calories an hour typing. That’s continual typing—not henpecking for a few seconds then thinking for fifteen minutes while you get another coffee (or bourbon). There are no reliable data on how many calories are burned in an hour of chain smoking, pulling out tufts of hair, burying your face in your hands, or feverishly striking the backspace key to delete whatever word monstrosity you just created. But it's indubitably fewer than a typical person burns during an hour of walking.

There is historical precedent for the relationship between writing and walking. William Wordsworth went on a walking tour of France, the Alps and Italy. Less than a decade later he took a walk and wrote a poem, memorizing the entire thing as he went. Then he wrote it down. From that poem, the not-quite-euphoniously titled "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798":

Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee: and in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations!

Many other writers have used walking as a jumping-off point for their writing, or the outright subject of their work, among them J.M. Synge, Yeats, Dickens, and Thoreau (in his aptly titled essay, "Walking"). Phillip Lopate pays homage to walking around Manhattan in Waterfront, a book whose introductory chapter pays homage to Robert Louis Stevenson's famed walks around France with his donkey.

And really, going for a walk is nothing more than going on a short journey, a narrative pattern with a rich literary history.

I don't know that walking has magically improved my writing this month, but it has forced me to alter my routine, and I feel healthier. Composing on the move does have its challenges. It is difficult, for instance, to remember many sentences of dense prose after several long blocks when the Houston humidity is somewhere between sauna and dog's breath. I've really had to think about what I'm trying to say to keep things clear in my mind; and that chore, I've learned, has helped me trim much of the fat that would have made it to the page if I were hunched over my computer in a dark room. I also have to transcribe anything I compose while writing after I'm back home; but it's typing, not writing, and it's over quickly because all the grunt work is already done.

Do yourself a favor and go for a stroll. There are likely formal walking tours in your neck of the woods. And if not, then strike out on your own around the block, across town, to another state. If needed, channel your inner Stevenson and get your own donkey to join you.

Misha Burgett is a graduate student in art history at the University of Houston. She is currently concluding her master's thesis on the Dada movement and the acceptance of reproduction of lost Dada work as a curatorial tool. She received her BA from the University of Houston in art history with a minor in photography, and this fall will begin an MLS at the University of North Texas.

Common Objects: Artists Take on the Familiar

Wednesday, April 17. 2013 | Posted by Misha Burgett at 12:19 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Relatively new to Houston, the David Shelton Gallery concentrates on the showcasing of regional emerging artists. Common Objects (January 11–February 16, 2013) brings together the work of Ted Gahl, Nathan Hayden, and Lane Hagood. Each of these artists deals with notions of the familiar, such as daily scribbles, cups of coffee, and tools for painting.

Ted Gahl’s work, twelve uniformly small canvases with two pointedly unmatched canvases among them, forms a single horizontal line that wraps around the front gallery space. His style is heavy with mark making and as a whole is highly unpolished and seemingly unfinished, including a canvas that seems to be only primed and sits slightly lower than the rest of the sequence. The paintings comment on painting itself, with references through imagery to masters and nods to the act of painting with works like Caught Painting and Content (both 2012).

The most clever act of self-referencing is in the way Gahl thinks through the installation process with his blank canvas Pause (Comma Painting) (2012), and with the last painting in the sequence, which is on a round canvas. Pause (Comma Painting) is positioned like a comma in Gahl’s sentence of paintings while the circular canvas functions as a period. The act of creating a visual sentence in his installation leads the viewer to think of the work as a whole in terms of a single thought or a single sentence about the painting process.

The front room also houses Nathan Hayden’s piece, there’s something in my jam and it says flavors, a much larger work on velvet. His work flows into the next room where the viewer finds a large installation piece comprised of smaller ink drawings and writings hung perpendicular to the wall to form a larger design. The drawings are meticulous and the words seem disconnected, as if they come from the doodles and mindless writing one does while on the phone or in class.

Nathan Hayden, "there's something in my jam and it says flavors" (2010)

While Hayden's drawings are intricate and not unimpressive, they are at the same time unmonumental. Their smaller size implies a private quality, like a journal or notepad that someone might keep close. Yet the act of creating a doodle or jotting down memories or notes is something known to us all, allowing the viewer to relate easily to the work.

Hagood's "Coffee Cup on Wall"

The rest of the gallery is occupied by Lane Hagood’s paintings. Six acrylic paintings on canvas are installed as diptychs, with two larger paintings serving as bookends to the smaller works. Hagood's work builds the strongest connection with the viewer because his subject matter, while evoking a certain personal archetype, is undeniably familiar to many. The repetition of feet and hands in the work creates a sense of a tangible and inviting although banal journey through coffee drinking, reading, and writing letters.

The simple style, attention to detail, and texture in Hagood's application of paint engage the viewer as well. Being able to see the brushstrokes in the bricks feels personal and the imagery of bare hands and feet against the bricks evokes sensations and nostalgia; viewers can recall a time when their own feet lay bare against brick or sand. Hagood’s work steals the show by revealing his personal daily rituals while also relating these images to the common objects in the viewers’ lives.

Arnea Williams was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas. She received her BA in photography from Sam Houston State University, and is currently an MFA student at the University of Houston School of Art in photography and digital media. Her work centers around subcultures of minority communities within urban landscapes, with a consistent emphasis on the female subject matter.		Performing Blackness: Radical Presence Wednesday, April 17. 2013 \| Posted by Arnea Williams at 11:44 \| Comments (0) \| Trackbacks (0) Arnea Williams was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas. She received her BA in photography from Sam Houston State University, and is currently an MFA student at the University of Houston School of Art in photography and digital media. Her work centers around subcultures of minority communities within urban landscapes, with a consistent emphasis on the female subject matter. Five decades of artistry which may otherwise have been disregarded—that's what senior curator Valerie Cassel-Oliver showcased through her selection of over forty exemplary artists in Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (November 17, 2012–February 16, 2013, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston). Acclaimed as the first comprehensive survey of performance art dealing with the notion of blackness, the exhibition provided a loose framework to generate dialogue concerning a black performance tradition spanning from the 1960s to the present. Given the experimental nature of performance art, this exhibition incorporated works ranging from video and photo documentation of performances to performance scores and installations, as well as artworks created as a result of on-site performative actions. A list of related events (appropriately scheduled to run the length of the exhibition) strongly encouraged audience participation. Of particular interest was a performance on opening night by multimedia artist Tameka Norris. This characteristic work explores the contradictions inherent in contemporary society and culture. Tameka Norris's "(Untitled) Performance" (photograph by Arnea Wililams) In a re-enactment of her 2012 performance, Norris, barefoot and wearing an orange jumpsuit, cut herself and then marked the gallery walls in theatrical fashion, engendering a new meaning to the act of painting. This performance challenged the artist’s threshold for pain while simultaneously challenging the audience’s ability to bear witness to such self-inflicted discomfort. At the conclusion of the performance, the walls were left stained with faint, though linear, blood-red markings, representative of what is presumed to be Norris’s literal bleeding for art’s sake. This act questions and examines the commitment of the artist to the work, particularly in relation to how the viewer interprets what is being presented as art. This challenging of what constitutes an artwork is a recurring theme explored within many of the works organized by Cassel-Oliver. The spotlight of this exhibition seemed to fall upon William Pope.L, who addresses contemporary issues such as race, class, and consumerism. His approach is dark and biting, distinguishable through its extremities of sarcasm. In the installation Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000), Pope.L used unconventional materials, including a glorified ceramic toilet, milk containers, ketchup, and mounds of discarded newspapers. Atop this structure, his partially nude body appeared to be covered with some form of powder, possibly flour, as he digested and regurgitated the Wall Street Journal. These cosmetic choices, alluding to purity and whiteness, specifically address how we consume and deconstruct the news presented to the public at large. Other artists explored culturally embedded issues, including Xaviera Simmons, Adam Pendleton, David Hammonds, Lyle Ashton Harris, Jayson Musson a.k.a. Hennessy Youngman, Benjamin Patterson, local artist Jamal Cyrus, and the renowned Carrie Mae Weems. This cumulation of artists speaks to heightened questions and awareness of both political and social issues prevalent in our world today, exclusively as related to the black community at large. These works employ stereotypes, language, and historical references as a means of challenging what we know as “blackness,” “black art,” or “black performance art,” and the future of black visibility within a contemporary landscape. The decision to curate a show solely exploring black performance art in itself challenges conventional norms of what viewers would anticipate to be confronted with upon entering a gallery space. This leaves one to wonder whether the African-American ethnicity of Cassel-Oliver was the driving force behind a show whose topic might not have been otherwise broached. installation photographed by Jerry Jones Radical Presence may or may not have generated dialogue, which is, of course, contingent upon the viewer’s vested interest, background, cultural standing, societal hierarchy, and the extent of his or her art historical knowledge of performance art. Despite these categorical factors, the exhibition undeniably situated provocative works in plain sight with the intent of providing a platform to create both awareness and curiosity. Radical Presence took the viewer on a journey, making connections between artists, while deconstructing elements within their work as they directly relate to both past and present contemporary practices.

Aaron Bielish is a multidisciplinary artist living in Houston. His drawings and sculptures have been shown at Houston Art League shows and are in collections in Los Angeles, Houston, and Calgary, Canada, while his experimental sound works were recently featured in the Foundation for Modern Music Introductions series in Houston and the "Sundays @ 4" series in the Baton Rouge Gallery. He is currently completing an MA in the IPEF program in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Houston.

Repetition, Variation, Connection

Wednesday, April 17. 2013 | Posted by Aaron Bielish at 10:34 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The group show Present Tense, curated by Sapphire Williams (Lawndale Art Center, January 25–March 2, 2013), revolves around the concepts of premeditated and restricted actions. These are works which craft multiple and successive images, creating recurring imagery to inform and strengthen the viewer’s connection to the individual artist’s process and narrative.

Repetition grounds the exhibition, best exemplified by Williams’s own work Standard Measure. The notion of variation, typified by Arnea Williams’s signed anonymous and Emily Peacock’s Pieta Series, is set in direct contrast to the works of both Rosine Kouamen and Shannon Duncan, whose pieces deal with pattern. Scream Queens by Britt Ragsdale is perhaps the most dynamic example of Sapphire Williams’s curatorial statement: namely, that when the viewer is confronted with successive images, especially in video, the complexities of multiple events occurring independently create a compelling singular work.

Scream Queens and Standard Measure at the Lawndale Art Center.

Kouamen’s work—three large archival inkjet prints hanging on the southernmost wall of John M. O’Quinn Gallery—is initially the most visually compelling due to scale and presentation. The prints float, supported by clips suspended from tension wire frames above and below the paper. In each print there is a woman removed from her typical surroundings, set in a neutral grey background. The titles generate narrative for these seemingly isolated women:

Several hours after this picture was taken, she was almost strangled by her then boyfriend. As she attempted to file a complaint at the police station in Douala, the officers laughed at her. She finally resorted to documenting her bruises. No legal action was taken. She never saw him again.

Engendering the photograph into a vividly colorful and anguished setting, these titles are found within the exhibition program as opposed to a title card next to the work. In separating the lengthy title from the image, Kouamen creates a temporal distance between image and text, thereby allowing the viewer to search for context and meaning.

Duncan’s Resale consists of 24 digital inkjet prints and 27 articles of clothing relabeled with handmade silkscreen tags. The documentation of the clothing, the photographs, and the silkscreened tags provide links to the long and substantial process Duncan has created.

Pieta Series and signed anonymous are more direct in their portrayal of experiences and memories. Peacock honors all of the sacrifices her family has made in allowing her to use them as backdrops and props for her photographs. She repeats the position of Michelangelo’s Pietà (1499), then creates variations by restaging the scene again and again with different members of her family and environments. Her images are almost musical, referencing a sixteenth-century sensibility akin to ritornello form, contrasting the elements of twenty-first century people and their surrounding environment.

Arnea Williams’s work is less straightforward. A grid of twelve panels, the work shares Peacock’s affinity for consistency. Unlike Pieta Series, however, signed anonymous chooses to provide only fragments. Presumably these are some of the “pieces that may have gotten lost, misunderstood, overshadowed, tossed aside, or even forgotten” that she refers to in her artist’s statement. The presentation of the grid combined with fragmentary texts induces a strong need to reconnect those pieces—to provide the image with a longer narrative, possibly out of a need to see the fragments return whole. The text denies this possibility, though; only short connections can be made, giving the work an overwhelming sense of mystery.

Sapphire Williams’s Standard Measure and Ragsdale’s Scream Queens complete the show, and both are the most direct and straightforward examples of multiple images creating a unique narrative. The different media, however, produce radically different results. Sapphire Williams’s use of repetition is bold and unrelenting. The image of a woman in spandex is stark; her eyes are covered with 10K gold leaf, and silkscreened onto the acrylic is the Pantone color average for a dollar bill. There is no variation, no additional layers of meaning. In order to provide the narrative one must look to her artist’s statement in which she reveals her work is about the repetitive images found in high-end women’s fashion magazines. Left without the artist’s statement, the work itself provides little direction.

Scream Queens provides the same unrelenting repetition as Standard Measure, but the medium—an eight-channel video presentation—lends much more direction. The stark black-and-white presentation of actresses lip-synching screams from a diverse range of horror movies is successful here, due in part to the richness of the accompanying soundtracks, but also due to the amount of information presented. The lip-synchers actively engage with the original film actresses, gesticulating to heighten the effect of their screams. After the act, however, comes detachment and calm. The eight channels provide a diverse display of engagement and detachment, and, while they share the repetition of Standard Measure, the additional complexities of content engage the viewer successfully.

In the closing of her curatorial statement, Williams writes, “Present Tense aims to challenge the functional power of image as carrier of facts and time by presenting the disruption of linear visual progressions.” The works Sapphire Williams has chosen do something slightly different; they do not disrupt so much as provide creative alternatives to a linear narrative. In doing so the viewer connects with narratives by six compelling artists.

Justin Chrestman was born in El Paso, TX and raised mostly in New Mexico. He has an MFA in creative writing from New Mexico State University. He currently lives in Houston, Texas where he is teaching and pursuing a PhD in fiction and literature at the University of Houston, and is an assistant editor in fiction for Gulf Coast. He has been previously published in the Owl Eye Review, and his story “The Monster” is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol.

A Mistaken Notion: The False Epiphany in Fiction

Sunday, April 14. 2013 | Posted by Justin Chrestman at 22:52 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

By now most of us are probably familiar with the prominent role of epiphany in contemporary American short stories. In his craft book Making Shapely Fiction, Jerome Stern describes the epiphanic story, or what he calls “The Aha! Story," as the shape “of discovery, disillusionment, and revelation.” Even as he acknowledges the potential power of this shape, he notes its attendant complications, stating: “The Aha! Story is persuasive, so pervasive, so much the basis for what feels like a story that it presents problems.” One of the problems is that the epiphany is used so often that it becomes formulaic.

Charles Baxter, in his essay “Against Epiphanies,” argues that an overabundance of epiphanies has deformed American fiction. Among his more persuasive charges is that the epiphany has become so overused as to become an unquestioned convention. He goes on to link the epiphany in American fiction to the preoccupation with personal improvement in American self-help culture—a dubious distinction—and to remark on the disproportionate number of grand realizations in fiction as compared to life. We have realizations all the time, he admits, but many of them turn out to be wrong.

I read Baxter’s essay for the first time ten years ago. His argument is convincing; and yet many of my stories still conclude with epiphanies.

In passing, both Baxter and Stern mention a different sort of epiphanic story. Stern notes “another possibility, with its own irony and power, is the story in which the reader has a realization but the character does not." Alternatively, Baxter writes of another possibility:

(I do not) think that the insight—if it does come—needs to be valid or true. Stories built from false insights have their own peculiar interest, particularly in a hard-sell society, all of whose economic pressures warp in the direction of secret knowledge that can be cannily merchandised.

At the end of this type of story the characters may be unchanged. They may come away with a new, erroneous understanding of the world, or find themselves even more deeply mired in delusion. But the reader experiences a moment of revelation. Often in these stories, it seems to me, the characters not only fail to come to understanding, but often fall victim to a kind of false epiphany.

One such story is Hemingway’s “Indian Camp.” At the end of this story the child Nick Adams is in a small boat with his father, who has just delivered an Native woman’s baby. Immediately after the birth, Nick sees the corpse of the baby’s father, dead by suicide. Nick and his father talk about death and as their conversation comes to a close we are presented with the following passage:

They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure he would never die.

The end of this story has many of the hallmarks of the epiphany as Baxter describes it. There is the rhythmic, elevated eloquence, the moment frozen in time, the world clothed in resplendence. But in this case the epiphany is false. At the risk of stating the obvious, Nick is as mortal as anyone.

This false epiphany is powerful in a number of ways. The boy’s refusal to accept the fact of mortality echoes the refusal of the Indian man earlier to “stand” the circumstances of his own life. Ironically, the man's refusal ends in suicide. This moment also carries an emotional charge given our sense of the boy’s vulnerability in this moment, his confrontation with the violence of childbirth and death, events beyond his understanding.

All of this is remarkable, but not as remarkable as the notion that such a basic misunderstanding of the world can be as powerful as insight. Even as Nick denies the possibility of his own death, the story reminds readers of our own mortality—the most fundamental and willfully forgotten fact of our lives.

Betsy Huete is an uncreative writer and installation artist who received her BFA from Rice University in 2006 and is pursuing her MFA in sculpture from the University of Houston. Huete has had solo exhibitions at Lawndale Art Center and Matchbox Gallery. She participated in this past year’s Fringe Festival and will be included in the retrospective of Darra Keeton. Huete attended the summer 2012 artists’ residency Mildred’s Lane in Beach Lake, PA, and was included last fall at the MOMA in conjunction with it. She currently serves as the assistant editor for Art Lies, assisting with its merger with Gulf Coast.		Leslie Hewitt, Bradford Young, and a Cold Intimacy Sunday, April 7. 2013 \| Posted by Betsy Huete at 14:55 \| Comments (0) \| Trackbacks (0) Betsy Huete is an uncreative writer and installation artist who received her BFA from Rice University in 2006 and is pursuing her MFA in sculpture from the University of Houston. Huete has had solo exhibitions at Lawndale Art Center and Matchbox Gallery. She participated in this past year’s Fringe Festival and will be included in the retrospective of Darra Keeton. Huete attended the summer 2012 artists’ residency Mildred’s Lane in Beach Lake, PA, and was included last fall at the MOMA in conjunction with it. She currently serves as the assistant editor for Art Lies, assisting with its merger with Gulf Coast. Artist Leslie Hewitt and filmmaker Bradford Young are currently showing (until May 5, 2013) their second and most recent collaborative effort, Untitled (Structures), at the Menil Collection. Commissioned by curator Michelle White in 2010, the pair began by looking closely at the collection's recently acquired Civil Rights Era photography from Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil. Those photographs, all 230 of them, provided the springboard for the rest of the project. Hewitt and Young began exploring this archive, and with it, notions of history, of memory and nostalgia. They were ultimately inspired to revisit the specific locations not only demarcated in several of the photographs, but areas that harbored pivotal moments in civil rights history. What memories does a location inherently hold? How does history, particularly a history so traumatic for our country, leave its mark on a place, and how does one access it in a contemporary framework? While filming in the Arkansas Delta, Memphis, and Chicago on location in such places as the former Johnson Publishing Company, the Chicago headquarters of Ebony and JET magazines, and the Universal Life Insurance Company Building, Hewitt and Young investigate such questions. The sheer historicity of Untitled (Structures) is easily the most compelling aspect of the piece. Via single-shot filming, a compression of the present day to the past occurs in these hauntingly rich spaces, simultaneously revealing and concealing to the viewer unspecified pockets of memory and time. As the fluorescent lights flicker upon the outdated furniture of the Johnson Publishing Company and sunlight peers through the windows onto the scarlet pews of the Clayborn Temple AME Church in Memphis, the viewer lingers along with the shot in liminality between movement and stagnancy. It is this liminality that exhumes these locations petrified in the decade of their relevance and reifies them into contemporaneity. Simultaneity of time and memory is further buttressed with notions of the body. In addition to vacant locations, Hewitt and Young incorporate actors in separate shots. The filmic strategy with the actors is similar to the location shots: single shots with minimal movement. The shot almost never, if ever at all, provides a straight on angle with each of the people in the film. They all seem to be looking somewhere else, aloof and waiting. These corporeal shots, sometimes crisp, sometimes intentionally blurred, are intimate and stunning, and are usually closely focused in on part of a face or a sleeve, or hands. These fractured faces and textures seduce the viewer into an observation of pure form in conjunction with the slow undulation of a breathing body. One of the few exceptions is a young adult black woman facing a wheat field, back to the camera. She stands poised and waiting, motionless among the beautifully excessive golden field lightly swaying in the wind. In this case, the captivating undulation rests with the field, not the actress. The viewer’s eye becomes mesmerized in the implicit narrative of the dual shots when a place is lined up with a place, or a body with a body. When incongruous shots are linked, however—for instance, a body next to a vacant place—the viewer spends less time considering the concurrent histories of location or intimacies of body and become more involved with the artists’ intention and logic. The viewer is therefore removed from the most effective and coldly intimate narratives of the shots because she becomes too busy attempting to solve a riddle. What does really work is the dual projection. It works fantastically not simply as a strategy for juxtaposition; it also brings the realm of video into sculptural space. While most opt for the dual projection to appear as anyone would logically think it would, which is side by side, Hewitt and Young opt to project on adjacent corner walls so that the viewer is forced to face the corner in order to see the film most effectively. One could argue that a projection, dual or not, is three-dimensional based on the given space between the viewer and the wall. But what enhances this sculptural component is that the film, quite literally, leads us into a corner. The projections engage the interior space so that the walls simultaneously hug, entrap, and confront the viewer. These notions of spatial interaction are especially pertinent given that the subject matter delves into a painful, cathartic, and still today difficult history. Untitled (Structures) is filled with stagings and discoveries, actors and time capsules. It is a reserved work that is deeply and confoundingly emotive. While some of the juxtapositions of people and places run amiss, Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young’s collaboration is wholly engaging both as a filmic entity and sculpture.

Frances Justine Post is currently earning her PhD in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. She will begin her tenure as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast in the Spring. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, The Kenyon Review, The Boston Review, The Massachusetts Review, La Petite Zine, and others.		Luck Is Not Chance Wednesday, April 3. 2013 \| Posted by Frances Justine Post at 15:28 \| Comment (1) \| Trackbacks (0) Frances Justine Post is currently earning her PhD in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. She will begin her tenure as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast in the Spring. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, The Kenyon Review, The Boston Review, The Massachusetts Review, La Petite Zine, and others. There is a revolution going on in the shiny, humid halls of the University of Houston’s English Department. Though it is so far a small revolution, a whispered revolution, we want it to grow and multiply, jump genre lines, departmental lines, state lines. The revolution, like many, concerns money. For twenty years, since 1993, University of Houston English Department graduate instructors have made the same salary: about $11,200 for PhDs and $9,600 for MFAs. Twenty years without a cost of living increase! 1993 is the last time the stipend amount was increased and that was only because the teaching fellows undertook a similar protest. That stipends have not been increased since then highlights an interesting fact for those of us who choose to work in the humanities: If we don’t demand to be treated fairly, we will not be. When my friends started talking about rumors of a petition being written up to be submitted to the University Chancellor and President, Renu Khator, I looked at them full of doubt, frowned, and said it will never work. I said that I felt lucky to have my tuition covered. I said that I felt lucky to be making money doing something I love. I said we shouldn’t rock the boat. I said we are lucky to be here, studying with glorious faculty such as Nick Flynn, Tony Hoagland, Ange Mlinko, Kevin Prufer, Martha Serpas—and that’s just on the poetry side. I said we are lucky to have each other, to learn from each other. I said we are lucky to be given a job in this economy. I said we are lucky to get teaching experience. Yes, that is all true, but you know what? Luck is not chance— It’s Toil— Fortune’s expensive smile Is earned— The Father of the Mine Is that old-fashioned Coin We spurned— I was wrong. Emily Dickinson was right, and I was wrong. I was wrong on a key point. Luck is earned, and we have already earned it. That’s why we are here. We, as artists, have a tendency to undervalue ourselves as much as the world undervalues us. The fact is, we are teaching as much as full professors. We are teaching classes in the core curriculum meaning every single student has to take our composition courses in order to graduate. Shouldn’t this demonstrate that the University of Houston values the importance of learning to write? So why doesn’t the University value the teaching fellows who are enlisted to teach? A recent Houston Press article on this situation quotes Shawn Lindsey, the university's director of media relations, as saying this: Teaching fellows are students in the graduate program who receive a stipend as partial compensation for providing teaching support as a part of their education. These stipends are modest and not intended to serve as a living-wage salary—students are here to study, learn and work with their graduate advisers to help them prepare for their careers. This statement implies that all teaching fellows in all departments make the same stipend. If such were the case, I might concede the point. However, at UH, teaching fellow stipends vary from department to department. In fact, teaching fellows in most colleges at UH, other than the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, make two to three times the amount that we in the English Department earn. For example, graduate student TFs in the College of Business make between $25,000 and $33,000 per year. In the College of Education: $30,000. In the College of Natural Sciences: $21,000-$23,400. If we in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences cannot possibly expect to make a living wage, why can those in other departments expect to? Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe everything will happen. But what is important is that we are demanding to be heard. For those of us who write, our voices are our art. We write loud and noisy prose. We write cutting poems. We write sentences that make you feel full of the world. We enjamb our hearts out in iambic pentameter. We say everything you ever wanted to say, but couldn’t or didn’t. In the confines and safety of a piece of paper, we are revolutionary. So, why do we become quiet and humble and shy when it’s time to ask for what we need? No more. You will be hearing from us. In fact, won’t you join us?

Thomas Calder is currently in his second year at the University of Houston working on his MFA in fiction. He's currently on the fourth or fifth draft of his novel that he hopes to publish someday soon.		Fictional Exhaustion? Write a Letter! Friday, March 29. 2013 \| Posted by Thomas Calder at 20:52 \| Comments (4) \| Trackbacks (0) Thomas Calder is currently in his second year at the University of Houston working on his MFA in fiction. He's currently on the fourth or fifth draft of his novel that he hopes to publish someday soon. Dear Reader, I’ve been working on my novel now for the last two years. I’m about six drafts in. After each draft I usually take a break to let the words sit, so that upon my return the flaws can jump out at me. Usually, these breaks don’t last very long. One to two weeks tops, before I start getting itchy and anxious. One to two weeks before my fingers need to get their freak back on the keyboard’s dance floor. That one to two week period, though—it’s an ugly time period. It’s probably why I only allow it to go on for those seven to fourteen days. Otherwise, I turn into a quasi-alcoholic, prone to feeling blue and unsure what to do. It’s a very dark, troubling, ungodly period in particular because I struggle to work on other pieces of fiction. I’m sure everyone’s experienced this once or twice. I call it fictional exhaustion (not because it’s imaginary, I just think fictional exhaustion sounds better than fiction exhaustion or fiction fatigue or writer's block [which I happen to think is imaginary]). It’s not that I can’t work on other pieces. I can. It’s just I can’t get invested. I try, but I don’t care what conflicts these other pieces have to offer. Their little quirks don’t amuse me. Their possibilities seem quite limited. Every last attempt feels like filler. And filler is cheap. And there’s no worse feeling than writing cheap. The problem, of course, is that I want to write. I need to write. I love to write. Fortunately, I’ve found a remedy for these periods: letters—to friends, to family, to my former colleagues. There’s a lot to love about writing letters. For instance, I develop certain voices depending on my correspondence. If I’m writing to my buddy Cernuda, I’ll often fill the page with cryptic predictions concerning his future. If these predictions happen to be written on these super rad, old-fashioned cards that my wife found at a garage sale (cards I often have to snatch without her knowing because she’s developed an odd attachment to them), I’ll use the images on these said cards to influence my prediction over poor Cernuda’s life trajectory. If I’m writing to my friend Vanessa, I’ll often experiment, sometimes penning the whole thing from the point-of-view of my dog, Patapouf (it’s humbling to imagine what your dog thinks of you). Other times, I’ll write a brief story to my two nieces, or tell my parents about a drug-deal I saw outside my bathroom window, or remind my buddy Chase that his fiancé Ramona still has time to realize she’s making a terrible mistake, or to write my buddy Kyle letting him know it’ll all be okay. Robert wrote to Elizabeth to while away those between-poem doldrums. Letters have a way of freeing you up. You’re writing just to write. You’re not concerned about your character’s motivation, or the plot development, or the story’s pace, or that ever-nagging question: what does this even mean?! You’re simply writing. Letters also guarantee you someone is reading your work (which, for an unpublished guy such as myself, is a great feeling). Another wonderful aspect of the letter writing process: people sometimes write you back! And when they do it makes the pointless catalogues and unwanted bills that typically fill your mailbox that much less of a bummer. Writing letters will also one day make you cool as shit. And who doesn’t want to be cool as shit? Because here’s the thing: when this whole internet fad fades (I’m calling it) and emails become as passé as these very letters you’re currently writing (which in effect will make these same letters as hip as that Don Draper outfit you’re currently sporting—do you see where I’m going with this): bam! You’re cool as shit. So the next time you experience fictional exhaustion consider writing someone you love a letter. It’ll aid in preserving your liver, maintain whatever sanity you’ve got left and make you a trendsetter. Plus there’s the United States Postal Service to consider. It’s in dire need of more pen pals. Hugs, kisses and kicks, Thomas

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