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Steve Sanders is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing. He hails from Norman, Oklahoma and received his MFA from Boston University. In each location, he learned to live and mostly die by the Sooners and Red Sox.
First Novel, Best Novel?
Wednesday, March 20. 2013 | Posted by Steve Sanders at 19:28 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Steve Sanders is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing. He hails from Norman, Oklahoma and received his MFA from Boston University. In each location, he learned to live and mostly die by the Sooners and Red Sox.
Cormac McCarthy’s first novel The Orchard Keeper, released in 1965, is an often fascinating work, an evocation of a Depression-era Tennessee landscape that is as mythic and haunted as the sea in Moby-Dick. It also borders on unreadable. Graham Greene’s debut, The Man Within, goes well over that border with turgid prose about a protagonist who is fundamentally dull, within and without. As for Haruki Murakami’s first, Hear the Wind Sing, its absence from the list of titles “Also by” in current editions of his other works speaks for itself.

This semester, I’ve real all three of these works in tandem with a later masterpiece by each author (The Road, The Heart of the Matter, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World). Certainly the results aren’t entirely surprising. Writers, as opposed to, say, mathematicians, are generally speaking assumed to be more skilled in their forties than their twenties. We wouldn’t expect that Greene at twenty-two would have the skill and, more importantly, the emotional maturity that he brought to his later “entertainments.” The myopic hero of The Man Within is the product of a myopic (though prodigiously talented) young writer who had yet to learn to balance his theological preoccupations with a deftly plotted narrative.

As a writer working on my own first novel, I can’t decide whether or not this should be encouraging. If even Graham Greene once sucked, that gives me hope that we’re all capable of Our Man in Havana or The Quiet American. But writing a novel, even a bad one, is damn hard and if even Graham Greene couldn’t get it right the first time what are the odds for the rest of us? Of course, it’s a false dichotomy.

Sometimes a first novel only looks weak by that writer's own later standards. Tim O’Brien’s Northern Lights is an often enthralling tale of two brothers trapped in the Minnesota wilderness during a snowstorm. It’s only with the hindsight of The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods that makes Northern Lights seem about as consequential as an Encyclopedia Brown mystery.

Early success just as often creates a standard which an author can never live up to. Consider the cases of Richard Yates and Walker Percy who each debuted the same year (1961) with a work—Revolutionary Road for Yates, The Moviegoer for Percy—than could make a credible claim to being the best novel of the 1960s. It is both tragic and somewhat predictable that neither man ever recaptured the greatness of those debuts. They were each undone by a writer’s worst enemies: alcohol (Yates) and Jesus (Percy). Still, books as good as Revolutionary Road and The Moviegoer are worth an entire career.

The question is also perhaps less one of age than self-awareness. At twenty-three, the preternaturally gifted Zadie Smith produced 2000’s White Teeth. In a work that spans the entire 20th century in the lives of three London families, Smith anticipated the following decade’s defining cultural conflicts—identity politics, religious violence, East/West assimilation, the ethical limits of science—and did so in hilarious fashion.

At twenty-eight, Jonathan Franzen wrote The 27th City, the novel Tom Wolfe wishes he had written. Set in 1980s St. Louis, the books weaves a high modern tale of conspiracy with the scope and wit of Dickens.

Donna Tartt produced The Secret History at twenty-seven, reimagining the detective story as a kind of whydunit confessional about a group of undergraduate classics scholars at an elite Vermont college forced into the commission and cover up of a horrific act of violence against a classmate. The plot, though, is less the selling point than the perfectly realized campus setting which allows Tartt to skewer academic pretension and WASP entitlement in equal measure while creating a world that’s as magical and surreal as Hogwarts or Narnia.

For first-time novelists, the most inspiring recent debut may be 2012’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain. A New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell introduced Fountain to the world in 2008; he published his first story in his early forties, his first collection at 48, and Billy Lynn last year at the age of 52. Patterned on a deceptively simple day-in-the-life structure, Fountain's novel follows an Iraq War platoon made heroes by Fox News. Before, during, and after a halftime celebration at a Thanksgiving Day game in Texas Stadium, Fountain deftly mixes reality (Beyoncé and a thinly-disguised Jerry Jones play prominent parts) and fiction as he paints a portrait of an America hell bent on consumption for its own sake. It’s a potent reminder for a writer of any age that the time spent honing your craft (over twenty-five years in Fountain’s case) is its own reward.


Author

Kimberly Bruss is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston and a Poetry Editor at Gulf Coast. She is originally from Milwaukee, WI.
Fame and the Myth of the Artist
Sunday, March 10. 2013 | Posted by Kimberly Bruss at 22:51 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Kimberly Bruss is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston and a Poetry Editor at Gulf Coast. She is originally from Milwaukee, WI.
The year I came to the University of Houston to pursue this thing called poetry, I was supposed to have a famous classmate.


Gulf Coast managing editor Karyna McGlynn at AWP with...James Franco?


Of course, that never happened. He deferred his acceptance for two years and then decided not to come, which is only problematic in that he occupied a position that could have been offered to another PhD student (a two-year deferment being a luxury not afforded to the rest of us). But it’s neither here nor there. It would have been nice to meet him, learn who he was as a person and artist, and his attendance at UH probably would have boded well for the program’s reputation. Or maybe not. It’s hard to say.

I’ve never really been interested in him as an actor, nor do I understand his seemingly universal sex appeal (I’m more of a Nick Offerman kind of girl), but I have found something about his forays into the creative writing world, both as a fiction writer and apparently a poet, intensely intriguing. Not necessarily because he is, as some people have said, a “renaissance man,” but because, in a strange way, I think he might be envious of the rest of us.

I knew after my first workshop that I couldn’t write fiction. Sustaining an entire story? For more than a page?! Reading my early fiction (hell, even my present attempts at fiction) is something I find physically painful. I have the utmost respect for the fiction writers I’ve been fortunate enough to meet; they have a talent I do not possess. I am not under the illusion I can write both.

But perhaps if I knew a press (and a respected press, at that) would pick up my book no matter what—or that, regardless of the quality of my writing, I’d be able to read a poem to the President of the United States at his inauguration—well, sure, I might take a swing at it. Why not? I wouldn’t have to worry about rejection, or time wasted on applications that will likely yield nothing. I could live off my bank account, eat great food, drink great wine, and meet great writers.

In this season of changes, with AWP over the weekend, graduations around the corner, deadlines for fellowships either impending or already passed, and the endless tide of rejection letters rolling in from literary magazines and presses, my peers and I commiserate over our rotten luck and our inept talents. This commiseration creates community and, though it’s no fun being denied the Stegner or a spot at Yaddo, it’s nice to know I’m not alone.

I wonder if my famous almost-classmate is a lonely artist. He has had a different experience of the art world than I have had—different from that of the majority of MFAs and PhDs, I would wager. It is a myth that the writer’s world is overwhelmingly solitary, that we hole up in our studio apartments, chain-smoking cigarettes, drinking whiskey, furiously punching the keys on our typewriters by candlelight. I mean, sometimes it’s like that, but only when things are going well—and, if you’re not a movie star, usually things are not going well. We are all far too busy and frustrated and disappointed for that kind of romanticism.

When we found out about his acceptance at UH, one of my friends, a fiction writer, said, “It’s too bad. I think he wants to be just like us, but he can’t.” I can’t say I pity him. I think it’s clear I find his experience in the writing world enviable—I may even sound bitter at times. And I’m alright with that. I do know, however, that he can’t and won’t know what it’s like for the rest of us who have not been accepted into this world so effortlessly as he. We who learn patience and resilience, camaraderie and true talent all because things have not been easy for us, because we are constantly working on proving our legitimacy as artists.


Author

Tyson Morgan grew up in Hawaii, California and Maine, and attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He's a second-year fiction MFA at the University of Houston, and an assistant editor in fiction for Gulf Coast.
Per Petterson
Wednesday, March 6. 2013 | Posted by Tyson Morgan at 03:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Tyson Morgan grew up in Hawaii, California and Maine, and attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He's a second-year fiction MFA at the University of Houston, and an assistant editor in fiction for Gulf Coast.
I’m going to use my blogging opportunity to plug the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson. Spring’s coming, and what better way to usher in the season than with some melancholic Nordic fiction?

You probably don’t need publicity if James Wood just did a piece on you in the New Yorker, but I’m still amazed that, at least given the people I’ve talked to, Petterson remains a relative secret here in the U.S. Which is why I’m going to gush for a while.

I encountered Petterson himself before his work, at a reading he gave at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis a couple of years ago, an event that kicked off the U.S. tour for his latest novel, I Curse the River of Time. I bought the book, then consumed his other four novels—his other four available in English, at least—like breakfast cereal.



I was completely taken by the intimacy with which his narrators relate their stories. Like Junot Díaz's Yunior, Petterson’s narrators sound as though they’re telling you a story from across a small kitchen table, and you two are the only ones in the room. His narrators speak in simple, speeding sentences that have a hushed, urgent feel. They’re to the point, but hum along more briskly than Carver's or Hemingway’s, and are typically gentler. For instance, this one from Out Stealing Horses:
That bus worked a stopping routine I never understood, but it certainly did stop often, and sometimes I slept on the hot seat in the baking sun, and when I woke up again and looked out the window, it seemed we had not gone a milimeter further, for what I saw was the same view I had seen before I fell asleep; a winding gravel road with fields on both sides and farms with white-painted homesteads and red-painted barns, and some were small and some were larger, and the cows behind the barbed-wire fences next to the road lay in the grass chewing the cud with half-closed eyes in the sunshine, and almost all of them were brown and only some had patches of white on brown or black, and then the forest behind the farms with its shades of blue rising to an unchanging ridge.


This intimacy extends to the atmospheres of his stories, even though they’re often bleak. A Danish fishing town in winter, a factory in Oslo—the intimacy with which Petterson renders these settings gives them a kind of warmth. The same goes for the characters. They seem like quiet, hard Scandinavian stereotypes, but they’re real individuals because they’re so specific, and because Petterson is not afraid to dip into their thoughts.

I Curse the River of Time (Graywolf, 2010), his latest, concerns Arvid Jansen, a character one might call Petterson’s alter ego, since he appears elsewhere in his fiction. Arvid follows his mother, who has just been diagnosed with cancer, to her small native hometown in Denmark. She hasn’t invited him, she doesn’t really want him there, but Arvid’s groping to pick up the pieces of his life, his marriage having fallen apart recently. His mother’s a mysterious, hard, sometimes cold woman—if your mom was something of a hardass, you’ll take to her instantly—who appears in another Petterson novel, In the Wake, which was translated into English in the late nineties.

Like I Curse the River of Time, In the Wake is another sort of family drama: a description, in fact, that fits all of Petterson’s novels. The novel that followed In the Wake was To Siberia, which has nothing to do with Arvid or, technically, his mother, but the facts of the main character’s life—a girl who lives in a small Danish town during World War II—roughly match those of the mother’s, so you feel like you’re still in Arvid’s family realm—a bennie.

The novel that followed To Siberia and preceded I Curse the River of Time was Out Stealing Horses, which is about a teenage boy who leaves Oslo to live with his father at his cabin on the border of Norway and Sweden one summer—and World War II figures in again. Out Stealing Horses won the Impac/Dublin Literary Award, and earned Petterson a bigger reputation over here.

Graywolf just published an English translation of That’s Fine By Me, Petterson’s first novel, but I wouldn’t recommend starting with that one—though it is interesting to see where he started. Try Out Stealing Horses or To Siberia.

Petterson's gifts create a very inviting kind of writing. Add to that his ability to jump seamlessly between the present and past (none of his novels are structured chronologically), and you get novels that are hard to put down—they feel uncannilly natural.


Author

Claire Fuqua Anderson, a native Texan, has worked as a bookseller, ESL instructor, and farmhand. She received a BA in English and linguistics from Rice University and is currently a second-year MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Houston, where she is an assistant editor of nonfiction for Gulf Coast.
The Sounds that Books Make
Tuesday, March 5. 2013 | Posted by Claire Fuqua Anderson at 01:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Claire Fuqua Anderson, a native Texan, has worked as a bookseller, ESL instructor, and farmhand. She received a BA in English and linguistics from Rice University and is currently a second-year MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Houston, where she is an assistant editor of nonfiction for Gulf Coast.
I used to think audiobooks were for little old ladies who were losing their vision. (Little old ladies, bless you! You are the readers of America.) I could understand the arguments for long commutes and multitasking, and I'd even consider myself partial to oral storytelling, still remember listening as a kid to Charlotte's Web and The Hobbit. I like going to public readings. There's no particular reason I didn't take to audiobooks earlier, but I didn't. And then I got a smartphone.

I don't need to convince you of the self-satisfaction that doing more than one thing at the same time can bring. Nor need I extol the virtues of today's technology, convenience, fingertips, blah blah blah. I can't bring myself to say outright that my phone has changed my life, and instead prefer to think it's books that have changed my life. Again. As they always have. When I remember to let them.

Around the same time I sold out for a touchscreen, I enrolled in a literature course on the nineteenth-century American novel. Turns out, any book first published in the US before 1923 is in the public domain. Which is to say, um, free. And those novels are big, bro, and I needed to cram reading into the cracks of my day whenever I could. Ten minutes at a time. Making lunch. Walking the dog. Stealth reading.

On a professor's recommendation, I looked up LibriVox, a not-for-profit online database of audiobooks in the public domain all read by volunteers. Anyone can read a chapter or more of a book, record it from his/her shabby apartment in Long Island or Dublin or Shanghai, in any language, without training, and post it online. The result is a global grassroots literary/performing arts piece/huge auditory library.

Now, let me stop a second and say I think there are reasons—really good reasons—to buy books, to shop at independent bookstores, to listen to the professionally read and recorded audiobooks made by publishing companies. But there are reasons, also, to listen to a book being read by someone who just wants to read it. Stuart Mills, who reads Moby-Dick on LibriVox, I picture living in Seattle, wearing a burgundy turtleneck and sitting on a leather sofa. I don't know why, but I do.

Listening is a different way of reading. I'm reminded of my first Walkman, the Christmas I was nine, how I slipped on the headphones and thumbed the tuner wheel of the radio and walked down the street from my uncle's house, taking the music with me. A few weeks ago I walked through a cemetery listening to The Scarlet Letter, and I doubt either would have been quite so creepy without the other. The world begins to complement the story, or maybe it's the other way around.

Often I do not remember if I've heard this part or not and end up listening to the same chapter two or three times. This can be rather annoying.

As with old-fashioned reading, the mind may wander as you listen. Sentences or even chapters will pass you by and you won't have a notion of their content. At first, wanting to catch every word, you may be tempted to rewind, but later you will not want to go to the trouble. I'd like to think that the sonorous effects of verbalized language can have their own meaning. Or that some lobe in the brain retains the background noise. That every word is absorbed somewhere. As the listener, you may read only at the same pace as the reader. You cannot skim faster than or skip ahead of the reader.

When you start listening to audiobooks, you may miss your exit, your own driveway. You might end up on the side of the road, sobbing for a while. You may at times have the impression that Toni Morrison, who reads her own books, is riding with you in your car. Perhaps because Toni Morrison continues to flip the human heart inside out in front of you, you begin to suspect that you and she are starting to develop a friendship. You may not be able to shake this suspicion. You may not be entirely wrong.


Author

Will Donnelly is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction Southeast, Hobart, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere. 
How My Writing Gets Written
Tuesday, March 5. 2013 | Posted by Will Donnelly at 00:16 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Will Donnelly is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction Southeast, Hobart, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere. 
In 1982, children’s book author Arnold Lobel published Ming Lo Moves the Mountain. In it, Ming Lo and his wife live next to a mountain that causes them nothing but trouble. Rocks fall from the mountainsides, their garden is always in shadow, clouds around the mountain’s peak cause rain to fall day and night. Ming Lo and his wife want the mountain gone, so Ming Lo asks a wise man in a nearby village for advice. The wise man offers several suggestions for how Ming Lo might actually move the mountain, but only one idea works. For the mountain to move, Ming Lo and his wife must disassemble their house and strap the parts of it to their backs.
Then they face the mountain, close their eyes, and begin a special dance. The dance goes like this: Take three steps back, one step forward, three steps back, one step forward, three steps back, and so on, for a long, long time. Once they have danced this way for many hours, they stop dancing and open their eyes, and behold—the mountain has moved far away.

It’s a joke, of course, and it’s funny because we can see the truth of the situation in a way that Ming Lo and his wife can’t, but I think it’s one of the best metaphors for my writing process that I’ve ever found.

People often ask me, “How do you write?” I know what they mean. I want to ask the same of other writers all the time, and I try to answer them as helpfully as I can, but the honest truth is that I don’t really know. What I do know is how I don’t write. I don’t write by making up excuses for not sitting down at the computer, by fooling around on the Internet when I do sit down, by waiting for inspiration to strike a fire inside my heart when I’m least expecting it. That’s how writing doesn’t happen.

Two important things I’ve learned about myself: 1. Inspiration doesn’t exist for me, or at least not in the way I used to think it did, and 2. I always have writer’s block. Always.

I used to think that authors like John Updike and Flannery O’Connor and Toni Morrison were constantly (or at least regularly) inspired, and that all they had to do was to sit down at their desks and feel the genius pour out of them and onto the page. Or even better, that their genius was like an angry ghost fighting its way out of their bodies, something that they couldn’t even contain. These days, though, after years of working to summon ghosts like those inside myself, I think differently. I can sit for hours at my keyboard, thinking, dreaming, trying, and a tiny spark of an idea might finally present itself, but that’s it. The next day, the same thing might happen, and the next. And that, to me, is the trick of inspiration. We think that it all just arrives in one fell swoop, and maybe for the lucky ones it does, but not for me. For me, it happens, but it happens very, very slowly, and only in small increments. It never feels like inspiration.

I read a quotation from Richard Bausch the other day in which he talked about how it took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and how nobody’s inspired, constantly, for four years straight. Much of that time (99 percent of it, if he was anything like me) was spent lying on his back up on that scaffolding, feeling frustrated and bored and tired and just wanting for the whole ordeal to be over. Yet there he was, every day, working. (And thank God that he was, because look how that turned out.)


     You don't see the Almighty waiting around for "inspiration."

Writer’s block is the opposite of inspiration, and yet the two are connected. If you wait to be inspired, you’ll meet with writer’s block. Me, I can’t control the inspiration. I’ve accepted that. But I can fight the block, and so I do it all the time. I’m like a boxer in the ring, always looking for an opening, because if I’m not looking for one, I’ll never find one, and if I never find one, I’ll never land a punch. My nose might be bloody, and I might even get knocked down now and then, but I won’t give up, and in the process I’m getting stronger all the time. And somehow, after all that fighting, I realize something strange: I’ve created a story, or a novel, or a poem. I don’t quite know just how it got there, but it did.

So the next time you see me at my writing desk or at a library with my computer open or sitting in a coffee shop with a pad of paper and a pen, you might think I’m just some guy wasting time, staring into space, looking angry or heartbroken or bored, but you’ll be wrong. I’m dancing. My moves aren’t exactly smooth. My eyes may be closed, and I may be moving backward just as much as forward, but I’m moving mountains. I’m just doing it one clumsy step at a time.


Author

Laura Jok is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Houston, where she serves as an assistant editor for Gulf Coast. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review.
I Lied about Lying: Fiction, Truth, and Brutally Accurate Mimicry
Tuesday, February 26. 2013 | Posted by Laura Jok at 15:31 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Laura Jok is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Houston, where she serves as an assistant editor for Gulf Coast. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Over a bottle of wine, a writer friend of mine once caught me telling the truth. I drained my glass and forgot how to end sentences and started telling the story about a woman I knew who had dated Voldemort. “I remember that story,” my friend said. I assumed that I must have told her already, but she said, no, she remembered it from the short story that I had submitted to our fiction workshop.

Whoops.

It was my own fault for not disguising the story better. I lifted the character in question wholesale from real life because he was uninventable and I couldn’t resist. With his fuchsia-veined bald head and flat nose, he bore a striking resemblance to the villain of the Harry Potter series. I didn’t even change his name because it was gorgeously, perfectly, impossibly—Tom.

I admitted it. I had lied about lying when the truth was that I had been telling the truth. I felt queasy. It wasn’t because I worried that my friend might assume that my stories were all autobiographical. We’re not supposed to, but most readers assume that anyway. It also wasn’t because I think that there is anything unethical about borrowing from real life as long as you protect your sources. As Margaret Atwood writes in her craft book Negotiating with the Dead, “the usual writerly methods…resemble the ways of the jackdaw: we steal the shiny bits, and build them into the structures of our own disorderly nests." In fact, the process of writing fiction is free-associative enough that often, you will not consciously know all of your sources.

But here’s the thing about fiction writers: we privately believe that politeness is the only thing that stands between us and omniscience. If we aren’t careful, one day, we will write something True and then we will be in huge trouble. The people who inspired our characters will recognize themselves and storm our desks, shouting, “How dare you! Give me back my verbal tic!” and we will work very hard to seem guilt-stricken instead of guilt-stricken and deeply impressed with ourselves.

This is the fiction writer’s worst fear and greatest desire. Take away the buffer of fiction and what we do is quite intrusive and rude. We observe, we imitate, and if we cling too close to real life and real people, what we do becomes less like mimesis and more like mockery.

Read: Stop copying me.
Stop copying me!
That’s mature.
That’s mature!

Without the excuse of fiction, characterization becomes indistinguishable from the impressions of classmates and teachers that got me into trouble as a kid. My behavior came as a shock to my victims because I was quiet and polite to a fault. I was excused, like most bright children, on the assumption that, if I were acting out, I must be bored.

I was the opposite of bored. If anything, I was too interested. Like many adult fiction writers, I felt accosted by detail, obsessed by gesture, burdened with omniscience, and pissed about it. I saw myself as a weary prophet, fated to notice the absurdities of the universe that everyone else had apparently agreed to ignore. In this way, I developed a big fat Cassandra Complex at a young age, and like most smart young girls, I padded my feelings of alienation with plaid and rage. And zeugma. I decided that the world must suffer.

Let me point out a few things about the craft of imitation. You have to do it well to be caught in the act. That is, your impression has to be a good enough likeness for someone to recognize its source. The person who catches you is usually not the victim unless your impersonation includes too much clunky exposition. The truth is that you could imitate someone to their face all day and they might never realize it. They have no idea what they look like from the outside—and you do.

By imitating, we take advantage of the blind spots of others, knowing that they cannot defend themselves. I don’t sound like that, they could say, sounding like that. I don’t look like that, they could say, looking like that. Imitation is the highbrow form of cruelty.

Austen's Emma features a haunting scene in which Emma mimics her neighbor Miss Bates in her presence. The reader can see that Emma has nailed Miss Bates’s longwinded and vapid prattle, but Miss Bates can tell only that she is being mocked. Hurt, she responds to Emma in the same style, down to the punctuation, heartbreakingly confirming the accuracy of Emma’s impression. Mr. Knightley witnesses this scene and chastises Emma for taking advantage of Miss Bates’s defenseless position.



I don’t doubt that Austen knew a Miss Bates in real life and felt uneasy about co-opting her in fiction. By allowing Knightley to scold Emma for presuming to—well—act like a narrator, Austen holds herself accountable for her treatment of her characters. What is narration, what is free-indirect discourse, if not brutally accurate mimicry?

Writers of fiction run the risk of reducing other people to instruments of our cleverness—but that doesn’t mean that we have to. There is a difference between surface-level imitation, no matter how clever, and genuine empathy.

I worry sometimes that I am making poor use of my empathy. If I were a little bit less like myself, I might be a doctor or therapist. I have the capacity to say, and mean, otherwise trite things like, “I feel your pain,” or “And how are we feeling today?” I know, however, that I could not trust myself to see patients. I might weep, vomit, or worst of all, stare. Glassy-eyed with rapture, I might murmur, “That’s interesting.” I might think of how I could make a project out of this pain, ignoring such banal physical solutions as bandages and antibiotics.

Knowing this about myself, I aspire to approach fiction from a place of empathy and humility. I try to recognize the limitations of my perspective and write outside my own experience in order to understand, not to show off. The fact that you are yourself and not someone else is a beautiful and arbitrary accident, and fiction writers have the gift, or at least the aspiration, to recognize that. We have little use for the boundaries between our feelings and the feelings of others. When we say, “How are we feeling today?” we are genuinely asking. Behind every snarky omniscient line hides a sloppy sentimental who wants to see everyone with the same indulgence and understanding that we reserve for those we love.

When I called my mother the other day and said, “How are you?” she responded, “Your father is concerned about commuting to work in this weather.” She transitioned seamlessly into a close third-person narrative in my father’s perspective: waking at five in the morning and realizing that we were out of oatmeal, scraping snow off the windshield of his car, digging his way out of the driveway, hydroplaning on the highway—coffee from the cup holder slopping onto his knees—did he remember to leave the wool blanket and shovel in his trunk in case of car trouble? She decided that she should call and check on him. She ended her story like she ends all of her stories. “And that’s all I know,” she said.


Author

Will Wilkinson is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Houston and an assistant nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast. Will's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Economist, The Daily, The Boston Review, Reason, Forbes, Big Think, Bloomberg View, Slate, Prospect, and a variety of other publication online and off. He blogs about American politics for The Economist.
Defamiliarization, Again for the First Time
Tuesday, February 26. 2013 | Posted by Will Wilkinson at 15:04 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Will Wilkinson is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Houston and an assistant nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast. Will's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Economist, The Daily, The Boston Review, Reason, Forbes, Big Think, Bloomberg View, Slate, Prospect, and a variety of other publication online and off. He blogs about American politics for The Economist.
A year or so ago, I listened to a Tin House podcast, a recording of a fascinating lecture on "defamiliarization" by Anthony Doerr, who usefully lays out a number of the themes of his talk in an interview in Fugue (and don't miss this great handout):
I argue to my students that (in most cases) verbal repetition has a blunting, even soporific effect. When a writer writes that, say, a character has her “heart in her mouth” or “a surge of adrenaline” or her “eyes sparkle,” then a reader, seeing combinations of words he has seen thousands of times before, glosses over the phrase, rather than seeing a vivid image. Over time a reader gets “habituated” to commonly-seen combinations of words like sidelong glances, and glinting eyes, and “a chill ran up my spine.”

This is true of phrases, and it’s true of narrative structures, too. Popular narrative structures which have been repeated often enough to be familiar can also have the same blunting, sleepy, familiar effect. How many evil villains are physically scarred? How many films end in a kiss? How many protagonists have a wise old grandfather? And this is fine! I’m not suggesting that this isn’t perfectly acceptable. I’ll go see the new Spiderman movie, or the new James Bond....A lot of care is taken so that the viewer does not get shaken up in any significant way. So familiar sentence constructions and familiar stories offer something safe and comfortable and sometimes our brains crave safe and comfortable.

But I do think that the role of art is to show us the familiar world in an unfamiliar way—to shake us up. The guy I always quote when I get asked about this stuff is an old Russian commisar named Viktor Shklovsky, in an essay he wrote called “Art as Technique.” “Art exists,” Shklovsky says, “that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”

Writers like us—writers trying (and usually failing) to make art—are trying to use words, maybe the most used and familiar elements of daily life, and we’re trying to combine them to create transcendent aesthetic structures. We’re trying to employ language in ways that helps a reader see life in some “defamiliarized” way. Always, for me, art is slightly strange. Strangeness is what helps us crack apart our old eyes and see the world in a slightly new way. ...

I'm glad Doerr takes care to note, following Shklovsky, that cliche influences not only the reception and effect of language, but also the apprehension and effect of structure, and indeed of all "techniques" or "devices" of literary construction. What's most striking to me about Shklovsky's famous essay, from which our current ideas about "defamiliarization" largely derive, is Shklovsky's novel theory that the function of art is to restore to human experience what is lost in the mind's relentless drive toward efficiency—toward the most economical use of its budget of mental energy and attention. This is so striking because Shklovsky's assumptions about the way the mind works, in 1923, turned out to be so congruent with contemporary cognitive psychology.

The thrust of Shklovsky's prescription—the defamiliarization or "enstrangement" (making strange) of that to which we have become inured through "automatization"—is most compelling in the context of his factual assumptions about the mind. Here's what he says leading into the passage Doerr quotes:
In the process of algebrizing, of automatizing the object, the greatest economy of perceptual effort takes place. Objects are represented by one single characteristic (for example, by number), or else by a formula that never even rises to the level of consciousness....

Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.

If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been.

And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.

Shklovsky runs together at least two distinct mental processes, but it would be shabby to blame him. "Algebrization," the use of physical tokens (bits of sound, marks on paper) to express abstract, general concepts referring to broad classes of particulars certainly has something to do with "the economy of perceptual effort." But when it comes to the perception of the actual world (as opposed to the mental representation of the world imagined in a text), that economy perhaps has more to do with "habituation"—diminishing sensitivity to repeated or unchanging stimuli.

Habituation (a.k.a. "adaptation" or "extinction" or "acclimatization" or "fatigue" or "stimulatory inactivation"), is an incredibly general psychological process. Habituation's why you hear the air conditioner click on, but you soon don't hear the hum; why the water feels frigid but then feels "fine"; why last year's tired silhouettes don't grab the dandy's eye. Habituation's why a luxury car ultimately contributes very little to our sense of well-being. You just stop noticing how great it is. We notice change. At any given moment, much of what you "see" in your visual field isn't what's out there as it is right now; it's somewhat stale information retrieved from memory. Why continually "re-draw" the unchanging elements of a scene? The fact is that our brains, as big and beautiful as they are, have fixed computational limits, and simply can't handle the load of extravagantly total attentional presence. We couldn't possibly get along without the economies of habituation. We don't have the bandwidth, processing power, or memory to be awake always to everything. But habituation has obvious costs, as Shklovsky so poignantly observes. Habituation is zombification. Insofar as we are creatures of routine, we literally stop noticing our lives.

So suppose we follow Shklovsky and Doerr in the idea that the point of art is to make us alive to what we've stopped noticing by making it strange—to fight the effects of habituation with defamiliarization. Okay. But notice that there is a difference between defamiliarizing our experience of the world and defamiliarizing our experience of reading. Shklovsky and Doerr both slide a bit too easily between the two ideas.

Doerr says that "a reader, seeing combinations of words he has seen thousands of times before, glosses over the phrase, rather than seeing a vivid image." I don't believe it! Habituation to a combination of words doesn't suggest that those words will fail evoke a "vivid image." That gets the logic of habituation wrong. Habituation to a combination of words suggests not that we become unaware, or become aware only hazily, of what the words denote. It just means that we stop noticing the words. We process them easily. They get out of our way. We go fast. If words are atoms, and phrases (some of them clichés) are molecules, then defamiliarization of the world occurs at the compound level. It's a matter of higher-order combinatorial juju. You can make something pulsing and surpassing strange out of an ingenious combination of shopworn tropes. Conversely, you can state the boring, obvious, and banal in startlingly original terms.

Shklovsky similarly fudges the distinction between defamiliarizing the world and refreshing the use of language and other elements of storytelling. He basically just assumes that the former follows from the latter. He begins from nice examples of Tolstoy's success in defamilarizing the familiar world. Narrate from the point-of-view of a horse! Replace generic abstract terms with naive description in simpler terms closer to the phenomena! And somehow he gets to the idea that "the literary work attains its greatest and most long-lasting impact" when it is "created by the artist in such a way that the perceiver, pausing in his reading, dwells on the text." And he arrives finally at the notion that the essence of poetic (i.e., literary) language is "impeded, distorted speech." But Shklovsky needs an argument, which he never delivers: that impeded, distorted speech, which causes the reader to stop reading and dwell on the text, is the best way to get the reader to regain sensation in her limbs, to feel the stoniness of the stone. Why would it be?

Shklovsky's surely right that the forces of automatization/habituation are indiscriminate. Sooner or later everything becomes old news and that changes our relationship to it. Thus, an artistic technique or device that once produced a striking and fresh effect sooner or later become familiar and loses oomph. If you want to achieve something like the original effect, you're going to have to use a different device. That is, for me, the central lesson of "Art as Technique."

Perhaps a more practically relevant lesson of Shklovsky's essay is that, by defying automated expectations, fresh language and innovative technique generally slow the reader down. And of course they do. The point of habituation is cognitive economy. It's of the nature of defamiliarizing language and technique to increase the reader's cognitive load. It makes reading harder. To me this suggests that defamiliarization is one technique for controlling, among other things, the readability and pace of prose. You'd think folks in writing programs might pay more systematic attention to methods of modulating the pace and intensity of prose, much as composers and conductors modulate the pace and intensity of music. You'd think.

Anyway, that defamiliarization bogs readers down a bit also suggests that artful writing skillfully manages the level of attention and effort readers must put forth to successfully navigate the text—with "load balancing," as electric companies and computer network people say. If the point of habituation is the economical deployment of limited cognitive resources, and the point of defamiliarization is to resist or undo habituation, it would seem to follow that attempting to defamiliarize on too many dimensions at once may overburden all but the most Herculean reader.

This is not at all to say that the reader must be spared all "difficulty". Nor is it to say, with Herbert Spencer, with whom Shklovsky specifically disagrees, that the pinnacle of style is "to so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort" or "that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is to reduce the friction to the least possible amount." We have friction to thank for so much of what's best in life. But there's friction and then there's chafing. We don't expect readers to put up with three-point sans-serif fonts, and we shouldn't resent them for feeling sore and bailing out because we tried to "make it new" in every way at once.

We must pick our battles in the war on the walking dead. There's no reason to make readers sweat, to force them anxiously to wrestle with the controls, if it's in our power simply to set the automatic pilot and crash them blithely into the fullness of their lives.


Author

Joseph Scapellato was born in the suburbs of Chicago and earned his MFA in fiction at New Mexico State University. His fiction appears in Kenyon Review Online, Post Road, Harper Perennial's Forty Stories, Artifice, Unsaid, and other places. Blog Editor at The Collagist, he can be reached at joseph [dot] scapellato [at] gmail.
Literary Magazine Submission Tips Submitted to Myself
Tuesday, February 26. 2013 | Posted by Joseph Scapellato at 12:53 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Joseph Scapellato was born in the suburbs of Chicago and earned his MFA in fiction at New Mexico State University. His fiction appears in Kenyon Review Online, Post Road, Harper Perennial's Forty Stories, Artifice, Unsaid, and other places. Blog Editor at The Collagist, he can be reached at joseph [dot] scapellato [at] gmail.
I. Submit Why?

Submit to the idea that submitting your work to literary magazines is an essential part of the writing process: compose, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, submit.

Submit to the idea that submitting your work can teach you where you’ve come from as a writer, where you’re at as a writer, and where you might be going as a writer.

Submit to the idea that submitting your work can only teach you if you let it.

Let it.

Submit to the idea that submitting your work to literary magazines is an essential part of the literary community creation process: read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, discuss, discuss, discuss, subscribe, submit.

Submission, like subscription, is participation.

Submission, like subscription, is motivation.

Submit so that your work might be worked on by dedicated editors, dedicated editors who might respond generously and ingeniously with ideas that can teach you about your work.

Submit so that readers might read your work alongside the work of other writers.

Submit so that your work might be in conversation with the work of other writers.

Submit, above all, so that you might be productively humbled by rejection.

Submit, above all, so that you might be productively humbled by acceptance.


      After all, even Gertrude Stein was rejected. Quite thoroughly.


II: Submit What?

Submit the work that you feel strongest, biggest, or sharpest about.

Whatever you do, don’t wait until you feel 100% certain that your strongest, biggest, or sharpest work is 100% ready. Instead, wait until you are 75% certain that your strongest, biggest, or sharpest work is as ready as it can be at this point in your life as a writer, right now, today.

If you aren’t sure how to hit 75% certainty, humbly solicit the responses of writer and non-writer friends, mentors, or acquaintances who are familiar with your work. Respond to these responses with revision and ideas of your own. Then submit.


III. Submit How?

Get to know the aesthetics of the literary magazines you wish to submit to, best accomplished by reading them, second-best accomplished by skimming them, third-best accomplished by visiting their websites.

If you’re not sure which literary magazines you’d like to get to know, check the title pages of collections to see where the poems, stories, or essays of writers you’re excited about have been published, or ask for suggestions from writer-friends, writer-mentors, or writer-acquaintances who are familiar with literary magazines and with your work.

Read and follow the submission guidelines of the literary magazines you’d like to get to know.

Simultaneously submit your work to a number of literary magazines.

Log your submissions in a document, spreadsheet, website, or notebook. Include what drafts you submitted to what literary magazines on what day, and update when you are rejected or accepted. Note any editors’ comments—positive rejections, close calls, encouragement.

When your work is accepted, refer to your submission log and immediately withdraw your accepted work from the other literary magazines where it is under consideration.

Remember that editors’ preferences vary wildly. In all sorts of ways, submitting is a crapshoot.

Remember that a work rejected at 21 places over two years might get accepted at a literary magazine you admire.*

Remember that you might have to submit the same work to 21 places.

Remember that you don’t have to submit one work to 21 places in one day.

Remember not to put it off.

If it helps, submit with writer-friends while enjoying caffeinated or fermented beverages.

If it helps, make deadlines or deadline-based bets with writer-friends.

Choose not to be made bitter by rejection.

Choose not to be made bitter by rejection.

Choose not to be made bitter by rejection.

When your work is accepted, be humbled, and honored, and thrilled.



*Happened.


Author

Layla Benitez-James is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston. She came to Houston by way of Austin with a four-year stop-off in San Antonio at Trinity University, where she majored in English and minored in creative writing and Spanish. Her work has been published in the San Antonio Express-News and the San Antonio Current. She is an assistant editor in nonfiction for Gulf Coast.
Oh, But I Insist
Friday, February 22. 2013 | Posted by Layla Benitez-James at 17:32 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Layla Benitez-James is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston. She came to Houston by way of Austin with a four-year stop-off in San Antonio at Trinity University, where she majored in English and minored in creative writing and Spanish. Her work has been published in the San Antonio Express-News and the San Antonio Current. She is an assistant editor in nonfiction for Gulf Coast.
Lately I have been thinking about urgency and insistence in poetry; about those moments where the poet really reaches through the page and grabs the reader by the collar. Often these are moments when the writer seems to become obsessed with some idea or image. More honestly, I have been thinking about how to infuse my own work with that feeling. What keeps us reading? What makes us remember? What brings us back?

I usually process insistence and urgency in the context of well-placed repetition. However, what brought on this most recent meditation was reading Moby-Dick. I was, before this year, embarrassed to admit that I had never read that Great American Classic. I felt that fact should be kept a secret, like I might be kicked out of grad school should someone find out. In one meta moment it became a work I pursued (though admittedly more with sheepish anxiety than zealous bloodlust), only to be thrown off course by other large volumes. However, unlike Captain Ahab (spoiler alert), I would not ultimately be destroyed by what I sought.

It was not as though I had never tried; I believe my first attempt was when I was pretty young, after watching Matilda. In the last scene of the movie, she uses her powers to lift a book from the shelf and begins to read: “Call me Ishmael,” she says, and the movie fades out.

I am confident that I am not alone in having wanted to have Matilda’s powers. I felt I shared a unique kinship with her because of our (completely unique) shared love of reading. The only key missing to unlock my magical powers was having Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman yelling at me.

“Yell at me,” I told my father, after watching the movie. Initially he was puzzled, but at my insistence he figured out my plan and had a good laugh. Needless to say, I did not get the amount of verbal abuse I sought to induce my magic powers. Though I stared with intensity at many objects, light ones at first, using the anger I felt towards my father’s unwillingness to aid in my acquisition of magical powers, nothing happened.


    These are the parents you want if you're bookish and telekinetic.

I decided to at least read all the books ever written to give myself some consolation, and begin with Moby-Dick. I don’t think I made it past the first few pages that initial time. In subsequent attempts I would make it a chapter or two further but never finish. I noticed though, that instead of picking up wherever I had left off, I always returned to that first paragraph. It had a pull, an insistence, a message that it needed to deliver that I found bewitching.

Though Melville is nonchalant enough in the opening lines, it is quickly apparent in the litany which describes his situation that this is no ordinary whim:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

Not only did I sense a kinship with the feeling described (though I prefer horseback riding to taking to the sea), I was drawn and compelled by the necessity of insistence. While a sentence would have sufficed to get across Melville’s general idea, it is the urgency and insistence within the prose which makes the paragraph iconic.

The admiration of this device, in turn, led me to one of my favorite poems; in times of crisis it is my substitute for pistol and ball: “One Train May Hide Another” by Kenneth Koch. Here, Koch insists in unwinding an entire galaxy of images and ideas which center around one urgent warning. The repetition of this idea as it turns away and then back on itself is like looking through a kaleidoscope; each line is like a different turn of the wheel and lets those same glass pices, this same idea, fall into place in different configurations. This main idea though, is what is ultimately important; it is a matter of lovely life and death.

Another poem which obsesses me with its urgency is C.D. Wright’s “Lake Echo, Dear”:
Is the woman in the pool of light   
really reading or just staring   
at what is written

Is the man walking in the soft rain   
naked or is it the rain   
that makes his shirt transparent

The boy in the iron cot   
is he asleep or still
fingering the springs underneath

Did you honestly believe   
three lives could be complete

The bottle of green liquid   
on the sill is it real

The bottle on the peeling sill   
is it filled with green

Or is the liquid an illusion   
of fullness

How summer’s children turn   
into fish and rain softens men

How the elements of summer
nights bid us to get down with each other   
on the unplaned floor

And this feels painfully beautiful   
whether or not
it will change the world one drop

What first arrested me about this poem was her insistence in asking questions; this is an interrogation of the reader. I am compelled to keep reading precisely because I cannot answer and hope she will eventually do it for me. There is also this resistance, a kind of negative insistence, to using a question mark which leaves each question unfinished and causes it to rush into the next one.

In my favorite moment, Wright presents us with an image: “a bottle of green liquid / on the sill” and asks if it is real. Like the other questions, like I initially expected, it could be rushed into the next phase of interrogation but then she stops me, as if accusing me of becoming frantic and rushing through: “the bottle on the peeling sill,” Wright insists, and I feel as though I have been staring out the window in class, thinking I have been engaged but caught out somehow. These previous images arise and pass away but Wright does not let this one disappear from our minds. No, she seems to say, really look at it, it is really there, I am going to ask you questions about it and you better be able to answer. Somehow there is so much urgency in those two lines of insistence that I have carried the poem with me since first reading it.

Dwelling on instances of mesmerizing urgency can, however, only get me so much closer to finding the key to infusing my own work with this energy. I realize that perhaps I must first discover what my core concern is, then I will know what to insist upon.


Author

Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Salt Hill, Columbia Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Octopus and Denver Quarterly. Karyna received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and is currently pursuing her PhD in poetry at the University of Houston. She serves as Managing Editor for Gulf Coast.
The Top 16 Sexiest Lit Mag Covers in the Last 6 Years
Sunday, February 17. 2013 | Posted by Karyna McGlynn at 14:16 | Comments (11) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Salt Hill, Columbia Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Octopus and Denver Quarterly. Karyna received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and is currently pursuing her PhD in poetry at the University of Houston. She serves as Managing Editor for Gulf Coast.
AWP is a few weeks away and, despite my well-documented anxieties about the whole shebang, I’m particularly looking forward to the book fair this year. When I’m not hunkered down at the Gulf Coast table hawking our new “Sexy Lady” issue, I’ll be scouring the literary labyrinth for ideas to steal. Since taking on the Managing Editor position last year, I’ve become an absolute dork about journal design: kerning, gatefolds, paper stock, bindings, pull quotes, CMYK, full bleeds, widows & orphans (those bastards)—these are the things that now wake me up at night.

Gulf Coast does subscription swaps with lots of beautifully-designed journals, but the AWP book fair is the only place to experience the true wealth and variety of lit mag design. In case you can’t spot me at said book fair, I’ll be the person fondling magazines pornographically, going “Ooooh, did you guys use Soft Touch matte lamination on this? So sexy.”

In that spirit, I present my countdown of the top sixteen sexiest lit mag covers in the last six years. When I say “sexy” I mean, of course, from a design standpoint: covers that are memorable, covers that pop, covers I wish I had designed. Some of the choices were easy, some painful. Many of the journals I selected are so consistently well-designed that picking my favorite cover was the hardest choice of all. And there were, necessarily, exclusions. If I omitted your favorite, I apologize. Feel free to yell at me in Boston: you know where I’ll be.


[NB you can click on the covers to view them in a larger size.]



#16
The Kenyon Review 31.2 (Spring 2009)
The “Man-Reading-Kenyon-Review” Issue
Does hot pink on black ever not work? A well-chosen splash of color on a great black-and-white photo of some guy reading a 1945 issue of the Kenyon Review (in 1945) is pure class, and yet so meta. No wonder they’ve been around so long.






#15
Missouri Review 33.3 (2010)
The Shadows Issue
Missouri Review loooves to feature cover photos of bodies jumping and flipping and contorting, but of all the bodies-in-motion covers, this one is by far my favorite. The slick placement of the text on the hardwood, the way their logo almost fades into the wall, the word “shadows” along the white shin, the blue underwear, the precarious chair, that dirty foot, and “the eerie photographs of Francesca Woodman”?! Yes ma’am.






#14
Salt Hill 21 (2008)
The Hardcover Issue
This one has to be held to be fully appreciated. First off, it’s hardcover—something almost unheard of in lit journal design. I don’t know how Salt Hill paid for this, but the result is gorgeous. It reminds me of a modern dystopian version of Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette animation in The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Those two little splashes of red: one in the barbecue pit, one on the rocket. And did I mention this thing has gold metallic endpapers?






#13
Caketrain 8 (Nov. 2010)
The Géraldine Georges Issue
Caketrain’s design is so good they don’t even bother putting their name on the cover anymore. They let their artwork do all the work. I respect that. This one is part Björk video, part blaxploitation, part revenge-of-the-thought-bubble, and all sexy.











#12
FENCE 20 (Winter 2008-2009)
The “Golden Obama” Issue
Remember the golden, triumphant, champagne-fizzy, HOPE-fueled, liberal homecoming of late 2008? Us to FENCE: “Hey, can you enshrine this glorious moment on the cover of your experimental literary magazine?” FENCE to us: “Yes we can!” And they did. With bling.






#11
6x6 18 (2009)
A Barrel of Herrings
It was only a matter of time until letterpress journals showed up on this list. If you don’t know Ugly Duckling Presse and you pick up a copy of 6x6 you may not even realize what exactly you’re holding, but you’ll open it anyway, because it’s like nothing else. The basic design elements of 6x6 are pretty consistent from issue to issue: the square format, the clipped right corner, the rubberband binding, the giant number, the catchy issue name. For those in the know, this is pure UDP. #18 is my favorite: the semi-transparent grape-y font over the intricate pink and green architecture of the background plus the accent of the turquoise rubber band makes me feel like I’m having an affair with an eccentric bookmaker in a Mediterranean villa in 1969.






#10
Paris Review 196 (Spring 2011)
The “Poor man, I heard Hanna say” Issue
Starting in 2010, the Paris Review underwent a relatively minor design change that made a big impact. A circle replaced the bird that had been dominating the upper left-hand corner of the journal for about five years. They got rid of the barcode on the front cover. Color choices became bolder and the whole presentation much, well, friendlier. I’m a particularly big fan of the big citrus colors, and hand-drawn sketchiness of issue 196. Plus, as a writer I adore visual art that integrates text: “Poor man,” I heard Hanna say. Yes.






#9
Black Warrior Review 38.1 (2011)
The “Wedding Dress & Jellyfish” Issue
BWR’s design is always top-notch, but 38.1 is just hauntingly gorgeous. I don’t know whether the issue has an actual name but I always think of it as “the wedding dress & jellyfish” issue. In 2009, BWR redesigned their logo as an unobtrusive spine wrap-around, brilliantly allowing maximum space to devote to cover art without sacrificing branding. The other great thing about this issue is the cover stock. It feels like velvet, or PVC, or skin. Seriously, go touch it at the book fair.






#8
Sycamore Review 24.1 (2012)
The Kathleen Lolley Wildflowers & Stardust Issue
Okay, Sycamore Review just keeps getting sexier and sexier. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to choose a single cover from their catalog, but this one made a big impact on me when it came into the office. The effect of this rich, darkly whimsical art (like something out of a book I would have loved as a child) against the milk-white square of their cover is dramatic, and goes so well with their font. The flipside of the journal provides further delights and simply sucks you down the rabbit hole of reading.






#7
A Public Space 11 (2010)
The “Well-Dressed Jumper” Issue
Every single issue of A Public Space is a wonder to behold, and, like Black Warrior Review and Caketrain, devotes cover space to its always-surprising artwork (like this one: a slightly out-of-focus mod guy levitating high among trees as an elderly couple passes, seemingly unaware). Their sexiest feature, however, is something you can’t see in the photo: French flaps—designed with a minimalist aesthetic and set off by colored endpapers. Color me jealous.






#6
Virginia Quarterly Review 84.1 (Winter 2008)
The Chris Ware Issue
VQR got real super-hero and graphic-novel-y for a few issues back in 2008, and it was hands-down the best look they ever rocked. We always knew they were good, but this Chris Ware cover made them cool.









#5
Tin House 8.3 (2006)
The “Come in from the Cold” Issue
Not only does everyone seems to remember this issue, they all seem to remember where they were the first time they saw it. (I was at Shaman Drum bookstore in Ann Arbor, where I had, indeed, just “come in from the cold.”) What is it about this girl? Is she crying? Is she embarrassed? Is she playing hide-and-seek? And how old is she? And how is her stance simultaneously defiant and vulnerable? And how does Tin House get away with putting their name over her face and selling this issue like it’s a peppermint mocha from Starbucks? I still don’t know, but it works.






#4
Forklift, Ohio 25 (Summer 2012)
The Chalkboard Issue
O, Forklift, Ohio! You darling of the Table X area and bane of every person who wants to list you in their bio but can’t figure out whether to use semicolons for clarity. The only question is which of your brave, memorable, startling, whimsical covers to choose. The one that looks like a pack of matches? The one made of something sort-of-like-but-cooler-than bubble-wrap? The one made of plastic office mat? The one that looks like a waffle? Ultimately, I chose the one that looks like a chalkboard because it’s your newest issue and I love you and want to support you, but I might as well have just used a dartboard to decide. Wait, don’t you guys also have an issue that looks like a dartboard? Support this labor of love and they’ll probably send you a big, fat, flat pencil that you’ll have to sharpen with a whittling knife.






#3
The Lumberyard Magazine 4 (2009)
The “Disco Cowboy” Issue
Wait, you don’t know Lumberyard? This is another labor of love out of Louisville that takes letterpress design into a whole new orbit. It’s not just about the cover with these guys: it’s every. single. page. They transform every contributor’s piece into a piece of visual art, making it something far more interesting than it was before. Some designers and writers might balk at this idea since the pervading aesthetic in literary publishing favors unobtrusiveness, readability, symmetry, and simplicity. Lumberyard shows us what the opposite of this aesthetic is, and it’s fabulous. Why this particular cover? Please: it’s a disco cowboy on roller skates.






#2
Ninth Letter 16 (Fall/Winter 2011-2012)
The “Glittery Gigolo” Issue
Probably one of the most memorable journal covers of all time. Words just can’t do it justice. Neither can a picture for that matter. I swear, it looks like the cover stock is made out of glitter, and the back cover features this same cheeseball blowing a glittery kiss at you. We all know Ninth Letter is the coolest kid on the block. Hell, they even make the barcode look cool. Working there must be a hipster-designer’s wet dream.






#1
Copper Nickel 13 (January 2010)
The “Nina Simone Valentine” Issue
Today (as of this writing) is Valentine’s Day, and, on a more somber note, I have reserved the #1 spot in honor of the late Jake Adam York’s tireless work on the big, beautiful Copper Nickel. I’ve been thinking about writing this blogpost for quite a while, and I always knew I wanted Copper Nickel on my list, so when I saw Jake at a reading a few months ago I asked him what his favorite Copper Nickel cover was. “Oh,” he said, “definitely the Nina Simone Valentine one.” I remember being a bit surprised that he didn’t choose one of the flashier covers, but also pleased. I remember getting that issue in the mail and thinking Krista Franklin’s “See Line Woman” was like a melancholy love letter from France. It made me hear “Do I Move You?” in my head as I read. In the publisher’s note, Jake Adam York says, “Thank you for reading this literary journal which we think is unique or, if not entirely unique, a rare specimen.” Indeed.


Author

Elizabeth Lyons holds an MFA from Purdue University. She is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Houston, where she serves as a nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast.
I’m Good, I’m Gone: Lykke Li, Looking Back, and the Culture of Loss
Thursday, February 14. 2013 | Posted by Elizabeth Lyons at 22:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Elizabeth Lyons holds an MFA from Purdue University. She is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Houston, where she serves as a nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast.
Alone in my apartment, I still prefer to listen to music on my iPod. There’s something about the immersive experience of music through headphones. There’s something about the way I can sing along and not have to hear my voice as I do so. Perhaps it’s different for those with a good sound system in their house—but for me, it’s the speakers on my computer or the headphones. And Pete Townsend and his warning on protecting your hearing be damned, I turn up my music as loud as it will go.

While Aimee Mann and Salt-n-Pepa get equal time, the best love, the biggest love, goes to what I lovingly call the Swedish Triumvirate: Robyn, Lykke Li, and Miike Snow. All three, in addition to creating music that falls somewhere between electronica and pop, tend towards the futuristic and apocalyptic in their music videos. Li, in particular, has some beautifully rendered images that are akin to Rorschach butterflies in her song “Get Some.”

The song I have on a loop that is getting me through all this February rain is “I’m Good, I’m Gone,” which has the lyrics:
I’m stepping, I’m stomping, I’m all gone
Give me the tone and I’m all gone
Yeah I’m walking by the line
Not here but in my mind



There’s something so sweetly aggressive about Li in this song—the way she sings about loss and need, a "you" who only seems to criticize and a narrator who is working, "peeking over shoulders," knowing she'll "get it back."

Of course, as with many lyrics, we accept abstraction in a way we wouldn’t on the page. It’s never clear what the singer will get back, or what line she’s walking by—but the song has the hook and the bass, handclaps and a piano’s sad progression, a soprano in distortion. There’s a sweetness to the loss in "I’m Good, I’m Gone" that I can’t seem to parse out. And perhaps this inability to parse it out is what gives it such power.

This same loss I can’t seem to parse is at the heart of one of my favorite poems: Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song.” She begins,
Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds,
And then they lay back down again….

The directive is what always stops me in this poem. The narrator is involving the reader in the experience of the poem, in the recollection of the memory, in such an explicit fashion. Listen, the narrator says. Listen. Here is this story, of a girl and a goat named Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, of a goat that sings the way a murdered person must (or should) haunt their killers. This is, of course, a haunting as well: for goats can’t sing, or at least not the way they do in Kelly’s world.
The body lay by the tracks.
The head called to the body. The body to the head.
They missed each other.

Both Li and Kelly, to me, are singing the same story—one of keeping a loss at the center of a life, of an experience. For Li, however, the loss seems to be a choice—the refrain “You’ll be calling but I won’t be at the phone” implies that the narrator knows someone is trying to keep a connection, and chooses to remove themselves from the equation. In Kelly’s poem, the entire town tries to repair the girl’s loss, to raise money to buy a new goat, to find the perpetrators. They want, in essence, to remove the event—to protect a child.

I was raised in the South, in the strange world of Flannery O’Connor, of a mother who says someone is walking over your grave when you shiver—a strange concept, I realize, but a comforting one as well. And perhaps there are many who are trying to avoid loss, or deny it—but I think that Lykke Li is smart to sing “We must go”—because sometimes, the hardest part of the mourning is accepting that things cannot be repaired. Once that hard work is done, as Kelly writes,
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

Writing of loss is always bitter, and also sweet; and for many writers, it is the thing we will always turn over in our minds.


Author

Patrick Clement James, a graduate of the Manhattan School of music, is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston. He currently serves as an assistant editor in poetry for Gulf Coast.
Who Is Sylvia? What Is She?
Wednesday, February 13. 2013 | Posted by Patrick Clement James at 22:26 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Patrick Clement James, a graduate of the Manhattan School of music, is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston. He currently serves as an assistant editor in poetry for Gulf Coast.
I used to love ghost stories, back when death didn’t seem so real. When I was young, my dad often took my brother and I camping. At night we sat around the fire, roasting marshmallows, and he told us about monsters, aliens, and ghosts. We lived in New Jersey, and the Pine Barrens weren’t far off, so sometimes his stories were about a local legend called the Jersey Devil: how it was born, the havoc it wreaked on the midwives, how it lurked among the carpets of pine. But more often than not, dad’s stories were about ghosts—luminous specters dangling in the branches above us. As a child, I felt simultaneously delighted and horrified by his stories; they’ve been lodged in my brain ever since.

As an adult, however, I’m terrible at telling ghost stories. I can never think of anything scary, and I usually veer toward distasteful violence. Despite having a bizarre fascination with the dead, I don’t really know how to talk about ghosts.

• • •

On Monday, fifty years ago, Sylvia Plath committed suicide in London.

Beyond this, what I know about Plath mostly comes from her poetry and fiction. I first encountered her poems as a teenager. And when I was in college, my mom gave me a copy of The Bell Jar, a book I found depressing and bewildering. In those days, I thought Sylvia Plath and I had very little in common—I have trouble relating to people who kill themselves. And even today, so much of Plath’s poetry leaves me feeling uncomfortable and nervous.

But I can’t deny the force of her work. There’s a fascinating, inescapable momentum to it. As Ani DiFranco says, “everything bows to beauty / when it is fierce / when it is flawless.” And Plath’s poems possess an undeniable power. The beauty may be terrible, in fact terrifying, but it’s there…and it’s fierce.

• • •

I have this friend, and we often talk about having a talk show together. We have an ongoing joke that there should be a segment on our show called “No! Sylvia! No!” What exactly happens in the segment is not quite clear. We just like the sound of it.

I think it speaks to the mythology of Plath. She’s the patron saint of too-many-feelings.

Recently, a friend of mine read one of my poems. Later, she said my work was confessional. Something about the comment stung. It was as if she were saying: you have too many feelings.

For me, the term confessional is rather loaded, and it makes me think of Plath. When my friend called my poem confessional, I couldn’t help but notice a derogatory statement hidden somewhere in the mix—like I was narcissistic and self-obsessed. Confessional sounds pejorative: a confessional writer is someone who can’t keep their business to themselves. They have no character and they’re a gossip. They’re self-destructive.

My resistance to the term might have had more to do with my own discomfort with my writing than anything else. In a recent roundtable discussion in Gulf Coast, curated by Allie Rowbottom, Eula Biss had this to say about the genre of memoir and its relation to the self:
I’m troubled by the very popular suggestion that memoir, because it sometimes sells well, is a selling of one’s self. This charge is sometimes extended to anything written in the first person, a charge of "navel-gazing." This also somewhat solidifies an often vaguer association between memoir and the body, and then the frequent efforts to position memoir as low art or "artless." It seems quite possible that all of these attitudes are actually the result of our extreme anxiety, as a culture, around the concept of the self. This self-loathing (ha!) just happens to intersect on occasion with woman-hating, another cultural feature…I don’t know. But I do know that all this affects, and sometimes paralyzes, my students, who are often fearful or apologetic when writing about or through themselves. I have, more than once, met that fear with this quote from [Sarah Manguso’s] The Two Kinds of Decay: "Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of a self."

In light of these ideas, I can’t help but wonder if my fear of being called a confessional writer has something to do with my own internalized self-loathing, and therefore my own unconscious homophobia/misogyny. As a gay man, it’s an incredibly uncomfortable thing to think about—which explains why a poet like Sylvia Plath is an uncomfortable poet to read. Her own insistent, courageous self-confrontation points to my barely repressed fear of staring down the self.

• • •

Sometimes I don’t want to comprehend the “dimensions of the self” because I’m not quite sure what I’ll find there.

• • •

Poets are fascinated with the dead. In her book The Burning of the Three Fires, Jeanne Marie Beaumont has a poem called "Channeling Sylvia: 8-Ball (Interrogation).” The piece is constructed from a series of questions addressed to Sylvia Plath, and the responses happen via a Magic 8-Ball. In the notes of the book, Beaumont affirms that the poem is a direct transcript, without editing, and that she actually performed this kitschy séance. The result is remarkable. Sylvia’s answers are terse, as the medium of the 8-Ball dictates, but they also snap with a wit that is unmistakably Plathian.

“Is there ennui in the afterlife? / YOU MAY RELY ON IT.”

I can understand the impulse, the need to ask such questions. A myth like Sylvia's commands our obsession.

“Was it all worth it, for the poems? / YOU MAY RELY ON IT.”

• • •

Last semester, my friend bought me a Ouija board for Christmas. I insisted that the first spirit we try to contact be that of James Merrill. It was an utterly unsuccessful enterprise, but we definitely tried our best. We even set out a jar of Nutella as an offering for him. In retrospect, we probably should have poured a glass of wine, like Yeats in “All Souls’ Night.” But unfortunately, I didn’t have any in the apartment.

We sat at my wooden table, both hands on the planchette, and posed our questions to the dim, eerie apartment. Candles burned on the table. Shadows caressed the walls. We concentrated.

And nothing happened. It was very disappointing.

As we begrudgingly put the board away and turned the lights on, my friend asked, “Why, of all the dead people out there, do you want to contact James Merrill?”

I thought the answer was obvious: “For the gossip!”

• • •

The Poetry Foundation’s webpage for Sylvia Plath has a quotation from Ted Hughes, regarding her work: “Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them.”

Yes, it’s these psychic gifts that make Plath’s poetry so remarkable—her ability to see the world so perceptively, so unbearably. And perhaps writing was the manner in which she maintained her vision, fifty years ago—back before she refused such clarity, before she had to turn away.

• • •

Thinking of Plath’s work reminds me of the reasons we tell ghost stories. Whenever I come across a really good poem, it takes me back to those nights with my dad and his campfire—that feeling of delight and terror, the curtain being slowly pulled back on a window of truth. In defense of confessional poetry, in defense of Sylvia, I think there’s more than the element of craft to good writing. To be a great writer, one must be willing to write the truth. And, when considering matters from this point of view, isn’t there an element of confession to all writing? This is the way I see it, we confide. Or sometimes, more emphatically: This is the way it ought to be.

• • •

And what is reading, if not a séance? What is writing, if not a little bit of gossip?


Author

David Tomas Martinez is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston, and Reviews and Interviews Editor at Gulf Coast. His first collection of poems, Hustle, will be released by Sarabande Books in 2014.
Love, Power, and the New Majority
Monday, February 11. 2013 | Posted by David Tomas Martinez at 14:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

David Tomas Martinez is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston, and Reviews and Interviews Editor at Gulf Coast. His first collection of poems, Hustle, will be released by Sarabande Books in 2014.
As all of our worlds grow a little smaller, the monopolization of less influential cultures by more dominant ones accelerates us toward one culture. While other countries lean toward a more polylinguistic society in their educational system, in America we still hold the jingoistic view that everyone should speak English because of America's position of dominance in the world. We do not feel that we should have to speak other languages, whereas other countries either must or do because of the proliferation of media in English. This insular behavior is made worse by the rhetoric in the politics of language advocating a homogenized American tongue and culture, a land where we only speak American under the old stars & stripes. But you already know this, my educated reader.

Maybe I'm only thinking of power because I am in love, and my mind is naturally moving to considering things beyond my own needs. Or maybe these thoughts are the residual dust from "The Cinnamon Tsunami," a roundtable I conducted for the forthcoming spring issue of Gulf Coast (due out in April!), featuring Angie Cruz, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Carolina Ebeid, Gustavo Arellano, Juan Felipé Herrera, and Rigoberto Gonzalez. In this conversation we'll explore the idea of worlds within worlds, and how Latin@s are becoming the new majority in California and other states. But I am sure you are aware of this as well, my erudite reader and avid Gulf Coast peruser.

What you might not know (and if you don't know me, I doubt you're reading this) is that I was recently married. Quite the whirlwind. Quite the little shocker to family and friends. The romance took 21 days to consummate from first date to marriage. It feels strange typing that, but it was as simple as we didn't want to be apart. And with as much frankness as I feel comfortable wearing, the quickness of our nuptials flattered my romantic sensibilities; so I probably had an easier time with it than most. As they say, sometimes you just know. But I also understood that this was a much more difficult decision for the future Mrs. Martinez. In the past I may have changed my life before, but never as expeditiously or fundamentally as I was asking her to change hers—nor have I ever done that for someone else. In order to move, she had to quit her job, get out of the lease for her apartment, and cancel her cable television. All serious matters, as you know if you have ever had to get out of a cable contract.

At this point, I would like to take a break from this blog to inform the reader that I do not expect I will read to my partner the story of how we met in attempt to loosen her memory from the rusty hold of dementia. Nor do I expect to die in the same nursing home bed at the same time. No, I do not expect these things, Nicholas Sparks.



Obviously, there were extenuating circumstances that made moving easier for her. Her trade is much more transportable than mine; she has lived in San Diego her whole life and was ready to see other parts of the country; and, unbeknownst to each other, we each had silently been attracted to the other for three years. Here are some of the reasons it was not easy. Another list—but first some intellectual contexualization as groundwork for a later point.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell explains that one problem with modernity is that we have broken away from ceremony. There used to be ceremonies that marked, and sometimes caused, a psychic break transitioning one from a particular aspect of life to the next aspect of life. In our society, the rituals that marked childhood to adulthood are either completely gone or watered down to such a point of banality that they no longer signify a change. Therefore, we have a culture of stunted growth. Now I'm not comparing moving across state lines to any severe rite of passage, but I do see a similarity in the psychic break from being single to married life this move has caused for both my wife, and, to a lesser extent, myself.

After spending a month and a half together we were separated for only two weeks. It was an arduous period of Skyping, Facebooking, texting, and Instagraming. When we finally were reunited there was an inevitable "Whoa, you're a real person again!" caused by separation and distance. This was overcome quickly by some late-night stretching. But her moving still did not seem real, even when the storage pod arrived. I ignored the storage pod almost completely; I must have seen it for what it is, a bill. We eventually began to pack, but my trepidation was quickly warranted when it became apparent she was going to lose a lot of furniture in this move. She was placed in the unenviable position of choosing what to keep. What we hold on to and what we release says a lot about us.

As she chose which furniture would stay, and which would go, I stayed quiet. All I did was move what where, when she said. I watched anxiously as her possessions dwindled, wondering which piece would lead to the epiphany that I was not worth this much trouble. It came on the last day of moving, after important pieces were already let go. The offending piece of furniture was an ottoman, and though there would be no falling of our ottoman empire that day….

The fear that she will someday not think I am worth much is still very real for me. Because I have not been able to provide as much as I would have liked financially during this move, I felt that the sham of a man that I am, was exposed—in a cheap rhyme which made it all the more damning in my head. But I also know that these fears of inadequacies derive from more than just lost furniture but also derive from my desire to adhere to the prescribed gender roles. I was falling into the old role of male as provider, though my wife makes more money than I do; but what I feared most was that by her backseating her career for mine, by moving to Tejas, by her leaving her friends and family to be marooned on Isla de Houston, by her taking the last name Martinez, she and I— no, we—were building a home from the prefabricated roles of a male-dominated society. I think I was more scared about the veracity of my own convictions in my actions.

And there it goes. I started this blog entry with the idea of power differentials, in part, because the most underwhelming news of this decade broke earlier this week: that Latin@s will be the statistical majority in California by the end of 2013, which doesn't change, presently, the distribution of power or the the way Latin@s are perceived in the media. But as I saw my wife begin to throw away important pieces of furniture, I couldn't help but wonder how our power differential was divided. As I hauled piece after piece of furniture, plates and silverware and appliances; as I answered "yup, I have that"; as I knelt on my knees and scrubbed the kitchen floor while she cleaned the baseboards—I finally realized this is not about power. This is about love. That I found an amazing person who did not have to leave everything to be with me; or more accurately, a strong person who loves, and is willing, for the first time, to put someone else first for their own happiness. At the risk of sounding hokey (maybe it is too late for that), when you love someone it is no longer about what only you want.

And maybe California, and the greater country in general, can learn from my little love affair—because whether America wants to admit it or not, you love Latin@s. We all love the food, the style, the passion, and even the stereotypes. Even the national anthem starts, "Jose, can you see?" Because America, you're married now. It's too late. Latin@s are all up in you, and we know you ain't that type of country to be messing around. Just admit it, America. I did. My wife is amazing and I love her. And she doesn't even do dishes or cook, America. Latin@s do all that and more. They write blogs. And poetry. Wait, is that why my wife loves me? Or is it the cooking? Damned power differentials.


Author

Caitlin Maling has published and performed poetry widely through Australia in places such as Blue Dog, Westerly, Quadrant, Going Down Swinging, The Australian, The Sun Herald Extra, and Fremantle Poetry Festival among others. This year she will be featured in Best Australian Poems 2012. She has also been the winner of the John Marsden Poetry Prize and has twice been awarded Varuna Center Fellowships. In 2012 she was awarded the Department of Culture and the Arts (WA) International Scholarship for her MFA studies at the University of Houston, where she is in her second year.
Creating Your Own Cult out of Poetry
Saturday, February 9. 2013 | Posted by Caitlin Maling at 14:12 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Caitlin Maling has published and performed poetry widely through Australia in places such as Blue Dog, Westerly, Quadrant, Going Down Swinging, The Australian, The Sun Herald Extra, and Fremantle Poetry Festival among others. This year she will be featured in Best Australian Poems 2012. She has also been the winner of the John Marsden Poetry Prize and has twice been awarded Varuna Center Fellowships. In 2012 she was awarded the Department of Culture and the Arts (WA) International Scholarship for her MFA studies at the University of Houston, where she is in her second year.
I watch a lot of ridiculous television. Normally of the very-attractive-young-people-pining-after-other-very-attractive-young-people type, with diversions along the way from people who think they can sing/dance/sew things, but are really just there for me to laugh at. Yet due to a sentiment hangover from the original Footloose, when I saw that Kevin Bacon was going to be appearing on my television weekly I decided to branch out. Hence, in what would become a journey into the deepest depths of incredulity and literary analysis of the basest type, I found myself being exposed to The Following.

In it Bacon plays a retired FBI agent bought out of retirement to deal with a series of murders being orchestrated by the followers of a Poe scholar. I should have been prepared; after all it’s only been a year since John Cusack played an attractive and energetic Poe, solving crimes based off his stories all while wearing a nifty hat. But I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t prepared for there to be an actual cult, one where all the members had been brainwashed by one man’s brilliant genius at…literary analysis?



Essentially (spoiler alert!), the imprisoned serial-killing Poe scholar Professor Carroll seduces his followers with the following thesis on Poe’s work: “The insanity of art is that it has to be felt,” and apparently it can only be felt through orchestrating the death of beautiful women. Preferably by cutting out their eyeballs first, while wearing—and this is important—a rubber mask of Poe’s face.

Obviously, with this kind of brilliance in the antagonist, the FBI needs equally amazing literary analysis skills. Enter the head of the FBI cult division, a sassy, maybe too skinny brunette, who breaks it down for us in terms we Poe illiterates can understand:
Carroll's using Poe's work as a religion. He's speaking to people through Gothic Romanticism. The pathology of today's Internet techno-bred minds. He's created a new—a vacancy in our humanity. Find the ones with additional disorders—jackpot. Enter a handsome, charismatic man who can touch them, make them feel their lives for the first time. He conditions them. The only way to truly live is to kill.

There is some truth here. Listening to her say this, I truly did feel a vacancy in my humanity, right where the logic center of my brain had been.



And what of Kevin Bacon? Is he up to the task of locating our renegade Poe cultists? You betcha! Upon entering a gruesome murder scene where the word NEVERMORE is scrawled on the walls in blood, Kevin knows exactly what to say: "'The Raven!'" he shouts out. “Poe is symbolizing the finality of death!” 

After I finished throwing things at the television, I did start to ask myself: what do I want my cult legacy as a writer to be? And which poets' work would make for the best cult inspiration? Obviously Marianne Moore has an advantage in having an established hat fashion; the Tricorns would make for a great cult name.

Pound is pretty much already a supremacist, so there’s not much left to do with him. Eliot is too boring…although the ending of "Little Gidding" has potential:
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

After all, nothing does quite say cult like a cleansing fire.

Personally, I think the best bet would be the language poets. Their followers could say things like, “I rid you of your fleshy signifier,” or “You are free of the structural paradigm of mortality!” as they killed you.

Dear techno-bred readers, I’d like to know: which poets would you follow?


Author

Sam Mansfield grew up and attended college in New Hampshire. He is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston. His work has been published in Explosion-Proof Magazine.
Of Fungi, Culture, Ignorance, and Obsession's Fertile Ground
Tuesday, February 5. 2013 | Posted by Sam Mansfield at 11:32 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Sam Mansfield grew up and attended college in New Hampshire. He is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston. His work has been published in Explosion-Proof Magazine.
One occupational hazard of writing is finding yourself frequently susceptible to strange obsessions. You might argue writers depend upon them. One of my latest is fungi and mushrooms, and I freely admit: that is a pretty weird fixation to have, if not a downright alarming one.

It all started when I was a vegetarian looking for palatable meat alternatives. (It's hard to get excited about tofu). I missed the texture and the umami of meat. In the meat-free section of a Stop & Shop, I discovered cutlets of a product called Quorn—a meat alternative derived from fungi grown in vats.

Sounds gross, I know. But it really does taste a lot like chicken. And, I learned, it's not so very different from the fungal byproducts I was already consuming. For example, almost all of the citric acid found in soft drinks you've probably been drinking for years comes from fungi. (Not, as I had thought, from grapefruits and oranges and lemons).


                                    Cortinarius violaceus.


I did some more research. What I discovered was an astonishing gap in my knowledge. Fungi and mushrooms are all around us. Many other cultures in the world are aware of this (e.g., Nigerian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Malawi, Slavic and Scandinavian). In fact, those people enthusiastically gather mushrooms, sell them in markets, consume them, and pass on knowledge of the tasty, safe ones to their young children through nursery rhymes.

Does this sound crazy? It did to me. “Mushrooms” conjured up three associations in my mind:
• Psychedelic drugs,
• Common white button mushrooms,
• Lethally poisonous toadstools.

At best, a pizza topping. At worst, a highly-controlled or deadly substance. Not something you would encourage your ten-year-old to go gather. You might as well put razor blades in the Easter eggs.

This turns out to be a pretty standard North American perspective. Despite the enormous biological variety of mushrooms on this continent, the relatively small number of dangerous species, and the usefulness, delectability, and beauty of many others, North Americans tend to regard all mushrooms the same way: with fear, mistrust, and above all, ignorance. Same goes for inhabitants of the United Kingdom and former British colonies (generally speaking).


                                    Entoloma hochstetteri.


Yet, we mushroom-fearing societies will find ourselves matched or outnumbered by our mushroom-loving counterparts if we travel to Africa or continental Europe or east Asia. Mycologist David Arora singles out Russia as a country with a singular fondness for fungi. If Arora's book Mushrooms Demystified) is to be believed, small talk in Russia isn't about the weather. Instead, “strangers often engage in polite conversation about how the mushroom season is progressing.” Apparently mushroom hunting is somewhat of a national pastime there.

Not so in the United States. Why some cultures exhibit wild enthusiasm for fungi and others, pure loathing, is unclear. But there's a reason we North Americans share our bias with other English-speaking peoples: literature. For many years, British and American writers have been perpetuating this categorical prejudice. Consider, for example, this passage by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from the first chapter of Sir Nigel:
A sickly autumn sun shone upon a land which was soaked and sodden with water. Wet and rotten leaves reeked and festered under the foul haze which rose from the woods. The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a size and color never matched before—scarlet and mauve and liver and black. It was as though the sick earth had burst into foul pustules; mildew and lichen mottled the walls and with that filthy crop, Death sprang also from the water-soaked earth.

Conan Doyle was not the only writer quick to identify fungi with evilness. Asserting that “the mushroom is the elf of plants,” Emily Dickinson once wrote,
Had nature any outcast face,
Could she a son contemn,
Had nature an Iscariot,
That mushroom – it is him.

For another decidedly negative portrayal of mushrooms (and the British bourgeoisie), see D.H. Lawrence's poem, "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is." He concludes, “what a pity they can't all be kicked over / like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly / into the soil of England.”

Exactly what harm does this particular systematically-reinforced bias do, you may be asking. Compared to the other prejudices that English and American literature have historically transmitted, a mushroom stigma doesn't sound so bad. And given the very real danger of poisoning posed by certain highly toxic species, a healthy amount of mistrust for fungi does not seem unjustified.


                                    Amanita phalloides.


It's a tricky question. For me anyway, the greatest shock upon learning more about the world of mushrooms was the intellectual embarrassment. So great a hole in my understanding of the immediate and familiar world cast the integrity of my other knowledge in a dubious light. If culture was responsible for my ignorance, what else might I be missing? Our society prefers not to think about fungi, and it makes this preference consistently across state lines and generations. What other calculated swaths of ignorance might I be unwittingly inheriting and reproducing? All good questions for an artist or a writer to ask himself.

Another line of thinking: in shunning fungi, we avoid serious risks, but we also ignore serious benefits. The bathwater, safely disposed of, might contain a baby or two. After all, penicillin was derived from mold. If Alexander Fleming had too readily absorbed the idea that fungi were just plain no good in 1928, we might be looking back on a very different twentieth century. Similarly, there is now strong evidence that other fungi can help address the problems of today. Some mushrooms have been shown to fight cancer, lower “bad” cholesterol, and even help clean up oil spills.

Maybe I've only proven here how difficult it is to write about your obsessions without alienating readers. It's hard to convert a strange fixation into literary fruit. Some people pull it off, though. Marianne Moore had a persistent fascination with zoo animals. And, as someone once observed, Walt Whitman must have spent a lot of time actually thinking about grass. An obsessive focus on a seemingly trivial thing probably didn't earn these poets a lot of respect at the time. Recognition came later, once the poems had been written, revised, and published. What's more, odd fixations, in and of themselves, aren't responsible for the success of these poets' best works. Without formal ingenuity and some connection to a larger human theme, a poem about a blade of grass or a wood-weasel or a fish would fall flat. Still, a recurring obsession seems to get things off to a good start.



I'm sometimes startled by the amount of time I spend thinking and reading about mushrooms—how some of them help detect crime; how some of them can break through asphalt, yet will dissolve into ink in minutes if you pick them; how some of them glow for no (known) reason. It's true, my preoccupation puts me in weird, weird company. But maybe I shouldn't be so alarmed. It's possible I'm in a very productive place.


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