Gulf Coast Editor's Blog

The Surreal Reality: An Escapist Point of View

nospam@example.com (Olga Mexina) — Fri, 04 May 2012 14:01:47 -0500

Olga Mexina was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and transported to New York at the age of twelve. Currently, she is a first-year MFA candidate at the University of Houston. She had never been viciously attacked by mosquitoes until she came to Houston.

Sitting in the circle of his letters in the grove that rustles
with scorn and error,
the heart blowing like a scrap of paper through the inhospitable
passageways.

-Tomas Tranströmer, from Gogol

I create worlds. Probably not very successfully yet, and I might never become an abstract perfection anyway. Maybe all I want is to create a world so real I could live there, a modern day Alice. A long time ago it seemed that the safest way to create these worlds is on paper. It also seemed that on paper I could create as many worlds as I wanted to, as opposed to ‘real’ life, where supposedly you can do only one thing at a time, choose only one direction. Unless you are drinking, but that’s another story.

In my own writing I try to understand this world by looking at it through a distorted lens, hoping that it shows the world not as we see it, but as it actually is. We see only one layer at a time and our brain constantly rationalizes our perception, trying to make sense out of everything, while the world is unfathomable and multilayered, like the works of Tomas Tranströmer. Reality at its best is what we call ‘surreal’, although I don’t really like this label. Through juxtapositions of ‘real’ and ‘surreal’ Transtromer manages to authentically recreate the many struggles inherent in the human condition:

There’s so much we must be witness to.
Reality wears us so thin
but here is summer at last:

a large airport – the controller brings
down planeload after planeload of frozen
people from outer space.

-From Summer Meadow

With the first line of the poem Tranströmer establishes the speaker as the observer and ‘namer’ of life and things that comprise it, while also softly reminding us that participation can be risky and painful. In a sense, he locates the audience without naming a place, and yet I know exactly where I am, in the middle of this thing called ‘life’. It is interesting to note here how allusions to reality invoke the ‘surreal’ nature of life and vice versa, so the logic of reality ‘wearing us thin’, and the summer saving us does not seem farfetched or artificially constructed. Summer becomes a metaphor for happiness, escape and redemption; summer becomes the surreal world we escape to in order to grow back some skin, in order not to become invisible from being ‘worn so thin’.

There might not be a better way to describe the unnatural quality of flying in the sky in a huge metal construction than ‘being frozen in the outer space’. Does that describe the reality? Not accurately I guess. But it does describe the reality of my experience. Of course, when I am on the plane I am not really frozen in the outer space. Really, I am flying on an airplane, which, according to Wikipedia, is ‘a powered fixed-wing aircraft that is propelled forward by thrust from a jet engine or propeller’. Does that describe the reality? I guess. But it has nothing to do with human condition or the way I feel in that ‘fixed-wing aircraft’.

Observing the world through a surreal lens might be the only way to accurately see it and assess how we feel in it. It is also a way to escape the constraints and the tedium, the immense boredom and the sadness that comes with it:

It feels as if my five senses were linked to another creature
which moves stubbornly
as the brightly clad runners in a stadium where the darkness streams down.

-From A Few Minutes

Isn’t this how we feel in the world? So alive, so aware, so connected and yet so disconnected from ‘another creature’? The juxtaposition of the surreal description of the five senses being ‘linked’ to another creature with the concrete reality of ‘brightly clad runners in a stadium’ locates the audience in an unmistakable ‘reality’ where the concrete stubbornly ‘real’ things collide with our emotional and mental worlds, which are most of the time (at least for me) far from stable and rational. And even though I don’t really know what the darkness that ‘streams down’ is exactly, I do know what it is, because I feel it every day, being caught up in my five senses.

The most successful representation of reality can be achieved only through layering of ‘surreal’ and ‘real’ as it reflects the substance of our life. This is what compels me the most in poetry; it’s ability to describe what cannot be described. At its best at least.

Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have a...Letdown

nospam@example.com (Aja Gabel) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:51:02 -0500

Aja Gabel is a PhD candidate in fiction at the University of Houston and a fiction editor at Gulf Coast. Her fiction can be found in the New England Review, the New Ohio Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere.

So, the Pulitzer board pissed a lot of people off this week. They pissed off the publishing industry, as reported here, causing publishers and booksellers to give out their own awards. They pissed off Sandra McNally of the independent New York bookstore McNally Jackson, who then said she would have given an award to Pym by Mat Johnson, a professor here in the UH program. They really pissed off Ann Patchett, and though I don’t wish that Ann Patchett was upset all the time, I love when she gets passionate about things, because she writes essays like this one where she boils down exactly why it was so irresponsible of the Pulitzer board to not award a work of fiction: “The Pulitzer Prize is our best chance as writers and readers and booksellers to celebrate fiction. This was the year we all lost.” I imagine they also kind of pissed off Karen Russell and Denis Johnson and the estate of David Foster Wallace, and all the people who loved those books this year.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that at first they pissed me off, too. This week, I’m re-reading The Road for a project I’m doing, and even though it’s my third or fourth read, I still finish the book and think, “Damn, no wonder this won the Pulitzer.” I thought last year’s winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad, was one of the best books I’d read in years and years. I had similar feelings about Tinkers, Gilead, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Interpreter of Maladies, and The Hours, just to name a few other Pulitzer winners. Up until Monday, I thought the Pulitzer really knew how to pick ‘em. I looked forward to seeing who would win, what living writer best represented the American experience through prose. For us young writers, it’s important to see someone’s work succeeding at being bold and complex so we might have something to aspire to, some great contemporary work that can live up to our canonical studies.

By choosing no one, whatever the board’s rationale, they told the readers and writers of the world that there was no one worthy, and that’s just not true. Stuck in a dead end vote, the board should have done something else. They aren’t Supreme Court Justices, bound by an ancient rulebook into making obscure decisions; the award is, as Ann Patchett says, not so much about picking the best book of fiction as it is about getting readers excited about fiction. Their decision was at best irresponsible and at worst a vote of no confidence in the state of American fiction.

So I say screw them. The semester is almost over, and this summer, I’m getting in the car and heading for an apartment on a lake where I will, among a few other things, voraciously read. Below is an incomplete list if some of the Pulitzer-worthy books I read in 2011 that I’ll bring along for inspiration combined with some of the books of 2011 that I’m most excited about dipping into. Consider it not a summer reading list, but an anti-Pulitzer reading list. No more complaining. Let’s celebrate the fiction of 2011 since the Pulitzer board refuses to.

2011 Books I’d Give a Pulitzer to Any Day:
The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson
Volt, by Alan Heathcock
Mattaponi Queen, by Belle Boggs,
We the Animals, by Justin Torres
The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenidies
Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward
This is Not Your City, by Caitlin Horrocks
Ten Thousand Saints, by Eleanor Henderson
Once Upon a River, by Bonnie Jo Campbell

2011 Books I’m Excited to Read:
Binocular Vision, by Edith Pearlman
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
The Buddha in the Attic, by Judith Otsuka
This Beautiful Life, by Helen Schulman
The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson
State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
Ayiti, by Roxane Gay

Assassins

nospam@example.com (Zachary Martin) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:01:40 -0500

Zachary Martin is an Assistant Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast.

Outside the Department of English yesterday, I paused to watch a young man in a cape pass. He was striding toward the building, looking cautiously over his shoulder every few seconds, and he carried with him a Nerf bat and a toy gun capable of firing soft plastic projectiles. He stopped outside the door long enough to lower the hammer on his toy gun—safety first in the classroom, I was glad to see—and entered the building, his cape kicking up behind him.

I stood there for a few moments, trying to process what I had just seen. The best I could come up with was that it was time on campus for another round of the game “Assassins.” That would at least explain the toy gun and the Nerf bat, which the young man seemed ready to swing at attackers at a moment’s notice. The cape I just chalked up to unique fashion sense. Or maybe capes on men are making a comeback.

For those unfamiliar with it, “Assassins” is a relatively common game on university campuses (and the recent subject of an excellent two-part episode of “Community”). It features teams of participants trying to tag each other with toy guns or water pistols until a single person or team is left standing. It goes by a lot of different names, our Poetry Editor Janine Joseph has informed me—Assassins, Zombies vs. Humans, Gotcha, KAOS (Killing As Organized Sport), Juggernaut, Battle Royale, Paranoia, Killer, Tag, Elimination, or Circle of Death—and I confess even those of us at Gulf Coast have played some different variations of it in the past.

Paranoia

Players divide themselves into three teams: Poets, Fiction Writers, and Nonfiction Writers. Players intermingle freely on campus and are allowed to switch teams at will but, in their heart of hearts, they all know which team they really belong to and live in constant fear that they’ll be discovered as impostors. Each team is convinced they’ve won, but pretends like the score is tied whenever asked.

Gotcha!

This is an every-player-for-themselves version of the game. Each player locks themselves in a quiet room and writes an honest, heartbreaking, book-length memoir about a difficult time in their lives. They spend years crafting searing prose about the experiences that shaped them and work diligently to fit these into a gripping overall narrative, only to find, when they emerge with the manuscript, that another player has just published a memoir on the exact same topic, and with a snappier title. Somehow, James Frey wins.

Zombies vs. Humans

Players divide into two teams, Zombies and Humans. The Humans teach introductory classes for very little pay and the Zombies handle university administration. Whenever a Zombie sees a Human on campus, they are allowed to verbally abuse them. Humans try to win basic concessions like healthcare and retirement benefits for their team and Zombies try to make Humans’ lives a living hell. The game is rigged, and the Humans always lose.

Battle Royale

Men-only version of the game. Players meet at a bar, swarm around female bar patrons, and try to engage in conversations about where they’ve published, who they’ve studied with, what classes they’re taking, which Cormac McCarthy novel they’re currently re-reading, why they didn’t enter different chapbook competitions, which panels they attended at AWP, and which summer residencies they’re applying for. The first player to get a woman’s phone number wins. (Usually ends without a winner.)

If you’re in a creative writing program, you’ve probably been playing some version of these games for years, without even knowing it. May I suggest that, next time, you try wearing a cape? It won’t improve your chances of winning, but it will get you noticed.

Making Sense of Things

nospam@example.com (Chuck Carlise) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:04:24 -0500

Chuck Carlise was (once upon a time) the Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks, A Broken Escalator Still Isn't the Stairs (Concrete Wolf 2011) and Casual Insomniac (Bateau 2011). By the time you read this, he will have defended his dissertation. And how.

At the endings of things, it’s normal to look backward for clues on how to make sense of what we have done, why we’ve been doing it, and what it will mean in the future. With that in mind, as I begin the final sprint toward a PhD in Poetry at UH this spring, I’ve been thinking about 2003 and my final quarter of Master’s work at UC-Davis. In particular, I’m thinking about a poorly realized article I came across that spring – written by a man I’ve never met, published in a major magazine I don’t subscribe to – that has nonetheless helped me greatly in figuring out what I’ve been doing writing poetry in the first place. Let me explain.

In May of that year, just two weeks before my thesis defense, I picked up a Newsweek, and flipped to an essay from their op-ed series, “My Turn.” The “my” in this case was a middle-aged career ghost-writer named Bruce Wexler; whose essay was entitled, “Poetry is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?”

Every few years another critic makes some version this case – usually lamenting how “poets today aren’t great like (whoever) long ago” – typically based in short-sighted and forgettable arguments. Wexler’s essay is different, though. He writes not as a critic, but a self-fashioned everyman. And rather than passing judgment on the quality of contemporary poems, he’s here to deliver the news that modern culture no longer needs them at all (or any of their forebears). He writes (speaking, presumably, for all of us) as a mourner who once loved poems, but who “got lazy… [whose] interest waned.” Poetry has no “buzz,” he insists, and in the twenty-first century, an art without “buzz” is over.

This is not a well-argued essay, and I suspect time has mostly forgotten it already. But I mention it, and indeed I’ve found it troubling, because its most basic observations aren’t exactly false. It’s true that there’s not a lot of money or publicity in poetry; that not many in this country can name our poet laureate or recite a poem written in the last half-century; that there aren’t enough people who make poems a daily part of their lives. But instead of announcing the death of the art, I think these gaps speak to why poetry will always be important – why we still have it and why we still need it, not as Americans or literary types, but as human beings.

That sounds contradictory. I should back up a little further.

I started my Master’s work in Davis in the fall of 2001, having only set foot in the city once, for a brief apartment hunt that summer. When I arrived for good, after two-and-a-half days on Amtrak from Ohio, I was disoriented and exhausted. My new roommate, Gabby, was visiting family in Austria for a week, so I caught a cab out to our west Davis flat, lugged my bags into the back bedroom, and collapsed. It was nighttime already and I fell asleep hard. It was September 10.

When I awoke, midmorning, I’d missed a half dozen phone calls already from my parents back east. The entire drama of that day, September 11, 2001, had played out while I slept: the Towers had been hit (one and then the other), and then they’d gone down. No one knew how many lives had been lost, but by now there was no more saving, just searching. The whole thing was already past tense.

I spent the rest of the day like everyone else: glued, catatonic, to the TV news; occasionally making lists of people I knew in New York who might have been downtown; feeling remote and helpless as I tried to reconcile the California sun out my own windows with the deathsmoke rising from the streets on the screen.

By the next day, with Gabby grounded in Vienna indefinitely, I knew I’d have to pull myself off the couch and learn this new city. Wandering around town alone, I found myself listening more than usual – and an unsettling pattern began to emerge. At the coffee shop, at Albertsons, on the sidewalk near campus, everyone seemed to have forgotten how to talk to one another. There were conversations, sure, but all of it seemed flat, declarative, devoid of emotion or judgment. Especially when anyone mentioned the attacks. As those first days unfolded, it was hard not to feel as though everyone in the world had taken a step away from one another. Like we’d all broken eye contact. Like we’d excused ourselves to go calm down in the hallway, and now returned: composed and terminally distant.

A week later, the Sacramento Bee (the major newspaper in the area) ran a short note to its readers, acknowledging that they had begun to receive poems from around the service area – already more than they could print – and were thinking they might begin posting some of them online. Something in the collective psyche switched on; the floodgates opened. By October 2, just two weeks later, the Bee reported that they had “received unprecedented numbers of unsolicited poems.” They were pouring in from everywhere. A spread of poetry went to press that weekend, and the paper continued posting more on the web. (It was happening in other cities too.)

It is perhaps expected that artists and writers make statements in times of crisis. But these weren’t written by career poets, with commitment to their craft and a sense of duty to the world, or even by the Bee’s staff of journalists and editors. They were written by people in the Central Valley, who were afraid, confused, and lonely. People who had non-poetry jobs, non-poetry lives, and may not have picked up a book of poems in years.

And therein lies something important. In that moment – in the confusion, fear, and crippling sorrow that followed the most terrifying communal tragedy most of us had ever faced; in the spine-buckling anxiety and silence that followed; with so many of us curled into ourselves, tiny islands of disquiet and clumsily feigned calm; when we finally straightened our backs and opened our eyes, when we parted our lips to call into that dark void of uncertainty – what came out were poems.

Poetry is in our wiring, it’s in our bones. It persists in spite of sales-figures and hype, because we need it, because we understand it. We know exactly what breathless onlookers mean, watching a graceful athlete or dancer, when they gush that it’s “poetry in motion.” We know exactly what the fire-eyed ballplayers mean, blasting out of the locker room after a barn-burning halftime speech, muttering, “man, that was fucking poetry.” It’s no coincidence that we read Celan and the Psalms at a funeral, or Rumi and Neruda at a wedding; that we write poems as broody teenagers (when the world and its pressures first announce themselves fully) and then come back to them in times of too-big tragedy or feverish joy; that we go to poems to seduce, to inspire, and to commemorate. Poetry is not just “the best words in their best order” as Coleridge famously called it. It’s a direct line to ecstasy, to grief, to loneliness and connection. It pushes us into the dangerous intersection of language, passion, and the mind. It embodies our emotional range when we’re closest to it – when it is most risky and most ruthless and most itself.

I don’t mean to overstate this or negate the other abstract necessities that charge our lives with meaning. We also need stories and music; we need contact and touch; we need laughter with others and quiet moments alone. But we need poems too. We can live without any of these, and most of us do for a while, but we’re poorer for it. And that matters.

God knows what I’ll be doing next year. Within a month I’ll technically be a doctor, qualified to do exactly nothing I’m not qualified to do now. It’s unsettling to march toward something so undefined and yet so utterly inevitable. But whatever exhilarations and dejections come (and both surely will, en masse), I know I’ll make sense of them by reading poems. And by writing them. And I’ll be grateful for that, and for everyone else who wants to read and write them as well. And regardless how little money or “buzz” poets generate, I’m never going to wonder whether the blood still pumps in the genre’s veins; whether a life in poems is a life worth living. It does; it is.

Is This Real Life?

nospam@example.com (Layla Benitez-James) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:41:06 -0500

Layla Benitez-James is a first-year 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 has never blogged before.

I refuse to chalk it entirely up to the fact that it is just “that time in the semester,” but my little brain has been refusing to stay focused on any one task. This has led to a sad cycle of intense concentration, followed by failure, followed by a chastisement of my brain and a re-focusing of my attention. I have helped myself slightly (so slightly) by starting up some (very few) short meditation sessions in the past couple of weeks. Last August, I attended a ten day meditation course here which taught me how to meditate successfully. However, finding time for two hours of meditation a day, or any amount, has been hard with school and everything else which creeps into a year.

I have adopted a similar attitude towards meditation that I have to reading all the things I feel I need to read (no I have not finished Moby Dick, or Infinite Jest, or Gravity’s Rainbow.) In the excellent McSweeney’s #24, the Barthelme tribute, there is an amusing, and heartbreakingly true, anecdote from one of his former students. She asks Barthelme for a book list, everything she Needs to read to make her a good writer etc. He tells her to read everything. She says she can’t and asks for a more specific list. Barthelme stands by his original advice. When she says she does not have time to read everything, he says that she is probably wasting time eating and sleeping. Yep. I definitely put an extra 30 minutes worth of sleep above my reading and meditation. Not to mention the seduction of the internet where blogs and YouTube are a constant temptation away from work.

During the meditation course, I had no choice but to focus. I was surprised at what an absurd amount of planning it took to be off the map for ten days: no driving, no phone, no internet, no tv, no books, no writing, no talking, no eye contact. Untangling myself from real life was difficult; even the simple act of telling people they would not be able to get in contact with me for ten days began to feel drastic and tiring. While I did not break it down exactly, I realized how much time I spent checking in with people and checking up on people: confirming to myself over and over the reality of my life and its connections. When I shut all of that down for ten days, the world went on. During my technology and sensory overload de-tox, the world felt more real. The things I saw were concrete and immediate. In meditation, I learned how the mind wanders away from the task it is set to and how to draw it gently back. Although, this is easier said than done and easier done without school and work and real life breaking in.

All this is to say what? I am trying to be nicer to my mind-to let it wander when it needs to-to let it run on a thought for a while before training it back to a task-to let it trip over something funny before writing my final essays? Yes. And it has paid off with some strange new poems and less neck ache. Last week, I misspelled “sincerely” in an email. Instead of seeing where I had hastily typed the wrong order of letters, I right clicked the word to fix it quickly. None of my computer’s suggestions were “sincerely,” but I gained some new ideas for signing off. I will leave you where my mind has wandered to-
Searingly yours,
Sensually yours,
Searchingly yours,
Semi-yearly yours,

Layla

Authentic ugliness

nospam@example.com (Joshua Gottlieb-Miller) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:35:22 -0500

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where he teaches introduction to poetry. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared most recently in The Birmingham Review, Linebreak, Switchback, The Laurel Review, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.

1.

Young artists are supposed to find their voice. One of the nicest things you might hear, as a young artist, is that you seem to have found your voice. Or your voice is quite clear. Or, even better: your voice, among all the voices in your workshop, nee, the world, is unique.

Let’s say you are one of those lucky young artists who have a distinct voice. If you are even luckier, that voice goes hand in hand with your subject. Because, of course, you already have a subject! You are an adult, you have interests, your craft as a writer doesn’t define you. So, maybe you need a subject. Go get one! (But let’s assume you have a subject…)

2.

In a student’s final year of course-work at the University of Houston, that student takes a thesis manuscript workshop. I’m in one now. There seem to be three main benefits to the class: preparing a manuscript for book contests, a manuscript my program can use to assess whether I deserve a degree, a manuscript that offers both myself and my readers the opportunity to define my spirit/soul/subject/whatever you want to call it that makes me unique. Maybe what’s unique is that voice that’s been developing even since I was first told I had one. Only there’s this one problem: people thought, after reading the culmination of my conscious and sub-conscious efforts to be a real writer—to write a book, no less—that I could be just kind of a dick. Not always in an interesting way; that would have been okay. To be a really interesting asshole is the fate of some of our best writers. In my worst poems, it turns out, I was just kind of uninterestingly off-putting.

3.

For sheer self-improvement, I can’t think of a more useful workshop than the manuscript workshop. There’s something so fundamental I had to reckon with, as an artist, by being forced to say: here is the work that defines me.

I tend to be fairly positive in the workshop setting. I look at a poem and want to figure out what is working and how the poem can improve. But when I presented my manuscript to my classmates, I wanted to know whether it held up on its own. Even if they didn’t know me at all, would they want to read it?

4.

Which leads me to the problem of authentic ugliness in poetry. I call it the Frederick Seidel problem.

Lots of super-intelligent poets love Seidel’s work, and to an extent I get it: He’s funny, he’s smart and he seems enviably relevant. When Seidel nails it, as in his poem, “Downtown,” he really nails it.

In general, though, Seidel doesn’t really interest me. I tend to agree with Ange Mlinko’s criticism of Seidel in The Nation a few years ago, “With Mercy for the Greedy,” in which she writes, “…the repetitiveness of Seidel's autopilot rhythms is so grating: Seidel achieves a kind of mesmerism, but there's no range.”

Seidel’s music seems intentional—if rhythm composes emotionally, then Seidel’s voice is perfectly fitted to his subject—ugliness abounds. This is another mark of Seidel’s authenticity.

We tend to expect some kind of authenticity in poetry. At the very least we expect some kind of truth, even if not a too-literal truth, or reportage. But for me it’s important that Keats writes “beauty is truth” before he writes that “truth [is] beauty.”

5.

When I read the entirety of the first draft of my manuscript, I realized that my poems had far more unlikable or at least conflicted narrators and characters than I would have guessed. Sometimes the speaker would say things that I as a poet disagree with.

Ironically, the ugly personalities in some of these poems contrasted sharply with their music. My work often expresses my interest in orchestral movement; occasionally I found one of my unlikable selves enmeshed in a lush soundscape. Because the irony between the music and the subject hadn’t always been intentionally realized, but instead was just kind of there, the poem could come off as in-authentically ugly. Or the ugliness was muddled. Then for revisions I was often faced with the choice of pursuing un-likability and whatever my point was, or trying to figure out if I had missed what the poem was really after. I was reminded time and again of how delicate a mechanism tone can be.

Sometimes we think we’ve found our voice, or our subject, but we are constantly evolving. There is often a disconnect between who we are and what our voices say about us. People who know me read my manuscript and told me that they understood that some of my speakers were conflicted or unlikable, but they knew that had nothing to do with me, the poet. I hope they were right. These were some of the more beautiful poems.

Writing the Body

nospam@example.com (Allie Rowbottom) — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:23:45 -0500

Allie Rowbottom is a PhD candidate in nonfiction at the University of Houston and an assistant nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast.

Many readers of this post, by virtue of its place of publication, are familiar with the slow bodily decay that grad school entails. For example, as I write and revise these very words, I am simultaneously polishing off a pint of (vegan) ice cream, as has become a bit of a mid-semester habit of mine. Perhaps you, readers, grad students or not, have experienced similar slips into similar habits and have therefore taken steps to rectify the mind/body disconnect consistent consumption of large quantities of ice cream connotes. Perhaps you have found this mind/body-rift-bridging challenging, given the piles of other work required of you. Perhaps you therefore find yourself looking in the mirror at three in the morning, at an unrecognizable face, one at once familiar and, in some indistinct but unmistakable way, altered. Perhaps it’s the presence of the bruise-like half moons now permanently in residence under you bloodshot eyes. Perhaps it’s the extra pillows of cheek-padding which have mysteriously formed along the side of your face and indeed, the underside of your neck as well. Perhaps, as you reader/grad student examines yourself, you wonder how, when you feel so exhausted, so drained, so weak, so utterly depleted, all this excess can exist in close proximity to your wane and withering body.

We all deal with this question differently. For example, for a period of time during my MFA years, I actively pursued a nonfiction project built around my yoga practice. I fully realize that a large portion of my audience here may now be eye-rolling. In my defense, I figured that melding my physical and intellectual lives might affect better balance and, as such, better writing, preferably in the form of a published piece somewhere smart and sophisticated. I abandoned this project, however, after realizing I’d long ago been beat to the punch or, should I say, to the chaturanga dan dasana. Yup, the “yogoir” is indeed a fully fledged literary trend. In addition to Elizabeth Gilbert’s astronomically successful and somewhat yoga-themed Eat Pray Love, journalist Claire Dederer has recently published Poser, My Life in Twenty Three Yoga Poses which takes its place in the annals of Yogoir history alongside older titles such as Finding my Balance, A Memoir with Yoga by actress Mariel Hemingway, and Lucy Edge’s Yoga School Dropout. Suzanne Morrison's Yoga Bitch: One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment, and Neal Pollack's Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude have likewise both come out in the past year or so from major publishing houses, a point which only goes to show that the yogoir, much like the westernization of the ancient physical practice it aims to discuss, is a growing American phenomenon.

Here’s where the potential problems arise. As if the word memoir wasn’t already fraught with enough connotation of self indulgent linguistic navel gazing, now we have a subgenre which not only entails the literal and physical act, but also the unconscious appropriation of a sacred, ancient practice. Indeed, the combination of life-writing with yoga, a highly personal practice, might seem to miss the point entirely. If you have to write about your yoga practice, confessing, in a sense, the importance of a seemingly self interested, self important practice to your self important life, rather than quietly putting the lessons you learn on your mat to use in service oriented situations, have you perhaps missed the point of studying yoga in the first place?

I say no. Not because I am particularly fond of the yogoir, nor because I am a nonfiction writer and lover of artful life-writing, nor because I think that writing, at its best, is itself a service oriented task, but because I feel the need to both address and applaud an oftentimes forgotten aspect of writing: that of embodiment, the yoking of the writer’s physicality to the transcription of her thoughts.

As mentioned, like many readers of this post, I am in grad school. I have been in grad school, albeit in different locations and programs, for going on four years now. This has provided me with ample time to observe the disintegration of the graduate student body. Let me rephrase that, I have had, over the years that I’ve pursued graduate studies, ample time to observe and participate in the disintigration of individual student’s bodies. Whole days and sometimes nights spent indoors, hunched over books; dietary habits dictated by meager fellowships and looming loan payments; stress induced ailments of all kinds…these things take their toll, oftentimes in the form of widening girths, slumped shoulders, seized sciatic nerves, and so forth. We live so entirely within the realm of the mind, concerning ourselves exclusively with matters of the intellect, that our bodies oftentimes fall by the wayside. Then, the inevitable frustration arises. Writer’s block, for example. Or the rare occasion for rest and rejuvenation presents itself. We are at a loss. We may have a nervous breakdown. I propose this tendency may, at least in part, be exacerbated by the mind-body disconnect grad school, and indeed many professional academic lifestyles, entail. It seems we think it our lot to suffer physically for the sake of our art.

But what of writers who instead considered it their duty to feel and experience for the sake of their art? I’m not thinking of food and wine critics here. I’m thinking of Guy Debord and the Situationists, or Beaudelaire and his Flaneur, or even nature writers like Annie Dillard and Rebecca Solnit, whose long walks through physical space frame and inform the thematic transitions they make in their essays. I’m thinking too of Whitman’s body-conscious poetics, or of Alice Notley who took hallucinogens and shamanistic pilgrimages for her poetry, underwent hypnosis to travel into history and return with lines like time’s illusion, like Whitman’s occult convulsions. In them she speaks about breaking through and reclaiming, about embodying and enacting language and memory, space and time. About doing all that, all at once.

Don’t these writer’s have something to say about the potentiality of “embodied writing”? About the opening afforded by performing with words one’s physical experiences? Many of us have written a page or two or thirty under the influence of a bottle (or two or thirty) of salty red wine, but how often have we done so after a ninety-minute vinyasa asana? Or a sequence of inversions in which we literally turn our bodies upside down, examining our surroundings from a different angle, reversing the blood flow, recycling what may have lodged itself in our veins, or brains? Maybe the yogoir isn’t really a representation of embodied writing. Or even good writing about bodies. But it certainly represents a movement towards a kind of writing I feel drawn to explore, elaborate on and even defend. Much in the same way it seems unfair, uneducated, to reduce memoir to solipsism and self indulgence, it seems unfair to do the same of the yogoir, or at least the merger of intellectualism and physicaliity, the embodied writing, it may enable.

Thursday, 8:52am

nospam@example.com (Elizabeth Winston) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:20:37 -0500

Elizabeth Winston is an associate fiction editor at Gulf Coast, and a first-year M.F.A. candidate in fiction at the University of Houston.

I’ve been thinking recently about the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, as I do every few years. This time, it’s in part because I’m doing research for a lit paper on what Foucault called the “Great Confinement” of the 17th Century, when the mentally ill in Europe – “unreasonable” people – were, on a large scale, put into institutions. Madness was viewed as the opposite of reason, and in the dawn of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, that was a bad thing.

The director Jane Campion made a film of Frame’s three-volume autobiography, titled “An Angel at my Table” after the first of the books. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, the story of Frame’s childhood and young adulthood in New Zealand (she was born in 1924), and follows her life as she traveled through Europe during her early years as a writer. It could be the story of any young writer, except that Frame - an unusually shy child whose life was scarred early by the separate drownings of two of her sisters – was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic in her early twenties. Confined for eight years at the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum near Dunedin, she underwent repeated electroshock treatments, and a scheduled lobotomy was only cancelled when a book of short stories she had published while hospitalized won the Hubert Church Memorial Award.

Eventually, it was determined that Frame’s diagnosis had been incorrect. She was released from the asylum, and began the long process of putting her life and her sanity back together. In addition to An Angel at my Table, a remarkable memoir, Frame went on to publish eleven novels, four short story collections, and a volume of poetry, which won numerous awards. She died in January, 2004, in Dunedin.

Many of the “stories and sketches” in Frame’s 1963 collection The Reservior are about the obsessions of childhood; learning to draw, wandering with her siblings to the terrifying and seductive nearby reservoir on summer afternoons, competing with her schoolmates for handwriting and poetry awards. The work is alternately dark and hilarious, and always pentrating. In “Royal Icing,” she begins,

My mother had no money and no clothes except for an old sack tied around her waist, and a costume, with moth balls in the pockets, hanging in the front wardrobe. Her titties were flat and heavy against her tummy. Her legs had varicose veins. Her forehead was damp with steam or sweat or something which, sighing and waving her powerful arms in the humid air, she called “atmosphere.”

“The atmosphere’s very heavy today,” she would remark. “It’s something in the atmosphere that is responsible.”

Responsibility was a terrible substance to be apportioned, and mostly it came to rest upon the government; but the atmosphere could accept it just as well.

Almost twenty years later, Frame published Faces in the Water, a novel about her experiences in mental institutions, her fellow inmates at Seacliff whose lives, we can only assume, were not saved by writing. In part, the book is about the fear people have of the “insane,” the marginalization and silencing of those who fell for one reason or another, in the mid-20th century, into the category of “unreasonable.” It’s a difficult book, and I haven’t read the whole thing. I picked it up again this week, thinking about the classifications of sane and insane, reasonable and unreasonable – about our need to categorize. Locked in a mental ward, Frame needed to write – to explore the vast middle ground, to make sense of herself outside her diagnosis. Fortunately for us, it saved her.

On Dealing with the Untimely Bullsh*t of Writer’s Block

nospam@example.com (Meggie Monahan) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:20:38 -0500

Meggie Monahan is a third-year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston where she serves as nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Third Coast, The Greensboro Review, Cimarron Review, Sonora Review, The Los Angeles Review, NANO Fiction, and elsewhere. She secretly loves Charles Bukowski and would have liked to have studied physics if she didn’t have to make a living.

One evening last summer, my best friend Christopher and I were drinking wine and watching the sun go down over the Atlantic Ocean when he decided that it was the perfect time to give a solemn recap of South Park’s mid-season finale, “You’re Getting Old.” Though neither of us are big South Park fans, we do (how predictable) love Stevie Nicks, and the episode’s last three minutes feature “Landslide” as the soundtrack to 10-year-old Stan’s disillusionment as he watches everything he loves and depends on turn—quite literally— to sh*t. Struggling not to make fun of Christopher during his reverent summary and critical analysis of the episode, I suggested that we watch the final three minutes together on YouTube. And my friend was right: between Stevie’s heartbreaking croon and Stan’s 2D frown at the disappointment surrounding him, it was enough to prompt some depressed sighs, not to mention two more very tall glasses of wine.

Since that evening, I’ve thought often of Stan and of the unsettling “transformation” of flowers, the sun, Stan’s food, and the kids in the cafeteria. I have spent the majority of the past 9 months experiencing this unfortunate reverse alchemy of sorts in my own life, particularly with regard to my writing. Some people don’t think writer’s block exists—they say it’s laziness, a lack of focus or discipline or commitment, clinical depression, la la la. And it might be related to all of these things, sure. But for those who have spent months and years looking for what’s salvageable amidst the sh*t, lying in bed like Stan, staring at the ceiling in that all too familiar posture of exhaustion, restlessness, cynicism, and rapidly-approaching apathy—for those people, and for me, writer’s block is the real deal.

At best, it’s inconvenient. But most days, it just feels toxic as hell. You sit at your computer and stare. You sit at the coffee house and stare. You write and scratch out, write and delete. You are perpetually annoyed with yourself. You read the writers you admire, thinking it will spark creative energy, but it only prompts procrastination and confirms that everything you’ve written is sh*t. You’re jealous of everyone, including the postman. You consider a career in zoology and start weird self grooming rituals. You feel like you can’t get comfortable no matter where you sit. You carry a notebook around because “that’s what writers do,” but you never use it except to sketch the occasional picture of a slice of pizza because you’re always hungry. Except when you’re not, when all you do is drink the same cold cup of coffee all day long.

This has been my life for 9 months—a twisted pregnancy, with no due date in sight.

I wish I had answers, but if I did I wouldn’t be writing this post. However, I would like to suggest the following to any brave, burn-out readers who are also considering careers in zoology. These things have helped me during the days when I have felt the most pathetic and somewhat incapable of normal human interaction. Perhaps they will help you, too:

Move your body. Stop sitting at your desk. It’s screwing with your posture and you’re starting to look like Aunt Mildred. Invest in a decent sports bra and go for a run. Lift some weights—you know, those heavy things. Find some hippies and do yoga in the park. Play tag with your kids. Pull weeds from the garden. Just break a sweat. If nothing else, you’ll feel like you accomplished something today.

Rest. 7-9 hours of sleep every night for a week. I dare you. I know, I know—nobody has time for this. So how about a nap? Joyce Carol Oates says that busyness “is the remedy for all the ills in America, [but] also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.” Schedule time for leisure—the not-doing is as precious as the doing.

Go outside. I’ll bet you this cold cup of coffee that we’re both vitamin D deficient. Go sit in the sun for 20 minutes. If you’re in Seattle, go to the light box at UW. If you don’t have a light box, get yourself some D3 capsules. And while you’re at it—eat something green. Those Totino’s pizza rolls won’t equip you to write the next great American novel.

Get uncomfortable. New experiences can really shake things up, sometimes even enough—dare we imagine it? —to spark a paragraph or two. Allow yourself to experience things that threaten to make you wildly uncomfortable. Go to church and call your mother. Wear a dress, dye your hair, and stop wearing makeup. Raise your hand in class. Go to the party alone and dance in public. Tell someone you’ve had a crush on them forever. Eat a bug.

Stop thinking about you. Because ultimately, it’s not about you. Or me. Or that writer you love and hate at the same time. It’s about something a lot bigger than any one of us. And I really believe that one of the best ways to feel better, no matter what you’re struggling with, is to get your mind off yourself. So volunteer. Write thank you letters to your favorite teachers. Set an intention for someone you know who is hurting. Drive someone to the airport. Call that one friend who you know is going to keep you on the phone for 2 hours, lamenting the latest details of some sad, unending tale.

Watch this video.

Write yourself an encouraging letter. Julia Cameron suggests this in her book The Artist’s Way. Write yourself a letter from you at 8 years old, and then write yourself a letter from you at 80 years old. It’s amazing, the wisdom and perspective we had when we were younger—and equally amazing, the hope we have for ourselves that we won’t admit we have.

Read outside your genre. This has been one of the more helpful things for me in an effort to salvage my love for writing. If you’re a poet, stop reading poems and read The Hunger Games instead. If you’re a memoir writer, read the collected Jack Gilbert. Get outside of your box.

Or, don’t read anything at all for a little while. This, oddly, works wonders.

Clean your bathroom. This one is terribly underrated. There’s creativity to be found when working with your hands. Scrubbing a tile floor can be life-giving (and, for some of you, life-saving, considering the last time you cleaned your bathroom). Try it, mindfully. You’ll be surprised. Then go wash your dishes.

Imitate the trees. In her Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton writes about the importance of patience, the kind that kicks in when everything really does appear to be turning to sh*t. She says we should “learn to lose in order to recover.” Think about the trees in wintertime—so many of them lose their leaves and look deader than dead, even though we have all the confidence in the world that come springtime, they’ll be in full bloom. If we believe this for the trees, why don’t we believe this for ourselves?

Put your hands up and step away from the screens. Stop making excuses and give yourself the gift of a technology-free day. It requires some planning, but you can do it. No computer, no GPS, no iPad, no TV, no movies, no video games, no Nook. You can do it! Don’t lose your soul to your smart phone! Pick up an actual pen. Play board games. Take out an actual map. Go see a play. Send some snail mail. Listen to music. The possibilities, we forget, are endless.

Don’t be afraid to feel awful. I recently went to a reading in San Francisco. There was a Q&A at the end, and I raised my hand to ask the famous memoirist what advice she would give to writers who struggle with loneliness, since so much of our profession requires time alone. She suggested that these writers should simply find another profession. The more I think about her response, the more I think it was ridiculous. Some of us are more suited to the solitude of a writer’s life, and others take energy from interaction with others. The latter reality isn’t incompatible with being a successful writer—it just means we might need to work a little harder and let ourselves feel lonely sometimes. And that’s okay.

Don’t just watch everything turning to sh*t— participate! Allow yourself to write some sh*t. This can be hard to do with intention. But, as Anne Lamott says, if we aren’t going to give ourselves permission to write sh*tty drafts, we’re never going to write ourselves into anything we actually like.

Get a life. In the eloquent words of Kurt Vonnegut, “literature should not disappear up its own @sshole.” I really, really believe this. Writing is an amazing, beautiful, important way to spend a lifetime… but so is living. So let’s get some hobbies. Heck, let’s go crazy—let’s love some people. Let’s invest in our communities and get to know our neighbors. Let’s be more than just brilliant writers—let’s be brilliant people. Because if you and I never do write the earth-shattering novels or poems or short stories that we’ve always dreamed of writing, we’re going to want to have something to fall back on… and a good life is a really good start.

The need for narrative (and the science that proves it)

nospam@example.com (Ashley Wurzbacher) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:42:54 -0500

Ashley Wurzbacher is a first-year PhD student in fiction at the University of Houston and an assistant fiction editor for Gulf Coast. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southeast Review, The Iowa Review, Barnstorm, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Eastern Washington University and has taught writing at The University of Houston, The University of Montana, and Eastern Washington University.

Since its publication in Sunday’s New York Times, Annie Murphy Paul’s “Your Brain on Fiction” has gone viral among my friends and fellow writers. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it here.

In the piece, Paul calls attention to research into the way that “stories…stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life,” drawing on various neurological studies that illustrate the ways in which fiction socializes us and hones our ability to empathize with others. As Paul points out, “The brain…does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.” Furthermore, fiction (and the novel form, in particular) affords us “the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”

All of this might seem obvious to avid readers and writers. I take these things for granted and have never felt any pressing need to verify their truth through science. So many times new things that happen to me are accompanied by a strange feeling of déjà vu, as if I’ve experienced the thing already. I think and think about where and when it happened; I run through scenes of my life and try to locate the origin of the vague familiarity I feel, and then I realize the thing never happened to me at all, but was something I read about, something I lived vicariously through a fictional character. Or I meet someone new and find that they remind me of someone, though I can’t place who, and then I realize it’s a fictional character who’s been summoned by my new acquaintance, the memory of someone I spent time with in story, though never in reality. My experience of fiction colors my vision of the physical world and the people I encounter in it; it helps me better understand where I am and who I’m here with. And I’ve always taken it for granted, too, that my writing and reading of fiction invite (indeed, require) me to “put myself in others’ shoes,” as they say, more often and more adeptly than I would if I did not frequently read and write. Paul is certainly not the first to make the case that reading and writing do good things for the brain and for humanity in general; most writers and avid readers are rather firmly committed to the idea that literature makes people better. Many, too, accept and treasure the notion that humans are hard-wired to construct and internalize narratives. For instance, in his craft book The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction, Robert Boswell suggests that “we may well be narrative beasts down to our very genes, which means that story has been selected for, that it is in the most profound sense necessary.” (60)

So, what’s so special about Annie Murphy Paul’s piece? For one thing, it’s that she exposes the science behind what writers and readers have always felt to be true in a way that I found gratifying. As she herself puts it, “Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.” But Paul’s piece does more than just vindicate writers who want to believe in the value of the stuff they’re producing. It’s one thing for me, personally, to feel good upon reading an article that suggests that I haven’t thrown my life away, after all, by devoting myself to professional reading and professional making-stuff-up, that there is indeed a biological benefit and a social use for what I do. But it’s another thing for Paul’s article to reach out to the broad audience of New York Times readers with scientific data that is more likely to persuade them of the need for narrative than any of my own vague humanist musings. I pass this article on not only because it confirms what I—and presumably the rest of us here at Gulf Coast and in writing programs everywhere—have always felt about the need for and value of fiction, but because Paul’s grounding of this argument in neuroscience makes it more persuasive to audiences who might be more skeptical of fiction’s importance to their lives and minds.

I hope you’ll pass it on, too.

Stress Rattle

nospam@example.com (David Tomas Martinez) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 18:04:42 -0600

David Tomas Martinez is an assitant poetry editor at Gulf Coast and Ph.D. candidate at the Univeristy of Houston. He is outside your bedroom window, creeper.

Friends, I do not sleep. I eat; I sip; I worry. A lot. I think of my manuscript, trapped under the desk of the judge of a book prize, unbeknownst to him, whimpering and calling out for crackers and water. I think of the judge, a man with mismatch socks and shoes with springs, taking a walk around his block; the park is wonderful around this time of year, except for the children on the rusted monkey bars yelling like girls with braces and blonde pig tails around a boy with tight corduroy pants named Davy Jones. I think of my childhood, watching the Monkees and liking Davy because my grandmother called me Davey as she asked me if I preferred Coke or Milk with my dinner. The answer was always the same, but she always asked. In those days, I lived across the street from her in East San Diego and I went to Hamilton Elementary. I was the crossing guard. Having to wake up early was the result of such power. I started as a sign holder until I earned my whistle. My responsibilities consisted of getting no children killed, making adults late to work, and twirling a stick. I think of many sticks, but mostly the sticks the attendants in movie theaters waved. The stick’s urgent motion made be believe my seat was important, as if the woman with four kids following the large man with a tub of popcorn, two sodas, and Jujubes was an airplane she dutifully followed with carts of luggage undulating through the light of the tarmac aisle. I think of planes and how the first time I rode a plane I was 33 and flying to Houston and the flight attendant was a woman in her early fifties with the type of figure women in their fifties that are flight attendants have now, and probably have always had. She was pretty. Because she gave me wings for my first plane ride. She asked if I was flying alone. I said no, my mother was 10 rows forward. Mother waved enthusiastically, when they made eye contact. She asked why I was flying, and I told her I was a poet and I need to get my first apartment, in Houston. We talked periodically throughout the flight, her esculent words, like “Future doctor, you won a drink of your choice for being so darn cute!” tasted so good. So good I didn’t tell her I wasn’t going to be that type of doctor. I often think of Scotch and things going fast when I remember when I saw a women kiss my father when we went to that bar in Tijuana where you paid women in short skirts they pulled down or up as their heels clicked against the floor to cumbia songs. They were paid with overpriced beer. For each bucket they received coupons, and customers that paid off the guy with the tequila and a whistle who walked around teasing your manhood could get any girl taken away from any guy, no matter how much they had spent. I think of the next morning, where my dad was like a cat pawing at a dead kitten with apologies and menudo. He wasn’t sure what I remembered. I did not, friends, sleep that night, but I ate and sipped and worried as a woman from Sinaloa slowly circled her index finger around my knee while slivers of ice walked around the living room thinking about how I have to teach and what if my book doesn’t get published and I don’t care if I have three years left without ever actually sleeping around a green beer bottle.

Gulf Coast in Chicago (AWP 2012)

nospam@example.com (Becca Wadlinger) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:53:44 -0600

Rebecca Wadlinger is the managing editor of Gulf Coast, and a third-year doctoral candidate at the University of Houston. Her writing and translations have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Ploughshares, Forklift Ohio, FIELD, Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, and the Best New Poets series, among others.

Hello readers,

If you're around the Chicago area, stop by our reading at Buddy Guy's Legends (700 South Wabash) tomorrow, March 1st, from 8:30-10:30 p.m.

We've teamed up with Indiana Review to bring you readings by Michael Czyzniejewski, Ross Gay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Leslie Parry, and D.A. Powell. Buddy Guy's Legends is just around the corner from the Hilton Chicago... and we hope to see you there!

Also: come see us at the AWP Bookfair! There will be Gulf Coast editors all day, and we love to meet and chat with our readers...

See you in Chicago!
Rebecca Wadlinger, Managing Editor of Gulf Coast

Somewhere in Africa...

nospam@example.com (Peter Kimani) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:03:50 -0600

Peter Kimani is a first year PhD student in Fiction. He has published two novels and poetry, and runs a satirical column in The Standard, Kenya’s leading national newspaper, where he served as senior editor.

“Where is Kenya on the world map?” I ask freshmen every semester as part of our introductions. It’s part of my evolving “teaching philosophy” which is premised on stimulating intellectual curiosity as part of the learning process.

“Africa,” comes the barely audible chorus.

“I know Kenya is somewhere in Africa,” I venture. “But so are 53 other countries, if we count the newest nation, South Sudan.”

There is eerie silence.

“Where in Africa do you find Kenya?” I pursue.

One student who has West African roots volunteers a response. “North Africa,” he says. An American student who spent two years in North Africa thinks Kenya is in West Africa.

I say to both it’s evident they have been away from Africa for a long while, but Kenya has not moved. It’s still in East Africa.

I presented the question to other freshmen last semester. While the question predictably drew a blank, there was a Kenyan student in my class, and he provided a revealing, if stereotypical perspective.

He said, with a chuckle, that he was surprised to find a Kenyan teaching English Composition and not, to use his own words, “engineering or something like that.”

Like most Kenyans, he understands the English language arrived on our shores by ship from England at the turn of the 20th century – and even the fishes in the ocean did not catch a word of it! Hence the student’s surprise that, a century later, his compatriot would fly across two oceans to teach, as he put it, “the white man’s language.”

I thought the comment was meant as a compliment, so I did not interrogate the student’s comment on science and technology as the more probable line to be pursued by Kenyans abroad.

Over the last semester some brave students would seek to know where I learned English, even how I arrived at the University of Houston, or simply U of H, as we fondly call it.
I would then, to use the expression currently in vogue in Composition, “allow a moment of weakness,” and patiently explain that English, alongside Swahili, is the official language, so we had to master its usage to survive through the long years in high school and college. This was followed by a stint in England for post-graduate study.

For good measure, I would state Kenya has 40-something ethnic groups, each with distinct language and cultural forms, not to mentions foods, dressing, etc.

On finding U of H, I would pin it down to good fortunes as I found about the writing program almost by accident. The more appropriate response is that I’m computer literate, so a simple Google search is likely to trawl U of H’s among the top writing programs in the nation.

The natural question that follows is the distance between Houston to Nairobi, perhaps to estimate the great lengths that I took to be here.

Once again, I allow another “moment of weakness” and confess I was equally surprised that it takes so long to travel to Houston from Nairobi. On my maiden trip here, it included a 17 hour non-stop flight from Dubai to Houston. It was so memorably long, I even wrote a travelogue.

I have learned from the students probably as much as I have given. We developed literacy autobiographies last semester. While describing to students my earliest recollections of when I was first able to read, my self-inquiry produced a very startling revelation.

As I recalled sitting under the shade of a eucalyptus tree on the way home from school, and opening a page from the Ladybird Young Readers Series, I realized that beyond the wonder that filled me as a six-year-old, staring at the blue-eyed and blonde-haired children in the book’s illustrations, those images had a deeper meaning. They fed my unconscious hunger for knowledge and discovery, and which had taken me to different corners of the world. And seated before me were some blue-eyed and blond youngsters, resembling the color illustrations in the Ladybird book!

This was the first time I was making connections between the day I learned to read, and my intellectual curiosity that has kept me going in life.

My students’ ignorance of the world has served a more positive role, and saved me from at least one unmitigated disaster.

While shopping for a ticket home last December, I called a tour agency whose number I found pinned outside the Department of English.

I indicated the dates that I intended to travel from Houston to Nairobi and back.

“Nairobi is in...” the female attendant asked on the other end.

I did not fill the dots. My antennae went up. While such display of ignorance is permissible among students, it is criminal dereliction for a tour agency that “sells” destinations for a living. There is no way they would not known about the city as virtually all international airlines fly in or out of the Kenyan capital.

My instinct was right. My online inquiries, and well as a check with the Best Business Bureau confirmed it was sham tour firm. The give-away was simply their ignorance. I notified the police immediately, as well as the university administration.

My students’ limited worldview and my optimism that our interactions should trigger curiosity that drive them to more discoveries, was vigorously tested early this month when I bumped into a former student. We took the bus together and sat chatting.

“Did you go home for Christmas?” he asked cheerfully. I answered in the affirmative.

“That’s...” he hesitated for a moment, staring ahead, before facing me: “Swahili, right?”

Another crucial lesson for my developing “teaching philosophy.”

Panic! At the AWP Disco

nospam@example.com (Karyna McGlynn) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:28:29 -0600

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 Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She serves as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast.

It's safe to say that I'm fully entrenched in the creative writing subculture. I've done the entire CWP gauntlet: undergrad, MFA, PhD. I submit to journals. I edit journals. I give people advice on how to submit to journals. I've started a failed reading series in my living room. I've started a failed press and drunkenly agreed to start another one. I've published chapbooks with tiny presses. I own a bone folder and an awl. I used to have a t-shirt that said “Garamond” in Helvetica font. I used to have a shirt that said “Poetry Slut.” I think both these shirts were stolen at AWP.

AWP! The only place where writers can still succumb to the the literary debauchery of yore and not be judged too harshly for it. The dancing, the day-drinking, the late-night hotel-room-hopping and unabashedly hungover brunches. It's carnival time for creative writers—an annual outlet for our bohemian predilections in an increasingly conservative era, when even creative writing program parties can feel like office mixers.

AWP is in two weeks and apparently everyone wants to know whether everybody else is going. Starting in January, AWP queries begin appearing at the bottom of every e-mail: “See you in Chicago?” “You're going to Denver, right?” “Sorry about misspelling your name in our last issue—I owe you at least 3 cocktails at AWP! Woot!”

So I can't wait to go, right? Er, well...

I used to go every year. Now I only go on even-numbered years. That means this year I'm going, and I've only half-committed to it. I don't even have a badge. I hemmed and hawed until, suddenly, the badges were sold out. I'm convinced it was self-sabotage.

The truth is, the mere mention of AWP makes me panic. Most people are surprised when I admit this. Socially, I'm pretty outgoing, but there's something about AWP that peppers me with anxieties—some of which I haven't felt since high school, and many of which I never had a name for.

I don't think I'm alone in this. Here's a handy checklist of the most pernicious AWP anxieties.

Roommate Roulette: This one starts before you even arrive at AWP. You realize you can't afford a room at the conference hotel. Then you realize the conference hotel is booked solid anyway. Then you realize that you can't afford a room at the Best Western six blocks away because you're a grad student and get paid about $6/hour. You need a roommate, or roommates. So you start asking around—only, everybody already has a roommate, as of months ago. “Oh my god, you don't have a room yet?” You thought you were fairly well-liked. How come nobody asked you to be their roommate? Now you're on that weird AWP “roommate search” message board exchanging e-mails with a woman from Arkansas who needs “absolute silence after 10pm.”

Lunch Table Syndrome: How is it that every writer you've ever met is milling around in a 5 block radius and you have no one to sit with? There you are, cruising through the hotel bar, looking for someone (anyone) you know. You're adopting the air of someone who has a specific mission—don't mind me...just rushing to meet up with my friends Lucy & Ed before the bookmaking roundtable—lest anyone think you're a lone dork with nothing to do. Do you feel like you're back in high school yet?

You should.

Acquaintance Leeching: Did you find someone you sort of know? Good! Now attach yourself to their side and never let go. Where are they going? Who are they going to see? Have they had lunch yet? Oh, the grant writing panel? Yeah, you were totally going to that too. Take your new BFF to the book-fair. Ignore any indication that they may be trying to shake you.

Badge Gandering: Assuming you have a badge of your own, you've got a difficult decision to make: do you keep your badge in plain sight so all the badge-ganderers can see who you are (or aren't)? Or do casually flip your badge backwards, tuck it in your shirt, attach it to your bag, or toss the badge over your shoulder so it hangs down your back? These latter options are understandable, if it a bit douchey. It foils the initial “are-you-someone-worth-talking-to?” assessment of the badge-ganderers, but it can also make you look the writer equivalent of the celebrity who wears big sunglasses and a baseball cap out in public. Either way you flip it, you're going to feel bad about yourself and suspect all the reasons people do or don't want to talk to you. And if they do talk to you (and even if they leech onto you) you will always sense their wandering eye, scanning badges over your shoulder. The worst part is this: despite your best intentions, you too will become a god-awful badge-ganderer. You will nod your head at the would-be memoir writer standing in front of you and think “Is this the best I can do? Oh, look! Kevin Young!”

What's-Your-Name? Paralysis: You have a terrible memory for names and everyone has now coolly tossed their lanyards over their shoulders and under their sweaters. Suddenly, someone recognizes you! Maybe you recognize them and maybe you don't, but you sure as hell don't remember their name. You read together at that place in Kalamazoo that time, remember? Suddenly, they are stuck to your side and the book-fair is a landmine of people that you should politely introduce this person to, but you can't because you don't know anyone's name and you have to awkwardly pretend like you assumed everyone already knew everyone else.

Trade Malaise: You can't afford AWP in the first place, but now that you're here you might as well try to self-promote and sling some product, right? Maybe you'll make a little spending cash. So you throw a bunch of your books/chapbooks/journals in your bag and haul them around stupidly for three days until there are welts on your right shoulder. Your bag keeps getting heavier as your wallet gets lighter. And why? Because AWP is a big book swap. It sounds nice, but mostly you end up trading away all the books you still owe your publisher money for in exchange for a stack of homemade chapbooks you'll never read. And you can't refuse to swap without looking like an asshole. If you've ever been swap-blocked, you know this to be true. What? You think your book is better than mine?

Hot Crop Despondency: Gosh, there are a lot of good-looking, fashionable people at AWP. You thought you packed cute stuff...that is, until you walked into the book fair and witnessed the newest crop of MFAs on parade with their cowboy boots, and their intricately wrapped scarves, and their Zooey Deschanel bangs. Suddenly, you think “I should have gone on a pre-AWP diet.” Followed by “But I don't have anything to wear to the dance!” You feel petty and old, and right back in high school. You end up ditching the keynote address to buy some seasonally inappropriate shoes.

Off-site Uncertainty: There is a plethora of off-site parties and readings going on each night and you are almost certain to pick the wrong one. Unfortunately, you won't realize this until it's too late, when you're sitting in some pub, eating bad fish and chips with people you don't know from VCU, who you are seemingly stuck with after agreeing to split a cab. Because of this likely outcome you will find yourself loitering around the enigmatic 'Table X' area asking the same stupid question over and over: “Where's everybody going tonight? Where's everybody going?”

Existential Collapse: This is probably the most pervasive and elusive form of AWP anxiety: Why are you here? Are you promoting a new book? No. Are you doing a panel? No. Do you have a line-up of off-site reading engagements with sexy little magazines? Probably not. Do you earnestly desire advice on teaching with technology in the two-year college? No. Is your lifelong dream to watch Joyce Carol Oates read for the second time? Eh. So what in the hell are you doing here? What is your raison d'être? Left unchecked, these questions will lead to poor decision-making and/or utter collapse, resulting in barricading yourself in the hotel room with Hulu, or getting drunk on Irish Car Bombs and deciding it's a good idea to ask C.D. Wright whether Frank Stanford was a good kisser.

So, see you all at AWP? Where's everybody going? Can I come too? We could split a cab. I don't have any cash but I could pay you in chapbooks.

Poetry Horoscopes for Love and Lust in the Year Ahead!

nospam@example.com (Francis Justine Post) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 15:36:46 -0600

Frances Justine Post is the Reviews Editor for Gulf Coast and is earning her PhD in Poetry at the University of Houston. Her poems have previously appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Boston Review, The Massachusetts Review, and others.

Sometime after the New Year but before Valentine’s Day, I saw an internet meme on Facebook that said:

Pick up the nearest
book to you.
Turn to page 45.
The first sentence
describes your sex
life in 2012.

Ok, I thought. It being a time of new beginnings, as well as the time of upcoming mild embarrassment about being single on Valentine’s (the grocery clerk asking if you have big plans when you buy a bottle of wine and bag of chocolate for yourself, and you lie and say “Yes, HUGE.” And then you wink.), I was susceptible to this directive. I half believe in horoscopes and astrology. Sometimes I think horoscopes are ridiculous, but other times I scour the internet for anything that will tell me that I have luck or money or love or health coming my way. So, I have decided to become a poetry astrologer for you. Yes, you. It’s all random anyway, right? I methodically went through all the poetry books on my shelves and read every page 45, and then I assigned a quote for each astrological sign. I didn’t choose the first line necessarily, but the stars did guide me to the perfect lines that will predict your sex life in 2012. I give you the best, most edifying selections here. However, if you share a horoscope with an ex-boyfriend, I am sorry. (If you want to know my horoscope, check out Cancer.)

ARIES

Kerri Webster, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, from Benediction:

Have you of late touched ice to your lips or
The back of your neck, as healing or waking or foreplay?

TAURUS

Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation, from Chapter for Being Transformed into a Sparrow:

After the first weeks after, I lost myself remembering
the worth of what was lost, the cost of which was nothing.
Between myself and where I stood, there fell a distance

only loss could fill, an empty world, a simpleness, its shadows
thrown across my window.

GEMINI

Ted Hughes, Crow, from Crow’s Undersong:

She has come amorous it is all she has come for

If there had been no hope she would not have come

And there would have been no crying in the city

(There would have been no city)

CANCER

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, from Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds:

Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

LEO

Tony Tost, Invisible Bride, from 5:

If one evening or street passes by, another shall come.

There is always the transformation of environmental events into either
eternal or internal regularities, but a wind still comes in the early
evening hours and the stars and moons get stacked like the colors of a
tin cup.

VIRGO

Lucie Brock-Broido, A Hunger, from Elective Mutes:

One day we will burn buildings together.
One day we will set fire to great things.
It sends shudders down my spine.
In the heat of swing park, we will take boys
down & mingle with them in the brushes.

LIBRA

John Ashbery, Selected Poems, from A Last World:

Everything is being blown away;
A little horse trots up with a letter in its mouth, which is read with eagerness
As we gallop into the flame.

SCORPIO

Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love, from If a Wilderness:

I bought a harness, I bought a bridle.
I wagered on God in a kind stranger—
kind at first; strange, then less so—
and I was right.

SAGITTARIUS

Mark Strand, Selected Poems, from The Dirty Hand:

the clean hand of a man,
that you could shake,
or kiss, or hold
in one of those moments
when two people confess
without saying a word

CAPRICORN

John Berryman, The Dream Songs, from 45:

Their paths crossed

and once they crossed in jail; they crossed in bed;
and over an unsigned letter their eyes met,
and in an Asian city
directionless & lurchy at two & three,
or trembling to a telephone’s fresh threat,
and when some wired his head

to reach a wrong opinion, ‘Epileptic’.

AQUARIUS

Samuel Amadon, Like a Sea, from Goodnight Lung:

How do we find a thing which

isn’t concerned enough with us to hide?

PISCES

Jean Valentine, Home Deep Blue, from Separation:

Over and over without a smile
the little walls break up and bleed
pure violence and mend and mend.