We are called watchers, though last I heard we were petitioning for a name change. It’s not so much that watcher is an inaccurate title. But it’d be like calling composers listeners or chefs tasters or sculptors touchers—not quite wrong, but certainly a lazy way of going about it.
Thom SawyerSPRING STREET: Works on Paper Unhappy small towns are all alike—claustrophobic, gossipy, dying. —Timothy Egan I have lived and worked in such a small town as this. Quiet, nondescript streets link manicured lawns and well-kept homes; neighbors guard their…
mother i have strayed here too
long. a winter mist rising at five
o’clock and oustide’s dim. outside’s
lust. (Mother I wish to tell you
I love a girl and I love her naked)
in ten years’ time or twenty
snow will fall from the sky and
i will find within me strength to stay
the night.
She led us knee-deep into mud.
Horses squealed and thrashed
as the earth dragged them under.
Mire sucked at our boots
while she shouted, stout
on her John Henry mule.
We pulled them hoof by hoof up
from the trembling cold.
Throughout Blindsight, the reader is presented with the voice of a poet whose urges to feel and desires to know reflect those universal to humanity. Through his plainspoken language which is, at times, conversational and, at times, confessional we are reminded of our own desires, those things for which we do still burn. We are also reminded of our own blindness, literal and otherwise which obstruct our view, reflecting the world through a glass darkly. But even in the dim light, in the uncertainty, even when, after finally getting what you want, you’re not sure if you’re left “maybe more/ nervous than longing, / maybe indifferent, or regretting”, there is still beauty in this muddled world, even when we are left lying, “mourning among the ruins.”
Dear June,
I think I am a thoughtful person, but I am really terrible at predicting who is going to give me gifts at Christmas and Hanukkah, and how lavish, or not, these gifts will be. Last year I was very embarrassed on more than on occasion. How does one respond in such cases?
—Inept in Indiana
Douglas Crimp’s memoir Before Pictures invites readers into the lively artistic and queer worlds of 1960s to 1970s New York where Crimp was formed as an art historian. This is the same New York which brought him to curate Pictures, a small exhibit at Artist’s Space now considered pivotal to ideas about contemporary art. In the art history textbook Art Since 1900 (2004), Pictures is historicized as having given a platform to artwork meant to give “a new sense of the image as ‘picture’” and to “transcend any particular medium.” Here, Crimp embraces this transcendence in a different way. In his consideration, no single art form, from fashion to architecture, comes out as primary.
Dear June, My boyfriend “Eric” and I have been together for three years now, and neither of us ever talks about ever splitting up. But I have a problem: until about six months ago, or maybe a year, we had…
Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist from Philadelphia and this compact book, his first, which won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovation Fiction, makes for a fine addition to the recent history of experimental prose by writers with ties to Philadelphia—from the late Fran Ross (whose 1974 novel, Oreo, was recently re-issued) to contemporaries like Samuel R. Delany, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Hilary Plum, Caren Beilin, and the West Philadelphia sci-fi collective Metropolarity.
Giggling girls have power the radio tells me
after the election. An epidemic of contagious
laughter spread through a girls’ school
in Africa, 1962, and no one then knew
why. Hearing this carries a now-giggling
me back to my 5th grade classroom—to tiny
freckles on Eddie’s nose, sprinkled sweet
as whispers. My girl-small hands unfold a scrap
of notebook paper, where penciled print
asks, Do you like Eddie? Circle: Yes or No
Throughout the election season, I noticed that some of my students seemed uneasy. After Donald Trump’s election, true fear had taken hold in many of them. A Congolese boy, who I had never before seen without a big smile, asked me why he would have to go back to his country. His village did not have enough food, he told me. People were very sad and hungry there. A second grade teacher showed me a picture one of her students had drawn. It showed two men with Crayola guns standing over a woman, scribbled red.
“This is my aunt,” the girl said. “Please don’t make my family go back."
When I took this job, I knew that I might have to console students who were going through rough times: moving, divorce, the death of a beloved pet. I never imagined I would have to have a discussion with elementary students like the ones my college professors had with us after 9/11.
The hero–or perhaps I should say anti-hero–of Dutch author Tommy Wieringa’s new novel, These Are the Names is a 53-year-old police chief named Pontus Beg. Beg lives in a fictional border town called Michailopol, a city ailing in post-Soviet corruption and aimless malaise. Beg has “set up his life as a barrier against pain and discomfort,” Wieringa writes. “Suppressing chaos: washing dishes, maintaining order. What did it matter that one day looked so much like the other that he could not recall a single one; he keeps to the middle equidistant from both bottom and top.”
WHAT IT IS
is how I hate my face. is how my face is amnesia. is how i love my face. is how my face is still amnesia. is waking up at 4am feeling like there is someone in the room, someone saying don’t forget me. is saying, ma, you know what the really effed up thing is, is how knowing where you come from is the privilege $99 and a mailing address gets you. is that the effed up thing is it isn’t a right. is buying your mom a dna kit for christmas. is what the hell is christmas anyway. is collective amnesia. is wanting to know if her estranged father had royal blood in him. is rethinking what is royal. is what is blood. is colonialism. is sitting in a lecture hall while a professor talks about post-colonialism.
Poetry is often in danger of being understood as purely conceptual material in need of processing and interpretation in order to become meaningful or real. It can be easy, after wading through stanzas, to lose a grip on time and place and the sensation of occupying a body. However, despite the ethereality and distance from reality poetry often possesses, Caroline Ebeid has proven that it can also be used to ground and remind us of the physical rather than simply blur or distract from it. In her collection You Ask Me to Talk About The Interior, Ebeid employs a sort of “bodily language,” flexing smoothly between word and body until the two seem irredeemably tied. I would argue that Ebeid, and this collection in particular, works to close the distance between words and what they mean, bringing the signified and signifier together on the physical stage of the paper.
Dear June,
About a year ago a coworker and supposed friend of mine betrayed various confidences and otherwise badmouthed me to my supervisor. I am pretty sure this led to my termination. Even if it didn’t, I have no desire ever to see this man—let’s call him Nick—again, and have actually changed my life in a few small ways (go to a different Starbucks, blocked some mutual friends on Facebook, changed food coops) to make it less likely that our paths will cross.
Abide with me the night shadows
caterwauling on the walls—Lava Lamp Red
as the squad car pulling up to the curb.
Inside, a fish tank shifts—precarious---Colors dizzy
in a kitchen of bodies without form. Pot partying,
I made-out with my boyfriend, our friend gave
his hands to be cuffed into silence—Whispers in
the next room. All said and done, Willy sat
in jail for an ounce of stale attic
mouse-weed. We went to college to cavil
in a dormitory of freshman.
I live in Provincetown but I’m from West Virginia. I’ve been thinking of the simultaneous provocation and balm that literature, like art, can have on moments of social and economic crisis. In Provincetown, year-round residents are disappearing as more and more houses are bought as second homes, thoroughly and exquisitely renovated, and then occupied in the summer only. In my hometown, Madison, West Virginia, streets have emptied out as an economy built on coal mining weakens, in part due to worries that burning fossil fuels overheats the planet. I want to paste a poem on the front of the beat-up house down the street from me in Provincetown where, in the last few months, shade trees have been cut and an architect’s sign has been planted out front. Here’s the possible poem...
The week has been long, one of the longest
in my heart's slim record-book. But the moon
is at its perigee. It hasn't come this close
in years, more than you and I have known. So rise
and go to the window, the one that faces the canyon.
Tonight, as red as Mars, it will ascend, round
and smoldering, through the dust.
I host our annual Thanksgiving feast. My family, who is a mixed bunch in terms of what we believe in, and how much, has adopted the secular Thanksgiving tradition where we go around the table and each person in turn says what they are thankful for. This year it was a total shit show. My uncle started off by saying he didn't have anything to be thankful for this year, because a bunch of morons just voted our democracy and probably the planet into oblivion, which reduced his little great-niece—who, though only eight, has a large vocabulary—to tears. I do not totally disagree with his sentiments, but there is a time and place for everything.
Detective Jonathan Wind is not a wisecracking, hardboiled investigator in the tradition of Philip Marlowe, or a hyper-observant sleuth like Sherlock Holmes. Rather, Wind uses his almost encyclopedic knowledge to investigate crimes for the Atlanta Police Department. When he’s not on a case, the protagonist of Jordan A. Rothacker’s And Wind Will Wash Away splits his time between Monica, his devout Catholic girlfriend, and his secret mistress, Flora, a goddess-worshipping sex worker.
The city guys are stringing Christmas lights on the locust trees.
The men are lifted up in buckets. First, any old witches come down.
And then the forgotten paper pumpkins. The bats.
The city guys shake loose the dried up locust pods: brown and curled
they land on Essex Street like snakes dropping. Finally, the white
lights can go up and stay up past the New Year.
The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street, winner of the 2016 Howling Bird Press fiction prize, is an honest, funny, and sometimes un-apologetically dark collection of short stories.. Its author, Jacob M. Appel (Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets (2015), The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up (2012)) can easily be described as a modern renaissance man: in addition to his writing, he is also a bioethicist, attorney, and a physician. These professional fields come into play in many of the stories included in this collection, often to highlight or expose ethical conflicts his characters must face.
Everywhere I went in Sudan, people offered me things. I was the foreigner in their country and they could tell the minute they saw me that I was different with my lighter skin and my long hair and my rounded body. They understood that it was me who needed their help. They knew that my system wasn’t used to the extreme temperatures, that I had not sufficiently acclimated to bacteria-ridden water, that my skin was too soft for hard work, my eyes too sensitive to the dust.
As a writer I’m forever reverse engineering great stories. That tendency to reverse engineer initially sparked might interest in first lines. First lines, like titles, are often given short shrift. Good lines, like good titles, have a way of becoming wallflowers.
OUTHOUSE BLUES
Three Poems by Herman Beavers
Featured on Life As Activism
Outhouse Blues #1
Accounts coming due, enunciated in
The mumble of feet. Coathangers,
The electric eye of catechesis.
Populism blushes in a frenzy
Of bared teeth, biceps swelling
With the ripple of Confederate flags.
Manacled in a pageant of
Disconsolate shotguns, the echo of
Self-confident dice, the public figures.
Amputation kin to the succulence of Crow.
◊
In the aftermath of the election, I overheard a phone conversation my housemate had with his friend, a conversation that was casual enough to be had while he was on the toilet. He explained he was bummed that Trump had been elected president but that he was also excited. He had plans to go out and buy a gun. He’d always wanted to play out a survivalist scenario, even if he would hate it when it finally came.
I am not sure now, the right or wrong way to post on Facebook. I attempt feebly my own brand of humor, certainly misunderstood. I surge with so much caffeine that the days go by in a blur. Then, binge drink, nights hazy and filled with whiskey, wine, spiked seltzer and even one time, a Twinkie. I do not eat things like Twinkies. So, this is therefore in and of itself the perfect metaphor for America really going to shit right now.
On Saturday, for the second week in a row, I attended a protest march against the election of Donald J. Trump as President. These marches here in Philadelphia, as they have been around the nation, are meant to bring people together to assert their anger, their betrayal, and their worry over the direction of the nation under Mr. Trump. To press for action. They provide an instant sense of camaraderie and communal feeling, and, yelling righteously into the cavern of towers, or the granite of monuments, or, in our case, the sturdy brick of Independence Hall, a heartfelt outlet for protest. The marches allow a person edging toward hopelessness to feel alive again, if only for an instant, and to sense oneself melding into the body politic. After despondent days, they come as a relief.
The author of the novel, Alessandro Baricco, a popular Italian writer, director and performer, suggests that a world based around logic and sense ultimately will stifle us. It is in fact, what the narrator of the main story, the “author” (easy to conflate with Baricco, though we shouldn’t), desires to escape from. He does so by running to fantasy: a place gleefully empty of logic or sense. However this is not to suggest that it is a place of chaos or anarchy—in fact quite the opposite. Fantasy rather offers refuge from the chaos of everyday life through its own simple and overriding logic: repetition.
I am watching the election results with a friend that I’m kind of in love with. He texts me after the first polls close. I join him at the Women’s Center where they are holding a viewing party, a nonpartisan event in name only. Early numbers look bad, and then they begin to look dangerous. People leave the party visibly upset. The Friend and I decide we need a drink. I call a local Mexican restaurant to ask if they’re showing the election results on any of their televisions.
One girl suggests we come with her to a fraternity where they are watching CNN. The frat has hard liquor, and we could buy mixers on the walk over. I bite my tongue. I don’t want to come across as judgmental, but I have always hated boys’ clubs. And besides, I want to be alone with The Friend.
“The love of my life is in that fraternity,” he says. “Just kidding.”
The Friend continually cycles through moments of revealing (if exaggerated) honesty followed by sham retractions. We continue to discuss specifics.
“Do you want to go, Cody?” he asks.
“I’d be willing, but it’s up to you,” I say.
I am a graduate student (in Clinical Psychology, not English or Literature) and have been writing short stories and novellas off and on for about six years now. I worry about how caught up I get in my fiction. I find myself laughing out loud, or crying, or getting turned on, or becoming really angry. My own sex scenes have sent me off to find my partner, or take a cold shower, and one time I got so mad about the way one of my characters was treating his son that I threw my coffee mug across the room, where it cracked against the wall. Is this normal?
Soon after I moved from Denver to Loveland, Colorado—a town of close to sixty-five thousand people and an odd mixture of artists, retirees, and hicks—I agreed to hold a series of one-on-one creative writing workshops for a twelve-year-old girl. Once I set everything into place, her mother phoned and explained that she wanted me to give her daughter feedback on her writing, yet above all, she wanted me to discourage her from becoming a writer. She wanted me to verbally agree to this proposal, this instruction to put an end to her daughter’s dream. I somewhat addressed the mother’s request—I told her that the writing industry is quite competitive and can be challenging to break into and that I could explain this to her daughter.
50,000 words in November. That's 1,667 words a day. Typing at a good clip, that's 21 minutes of work for me. But is National Novel Writing Month really about writing? For me, it’s about climbing a mountain. It has less to do with writing than with the sense of accomplishment that goads me as a writer. And I’m not alone: last year, 431,626 writers worldwide cranked out a couple of billion words.
Do not give way to despair or complacency: the middle way, hope, is the only one that leads anywhere. Keep working for the causes you believe in, even if it may be hard to see the point just at present. Start working for new causes. Shore up causes that are threatened. Contribute as much time and money as you can. Remember to be grateful for all we have in this country and on this Earth, and do your damnedest to preserve these blessings and see that they are shared more fairly. “Don’t mourn, organize,” Joe Hill told us. “Pray for the dead, but fight like hell for the living,” added Mother Jones.
Tanay is a young, closeted queer man trying to work through an internal rut by living for the company of and validation from others. As Tanay befriends an out-of-towner renting a room in his family’s home, he finds himself in awe of the Guest’s ability to thrive in solitude, to fully embrace his mood of the moment, to being in a class of “men who lived their own idiosyncrasies” (the house guest is unnamed in the novel, but for the sake of clarity in this review I call him the Guest). It’s enough to gradually wrestle Tanay out of his day-to-day haze, to make him “aware of the mediocrity, the ordinariness” of his “secure and comfortable life.” Anuj, Tanay’s fiercely independent younger sister, is also taken by the Guest’s charms, but to different effect. For Anuj, the Guest doesn’t so much unearth a hidden urge to be, he reflects and accepts with ease the off-center personhood that comes natural to her, a personality she’s often had to defend to claim as her own.
Dear June, I am in a creative writing workshop with seven other people. One of the writers in my group, “Don,” just submitted a story that has a very similar plot line to one I showed the workshop a month ago, as well as the same rather unorthodox format. I was already annoyed with him because his previous story contained snippets of dialogue virtually identical to some in a novel chapter I had submitted a few months before that, and used an epigraph from the same poem I had quoted under my chapter heading. Now he tells us that he is planning on writing a memoir about life with a sibling who has Asperger’s, which (except that my sister is on the more severe end of the spectrum) is exactly what I recently told the group I had on my back burner. How do I stop this? It is getting so I do not want to submit to the workshop any longer, but I would really miss the other members’ critiques.
Golden Delicious follows a fairly straight plot structure. (Thank God.) The novel’s a story of a family in Appleseed, Massachusetts, the kind of small town where apple-cheeked children frisk beside white picket fences, waving baseballs over the heads of leaping, barking terriers. It is, for lack of a better word, a wholesome place, a village that knows its own story too well to outgrow its roots. Here, history is literal. Sentences sprout from the soil, locals bear unusual names, and mothers practice their flight techniques. But under it, this is a simple story. The narrator, after his family takes to the four winds, sets out to save his town from hard times as its apple industry falters.
If writers are interested in portraying human experience in its varied forms, then part of that work is depicting climate change. Certainly there has been a strong tradition of writers turning to their surroundings for inspiration and literary fodder. And for many of these writers—Wendell Wendell Berry, Homero Aridjis, and Jean Giono for example—the earth becomes a character just as palpable and mercurial as any human, with capacity for danger alongside beauty. Yet our current moment calls for something even more complex: not just the earth, plants, and animals as powerful forces in fiction, but also a realization that we humans have brought this change upon our whole planet. And Ghosh, while not optimistic about the current state of literature, does think such fiction has yet been written in our age. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Liz Jensen’s Rapture are particularly good examples. Yet, these kinds of works, at least in Ghosh’s calculations, are the exception and not the rule.
Is there anything more disappointing than waking up in your mid-30s and wondering what the hell happened? Suddenly, you have a family, children, a mortgage, and a job that, despite your best efforts, is starting to define you. Your sensible car is in perfect order. You have a retirement account. Where’s the punk you used to be? What happened to all those bad decisions you made in your 20s?
I was completely amazed at my good luck at having found such an attractive, interesting, sexy, and thoughtful man to build a life with.... Or so I thought, until the other night when Jason tearfully and drunkenly confessed that he and one of the female housemates, Melissa, had slept together on and off for over two years, almost since he joined the household. At first he said that it ended when I moved in, but after I pressed him for details about the affair, or whatever you call it, he broke down and confessed that one night last month, while I was out of town, she came into his—our!—room at two in the morning and “one thing led to another.”
In her debut young adult novel Rani Patel in Full Effect, Sonia Patel takes us back to the era of faded box cuts, high-top Adidas, and gold chains as thick as your wrist; to the era where hip-hop reigned supreme and rhymes flowed out of boom boxes like water down Moaula Falls.
It wasn’t Michael Gerhard Martin’s stories in the collection Easiest If I Had a Gun that wooed me as much as it was his crisp, visceral writing. His narrative constructs are alluring and beg to be unpacked, analyzed, and savored. Without apparent ego or bias, he transcribes the thoughts, memories, and dialogue of his characters as they struggle to navigate the mundane obstacles associated with living as lower middle-class, white Americans. This theme—the white man’s struggle—is not new. Yet, Martin manages to bring to the subject a fresh voice and a macabre sense of social conscience.
I began as a fiction writer, naturally drawing from my childhood as my mother had told it to me, working hard to bring her stories to life through scene, dialogue, and sensory detail, pacing them as mysteries. The memoir that many of these fictionalized stories eventually became is better, I think, because I didn’t start out writing memoir, trying to “remember.”
When Mike and his family move, just before his freshman year, Mike starts high school in a new state and begins to forge some tentative friendships. But Victor, also low on the totem pole in terms of the high school hierarchy, seems to have a personal beef with him. Mike tries to lay low and mind his own business but Victor’s attention is unsettling...
DREAMS OF THE CLOCKMAKER an original radio play by Sean Gill performed by Kelly Chick produced by Grace Connolly Recorded Performance, full text, and an interview with the author by Grace Connolly Read Sean Gill’s script: [pdf-embedder url=”https://www.cleavermagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Dreams-of-The-Clockmaker-Script.pdf” title=”dreams-of-the-clockmaker-script”] …
There are two kinds of important reader: the one who hates you, and the one who understands you.
When I write, I come to the page knowing that someone will probably hate what I produce. In fact, I count on this. As I work, I read each sentence as though I am my own worst enemy. Zadie Smith says to “try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.” That means that every adorable turn of phrase—everything that I thought was so smart—gets bullied out of the final copy.
Yoram Kaniuk, an Israeli novelist who died in 2013, was the kind of man who tells jokes as he's dying in the hospital, even when he has no voice, when there's a respirator thrust through an incision in his chest. His humor is at times bitter, biting like Sholem Aleichem's pogrom narratives, descending into sullen anti-prayers: “cancer, like Hitler...is a messenger of the Lord.” In this respect, Kaniuk's Between Life and Death, published this year in English, probably most closely resembles Christopher Hitchens' Mortality. A sense of the meaninglessness in so much of life, of banality in death, pervades both authors’ stories. Kaniuk rages and rejoices, but sometimes qualifies these outbursts by settling, like Hitchens, for a tone of ambivalent irony, communicated in prose thick with vibrant images and cumulative sentences.
Dear June, I had an abortion last spring. I was very sad about it, but do not regret it in the least, for many reasons. I decided not to tell my mother because she is a fundamentalist Christian and completely anti-abortion. But, thanks to one of my cousins who knew my then-boyfriend, Mom found out a few days after I had it. She actually came to my town—I work about 100 miles away from my parents—to have a big fight with me about it, and we did. In the intervening months we have sent emails and letters back and forth, most of them from her with short responses from me.
WHO ARE WE, WHEN WE TRAVEL IN BURMA? by Judy T. Oldfield I reached up, scratched the side of my nose, and out popped my brand-new nose ring, falling down to the tile floor of Yangon’s Bogyoke market. Squatting down,…
To make a book about school shootings stand out among an influx of young adult books about the topic takes skill and in her new novel The Light Fantastic Combs delivers with detailed characters and a unique premise. Told from several different points of view, the novel covers the span of a few hours across multiple time zones as a new day starts and a nationwide school shooting epidemic begins.