Editor Blog

  • Announcing our Issue 14 Dedication

    Each issue of The Los Angeles Review is dedicated to a West Coast writer who has made an indelible mark on the literary world. We at LAR are proud to announce that our fourteenth issue will be dedicated to the life and work of the poet Madeline DeFrees.

    DeFrees was born in Oregon in 1919, and studied at Marylhurst College and the University of Oregon. In 1936, DeFrees joined the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary and served as a nun until 1973. Once she was dispensed from her vows, she turned to writing and teaching, and published 10 collections of poetry, including From The Darkroom, Magpie on the Gallows, Possible Sibyls, Blue Dusk, and Spectral Waves, and two works of nonfiction.

    Readings for issue 14 begin February 1.

  • Registration now open for January Online Workshops

    We at The Los Angeles Review are pleased to announce our January Online Workshop course offerings in nonfiction and poetry. Our workshops offer you the chance to work closely with the editors of The Los Angeles Review and with likeminded writers from all over the nation and the world. Learn more about our course offerings here.

  • Pushcart Nominations for 2012

    We at The Los Angeles Review love our contributors. We love them so much that it’s difficult to choose a mere six authors from our publication year to nominate for The Pushcart Prize. The difficulty aside, it is, as always, our honor to recommend our writers to The Pushcart Press. This year, we’ve selected:

    “Namblish,” essay by Alan Barstow

    “Believe,” essay by Nick Ripatrazone

    “Meridian Holds the Gun,” poem by Monica McClure

    “Wishing on a Shooting Start My Friend Informs Me is Likely Just a Satellite,” poem by Okla Elliott

    “A Return to Glencoe,” fiction by David P. Langlinais

    “Her Adult Life,” fiction by Jenn Scott

    Comments from our editors:

    After I chose the two stories for Pushcart Prize nominees, “A Return to Glencoe” by David P. Langlinais and “Her Adult Life” by Jenn Scott, I realized that they both include characters who are unreliable narrators. In the case of “Glencoe,” the reader slowly realizes with a bit of backing up and furrowed brow that the narrator might have illegal or immoral intentions. In “Her Adult Life” we are initially told about her “her inconsistencies,  her flaws, and her chiseled angst.” She spends time thinking about the meaning of a brush against her, so much thought, we realize she doesn’t even quite trust her own thinking. And later, neither does another character, and possibly, neither do we. While Scott’s story is clever, sassy, fast-paced, the Langlinias story moves more slowly, allowing the scenery to seep in, the details to absorb, the pain to slowly register. Both stories are well-done, memorable, and have a completeness about them, a satisfaction that we’ve been told a story, a good story worth thinking about, worth pondering, worth weighing the intentions and actions of the narrators.

    –Stefanie Freele, 2012 Fiction Editor

    Okla Elliot’s poem, “Wishing on a Shooting Star My Friend Informs Me is Likely Just a Satelite,” melds the insular with the universal, and the colloquial with the carefully crafted. Okla deftly navigates that fine balance to bring to life a moment that transcends all of the aforementioned qualities, creating anew the sensation of gazing into the night sky only to find it gazing back at you. ”Meridian Holds the Gun,” by poet Monica McClure, takes the narrative form into unchartered territory with a precision of language that is rarely seen from emerging voices. The poem’s persistent, hard-driving pace ensnares the reader for a thrilling, sharply intellectual ride.

    –Tanya Chernov, Poetry and Translations Editor

    In “Namblish,” published in Spring 2012, Volume 11, Alan Barstow is the voice of witness for a Namibian community whose continued existence is threatened by AIDS. Barstow deftly shows us that the stakes are high. As the narrative unfolds, so does the reader’s understanding of the dire yet hope-filled situation among Namibia’s children–the future of an entire country. The essay is rich with imagery, peopled with full-dimension characters, and shows deep respect for language– be it foreign or familiar, spoken or un.

    Without dark, there can be no light. Published in Fall 2012, Volume 12, Nick Ripatrazone’s “Believe” visits the dark side of Catholicism. In nine haunting, provocative, and revelatory parts, Ripatrazone considers the existence of the devil, and influences, rituals, and implications thereof. This tightly-wrought mini-memoir thoroughly explores this aspect of faith, as well as that of the author himself.

    –Ann Beman, Nonfiction Editor

  • LAR’s Workshops are Moving

    For the past several years, LAR has offered its popular workshops in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction twice each year, in November and June. Many writers tell us they’d like to participate in our fall workshops, that November is just too hectic a month. We’ve been listening! This year, our workshops will move to January, 2013. Check back December 1 for course descriptions and open registration.

  • Our Issue 13 Dedication

    We at The Los Angeles Review are delighted to announce that our thirteenth issue will be dedicated to Dana Gioia. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia holds a BA and an MBA from Stanford and Harvard, respectively, and has published several collections of poetry. His Interrogations at Noon won the 2002 American Book Award, and his critical volume Can Poetry Matter?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is credited with helping revive the role of poetry in American culture. As Chairman of the NEA, Gioia garnered rare, bi-partisan congressional support for the mission of the Arts Endowment, leading Business Week Magazine to call him “The Man Who Saved the NEA.”

  • Summer Workshop Registration is Now Open

    Registration is now open for our Summer Online Workshops with courses in Memoir Writing with Tanya Chernov, author of A Real Emotional Girl, Flash Fiction with Stefanie Freele, author of Feeding Strays and Surrounded by Water, and Travel Writing with Ann Beman, Nonfiction Editor of The Los Angeles Review.

  • The Los Angeles Review Podcast Lounge: Episode 2

    Welcome to Episode 2 of The Los Angeles Review Podcast Lounge. In this episode, we bring you stories about starting over, pressing the reset button, and choosing to look forward. This episode features poetry written and performed by Paul Scot August and Colin Pope, and an essay by Janet Buttenwieser. Listen below or visit losangelesreview.podbean.com to subscribe to this podcast.

  • Introducing The Los Angeles Review Podcast Lounge

    Welcome to the inaugural podcast from The Los Angeles Review. Today, we bring you stories of Man’s Best Friend, whether dog, cat, or snake. This episode features fiction and essays from Gregory Wolos, Angela Morales, and Kathlene Postma. Click below to stream audio, or subscribe using iTunes. 

  • Announcing Issue 11

    We at The Los Angeles Review are proud to announce the release of our eleventh issue, dedicated to John Rechy.

    Issue 11 features new writing by Yahia Lababidi, Brenda Miller, Alberto Rios, Charles Harper Webb, Valerie Vogrin, and many more; an extensive book reviews section features B.J. Hollars on the future of fiction; and poetry editor Tanya Chernov hosts an LGBTQ poets’ roundtable discussion on a new generation of gay poets.

    Order Issue 11 today, or subscribe for 2012.

  • Now Open to Submissions

    Submissions for our 12th issue are now open. This issue, dedicated to Ron Carlson, will be published in October, 2012. Submissions will close on April 30. See our guidelines here.

  • Changes are Coming to LAR

    This spring, changes are coming to The Los Angeles Review’s submissions process. Beginning with our new reading period opening February 1, 2012, LAR will begin charging a reading fee for electronic submissions. Our current subscribers and our former contributors may continue to submit their work electronically free of charge.

    Many other journals have already taken the fee-to-submit route, and while the editorial staff at LAR has for some time considered instituting fees, we have until recently resisted making the change. As much as we would like to continue to keep online submissions free for all our submitters, the truth is that quality printed literature is expensive to produce, and is becoming more expensive as the cost of printing continues to rise sharply. However, we believe in the impact and permanency of the printed journal, and in the contributions our staff and authors continue to make to the nation’s literary conversation.

    The revenue raised from reading fees will go toward printing and distribution costs, and we hope to use some of the funds to give back to the writing community through a program of literary outreach that we are developing.

    We recognize that fees for online submissions are a burden for writers. Those who submit to a large number of journals may find that the expense adds up quickly. However, we still believe this system represents improvement on the old-fashioned method of printing and mailing manuscripts, though you are still free to submit your work by post, free of fees, if you wish.

    We hope our submitters will continue to support LAR’s efforts to bring divergent, West Coast literature to the mainstream.

    Please see our Submissions Page for more specifics about our guidelines.

    –The Editors

  • LAR’s 2011 Pushcart Prize Nominations

    Each fall, it’s our pleasure to select six pieces from our publication year to nominate for the Pushcart Prize. For our 2011 issues, we have chosen to nominate the following authors for their outstanding work:

    Poetry:

    Tim Kahl, for “Cello Suite,” Issue 9

    James E. Allman Jr., for “Corpus Delicti,” Issue 10

    Nonfiction:

    Rick Kempa, for “Not at all Like Despair,” Issue 9

    Melita Schaum, for “Constellations,” Issue 9

    Fiction:

    Ryan Call, for “The Walker Circulation,” Issue 9

    Manuel Martinez, for “Six Hours Before the End,” Issue 10

    Notes from the editors on their selections:

    Tim Kahl reminds us just how good more formally constructed poems can truly be. The quality of craftsmanship and powerful use of language offer a commanding presence. Though we often see and print poems broken into sections, rarely do we see them so well-crafted and categorized with such purpose. Most importantly, the images and meaning in “Cello Suite” so beautifully echo the musical qualities of a single instrument suite. Staccato notes, lyrical phrasing, and fluidity of movement throughout the poem had us, as editors, stopping in our tracks to read and listen.

    Though LAR does not often publish the more experimental forms of poetry, we were enchanted James Allman’s “Corpus Delicti” and the notably sharp, tight-fitting corners of both the poems’ lines and the author’s wit. Form, thought and rhythm come together to make a strikingly vivid and at times even chaotic masterpiece. The combination of raw, visercal details and intellectual accuracy makes this poem fodder for much haunting thought long after the page has turned. Not for the lighthearted and not for the novice, “Corpus Delicti” embodies exactly what contemporary poetry should be: powerful, well-crafted, and smart.

    –Tanya Chernov, Poetry Editor

    Rick Kempa’s “Not at All Like Despair” walks lightly around it’s subject, just as the friends in the essay walk around the ivy planter they’re examining. The essay’s substance echoes its style; its tone quiet and matter-of-fact, employing a lyrical simplicity to describe a tragedy without despair, and using the power of the form to share a personal, one-of-a-kind perspective, revealing vast amounts of character detail in very few words; each word chosen with precision and humble grace.

    In Melita Schaum’s “Constellations,” the structure supports the theme. Diagramming the contemporary essay, the piece speaks the language of poetry, leaping from thought to scene to image; invoking quantum mechanics, sex, Beethoven, the tides, and more. Details resonate, imagery haunts, and the segments flow into one another in both logical and surprising ways. In the end, the piece achieves its metaphor, inviting the reader to consider “those imagined connections between points of light … the points between people or moments, lines drawn or imagined.”

    –Ann Beman, Nonfiction Editor

    Ryan Call’s “The Walker Circulation” is one of those unforgettable pieces of fiction in which the one must pause frequently for the mind to catch up with the cascade of fantastic ideas: “People had only recently begun to carry about them their own private weather.” A family’s recent addition, a temperamental baby named Walker who has a “disposition toward inclement weather, an unfortunate consequence of his parents’ colliding fronts” causes havoc as he thunderstorms “terribly each night” and the parents struggle with how to raise him. “The Walker Circulation,” with its highly original prose, plays on humanity, exposing our will to control, personalities, communities, even the weather.

    In “Six Hours Before The End” by Manuel Martinez, there is just little time prior to the end of the universe. Here we watch one man plan his final speech, “something appropriate to say in those last few moments,” while begging his woman to stop doing laundry. His wife organizes everything, even hermetically sealing underwear. The piece is reflective, ingenuous, and provocative, making every reader wonder: what would I do with only six hours left until nonexistence?

    –Stefanie Freele, Fiction Editor

  • On LAR’s partnership with AROHO Foundation

    In the past year, the literary community has been taking part in a discussion that’s close to The Los Angeles Review’s heart: the status of women in print.When VIDA: Women in Literary Arts began its count–a tally of the numbers of men and women writers in major national journals–we at LAR weren’t surprised to see confirmation of what we already felt to be true: that women writers have an outsider status in much of literary publishing.

    We at LAR feel it is both our privilege and our responsibility to provide a home to an eclectic group of writers. Our identity as a West Coast journal under the umbrella of a West Coast press gives us outsider status that naturally makes us interested in outsider writing, and we’ve long been dedicated to representing a wide selection of fine work by women writers, minority writers, writers of all faiths, LGBTQ writers, writers outside the academy, and new writers publishing work for the first time.

    As a journal that routinely publishes equal numbers of men and women contributors, we hope to see changes in the literary landscape as a result of VIDA’s count. But we feel that a true move toward gender parity in literary publishing involves more than journals simply increasing the number of women in their pages. We feel that literary organizations like ours have a responsibility to uncover and discuss the many opportunities for women in writing, and to foster community. This year, it’s given us great pleasure to partner with A Room of Her Own Foundation, an organization that actively supports a community of women writers through its retreats, conferences, and through its $50,000 Gift of Freedom award that grants deserving women the financial freedom to write.

    In 2011, we’ve published the winners of A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando Awards–semiannual awards in poetry, nonfiction, short fiction, and flash fiction, that celebrate the diverse spectrum of women’s writing. The winners of the Orlando Awards are teachers, students, playwrights, urban farmers. They live in Los Angeles; Seattle; Louisville, Kentucky; Providence, Rhode Island. They are an eclectic group of women who deserve to be heard, and it’s our honor to present their work in our pages.

    In our recently released Issue 10, we’re proud to present Jen Silverman’s essay “Six Bright Horses and the Land of the Dead,” Jennifer Beebe’s poem “The Green Season,” Laura Brown-Lavoie’s short story “A Strange Woman,” and Ashley Kunsa’s flash fiction “A Woman’s Glory.”

    Learn more about A Room of Her Own Foundation: www.aroomofherownfoundation.org

  • Registration for our Online Workshops Closes 11/1

    November 1 is the last day to register for our Fall Online Workshops. Poetry with Tanya Chernov is filled to capacity, but there is one registration available in Flash Fiction with Stefanie Freele, and several registrations available in Nonfiction with Ann Beman. More details here.

  • Announcing LAR Issue 10

    We at The Los Angeles Review are pleased to announce the release of Issue 10, dedicated to Ishmael Reed, with contributing editor Douglas Kearney. This issue features new work by Terrance Hayes, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Peggy Shumaker, David Wagoner, Natalie Goldberg, Lydia Davis, Manuel Martinez and many more, with an expanded book reviews section that takes on the best of the West Coast and the nation.

    Buy Issue 10 for $15.00 plus shipping, or subscribe for the year (Issues 10 and 11) for $20.00 plus shipping.

Fiction

  • Some Girls Like. Get to know our new Fiction Editor.

    Most days, when a girl is hankering for some words on a page, she wants to read something fast-paced and lively. Some days, she wants to luxuriate in words and their meanings, and take a great amount of time to understand what, exactly, the author wants her to take away once she’s turned the last page of a submission.

    All days, a girl wants to read something that makes her want to know more about a character. A girl wants to be able to hear the characters rattling around in her own brain as they speak and do things and, in general, live out their lives, long after a manuscript’s been printed and bound.

    In general, a girl pays attention to voice. A strong voice makes a girl happy, the better to hear the characters rattling around in her head, my dear.

    Even better, a girl likes to see what some in the biz like to call a “strong plot line.” By this she does not mean that she wants to see only the plot line. By no means. She most definitely wants to see something happen, but that doesn’t mean that what happens should be all that goes on in a good story.

    Likewise, a girl is fully aware that some writers may use words in inventive ways. But she is most drawn to words that are used sparsely, and she finds herself curiously drawn to great dialogue.

    Some days a girl goes to the bookstore. She finds herself stuck in the mystery aisle, or sometimes, shamefully, in the thriller aisle, but these seem to be the places to which she gravitates most. She also is sometimes found lurking in the nature aisle, staring at animal photographs. You may find her lingering near Annie Proulx, or Raymond Chandler, or Dashiell Hammett. Predictably, you will also find her in the Alice Munro section, and even in the Sandra Cisernos and Sherman Alexie.

    You will NOT find her in the section of authors that write purely for their own gratification.

    Sometimes a girl gets lonely, you see, and wants to know that the writer is also writing for the reader.

    Perhaps that, then, is the thing you most need to know.

    Yi Shun Lai joins the staff of The Los Angeles Review as our new Fiction Editor this August.

  • Changes are Coming to Fiction at LAR

    The face of fiction at The Los Angeles Review is changing. This fall’s Issue 12, out in October of 2012, marks the final issue for our fiction editor, Stefanie Freele.

    Stefanie, the author of the collections Feeding Strays (2009) and Surrounded by Water (2012), has served as The Los Angeles Review‘s fiction editor since our sixth issue in the fall of 2009, and has been an invaluable force in bringing the best flash and short fiction to our pages.

    While Stefanie will be sorely missed at The Los Angeles Review, we wish her all the best in her continued writing and service to the literary community.

  • Stefanie Freele interviews Kat Meads

    Kat Meads – on Madam Lenin, Sleeplessness, and Writing Like A Man

    Interviewed by Stefanie Freele

    Kat Meads is the author of twelve books and chapbooks of poetry and prose. Her fifth novel, For You, Madam Lenin, is forthcoming this fall from Livingston Press. A native of North Carolina and graduate of the MFA Writing Program at UNC-Greensboro, she now calls the Bay Area home. Her awards include an NEA, a California Artist Fellowship and artist residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Millay Colony, and the Montalvo Center for the Arts. Other prizes include the Chelsea award for fiction, the New Letters award for essay, and the Editors’ Choice award from Drunken Boat. Her short plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York and the Midwest. Reviewers have called her work “smart and provocative” (Other Voices), “bold and beautiful” (Midwest Book Review), “riveting” (New Pages), “brilliant” (SFRevu), “passionate and gut-wrenching” (Alan DeNiro) and “breathtaking” (John Dufresne). She teaches in Oklahoma City University’s low-residency MFA program and as a Creative Nonfiction mentor. Visit her online at katmeads.com.

    SF: You have produced long fiction, short fiction, realistic fiction, sci-fi, poetry, fables, non-fiction, etc. What is it like to be prolific in many genres?

    KM: Actually, I don’t feel at all prolific. I started publishing fairly late by the standards of the day (in my thirties). And although it looks as if I’ve been cranking them out lately, the publication dates aren’t really indicative of when the books were written, or even started.

    When the Dust Finally Settles is a novel—and a short one!—that I rewrote for 20 years. And although Sleep was my first published novel, I’d written several versions of Kitty Duncan before starting on Sleep’s speculative journey. The novel that’s coming out in October from Livingston Press, For You, Madam Lenin, took eight years or so to research and compose, and it falls in the historical fiction category. But as far as genre jumping goes, I just follow my nose and whatever interests me at the moment. I don’t deliberately set out to vary the form.

    SF: Can you give us a sneak preview of Madam Lenin?

    KM: Sure. The snippet below is the novel’s introduction to both Nadezhda Krupskaya (Madam Lenin) and her acerbic mother, the narrator of this chapter:

    “When the tsar’s government ordered us from Poland in the spring of 1874, my daughter, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, was forced to leave behind her dog. A mongrel dog with a limp and copious fleas. Did such defects and disadvantages lessen my Nadya’s love for the beast? Not in the slightest. Very likely such misfortunes made my daughter cherish her pet all the more.”

    SF: What was behind the decision to and experience of trying a novel with a male protagonist in Senestre On Vacation? You also wrote this under an ambiguous pseudonym, Z.K. Burrus. This reader did not guess the author was female, you had me convinced. How did you inhabit the male mind while writing this novel?

    KM: Very happy to hear you were convinced! I’ve since owned up to the ruse, but for six months or more I had great fun putting together a Z.K. Burrus website, altering my singing voice to sound male on an “Irene, Goodnight” book trailer, posing online as Z.K., responding as Z.K.

    In Senestre, I wanted to see if could I “throw” my writer’s voice in that particular way. So writing that book was something of a self-to-self challenge. And there’s always the desire to “start fresh” with each project and pretend we come to it unencumbered by our various writerly tics and quirks. A few people did perceive the Kat in the Z.K. They had to be bound and gagged and locked in the cellar for six months, but otherwise…
    SF: In your novel The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan, you’ve paired two odd characters together: a sassy, lazy, yet clever teenage mother and a bright driven college student. What are your thoughts on the importance and technique of juxtaposing dialogue and individual voice of characters?

    KM: I suppose some would argue that whenever you bring together wildly different characters you are, as a writer, taking the easy road. Glaring differences always make for a certain degree of conflict and tension. But in Kitty Duncan I wanted those glaring differences to incite more than conversational sparring and stand-offs between narrator Mo and Kitty. I wanted those differences to cause Mo no end of doubt and trepidation, to push her to evaluate (and to continue evaluating) her life choices.

    What still catches me by surprise about that novel is the intensity of the reactions to Kitty Duncan, the character. People either love or loathe her. No neutrals. I was once discussing the book in a class at East Carolina University and one of the students started screaming—and I do mean screaming—about how much she utterly despised Kitty Duncan. Then again, another someone in that same class pledged to name her next cat Kitty Duncan—which was pretty damn cool.

    SF: In your novel Sleep (Livingston Press), separate cultures have developed in regard to their belief systems around the pros and cons of rest. You’ve said that this other-worldly sci-fi novel was inspired by your battles with insomnia. How has sleeplessness affected your writing?

    KM: Since I’m just now finishing up a collection of nonfiction called The Insomnia Essays, I’d say: a lot. I’m in perpetual mourning for the deep sleeping gal I once was. Truly.

    Very soon after I moved to California, my sleep battles began, but I avoided the word insomnia for a ridiculous amount of time. I guess I was hoping denial would be the cure. Regardless, insomnia it was and is. At the time—early 1990s—the culture was shifting to its all-information-all-the-time state of being and demand, and my brooding about that phenomenon also found its way into the book. I also think of Sleep as something of a future feminist fairytale, but that’s a mouthful that’ll never be taken up as a chant.

    SF: Your newest book, when the dust finally settles (Ravenna Press), is described by Jason Sanford, the founding editor of storySouth, as “explod(ing) the stale stereotypes of the South.” Was that your intention? How did your southern upbringing and experience play into the book?

    KM: Jason was very kind to say the book accomplished that, but as far as intentions—no. Dust started out as a fairly straightforward coming-of-age tale. Ultimately I realized I wanted the book to deal with regret, and regret isn’t really in a teenager’s vocabulary. So Clarence Carter, dead man narrating, came to be.

    Both dust and Kitty are set in Mawatuck County, a fictional stand-in for Currituck County, North Carolina, where I grew up. I’ve made no secret of that. The social and economic upheavals that were part of my own coming-of-age—the integration of schools, farmers ousted by real estate developers, daughters declining to marry and “settle down”—were in no way unique to Currituck. Nonetheless, life there changed fairly radically in a relatively short period of time. Fiction thrives on that kind of discord and realignment. Some material you seek out as a writer. Other material gets dumped in your lap. I’m a female born at a certain time in a certain place, and that place just happened to have been a changing South.

  • Jensen Beach: Priest Lake, Idaho

    Jensen Beach’s “Priest Lake, Idaho” appears in The Los Angeles Review Issue 10.

    There is a man who lives at the end of a street on the outskirts of a medium-sized city in the state of Washington. The street is a cul-de-sac. His house is the one with the black shutters that were replaced upside-down when the house was repainted. The man has since never been able to tell just what it is that looks so strange about his house, but he finds—every time he comes home—a deficit in its appearance. For a living he makes fine, artisan furniture. He specializes in rugged outdoor pieces, or maybe it’s Adirondack chairs. Either way, he owns a lot of tools, which he keeps in a shed in the backyard. Picture this shed: the house has been newly painted—yellow with white trim, black shutters (upside-down, as I’ve already mentioned)—but the shed has not. Dirty, white paint is flaking off the walls of the shed in roughly the shapes of familiar geographic bodies—Priest Lake in Idaho, for example, where the man often camped with his family. The roof of the shed is beginning to give—rot—it seems, from the inside out. It dips several inches at its peak, and a whole row of shingles has fallen into a dusty pile atop the long weeds. Or, if we decide this man is tidy and meticulous, replace the weeds with Bergenia. The man’s wife might be dead. Let’s say that she is. She’s dead. The pain is still familiar and, for this reason, confusing to the man. His work has been suffering. There is a stack of unused hemlock boards beside the tool shed. The man speaks of his wife in the present tense, says things like, “my wife enjoys camping.” It is not that the man has forgotten his wife is dead; it’s only that, in the way I am doing now, he uses language to manipulate how he feels. His wife enjoyed camping at Priest Lake in Idaho, and, if the man says it often enough, she does now, too. She enjoys it. She exists in this enjoyment.

    One evening in the last week of October, on a rare warm evening, the man is sitting out on his back porch. Depending on what sorts of habits we might choose to believe this man employs, he is drinking a glass of wine, or maybe scotch, or maybe he’s smoking a cigar. Behind the man, the fresh paint of his house has a glowing quality to it in the dusk. The back of the house faces west, and the sun sets behind a thick row of pines that mark the edge of his property. In the shadow of these trees, the tool shed appears filthy and decrepit. The man watches it from the porch. He is sitting in a chair he made with his own hands, and it is comfortable. The longer the man looks at the tool shed, the more he becomes convinced that it must be replaced. The painters offered to paint it with the same pattern as the house, but the man refused. It’s a tool shed, he thought then, it’s supposed to look the way it does. Now, though, he sees it for what it is. It is old, and it will not stand for much longer. The man recognizes himself, or some image of himself, in this shed. Like it, he is old, and will, more than likely, not be around all that much longer. He’s already lost his wife. His son—or it could just as well be a daughter—is married and lives back East. He’s alone, apart from the dog I haven’t yet mentioned he owns. The man reflects on all this for a moment. Inside the shed, he keeps the means of his livelihood. Without his tools he could not do his job. There are dowel jigs and other, more fantastic, pieces of equipment. The man that this man is is wrapped up in this job. He makes fine furniture. It is what he does until one day it will be what he used to do.

    He gets up slowly from the chair that he once made, goes to the garage for the gas can he keeps filled for the lawnmower he uses once a week in the summer, and returns to the backyard. By now, it is dark. The pines are tall silhouettes. Or he might instead notice the orange glow of the security light, only just turned on, at the neighbor’s house. He might hear a ringing phone from an open window, or a siren from a few blocks over. Some kind of sensory detail that makes clear to the man that the world is bigger than just his yard seems appropriate here. The man empties the contents of the gas can onto the shed. He splashes it on the peeling walls. More flakes of paint fall to the ground. The man might be happy about what he is doing, whistling or smiling, perhaps; or he might be upset; or he might not feel much of anything at all. Who can say? He takes a lighter from his pocket—the cigar-smoking seems more convenient at this point than drinking—and looks around for something to light. If the man is a careful sort of person, he will go into his house and find a newspaper or maybe one of the old quilting magazines his wife used to get from the library sales and rip the covers off of—the man never understood why she did that—and light this first and use it to set the shed to flames. Or he will find a stick or a pile of dried grass. What is not a question, though, is that he will light the tool shed on fire, and that it will burn to the ground. Smoke, first a thin gray cloud of it, but soon, when the thinners and stains in the shed become fuel, darker and then black, rising into the sky: acrid and dense. The man takes a step back. The heat is still on his face so he takes another step back. Then another. And in this way he goes about the task of building something new.

  • Ray Vukcevich: What the Socks Meant

    As 2011 draws to a close, we’re featuring some highlights from our publication year with selections from Issues 9 and 10. Ray Vukcevich’s “What the Socks Meant” appears in Issue 9 of The Los Angeles Review.

    What the Socks Meant

    I set traps, and I fall into them.

    Because you won’t haunt me, I haunt myself.

    Better you should come screaming and decomposing out of the closet, or be a stiff zombie walking woman rising up from under the bed, or bang on the walls, rattle the china and spoons, moan, manifest inexplicable cold spots. At least say, “Boo.” Something.

    Today, I ambush myself with purple socks.

    I might not have come across the socks for many months, maybe not for years, maybe never, if I did the laundry more often. But I am a busy man. So very very busy. I am the sort of man who should have hired someone else to do his laundry. You sometimes overhear such men saying things like, Yes, it’s an added expense but when you consider the cost of my time, and we see the dot dot dots trailing off into space in the same direction he’s gazing while we consider the cost of our own time and wonder if he will be doing anything important while he’s not doing his laundry.

    It hadn’t been my birthday the day you pushed the small flat box across the breakfast table to me. It was about the size of a checkbook. There was a blue bow. Your secret smile said oh just wait until you see what’s in this box! You may have been bouncing a little with excitement in your chair. Yes, I definitely remember some bouncing.

    I ripped off the gift wrapping and opened the box and looked down into the black void of space. I imagined my hand passing through darkness into nothing, but my fingers were stopped by cool smoothness, and I lifted the deep purple mass out of the box. A pair of socks. I turned them in my hands and rubbed them between my fingers and thumbs, and they caught the morning sunlight and gleamed like incandescent lizards—X-eyed, pretending to be dead so I might get confused and put them down, and they could get away.

    They’re not really silk, you said. It would be just too weird to give you silk socks, you laughed and looked away, but they are very silky, don’t you think?

    I did think they were silky. What had you been trying to tell me with those socks?

    What should I have done that morning instead of saying hey cool and kissing you on the cheek and after a brief period of sighing over the color and silkiness of the socks taking them to the bedroom and putting them in my sock drawer where they remained until today?

    I should have put them on. Yes, that’s it. I should have pulled off my shoes and replaced my old socks with the new socks. I should have held up the legs of my pants and walked around so you could have gotten a good look.

    Or maybe I should have undressed altogether and put on the shiny purple socks and then done a runway routine around the kitchen until you were clapping and laughing and I was so red you’d think I’d been cooking myself nude in the sunlight all day long, and we would have both called in sick—the giggles, we’ve got the giggles and can’t come to work today.

    I could have danced, done deep knee bends, jumping jacks and shooed you back to bed and then made another breakfast, a better one, and brought it to you on a tray.

    Is that what you meant by the socks? Am I getting warmer?

    You’re not saying?

    Okay, okay.

    I will put on the socks now, because it’s either that or wear dirty socks. Maybe putting on dirty socks would be better. Maybe I should also not bother to shave. People will think I’m going for that retro stubbly look. But I’m not going for anything. I’m in a kind of fog sitting here on the bed in my underwear holding the limp lizard socks with nothing left to do but put them on.

    The left one goes on without a problem. It’s cool and smooth and thin, and it fits so well you might imagine I’ve painted my foot.

    As I pull on the other sock, I tear something loose with a ragged toenail, and a thread pulls up tight between two toes. Now I must take the sock off and snip the thread and maybe cut my toenails. But that would mean I’d have to take off the other sock, too, because I would want to cut both sets of toenails, wouldn’t I?

    Forget it. The thread will break.

    Instead of breaking, the strong silky thread cuts me deeply between the toes.

    No one ever mistakes being cut for something else. Being cut is an immediately recognizable sensation. I realize this will change the way my day goes. I wonder how badly I’m bleeding.

    I pull off the sock. It’s wet already. Yes, there is quite a lot of blood.

    I hop into the bathroom and close the toilet and sit down and snatch off a bunch of toilet paper and apply pressure to the cut between my toes.

    When the toilet paper is soaked, I replace it with new toilet paper. I would throw the bloody toilet paper in the toilet, but I am sitting on the closed lid, so I throw it on the floor. I do that many times. The bleeding doesn’t stop.

    The pile of bloody paper is getting pretty impressive.

    I’ve cut myself with a sock, and now I’m bleeding to death. I feel ridiculous.

    I will have to call 911. Help me, I’ll say, I’m bleeding. The operator will want to know who and where I am and what happened. Why are you bleeding, sir? Well, I was putting on my socks—you know, the purple ones? No good. I will have to make something up, something about an intruder with a knife. And this housebreaker cut you between the toes? Oh, it’s hard to explain! Maybe I should say a burglar shot me. But then the paramedics might be primed for another situation altogether, and when they got here, they would not know what to do with a man bleeding between the toes. They might be totally at a loss. They might just go away and let me die. Not that I will call them anyway. No one calls an ambulance for a sock cut. The bleeding will stop.

    The bleeding does not stop.

    I’m feeling dizzy.

    After I bleed to death, I will haunt you. You know I will. I won’t just go off somewhere and not haunt you. Watch for me.

    I will leave you a note. Yes, that is what I will do. I will write you a note, explaining everything and telling you what to expect.

    Can a ghost haunt a ghost? And what am I doing back in the kitchen? And how come I’m wearing nothing but my shorts and one purple sock? I slump down at the table.

    I must have circled the table many times like a dog getting ready to settle down for a nap because there are bloody footprints all over the floor. Why did I do that? There is the grocery pad and pen in front of me. That explains it. I was wandering around looking for the means to write you that note.

    I’ve killed myself with a sock. The thought does not frighten me now. I need only write my last thoughts to you, and that will be that. I will tell you how I should have put on the socks. I will tell you how I should have stayed home that last day, how I should have seen somehow that it was the last day. I will try not to be snippy about the fact you have done no haunting. I will talk about all the good times. I will list them. We’ll laugh at all the sudden memories.

    Oh, hello, here you are at last, looking so light, so bright, like clear glass—hard to see, I mean. I can see right through you.

    Never satisfied, you say, I’ve come, and now I’m not meaty enough for you?

    Tears in alternating colors come to your eyes, red, blue, yellow, and green, and run down your glass face and fall and splatter on your glass knees and bounce away in all directions.

    No, no, you are plenty meaty. You are the meatiest!

    You sniff. You smile a small sad smile.

    I put my head down on the table to die.

    Which is all well and good, but some time later, I come to, and I am not dead. The bleeding has stopped. No one dies from a sock cut between the toes. I get up and go to the refrigerator and drink orange juice right from the carton. It’s late. I should call in with an excuse for missing work again.

    There will be a lot of cleaning up to do here. There is blood all over the place—on the floor, on the table, on the walls. It looks like whatever died here put up a fight. I take the orange juice back to the table and slump down again. I pull the pad in close to read what I wrote.

    Bloody fingerprints and one line.

    “I so do miss you. Oh, and thanks for the socks.”

  • Freele Pesters Rusty Barnes

    From time to time, LAR’s Fiction Editor, Stefanie Freele, pesters our contributors for their thoughts on fiction, form, and function. This week, she talks to Rusty Barnes, author of “An Explanation of Love,” LAR Issue 8.

    From “An Explanation of Love” by Rusty Barnes: “They say get into the ambulance, go with your wife, and I do. Everyone ignores that she’s not my wife anymore.”

    SF: How important is the first line in short fiction?

    RB: Incredibly so. You need a reason to keep the reader reading, even and especially in the beginning. Don’t imagine that your wonderful prose will keep people on their butts with their heads in your precious work. You need that prose skill, yes, and for the kind of stories I write, you need a protagonist to appear up front as well, and for other kinds of stories, you need even more strong prose or an unusual idea to keep readers in it to win it. Always remember that attention spans are short and the quicker (and better) you hook readers the better off you’ll be. Beware, though, of too much front-loading. I start many stories with a kind of personalized rubric that I then have to edit out in revisions. Joe Levens, the savvy editor of Summerset Review, pointed out in a discussion that so many stories begin by naming a character ‘X’ in the subject of a sentence and continuing on to have ‘X’ perform some random action while thinking of ‘insert plot point’ here. And I said, uh-oh. I am guilty as all hell.

    SF: Does the first line have a job?

    RB: The job of the first line is to get a reader to the second line, and also to establish tone. Yes, that job begins with the very first sentence.

    SF: Where did the inspiration for this first line (and subsequent story) come from?

    RB: I thought of a man in an ambulance who wasn’t hurt, but who had complex stakes tied in with the well-being of the person who was hurt. That was really it. I wrote the whole thing in maybe forty minutes, ran it through the grammar grinder, and there it was. I had always wanted to have a protagonist talking to God, inspired perhaps by the great Andre Dubus’s “A Father’s Story.”

    SF: What is a favorite first line from your own work or another writer?

    RB: William Gibson’s first line of the novel Neuromancer has always been a great model: “The sky over Chiba City was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” He doesn’t have a character in the first line, but how could anyone not want to know this book after reading that?

    Rusty’s new fiction collection, Mostly Redneck, can be purchased here, and his flash collection, Breaking it Down, can be purchased here.

  • Announcing Issue 12′s Dedication

    The Los Angeles Review is pleased to announce that Issue 12, for release in October of 2012, will be dedicated to Ron Carlson.

    Ron Carlson, the notable West Coast fiction writer, has published four novels, most recently The Signal (Penguin), a young adult novel, five collections of short stories, a nonfiction book, and has been widely anthologized. Among his honors are a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Cohen Prize, and the National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award.

    Submissions for Issue 12 of The Los Angeles Review will open February 1.

    As always, we suggest writers become familiar with our journal’s range and aesthetic before submitting work. Please consider ordering our current issue, dedicated to Ishmael Reed, today.

  • Emily Walker interviews Alexander MacLeod

    Alexander MacLeod currently lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, which, for an ignorant American like myself, sounds like a place you’d film landscape shots for Irish Spring commercials. Someday I will visit this mystical place and I hope it lives up to the fantasy I’ve concocted in my twisted brain. After years of slogging through the rigors of academia, MacLeod released his first short story collection, Light Lifting, in September 2010. Hours after its release it was long-listed (and eventually short-listed) for Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize. MacLeod went from university professor at the relatively small St. Mary’s University in Halifax, to a Canadian literary sensation seemingly overnight. The reality: Light Lifting took the better part of fifteen years to create before the world was able to first crack its spine. The first time I met MacLeod was in February 2011, when he visited the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing program and he sat in a workshop of a story I wrote. Since then, I’ve stayed in occasional contact with him, and decided to discuss his crazy ride over the last year.

    EW: It’s been a bit of an interesting year for you since releasing Light Lifting. How have being nominated (or winning) awards like the Giller, the Frank O’Connor Award, and the Atlantic Book Awards over the last year impacted your writing and your life?

    AM: Well, I haven’t done any real writing at all in the past year so I guess that qualifies as a serious impact.  I have travelled more in the last ten months than in the previous ten years and there were times when it got a bit tiring and the schedule was hard on my family at home, but we got through it.  My wife and kids and I all understand that this past year was kind of like winning the lottery, so we just held on tight for the whole strange ride.  It was great to meet so many different readers from different places and the response the book received was almost overwhelming. Now, though, there are new prize-winning stories for everybody to think and talk about and I’m actually very eager to climb back under my rock and get back to work.  

    EW: Light Lifting has a lot of characters in these stories that are working-class- was that a conscious decision you made to primarily create those kinds of characters?

    AM: No, not really. When people ask me about representations of class, I think the question says more about our standard readings expectations than it does about my particular book.  I see the characters in Light Lifting as completely normal and average. Strange things may happen to them during the course of the plot, but there’s not too much that’s out of the ordinary about their lives.  Class is a relative term and though in real life we all know there are far more people working in factories than in universities, you’d never guess that from reading most contemporary North American literature.  I think that’s why a story about somebody who puts in interlocking brick is immediately seen as a ‘working class’ story while a story about a family in the suburbs is rarely discussed as  ‘middle class’ literature.  Both kinds of characters are shaped by the material conditions of their lives, just as they are both shaped by gender and race and sexuality and the rest of it, but it’s normally the bricklayer that will be interpreted as a classed subject. If you pushed me on it, I’d say that I am far more interested in the idea of ‘work’ itself – the way we all have to give our energy over to something – and I think that is a far more personal negotiation.

    EW: I think “Wonder About Parents” is probably my favourite story from the collection because it showcases how love can be created and thrive in chaos. You’ve described that story as being the ‘dividing-line’ of the book, and it definitely has a different tone and feel than the rest of the stories. Why did you choose to include it considering it’s a bit different than the others?

    AM: Thanks for bringing up that particular story.  It’s my favourite, too, but that may be because I’ve had to fight for it a bit.  I’ve found that if readers will ‘go along’ with Wonder About Parents, then there’s nothing else in the book that’s going to bother them. They may, in fact, find the rest of the stories to be kind of traditional and conservative and boring.  ‘Parents’ was almost the last story I wrote for the collection so it feels the freshest for me and I really wanted it in there to show that the whole book wasn’t going to be exclusively about loneliness or about kids and the risks they take. After I read Hans Zinsser’s extraordinary (and slightly crazy) book – Rats, Lice and History – I knew there was something powerful in that image of how civilization has struggled with lice over the millennia. The way these stubborn parasites are so intimately connected to human experience and all those associations they carry with filth and poverty and shame: I thought I could do something with that mix of ingredients.  I also wanted to think a bit about how love works in the real world and the challenges of dealing with a domestic lice infestation – all the deeply personal but seemingly never-ending work that demands  – came close to how I see it. ‘Parents’ isn’t really a romantic story, but at some level I wanted it to touch on the fragile possibilities of mutual trust and loyalty and I thought those qualities were worth looking at.

    EW: When I was in undergrad I was a double major in English Literature and Creative Writing, and by the end I felt like the English part of my degree was sort of hindering my writing because I always tried to think about it in academic contexts, rather than character and narrative arc. You teach English Literature primarily- do you think being an English academic has hindered or helped your writing over the years?

    AM: That divide between the creative and critical is an ancient bit of conflict and there’s no easy resolution to it.  I was teaching a class on Plato’s literary theory this week and it came up again in a text that was 2,500 years old but still hit on the exact same frustration you’re describing.  Knowing that this is a timeless, give-and- take relationship that is never going to go away is actually kind of comforting to me – writers will always need readers and readers will always need writers – and in my experience, I have tried to balance both sides.  Teaching and all the plain old bureaucratic work of a university do certainly take away the time and energy you could devote to writing, but I think good writers have to be good readers.  Like lots of other people, I often find the purposeful obfuscation of some theoretical jargon to be very frustrating, but I also feel that concentrating on ‘difficult’ books and giving them careful attention in a university classroom is never a bad thing.

    EW: There’s a bit of a fear among artists in Canada with the recent election of a Conservative majority government, because under a Conservative minority government we had some of the largest cuts to arts grants. How have grants like the Canada Council Grants helped your career over the years, and where would your writing be without them?

    AM: I’ve received one Canada Council grant and another similar award from the Nova Scotia Department of Culture and both were very helpful to me because I used the money they gave me buy time and that clear block of time turned out to be far more valuable than the cash.  I think governments owe it to their constituents to support the arts at the local, provincial and national levels. I’ve heard the conservative party line on this issue  – we should leave everything to market forces and whatever kind of lowest common denominator culture they produce should be accepted as an accurate representation of our society – but I just don’t buy it. Practically every important advance in Canada’s intellectual life – in both the arts and the sciences – has received some key support from the government and if we want to continue to make advances, we need to continue to support that kind of work.

    EW: You teach Creative Writing at St. Mary’s as well. What are you telling your students about the art of short story writing? Is it dying? Is it thriving?

    AM: I tell them that it’s not dying or thriving, but it is getting along and there are definitely many, many excellent readers of short fiction out there.  Yes, I understand that most book clubs, and therefore most big publishers, prefer big historical novels, but I believe that artists should be left alone to do whatever they think is best, and I would never force somebody away from the genre.  Our students at Saint Mary’s work primarily in short fiction while they’re here in the workshop, but they have gone on to do lots of other things in their writing lives so I don’t see it as a test of purity or anything like that. Good writing appears in lots of different forms and the short story has strengths that we don’t find in novels or poems, just as those other genres have strengths we don’t find in short fiction. I love the way short fiction often surprises its reader -  the way a good story can surge, or pivot, or drop you into a whole new world. The writers I love have complete mastery over the narrative structure of their work, and I’m often amazed at how they can take us from one starting point to completely unforeseen conclusion in just a few carefully crafted pages.

    EW: What next? Any more manuscripts on the horizon or are you still reeling from the last year?

    AM: I don’t have anything new yet. There are a couple of ideas I’ve been churning around for the last little while and whenever I do get back to the desk,  I know exactly where I’m going to head. It’s actually been great to have that feeling of anticipation again, to be raring to go with a clear vision in your head and at least a beginning notion of how the project should be tackled. Looking forward to writing is much more fun than writing itself and even though I know the long grind is coming, I still can’t wait to get at it.

    Emily Walker’s essay “Breadcrumbs and Bird Legs” appears in Issue 10 of the Los Angeles Review.

  • Philip John Harris: The Novelist Identity in LA

    It’s mid-August, and I’m at a birthday party for a screenwriter friend of mine. He lives on the Miracle Mile, just south of Olympic.  His small back yard is filled with family, friends and a gaggle of show biz folk—that scruffy guy is an actor, the blond in the jeans is an agent, the tall woman with the brown bob is head of development at NBC.

    Leaning against the makeshift bar, a hipster I’ve just met dives headfirst into small talk, asking me, “So, where are you from?”

    I tell him I was born at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Hollywood, California.

    “Wow!” he responds, “I’ve never met anyone actually from here. What do you do?”

    “I’m a writer,” I say off-handedly. Everyone’s a writer.

    He takes a slurp of his cheap beer and says, “Oh, me too. I’m with CAA. One of my pilots is in preproduction, and next week I’m pitching to Comedy Central and FOX. What show are you on?”

    My face screws up as I say, “I’m not on a show. I’m a prose writer, finishing up my first novel.”

    “But, you do screenwriting, too, right, to pay the bills?”

    I shake my head.

    “Oh,” he says.

    With a sincere hope of putting him out of his confused misery, I walk away.

    In college, where show business isn’t, every writing class I had was based on the workshop model, with the underlying format of community being as paramount and vaguely present as the holy ghost. In Los Angeles, Paramount is the name of a studio. I love my hometown. I still live here. I go to Dodger games. I curse Hollywood traffic during Oscar week. I smirk affectionately at young couples on the West Side who complain about bagels as their children languorously lounge in four hundred dollar strollers. I eat tamales bought off street vendors in Boyle Heights. My senior prom was at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum in Elysion Park. The first club I ever went to was Rage on Santa Monica Boulevard in 1999. And yet, I still feel like an outsider.

    Finding other prose writers from LA is near impossible. I’ve heard tales of them, but I’ve yet to meet them, let alone form an actual writing community. There is a disconnection between the industry of Los Angeles and the perceived culture of books. Yes, we have the Yearly Book Festival. Yes, we have entities like the Los Angeles Review of Books; but there is still a cultural stigma that pervades the city, keeping the voices of future writers handicapped from hitting it big, relegating book culture to a few pages in the Art section of the Sunday edition of the LA Times. Why is this?

    A friend of mine, Amanda-Faye Jimenez, a blogger and writer, had this to say: “I love this city so much, but as a writer I find it somewhat stifling. I can’t say why exactly. I know a successful novelist who lives in LA, but she travels a lot. Of course, her screenwriting gigs pay the bills in between books.” Gregory Bonsignore, a screenwriter, says, “I think novelists are a little cleverer than to live in Los Angeles, and screenwriters kind of have to.” And Billy Pollina, a self-proclaimed writer and producer, had merely this to say: “What’s a book?”

    So, what is it about LA? I checked in with some writer friends on Google+ to see how they would weigh in, asking them specifically if they would ever want to be novelists who lived in LA? Again, the responses were not kindly toward The City of Angels. A writer living in Wyoming said, “[Los Angeles is] the last place on the planet I’d move. Shudder.” A writer living in New York said, “I left LA for that very reason—I didn’t have to be there!”

    And yet, this is where I stay. I find moments and instances pregnant with possibility every day in this city. Successful authors do live here. Christopher Rice and Brett Easton Ellis to name but a few. I’m not convinced it’s impossible to be a novelist in LA. I guess it’s just a little harder and a bit more isolating. Why? A state of mind? A perception of Angelenos? Well, sorry. That’s not enough of a reason for me to leave.

    Philip John Harris’s “Ghosts of the Canyon” is forthcoming in LAR 10, October 2011. http://authorphilip.com/

  • Debra Daniel: Can a Funny Writer be Taken Seriously?

    From the time I was a little girl, I could make people laugh.  Jokes, puns, impersonations, parodies of songs, I had a million of them. Was I genetically predisposed for funniness? I doubt it, my parents being the polar opposites of hilarious, knee-slapping pranksters.  Nevertheless, I reveled in my role as the comic relief in any and every situation. And I wasn’t just orally witty. I found that my sense of humor could translate to the written word. Whenever a teacher assigned a theme, I’d invariably look for a way write funny. How cool I thought it was to make someone laugh even when you weren’t standing directly in front of them. I wanted to do for people what Mad Magazine did for me.

    So now here I am attempting to make it in the literary world as a serious writer. The problem is I’m quirky, offbeat, witty, hysterical, and that just doesn’t cut it when the Pulitzer committee meets. I really do try to be morose, maudlin, and melancholy. What I wouldn’t give to inspire a lump in the throat, a tear in the eye, a plucking of the old heartstring.  Come on. Throw me a bone. At least, I deserve an occasional, “aw.” I don’t expect the Pulitzer, but it would be nice to have an editor, a publisher, hell, even my family, to realize the effort it takes to evoke a giggle, a titter, much less a guffaw. I’d love to utter the words, “Does this Pushcart make me look fat?”

    I can write about divorce and depression. I can write about death and destruction. I can even do it with amazing alliterative powers. Notice, for example, all the d’s I’ve already used in this paragraph, and that was without even trying. We funny writers can craft a sentence with a complex clause or two. We can extend a metaphor and do it without dangling a single participle. Come on, people, now, smile on your brother. We’re the stand-up comics of the literary world. Can’t you guys love us just the way we are? I am a funny writer. If you cut my story, will I not read? Take my prose, please.

    Debra A. Daniel’s story, “There Are Reasons You Don’t Hear About Pavlov’s Cat,” appears in  LAR Issue 10 (forthcoming in October 2011).

  • Red Hen Short Story Award Deadline: June 30

    Fiction writers, take note! The Red Hen Press Short Story Award’s deadline is rapidly approaching. The winner of the short story award receives $1,000 and publication in The Los Angeles Review. More details below.

    The Red Hen Press Short Story Award

    For publication in the The Los Angeles Review

    $1000 Award

    Deadline: June 30, 2011

    Final Judge: Rob Roberge

    Established in 2001, in celebration of the new century and a new tradition of literature, this award is for an original short story with a maximum of 25 pages. Submission is open to all writers and themes. This year’s judge is Rob Roberge.

    Find guidelines and submission procedures here. In order to be considered for the Short Story Award, you must submit your work via Red Hen Press, not via The Los Angeles Review. Contest submissions sent to The Los Angeles Review will be deleted unread.

  • Stefanie Freele interviews Roy Kesey

    In May, LAR’s Fiction Editor Stefanie Freele interviewed Roy Kesey, Issue 9 contributor and author of the new novel Pacazo.

    SF: You live in Peru now after having grown up in Northern California; the book takes place in Peru. I can’t help but wonder what real-life experiences may have shown up in the book.

    RK: Perfect timing—I was just reading an old interview with Bernard Malamud, and when he gets the same question, he says, “Source questions are piddling, but you’re my friend, so I’ll tell you.” I like that, but I also think they’re fun, and basically harmless. So. Lots of bits from my life and the lives of people I’ve known found homes in Pacazo, but of course they were always de- and then re-contextualized, or, maybe better, each pitted as if an olive, so that I could then stuff in the proper stuffing, chestnut or pimento or serial killer as the scene required.

    Let’s see, off the top of my head: I did once lead a choir in a song I’d just made up called “Happy Verbena To You.” The turkey ‘n’ machete scene is something that kind of happened in Guatemala back in 1994. “Arantxa” and “Reynaldo” are the names of actual friends of mine—the characters have nothing at all to do with the real people, but I loved the sound of those names too much not to ask for a loan. What else. I did plenty of book-ferrying when the Language Center I was running got flooded during the ’98 Niño storms. Is that enough for a start?

    SF: Pacazo is a heavy book, both deliriously intelligent and heavy in weight: 531 pages, equaling 1.8 lbs on my scale. Lately, it seems there is a boom of flash fiction, yet you deliver a wonderful, long journey. This is against what we hear at writing conferences –that agents and publishers aren’t interested in the longer book, readers don’t have time for length, short books are cheaper, etc. Did you run into any of these roadblocks? When you began this book, did you head out to write a long novel? What seed began this book and how did it sprout? How did the novel evolve? Did you know the plot before you wrote? Did you outline?

    RK: Thank you, and sorry about the weight—just remember, lift with your legs, not with your back.

    As far as the waves of literary fashion go, I’ve always been a pretty crap surfer. And these days it’s even worse, or, I guess, better. Living in Peru gives me the luxury of not knowing what’s booming or bottoming out, the luxury of bearing no responsibility except to the narrative itself. That’s overstating the case, of course—I could always find out if I wanted to—but it’s not some constant slight smell filling the room, the way it seems to be in some places.

    I’m sure there’s some limited truth to the current wisdom regarding biases against longer work on the part of some people in all parts of the industry, but there are also so many counter-examples (2666, Against the Day, The Lacuna, Wolf Hall, Tree of Smoke and on and on and on and that’s just recent literary fiction…) that I’m not sure it’s something to lose sleep over. The manuscript sold at half its current length—more on that below—so my agent never had to worry about it. Much to their credit, even when my final pre-edited draft came in at twice the length they were expecting, my publishers never gave me any grief at all, though they must have winced at the thought of the printing costs. And from there, my editor helped slim it down by forty pages or so, but that was just polishing—we didn’t cut any scenes.

    As far as your other questions go, when I started writing it, I wasn’t looking to write any sort of book at all, and I knew nothing whatsoever about the plot. I was just following a voice that interested me, poking it now and then with a sharp stick to get it to show its fangs. At the beginning I was working on it as a short story, and McSweeney’s published it that way a few years later, though by then I already had a whole first (or second?) draft of the novel. It had become clear to me really quickly that everything was coming together for a longer project—the voice first and foremost, but also the amount of event that was accruing to it, the other characters appearing in the vortex, the pleasure of painting with local colors, etc.

    And yes, I did do quite a detailed outline, but not until I’d been working on the book for several months, just following the voice wherever it wanted to go. I’m sure that in the short term, that helped me to stay focused and clean, plot- and character-wise. In the long term, though, it may have been a problem, or at least set the scene for one, in the sense that having used such a complete outline gave me a sense of completeness that the manuscript itself (at that point, Year 8, Draft 9, a measly 350 pages long) didn’t merit. That was less an issue of length, though, than of density—or rather, of its lack. Not linguistic density, but maybe thematic? It was missing a certain aboutness, is how I would unhelpfully put it. That was a problem that took me a few years to fix. And by the time I did, the manuscript was almost 600 pages long—but at least now they all counted for something.

    SF: Occasionally in Pacazo there is this very unusual sentence structure I came to love and look for, where you string the current action in with the thoughts of John Segovia all in one breathless sentence: “I nibble at the last crouton and read Inge Schjellerup and the murder cannot have had anything to do with Pilar, simply cannot.” What do you call this and why does it work so well, when we know it goes against all our grammatical upbringings?

    RK: I’m glad you like it, and dang, you’re right, it needs a name. How about Wolverining? Sugar Pounding? Build-a-bear? Shave the Uncle?

    Ahem.

    I guess that what interests me about this structure is that it’s vaguely analogous to how certain strings-of-experience actually feel as they occur in our brains. Not all brains, maybe, but most, or so I hope. And not all the time, certainly. But even during relatively straightforward mental progressions, I think that most of our thoughts don’t need to be fully instantiated—fully thought—for them to do the necessary work. They only need to be begun. We get the first few words into thought-language, parenthesize the rest, and already we’re at the beginning of the next needed thought.

    All of which is hard to do clearly on the page, of course. But I don’t think it’s necessary to do it fully every time in order for a reader to hear it happening throughout the book. I think it might work a little the way dialect does. We don’t have to drop every ‘g’ in the book; if we drop one or two in the first paragraph (or even just imply that they’ve been dropped,) then the reader will hear them dropped for the rest of the book, without all the irritating apostrophes.

    The other thing I’ll say is that even brains disposed to work this way, skittering from one subject (or one century or one country) to the next in the space of a single sentence, are not like this under all circumstances. It happens more, I suspect, when we’re under stress of certain sorts. Which is to say, there was sadness and violence and skitteryness in my narrator’s voice even before I knew that anything bad had happened to him. It was his voice, in fact, that taught me what had happened.

    SF: There is a juxtaposition in the novel between the high standards set for John Segovia by the university –he is expected to behave professorially even off-campus, and all his odd behavior seems to be reported – and the corruption around him. He seems to be paying corrupt (yet usually pleasant) officials left and right. This is very different than in the U.S. Is this the type of scenario an American faces living in South America?

    RK: I think that every given setting is just a new conceit: a particular and particularizing context, a new set of challenges and pressures, ones that will require new defense strategies on the part of each character. I wanted to get John in a lot of different kinds of trouble, and see which ones cowed him, and which ones made him rise up.

    The university, for example, serves as an oasis of sorts in some respects. It’s the one place in the city that’s relatively free of trash, of graffiti, of the kind of corruption you mention. You don’t have to bribe anyone to make photocopies for you, or to water the flowers. But the place has its own ridiculousnesses, its own extremes, and thus creates new tensions in John’s brain, ones that couldn’t have been caused elsewhere, and that are important in terms of how his life in Piura has become what it is, and also, of course, what it will turn into in the future.

    As for the realism question, I think you’re right—basic human corruption manifests itself differently in different places. You’re more likely to run into the extremely low-level “problem-solving” sort of corruption you reference in some parts of Latin America than in the U.S. or Europe, for example, where the corruption tends to be on a much larger scale, and to happen farther up the food chain—the scandal there not being what’s illegal, but what’s legal, as the Bogle quote less confusingly has it.

    SF: The editing process between you and Matt Bell: how did that work?

    RK: Like gangbusters. Literally, we went out, found a bunch of gangs, and just totally busted the shit out of them. This was possible because he Got the Book. Partly because he’s read and thought well about a ton of good books, and partly because he put the work in on this particular book. He’s just very, very good at the job.

    It was an incredibly dense, intense process, mostly because we were up against it, time-wise, but also because that’s just how the two of us are geared, I think. I knew exactly what I wanted of/from the book, and there weren’t any major issues with the text—I’d been working on it very hard for a very long time—but all the same, getting everything right to the best of our abilities meant hours and hours every day for six weeks, thinking about very little else.

    I was fairly useless to my family during this period. I am not proud of that. But I’m glad of the book that came of it, and very grateful to Matt in particular for making sure that my own obsessions never came to work against the book at any point, and thus for bringing Pacazo to a place of far greater pacasification than I ever could have on my own.

  • Daniel Coshnear on The Balanced Life

    (Notes for a talk to the Writing Certificate students at UC Berkeley Extension.)

    First, so as not to be misleading, successful here does not mean lucrative. I am speaking as one who has made very little money directly from writing, but who earns half a meager living from teaching writing. Successful means to have continued to write now twelve years after completing a grad program in writing, to still find pleasure in it, to publish occasionally, to still, now and then, surprise myself. Successful means sustaining hard work in a pleasurable way.

    The real purpose of this discussion focuses on the idea of balance.

    Let’s start with the easy stuff. If you’re a writer and going to get married or enter into a long term partnership, don’t partner up with another writer, or for that matter, a musician, someone studying to be a masseuse (though there could be benefits there), or a grad student/dog walker. Find someone with a steady job. This someone should have an even temperament, make witty conversation, and enjoy handling the household finances. She/he should not stuff her/his feelings, but rather be one who can fight efficiently, get quickly to the point, accept your apologies, and move on. You should apologize frequently for your failure to hold up your end of responsibilities. As a writer, you should be practiced at noticing little things, so make a practice of being grateful and saying so to her/him for the little things she/he does. Don’t call them little things, though.

    If you plan to have children—why would you do that?  But children tend to show up; they charge in with a Ready or Not, Ollie Ollie in free, whatever that means. So if you must have children, have the kind who are intelligent and independent and who from an early age put themselves to bed. It doesn’t hurt if your children make witty conversations, too.

    Or perhaps it’s your wish to write about families. Then go ahead, marry the first nut you fall in love with, someone who could get his or her picture on the cover of the DSM.  Expect trouble from your spawn. Expect to do their homework. Learn to make your 4’s and S’s backwards. Learn to say everything two or three times, at least. Take plenty of notes.

    Suppose you have to have a job—but of course you do. Choose the kind of work which does not tax your creativity or your passion, which permits you to think about what’s on your mind. Perhaps the best job puts you in a position to meet people and hear stories, but requires little responsibility to these people. Collecting tolls might be perfect, if not for the fumes. A job which permits moderate daily physical activity would also be good, given that most writing is done from a sitting position. Mail carrier, water meter checker, drug dealer, door to door merchant—all worthy considerations. Though I caution against sales work because it usually necessitates lying and manipulation, and lying and manipulation are skills one should save for writing.

    Or perhaps you want the kind of job that inspires compelling stories and poems. Maybe high stress turns your brain on. EMT might be the way to go. There’s always a need for people who like to defuse bombs. Sex worker. Daycare worker. Marriage counselor. Elementary school teacher.  All of the above.

    Onto bigger considerations. Writing is hard work, but one shouldn’t think of it only as work. Remember that it is something you’ve chosen to do. Watch yourself when you write, or reflect shortly after. If it happens to be fun, don’t forget it. Don’t forget why. Try to cultivate a fun approach. This won’t always work, of course. Here’s a trick. In the morning make a to do list. Load it up with the most unpleasant tasks you can imagine: doing taxes, doing crunches, stirring compost … writing.

    If you work well with routines and are generally self-disciplined, good for you. If neither of the above apply, you’re probably well aware of your other positive attributes, and have needed to remind yourself of them often. You are pleasant, you have a good sense of humor, your life is full of problems and you’re a pretty good problem solver, you’re creative. You may have to create many, many distasteful to do lists.

    Thankfully there are other potent sources of motivation. Take aging, for example. Take death. Writing won’t likely extend your life, but it might spare you some of the kinds of self recrimination that arise when we feel our mortality, when we wake up in the middle of the night sweating or shivering or both and ask ourselves, what did I do in that decade that just went by? You might say, at least I’ve thought about my experience, at least I’m trying to create something lasting. Or you might say as Bob Dylan said, “I’m just whispering to myself so I can’t pretend that I don’t know.” I mean, writing might be a way of preserving who you are, pre-posthumously, at least. None of this, by the way, applies to genre fiction.

    It is said that writing is a lonely occupation. How does one balance one’s need and desire to hear and express her/his own thoughts with the desire to speak to and listen to others? Here’s another trick, borderline psychotic, perhaps. Others are speaking to you even when you are alone. Others are a part of you. Wait, it goes even further—you ARE a conversation. Life and literature are full of such paradoxes, through-the-looking-glass type experiences. Wisdom is ignorance, blindness is vision, maybe when we are alone and reflective, we are only then aware of how deeply connected we are. If you are lucky, you’re characters will make very good company.

    All that said, still sometimes you get lonely. You want to hear someone laugh and you don’t want it to be the sound of your laughter. So, though writing is a solitary act, the end product, even the process, can be a matrix for rich, rewarding, complex, lively, heartfelt social interaction. I’m talking classes, writing groups, readings, retreats if you can afford them. A group of writers together sharing poems and stories — it’s way better than the best potluck. And you don’t get full. The give and take of honest criticism is more intimate than a crowded hot tub. And more hygienic.

    Finally, there is another aspect of the balanced life of a writer and it has to do with how we learn. Pause and consider how you’ve learned any new and challenging skill in your life. Making pie crusts, driving a stick shift, communicating in a foreign language, fixing a weed whacker, surfing. Often there is a period of frustration like a tangled rope of nylon cord, and the sense of being lost, and the sense that people who know how to do it— whatever it is —don’t know how or why they know how to do it, maybe they were born knowing, but the more they tell you, the more you get confused. Then, most often mysteriously I’ve found, there comes a feeling of breakthrough, of some sudden new understanding and competence. You didn’t get it— then you got it, and you don’t know exactly how. It’s curious that schools don’t teach us more about how we learn — that would seem to make a good primer for first grade, but so it is and we have to work out our own pedagogical theories for ourselves. The idea that practice makes perfect seems often untrue. I’ve been practicing my slam dunk of a basketball since I was nine years old and I’ve gotten only an inch closer to the rim. Perhaps a truer aphorism, though not at all catchy, would be — Good practice makes better. But what is good practice? A former writing student once described his efforts to become a surfer. He said he’d heard plenty of advice. He watched skilled surfers very carefully. He was learning, but slowly, and feeling frustrated. He could tell you what he needed to do, but he couldn’t execute it, not at the crucial moment of the wave break. Then, he said, he put the advice out of his mind, not forgotten, but filed away for later. He relaxed. He felt the movement of the water, how it pushes, how it tugs.

    Well, there’s an ocean of words on paper and words on screens, stories and poems and memoirs and essays, half an ocean of how-to-write articles. Read widely and read deeply, meaning read the pieces that move you and confound you two and three and four times. Watch yourself reading. And, of course, write. Here is the balance — no surprise — reading and writing. Reflecting and risking and risking and reflecting. Risk new structures, new ways of distilling experience, new ways of making meaning and new voices. It’s a good practice and it often works. One of the new voices you discover may be your own.

    Daniel Coshnear  lives in Guerneville, California, works in a group home, teaches at a variety of SF Bay Area university extension programs, and writes. He is author of Jobs & Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine 2001). His fiction appears in LAR Issue 8.

  • An Interview with Nancy Lord

    In our 9th issue, Fiction Editor Stefanie Freele interviewed Alaska Writer Laureate Nancy Lord about writing, the wild, and the world. Below is a portion of their discussion.

    SF: What is life like as the Writer Laureate of Alaska?

    NL: I’ve just turned my “laurel crown” over to the next Writer Laureate, poet and lyric essayist Peggy Shumaker. Alaska’s Writer Laureate, who’s appointed by our state arts council, serves a two-year term and is the equivalent of the poet laureate in other states and nationally. It’s an honorary position, and the idea generally is to promote Alaska writers and writing. There’s a small travel budget to help get around in our huge state. Each of our Writers Laureate is asked to develop a particular project. I’ve had a lot of involvement with my local library, including chairing a successful capital campaign to fund a new building a few years ago, so my project involved visiting libraries around the state for multiple purposes—presenting readings, talks, and workshops, and also meeting with their boards or “friends” groups to encourage them with fundraising and share my town’s experience in planning and funding a new building. Most community libraries in our state have been starved for funding in recent years, but the Alaska Legislature recently created a funding mechanism so they can begin to expand and modernize.

    I like to quote the political writer Joe Klein, who wrote, “Libraries are places where we writers go after we die, if we’re lucky. We’re going to live on through libraries. But there is also something more. In addition to being a place that we go after we die—if we are lucky—libraries are also the place where a great many writers are born.” That was certainly true for me. As a child growing up in New Hampshire, my local library and the bookmobile that came to my neighborhood opened up the world to me, fed my curiosity, and helped shape me as an independent thinker who would one day write my way into understanding.

    SF: Your collection The Man Who Swam with Beavers was, as you say in your acknowledgements, “largely inspired by the titles and themes of stories belonging to Native Americans, particularly Alaska’s Athabaskans.” What can you say about the transformation from an Athabaskan story to a Lord story?

    NL: I was not at all interested in retelling traditional stories, which has frequently been done, often without permission or respect to the originals. I think, instead, that there’s a great deal of wisdom in traditional stories which, after all, were usually told for teaching purposes: This is how one should live, or this will be the result of bad behavior. I live in Athabaskan territory and have always tried to be a student of that culture, on the theory that the stories, language, and overall culture belong to this place in the same way that the plants and animals do and I ought to be “grounded” with them if I’m going to be at home in my adopted place. So my intent was to try to respectfully draw upon some of that ancient wisdom in my creation of contemporary stories.

    Many of my stories work as fables; they have some magical properties and present “lessons” in a way similar to the source stories. Many, both the source stories and mine, deal with transformations—in literal ways, as people turn into animals or otherwise become other than they were. That, of course, is a characteristic of all stories; things happen, and the main character changes somehow by the end.

    In some cases, I worked quite directly with themes (a man making a transforming journey in “The Man Who Went Through Everything”) and in other cases my inspiration came from an image or even just the suggestion of a title (“The Attainable Border of the Birds”). The settings of my stories are largely urban and American—another form of transformation, from Alaskan and Native American cultures into today’s dominant one (as, for example, relocating the concept of “counting coup” to the touch of an urban installation artist in “Candace Counts Coup”).

    SF: One of the techniques I admire so much in your fiction is your ability to close with a fabulous ending, and often a hopeful ending, which seems rare in modern fiction. How do you it? What elements are in the successful modern ending and/or in your endings? How important is the ending to you?

    NL: Wow. Thanks for saying that. The hardest part of a story to get right, at least for me, is the ending. My goal is that it both be surprising and seem inevitable. I hate “trick” endings, sentimental endings, endings where nothing has changed, and endings that are tied up too neatly—and try to avoid those in my work. I like to think that a great ending leaves the reader with something to think about, something that might carry over to the next day or longer. For me, this usually means a visual or at least sensory image—something a reader can really latch onto and hold in his or her mind. This may be something that ticks the story upward emotionally, but I certainly don’t try to achieve a “happy ending.”

    Perhaps because of their fable-like nature in The Man Who Swam with Beavers, these stories have more hope in them, more sense of a positive transformation, than other stories I’ve written. Your question has sent me back to the book, and I do see that pattern of hopefulness, a brightening at the end of most of the stories—not something I intentionally strove for but maybe a direct result of the instructional fable form. Certainly much of contemporary fiction, perhaps in fear of being sentimental or too simple—or simply representing the larger culture—tends toward darker, less resolved endings.

    SF: In your most recent book, a collection of essays titled Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life, you explore the importance of place, nature, global change etc. In the book you ask, “…whether we’re willing to commit ourselves to life all the way around our one watery, interflowing globe.” What would it take for such a global commitment to turn around the mistreatment of our planet?

    NL: Well, I’m afraid I’ve become a pessimist in this regard. I don’t think our global community of seven billion humans is capable of reining in its growth and destructive practices, and it appears that we’ve already reached a number of tipping points that mean conditions on Earth will soon be very different than they’ve been. Recycling plastic bottles and changing light bulbs only go so far, and we face mass extinctions, water shortages, displaced people, and conflicts and wars caused by competition for resources.

    One of my gripes with the writing about climate change and other environmental insults is that writers seem to feel they need to end with some kind of hope. I know I spoke to hope earlier—and hope is a good thing—but so many books end with something like, if we turn down thermostats and ride our bikes, we can solve this problem. We should do those things because they’re the right things to do, and doing them might help us feel better, might improve our local communities, and might possibly build a groundswell our political leaders would pay attention to—but the real change that needs to happen needs to take place on a global level, beginning with a limit to human population growth and a sharp reduction in the consumption of resources.

    SF: As a writer dedicated to exploring and admiring the northern wilderness, ecosystems, and cultures, you’ve investigated and revealed many changes in the northern wilderness—in some places, even the extreme change or loss of cultures, languages, forests, salmon, etc. How frail is our earth and humanity?

    NL: I’m lucky to live in a place where indigenous cultures still flourish—if not in the same way as they did before Europeans arrived—and the natural environment is always very present, both inspiring and threatening around us. As a writer I’m able to draw upon both sources to try to understand connections and relationships and to create work that at least asks questions about what we know, what we choose as values, what the past tells us and the future might hold. In my writing I try not to be polemical and offer judgments or answers—despite what you might think from the answer to your question above—but to ask questions and encourage readers to think for themselves. Well, okay, I do try to guide their thinking. James Baldwin once said, “The purpose of all art is to lay bare the questions that have been obscured by the answers.” So, rather than try to answer your question, I’ll default and say, that’s one of the questions I try to pose with my writing. What are the connections between the health of the Earth and our survival as people? What does cultural loss mean? How important are wild salmon? Just how resilient are natural systems and cultures, and what actions increase resilience? How do we want to live our lives?

    In one of the essays in Rock, Water, Wild, I wrote that the greeting in the Athabaskan language, which is native to where I live, is Yaghali du? It means, literally, Is it good? Not How are you? but Is it good? This emphasis suggests to me a more holistic way of looking at what’s important, something less anthropocentric and individualistic. I hope that by sharing this with readers they might ask themselves something similar when they meet one another and when they look out upon the world.

    Nancy Lord, former Alaska’s Writer Laureate. In addition to being an independent writer based in Homer, Alaska, she fished commercially for many years, and more recently has worked as a naturalist and historian on adventure cruise ships. She is the author of three short fiction collections (most recently The Man Who Swam with Beavers, Coffee House Press, 2001) and four books of literary nonfiction (most recently Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life, University of Nebraska Press, 2009.) Her next nonfiction book,Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North,is recently out from Coutnerpoint Press. www.nancylord.alaskawriters.com.

    The full text of Freele’s interview with Lord can be found in Issue 9 of The Los Angeles Review.

  • Randall Brown: A Third Way

    In The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (2009), Night Train co-founder Rusty Barnes writes, “Somewhere between the linear narrative and the post-postmodern fracturing of narrative, there might be a third way, dependent on its brevity as its primary descriptor” (136). Since first encountering Barnes’s idea, I’ve been fascinated by its implications. I’ve begun to refer to contemporary very short forms as “compressed fictions,” but they have many other names: twitter fiction, hint fiction, micro fiction, one-sentence stories, flash fiction, sudden fiction, quick fiction, pocket fiction, and so on. Each label compresses fiction to a specific word/character limit, but Barnes’s quote hints at something beyond the constraints of characters and words: “There might be a third way.” A third way to what?

    If indeed the world has fractured, and the traditional linear narrative can no longer capture its truths, then the post-postmodern answer is to reflect the world as it truly is (or as its writers perceive the world truly to be), and hence the broken narrative. However, imagine instead of taking up the shards of the shattered world and piecing them together in some new form with the cracks and the process of sequencing them visible (narrative that is aware of itself as narrative), the writer chooses Barnes’s third way.

    In doing so, in choosing brevity, the writer picks up one of these shards and views it as complete in itself. Working within the constraints of that infinitesimal space, the writer creates something whole. Compression factors into the process of working with the (very) tiny, but afterwards, compression also works upon the piece as product, continuing to impose itself upon the work. In This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey: Essays (2009), Steve Almond writes, “Writing is decision making. Nothing more and nothing less. What word? Where to place the comma? How to shape the paragraph? Which characters to undress and in what matter. It’s relentless” (7). Working with compression forces new questions upon the writer: “How to make something so tiny matter? How to imply the history? How to tell the reader all that can be told about the character when working against the wordiness of exposition? How to make words do double, triple, quadruple duty? How to create reader-identification in so little time?” Ad infinitum.

    Each writer, of course, might meet the demands of compression with different questions. Once written, compression has a tendency to make each word count (both literally and figuratively), to give extra weight to each choice the writer makes, to release the power of synecdoche (a force that makes each tiny particular thing represent a larger, universal something), to make readers more aware of rhythms and repetitions, and so on.

    Oh yes. That question: A third way to what? Is it a third way to tell stories or is it a way to tell something other than the story? In most of these compressed fictions, I feel narrative’s  meaning-making apparatus at work: the inciting incident leading to a confrontation fraught with challenge and obstacles leading to insight, understanding, transformation, an emotional truth.  It’s submerged, implied, hinted at, a single word the whole of the back story, the title its inciting incident, a deleted world the whole of the subtext. Sometimes I feel something else at work, maybe a sense of capturing a literal truth rather than a metaphorical one, the desire to see, for example, a dragonfly as a dragonfly, much like a haiku might.

    A third way to what? Perhaps just another way for writers to express themselves, their insights, their experience. For writer and reader, it is perhaps as Stephen King in On Writing describes it: “We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. Not mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”

    Writers working with compression and their compressed messages convey their “minds” through what to some readers, especially those used to more lengthy narratives, might read as secret spy messages: “The buffalo howl at the heavens, pretending to be coyotes.”  There is something of Eliot’s “objective correlative” to it: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” Imagine a compressed piece titled “Before the Shooting.” The challenge, then, might be for the writer to find that particular arrangement of words and images and sentences to engage in real telepathy, not just so readers can see what the writer sees, but to feel it, too—and perhaps also to see and feel beyond the writer’s perception; or the challenge might be something entirely else, depending upon how that individual writer views compression’s constraints and challenges.

    To me, compression is a third way to figure things out: about myself, others, the world, what has been, what might be, an aging parent, crippling panic, and so on. Surely, one way to figure things out is to have characters act & fail, over and over, each time gaining a greater understanding of what they face and what’s require of them to overcome it. Other times, it’s not that easy.

    Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, has written that, because the words we use to capture the reality of our world have been placed upon the world arbitrarily, our words can never fully capture the truth of our existence.  But we try — word after word, sentence after sentence, breath after breath trying to grasp an essence that will always elude us. Maybe that too appeals to me about a compressed fiction, its desire for the perfect word (what a teacher of mine, Terri Brown-Davison, referred to as “fixity”), the right word after right word for the right slot, as if such a thing were possible, as if that fragment of the broken world upon which we’ve written our tiny fictions were the world entire, before things fell, before words became separated from the Real, like the compressed moment before the Big Bang, before time, history, narrative, the fall of apples and towers, this tiniest moment that contained within it the all of everything.

    Randall Brown’s reviews appear in numerous issues of LAR. He is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection Mad to Live. He directs and teaches at Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. He appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field and in The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction. He’s also the founder of Matter Press, its online magazine The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and the blog FlashFiction.Net.

Nonfiction

  • LAR in Best American Essays

    The Los Angeles Review congratulates Jeremiah O’Hagan, whose “Essaying,” which appears in LAR Volume 10, Fall 2011, is listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2012. O’Hagan’s essay was selected by series editor Robert Atwan.

    Congratulations also to Mark Doty, LAR’s contributing editor to Volume 8, Fall 2010, who is also included in the anthology.


  • Communiques to Mr. Lee Child by Yi Shun Lai

    January, 2011

    Dear Mr. Child,

    I was stuck in the White Plains airport, victim of yet another US Airways flight delay, when it occurred to me that I had nothing to read.

    I love airport novels. I love them for their speed, their pithy plotlines, the gems you sometimes discover in the cheap wire racks. Usually I look for Dick Francis—who knew that the British horse-racing world was filled with such crush-worthy heroes?

    So I went down to the ONE rotating rack they have in the little café-cum-newsstand, and I spotted something called The Persuader on the very bottom. By you, of course. Starring a guy named Jack Reacher.

    Mr. Child, I am no professor of character. But I think I am not alone when I say that Jack Reacher is probably the best fictional persona to cross my desk in a long time. And not in a washed-up detective kind of way, but more in a, “I’m a little bit broken but I like myself this way” way.

    The part where he gets his front teeth knocked loose? Where he gets angry because he’s always had his teeth, and doesn’t want to get new ones? What a winner.

    Thanks for a satisfying read.

    Sincerely,

    Yi Shun Lai

    February, 2011

    Dear Mr. Child,

    I’m reading Die Trying. I like that you’ve made the female protagonist an able FBI agent. And I like that you’ve set part of this book in a city I know fairly well, Chicago. I also appreciate that you haven’t made any idiotic street-mistakes, like other authors have made. Come to think of it, movie directors make this mistake, too—I once watched a character bolting from 79th Street in Manhattan to Soho on foot in three minutes, and we all know that’s not happening.

    I’m having an argument with a friend of mine. She’s British and she likes to read, although she’s narrower in her tastes than I am. She was very quick to peg Die Trying as a fluffy read. I don’t mind that, except that she then followed it up by saying, “I can tell by its cover,” which made me go all tingly in an angry kind of way, because, Hell-o! Don’t judge a book by its cover!

    What I’m trying to get at here is, I like your covers. They’re shiny and attractive and I like the fact that you have a bullseye theme going. But I couldn’t help thinking: Does this make less of my literary skills, to read fluff?

    I went looking for help. To the New York Times, specifically. I wanted to know what their reviewers thought of your books. They called them “pure escapist gold.” I’m okay with that. Books ought to help you escape, don’t you think? And Reacher is as fine a companion as any. Heck, I always know that even in a fight against six men, he’s going to find some way to head-butt at least two of them, and that he’ll always walk away with minimal damage. If reading you means I get to hang out in a world where the good guy always wins, I’ll take it.

    Sincerely,

    Yi Shun Lai

    March, 2011

    Dear Mr. Child,

    I introduced my husband to Reacher. He won’t stop reading. I think this has much to do with Reacher’s propensity to lonely places in the desert/mountains/spaces-in-between. I also think this has to do with the fact that Reacher is, in his heart of hearts, a not-very-confrontational man. And it might have something to do with his penchant for righting wrongs done to innocent folks.

    Anyway. Today, I went to buy Jim a Reacher book,and  I discovered something: AN AUTHOR PHOTO! Of you, I mean.

    Reacher looks a lot like you, I think. Did you mean for that to happen? He’s tall, you’re tall. He’s blond, you’re blond. Neither you nor Reacher looks or sounds like you’d be considered traditionally handsome. I don’t think you have a 50-inch chest, though.

    I went looking for some biographical information about you after. I wondered if you were an MP, too. If you had served in the army. It says you’re British, which is interesting: How do you know so much about the US Army?

    It says you never served. I’m kind of disappointed, because in 61 Hours, there’s a lot of detailed information about how to spot a suicide bomber. How does someone who never served know all that? I’ll keep on reading. You are still getting the details about my favorite cities right—I know the places in New York you’ve written about, the rare times Reacher goes there, and that goes a long way with this reader.

    I can’t stop my husband now, anyway. Whenever we’re in the bookstore he asks if we’ve read this Reacher, or that Reacher…

    Sincerely,

    Yi Shun

    May, 2011

    Dear Mr. Child,

    Fascinating! Although all the books tell the stories as Reacher sees them happening, the one I’m reading now is in the first person. I had to root around in my memory for a while before I realized that the first book I read by you, The Persuader, is also in the first person.

    This is what I think has happened: When I read The Persuader I was just meeting Jack Reacher, so I wasn’t really invested in the fact that he was telling it from his point of view. Now, four or five books later, I’ve gotten to know him pretty well—the thing with the folding toothbrush is pretty funny, and the tree-hugger part of me cannot believe that he just throws out clothing after he’s worn it four or five days—so I’m more attuned to what he thinks, how he feels.

    Cracking a book and seeing it told from the first person—from inside Reacher’s head—feels a lot like seeing an iconic work of art that you’ve only seen in photographs, in real life. Like you know, you’re visiting Berlin, and you go around the corner, and then suddenly, pow! There’s the bust of Queen Nefertiti, bright and solid and snooty-nosed, just like you’ve seen in social studies books.

    Nefertiti’s bust is a lot smaller than you’d expect, by the way. You’d think it’d be just huge, after all those years of knowing it’s an icon.

    Not so with Reacher. Reacher is exactly like I thought he’d be inside his head, except a lot funnier.

    I think it’s really cool that you’ve chosen to switch back and forth. I think I’ll stick with the first-person ones for a bit. I like getting to know Reacher this way.

    Cheers,

    Yi Shun

    July, 2011

    Dear Mr. Child,

    Really? Tom Cruise? You okayed Tom Cruise to play Reacher, after all these years of struggling to get the Reacher books made into movies?

    Let’s review:

    Reacher: Blond

    Tom Cruise: Dark hair

    Reacher: 6’ 5”

    Tom Cruise: 5’ 6”

    Reacher: Doesn’t know who Oprah is and couldn’t give a flying fuck, although he wouldn’t say it that way.

    Tom Cruise: friend of Oprah; knows her well enough to jump on her couch. (This is something else Reacher would never do, not even if he’s high on a kite in love, like he was in 61 Hours.)

    Reacher: Almost never looks in the mirror

    Tom Cruise: Pretty; probably uses a lot of hair gel

    Reacher: Serial two-night-stander

    Tom Cruise: Serial monogamist

    Both Jim and I are sorely disappointed. We probably won’t go to see the movie.

    Yi Shun

    August, 2011

    Dear Mr. Child,

    Has anyone ever told you you have a way with words? I know, that sounds so stupid, since you’ve written 15 bestsellers and, when The Affair comes out, probably 16. But I don’t just mean that you can string them together.

    What I mean is that when you describe something, your readers experience it.

    I’m not talking about the love scenes. There are only so many times a reader can be impressed by Reacher’s dexterity with multiple buttons and zippers, or be moved by the light behind a clean white shirt showing a fit woman’s silhouette.

    I’m talking about the ordinary stuff. Reacher butts papers into neat stacks; he doesn’t just tap them back into a stack. Slow-moving security vehicles snuffle in one direction or another; they don’t troll or crawl like they do in other books. Motors pop and burble as they’re cooling down; they don’t just tick.

    Do you think this is because Reacher likes to read? I don’t know where I got that information, exactly. He gives off that impression, that he’s a guy who would really consider the right words to say before committing to them.

    Sincerely,

    Yi Shun Lai

    September, 2011

    Dear Mr. Child,

    Thank you so much for writing The Affair. Getting to know more about Reacher’s days in the MP feels like a missing piece materialized, even if I never knew it existed. You do wonder about a guy like that, don’t you?

    Sometimes, I marvel over the idea that so many people must know Reacher as least as well as I do. It’s like Reacher’s one of those guys that has a million Facebook friends (except Reacher would never Facebook). And then I think that maybe what you’re doing yourself is getting to know Reacher book by book, as he’s presented with different situations.

    And, as a fictional character, Reacher doesn’t have too much of a fleshed-out past beyond the broad strokes you’ve created for him in previous books, so writing these books that center around his past must be gratifying for you, too—you’re getting to know a whole new person, much as you’d get to know a new friend, as they choose to reveal themselves to you.

    It’s as much about the way he says things, isn’t it, what he chooses to reveal to the reader, and what he chooses to hold back for another day, or maybe never.

    When you first meet someone, the first thing you might notice about them, after their looks, is the way they talk. You get to know them pretty well, just by listening.

    Listening to Reacher as he gets older and more experienced over the years has been like watching someone grow. Reading The Affair, seeing what he was like back then, when he was a part of something, is like understanding him better because you know what he came from.

    Cheers,

    Yi Shun Lai

    October, 2011

    Dear Mr. Child,

    In the movie, you’ll have to write in fighting moves for Tom Cruise that involve pinching. He looks like that’s what he’d do best.

    Yi Shun

    October, 2011

    Dear Mr. Child,

    You’ve written sixteen Reacher books, and I’ve read 15 of them. I’m about to crack open my last Reacher, and then I will have to wait until you write another. But do you know what? I’m wondering if you’ll write someone else, another character, sometime soon.

    I’ll be looking forward to seeing what you come up with next. Part of me hopes it’ll be another Reacher, and part of me hopes to get to know someone new.

    Thanks for a terrific sixteen reads.

    Cheers—

    Your reader, Yi Shun

    Yi Shun Lai is Fiction Editor of The Los Angeles Review.

  • On the Dangers of Sacrificing for Your Art: Dan Moreau

    The other day my wife and I had a serious talk, the kind of talk where both parties need to be sitting down, the kind of talk where tears are shed. The gist of the talk was this: Should I keep pursuing this creative writing “dream?”By dream I mean finding a full-time job teaching creative writing at the college level. For a long time, that was my goal. That’s what writers I knew did for a living and that’s what I enjoyed doing most outside of writing. Color me naïve, but it’s taken me almost a decade to realize that that dream, well, it’s a pipe dream. Not to say that I’ve given up, but that dream is becoming more and more unlikely given these two basic facts: I don’t have a terminal graduate degree and I don’t have a book under contract with a major New York publisher. I’m sure you could pick apart my CV and find other reasons why I can’t find a college-level teaching position, but those two glaring facts remain.

    In the decade I spent pursuing that dream, I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I took part-time odd jobs. I didn’t have health insurance. I couldn’t provide for my wife. I went back to school for two years and got a master’s in English with a creative writing emphasis. At the time I didn’t know the difference between an MA and an MFA, the all-too-crucial difference between a non-terminal and terminal degree. That one letter has made all the difference. That one letter has made me ineligible for many teaching jobs. I may not have the best credentials, but given my lack of a terminal degree I can’t even apply. Department heads have told me that my lack of a terminal degree is a problem. I want to tell them: It’s just one letter. I completed the requirements on par with most MFA programs. I took two years of workshops and literature classes and submitted a creative work for my thesis. But the real burn is this. This is what keeps me up at night. The program I graduated from is now MFA program. That’s right. My alma mater discontinued my degree. You can’t even get my degree if you wanted it. It no longer exists.

    On the other hand, I know getting a terminal degree won’t solve my problems. There are plenty of unemployed MFAs and an MFA is by no means a guarantee to a teaching job. At the same time, I wish I had at least a shot at these jobs. I’m starting to regret all the effort, time, energy and money I’ve invested in my writing. As minor as my successes have been, writing hasn’t paid many dividends. I never got into writing for the money. But I always expected some kind of payoff, namely a teaching job.

    This is not to say that I’ve given up on writing, not that anyone would care if I did. But what I would say is this: before you get an MFA, before you spend $20 on a contest entry fee, think seriously about what you’re sacrificing for your art. Is it worth it? I will continue writing and sending out my work in brown clasp envelopes to editors. But it’s time to wake up. It’s like a Janet Jackson song. What has writing done for me lately? I’ve dealt with a lot of rejection and spent ten years chasing a dream. What do I have to show for it now? A few journal publications. It’s always nice to get a piece accepted for publication but unfortunately that doesn’t pay the rent or put food on the table. Creative writing is a dream worth pursuing, but at least for me it’s time to quit tilting at windmills. I’m sorry, creative writing dream. It’s over. It was fun while it lasted.

    Dan Moreau’s nonfiction appears in LAR Issue 7.

  • Yahia Lababidi: Forging Words from Silence

    I first began experimenting with silence in university.  I would go on fasts for up to a week at a time, rationing words, and speaking only when I must – perhaps a mouthful in class, or even less if someone were in my face and absolutely needed to hear from me. Otherwise, friends understood that I’d ‘gone under’ and only the very committed continued leaving me voice messages or, braver still, tagging along, noiselessly.

    The idea at the time–more inner imperative, really, than any sort of formulated thought- was to sound my depths and think things through. This was my first taste of freedom as an adult, and that is how I chose to exercise it. It was as though, suddenly and without explanation, I was taken in for questioning, and I had to play both parts:  officer and suspect. Who was I, What did I know, Why am I here, and Do I have an alibi?

    Typically, I’d walk around all day in a semi-trance talking back to the books I’d read, lost in the echo chamber of my head.  I read a great deal more those days, again out of an inner imperative, but hardly the assigned work.  My self-imposed reading list was a volatile cocktail, unequal parts literature / philosophy, and the discovery of those great contrarians, Wilde and Nietzsche, made my world spin faster.  Unaware of it then, this obsessive reading was in fact teaching me how to write.  The rhythms and cadences of my Masters insinuated themselves into my style, just as their stances and daring were persuading me to distrust ready-made ideas and try to formulate better questions.

    It was out of these silences and (attendant) solitude that I began writing what would become a book of aphorisms – by transcribing the heady conversations that I was having with myself at the time.   My ‘method’ in writing these aphorisms was simply to jot down on a scrap of paper (the back of a napkin, receipt, or whatever else was handy) what I thought was worth quoting from my soul’s dialogue with itself.

    If ever I tried keeping a notebook, the thoughts would hesitate leaving their cave – sensing ambush.  So, by night I kept bits of paper and a pencil by my side, just in case.  And, when something did occur to me, I feverishly scribbled it down in the dark, without my glasses, out of the same superstitious cautiousness of scaring ideas off.

    These aphorisms were to reveal me to myself and served as the biography of my mental, spiritual and emotional life.   I read as I wrote, helplessly, in a state of emergency; and, in my youthful fanaticism, I was convinced I was squeezing existence for answers, no less.  I felt that one should only read on a need-to-know basis, and write discriminatingly, with the sole purpose of intensifying consciousness.

    Strangely, during these years of white-hot inspiration, I discovered that when I returned home to Egypt (for the summer, Christmas, and eventually following graduation) I was unable to write aphorisms.  No longer the master of my environment, and forced to accommodate the interruptions that make a life, I gradually realized that because I had lost my silences, I had lost my Voice… (Which is to say, I composed the bulk of the aphorisms in my book, Signposts to Elsewhere, before I turned 22.)

    It would take me several years to begin writing again and, out of this unsettling and involuntary silence, would be born two new forms:  poetry and eventually essays. Not that I am incapable of aphorisms, nowadays. They still trickle, but my relation to them has changed and is somewhat more opportunistic.   I no longer wait around for these fickle visitations and, if I happen to be struck over the head by a good line,  I’m more likely to see if I can’t massage that into a poem, or even try to unpack it into an essay.  (Perhaps not much has changed, and I’m still rationing words after all these years…)

    Yahia Lababidi’s essay “Speaking in Sayings” appears in LAR 11.

  • Janet Buttenwieser: The New Year

    Janet Buttenwieser’s essay “The New Year” appears in Issue 10 of The Los Angeles Review.

    The New Year

    Cold is the point. We intend to be cold, we wish to freeze ourselves, to numb our limbs and hopefully our minds.

    We have a dreaded task ahead of us, even harder than plunging into a forty-six degree lake on the first day of January. Five miles from the beach where we strip down to our bathing suits, your files lay in wait. After our swim, after my scalding shower, I will drive across town to your house. Kevin will greet me at the door, make me a pot of green tea. I will sit in your desk chair, and categorize. I will place the mountain of medical bills in order by date. I will make files for your letters, your college papers. Copies of your passport. Letters from one doctor to another, deliberating the best surgical approach. I will discover your artwork, your poetry. I will look down the hall to the bedroom where I sat holding your hand, sun streaming through the windows, your slender fingers warm against mine. You will sit in a handmade pine box on the shelf above me as I kneel on the floor, deciding where to file the permission form to scatter your ashes.

    I survey the crowd around us, a thousand people getting ready to swim. It is a raucous scene, a chaos of people laughing at the preposterousness of what we are all about to do. Clusters of volunteers pockmark the lawn, holding souvenir patches and hot drinks, rewards for the brave and the foolish. Clouds bunch together just above the tree line, sending down occasional drops of fine mist. The damp air is laced with scents of coffee, hot cocoa, and wet dog. I wrap my goose-bumped arms around one another, trying to generate my own warmth.

    Kevin wears your wedding ring and his own on a chain around his neck. He has grown a beard, and gotten a tattoo, a raven whose wings spread open across his shoulder. I want to siphon off his pain, to dilute his loss and mine, all of ours. But I am learning that grief is not a temporary state, a demon we can exorcize. Rather, it is like a skin we wear inside our own. Eventually it blends into our body, becoming a part of our being that we carry with us, always. We learn to live with it, to bear it. You are a piece of this new skin, your essence helping hold our broken parts together.

    Kevin turns to me. “Ready?” He asks, energy high, the cold working already. “You going?” I’m not ready, but I’m going anyway. We’re both going, picking our way, barefoot, across the wet grass to the throng of people gathered at the water’s edge. The lake is dyed tan from sand kicked up by hundreds of feet. Everyone is screaming, laughing, running into the lake and sprinting back out again in a frenzied, frigid baptism. My first steps in the water cause instant pain. I let the momentum of the crowd propel me forward, deeper into the freezing swirl. This is not the year of your seizure, your cancer, your surgery. I am up to my waist, and then my chest. This is not the year the tumor came back. I take a deep breath and dive down. This is not the year that you died. For a split second I am fully underwater. It is not a numbing after all. It is a jolt, an awakening.

  • Jenny Sadre-Orafai: Hooking, Toprolling, and Pressing

    As 2011 draws to a close, we’re featuring some highlights from our publication year with selections from Issues 9 and 10. Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s “Hooking, Toprolling, and Pressing, or What It’s Like When I’m in Love” appears in Issue 10 of The Los Angeles Review.

    The hook is the most common move in arm wrestling. You are probably familiar with the hook, because it is the move that is used when arm wrestling is portrayed in bars and elsewhere on TV. It is considered an “inside” move, meaning you are trying to beat your opponent’s arm instead of his hand (as you do in a toproll). To be successful in a hook, you should be stronger than or at least equal to the strength level of your opponent. From Ultimate Arm Wrestling (www.eiyc.com)

    A pair of gummy headphones and a portable tea infuser.

    Neither of these are pricy, but they are all that’s left of an intense match of strength. They’re testaments that there was even a match here.

    You should know that I never played sports in school. Neither of my parents played sports when they were in school, either. It seemed foreign to the entire family, including my sister. I was competitive in my own way, just maybe not in that physical way. I held games. Great matches took place between me and whomever I found myself dating.

    I met the man who would buy me the headphones not that long ago. Our first date was generic. A movie. Just a movie. Not a movie and drink or dinner or coffee. On a Monday night. The second date was at a coffeehouse. This is where I told him about all my rules and how it takes a while for me to let people warm up to me, physically at least. It was at this table that I crossed my legs and brushed my hair and mimicked whatever he was doing with his hands—all nonverbal and unconscious clues that I was attracted to him. It’s also here (in between playing with my hair) that I told him how much I detest public displays of affection because it shows a lack of control, a lack of strength. Here is where the two of us—he and I, not you and I—become metaphorical hands (for the purposes of this essay) locked in a tight grip on the table. The referee (yes, they have them in arm wrestling) just released our hands. He blows go into the whistle.

    After leaving the coffeehouse, he walked me to my car that was parked by these railroad tracks here and that restaurant across the street that stays open 24 hours a day, just like the signs says. When we got to my car, I noticed people strolling around the various restaurants in the area, other people parking their cars around us. Then, I looked at him only to realize that he had been looking at me while I was people-watching. He shook his head and said, I’m sorry, but I have to kiss you. I’m sure at first I looked confused, then angry, and lastly just defiant. I couldn’t believe that this man who I was very much attracted to on many levels after only two dates was pushing aside all my rules. He grabbed my face and kissed me here in this parking lot with people milling around. I couldn’t believe what had happened. This is when my elbow first slipped and his arm pulled mine closer to the table.

    The toproll is a great move to beat your less experienced friends with. If you win with a toproll, you are winning with leverage instead of brute strength. This is because the toproll is what is referred to as an “outside” move. You are trying to put tremendous pressure on your opponent’s fingers, causing his hand to open up and allowing you to gain leverage. When the opponent’s hand opens up, it allows you to get further out on his hand (toward his finger tips) and makes it very difficult for him to “outmuscle” you until he regains his hand position. From Ultimate Arm Wresting (www.eiyc.com)

    We dated into the wintertime. This is when people who own older houses unearth space heaters from their old attics. He had three. And, he made sure that there was at least one on the highest setting and near me at all times. He would have friends over and they would watch him hunt down a heater to put at my feet. He didn’t seem embarrassed by the act. I most definitely was. He knew I was cold but wouldn’t dare ask him to bring the heater near me. He made me seem breakable.

    This wasn’t the only time he would do things like this. Once, we went out with his best friend. It was probably two or three in the morning. We were at a small country diner. It was spring but it was freezing inside the diner. He took my car keys (I drove that night) and rummaged around in my car for something, anything, to keep me warm. Victorious, he came back with a hand towel and draped it across my lap.

    This place looks different, doesn’t it? That’s because we’re in Nashville. It had been raining and hard. There was a puddle the size of a car in our path to his car. I had on heels and a dress. Since it was between sets at this bar, most of the crowd was outside on a covered patio. As I began to walk around the farthest edge of the puddle, I felt two hands lift me up and over the water. In front of everyone. I tried my hardest to weigh hundreds of pounds more. I wanted to weigh down his hands and arms as much as I could so it would look harder than it was. I could feel my knuckle brushing the table. He almost had my arm pinned.

    I came to learn that I could fight back in my own way. I could show him how strong I was. For example, I never, ever called him first. Ever. Also? I didn’t always answer his phone calls. I would purposely take hours to respond to texts and e-mails. I held him off. I kept him at arm’s length as best I could. He wanted to meet my parents, who live a mere hour and 15 minutes away (depending on how fast or slow you drive). I made excuse after excuse. Too much work to do. The dog. It’s raining.

    There were other ways I regained my strength, other ways I showed him how strong I was. He was never allowed in my apartment. I would come to him if and when I came to him. He wasn’t allowed to visit where I lived and see my things, things that I saw on a daily basis, things that would tell him more about me than if I sat down next to him and whispered in his ear for days.

    However, he began to push his way into my life and my apartment. I began receiving surprise visits. The first time he came to my apartment he brought fries and cheese sauce, a favorite food of mine that I rarely buy and eat. It was too much. Him in my space and bearing gifts.

    You can come in but no shoes on the carpet. This is my place. When he first came here he walked around like he was in a museum. He was careful about showing how eager he was. This is my bulletin board. I cut out things that appeal to me and pin them to this board, like most people who own bulletin boards. When he saw all of these clippings, he took one of the biggest breaths I had seen him take. He studied the board with an intensity that made him seem like he was cramming for an exam at the last minute, right before the teacher walks in. He didn’t want to put the notes away. Here he was, right here, in my space, learning things about me that could be used against me at some point. Him.

    We had gone to a festival. It was the spring. I’m not sure why writers always feel compelled, okay, why this writer feels compelled to tell you what season it was. I think I’m hoping you and I have the same version of seasons committed to our memories. Maybe? Regardless, spring and an outdoor festival. We had a busy schedule that day— ice-cream-eating to fit in and a work party to go to. Somewhere in there I left my purse alone and apparently near him. I should say that somewhere in there I had also told him that I blew out another set of my earbuds while at the gym. I barely remember now telling him, although I know I did. Regardless, between eating ice cream and the office party, I was back at my apartment and getting ready when I shoved my hand in my purse to find a set of earbuds in hard plastic packaging. He was listening. He was always listening and watching for what I needed, his needy thing of a girlfriend. I stared at the headphones for a long time. First, I looked confused, then angry, and lastly just defiant.

    The weekend before we broke up (for good) we came here, to this fancy grocery store. I know, it just smells fancy here, doesn’t it? Anyway, we were going to cook together. An intimate act that we had yet to do with each other. Yes, that’s us throwing oil and cheeses into the cart and not at all concerned with who’s paying. However, I found myself desperate to get my footing back. We passed the tea aisle. He couldn’t believe the varieties of tea flavors and brands they carried. He picked up a portable tea infuser and said have you seen these before? I’ve always thought about getting one. It wasn’t much but I knew that wasn’t the point really. I took one and put it into the cart. When I paid for the strainer, he stared at it much like how I stared at the headphones. And seeing it later sitting on his countertop with the green tea beside it thrilled me.

    The press is one of the purest power moves in arm wrestling. Having a bulky upper body certainly helps with this one. If you are confident that you have superior upper body power (especially chest and triceps) to your opponent and are at least equal in bicep and forearm strength, this is a good move to perform. If, however, your opponent is much stronger than you are in the chest and triceps, using the press might be a bad idea. This move can be beaten by a quick toproll, as it is vulnerable to strong, quick backpressure. This is because your arm must be close to your body to perform this move, so if your opponent can pull your arm across the table you will not be able to win with a press. From Ultimate Arm Wrestling (www.eiyc.com)

    The table has been taken away now. The referee has gone home for the day. And two arms that only wanted to be on top, to be the stronger one, are gone. I don’t feel any stronger. I don’t feel like I won, and even if I did I don’t know that it would be much comfort. I lost my head during the time I knew this man. I lost my heart and found it hard to weigh every little thing I did. And, honestly, it was exhausting. I sometimes wonder what it might be like for other people when they fall in love. Maybe they fight it as well. Maybe they struggle with losing their strength and power in the smallest and largest of ways. Maybe love isn’t like the seasons I was telling you about earlier. Maybe love just isn’t something I can tell you about and hope that you know what I mean because your experience is similar.

    I know you thought I wouldn’t bring you back here, but hang on. Just one more trip to his place. Right before the summer started we were thinking of all the cliché summer activities that would present themselves to us as a couple. And, what would we, as a couple, take part in? During the summer? In the future? We were here, in his office at his house. He said why don’t we make a list? Hold on. Let me grab a pen and paper. I wondered then if he knew what we were both walking into. That we were going to make a list of future activities to do over a three month stretch. How could this not frighten him? How could this not weaken him? These wouldn’t be words floating around in the air anymore. No, we were capturing them—rare insects—and pinning them to the paper. So, go to the beach, right? I snapped my head up. Right. He was scribbling the words down and then began bouncing the pen off the pad What else? And when we looked at each other, I realized he understood just how vulnerable we both were in that moment. I felt like I had to meet him half-way, make him feel comfortable since we apparently had taken our hands out of the firm grasp they had been in. Make out in the backseat. He laughed and wrote it down.

    Weeks later I walked by our abandoned list on the coffee table. I wanted to believe that we would actually do all the things we had set out to do that summer, that we would last, that neither one of us would just walk away from the table, that neither of us would get tired of the constant testing of strength.

    Sure, a pair of rubber headphones isn’t much, but they are enough to remind me of him everyday I use them, which happens to be every day. He wins that. Something he bought me and slid into my purse when I wasn’t looking, something to let me know he was thinking of me and how hard I am on my headphones, does make me think of him…at least until I’m too hard on them. He wins that.

    And, sure, a portable tea infuser isn’t much, but drinking green tea is an act he commits every single day. I suppose I win that, don’t I? Unless, of course, he rediscovered his love of coffee. Anything’s possible. I like to picture him pinching the loose leaves in between his longish fingers and sighing his hefty sigh that causes the leaves to scatter. He recaptures them and nestles them back into the wire basket. He does this every day. He always forgets his strength over the leaves. He never learns to sigh softer.

  • D. E. Steward talks about his new work, Chroma

    With nearly eight hundred publications, I’m beyond what I ever hoped to accomplish as an independent writer. The only thing I’ve ever taught in my life is swimming. The only classes I’ve ever taken were academic ones – and I didn’t even major in English. I’ve never had anything to do with workshop writing, never had a pedestrian job since college, and never published anything I’m not proud of.

    I have twenty-five consecutive years of month-to-month poems that together form the larger work called Chroma. There are now, in August 2011, two hundred and ninety-nine of these months and I add twelve more every year. When I started them in September 1986, I saw not much point in the patterns of verse composition and was a long way from the she-said-he-said conventions of fiction. Lee Hickman used poetry sequences of mine in his seminal LA magazine, Bachy. Then he published a cluster of five of my months in the eighth issue of Temblor in 1988, his last and even more significant magazine out of North Hollywood, fully establishing me in the genre. Having written this body of unique verse/prose, Chroma, with nearly two-thirds of the months published, I think I know what I’m up to.

    Cranking up the structure and method of writing a long poem every few weeks is gratifying. Irregular line breaks, fragments as verse, missing full stops, color and music motifs, and month designations are present throughout Chroma, and many months segue in some manner from one to the next. Allusions to distant places and events are not forced but mostly are a part of my experience, as matter-of-fact as riding a bicycle. The months ignore too many formalities and inflate associations too intensely to be read as randomly cohesive observation. The stanzas or fragments are pulses that coalesce from the keyboard, and writing like this probably was impossible before the computer scrolling. The text of Chroma grows, buttressed by search engines and enhanced by the ability to accumulate massively from notes, and to cut with the ease of block deletes.

    D.E. Steward’s essay “Junhot” will appear in LAR issue 11, February 2012.

  • Why Nothing Will Save Us—But Maybe Theatre Can

    by Jen Silverman

    The spring after I turned nineteen, I would wake up, go to class, come home, and another of my peers would be dead or hospitalized in a suicide attempt. It seemed as arbitrary as it was unrelenting. One close friend called me from the top floor of an apartment building, standing in an open window, torn between stepping forward and stepping back. It felt like living in a war zone. It felt like my generation had completely given up on the world.

    What I remember most from that blur of a spring was McCormack Theatre, a small black-box theatre at my university. McCormack was a place where we made sense of our stories and dared to re-envision them, to change them, to imagine new endings for ourselves. It was a place where we could look at the world in ways that didn’t feel as damaging and hopeless as everything outside those walls. I remember after rehearsals, I’d lie down with my cheek pressed to the wood floor. Taking breath after breath, I could feel every rigid sinew in my body soften. As a nineteen year old, two things quickly became clear to me: First, McCormack Theatre and everything happening within was magic, and second, theatre was the only thing I’d found that I could place my faith in.

    When people ask me “Why theatre?”—which happens more often than you’d imagine, and the question is always followed by: “I mean, because you don’t make any money, right?”—I say I write plays because theatre is a truly collaborative form, it’s all about forging community and forming families. And yes, there’s nothing like the rush you get from the bravery and daring of live acts performed in communal spaces. But maybe the real answer for why I write for the theatre has more to do with the spring I spent with my cheek pressed to a wood floor.

    I think it’s fair to say that my generation has become more and more distanced from our sacred spaces, from traditions that we consider holy, from any belief in rightness, goodness, and order in our world. We have lost faith not only in our political structures, but also in ourselves. We are afraid, and our media feeds our fear back to us in sound-bytes. We are cynical, and our cynicism engenders more of the same. We’re angry, without the conviction that our protest will effect change, so we mask our anger in apathy. We need help, but we don’t believe in it. The need for theatre has never been greater.

    The playwright David Adjmi once told me that when Oedipus was performed in the outdoor arenas of ancient Greece, it was staged so that just as Oedipus blinded himself, the sun went down leaving audience and players in darkness. It underscored a simple fact that has haunted me ever since: we are blind together. What is happening to one of us, is happening in some version to us all. We are connected to each other and to our world, but many of us have forgotten this. Perhaps it takes an act of theatre to remind us.

    My generation is starving for a medium that—by its very definition—challenges isolation by demanding that an audience come together, witness together, react together. My generation is starving for theatre that is relevant, provocative, that reflects our needs and contradictions, that doesn’t shy away from multi-national, multi-racial, and queer voices. I think it might be dramatic—but it would not be unfair—to say that theatre-makers are in a unique position to hold up a mirror and ask audiences to see themselves clearly, to imagine how we might change what we see. I think of the story of Medusa, who was so ugly (poor thing) that you couldn’t look at her without being turned to stone. Like the mirror through which Perseus could see Medusa without being turned to stone, theatre is a way to reflect the world truthfully back to us, but in ways that invite self-awareness and understanding instead of paralysis and horror. Theatre-makers say: Come in. This is what our world looks like. This is what our world could look like. This is who we are to each other. This is a sacred space. Come in.

    Jen Silverman’s essay “Six Bright Horses and the Land of the Dead,” winner of the Orlando Award for Nonficiton, is forthcoming in Issue 10, October 2011.

  • Reading Like a Weed, Parenting Like a Warlock

    By Charles Hood

    From a botanical perspective, any tumbleweed or dandelion is as glorious, as successful, as worthy of emulation as a rose, an oak, or even a redwood—and in some instances, even more so. What a great model for prolific happiness: be content to thrive on the margins. Just blowin in the wind, Dylan says. Weeds need very little, and what they want, humans (and before them herds of auroch cattle or just natural disasters like fires) provide daily, hourly—namely, disturbed ground. We all know that if you were to take a given piece of hillside and bulldoze it to down bare soil, the first plants to come back in after even a trace of rain (and often not even that) would not be orchids.

    If you’re reading this, you probably had a weedy childhood—no pun on Cheech and Chong implied—not so much a cultivated and symmetrically-edged childhood as it was surviving between the cracks or finding a place out of the wind next to where the waste oil from the auto repair shop got dumped in the gravel by the railroad tracks. That’s fine (you’re here, now, reading this, aren’t you?), but one of the best things to have come out of that is the pleasure and thrill and terror and confusion of getting to read whatever crazy ass stuff came to hand. I did not grow up in a household with an edition of Proust anywhere within, say, a ten-mile radius. But what we did have, including three kinds of Bible, I read every bit of, nonstop, day and night.

    Just as a quick detour that’s not a detour I have to mention how one book that I used to love as a child was my father’s World War Two naval handbook, with diagrams of knots and grainy photos of strange men in white doing elaborate cheerleader poses with coded flags. (How deliciously gay was that?) I spent hours with this book. One day it was gone. Not lost—gone. Me, stunned (who knew books could disappear?), asking, what happened to it. Nobody would say. Turns out that my father—what a nutcase that guy could be—had thrown it out because the author had died of TB and my dad was worried I would catch tuberculosis from the book itself. No, this was not a signed copy: the physical book and the physical author had never met. This was a title with a print run of 50,000 copies, and our copy was a beat-up hardback at least twenty years old. But it could somehow expose me to a disease, and so had been thrown out. Jesus.

    Of course the disease had already taken root, the disease of reading, of being ready to do anything for another fix of language. It didn’t have to be good writing, just a book. Barry Lopez on a flight was asked by the man next to him about advice for his teenaged daughter, who wanted to be a writer. Tell her to read, Lopez found himself saying suddenly, tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if people want to say what she is reading is trash. Lopez: “No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language.”

    I love this advice, since all I read from Dr. Seuss all the way into college was trash. Porn, sci-fi, my dad’s monthly copy of Western Horseman magazine (after the Navy, dad had been a cowboy), my mom’s hidden-from-sight book club edition of The Godfather, all of the Narnia books all out of order, how-to books on making money, White Power tracts, cookbooks, geology handbooks. If it had language, I wanted it. Even lists would do. I never took a single AP English class but by middle school I was becoming an expert in Nazi tanks, and by early high school was publishing on the same, and branching out into a near fetish-level obsession with Third Reich regalia. But I also knew a lot about cactus, or thought I did (the taxonomy all now has changed), and I adored chick lit, like Misty of Chincoteague. (Horsies! Spanish shipwrecks! Small-town grandpas! O yes, give me more.)

    The porn I had to shoplift but the rest I used the branches of libraries from three cities for, and all of my allowance money, my lawn mowing money, my working-for-my-dad-in-his-delivery-truck money. Finally at Glendale College I started becoming more systematic, and I remember asking Mrs. Nibley about this guy Kafka, I had heard of him, was his stuff worth my time?

    I knew the name Edgar Rice Burroughs long before I ever heard of the other one, William Burroughs. Gore Vidal in an introduction to Tarzan said that we’re all heroes of our own adventure serials, all day long. Annie Dillard certainly was; she talks about this explicitly in American Childhood. What I find most encouraging about the Lopez quotation is that it implies that he, too, read trash as a young’n. What ho, my lord—what news is this? After all, he’s so High Church in the nature prose, somehow I just pictured him only re-reading some of the more abstruse essays of Emerson, maybe while listening to a lesser-known work of Sibelius and eating an organic strawberry. In contrast, for me, one of my favorite Red Hen Press covers of all time has Barbie as a suicide bomber. Do you think Barry Lopez ever did an air guitar version of “Stairway to Heaven” in his garage?

    So many murder mysteries. So little time. Anybody read Anne Rice? Harry Potter? The late, great World Weekly News? But it pays back, in the end, even more than five hundred shares of Microsoft. When I was applying to the National Science Foundation to go to Antarctica, I knew it was one of those zillion-to-one kinds of grants, and in the NSF process, one of things one has to do is to give the project a name. Mine was an aviation project, and because of a Hollow Earth theory promoted in a series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, I named my proposal “Flying to Pellucidar.” (The Hollow Earthers, you may recall, think there’s a dinosaur world inside of our own, accessed at each Pole.) My reasoning was that while the word Pellucidar might be a screwball risk, hell, I come from a long line of screwballs, and meanwhile, if any science fiction nerds were on the selection committee, this could be better than a Masonic handshake.

    Sure enough I got it, and I heard later there were indeed some folks who dug the allusion. Right on for us. I am just sorry I couldn’t work in a reference to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Other than the near-endless Tarzan books, movies, tv serials, and loin-clothed action figures, E.R. Burroughs is next best known for the John Carter of Mars stuff, now soon to become a full budget movie franchise. Could be okay: the previews quieted my initial and very bitchy skepticism, and I am sure the panel proposals for the Pop Culture Association Conference to deconstruct the movie-text symbiosis are already cranking up. Burroughs himself is buried in an unmarked grave under a tree in front of a real estate office on Ventura Blvd., so he doesn’t care.

    Willy Nelson sings, Mama, don’t let your kids grow up to be cowboys. Aw heck. Ain’t no stopping them. Kids will grow up to be whatever kind of weed they want, with or without all the mulch of ballet lessons and soccer balls you do or don’t want to waste on them. The thing is though, that same kid wants to read? Has to do it, any book, anywhere, even in line at the store or driving back from lunch with some high-fallutin Pulitzer Prizer you foisted off on them for two hours? Watch out then. Now we do have us some dangerous and poisonous swamp cabbage brewing. That’s the first sign that they’re going to grow up as English majors, or, worse still, not just users but dealers, the top royalty of the cartel—they are going to grow up to become not cowboys but poets and novelists and small press interns and bookstore owners and English professors.

    God help us all.

    Charles Hood’s nonfiction appears in LAR issue 10, forthcoming in October, 2011.

  • Jenny Sadre-Orafai: The Matrix MX-T3

    The Matrix MX-T3 doesn’t belong to me. And, although there are three in this small space, I only run on the middle one. I suppose I’m superstitious like that. However, it’s not the slickest treadmill in the apartment complex gym.

    I’m disciplined in some areas of my life, especially running. I run 7.5 miles every single day. I’m not so disciplined when it comes to writing. Although I’ve been a writer much longer than I’ve been a runner, I’ve never been good at sticking to any sort of writing schedule. This was before I combined the two.

    I don’t come to the treadmill with a pen and paper and casually walk. No, I bring my Blackberry and I run. Only when I have an idea that I know I’ll forget do I reach for the lip of the treadmill. It’s a graceful fumble. I know it’s not the smartest of places to use a phone and I’m sure I look like I’m punching in the most important text of my life. Sometimes I even think my fellow gym-goers place bets on me falling. It hasn’t happened yet.

    I type drafts of e-mails and save them onto the phone. These e-mails that never get sent are typically snippets of larger pieces of what I want to say. It should be noted that I write incomplete sentences and misspell quite a few of the few words that do make it out. Sometimes the fragments make little sense, the words all jumbled.

    Here’s the eye of the storm: he robs her of men.

    Some element (personal) foreign in all.

    What you get in this short life together

    What’s ours for now

    For the taking

    Keep driving until you hear my voice

    I’m only able to write here in the gym because of what I listen to when I run. Let’s just say I would be more than embarrassed if anyone ever scrolled through my running playlists. The songs are pure sugar and lack any sustenance. But, the beats and the bass? They make my feet go. Sometimes I listen to the music so loudly that I can hardly hear my shoes hit the belt. It’s best this way. And, since I’ve listened to these songs so many times, they’re truly just sound. I can turn off the writer in my head that listens for lyrics, makes meaning, like when I listen to Bjork or Jolie Holland.

    I can’t tell you what it is that gets me to write when I run. It’s there though. It’s on the treadmill that essay ideas start to form, a first line to a poem, a title to a poem I wrote the day before on the run before. While I know plenty of people see their run (whether outside or inside) as an escape from every thought and worry, I see my run as time to really think about what I want to say. I’d be lying if I said I don’t like the urgency of what I want to say, what I need to say, as I’m trying to keep my pace.

    It’s not that I don’t have the obvious places to write. I have a desk at my home office and at my office office. A computer lives on each of these desks. You’ll still find me writing the most when I’m running on the treadmill that doesn’t belong to me while listening to bad music.

    I have tried other combinations though. I’ve downloaded podcasts from literary journals and magazines that I enjoy and even a lecture or two. I listened to these podcasts and lectures only to be too crowded with the speaker’s words to have my own thoughts going.

    Of course it’s logical to get my own treadmill in hopes of writing even more. That’s faulty reasoning though. When I come to this dinky gym that my apartment seems to pride itself on as they parade potential renters by, I’m stripped of all my things, all the distractions—stacks of books and magazines, my dog whimpering in her sleep, the glowing television, the internet. There’s not room for them here.

    Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s essay “Hooking, Toprolling, and Pressing, or What It’s Like When I’m in Love” will appear in LAR Issue 10, October 2011.

  • Ann Beman interviews Jeremiah O’Hagan

    Jeremiah O’Hagan’s essays “Pink,” “White,” and “Blue,” appear in Issue 7 of The Los Angeles Review, and his “Essaying” is forthcoming in our 10th issue (October 2011). This summer, Jeremiah sat down with Nonfiction Editor Ann Beman to discuss the essay, the craft, and the writing process.

    Ann Beman: In her Introduction to In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, Annie Dillard writes, “Tear up the runway; it helped you take off, and you don’t need it now.” What does that mean to you? Is it good advice?

    Jeremiah O’Hagan: This is a great quotation. Reminds me of another Dillard bit, from The Writing Life: “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” Not because “spend it” is really related to revision, but because Dillard’s recklessness is charming. Inspiring. (“Bring on the lions,” she shouts at another point.) But if “spend it” doesn’t apply to revision, it certainly applies to drafting. Get it all out — there’s no other choice.

    Here’s the deal, in my experience: occasionally (more honestly, rarely) I sit down to write knowing more or less what I want to say, I say it well, and then I tinker a bit with it and it’s nice, and finished. Most often, though, the first draft is a draft of omission: when you sit down to write, even when you ‘know’ what you want to say, the possibilities for saying it are endless. Anecdotes are numerous. You’re juggling with infinite possibilities, and infinity is an unwieldy number at best. So you type, and for everything that inks the page, infinity-minus-one other possibilities vanish. At the end of the first draft, the page looks back at you: This is what you have to work with.

    As you revise, some of those ‘vanished’ bits might creep back in because they work — there’s a place after all — and because you remember them, but many, most, won’t. So when you’re drafting, and a good phrase or word or image flashes, and it fits, spend it. Get it down before it’s gone.

    Then, yes, tear up the runway. Writers in love with themselves are dangerous to themselves, deadly to their own ambitions — it’s crippling to love your words too much. I’m always reminded of Marvin Bell, who said, “On the one hand, it’s poetry, it can save your life. On the other hand, it’s only poetry.” Same with words — they’re everything and nothing, all at once. Spend ‘em, tear ‘em, finesse ‘em, discard ‘em — the story is the thing that survives, that matters, and everything else has to serve it. (But seriously, save those cut out flashes of insight and images — there might be a place for them later. I like David Wagoner’s story about the journals he kept as a young man; as an old man he’s rereading them, realizing, ‘oh, I know what to do with that now,’ and churning out poems.)

    In a Rolling Stone interview, Ray LaMontagne said he considers himself “a craftsman” when it comes to song writing: He’s striving for songs that will still move people it 20 years. They’re not necessarily autobiographical, or personal, so much as they’re crafted to endure. I like that idea. Revision is about craftsmanship, too. For some reason, I equate craftsmanship with making furniture. Consider the elegant leg of a piano — sexy, curvaceous, strong. And a lot smaller than the piece of wood it used to be trapped in. Which was smaller than the branch it was cut from, in turn smaller than the tree. Infinite, manageable, intentional, gorgeous.

    AB: How many drafts does one of your essays go through? What are some of the differences from your first draft to, say, your 5th draft?

    JO: No less than five, no more than five and a half.

    I’m kidding, but wouldn’t that be grand? To know?

    My essays generally don’t go through a terrible number of genuine drafts (I don’t consider banal copy-editing a ‘draft’), though I’m anal about cataloging my changes. “Pink” was written in one shot. It was always what you read now, save a couple nitpicks. I think two words changed, total, and maybe a couple punctuation marks. “White” was revised twice: I wrote it, revised it twice in about an hour, just tightened it, really, and sent it. But that’s not to say it came effortlessly. Both those piece are about instances that had profound impact on me, experiences I’d relived and contemplated and articulated out loud and to myself in various ways and contexts countless times. It’s safe to say many drafts happened in my head. I guess that’s what I meant previously, when I said I sometimes sit down to write knowing what I want to say, more or less, and a little microevolution takes place during that inevitable process of omission. Other times, the first draft is me trying to figure out what I think. The second draft is me trying to articulate that clearly. Then more clearly.

    “Blue” took three difficult drafts, all widely different. It’s a good personal experience with “tearing it up.” The piece was first a poem, and not a very good one. Second, it was an essay that picked apart and unpeeled the poem, teasing its layers and trying to figure out what I really wanted to say. Finally, it became what you read now.

    I think 10 drafts is my record, if we call that sort of thing a record. I work at a newspaper now, though, so I write often and quickly and don’t have the luxury of drafting. We change on the fly, and I think that creeps into my essays. Mostly, we’ve gotta get shit down, as close to perfect as possible the first time. Then, off to the editor. A “revision” might entail adding quotations from someone who finally called back, or plugging in two sentences of back-story. Not real involved. Often, copious phone calls, interviews, researches and notes go into that one shot, though.

    Many of my essays are similar. I’d say three and a half is the average number of drafts for me, the half-draft being final copy edits and last-minute tightening. During the progression, the piece is focusing (ideally). The first draft kinda captures the essence or philosophy of the piece, the loose memories, maybe, and the drafts coax that into something concrete, burnished, certain. Focused sometimes means shorter, but not always — often, I need to add in order to articulate my stance, illustrate abstractions or build transitions. And I want to varnish — I love playing at the level of the sentence, the words and marks of punctuation. It’s beautiful what a comma can do, or a verb. LaMontagne’s craftsmanship again. Blank pages and blinking cursors are empowering, sure, but also terrifying. I’m much more comfortable once the boundaries are established and I can start straining them.

    AB: When you’re recalling an experience, how do you decide which details to keep and which to leave out?

    JO: Not to be cheap on words, but keep the ones that advance the piece. Toss the rest. A good portion of writing serves only the writer. My former co-worker said, “Words tire easily.”

    Why am I writing? What’s my point or what story am I telling? The answer to those questions is the answer to “how much” or “which.” If the details start to change the direction of the piece (assuming we’re not still in the exploratory first draft), or distract from the purpose of the anecdote, they’re superfluous to the writing, no matter how treasured they are to the writer.

    Here’s what I told my friend once, when I’d had more wine than I likely needed:
    Sometimes, when I can’t write or when what I need to write is too much, too hard, too fogged, I quit worrying about writing it. I just try to describe it. I focus on the craft, not the story … I make a game of it with myself: to describe [experiences] in a new way, a perfect way, to capture in wild original images all the abstractions I can’t name, and which hurt so damn much, and which no one — no one, I convince myself — would understand anyway. Once the images are there, they seem to free my mind, my pain, my pen, and I fill the void between them with the absolute least amount of prose needed to make sense.

    AB: What’s the smartest tip regarding the revision process that you’ve ever been given?

    JO: “Re-vision.” My professor, Jeanne Yeasting, wrote in on the white board as a hyphenated verb rather than a noun, and I finally got it.

    Revision is not a noun that describes a product or process. It’s an act. To take that first draft and envision in anew, angled, slanted, torn up, re-imagined.

    Words are often all writers feel like they have — we think we’re better at words than we are at talking, interacting, or going to brunch. Words are our everything, so we hold them tight in the long lonesome hours. Or they’re elusive, and we shake to think of turning them loose once we’ve captured them. But once that first draft is down, black on blank, they’re just words. They’re no longer scary, or a savior — they’re ours to revise.

    Revel in the craftsmanship.

  • Marte Broehm: Something Old with a Fresh Look

    I recently purchased a new cell phone. I liked my old cell phone, but it seemed less enchanted with me, gave me all kinds of problems. The company sent several new ones to me, they all developed attitudes, so the company finally sent me an entirely different model. I liked it. I decided to play with its camera to get used to it.

    At about the same time, I had a friend tell me about the importance of adding  “good fats” into my daily diet, how they would help combat skin lines and wrinkles (pesky things; I’m sure it had nothing to do with my age, or what she read on my face). I went to Whole Foods and bought the coconut oil she recommended.

    I decided to blend my two new things into something “one.” I took a picture of my morning coffee inside my cup. I added coconut oil to my morning cup of coffee, aimed my cell phone camera, clicked. I stirred coconut oil in before I added my cream, aimed and clicked a picture. I stirred coconut oil in after adding my cream. Click. Then I started looking at the sides and rims of my ceramic mugs. Click, click, click with all of above variations. Then I started to notice that when I finished drinking my coffee, the coconut oils created new residues that were beautiful or eerie or similar to the possibilities of what one sees and imagines reading tea leaves. Wow. I changed the color of the cup I used each morning, colors, some plain, some with swirl designs inside. Click. I’ve become a maniac, focusing my camera, clicking pictures of my morning coffee. Changing the angle, the light source (natural light, florescence, skylight), which counter I set it on. I’ve found myself meditating about my coffee.

    And coffee and coconut oil have found their way into my heart, into my poetry and writing. It’s been fascinating to find something so routine become so new to me. Find something for yourself, familiar or old to look at in a different way, different light, imagine, wonder, write. That’s what we writers do. Just write.

    Marte Broehm’s nonfiction appears in LAR 9.

  • J. Dunn Stewart: Words Belong to Everyone, Right?

    It happens all the time. It’s the nurse who takes my blood pressure, the corporate lawyer sitting next to me at the bar, the cellist I meet at an art opening, the executive director of a local not-for-profit; they are surgeons, engineers, athletes; they are accountants, politicians, tax attorneys. Here’s how the conversation typically goes:

    So what do you do?

    I’m a writer.

    Oh! Cool. (Or sometimes it’s Awesome or Interesting or Great or even, my personal favorite, Good for you.)

    What kind of writing do you do?

    Right now I am working on a novel.

    Really? I have been thinking about taking a year off to write a novel myself.

    As someone who started my first novel almost three years ago after more than a decade of writing short fiction, here is my issue with this seemingly innocent and undoubtedly supportive comment:

    I have been thinking about taking a year off to write a novel myself.

    I have to say, as my novel-slogging years tick by, as the number of times some version of the above exchange exceeds my ability to count, I practically have to bite down on my own tongue in order to prevent delivery of the following retort:

    Cool! (Or awesome or interesting or great or good for you.) I have been thinking about taking a year off and being an electrical engineer.

    Or nurse, or real estate lawyer, or violinist, or gymnast or whatever.

    I am fully aware that this is unfair. I mean, words belong to everyone, right? The ability to use language in some form or another is just floating around out there, part of everyone’s skill set. Everybody tells stories; we all do it every day. The same most certainly cannot be said of computational numerical simulations, triple salchows, circuit theory, cantata composition or sonopuncture.

    The trouble is, these people are out there, these whip-off-a-thoughtful-emotive-and-original-novel-in-a-year people. You know who you are. You brain surgeons mapping manuscripts on the backs of patient intake forms, you software developers jotting down paragraphs in some secret Word doc you keep on your desktop, you CEOs and general counsels doing it on cocktail napkins— and let me tell you, you ruin it for the rest of us.

    After four years writing as an undergrad, two years in an MFA program and ten plus years writing short prose thereafter, I figured I was ready. Isn’t this what I had been training for? After all, this is what they tell you (without really wanting to tell you, if you know what I mean) in your graduate program. That short fiction, at least as far as the industry is concerned, exists as some kind of warm-up to novel writing. Honestly, how many times have you heard emerging writers confess that some agent or editor said to them: Your short fiction is great, but do you have a novel?

    But I was going to get out in front of this phenomenon. I was a sprinter ready to take on the marathon, an intern ready for my solo procedure. Don’t get me wrong. I have no doubt that all the writing and study of writing that I have done up to this point has made my novel writing— or maybe, more on point, my ability to conceive of my novel writing— possible. But really, to put it plainly, a novel is a whole other animal altogether.

    I used to find it incredibly annoying that seasoned novelists constantly spout some adaptation of the mantra: If you’re going to be a serious writer, write for at least four hours at the same time in the same place every day. This particularly irked me back when I was a grad student. What about inspiration? Epiphany? Feeling the moment? But, I have to admit, I get it now. The process of writing a novel— for me, at any rate— has been less like writing short fiction than it has been like that half-marathon training I did a couple of years ago. At first, you suck. You’re sore all the time and making it four miles without collapsing in a heap of frustration seems nearly impossible, let alone making it thirteen. But you get better. And pretty quickly, too. You become limber, fit. You start feeling confident, cocky almost, you might even experience one of those addictive, endorphin-fueled moments of invincible clarity every couple of days. Sure, every now and then your tendonitis flares up, or your runner’s knee, and you backslide. But the idea is pretty simple: the more regularly you run, the better you’ll be. Your muscles just… just start remembering.

    But tandem to this reality is the miserable truth that it is incredibly easy for something— maybe it’s the tendonitis, maybe it’s too long a stretch without getting that chemical rush, maybe your favorite route gets too crowded, maybe it just gets too cold out— throws you out of it for a while and you leave it too long, lose the feel. By the time the ankle is better or spring arrives or they widen the bike path or whatever, you pretty much have to start all over again.

    I myself never did actually run that half-marathon, which is something I don’t particularly like to muse on.

    Maybe because I’m a writer and not a tax attorney or vet or astronomer or hockey player, I don’t realize that everyone suffers some variation of that irritating exchange, everyone has to bite their tongue sometimes and sit through a Cool! I’ve thought about taking some time off to be a [fill in the blank here]. For the astronomer it could be: I’ve always loved the stars— I know all the constellations! Or for the vet: I really connect with animals. Or the hockey player: I have innate hand-eye coordination.

    I have strong a suspicion that this is likely true.

    But I still think that for writers the trend lies nested within a broader context, and this context has something to do with stories. Telling stories is how we make ourselves real to other people, is how we weave together that immense, narrative fabric that somehow comes to represent what we think of as our selfhood. Everybody is telling them all the time; everybody is telling them all the time and sometimes we don’t even realize we are doing it. Stories belong to everyone. Words belong to everyone.

    Right?

    I do try to remember this, I really do. When people talk about taking a year off to write a novel like it’s some kind of hobby you can pick up and put into your bag of tricks— like learning how to do a back flip on a trampoline or whittle those little faces out of sticks you find in the woods. But remembering this doesn’t really make it any better, and as I approach the three year mark of my own novel writing process, I can sense my indignation mounting. Should I be able to write more quickly? Have I had poor training? Did I make some tragic miscalculation and pick the wrong sport?

    I’m in it now, that’s for sure. That’s the competitor in me. I don’t know how I’ll feel if I end up being one of those people who limp— saggy and deflated and six hours after everyone else— across the finish line, if I end up being one of those people who inspire such comments as: Well, at least she finished it. But I guess there will always be time to bone up on my differential equations.

    J. Dunn Stewart’s essay “Various Prisons” appears in LAR issue 9.

  • Melita Schaum–The View From Space

    The last time I went to visit my parents, I walked in on my mother cleaning the house wearing my prom dress of thirty years ago.  I guess the smell of mothballs and carnations should have tipped me off.  It was eerie, seeing my own self projected into the future:  a wallflower at 79.  Wrinkles and crinoline.  Sweet Baby Jane.

    I said the only thing that came to mind:  “That’s my prom dress.”

    “Yes, it’s comfortable.”  She continued her tango with the vacuum cleaner.

    “But it’s my prom dress.”

    “Well, you’re not going to wear it, are you dear?”

    Recently I’ve noticed my mother changing her orientation to things.  Last month, for instance, she handed me a ring.

    “Would you like this?  I’m getting rid of it.”  It was her wedding band, the one she’d worn for 47 years.

    I was visiting for Christmas, in their retirement resort outside of Phoenix, a mobile home park festooned with so many holiday lights it resembled a landing strip.  You could hear the buzz of voltage two blocks away.  Pulling in, I recognized their neighbor, Earl Peeper, standing in his front yard, gazing up at the night sky.

    “80,000 watts,” he marveled.  “They can see us from space.”

    “Mom, why are you giving away your wedding ring?”

    She held it up against my outfit like a fashion accessory.  “Oh, it’s so plain, and for Christmas I had your father buy me this.”  She gave a little Queen Mother wave to show off a cocktail ring of platinum and diamonds, large as a nut cluster.  I glanced down at the slim gold band that had been on her hand for half a century, part of a set she and my father had bought during the war, half borrowing, half bartering to make the final payments.

    “Well,” she shrugged, “if you don’t want it, I’ll add it to the yard sale.  I don’t think it’s worth much.”

    She put it back in the box among other pieces of costume jewelry.  There was the yachting pin she’d bought for their retirement cruise to the Caymans, the charm bracelet from her youth, bristling with tiny pewter baby carriages and enameled hearts.  I recognized a pair of huge hoop earrings from a five-and-dime she’d worn to a Halloween party decades ago, where she’d dressed as Mata Hari.  Afterwards, my father and she had fought over how closely she’d foxtrotted with our dentist.  I thought of all her disguises, the ones she’d danced in, accessorized, displayed, and now was beginning to discard.  Maybe she was right—no matter what you wore, life in the end was just a gym with paper streamers and a bad band.

    My mother hiked up her slips and put away the vacuum.  Outside, the neon sizzled, the neighborhood lit like a slot machine.  My father in another room muttered at the television, tinged blue by its flickering eye.

    I went to stand in the yard for a while, the daughter from another planet, looking towards home.

    Melita Schaum’s essay, “Constellations,” was the winner of the 2010 Orlando Award, and appears in LAR 9. To learn more about the Orlando Awards, please visit A Room of Her Own Foundation.

  • Michael Hemery on the ethics of disclosure: That Essay

    Two days before my new book No Permanent Scars, a collection of nonfiction essays, was scheduled to go to print, I freaked. I’d read the entire manuscript a half-dozen times, and spent years writing and editing individual essays. I never gave a second thought to sending any of the stories out to literary magazines; I flooded the market with submissions. Yet forty-eight hours before my publisher was scheduled to send the fourth and final proof off to the printer I realized people, real people, would read that essay—and I began to panic.

    A bit about that essay. It had little to do with me. I have no problem throwing myself out there. Self-deprecation worked for me in high school (kept me from being stuffed into many a locker), and it works in my writing. I’m often the punch line to my own joke. No, that essay focused on someone else. A failed relationship from my very distant past. The essay was brutally honest, revealing the flaws not only of the relationship proper, but the other person. The raw, private conversations. The disclosures. The addictions. The shortcomings. The many shortcomings. Those, after all, are more interesting. Grit is good.

    During the first semester of my MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts one of my advisors read the essay and asked about the redeeming qualities of the person. Even though she liked the essay, she was curious how we ever worked at all. So, I revised and revised until I believed I’d accurately sketched this person—retaining the flaws, but folding them into the sincere, kind moments. The experiences that helped to shape me. The story was still imbalanced (as was the relationship), heavy on the darkness, but the edits allowed in more light.

    The essay then felt complete—it transcended the personal to reveal a lot about the struggles of relationships, how sometimes they just fall short, despite both parties’ best intentions. How you can gain much from a person, yet there are times when you must retract, walk away, because it’s no longer healthy to mend the fraying bonds.

    When I originally wrote the essay, I figured time offered enough distance to make the ethics of disclosure acceptable. Plus, I dissolved this person’s identity like I do many characters in my nonfiction stories. My students are never really my students. They are amalgamations of true experiences—events, characteristics and moments. But the real people are well protected beneath the layers. But despite my best efforts to conceal, the cloaks were still translucent in that essay. The nuance of the face, the details of the hair were necessary. This person would know, as would anyone else who had loose connections to our lives. Of course it could be argued that these were my experiences, too. I owned them as much as this person did. But, they were being told from my tongue, and I had much less to lose.

    My meltdown about that essay really began to manifest itself those two days prior to publication as I was putting together a gift, a plastic workbench for my toddler. I began to think about him. What it would be like if he messed up in a relationship later in life and someone publicly aired his mistakes. My child didn’t deserve that. And neither did this person. I called my publisher that night and begged him to remove the essay from the collection. Luckily for me, my publisher is a kind, patient soul. He assured me the essay was quality—that it spoke to an important truth. But he said he understood. We’d have to delay the book’s release, work out another draft, but he said I ultimately needed to be comfortable with the final pages.

    A week (and full revision) later I drove by an establishment where this person used to work. I’d entirely forgotten about the years this person spent altruistically helping others. Somewhere in the grime and true pain of the recollection, I’d omitted this detail. I thought for a moment about revising again, digging into my subconscious for more positive details. Finding balance. But ultimately I decided the essay wasn’t worth it. The arc of the book was surprisingly strengthened without the ugly essay, and my wife no longer had to endure my paranoid ramblings, as I felt entirely at ease with the stories in my book.

    There are times in nonfiction when it’s worth it to attack the jugular. No Permanent Scars is in no way timid. Throughout much of the book I’m screaming at full throat about class discrimination and abuse. Sometimes finger pointing and anger is the only way to invoke change. And that bold, aggressive approach continues in the book I’m currently writing about my father’s two-year struggle with ALS. This experience opened my eyes to the lack of formal patient care for orphan diseases. Many will feel the wrath of my pen—because they deserve it. I will never censor myself. I will never shy away from attacking those that must be called out. But not those who just made some mistakes. That essay will never go to print. There’s no reason for it—no reader will benefit enough to justify the fallout.

    Nonfiction is a tricky genre. There’s nowhere to hide. Some might say I backed down, chickened out. But as a writer you make your decisions and run with them. And when my son—who is still innocent, but will inevitably make mistakes in his life—stands outside my office, banging his plastic drill against my door, saying, “Daddy. Hey, Daddy. Come play,” I never doubt my decision for a moment.

    No Permanent Scars, by Michael Hemery

    No Permanent Scars, by Michael Hemery

    Michael Hemery’s nonfiction book No Permanent Scars, which includes work first published in LAR 8, is now available from all major book retailers (including Amazon and Barnes & Noble) or directly from Silenced Press. The book offers both the sober realities of class discrimination and the humor and love of family. Intertwined with serious issues such as suicide, alcoholism, abuse, religion, and immigration, Hemery also endures a painfully slow and often naive coming of age (for instance, in college, he once mistook an obvious prostitute for an office supply store employee). Hemery, who earned his MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, teaches English near Cleveland, and served as the nonfiction editor for Hunger Mountain. His stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, including the Los Angeles Review, Passages North, The Portland Review and Redivider, to name only a few.

    For more information, please visit www.NoPermanentScars.com.

Poetry

  • Poetry Editor Tanya Chernov reading in the Northwest

    These days, I’m finding it pretty easy to be proud of where I live. I’ve made the Pacific Northwest my home for more than 13 years, and I don’t think I’ll ever regret it. Born and bred in Wisconsin, I took to the PNW lifestyle like a fish to water when I first moved to Tacoma to attend the University of Puget Sound in 1999. Though I often write about Wisconsin, and visit my family who still lives there, I know that this is my home now, and I’m damn proud to say so.

    The diverse culture, incredible restaurants, breathtaking landscape, and yes—even the weather of this part of the country offers me everything I need to continue living the rich, beautiful life to which I’ve grown accustomed. And this past week, having recently filled out my ballot and voted, I have to say how monumentally proud I am to live in a state where I was not only able to vote for an African American president who believes that “You can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your ‘religious freedom,” but was also able to vote to give same-sex couples the rights and responsibilities to which they are entitled, and legalize the use of marijuana to make it safe and available to all who need it. I love living in a state that is progressive enough to start sending a message to the rest of the country about learning to have a little something called compassion for others. Hallelu!

    But none of this holds even the dimmest candle to the literary love I feel in this region, and how incredibly crucial it has become to my happiness here. Having completed both my undergraduate and post-graduate studies here, I knew I would be able to carve out a fulfilling and challenging literary life among the tightly knit community of writers and readers in this neck of the woods. Coming into my own as an editor of The Los Angeles Review (which, by the way, has the most kickass contingency of contributors and readership in the Northwest!) and now as a published author, I feel intensely fortunate to have found a fantastic network of fellow lovers of the written word in a place I love so much. This is why it pleases me so to be able to make my way around the state, reading and discussing my memoir, A Real Emotional Girl, which was so heavily influenced by my adopted homeland.

    I hope to see all my PNW friends at my upcoming events so I can show you in person just how grateful I truly am. For all my Portland-area friends, please join me at one hell of a show at the Gerding Theater next Monday, October 29th at 8 pm. I’m honored to share the stage with my dearest friend, Caleb Barber, brilliant writer Brendan Constantine, and poetry legend Tess Gallagher. And for my Seattle peeps, I’m also reading Wednesday the 24th at the Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park at 7 pm. I hope to see you all there!

  • Its Infinite Variety: An interview with Okla Elliott

    David Bowen interviews LAR issue 11′s Okla Elliott.

    Okla Elliott is currently the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is a PhD candidate working in the fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University. His drama, non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, and A Public Space, among others. He is the author of a full-length collection of short fiction, From the Crooked Timber, and three poetry chapbooks. He also co-edited (with Kyle Minor) The Other Chekhov.

    David Bowen: You’ve published a number of poetry chapbooks, but you’ve recently published your first collection of short stories. Does it feel any different to release a book of stories? When your author’s copy of From the Crooked Timber arrived and you first held it in your hands, did you feel a shift in your writerly identity at all?

    Okla Elliott: It used to be that every time I published anything I got a bit disappointed that it didn’t make me feel more like a “real” writer or whatever. I still felt like the same old me doing the things I always do. So, over the years, I’ve stopped looking to moments of publication or external recognition via prizes or fellowships or whatever to make me feel validated or real as a writer. I enjoy getting publications and awards, as anyone does, but I feel most like a writer during and just after a great writing session. And I feel most like a critical thinker or philosopher when I am gnawing on a difficult problem on a long brain-walk, as I call my almost nightly walks of about two miles around town here in Urbana, Illinois. (Side note: I sometimes worry my destiny is to end up that slightly unstable-seeming guy who walks around town muttering things to himself like “Well, of course, you’d think that, but you’re not listening to me!”—where both the “you” and the “me” of that accusation refer to myself.)

    All that said, and parenthetical joking aside, a first full-length book of whatever sort (poetry, short fiction, a novel, scholarly monograph, etc) is a major thing in a writer’s life. I would be lying if I said I haven’t felt as if I’ve gone through some sort of rite of passage. But it’s less about the book coming out and getting reviewed and all that, and more about the work I put into writing and rewriting the stories and the novella in the book—finally arriving at a product that I was happy with, and even proud of. I did over a dozen drafts of all of those pieces, and I wrote over 230 pages on the novella, which clocked in at about 80 manuscript pages in its final form. After all that effort and what I learned doing it, I do feel like I’m at a different stage as a writer. I’m approaching my new projects with a new attitude. It’s hard to describe, but I just feel I know what I want to be doing as a writer more than I previously did.

    DB: You’ve said previously that real art demands that the artist remain “critical” and avoid “falling victim at every turn to ideology and thus to safe thinking as usual.” Clearly we want our artists to help us discover new ways of seeing the world, but is there any way to actually avoid “falling victim” to some form of ideology? Do you think about how ideology is or is not manifesting itself when you’re writing a story or poem, or translating the work of others? Do you think differently about ideology when you do these different kinds of work?

    OE: Well, as you point out, I said remaining philosophically and politically critical can help us avoid falling victim at every turn to ideology. I don’t think we can ever fully escape the ideology of our time and culture, but we can avoid falling victim to it at every turn. We can reduce our blind-spots a bit, though never totally. And I think the best weapon against this is to avoid what Jean-Paul Sartre called bad faith, which is more or less a type of self-deception whereby we don’t admit to ourselves what we’re really up to when we do or say or think a certain thing.

    I would never want to suggest, however, that writing ought to become programmatic and politicized in a cheap proselytizing way. Bad writing of this variety often turns into self-congratulatory preaching. I think writing ought to be a sort of fictional laboratory of sorts, where we put characters into situations and then see how they respond. This requires being as emotionally and intellectually honest as possible, if it’s going to achieve real art and be truly effective. The comparison I often make is between a book like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and a book like Upton Sinclair’s Oil—the former is a masterpiece of literature that is also a depiction of political and social injustice; the latter is cheap propaganda written in a prose style that makes me want to die (though P.T. Anderson did adapt it into the wonderful film There Will Be Blood, which required that he completely rewrite the thing and give it some artistic life). Both books tackle issues of social justice from a progressive standpoint, and I agree with the worldview put forth by both books, but Oil just fails utterly as art, whereas The Grapes of Wrath completely owns me when I read it.

    DB: As a poet, fiction-writer, essayist, blogger, critical scholar, and translator, you direct your energies in a lot of different directions. We’ve talked before about the way graduate writing programs often encourage specialization in fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, whereas many of the writers we’ve admired did substantial work in all these fields. Should writing programs do more to encourage or even demand work in different genres? Who are the polygenre-ists working today that you most admire?

    OE: I absolutely believe we need more people working in multiple genres, and I also believe that the tendency for people to focus on only one genre is a product of graduate writing programs—though some programs, like Ohio State’s, allow taking classes in multiple genres. I won’t go so far as to say programs should require that students work in multiple genres, since some people really are just interested in poetry or memoir or whatever, but I think working in multiple genres should be encouraged and rewarded. I think some people worry that writing in more than one genre will make a writer’s efforts diffuse, and one will become a jack of all trades but a master of none. But when I think of past writers such as Conrad Aiken, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertolt Brecht, Chekhov, Hugo, Goethe, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Robert Penn Warren, as well as many contemporary writers such as Margaret Atwood, Fred Chappell, Kelly Cherry, Joyce Carol Oates, David R. Slavitt, and so on, I find it hard to believe that working in multiple genres is somehow detrimental to a writer. In fact, I think writing poetry can help a person focus on precision of language in a way that will carry over into the prose, and a keen sense of narrative developed in story writing can help a poet do more ambitious work in verse. It’s all language, and nearly all the tricks you learn for one genre can somehow inform the others.

    Myself, I think I would get bored if I didn’t write in various literary genres, translate, conduct scholarly research, and produce political commentary. I just find everything in the world so infinitely fascinating that I can’t imagine cutting myself off from so much of it. Also, you mention that many of our mutually favorite writers work in multiple genres, but I think I can go a step further and say that all of my literary heroes do so. Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht are two of my foremost heroes from earlier in the 20th century. Sartre wrote drama, essays, novels, philosophy, political commentary, and short fiction with equal mastery and recognition, and Brecht wrote drama, essays, poetry, and short fiction. Norman Mailer is a hero of mine from the second half of the 20th century, and he wrote creative nonfiction, novels, political commentary, plays, poetry, and screenplays. I like my heroes to be larger than life, bursting with creative energy and thought, not safely playing a single game they know they can win. Margaret Atwood is another shining star in my literary cosmology, and I love her novels and poetry equally (though her short fiction, while quite good, does not own me in the same way).

    As a final thought on the subject, I’ll add that with jobs going the way they are in the humanities, I think we’re going to have to wear multiple hats if we want good jobs, so hopefully people will become less resistant to what was pretty common in past generations.

    DB: To continue the previous question, how do you see the demands, requirements, hopes, or expectations of academia shaping writers’ writing choices? Given that very few literary journals or magazines pay for publication rights, and given that most of the books published every year struggle to earn back their production costs, we find the lion’s share of our most promising writers co-dedicating their lives to both writing and teaching as a means of earning a livelihood. Does such a situation expand or limit literary production in important ways? Does it offer certain benefits to writers and readers? What would you say to an undergraduate student who came to you and said, “Tell me how to make it as a writer when I grow up”?

    OE: You have to have a day job unless you’re the heir to a massive fortune or have the good luck of writing a bestseller your first time out (and even then, you likely still need a day job unless you can keep cranking them out). I think it’s mostly people raised around educated people who see academia as somehow evil. Neither of my parents graduated high school, so I see education as an unalloyed good. If a person wants to teach and read books and write books for a living, more power to them. If they want to be a bartender and read books and write books, more power to them. I figure we just make this stuff up as we go, and whatever ends up working is what we do. I’ve worked dozens of different jobs ranging from janitor to film projectionist to kitchen staff to library manager to visiting professor. I love teaching and plan to make that my day job when I’m done with my PhD. Nothing fills me with greater joy than opening a student’s eyes to some hugely important philosophical issue or to some wonderful little aesthetic trick. Hell, I even love teaching grammar and composition, which some friends tell me makes me insane, but I really do love it.

    But none of that has really answered the final question in your list of questions. What would I tell undergraduates to do today? I’d tell them, first off, to read constantly and widely—everything from Stephen King to Maxine Hong Kingston to Kingsley Amis (as well as authors without the word “king” somewhere in their names). This is by far the most important thing. To be a serious writer you have to be a serious reader. And since you’ve made the question about what I would tell undergraduate students specifically (as opposed to, say, a thirty-year-old bartender thinking about working on a novel), I’d tell them to pick good majors and/or minors. Double-major in comparative literature and anthropology, or in English and philosophy, with a minor in creative writing; or major in history and double-minor in creative writing and German; etc, etc, etc. Major (or double-major) in something that will bring cool and smart stuff into your writing, and then take a handful of creative writing workshops to help you learn some of the tricks of the trade. I would tell them to take workshops in every genre they can—creative nonfiction, fiction, playwriting/screenwriting, and poetry—since at that age, they need to just be exposing themselves to as much stuff as they can as they figure out what they want to do and where their talents lie. And speaking of exposure to things, I have advised many students to do a study abroad, preferably to a country that does not speak English. This gives a writer two very valuable things: 1) Experience in the world, and 2) A foreign language they can use for getting jobs or doing translations.

    You’ll notice that very little of what I’ve said was about the career of a writer and more about the formation of a writer. That is not an accident. As I said earlier, we have to have a day job of some sort, but if we truly have the real vocation of being a writer, it doesn’t matter what our job is. Just think of William Faulkner working as a night guard at a factory where he supposedly wrote As I Lay Dying, or think of Stephen Dixon working as a bartender for many years as his stories showed up in places like The Paris Review and small press journals all across the country—or, if this is more your speed, think of Louis Auchincloss working as a Wall Street lawyer as he cranked out novels and short stories and nonfiction books at the rate of about one book every sixteen months for nearly fifty years. There are dozens of jobs you can have and be a writer, but the only way to be a real writer is to absorb as much experience and education (in the broadest sense of that word) as you conceivably can, engage the world in its infinite variety, and then to translate all that into words in the best way you know how.

    DB: Since this is an interview for The Los Angeles Review, where your poem “Wishing on a Shooting Star My Friend Informs Me Is Likely Just a Satellite” appears in the current issue (Volume 11), could you talk about that poem for a bit? It is a long poem, over three pages, and is humorous, high-brow, and heartfelt all at once. Could you tell us about its composition and how you managed all these disparate parts?

    OE: It’s weird to dissect your own work, but I’ll give it a go. First off, for a while there I was writing a book of poems based around famous scientists of the past, but my particular scientific heroes (since I started college as a physics guy, I have scientist heroes along with my literary heroes). These include Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, and Nikola Tesla. I ended up abandoning the book, even though I continued writing the poems as single pieces, so I have a bunch of poems about these guys, and I have all this research I’ve done about them. I got the longish epigraph for the poem in LAR from the letters of Isaac Newton. Then the poem took a weird turn when I learned that most of what we see in the night sky that looks like shooting stars are really just satellites falling and burning up in the atmosphere. I did not learn this from a friend, as the title claims, but from the Yahoo News science and technology section. That said, for some reason I’ve always imagined the friend in the title being this great guy named Chris Boyette I used to hang out with a lot when I still lived in Greensboro, North Carolina. Not sure why. He’s not the kind of person to pooh-pooh someone’s star-wishing activities, and he’s not all that interested in science to the best of my knowledge. I think I just needed a person to fill in the character of this friend, and I wanted it to be a playful friendship the speaker of the poem and his friend have, one full of little jokes and amiable jabs, which was true of Chris and me, so I guess maybe that’s why I picked him, but I didn’t go through that conscious process to pick him. I just always kinda saw him as the friend. Anyway, as for the other stuff you mention, it is a pretty long poem by some standards, and I don’t always write poems that long, but I really enjoy when a poem spreads its legs and walks around for a while. But long poems can be tedious. For some weird reason, when I open a book of poetry and see a six-page poem, I immediately think, “No way, dude. I’m reading a one-pager first”—and I do this even though I love reading longer poems and love writing them. I have a ten-page poem in my most recent chapbook, for example, and Albert Goldbarth, who writes ten- and twenty-page poems all the time is among my favorite living poets. But for some reason, I think a lot of us have an initial negative reaction to longer poems. Of course, when we open a short story collection and see a twenty-page story, we think nothing of it. This has something to do with genre expectations, I think, but that’s the way it goes. This is likely why I put the humor you mention in the poem. It was a rhetorical choice. Almost like I was saying to the reader, “Hey, you gotta read this long poem with all this science-y stuff in it, I know, but you’re laughing now and then, so everything’s cool.” I’m not sure what else to say about the poem. I hope what I’ve said is helpful to anyone who reads it. And I hope everyone buys a copy of the issue, not only to read my piece, but for all the other great stuff in the issue.

  • Ezra Dan Feldman: Criscrossed Admirations

    Authors can spend a lot of time thinking and talking about audiences, especially our ideal audiences. We think of them as the readers who will give our work the most credit and who will, at the same time, understand our work’s ambition and accurately measure its success. Admiring them and courting their admiration, we hold these readers in mind, write our poems or essays or blog posts for them, and then hope to put our writing in their hands.

    On a small scale, this can be easy. Among my own such readers are my partner, my brothers, and a few old friends. I can send them my work in an email or even call across the room: “Will you read this essay for me?” or “Can I read a poem out loud to you?”

    But reaching such readers on a broad scale seems more difficult, and probably it requires a bit of luck. The ideal reader for one piece may not be the same as the ideal reader for another. And sometimes our ideal readers are already dead; or not yet born; or strangers, whom we never expect to meet. Sometimes they are exclusively, necessarily, made up. Even when they are real, how do we get our writing to them if we don’t know exactly who they are?

    The data miners of our culture’s commercial powerhouses could probably help (See The New York Times‘s “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”). With the right resources, we could direct-mail our work to the audience most likely to appreciate it emotionally and intellectually; and if we didn’t reach everyone who might respond, we’d still know we were doing all right. In practice, though, our audiences can be mysteries – especially for “emerging” writers.

    My friend Avi was visiting me a few days ago. Avi is also a writer, a year older than I am, and we sat in the sun outside a local coffee shop to talk about the writing we had done and were going to do – and the people who were going to read it. Somehow Avi and I aren’t ideal audiences for each other: much of what we push to articulate on the page we can transmit to each other with a word or two. Consequently, there is a lot we don’t know about each other’s careers.

    “Are you part of a group?” Avi abruptly asked me. “Are you part of a movement?”

    Hardly thinking, I told him I wasn’t. I haven’t affiliated myself with a literary group or built a community around some theme. I haven’t committed to sharing writing and critique with other authors in the hope of promoting one vision, style, policy, or set of values. I don’t have a literary clique.

    But on reflection, I answered incorrectly. It turns out I am part of a movement, though I only joined up by writing what I care most to write. It turns out I am a queer writer, and I know this because my readers, my actual readers, have told me. Over the past eight months or so, my poems have come out almost exclusively in queer journals or queer themed issues. The editors of these issues have collectively shown me, and suggested to their readers, a current of queer in my work.

    As this pattern of acceptances developed, I found it wondrous, exciting, and challenging. I didn’t know whether, as a queer writer, I might wind up speaking for people whom I hadn’t consciously chosen to represent ; or whether I was assumed to participate in queer political communities. Did I have to back my queer writing with other queer activism?

    The question needled me in two ways. First, I wanted to affirm for the editors who had selected my work, and for the readers who had read it, that they hadn’t made a mistake: You’re right, I wanted to say, I am a queer writer. But I didn’t know where to deliver such a pronouncement, and not knowing made me uneasy. Second (and this is contradictory), I worried that my being known as a queer writer might pigeonhole my future work, might limit its range of meanings or its appeal.

    Finally, though, I saw how ungracious my fears were. The readers I was worrying about were the ones who liked and chose my work, and it was part of my job as a writer to give them all the credit I could, just as I asked them to credit my poems. They saw the queer in my writing, and they didn’t need me to confirm, “Oh, I’m queer, too.” And if their judgment of my work matched my own, I had every reason to believe that this set of readers was eager to see my work more widely read. These were people who could identify with the crisscrossed admirations in my writing and my living – for women, men, ideas, ideals, voices, silences, things.

    No doubt what I write in the near future will participate in a conversation that other people have shaped more than I can. But this is always the case. Publication and readership change the meaning of the written word, and I have the same burden as ever of trying to write and speak well.

    The insight I would later share with Avi is that once we reach a wide audience, most of our ideal readers will know us better than we know them, and they will know us from a distance.

    The distance is unfamiliar, since we are used to having our ideal readers – the ones who influence us the most – close at hand. But it is advantageous, too. These readers receive our work in new ways, and their stakes in our work are separate from their stakes in our persons. They can teach us about what we are saying, and they can give us a community that includes not only themselves, but other writers, too. They can catch our work up in a movement and make us what we never were before.

    I am a queer writer, now; and many authors may be who don’t know it yet. So much depends on what we say, and to whom.


    Ezra Dan Feldman’s poetry appears in LAR Issue 11.

  • Our Nominations for Best New Poets 2012

    LAR is pleased to announce our two nominees for the 2012 Best New Poets anthology:

    Richard Prins for “Some God,” Issue 11. Richard Prins is a lifelong New Yorker who also spends time in Dar es Salaam. He is an M.F.A. student at New York University.

    Andrea Scarpino for “Observation Deck,” Issue 11. Andrea Scarpino is the author of the chapbook The Grove Behind (Finishing Line Press) and a weekly contributor for the blog Planet of the Blind. She teaches with Union Institute and University’s Cohort Ph.D. program in Interdisciplinary Studies.

  • Breaking Out: Vanessa Blakeslee

    During the first week of fourth grade, our teacher, Mrs. Frey, announced several projects our class would be undertaking. A sturdy woman in her prime with snappy eyes and cropped brown hair, Mrs. Frey might have been intimidating if not for the warmth underlying her attitude, one that called for the highest standards. We would print our own newspaper. We would put on a play. And we could use the class computer to type our stories, cut and paste them onto pages of our own illustrations, and present the “published” books to the class in a reading. Our books would be displayed with the other young adult novels for the remainder of the year, available for our classmates to borrow.

    At this, I caught my breath. Ever since I’d learned to write, I had been creating my own books at home—just lined paper torn from notebooks and stapled along the sides. Still, I had never shown anyone my stories, except perhaps my parents. I desperately wanted to see my work in print, yet I was frozen with stage fright. To present my book to the class, aloud, just as Mrs. Frey read to us in the afternoons, her clear voice bringing to life the humor of Judy Blume or Beverly Cleary, was a nerve-wracking thought. What if no one liked what I’d written?

    Weeks passed. Then one day Mrs. Frey announced that another girl had her own book to present. After recess we gathered, straining to follow the author’s thin voice and glimpse her illustrations. The book was bound by shiny spring clips; Mrs. Frey had laminated the front and back covers in the teachers’ lounge. The story, however, was disappointing—not much of a story at all. That girl wanted to be published, but she’s not a writer, I couldn’t help thinking. I’m a writer, and I could do better than that.

    My first book was a simple horse story, evocative of the obsessive phase I was going through at the time. Reading my work aloud to the class wasn’t nearly as terrifying as I had supposed, either; instead it proved exhilarating, and classmates praised the tale.

    Yet I wasn’t satisfied. I knew I could write better stories.

    I wrote another story, and another, each one better than the last. My breakout book was a horse story set in the pioneer days with an evil stepmother; by then, fourth graders who visited our classroom for their reading group were acquainted with my fiction. Kids I didn’t know approached me in the cafeteria and asked when my next book was coming out. For the first time I felt the real pleasure of accomplishing something true to who I was, that putting my visions on paper was not a vain activity, but worthwhile to others.

    In June, I gathered my half-dozen books from the classroom library. I hadn’t paid much attention after they were “published” and joined the paperbacks. My carefully crafted books sported crinkled corners and smeared pages; some were barely recognizable, the back covers missing, pages barely hanging on. Mrs. Frey had instructed us to insert a blank page in the back for “Readers’ Comments.” The uneven scrawls of my classmates filled the page; a few readers, needing room, had made use of the margins so I had to turn the books sideways to see what they’d written. “Great story,” wrote Paul G., “I loved the evil stepmother,” and “Loved it! Can’t wait for you to write another one,” from Amy C. “You’re a terrific writer,” said another. “I love all your books.”

    My heart thudded as it had when Mrs. Frey first made her announcement, but with excitement, not fear. For I had learned bravery, and my peers, in turn, had shown me my truth—that I was an author, and a respected one. There would be no turning back.

    Vanessa Blakeslee’s poem “Monk’s Blend” appears in LAR 11.

  • Michelle Brittan: The Sky Will Look White

    Michelle Brittan’s poem appears in Issue 10 of LAR.

    The Sky Will Look White

    You want to be skiing, like the girls in your class who come back
    from winter break with photographs of themselves, puffed inside
    their jackets. But you’re sitting by a window in the house of your grandfather,
    a man you’ve met twice now. Here, it’s the monsoon season and you are

    fifteen, already you believe you’re an artist, insist on only the black and white
    rolls of film your father sometimes gets for free at his job. He works
    as a cashier in a drugstore, saves money to bring your mother back
    every five years to the country she’d left. But in this village you’re alone,

    you’ve stayed behind from a drive into the city, because shopkeepers tease you
    for not answering America to a question asked in the language you recognize
    but don’t understand. Slapping a mosquito on your knee, you don’t know
    how to be grateful, so you take pictures—elbows propped

    on the sill, lens pressed beyond where a screen would be. In two weeks
    your father will develop this picture: the sky will look white, the jungle
    canopy drained of green in a deep slope, telephone wires
    like a chairlift up the mountain, the raindrops stilled and soft.

  • Wendy S. Walters: Cold

    Wendy S. Walters’s poem “Cold” appears in Issue 10 of The Los Angeles Review.

    Cold

    I ran anywhere without asking first.
    At the end of a road, I met a door
    built to close when I called. Years of doors
    then the sky turned low and gray on me, too.
    Before I could tell God why I shouldn’t
    be so lonely, a letter explained my
    lack of distinction in cursive: You are
    not what I think of you, it made plain. I
    unraveled the words then hand-drew this map
    to rescue me from spacelessness. This was
    how I first killed the writer. The next time
    I started the story over. The next
    time I let you believe you heard me say
    this before, something like this but bitter.

  • W. Todd Kaneko: Remembering Minidoka

    As 2011 draws to a close, we’re featuring some highlights from our publication year with selections from Issues 9 and 10. W. Todd Kaneko’s “Remembering Minidoka” appears in Issue 10 of The Los Angeles Review.

    Remembering Minidoka

    W. Todd Kaneko

    And with the camps came extremely significant designations and
    distinctions that are with us to this very day: “What camp were
    you in?” Or as my great-grandchildren in the next century will
    say: “What camp were they in?”
    —Lawson Fusao Inada, Legends from Camp

    There’s no place like home.
    —Dorothy Gale, The Wizard of Oz

    1.

    My grandmother remembered little about Minidoka
    because her husband remembered it for them both—
    fabricating home from splintered timber and
    a lingering taste of horses. She remembered life
    before the war—dancing with her husband
    in hay-filled barns, fearless walks across
    meadow and township, through forests deep
    with greedy tigers, through Chinatown.
    After the war, she rebuilt her family in that house
    brimming with shadows, the forgotten odor
    of livestock. After her husband died, she reread
    old newspapers in the dim light of her living
    room, she gazed at outlines of barbed wire
    just beyond her curtains.

    2.

    My father remembers Minidoka differently—
    I remember it all wrong, he says, then explains
    how the crows kept him awake, their sorrow
    drizzling through morning. When the wolf loped
    into camp, my father climbed on its back, rode it
    through laundry lines, his fingers digging into fur
    reeking of brimstone. He battled hordes of rats
    in the hollyhocks, drove them out of gardens
    and into fissures beneath other families’ barracks.
    The memories I have are all that I have,
    my father says. They’re just memories—
    flocks of sheep devoured hillsides
    like earthbound clouds, the hills
    caught fire and set the sky ablaze for days,
    the children were set to play
    cat’s cradle only to find they had no thumbs,
    all they had were hooves.

    3.

    When I visited Minidoka, all that remained
    was a scar—that debris of family reclaimed
    by the earth, that rubble of guard towers
    left like broken mousetraps in the remote
    curves of the yard. My grandfather’s great hands
    are buried out somewhere in the thistles.
    My father’s childhood lies overrun
    by knotweed because this is all we have.—
    the landscape is coated with a black sheen
    of memory. The land feels nothing.


  • Introducing Mania Klepto: The Book of Eulene

    Carolyne Wright, whose translations appear in issues 6 and 10 of The Los Angeles Review, has just released her latest collection of poems, Mania Klepto: The Book of Eulene.

    This new collection of poems centers around Wright’s wild, free-spirited, and unforgettable alter-ego, Eulene. Don Bogan, editor of The Cincinnati Review, says, “Of all the descendants of Berryman’s Henry Pussy-cat, Carolyne Wright’s Eulene has got to be the most, to use the poet’s own term, bodacious. This ‘gregarious loner’ weaves her formidable presence from Puyallup to Calcutta, from childhood memories to apocalyptic myth. Narrative, satire, and lyric meditation come together in an intricate, vivid portrait. In Mania Klepto, Eulene demands her say—and she says a lot.”

    “Postmortem: Eulene,” reprinted below by permission of the author, gives a glimpse into Wright’s musical language, her uninhibited vision, and her unforgettable protagonist.

    Postmortem : Eulene

    Occluded stars bully me
    like ghosts among twilit half domes.
    They mock my tongue
    with honey and silver, bloodhued
    moons and tree sloths
    that unwrap their slow shovels

    and plummet past the lustre palms
    in a mottled swoon. Their tails
    never did curl properly. So
    what about the blood count
    of the stars, the night’s relentless weather?

    Cancún couldn’t let on about its revelers
    under such yield signs, hedged about
    with corduroy and sticky milk.
    The scatter-bird snaps the quetzal’s
    neck and panthers grind their incisors.
    Only names whose conjure fires

    ash out a superhuman scorn
    jump ship and disappear into the port’s
    labyrinth of alleys. New lovers move
    to safe houses after curfew
    and emerge next season

    with land-legged suits, new pin codes
    in their documents, new histories—
    they’ve always been here.
    Charismatic black sheep, the baby
    in the brain cries Baby, its mother
    opens her blouse in the Swiss-cheese

    riddle of hymnals. Jezebel is the name tag
    on the morgue’s latest arrival. So
    why don’t I turn my face, rueful
    blue but featureless, toward
    the self-effacing cradle?

    Learn more at Turning Point Books.

  • Nick DePascal: You’re Not Stupid

    You’re Not Stupid: A Student Perspective on Workshop and Critique

    Over the past two to three years, my biggest struggle and stumbling block as a poet has been over the issues surrounding difficulty and accessibility.  How much do I want to reveal?  How close do I want to play my cards to my chest?  How can I achieve clarity without sacrificing originality in terms of voice, tone and content?  Certainly, these questions have been most helpfully raised by fellow students in graduate level writing workshops.  However, as we wander through each other’s poems, attempting to discover and understand what makes each other’s poems tick, identifying themes and obsessions, and yes, struggles, there are always moments when one another’s poems become simply unintelligible and beyond the grasp of our emotional and intellectual experiences and tendencies.  It’s at these moments that the poet in question needs most to hear the confusion and questions of his or her readers.

    As readers we can all quibble about particular line breaks, image strength, and word choice, but the biggest and yet most delicate part of the workshop comes when a poem fails to register interest with its readers.  It’s good for a poet to know, especially in a workshop setting, if readers are having difficulty accessing a poem, and typically if one person is having the issue, others are as well.  Yet when it comes time for us to critique the poem, most readers are overly cautious in addressing their outright inability to “get” the poem, and will at times gloss over this inaccessibility.  Which leads me to perhaps my greatest pet peeve as both a writer and reader in a workshop – when someone utters some variation of that self-effacing phrase: “Maybe I’m just stupid, but…”  Or, “I think this just went over my head.”  Instead of engaging the poem, along with all its attendant problems, head on, the utterer of this phrase chooses to take the easy way out, which incidentally is detrimental to the poet’s ability to listen, learn and hopefully revise.

    If you don’t “get” a poem, you’re not stupid.  This feeling of not-gettingness occurs when whatever experience being put forth in the poem is difficult to connect with emotionally or intellectually.  Perhaps the poem puts forth a situation or event you’ve never experienced in life, and the way it’s rendered would only make sense to someone who has experienced it firsthand?  Perhaps you have experienced the situation in the poem firsthand and feel it negatively addresses your own experience.  Perhaps the poem is muddled by imagery both beautiful and mixed or confusing (a sin of mine)?  Perhaps the lines are too long?  Too short?  Perhaps the sentences are too long, leading breathless building of images and metaphors that sometimes lead nowhere (also a sin of mine)?  None of this makes the reader who doesn’t connect to the poem stupid, or render their opinion invalid.  In fact, it puts more responsibility on that particular reader to try and explicate what is and isn’t working in the poem, and what it is that keep them out, for accessibility is an issue all poets wrestle with, whether they admit it or not.  The responsible reader and critic in the workshop will attempt to couch this inability to connect as a useful critique for the poet, and try to locate what about the poem inhibits their understanding of it.  Are the images too abstract, or seemingly at odds with what seems to be at stake in the poem?  Is there a lack of centering or grounding location in the poem?  Are you unsure of what emotion is being presented in the poem?  It’s ultimately up to the poet to decide and how they want to make the poem more accessible, based on the criticism received, but simply copping out as a reader and critic deprives the poet of even that opportunity, and is unhelpful as a critique.

    Nick DePascal’s poetry appears in LAR Issue 10, October 2011.

  • Carolyne Wright on being a “Permanent Temporary”

    Several years ago, I was asked by Sally Shivnan, a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland – Baltimore, to provide a few comments for an article she was writing for the AWP Job List, about some of the early-career challenges of writers who teach for a living.

    The article, “Surviving the Trip from Adjunct to Professor: How to Keep Writing through an Overload of Teaching,” offered some practical solutions to the problems of balancing time to write with the demands of the early stages of a teaching career.

    The comments of mine ultimately used for this article dealt with the value of establishing a writing routine (I was quoted as preferring “the wee hours ‘when banks and offices are closed and the phone doesn’t ring’”) and of staying organized in my writing life—keeping detailed lists to track queries, deadlines, and follow-up calls and e-mails.

    But these nuggets of practical wisdom were only a small fraction of the reflections that Shivnan’s questions generated.  In response to her query, I found myself writing a narrative about my odyssey as an “academic migrant” and “permanent temporary” job holder.  What follows is an updated version of the narrative I wrote—my version of a career trajectory that for a time seemed stuck in the early stages of short-term, contingent jobs, but which has become the long-term status now for many writers who teach.

    Over the last two decades, in nearly a dozen states, I held a series of limited-term (one-semester, one-year, or two-year) teaching positions–most of them full-time with benefits, several of them visiting writer posts with some degree of prestige because of the extensive publications required to qualify. But for different reasons (mainly budgetary), none of these short-term jobs led to an ongoing position. Consequently, while indicating my keen interest in remaining at each institution if possible, but not holding my breath that I could stay, I would embark on the next round of applications for positions for the following year.  Hardly would I arrive at the next new university or college, and (while getting set up in the new department, town, and community; meeting a new group of colleagues; working out routines for teaching, writing, shopping, social life, and all the rest), I would almost immediately begin applying for the following year’s job. Since the academic job search cycle begins as early as August, for jobs that will start the following August, I was constantly applying.

    Although these visiting posts usually carried no advising or committee responsibilities, I would often volunteer for such duties anyway, to demonstrate my collegiality and the kind of contribution I would make if kept on in that department. Colleagues were glad for my participation, but not able to alter departmental policies or influence the financial circumstances that prevented the continuation of my appointment. For my own financial and professional survival, I was compelled to spend as much time applying for the next round of jobs as I spent preparing and teaching my current classes, and doing the writing and publishing that would help me land future jobs. These were full-scale academic applications–letter, CV, dossier with reference letters and transcripts, writing samples if requested.  If there was interest in my candidacy, this packet of material was followed by preliminary interviews at the MLA Convention, the AWP Conference, or by telephone, and on-campus interviews when the search reached that stage.

    Hence, for over dozen years, I was an academic itinerant, moving from one state to another– Massachusetts to Virginia and Wyoming, Wyoming to Georgia, Georgia to Florida, Florida to Oklahoma, Oklahoma to Ohio, Ohio to Washington State–for the sake of the next short-term position.  I learned to pick up and go where I needed to for the sake of work, and basically live in perpetual transition.  I got to the point where I left most of my stuff in the same packing containers in which it would be shipped to the next destination: books and manuscripts in cartons organized like drawers and shelves, clothes in cardboard wardrobe boxes, as few household items as possible, and no furniture.  I was the “scholar gipsy” of my generation, with displacement as my permanent address.  This way of life quickly became tiresome–the pattern of constant change grew repetitive, the continual moves grew monotonous.  I grew weary of how efficiently I could finesse the whole process–how I could hammer the tent stakes in for six months, then pull up those stakes and transplant elsewhere.

    Once I met my husband (in Ohio), I would have been okay with remaining in Cleveland had he wished to continue working there.  But by the time we met, he was tired of the Rust Belt, so after a year, we departed Cleveland for my native Seattle.  Since he has a good position in his field (and a salary which covers health benefits and most expenses for both of us), I am glad to stay here, with a home base in my home town!  With this external stability that mirrors–at last!–the internal stability that has been essential to staying balanced over so many years of employment odyssey, I am content with the jobs I am offered (or create for myself) in this region. When I am offered short-term posts in other states, I accept them, but I no longer seek to remain at any distant institution.  My home base is my native Seattle, and I love the teaching job I have held for the last six years—since mid-2005.  In fact, if this were a tenure-track post, I would no doubt be coming up for tenure consideration just about now!

    A few months before the move (back) to Seattle, following a few suggestions and contacts given to me by literary associates, I made a few informal job queries–mainly via email with attached CV, course descriptions, and writing samples.  As a result, I was invited to join the faculty of a new low-residency MFA program, the Whidbey Writers Workshop of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, on beautiful Whidbey Island.  It’s an ongoing but part-time post, it has a wonderful family of faculty colleagues, students and (after several graduating classes) alumni—and I have been with the team since the first residency of August 2005, the first semester, participating in the development of the program since the beginning.  Talk about continuity and stability!  In many ways, it has been my best job.

    I also have been able to propose courses and teach frequently at a local community center for the literary arts, Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, another organization whose evolution I have been part of for the last half-dozen years now. These part-time posts are supplemented by readings and workshops at various colleges and universities, and at writers’ conferences and festivals around the country.

    I spend a good deal of time organizing these events, as well as the travel and other logistics involved, and I receive a goodly number of (mostly modest) honorarium checks in return. This sort of short-term travel is a good way to meet students and fellow writers all over the country as well as locally.  It also requires the organizational ability, attention to details and deadlines, and all the other qualities and skills that I had to hone during the years of academic peripatetics—skills that would be an asset to any department that might have hired me for an ongoing position.  I would not be able to subsist on my current level of income if I were living on my own, but fortunately I don’t have to, as long as my husband has a full-time position with benefits.

    These days, I apply for a limited number of posts advertised in the MLA and AWP job lists, but this is nothing like the full-scale application process I undertook for over a dozen years in the 1990s and the first few years of the new millennium.  At this point, I seem to have achieved something approaching the best of several worlds:  the flexibility afforded by low-residency, part-time teaching—which permits much more writing time and professional travel to promote that writing than many full-time jobs.  I also enjoy the continuity of an ongoing position that I love, with a family, a wide circle of friends and colleagues in many parts of this country and the world, and a home base in a city and region of the country that feels like my geographic and psychic center.

    What have I learned from all this?   I am grateful for the adaptability and flexibility that were necessary to keep my wits and balance over the course of so many moves, and I am glad that I have had a more varied existence than many writers who achieved the tenure track.  But what I have learned is the subject for another day, another set of notes as-yet unwritten.

    Carolyne Wright’s latest collection of poetry, Mania Klepto: The Book of Eulene, is forthcoming from Turning Point Books. Read sample poems here. Carolyne’s translations appear in LAR Issues 6 and 10.

  • Dzvinia Orlowsky: A Poet’s Anti-Rule Book Part II

    Breaking the Stereo-type of Poetry Workshop Teachers or, Who the Hell’s Workshops Have You Been Sitting In On, Steve?

    Many years ago, as an emerging creative writing teacher, I had the good fortune of facilitating a summer conference poetry workshop taught by a nationally established poet who had several books to his credit, each published by a reputable press. A student had submitted a poem to the workshop about a couple spending the night in the woods. The teacher wanted to know more about the couple: Were they deeply in love? Should we care? Why were they there on that particular night? He wanted more of the telling. I, on the other hand, wanted to know how the moon appeared brighter and what it was like, using similes which would reveal more about the speaker and the couple, why the moon appeared brighter at that hour and why/how campfire smoke seemed to linger in the surrounding brush. If, through these sensory particulars of how it looked, smelled, felt, I could get under the skin of the speaker, allow myself to see with his/her selective eye, emotionally tethered to the concrete via poetic devices mentioned above, I would come to understand the significance of the couple and, more importantly, of that night.

    Whether or not the couple was in love or they hated one another, and whether, in the end, the moon appeared bright simply because its easy-reach appeal rhymed with delight or blight, I can’t remember. What I do remember, however, is that the three-hour session flew, and that my hand throbbed from detailed note taking. I couldn’t wait to get back to my room, organize my scribbles, and see where and how all this input for which I was immensely grateful would nudge the first words of a new poem out onto the page.

    Some of us can’t get enough of plucking the worms, and others, turning over the large rocks to get to the worms. The ideal process of writing and revising combines both—negotiating unfamiliar, unmarked coordinates where language strikes with greatest possibility and surprising accuracy, as well as use of poetic devices such as imagery, metaphor/simile and sound.

    As a poet, I’m quickly drawn to any essay that risks breaking of rules or sideswiping current trends. But I have a serious problem with sweeping generalities that encourage increasing cultural leanings toward a bias, an attitude of  “this” vs. “that”, of “us” vs. “them” that continues to grow at an alarming rate.

    Steve Kowit’s “A Poet’s Anti-Rule Book,” recently published in The Writer’s Chronicle presumes a position on current teaching practices I strongly disagree with. First, I disagree that creative writing students come into academic or summer conference workshops completely lacking in their own diverse and deeply rooted sense of who they might be as writers. This view assumes that a student readily accepts and abides by all rules, complying merely for the sake of pleasing “teacher.” In my many years of teaching, this has not proven to be the case. Students often come ready to do battle in order to justify and–in many cases–enlighten their teachers to diverse cultural nuances in addition to their mixed punctuation, their antiquated diction and voluminous abstractions. Even in remote community library workshops, if a one-shot Sunday session poet wants to write about kitty, fluffy purring kitty, chances are that I’m simply not going to get her/him to consider the subject of leisurely hours spent licking genitalia. Or the cat’s swagger as it freely walks away.

    And that’s fine. After all, it’s not my poem.

    However, it’s our job as teachers to encourage our students to meet us mid-ground. I was recently (gratefully) reminded by poet Nancy Mitchell of the following lines by Rumi:

    Beyond all ideas
    Of wrong doing and right doing
    There is a field-
    I’ll meet you there.

    I don’t mean that teachers should be in the habit of co-piloting their students’ poems into sounding more like their own. Rather, I mean that we should remain open enough to consider other possibilities, other craft-related approaches that allow emotional truths to surface, purely and noticeably voiced. Misguiding students into believing that half the battle is won by simply breaking rules is deadly; it absolves them of the responsibility as poets to reveal, and in that revelation provide the vehicle by which the poem transcends the concrete and moves the reader in the process.

    Which brings me to my second objection to Kowit’s assertions: I’m weary of poetry teachers being lumped into some large wad of drones who “facilitate” predictable workshop sessions, in which students are stripped of diversity and originality in favor of a half-dozen “best-bet” rules on how to write meaningful poems. Does anyone ever really say, “I think you need to get concrete and specific if the poem is gonna have a shot at the quarterlies?” If so, whoever he/she is, he/she shouldn’t be teaching.

    Yes, the dictum “show don’t tell” has been used ad nauseam.  It’s boring to hear, and equally boring to teach. But certainly, by now one has figured out that there are variations on that theme. A student of mine develops her poems (without compromising her own voice) along a “tell show tell” pattern – including concrete details and imagery -of which Ezra Pound speaks:

    An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art-

    The problem I have with the term “concrete” detail is that it subconsciously conjures up an association with things artificial or of a paving track. In other words: denying one direct access to heart.  Consider the “concrete” poem by Charles Simic, which reveals worlds in a single image:

    Love Flea

    He took a flea
    From her armpit
    To keep

    And cherish
    In a matchbox,
    Even pricking his finger

    From time to time
    To feed it
    Drops of blood.

    Regarding the “Show, Don’t Tell” mandate,” Kowit puts forth, “Any quick look at good writing will demonstrate that effective writers spend a great deal of their time telling the reader what is happening, what a character thinks or feels, what a situation or event implies, and what the author would like the reader to think, feel, and believe.  Yes Telling.”  Then he goes on to quote the first four lines of “Hide-and-Seek 1933″ by Galway Kinnell.  If discussing Kinnell’s work in light of the more typical first-draft student poems one encounters in most workshops doesn’t unjustly tip the scales, he then excerpts the final eight lines of W.B. Yeat’s “Politics” to show, to his mind, that the success of this poem relies in its telling:

    Yet there’s a traveled man that knows
    What he talks about,
    And there’s a politician
    That has read and thought,
    And maybe what they say is true
    Of war and war’s alarms,
    But O that I were young again
    and held her in my arms!

    Here much of Yeats’s poem’s emotional power is driven through syntax, meter, rhymes and half-rhymes.  Sound links uproot us—to use Seamus Heaney’s words -”to master new rungs of the air.”  We feel the poem’s wholeness, the appetite and gravity that pull us toward the memory, a projected imagining of holding an elusive “her.”  To ignore these poetic devices allows the student to, as Pound writes, imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music. We can all imagine a less successful version of this “telling.”  And why it wouldn’t work.  Kowit’s points would be a lot more convincing if he had been able to excerpt student writing samples that merely tell and still manage to be decent poems.  Regardless, I don’t think any workshop facilitator would say, “why not have her swinging an alligator handbag while staring into the window of a fashionable Dublin boutique.” At least not in this poem.

    Continuing on with this idea, this facilitator would have just broken a cardinal rule by using the word “swinging.” “Poems demand active language,” Kowit goes on to say, “Students sometimes are given the idea the “ing” words should be avoided because the present progressive is apt to lack the energy and vividness of the ordinary tense.”  Yes, students are sometimes given that idea—particularly if the action occurring in the present is not likely or doesn’t appear to need to be continuing into the future. Words like “twirling, swirling, whirling, turning” appear, for example, in countless poems about dancing. The student attempts to recreate a sense of movement in the poem more effectively achieved through rhythm and syllabic stress—two craft disciplines which I feel aren’t taught rigorously enough.  Kowit concludes, “What language is or is not appropriate in any passage is determined, I think it would be fair to say, by the intentions of that particular passage.” Ya think? I can only match this revelation with one made by another published poet who once while giving a short lecture on figurative language years ago at the Cambridge Public Library referred to the act of comparing two dissimilar things as something he liked to call simile and metaphor.

    Under rule header:  “Avoid Sentimentality:  When Expressing Overwhelming Emotion Use Restraint and Understatement” Kowit continues, “If one writes well enough and structures the poem cleverly enough, the reader can be made to weep over the tearing of a shoelace!”   I have a hard time associating emotion with cleverness.  My gut instinct:  you’re in the moment, or you’re outside of it.  I wouldn’t suggest printing on a condolence card Kowit’s “un-imagineable” poem:

    Oh  Belinda, you’re dead. boo hoo, boo hoo.
    And will never to me be returning.  I don’t know where in this poem to begin.
    my heart for you it really and truly is burning
    with your little nose and your chiny-chin-chin
    Oh a million boo hoo hoo hoo hoos.

    But oddly enough I can easily imagine someone deranged who’s just committed murder, spewing these words as he violently struggles to bury Belinda or whomever.  Maybe a workshop facilitator who’s collapsed mentally? “It is not the emotion that is false or excessive,” Kowit criticizes his above mock-verse, “but the writing that’s inadequate to the situation.”  What is the situation?  Have I missed something?

    For each of Kowit’s subtopics I find agreement and disagreement.  Yes, readers have to be hijacked.  No, not everyone reads a piece of writing five times mulling over each phrase.  But to say that this only happens in a university setting (which by the way, I strongly feel it should) and that independently of a university setting, no “sane” person does this, is incorrect. Poetry comes into our lives to move us rather than to offer itself up for scrutiny and dissection, but as is the case with listening to music, the poems that get under our skin stay there, and it is not out of the question to find ourselves reading and re-reading passages.  Or as Victor Hugo wrote: (I’m paraphrasing here) The first read lights the fire.  Each subsequent reading finds the syllables that spell out the sparks.

    In an attempt to end on a positive note, Kowit points to a colleague as example encouraging “guest appearances—to turn her students on to particular poetic orientations for which she herself has little sympathy.”  “How clever and large-spirited!” Again I ask, aren’t most programs doing this? I can’t imagine programs not encouraging diversity.  So much so that doing so, for me, seems rightfully spirited—without garnering extra applause for the effort.

    In closing, I want to say I graduated with Steve from a low-residency undergraduate MFA program which hopefully, like me, he recalls as a positive experience, workshops and all.  He’s a likeable guy, and I have enjoyed a good many of his poems in the past. Ultimately, I agree with his concluding quoted line from a poem by Nicanor Parra that supersedes all previous rules: “You have to improve on the blank page.” But I would ask that the same standard be held for writing articles on craft and teaching.  Unfortunately, as a poetry workshop instructor of many years, I find Steve Kowit’s broad summaries disheartening. And to be perfectly honest, to those caricatures of academic incompetence of which I can’t help but feel included, I respond with a hearty “bullshit”—breaking Kowit’s own previously published rule to “never to use a word that you’re proud of.”

    Dzvinia Orlowsky’s fourth poetry collection, “Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones” published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Dzvinia teaches at the Solstice MFA Low-Residency Program for Creative Writing at Pine Manor College.

    Her translations of Mieczslaw Jastrun’s poems (with co-translator Jeff Friedman) appear in LAR Issue 9.

  • D. Gilson: My Mother’s Breasts

    In an informal poll of two friends and riders of the Pittsburgh Port Authority Transit, I have recently found that few men feel comfortable talking about their mother’s breasts.

    That is not to say men are uncomfortable talking about breasts in general. Or further, very specific breasts—those of that woman who works in the coffee shop on Murray Avenue; those of the First Lady of the United States; those of any actress or musician; or those of an icon like Pamela Anderson, whose breasts are their very own narrative arc. Indeed, many men can talk at great lengths about breasts. Just not those that belong to their mothers.

    According to the 2010 Census, when a man talks about breasts in America, 52.6% of the time those breasts will belong to a mother. But this is not science. No. I want to talk about my mother’s breasts. According to those same statistics, my mother is only one of 157 some million women in these fifty sundry but united states and territories. I do not know how many of these women have breasts, and cannot account for such tissues within the male population, either. But it doesn’t matter. I want to talk about my mother’s breasts.

    They are large. The youngest of her six children, I have never known my mother with anything smaller than what can be colloquially referred to as D-cups. For a good deal of my life, they have been larger. What wonder! Disclaimer: I have no stake in breasts, my mother’s or otherwise. I was not breast-fed, and am still not. I am gay. The 2010 Census also reveals that three in every five gay men in America has an obsession with breasts. Of these obsessions, one in every three is toxic. I have beaten the odds!

    And so have my mother’s breasts. They may kill her now. Cancer. One in 35 cases results in death, both of breast and of woman. My mother tells the doctor—cut them off—and the doctor complies. The world continues to spin, neither faster nor slower, but with some adjustment.

    D. Gilson’s poetry appears in LAR 9.

  • Nominations for Best New Poets 2011

    LAR is pleased to announce our two nominees for the 2011 Best New Poets anthology:

    Ciara Shuttleworth for “What Sings is the Drunk Boy’s Hands,” and Stephen Lackaye for “Morella.” Both poems appeared in LAR Issue 9, February 2011.

    Best of luck to both poets!

  • John James: Should Poets Steal?

    I was recently reading Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010) when I came across a poem titled, “Dream of a Poetry of Defense,” a mash-up, according to Donnelly’s notes, of excerpts from Percy Shelley’s 1821 essay, “A Defence of Poetry” and section 13.5 of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004). Reading Donnelly in conjunction with T.S. Eliot, I began to notice a trend—one that had announced itself previously, but never so apparently problematic as at that moment: Poets steal, and that’s a fact. But at what point do writers become unaware of who they are stealing from; when, if at all, does it matter?

    In the cases of Donnelly and Eliot, both poets draw on largely original sources. Shelley’s essay, as far as I can tell, doesn’t attempt to rip off Byron or Coleridge. And I doubt the authors of the Commission Report have read a poem since they encountered “The Road Not Taken” in English 101 (Had they, perhaps the U.S. would have taken a different “road” in 2003). Eliot, of course, draws primarily on the classics—Homer, Dante, The Bible, Shakespeare—but also on his near contemporaries, like Baudelaire and Hesse. Here, the poets know precisely from whom they are stealing, and the context in which the lines originally appeared. Thus, the allusion is rendered perfectly clear.

    The problem with stealing from The Waste Land, however, is that nearly every line comes from another source. And while those sources are mediated, even reworked by Eliot—who then creates meaning through juxtaposition and disjunction—the original reference remains clear. Moreover, allusion, in Eliot, serves a vital purpose: that of compression. Without it, The Waste Land might have sprawled over twelve books.[1] Similarly, these excerpted borrowings serve a poignant function in Donnelly’s poem as well. The poet counter-points two radically different texts to create a single poem that, through the immediate topicality of one, satirizes the poet’s political environment; and through the other, fashions an important statement on the role of poetry to actively affect our cultural landscape (which, by the way, it does).

    But who is to stop a poet, particularly a young, naïve poet, from pulling lines from Eliot and unknowingly referencing Andrew Marvell or Dante’s Purgatorio? And if we could, should we stop him? So much of a budding poet’s work is made up of imitation, adoption, and rejection of certain lines, purely on an instinctual basis—of the poet discovering whether she prefers Graham to Heaney, or Crane to Stevens, and pursuing the passion felt toward (or against) those works.

    I don’t have an answer to this question. I fear that our culture has a short memory, and that stealing from any poet anywhere—who might have stolen from any poet, anywhere—risks the further clouding of that remembrance. But such, I suppose, is inevitable. Really, all of this was to say, I’ll give you a quarter if you can tell me where the following lines come from (without Googling them!). Eliot would know, and I’d venture to bet Donnelly would too.

    My first thought was, he lied in every word,

    That hoary cripple, with malicious eye

    Askance to watch the working of his lie…[2]

    [1] From I.A. Richards’ “The Poetry of T.S. Eliot,” originally published in 1926. My own reading comes from the Norton Critical Edition of The Wasteland (Michael North, ed. 2001).

    [2] Give up? The lines are from Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland,” which draws on King Lear. Browning perfected the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, which Eliot “borrowed” from him a generation later in poems like “Prufrock” and “Gerontion,” and to some extent in The Waste Land.

Reviews

  • The Art of the Book Review

    by Joe Ponepinto

    With the recent flurry of articles that excoriate book reviews as unfairly positive, such as Jacob Silverman’s in Slate, or as written for hire or cronyism as in The New York Times, it’s tougher than ever for book reviewers to maintain their credibility with readers.

    As the Book Review Editor for The Los Angeles Review, I at least get to define how ours are presented, in the hope that readers will find them honest, informative and fair.

    First, an explanation. I’ve blogged on my own site about the incestuous relationship between book authors and reviewers, and noted we are not immune to the pressures that situation creates. Many of our reviews are positive, in large part because my review staff and I are free to choose books that we think we will enjoy reading. Reviewers on mainstream publications like The New York Review of Books must generally review books that are or will be in the news, so the chances of disliking the book are higher. And we do include negative observations in our reviews, although we tend to discuss them as reviewer and editor beforehand, and look for ways to temper the bad with the good before we publish.

    So all that being said, what do I look for in a book review? With thanks to Ami Hendrickson for the opportunity to blog, here’s a list a of some of the major considerations:

    • What’s it about? What’s it really about? Give me the tone and the theme, not the plot. Anyone can recite the plot of a book. What’s more valuable to me as a reader and an editor, is an indication of the emotions the book is meant to invoke. That relies heavily on the author’s execution of the theme. Of course the premise and some plot is necessary to help ground the reader of the review, but in general, I want to know what the book is about, not what happens.
    • What’s the author trying to do, and did s/he do it? A good reviewer should recognize an author’s techniques and underlying ideas. Most books (the good ones, anyway) are filled with metaphor, both within the actual writing and in the theme. Reviewers—and I find the best ones are writers themselves—must be able to reverse engineer the author’s motivations to determine the effectiveness of the book.
    • The “I’s” don’t have it. I do not like “personal reaction” book reviews. Let me rephrase that: I despise “personal reaction” book reviews. They are self-indulgent navel gazing of the worst kind. Bad enough the reader has to slog through some reviewer’s personal issues, but to brush aside an author’s hard work to do so? I advise my reviewers to write in a professional, third person style, unless there is a strong personal connection to the subject of the book that would warrant such a treatment.
    • Specificity. Nothing turns me off a review faster than a string of generic adjectives. Wonderful, fabulous, well-written, enjoyable and their friends all go out the window. (Clichés, too—like that one.) Show, don’t tell is just as important in book reviews as it is in the writing.
    • Creativity. A book review can be as creatively written as the book itself. When I write a review, I try to capture the attitude of the book to a small degree in order to relate the tone of the work. If it’s funny or quirky, dark or deeply emotional, I try to reflect that mood. But just like more creative genres, if the writing is over the top and tries to outshine the review, that only makes the reviewer look amateurish.
    • This ain’t your high school book report. Show me you know what you’re talking about. Use literary theory. Reference other works for comparison. Build on the criticism that’s already out there, and make your review part of the literary conversation. Reading other books—a lot of them—helps.

    Of course that’s just my short list. I could go on at length (and I often do). I welcome inquiries about book reviews and reviewing at lareview.bookreviews@gmail.com.

    This piece first appeared at MuseInks.

  • A joint interview, part 2

    Judge Us Not By the Color of Our Skin, But the Content of Our Books: Interviews On Race, Writing and the Limits of Subject Matter, Jason McCall and B.J. Hollars.

    Part 2: B.J. Hollars Interviews Jason McCall

    missed part 1 of this series? Find it here.


    B.J. Hollars: Norse mythology plays a major role in your first book of poems, Silver. Why Norse mythology? Why was this the vehicle you selected to describe your experiences growing up as a black man in Alabama?

    Jason McCall: Norse mythology is hopeless. The gods can’t save mankind from destruction. They can’t even save themselves. They can only delay the inevitable and put up a brave fight when the doom comes. They are slaves to prophecy, to circumstance. And, really, that’s where the title of the book comes from. Silver represents being trapped in second place, and it represents how reaching for something more can be a maddening experience.

    And in many ways, these are the same hopeless circumstances offered to African Americans. It can seem hopeless when you read the stories about James Watson, the father of DNA, saying that Africans are not as intelligent as Europeans. It can seem hopeless when you see a black president and see that the black unemployment rate is still twice the national average. It can seem hopeless when a black man can still get run over by a car in Mississippi just because some white kid feels like running over a black man. It can seem hopeless when you read the studies about how people with “black” names are less likely to get job interviews. However, despite the odds, surrender isn’t an option. If I surrendered to the ideas and stereotypes surrounding me, I wouldn’t have written this book. I wouldn’t have studied Classics, and I wouldn’t be a teacher right now. In the black community, there’s a belief that we have to recognize that the odds are stacked against us, but we still have to attack those odds with every breath we take.

    BH: Throughout, your poems introduce a wide cast of characters—Odin, Thor, Fenrir, Loki, Surtur among others Norse gods and heroes. Why do these particular characters resonate for you? To put it another way, do Norse myths do something classical myths don’t? Are the stories of Greek and Roman gods different?

    JM: Greek mythology is a sitcom. Norse mythology is a drama. That’s the main difference. The Norse gods suffer. There are real consequences in Norse mythology. When a god gets his hand bitten off, that god has one hand for the rest of time. When Odin gives up an eye in exchange for knowledge, the eye doesn’t grow back. When it comes to the classical (Greek and Roman) gods, they are as static as the statues of them we find in museums. Sure, you can put them in difficult situations—Apollo and his unrequited loves, Hephaestus and his disability—but they don’t change much at the end. Once you get to know them, they don’t change, and, in a way, we don’t want them to change. Zeus is an easy reference point for the adulterous husband; Orpheus is a stand-in for any tortured artist. Many writers have used Greek and Roman gods to create great art. There’s Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Nicelle Davis’ Circe, and Ashley McWater’s Whitework, to name a few. Hell, Carl Dennis was one of my biggest influences as I was developing my voice.

    But as my writing evolved, I realized those Greek and Roman characters didn’t fit my project. I think the use of persona or allusion should say as much about the writer as it does about the personas or references used in the writing. The Greek and Roman gods are familiar, and I wasn’t in a familiar place when I was writing this book. I was staring into a lot of unknowns, and I wanted to use characters that embraced those ideas of mystery and unfamiliarity.

    BH: You’ve previously mentioned writing about your “unhealthy” religious upbringing. In some way, did these “unhealthy” experiences veer you toward the Norse myths

    JM: My experiences in the church drew me to studying mythology and religion. When I say it was an unhealthy experience, I’m not making some “opiate of the masses” argument. I respect religion; I respect the power of religion. But some of the things I heard in church just didn’t make sense to me. I heard that white people didn’t have the same soul as black people, and I heard that prayer was the only medicine people needed. I heard the story of Job. I heard the story of Lot’s wife being turned to salt. These messages about God left me with more questions than answers, and the idea that “God works in mysterious ways” was not good enough for me. So my own soul searching led to my interest in other religions and other forms of divinity and salvation. At this point, I’m probably a pantheist if I am anything. I never considered converting to another religion or worshipping another god or pantheon, but studying Norse mythology was another one of my futile attempts in understanding how God works.

    BJ: You’ve mentioned that these poems sprung from a previous project concerning the mythical John Henry—the “steel-driving” former slave whose industrious spirit and incredible strength helped build railroads across the country. No folklorist myself, I’ve often pigeonholed John Henry as a kind of African-American equivalent to Paul Bunyan, though I struggle to come up with other examples of African-American characters portrayed in myth and folklore. Does Norse mythology have non-white gods? If not, does it matter?

    JM: No, there aren’t black gods in Norse mythology. There was actually a funny dust up over the new Thor movie because Idris Elba, a black actor, plays the Norse god Heimdall in the movie. Some white supremacist groups called for a boycott of the movie because they felt the movie was degrading their culture. So yes, the race of the gods does matter to some people. It never really mattered to me, though. That was one of the points I wanted to make with the book. Old traditions change, and we have to find ways to deal with it. My family traditions didn’t give me all the answers I needed, so I had to look for other examples to describe how I was feeling. And some of those examples came from Norse mythology. Some of them came from professional wrestling. Some of them came from history. I guess I could have found some clumsy Egyptian or African equivalent for Odin, Thor, and Balder, but that would have felt artificial.

    When it comes to John Henry, he was one of the original characters I wanted in the book, and even though he didn’t make it in the final version of the book, he’s definitely a character I want to visit again. Some legends even place John Henry in Alabama, so that made him even more interesting to me. Thinking of John Henry’s fight with the steam engine is what drew me to Thor. Both of them use hammers. Both of them fight for the common man. Both of them die after battling a monster that spews poison. Those parallels represented a similar struggle against unstoppable forces, so using Thor and other Norse gods felt natural.

    BH: In “No Search Engines in Valhalla,” the poem includes many modern era words such as “Google” and “404 errors” alongside “Odin” and the “Well of Knowledge.” What message (if any) are you trying to convey to your readers by bringing these “untouchable” gods into our modern lexicon? Are you humbling them? Drawing connection between the fallibility of man and god?

    JM: With this poem, my main point was not to humble gods, but to humble myself and mankind. With the internet and smartphones and Google, knowledge is something we easily take for granted. We’re supposed to be able to know anything we need to know in a manner of a few clicks. With a few clicks, I can find out the population of Brazil. With a few clicks, I can find my great-grandfather’s birth certificate. As a generation, we’ve been trained to think of knowledge as something that’s easy to come by, but during the time of my life described in Silver, knowledge wasn’t easy to come by. Answers to questions like “why did I wake up this morning?” and “why did I end up in the back of a police car?” were not easy to find, and the answers came with a price.

    In mythology and folklore, there is always a price for knowledge. Ulysses had to travel through the underworld. Adam and Eve had to give up the Garden of Eden. In Norse Mythology, Odin had to give up his eye for knowledge in one story and hang himself for nine days in another story. With poems like “No Search Engines in Valhalla,” I wanted to point out that there is still knowledge in this world that doesn’t come cheap.

    Finally, how do Norse myths speak to the African-American coming-of-age? It seems an unlikely marriage, yet your poems seem to create a close bond. Do you think these bonds might hold strong for other African-Americans, or is the comparison more personal?

    It’s probably more of a personal comparison. But the heart of Silver lies in family relationships. There’s my relationship with my parents, and there’s the relationship between the Norse gods and their children, namely the relationship between Loki and his kids. Loki is the trickster god; he’s the hustler. And his children are the ones who run wild and break the world. I write from the viewpoint of Fenrir, one of Loki’s children, a few times in the book. I saw the relationship between Loki and his children as a parallel for fathers in the African-American community. The African-American father is supposed to be the hustler, the rolling stone, the trickster who’s sliding out of jail and into the next woman’s bed. And black children are supposed to have behavior problems because we never had a dad to watch out for us. We’re supposed to be the ones who ruin schools and bring down the property values in the neighborhood. My dad wasn’t at home as much as I wanted him to be, but that was because he worked two jobs while I was growing up. That’s why the idea of Fenrir appealed to me. Also, he eats Odin, and I think that’s cool.

    Will every African-American reader agree with the parallels I’ve drawn in Silver? Probably not. But I’m fine with that. One of the big ideas in Silver is my attempt to break away from tradition and find an individual path for understanding the world around me. But at my core, I’m a storyteller. So if readers can’t use Norse mythology as a reference point, I hope they can find some other reference point that helps them connect with my work.

  • A joint interview between Jason McCall and BJ Hollars

    Judge Us Not By the Color of Our Skin, But the Content of Our Books: Interviews On Race, Writing and the Limits of Subject Matter, Jason McCall and B.J. Hollars

    Authenticity was at the core of many of the AWP 2012 panels. At the panel for A Face to Meet the Faces, the new anthology of persona poetry released by University of Akron Press, the panelists discussed what limits, if any, authors had to acknowledge when writing in the voice of another. The panelists for Angles of Ascent, a forthcoming anthology of contemporary African-American poetry, worked to decide what subject matter was necessary for literature to be considered African-American literature.

    These are questions I struggled with when I used Norse mythology in Silver, my first collection of poems, to describe my experience of growing up as a black male in Alabama. I also couldn’t help but think about BJ Hollars’ Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America. Hollars uses three Alabama murder cases—including the 1981 murder of Michael Donald, which is often and controversially referred to as the last lynching in the United States—to discuss the racial and class complexities that grip not only Alabama and the Deep South, but the nation as a whole. Hollars is not a Southerner; Hollars is not African-American, so I wanted to ask him how he approached issues of ownership and authenticity in his work.

    Likewise, he wanted to ask me about my book; specifically, what role my own race played when writing on the white-centric world of Norse Mythology. It had become obvious that we’d both settled on somewhat unlikely writing projects that, arguably, might be better told by someone else. All of this left us wondering: What credibility is lost by the author photo?

    Join us in a frank dialogue on race, writing, and the boundaries of subject matter.

    -Jason McCall

    Part 1:

    Jason McCall Interviews B.J. Hollars

    Jason McCall: In Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America you trace Michael Donald’s footsteps, but you don’t walk in his shoes. And I don’t get the sense that you want to walk in his shoes. How did you decide where to place yourself as a narrator in the book?

    B.J. Hollars: You know, that’s probably the biggest question I faced when trying to write this book. Of course, there were all kinds of ethical questions as well—the fine line between exploitation and documentation, among others—but at the root of many of these ethical questions is an unequivocal truth: I am a white Northerner trying to write about racial violence in the South. I often joke that my race and “geographical shortcoming” makes me a “no-good-carpetbagger,” and while the terminology is a bit anachronistic, the fact is, there’s a bit of truth to it, too. While my heart remains in the South, my four-year stint there hardly qualifies me as a “Southerner.” No one has ever called me a Southerner—though it’s a compliment I hope to one day receive.

    To answer your question directly, after several drafts, I soon discovered that I had virtually no place in the narrative. I felt that if I were to weasel myself into the various scenes, then I’d be doing a disservice to the book, and more importantly, to the lives of the people I was writing about. I simply do not know what it’s like to be an African-American male walking the streets of Mobile in 1981. As such, I don’t want to give the impression that I do know, or that I might know, or that I even have an inkling of this experience.

    The only instances in which the first person “I” appears in the narrative are in the rare moments in which I was “on-scene” so to speak. As I walked a Birmingham cemetery searching for the grave of a fallen police officer, the “I” made a brief appearance. Likewise, in the book’s final chapter, I return to Michael Donald Avenue—a street now named in Donald’s honor—and the “I” infiltrates the text momentarily, allowing my own emotional toll to peak out. Arguably, even these very brief appearances are too much, yet I included them because I wanted the reader to understand that while I can’t fully grasp the emotional toll endured by the victims and their families, I, too, became haunted by these stories. Nonfiction is not fiction, even when the violence of this world is unfathomable.

    My book is a hard book to read, and it was a hard book to write. But I understood from the very first page that I did not live this story personally, and so, I needed to keep myself mostly out of it.

    JM: What was your biggest fear or anxiety when you began to put this book together?

    BH: I wanted to tell it right, and I wanted to do justice to the families of the victims. As I’ve found, no two people tell the same story, and so, it’s often the author’s burden to grapple with the in-between, trying to parse the fact from the fiction in an effort to tell it straight. The hard truth is this: It’s impossible to please everyone. For instance, I don’t think the United Klans of America will select my book for their book-of-the-month club. I don’t mean to be glib. I’m simply trying to make clear that throughout the book, the United Klans of America are likely depicted in a somewhat unfavorable light. This was not necessarily I conscious choice on my part; rather, I allowed the stories to tell themselves. I dealt with the facts as they were made clear to me, and the strength of the undisputed facts—those proven in the courtroom and agreed upon by witness testimony—seemed to drive the tone of the story.

    My fear was never really about any kind of retribution by the UKA. I believe I only quote its members from previously published testimonies, and I do my best to avoid my personal bias. My biggest fear was unintentionally disrespecting the families of the victims. I never wanted to feel like I was exploiting their stories. As such, I chose to work with the University of Alabama Press, a non-profit university press that specializes in Alabama civil rights.

    JM: We Southerners are famous for our stubbornness, for being set in our ways, and for being protective of our traditions. When I mentioned things like my religious upbringing in Silver and how that upbringing was unhealthy from both a social and mental standpoint, a part of me felt—and still feels—like I was opening a door I wasn’t allowed to open. At any point, did you feel like your research and your interest in the subject became an invasion?

    BH: I suppose that’s one way of explaining it. When I started the project I was just graduate student who could not let the story go. I was so drawn to it that I have a hard time remembering a single, specific memory that occurred during the year I first drafted this book. This book consumed me. I was reading redacted FBI files every night before bed. It probably wasn’t healthy.

    If I “invaded” the South by drawing attention to racial violence, then I think I’m comfortable with that outcome. I wanted to draw attention to the victims, but also to the heroes who helped defend the victims’ civil rights. For instance, as a result of Michael Donald’s murder, the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the United Klans of America for seven million dollars and won, essentially bankrupting them. Likewise, Michael Donald’s family—and Michael’s mother, Beulah Mae, in particular—showed enormous strength throughout the ordeal, and I wanted the world to understand this strength. There are so many heroes, and while the “bad guys” are also highlighted, it was far more important to me to recount the stories of the victims and the heroes, both of which are often forgotten.

    In short, I hope my book is viewed not as an “invasion,” but rather, an opportunity to keep pressure on an important debate.

    JM: From Phillis Wheatley’s poetry to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help, race has always been a central theme in American Literature. Was this intimidating to you in any way? What are you hoping to add to the conversation?

    BH: Well, for one, I hope my outsider perspective might contribute to the conversation.

    But to answer your other question, yes, of course it was intimidating. Equally intimidating was that throughout the spring of 2011—my last term at the University of Alabama—I was assigned to teach two sections of African-American literature. I’d requested the classes, and the department was quite generous to give me a chance. I can’t describe some of the looks I received when my students walked into the classroom to see me standing behind the podium. What’s that white guy doing here? they likely wondered. I literally watched students double check the room number to make sure they were in the right place. During this time, I was in the midst of my second book about race in Alabama—this one about desegregation and the civil rights movement in Tuscaloosa—and I think I requested to teach African-American literature in an attempt to fully engulf myself in works that might resonate with my research.

    While writing books about race is surely intimidating for a white male such as myself, I do it with an open heart and honest curiosity. Also, as previously mentioned, I have made it a point to work with non-profit, university presses. I’m not interested in becoming a millionaire from these books (and don’t worry, I’m far from becoming one). My primary goal is to record these stories for future generations.

    JM: Who were you thinking of when you wrote Thirteen Loops? Southerners? Older readers who lived through the events described in the book? Younger readers who are coming of age in a “post-racial” America?

    BH: That’s tough. To be honest, I’m not sure I had an ideal audience in mind. I think I just wanted to tell it to the best of my ability. I knew the murder of Michael Donald was known by many, but I was surprised at how little was known about the events leading up to his murder. I was anxious to try to fit Donald’s murder into a larger context, comparing three race-related murders (two of which were directly linked) in an effort to better understand the serendipity, happenstance, and lunacy that led to Michael Donald’s death.

    But if I had to pick an audience in retrospect, I’d agree with my earlier statement—these stories are for future generations.  Of course, I hope this book might also appeal to “post-racial” America (good use of quotation marks, Jason). I wasn’t alive when Michael Donald was alive—not for a single second. And somehow, throughout all my years of schooling, I had never even heard his name. It’s important to me that future generations might know him, as well as the other victims. Likewise, I hope we remember the heroes as well.

    JM: How did your understanding or appreciation for Southern race and culture—and by extension, American race and culture—change after working on this book?

    BH: I’m still trying to figure that out. It’s amazing how much information is out there. My hard drive is filled with saved microfiche clippings from newspapers between 1956-1971. I read old newspapers the way most people read daily papers.

    To be perfectly honest, I still don’t consider myself an authority on Southern race or culture (or American race or culture, for that matter). I’m just a curious guy who spends a lot of time marveling not only at the events that occurred in recent history, but how they were reported as well. I’ve become quite interested in how Southern newspapers, in particular, reported news on racial violence. There’s a great book called The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, which basically tells the media’s history of reporting these issues throughout the Civil Rights movement. I teach a class called “Race and Rhetoric,” now, and each day I can pull up a random newspaper article from a random day, and we can always analyze the peculiarity of the reporting—what is highlighted and what is overlooked, what is described and how.

    To conclude, I’ve always had a great appreciation for issues pertaining to Southern race and culture, and while I only spent four years there, I hope, one day, I might lose my “carpetbagger” status.

    Join us next week for Part 2 when B.J. Hollars interviews Jason McCall.

    B.J. Hollars’s book reviews appear in LAR Issues 10 and 11, and Jason McCall’s poetry appears in Issues 8 and 11.


  • Changes to our Book Review Offerings

    This spring, The Los Angeles Review will begin offering a limited number of online book reviews to authors who have self-published works of fiction and nonfiction (including memoir) of at least 60,000 words, or poetry of 60 or more pages. We recognize that advancements in digital technology have made self-publishing a viable alternative to traditional publishing, and that there are many books of quality published in this way. However, there are few literary journals that review books in this growing and potentially important field. Our goal is to publish at least one review of a self-published book per month throughout the year.

    The Los Angeles Review applies the same standards of good literature to reviews of self-published works that we do in reviewing books supplied by traditional publishers. Our aim is to provide readers with an honest, professional critique of each book.

    To submit a self-published book for possible review, authors should submit a query letter and the first five to ten pages of the manuscript only to the Book Review Editor through our Submishmash portal. No other material will be considered, and, if included, may cause your submission to be rejected. A $3 fee is required to submit, the same as with our regular fiction, poetry and nonfiction submissions by non-subscribers. For self-published books, we do not accept snail mail queries.

    The Los Angeles Review will select approximately one book per month from the self-published book queries submitted for review, and will contact the author of the book with information as to the approximate publication date of the review. The review will be assigned to a staff reviewer; we do not accept unsolicited reviews.

    In the case that a query submitted for a book review is rejected, the submitter will receive notice via Submishmash. The Los Angeles Review is under no obligation to provide an explanation for the rejection, or to respond to additional questions. The Los Angeles Review makes no promise that any book queried will be reviewed, or that a review, if scheduled, will be completed. In addition, we make no promise that a review will be completely positive in nature. It is normal, during the review process, for a reviewer to discern shortcomings in some aspects of the writing, and these may be included in our review.

    –Joe Ponepinto, Book Reviews Editor

  • Creating a Literary Space vs. Building a Platform

    By Ramola D

    It’s no secret, this mantra we often hear from agents, publicists, publishers, about the need to “build a platform” to attract attention to one’s work—but how many of us are attracted to this idea? Pursuing solitude, distance, quiet, trying to immerse ourselves in language and story, supporting ourselves with teaching and editing jobs—many of us are far removed from the specter of the gregarious performing artist with a myriad of marketing tricks up her or his sleeve.  Might it be possible there’s another way instead, of connecting with possible audiences while staying essentially true to ourselves as writers? Three fiction writers offer their takes on creating a meaningful literary space that attempts to do just that.

    Tania Hershman, author of The White Road and Other Stories, and editor of The Short Review, says: “I do love the phrase “literary space” and that is a lovely way of thinking about it, because the word “platform” makes me distinctly uncomfortable, I would rather not think of myself as a commodity in that way. I began creating this literary space with my blog, TaniaWrites, which I started in 2006 because at the time I was living in Israel and didn’t have a community of writers with whom to share work and talk about writing. The blog was invaluable, it gave me a feeling of connection, a place to share not just the joys of writing but the lows, too, the pain of rejection. When I moved to the UK two years ago, things shifted, I now have a face-to-face community of writers and short story readers, and I began to receive invites to meet reading groups at libraries, writing groups, to do readings at live lit nights and as part of festivals.”

    Robin Black, author of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, writing teacher, and fiction editor of Inch Magazine as well as contributing editor of the Colorado Review, emphasizes the importance of such connections, as also the need to balance them. “I think it’s incredibly important for writers to have writing-related activities that bring them into contact with readers and with other writers; and equally if not more important to be sure to leave enough time and mental space for the writing itself. I am going to come down with the traditionalists who say that the best platform you can build is a great book. Writing-related activities I do that have absolutely nothing to do with selling books are teaching, occasionally for institutions (Bryn Mawr College, most recently) but also individually and in small workshops. I find that being part of helping other people determine what they want to achieve in their work and how best to achieve it helps my own work in a way that nothing else does. Long before my book was published I held literary evenings at my house – less pretentious than it sounds – at which a dozen or so of us would each read from our work for five minutes. I loved that, loved just having a window into what my friends were up to in their work. And also loved the affirmation we all felt in our writerly identities.”

    Liam Callanan, author of All Saints and Cloud Atlas, and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, notes the distinction between a literary space and a public persona:  “Currently, the most important “literary space” to me is a 5′ x 10′ windowless cubicle in the basement of my university’s library. It’s where I hide and write whenever I can, and it’s very literary — made so not so much by my typing but the company: right outside the door is that section of the library devoted to books about books — publishing memoirs and library administration books (some of the spines tempt me to stop, leaf through and procrastinate, others — like Selecting Library Furniture from Oryx Press — provoke the opposite reaction).

    “But I’ve thought about this other notion of literary space — some way to maintain, even promote, a public persona (and thus an awareness of your work) through means that, unlike a lot of PR efforts, pay you back. For my first novel, I logged 25,000 miles of travel (a lot of that due to readings around Alaska), sat for a lot of interviews, and one time, stood — I was in a cemetery in Trenton, Missouri, where we’d come to visit my wife’s grandmother’s grave; when her old neighbor, an AM talk radio host from Des Moines, called my cell phone there, we all decided the spectral plane had clearly determined I was supposed to take the call and so I did.

    “So I got a strange anecdote out of that, but not much writing. Opportunities that allow you to feed your literary self while simultaneously promoting it seem more rare. Blogs like this are one, and so is print journalism, but as my old teacher Richard Bausch used to say (and still says, on Facebook and, I assume, in the classroom), it’s all about the work. In other words, the best way to promote yourself is to write a terrific book.”
    With the work itself as central, would editing/blogging have a place? Tania Hershman considers that question: “A huge part of my literary space is The Short Review, the journal I founded and edit, which reviews short story collections and interviews their authors.  I founded TSR in Nov 2007 when I was still in shock about being offered a book deal for my first collection and wanted to do something for the short story. I had no idea it would grow the way it has nor that it would boost me personally, my whole plan was to publicize other people’s writing. But the contacts- -and friendships!— I have made through The Short Review, which my editors/reviewers and I do purely for the love of it, are invaluable to me, creating relationships with writers and publishers worldwide. And no less valuable is the exposure to new writers I get through the books we are offered for review, many of whom have become favorites and sources of inspiration. I also learn a lot about the writing of short stories from the close reading necessary for a reviewer. I have also judged short story competitions, chaired panels on short stories, and written guest blogs and articles (some paid) on short stories. To be honest, I am still finding it hard to balance my writing time with all these activities, although talking about short stories brings me such joy and I don’t want to say “no” to anything. My answer is to regularly go on some kind of writing “retreat” and spend that time concentrating on writing. I recently went to a Scottish castle for a month, where there was no Internet, and I was extremely productive! My blog has suffered — I write less and also, knowing that the blog is being read by more people than when I started, I am rather more inhibited about what I write about. But my needs have changed so this makes sense.”

    Robin Black’s blogging is also being tailored to her own needs: “As far as blogging goes, I have been lucky enough to be invited to join a group blog called Beyond the Margins. I like the sense of community of a group blog and the truth is that if I didn’t feel a responsibility to the group, if it were just me, I would never do it. (I blogged on my own website about 17 months ago – and never since.) And in fact, I have just recently cut my contribution from once every two weeks to once a month – because I need to tip my time commitments toward writing right now. I blog at all for mixed reasons. It certainly has something to do with selling books, just having my name “out there.” But again, I think being in conversation with other writers about writing is crucial – at all stages. Or anyway, it is for me.”

    There is a value in blogging, suggest both writers. Tania Hershman says, “I would recommend aspiring authors set up their own website or blog, first and foremost to keep track of their own achievements. When I am feeling a little down about writing, I like to visit the page on my website which lists my published work, and that cheers me up immensely! Also, writing a blog does place you within an online writing community — if you visit others’ blogs and comment, they will visit yours — which has the potential to be both informative and supportive. You don’t need to share personal details if you are not comfortable. Also, having an online “platform” allows you to link to any work published online - - I also link to all the articles I wrote when I was a science journalist — it is a living resume, if you will. The first thing many people do when hearing about a new writer is to Google them, and if you want people to contact you, you need to make this easy.”

    Tania’s blogging and tweeting experience has been extensive. “My “unique selling point” is fiction inspired by science so I straddle these two worlds and have running several workshops and events on using science as inspiration for fiction as well as workshops on writing flash fiction, including at the British Science Festival and at Jewish Book Week. I blog on the Bristol University Science Faculty blog too.  I also created my own web site, which I update myself, and built a website for my book, which I have now, almost 3 years after publication, incorporated into my web site.

    “I can’t say which aspects of this literary platform have contributed to the sales of my short story collection, I imagine it would be hard to tease it all apart. I see how many visitors to my website click on the link to my blog, which gets far more visitors, and as part of my vision of being “useful” to the writing community, I am keeping an ever-growing list of publications in the UK and Ireland that publish short stories, which gets many visitors. I really would rather promote others’ work, I am uncomfortable blowing my own trumpet. I imagine a lot of writers are. I used to be on Facebook but did not enjoy the aspect of “liking” what someone said or did. I left Facebook and am a great user of Twitter, which I feel is more about what you say than who you are. Those who only tweet about themselves tend not to be that popular on Twitter, it’s more about sharing and passing on interesting information, and I think Twitter – - with its brevity and focus — is a wonderful addition to my literary space. I believe that promoting the short story in general helps us all — and I will continue to do that loudly and enthusiastically!”

    Tweeting, blogging, reading blogs, all enticing, but is there also an element of danger there? Robin Black says, “I worry about beginning writers who seem to put much more effort into Twitter etc. than they can possibly be putting into writing, given how many hours a day they’re on Twitter etc. And I speak from some experience with that as I write a second book with all those temptations out there. It’s all too easy to feel like tweeting and reading blogs and all of that is the same as writing, when it’s not. It may be a good complement to writing, but the actual work has to happen and that’s pretty much a solitary act.”

    Ultimately, perhaps, it all comes down to a careful managing of your time. Robin Black notes the liveliness of her own schedule: “I just checked my calendar and see that I have 8 events scheduled – talks, readings, book club appearances, fund-raisers between September and November. None of these is paid and none is going to sell me a statistically noticeable number of books. So I am doing them for other reasons, chief among them that I simply enjoy being in the literary world, among writers and readers. But, as I say, the trick is to write the best book you can write and just be sure that the lure of platform building doesn’t leave you with nothing to show except a platform. And that goes for second books too, as I am finding out. I am eternally glad that the Internet wasn’t what it is today when I started writing in 2001.”

    To echo which, here is the last word from Liam Callanan: “The funny thing is that, once upon a time, before the novels came along, I worked in PR. I know from this world. And I remember best of all that the best way to get your message across is to repeat it constantly. And so I tell myself: work on the book, work on the book, work on the book…”

    No better advice yet, surely.

  • Ramola D on The Age of Independent Reviewing

    From Tillie Olsen’s Silences (1978), in which she follows on Malcolm Cowley’s 1954 findings in The Literary Situation:

    “Few books ever have the attention of a review—good or bad. Fewer stay longer than a few weeks on bookstore shelves—if they get there at all. New books are always coming in. Quality or ephemera—if the three- or four-week-old one hasn’t yet made best-sellerdom or the book clubs (usually synonymous)—Out! Room must be made. It is always fall in the commercial literary world, and books are its seasonal leaves. Even fewer books (again, regardless of merit) are kept alive by critics or academics who could be doing so. “Works of art” (or at least books, stories, poems, meriting life) “disappear before our very eyes because of the lack of responsible attention,” Chekhov wrote nearly ninety years ago. Are they even seen? Out of the moveable feast, critics and academics tend to invoke the same dozen or so writers as if none else exist worthy of mention, or as if they’ve never troubled to read anyone else. Anthologies, textbooks, courses concerned with contemporary literature tend to be made up of living writers whose names will immediately be recognized (usually coincident with writers whom publishers have promoted). …(It) is harder and harder for the serious writer to get published or get to readers once published.”

    That was 33 years ago, but things haven’t changed, have they? If anything, they’ve gotten worse. We live in an age of commercial publishing. Not every book that is published is reviewed by the well-known reviewers—the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, any of the big newspapers, the big literary reviews—or by anyone at all. Books released by small presses are notoriously under-reviewed. Advance review copies of thousands of books from small presses sent to mainstream reviewers fall into a giant black hole and are never heard of again. Books by little-known yet exceptional writers are forgotten this way. Books by women and men of every color. And not worthless books—but fantastic books, fabulous, inspiring works of fiction and poetry and memoir, books by writers so surprising, so engaging, so imaginative, that, if you only knew about them, you would want to follow all through their writing careers and read over and over again. The old hierarchies and patriarchies persist. Going by the old criteria, if you’re not part of the inner, elitist, literary coterie, you might not have a writing career.

    Yet we live in a day and age, as Tillie Olsen reminds us, true then in the ‘70s, and truer for us today, of burgeoning writing programs, growing independent and small presses, and flourishing literary arts. More of us are writing, by which I mean seriously, and more of us are publishing. More of us, however, are not being noticed, recognized, or reviewed. Publishing a book today, fiction or poetry, doesn’t anymore mean gaining the attention of reviewers, and thence, a larger reading audience.

    True, these days there’s Amazon, and Goodreads, and LibraryThing, and all those others, not to mention social networking media and creating a buzz on Facebook or Twitter or Buzz or StumbleUpon, but I’m not talking so much of publicity and promotion, online and otherwise—which we’re constantly told authors should engage in themselves—but of good old-fashioned reviewing, the kind of solid review where a writer/critic with acuity, intelligence, and wit takes the time to read a book, and critique it with verve. Reviews still seem to matter. Why? Because the literary world is interconnected; none of us operates alone. If your book is well-reviewed, the greater your chance to go from hardback to paperback, to be picked up by a trade publisher or a foreign publisher, to be translated into other languages, or to be marketed elsewhere. Or to gain that teaching position you’ve been spending your years of writing struggling to reach.

    I’d like to suggest it’s time we as writers created an alternate reviewing sphere which matters. In a recent post on his blog, Book Review editor Joe Ponepinto relates a recent experience of being inundated with responses on a call for reviewers for The Los Angeles Review. This would suggest there are loads of talented writers and critics out there keen to write literary reviews. There are many of us who have so much to give, and no sure venues to send our work to.

    But wait, we do have options. Surely we live in the Age of Options! Why not start a book review blog oneself—a la Mark Sarvas, or Maud Newton, or myself! Why not write to or meet the editors of a dozen small presses or literary magazines one admires, offering your reviewing services? Book Review editors at many quarterlies and journals are indeed looking for serious book reviewers. At the AWP conference this past February in Washington, DC (where I live), I stopped by several tables at the Book Fair to mention my interest in reviewing small press fiction and poetry, particularly by bicultural writers, to review editors, and several editors expressed an interest. True, I still have to follow up on some of those conversations (procrastinating me!), but my impression was that reviewers are in demand, and will not be turned away.

    My own book of short fiction, Temporary Lives, released late in 2009 by the University of Massachusetts Press, after it received the 2008 AWP Grace Paley Short Fiction Award, was a finalist in the 2010 Library of Virginia Fiction awards, but, after a Publisher’s Weekly review, was not reviewed by any of the big newspapers or magazines. It joins the legions of fine books released by small presses each year which, regrettably, do not obtain the notice of the established reviewing world. Which in itself creates a Silence of the kind Tillie Olsen speaks. Much to our communal loss.

    Just as there is a flourishing small press, I believe there should be a flourishing small press reviewing sphere. I call on every writer who cares about books to make an effort to review other writers’ books, especially small press and university press books, whether or not your own book was ignored or recognized by the mainstream reviewing world. Truly, we need to get past the Silences of commercial publishing, alter the status quo. To cite Malcolm Cowley, which Tillie Olsen does, as she closes her essay, “We are the injured body. Let us not desert one another.”

    Ramola D is a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Review. She currently lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband and daughter, and teaches creative writing part-time at The George Washington University and at The Writer’s Center, Bethesda. The covers of her books, Temporary Lives and Invisible Season feature her paintings.

  • Why We Don’t Review Self-Published Books (For Now)

    It’s a memoir about a life before, during and after the Holocaust, told from the perspective of a granddaughter.

    I am cautiously curious. As an avid reader, history enthusiast, and, oh yeah, Book Review Editor at LAR, I should consider this book as review material. But in the course of due diligence, I discover the uncomfortable truth—it is self-published.

    That’s a bummer, and for now an automatic rejection.

    The logic has always been that a self-pub book is an exercise in ego. That the author can’t see what every agent and publisher s/he has shown it to has said: “Not good enough for publication.” In terms of LAR’s policies it means the writing lacks the validation that traditional publication theoretically bestows.

    As I’ve written on my personal blog, a perusal of self-published fare on e-pub sites like Smashwords and Amazon corroborates this view. A random sampling of books and stories on such sites reveals a landfill of so-called literature—one piece of garbage piled atop another, stinking and sinking slowly into the polluted ground of mainstream reading tastes.

    But the state of publishing may change our stance. Actually, there are hundreds of well-written, interesting books produced each year that are not published traditionally. Since the book biz has been eviscerated by its big business overlords, whose mantra is mass market salability, there isn’t room for many works of literary quality. Smaller presses (with whom we work almost exclusively) help make up the shortfall, but their efforts are not enough to reward the talent and hard work of many serious writers.

    For some, self-pub is the last option. For others who disdain the meat grinder of the publishing industry (not to mention its ridiculously low percentage of profit returned to the author), it is the first. At this point, I don’t fault either decision.

    Some successful writers have already turned to self-publishing as a way of maximizing profit on their work. And just this week the New York Review of Books reviewed a self-published memoir alongside two other volumes.

    Clearly the paradigm is shifting. Self publishing may be moving from a humorous industry anecdote towards becoming a serious part of the literary conversation. If only there were a way of extracting the treasures from the heaps of trash. Still, this change gives us much to ponder, and our editorial staff will do just that. Who knows? I may just have to reconsider those automatic rejections.

    –Joe Ponepinto

    P.S.: Before you flood my in box with queries about self-published books, please wait for an official announcement.

  • Joe Ponepinto Knows It When He Sees It

    Recently I’ve received some questions regarding how we select books for review at LAR. Surprisingly, there is a method.

    Approximately six to nine months before the next issue (depending on publication schedule), I survey catalogs and press releases of recent and upcoming titles from about 30 small publishers from around the country. I pay close attention to publication dates, due to our very long lead time, and try to have the books reviewed coincide as closely as possible with our release date.

    From the hundreds of books offered I select about two dozen. This includes fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Subjects or authors with a tie to Southern California do get special consideration, since we are a SoCal publication. I am primarily looking for works that appear to have literary merit.

    What do I mean by “literary merit?” I am tempted to recall the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who said, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.” Of course, he was talking about pornography…

    But let me try. To me, literary merit implies a work that has an intrinsic concern with the development of character and attempts to identify some truth about the human experience. The writing induces the reader to reevaluate, rather than reinforce his/her perceptions of the subject addressed. The author is aware of and influenced by the good writing that precedes the book. And, it appears to be just damn good writing—inventive and, even with fiction or nonfiction, occasionally poetic.

    And how do I deduce these qualities from a marketing blurb or press release? Well, um, er … let’s just say I know it when I see it.

    When my decisions are made, I create a list with detailed info about each book. I send it to my dozen or so reviewers (all of whom have considerable book review or publishing experience). They select one or two books each for review. I then contact the publishers and have the books sent directly to the reviewers.

    We have recently revamped our review section. We now feature one major review that covers two or three books that address a specific theme and is written by a prominent guest writer. Following this are 10-15 brief reviews of about 200 words each. We’re looking forward to this change and hope our readers enjoy the new format.

    Next time: why we don’t review self published books.

    by LAR Book Reviews Editor, Joe Ponepino.

  • Joe Ponepinto on LAR reviews and reviewers

    The changes we’re planning for our Book Review section (details coming soon) meant we needed to recruit a few additional reviewers, so we placed an ad on CRWROPPS. Although the position doesn’t pay, within six hours we had received more than thirty responses, most including CVs or samples of published reviews, and most from writers who would be well qualified for the job, even if it paid.

    To those who applied, thank you, and we’ll review the applications within a few days.

    The overwhelming response for these unpaid positions sheds, in its way, some light on the literary profession. I know of no industry outside the arts where an advertisement for a volunteer position would bring so many applications. This result, and the fact that CRWROPPS, a simple online posting service, reports a membership of nearly 6,000 writers, indicates the still large, and I believe growing, community of writers, despite an almost complete disregard of the literary world by mainstream media. It means also there are far too few publishing opportunities, especially for those who believe criticism is an important a part of the literary world as the more creative endeavors.

    This is not a surprise, but it is a bit of an eye-opener regarding how the cramped literary field has forced writers to jump at even the slightest opportunity for publishing credits.

    For us at the Los Angeles Review, it means we will do our part to improve opportunities in this important area. Without divulging too many details I can report we are looking to review more books by more writers, particularly those who are published by smaller presses, which are more geared towards promoting artistic quality than the large, sales-driven publishing houses and booksellers.

    We’ll update our progress in this area as we work towards our next issue.

    Joe Ponepinto is the Book Reviews Editor of The Los Angeles Review. Read more from Joe at http://joeponepinto.com/

  • In memory of David Case

    The staff of The Los Angeles Review was saddened to hear of the recent passing of book reviewer David Allen Case, whose work appeared in our Spring 2010 issue.

    Dr. Case was an adjunct professor of English and Literature at Santa Fe College. He was a published author whose poetry appeared in many publications. He was also a classical pianist, and performed with chamber music groups while living in California.

    He was born in Birmingham, AL, and earned a B.A. in English from the University of Alabama in 1982, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from UCLA in 1992. Before moving to Gainesville, FL in 2007, he taught at Los Angeles City College and Pasadena City College.

    We will miss David’s contributions to our journal. Our sympathies go out to his family and friends.

  • Register now for LAR Winter Workshops

    The editors of LAR are pleased to announce our two winter workshops, beginning January 3, 2011. In addition to our popular Poetry Workshop with Tanya Chernov, we’re excited to introduce the first of our Book Review Writing workshops with Joe Ponepinto.  Learn more below, but hurry, because registration closes December 27.

    LAR Winter Book Review Workshop with  Editor Joe Ponepinto

    Though often overlooked in literary journals, the book review can be an artistic endeavor of its own, employing language and themes that rival the best of prose, whether non-fiction or fiction. The modern book review not only examines the book in question, it connects the work to literary traditions and discerns its place in art and society—and book reviews are among the fastest avenues to publishing credits in the literary world.

    This workshop is intended for writers who not only love a good read, but also enjoy analyzing a book for the author’s ability and intentions. It is designed for writers who understand the tremendous research and thought that goes into a successful book, and want to relate that process for readers, helping them decide whether to read it for themselves. This four-week online class will include writing exercises and critique sessions, and concentrates on the belle-lettres style of reviewing.

    About the workshop leader: Joe Ponepinto is the Book Reviews Editor for The Los Angeles Review. His reviews and fiction have appeared in our journal, as well as in varoius other literary journals across the country. He is a former newspaper editor and holds an MFA in Creative Writing.

    Dates: January 3 to January 28

    Cost: $150, includes our texts for the class, The Los Angeles Review issues 7 and 8.

    How to apply for this workshop: Email lareview.bookreviews@gmail.com with a brief writing sample. Please include “Winter Workshop” in the subject line of your email.

    Application Deadline: December 27, 2010.

    LAR Winter Poetry Workshop with Editor Tanya Chernov

    This workshop is intended for people who want to jump-start their poetry practice and to keep the engine oiled. You’ll do plenty of writing and reading, and have lively discussions  about both the craft and the process of poetry. The weekly homework assignments (workshopped the following week) are designed to provide fresh angles of approach that can surprise–even startle–both the writer and his/her readers. As writers, we all get stuck in ruts, and this workshop will offer ways of digging ourselves out, whether we use these strategies to simply get started at writing or to revise a particularly challenging poem.

    The class is suitable for a wide spectrum of poets. The focus of the class is generative: to get everybody going and excited about doing new work, to take away strategies that can help with their current and future writing–and to have a great time while we’re at it.

    About the workshop leader: Tanya’s poetry has been published all over the literary map, ranging from experimental forms to traditional, from literary narratives to imaginative farces. Tanya holds an MFA in poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, and serves as both the Poetry Editor and Translation Editor for The Los Angeles Review.

    Dates: January 3 to January 28

    Cost: $150, includes our texts for the class, The Los Angeles Review issues 7 and 8.

    How to apply for this workshop: Email lareview.poetry@gmail.com with a brief writing sample. Please include “Winter Workshop” in the subject line of your email.

    Application Deadline: December 27, 2010

    *Please note that these are online workshops, and are most suitable for participants who are comfortable using and interacting in an online environment.

  • LAR 7 reviewed

    Rants Raves Reviews gives us rave! Check out it out here.

  • Bookness and Literary Innovation

    Since long before Gutenberg, a book has essentially been a writer’s thoughts translated into symbols on a page. At first an occasional drawing was added to the text, and later photographs, but the basic idea of a book has been unchanged for centuries. Within that framework, however, there is still room for unique expression, evidenced by Anne Carson’s Nox, just out from New Directions.

    I picked up my copy last week at a reading she gave in Ann Arbor. Thanks to new design and printing technologies, her vision in this elegy for a lost brother is conveyed as a book that is many pages yet a single page—the paper, covers included, somehow seamlessly engineered into a continuous stream of memory.

    This is a rare volume, in which the form itself, as well as the language and theme, is part of the author’s statement. But Nox is not a gimmick or a puzzle—it loses none of its bookness through its unusual construction.

    We at LAR are interested in innovation, whether it’s in the writing or the format of a book. As Book Review Editor I’m always looking for new forms as well as new authors. I’m open to queries and suggestions, from graphic novels to experimental language to uncommon constructions and printing techniques. If you know of such a book that might be worthy of review, please contact me at LAReview.bookreviews@gmail.com.

    Joe Ponepinto, Book Reviews Editor

  • So Many Books, So Few Reviewers

    My recent visit to the annual AWP conference (this year in Denver) brought home a couple of things: the first was a box of books so big I had to ship it to myself to avoid the airline baggage charge; the second the reinforcement of the fact that there are far more authors in the literary world whose books are worthy of review than there are journals that review them.

    On my first two days I toured the rows and rows of the bookfair, meeting dozens of authors, editors and publishers. Most of them, on learning my role at LAR, suggested (and often presented) volumes for review—most of them seemed, at first glance, interesting enough to consider.

    Of course I couldn’t make promises except to consider their work, and as my book bag strap began to bore its way through my shoulder from the weight of the volumes, I began to wonder if even the shard of hope I offered the writers was too much. At LAR we dedicate 10-15 pages per issue to reviews, which is more than most journals. Even one page would be more than most newspapers in the nation.

    We are considering expanding LAR’s reach by publishing some of reviews online, which would help accommodate a few more of the many excellent pieces we receive. However, we’ll need more qualified reviewers to handle the titles. I could go on about the benefits of reviewing—of the good odds of acceptance and the expansion of writing horizons—but remember also the concept of literary citizenship, the “pay it forward” aspect of the writing life that asks you to do a turn for a fellow writer, and know that someone will be there, when the time comes, to pen a review for you.

    Remember also that if we don’t fulfill this literary obligation, the only criticisms left may someday be those abysmal “reader reviews” on Amazon. If you’re interested in reviewing for LAR, please contact me at lareview.bookreviews@gmail.com.

    Joe Ponepinto, Book Reviews Editor

  • A Word from LAR’s New Book Reviews Editor

    These are exciting times in publishing—and I’m not even talking about the digitalization of the industry and the future of printed books. Criticism of novels, poetry and non-fiction is exploring several avenues, challenging mainstream and traditional attitudes towards writing, and seeking new connections between the written word and human perception and understanding. As the new Book Reviews Editor for The Los Angeles Review, working with a team of editors who are open to new forms and critical responses, it’s fun and fulfilling to be part of this time in publishing.

    But just because we are interested in literature’s explorations into new ground doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate the beauty of a traditionally written poem, short story, novel, or non-fiction work. Reviews in our journal will cover these books and collections as well as forays into more experimental and occasionally controversial areas. The goal is for the reviews section of LAR is to be both entertaining and an important source of information about literary trends and thought.

    I’m lucky to have inherited (from Kelly Davio, now LAR’s Managing Editor) a group of experienced and talented book reviewers who understand the field of criticism. Even better, each of them conveys these concepts to readers, and writes in a style that is, in itself, a form of literature. I’m looking forward to working with them.

    But there’s always room for a few more. The number of books we receive for review is greater than we can handle, and it’s growing. If you are interested in writing book reviews for LAR (and have some review experience), please send your qualifications to me at lareview.bookreviews@gmail.com.

    –Joe Ponepinto

Translation

  • A Fraction of the World: Matt Reeck on Translation

    When I began translating Saadat Hasan Manto, a fellow writer—a mentor, and moreover one sympathetic to my interest in India and its literature—told me a market publishing house would never touch it. I suggested that he didn’t know how good it was. He said it didn’t matter; Urdu was too far removed from people’s expectations.

    When I finished that manuscript, I decided I needed an agent, and I was surprised to find that the stories immediately interested one. I felt temporarily vindicated. My agent was excited about the stories, but said it would be difficult to place them because Manto was dead (he died in 1955). The publisher would want help selling the book, and Manto would not be able to promote it. A book tour would be impossible.

    * * *

    The idea of the exotic has an important place in the business end of translation, which is to say publishing. A translator is supposed to bring home a different world (which is in one sense the exotic) and yet some of these worlds are so unfamiliar that simply translating the words won’t be enough for the reader to understand the text’s richness. There is a level of cultural knowledge—historical and aesthetic—that the reader must possess, and if they don’t, then they must at least possess a level of willingness to learn.

    While this is theoretically not a problem, practically this means that most readers, like most people, are sometimes lazy and don’t want to commit to additional learning. Yes, they want to read. Yes, they may want to read something “exotic.” But, no–they don’t want to do too much beyond the actual reading. The text needs to be easily approachable, and easily digestible; the reading experience shouldn’t be a frustrating one.

    What level of cultural and aesthetic knowledge is necessary to read Manto’s “Second Letter to Uncle Sam”? Not that much. Since the letter is addressed to the quintessential American reader, Uncle Sam, many references are to American matters. But in his eighth letter in this series of nine, the general conversation begins with Communism in the fledgling Pakistani state and, in the first three paragraphs alone, there are four people mentioned–real people. For the reader who doesn’t know Mulk Feroz Khan Noon, Ferozuddin Mansur, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and Iftkharuddin, what are you supposed to do?

    Proper nouns in general and especially those that refer to some aspect of historical reality serve as a representative case of the cultural barrier of “exotic” texts. In the case of Manto’s “Eighth Letter,” you can appreciate the text’s gist and get some of its humor without knowing the specific people because you can substitute fake names—A, B and C—and you get something. But if the references continue, and you end up using an entire alphabet of replacement names—A to Z—then to what extent can you say you understand the text? To what extent is it possible to enjoy the text? Doesn’t it almost earn your chagrin, as it makes you feel a little dumb for not knowing these things?

    ***

    It takes a sort of hyper-investment for the reader to get into the truly exotic text–the text that requires the reader to know what an average, culturally literate reader doesn’t. This is a death-blow to the text—publishers know this recondite text will not sell. While university presses help by publishing some of these works, they don’t take on others: the manuscript must match a list, and this list consolidates established emphases of teaching and research. For a university press to open a new literature—say, modern Urdu prose—it has to make a commitment to something that they know will not only be unprofitable but will lose even more money than their lists already do.

    This situation exposes some of the hollow rhetoric around translation: how believing that translation is a vast, trans-cultural, humanist enterprise without bias fools us into thinking that we’re reading the world, that we’re interested in the entire world, when in fact what we commit to as a culture, and so what is available to readers, is only a fraction of the world. And those remaining parts—the majority—stay unknown to us while we congratulate ourselves on how culturally sensitive we are, how well read we are. From where I sit, I’d say we need more opportunities for the publication of previously closed literatures, and we need to commit to learning about cultures that we know little or nothing about.

    Matt Reeck’s translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Second Letter to Uncle Sam” is forthcoming in LAR issue 10. Subscribe today to receive issues 9 and 10.

  • Harry Thomas tells a Story from the Teaching Front

    Teaching “Ozymandias” in the Valley

    I was told by the team leader to teach “Ozymandias” on Friday. I would find the poem on page 57 of The 100 Best Poems of All Time, the insultingly defective anthology with the preposterous title (it includes poems by Robert Service, Ernest Thayer, Alfred Noyes, and Maya Angelou, among the notables) that he and the other three members of the department who had been at the school for a year already had selected for the five sections, two of them mine, of 9th grade English.The week before, in yet another instance of my absence of team spirit, I had asked my students to memorize “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Only three of the 31 students had been able, or had bothered, to learn it, and they and those who had learned at least the first stanza had recited the first line as “Whose woods are these I think I know,” because, I saw too late, that’s how it was printed in the anthology.

    I didn’t know what to expect from them on “Ozymandias.” I thought they might need to know the meaning of “antique” (the sons and daughters of affluent suburbanites, they might be misled by “an antique land”), “visage,” or perhaps even “sneer,” and the brighter ones might wonder who Ozymandias was, whether he was a real king, and how and why Shelley had written the poem. Of course, I could teach them something about the different kinds of sonnets, and ask them about the rhyming in Shelley’s sonnet.

    As always I started by reading the poem aloud, slowly, letting the phrases and sounds hang in the air, and then asking for questions. A girl to my right, a lifer, a student who had been at the school since pre-school, raised her hand.

    “Elizabeth.”

    “I have a question. I don’t understand what she means when she says that–”

    “I am sorry to interrupt you, Elizabeth, but before we get to your question, please tell us who she is.”  The girl looked down at the page, hesitated a moment, then said, “The author.”

    “Oh, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a man, not a woman. Percy was a somewhat common name among the English aristocracy. Have you ever seen the movie (I learned early on that, though the students never read anything out of school, this being Los Angeles they did see a lot of movies), The Scarlet Pimpernel? Well, the English aristocrat in the movie, played by the famous actor Leslie Howard—Leslie is also a man’s name—is named Percy.”

    “Okay, okay. But what I don’t understand is what she means by…”

    “No, no. The poet was a man. Percy is a man’s name.”

    “All right. But my question is about why she says…” Laughter percolated in the room. Then, as if to save her, the sweet boy to Elizabeth’s left raised his hand.

    “Yes, Daniel.”

    “I have a question.”

    “Yes, Daniel.”

    “What does the poet mean when she says…”

    “Daniel! Percy Bysshe Shelley was a man! Percy is a man’s name!” From the back of the room came the booming voice of an enormous girl:

    “Give it up, Mr. Thomas. He’s a woman.”

    “Well, clearly he is on the way to becoming bisexual.”

    At this point I was remembering that scene in Moonstruck when the aged Italian grandfather, sitting at the kitchen table with his bewildering family, lowers head and, his eyes watering, mumbles, “I’m confused.”

    I decided to give up on “Ozymandias.”

    “Do you know who Shelley’s wife was?” I asked.

    A wag at the back: “Joe?”

  • An Editor’s Pride

    Jumping into the Translations Editor seat for the Los Angeles Review gave me a lot to think about straight off the bat. First, I really had no idea how to tackle all of the rights and permissions involved with printing work translated by someone other than the original author. Thankfully, I had many mentors in the field with whom I could converse about such tricky matters, and was able to navigate my way through my first reading period.

    My next challenge was to try to ensure that the languages I featured would extend beyond Spanish. Not very many literary magazines publish translated work anymore, and even fewer print anything other than Spanish translations. Though the bulk of submissions I receive are in this widely-used language, I desperately wanted to highlight other, less-known foreign languages. After hunting down and sending personal requests to some of my translation idols, I finally received wonderful pieces in Hebrew, Urdu, and of course, Spanish.

    But one of my most favorite submissions came from a man named John Smelcer, who is the last person on this planet who can read and write in the Ahtna Athabaskan language, an indigenous language of Alaska. We printed three of John’s translations in LAR 6, much to my delight. It is truly my honor to be able to keep this beautiful language alive just a bit longer, and to leave a touch of its legacy in print through John.

    Though the work of editing a literary magazine can be arduous with often very little payoff, it is through talented writers like John Smelcer that I get my reward; being able to preserve an endangered Alaskan language just by selecting a few poems for publication is easy enough for me to do, and the effects will be long-lasting. As an editor, I have a responsibility to provide the LAR readership with fine quality work, representative of a larger desire to keep a love for the written word alive. I consider this duty an honorable one, and am proud to think of myself as fulfilling this role in a way that the LAR readers will appreciate.

    Translation Editor, Tanya Chernov

    Please visit John’s online home for more information on his work and the Ahtna Athabaskan language at http://www.johnsmelcer.com.

  • Translation highlights for issue 6

    Issue Six features work by Eugenia Toledo with Carolyne Wright, Munir Niazi with Alamgir Hashmi, Jon Smelcer and others. Check back for guest blogs by our contributors and by Translation Editor Tanya Chernov.