Author: asitoughttobemagazine

A Review of Mike James’s Elegy in Reverse

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Mike James Elegy in Reverse

A Review of Mike James’s Elegy in Reverse

By J. Andrew Goodman

Elegy in Reverse is a tense poetry collection exploring how loss and absence manifest. Family, friends, lovers, talents, and faith are shadows made measurable by experience and reverence in Mike James’s eighth collection, released by Aldrich Press earlier this year. James’s verse reminds us that what we hold dear is perishable and that words are often not enough to hold these things accountable for leaving. His poetry is plainspoken but evocative, fully rendering the familiarity of longing and grief for that which has a propensity toward leaving. Amid such an exodus, James captivates readers with his rapturous voice.

The characters of James’s past are made tangible by his written memory. In the early pages of his collection, readers are introduced to his mother and his alcoholic father; the latter is deceased and the former presumably so. In “Jailbird,” his father invents a dance, “the prison shuffle,” that the son enjoys, but his mother refuses to join:

when i was with your father
i had enough dancing
to do me
until cows or jesus
came home

she always
laughed
when she said that
as if she were saying it
for the first time

In economic verse, James details the family situation of his childhood: His father goes or returns to prison. His mother hopes to prevent her son from making similar choices. She makes light of her husband’s antics, yet reveals in doses the continuity of the past, her worry refreshed.

His mother appears sparingly throughout the collection, despite James’s apparent fondness of her, while his father returns frequently. The collection contains a number of heartbreaking poems about his father’s alcoholism, which “cost him a sense of direction,” ultimately turning him away from his family. The son is left only with his memory, piecemeal and bitter. James seems to believe he has inherited such transience. Or, possibly, he recognizes this as a feature of human nature, the human condition. He expresses “a sad anger” toward most loss or abandonment, writing in a poem later in the collection that “an old friend says leaving is contagious.” This sets a precedent for the remainder of the book.

Despite his ability to make good use of them, James recognizes that words often escape or fail us as well. In “Message at Babel,” James alludes to the biblical account of God confounding the human language. As part of a short series of poems within the collection that questions the necessity of disparity in faith, James explores through a lens of mourning what it means that Eve was possibly judged “before she even chewed,” that Job’s wife was silenced by her children’s “faces / so stiff in death.”

Still, James shows us clearly that language and voice help diffuse the power of death and grief. Our memories become stories, become physical. “I don’t know what to make / of the language / of grace” James writes in a poem about refusing to offer a prayer before a meal with his wife. The litany and ritual of biblical language are not as significant or endearing to him as experience itself:

those words / don’t cling to me / the way a blanket does / on mid-winter / mornings / / or the way we cling / to one another / at night / as we swim / across the ocean of our bodies / past the edge of our wants / / the night sky full of stars / mariners used / for passage/ their breath filling sails / with a word / that can be a taunt / a promise / or something close to grace / / home

James’s refusal isn’t a rejection of faith, but of its language, poor in its appraisal of our desires and necessities. He suggests silence is its own grace in “However Bright the Sun” and “Wild Apples.” In labor, we work through our grief and unpleasantness. We forget our losses, even though their accumulation manifests into a shadow, “some days . . .  into a taste.”

The dichotomy of what is unreal as it exists in reality is essential to James’s collection. He is visited by his father’s ghost, and they converse. Eden’s inhabitants are capricious, envious of Eve’s taste. James even defines an elegy as “a love poem to an abstraction / once touched.” It seems, then, that with poetry James is enabled to seek the abstraction through language, to define absence by its bounty. The way the monk in “The Monk’s Dream” seeks God’s face during sleep or contemplation but can think only of hawk’s feathers and an empty bowl is how we, with James, seek the unreal through the limitations of the real.

More than a reconciliation of grief, Elegy in Reverse is a love poem to language and the surprising result of what happens when we’re able to say the right thing. Even when describing that which is fleeting, Mike James’s voice is nascent, emerging. He is never at a loss for words.

Mike James, Elegy in Reverse. Aldrich Press, 2014: $16.00

***

J. Andrew Goodman is a graduate of Murray State University’s MFA program and an intern for the independent literary publisher, White Pine Press. He currently lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JENNY SADRE-ORAFAI

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Sadre-Orafai

KARAJ
By Jenny Sadre-Orafai

When I miss her, I open my popout map.
I spill my face into the streets of Tehran.
I hide in Laleh Park. I read street names
aloud, like I’m reporting to someone.
I pretend I see things no one else can─
who took the Peacock Throne, how the burnt
city fell. I say Karaj like I’m telling you your future.


Today’s poem was originally published in Thrush Poetry Journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of four chapbooks. Her first collection Paper, Cotton, Leather will be published this fall by Press 53. Recent poetry has appeared in Redivider, Thrush Poetry Journal, PANK, Rhino, Sixth Finch, ILK, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, and Poemeleon. Recent prose has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, and Delirious Hem. She is co-founding editor of Josephine Quarterly and an Associate Professor of English at Kennesaw State University.

Editor’s Note: I fell in love with today’s poem because it so intimately and distinctly tells the poet’s story, and yet, this is not her story. I have my own Karaj, and anyone who has ever loved a city that lies on the other side of the world—anyone who has ever loved a city by way of memory and longing—speaks the language of this poem. I am reminded, too, of Danusha Laméris’ beautiful poem, “Arabic,” of the ways in which love—of a language, of a people, of a place—remain with us across the span of distance and time. When Jenny Sadre-Orafai leaves us with her (killer!) end-line, I know what my future holds. I know what city waits for me on distant shores.

Want to read more by Jenny Sadre-Orafai?
Official Website
Two poems with audio in PANK
Creative nonfiction essay with audio in The Rumpus

Lyn Lifshin: A Micro-Interview and Three Poems

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lyn

Lyn Lifshin: A Micro-Interview and Three Poems

by

Okla Elliott and Lyn Lifshin

Okla Elliott: You organized A Girl Goes into the Woods by themed sections (autobiography, relationships, family, war poems, and so forth). How did you decide on these particular themes, and how did poems that might fit in more than one section end up where they did? Also, if poems were written years apart yet fit the same theme, what differences did you find in your own thinking on the theme?

lyn2Lyn Lifshin: Though I hadn’t thought of it until you asked the question, it seems many of my books (all three Black Sparrow books—Cold Comfort, Before It’s Light, and Another Woman Who Looks Like Me—as well as Persephone) are arranged in a similar way with similar themes. In contrast, are the many books that focus on one theme—all the equine books: my just published Secretariat: The Red Freak, The Miracle; The Licorice Daughter; My Year with Ruffian; and Barbaro: Beyond Broken. And many other books are one theme: Malala; Knife Edge & Absinthe: The Tango Poems; Tangled as the Alphabet; Blue Tattoo; Marilyn Monroe; The Doctor Poems; etc. Actually I had not realized until looking thru some titles how the one theme book is so prevalent!

As for how I decided on these particular themes: when I first started writing, I wrote mostly political poems and was referred to as Mr. Lifshin. Later I wanted to show the variety of my work, not just political poems but erotica, family poems, nature poems, love poems, poems of place and of course, mother and daughter poems. (I had written no mother and daughter poems when I edited Tangled Vines, a mother and daughter anthology that stayed in print in various printings and versions for about 20 years—but from that time, it became an obsession for many years) Some poems were triggered by requests by editors doing anthologies: Richard Peabody ‘s Marilyn Monroe and Barbie anthology, got me going on poems that turned into my own books, as did the request for poems about Malala, Joni Mitchell, Dick for a Day, requests for poems about an earthly Jesus—a request for poems about Obama led to a series, as did requests for poems about September 11.

Sometimes I’ve wanted to do a collection of new poems but often the editor/publisher wants to do a best of. For A Girl Goes into the Woods I selected what I thought were the best and strongest poems whether they were new or old. It’s hard to say what difference I found in new and old poems on the same subject. I know sometimes when I read old poems, I change the language but it’s hard to make any generalizations. It’s true some poems could have fit in more than one section but mostly I think they are where they should be! I’m not sure I can give a true answer about how I may feel differently about a certain theme when I wrote it in the past and now am writing about it again. I think it would vary too much from poem to poem.

OE: Your poems “Barbie Wonders about Buying a Coffin” and “Thirty Miles West of Chicago” both touch on childhood and death in quite different ways—the former by playfully personifying a child’s dolls, the latter with a dark and heart-wrenching heaviness. Tell us a bit about these two poems, how you came to write them, and maybe discuss the wildly different styles employed.

LL: As I mentioned, when Richard Peabody asked for Barbie poems, I did intenselyn3 Barbie research not ever having a Barbie doll myself and just imagined her in a variety of situations— enough to do a whole book of Barbie poems. I don’t really remember when or what mood I was in when I wrote “Thirty Miles West of Chicago.” At different times of my life and in different places I seem to write at different times of the day. Somehow I remember when I first began, I stood at the kitchen counter. More recently, I write on the D.C. Metro going to ballet, an hour metro ride going and coming back, or in a cove in the living room in an apartment rented in DC with Janet Reno on one side, a drug dealer across the hall and the owners of the Fifth Column, a night club—they always came back about 3 am, loudly. Always thought they were selling drugs too—but it was income tax evasion or something like that. I wish I remembered the circumstances—I just don’t.

OE: What’s your current project? What can readers look forward to in the near future?

LL: After publishing 5 books this past year and having some of the most stressful experiences in and out of publishing, I planned to take a real break and just dance—Argentine Tango, ballroom. But some road blocks there. But I did get back and took a private class this week. In the shelf above my desk, I have about 60 spiral notebooks—I still write poems by hand and then am always way behind typing them up—now they are howling, waiting for me. Some of them go back to the early nineties…so that is a huge enormous undertaking and not a lot of fun since it’s hard to read my handwriting and the references. But forthcoming in July is Luminous Women: Enheduanna, Scheherazade and Nefertiti, a totally different kind of theme for me. It started off as a project with a painter—selecting women thru history who left an indelible stamp but the plan never materialized and I was left with poems about these three women (and also Pachamama—so I suppose that could be a book on its own) and another small book due in the fall, Moving Thru Stained Glass: The Maple Poems.

***

Thirty Miles West of Chicago

paint chips slowly.
It’s so still you
can almost hear it
pull from a porch.

Cold grass claws
like fingers in a
wolf moon. A man
stands in corn bristles

listening, watching
as if something
could grow from
putting a dead child

in the ground.

***

All Night the Night Has Been

lightening with moths

white behind the walnuts

If a woman couldn’t sleep
and came to this window
in this light her skin
would glow like bones

Clouds over the full moon
even with the wind

What would have been nuts
look like limes
on the white stones,

it sounds like some-
one tapping on a glass
coffin. It sounds

like someone tapping
from within the tree

***

Taking My Mother to the Bathroom

I lead her, a
child waking up
from a nightmare,
dazed by light.
She lags, hurries
then, half cranky,
half grateful.
She wants the
door shut, then
says open it,
wants my hands
the right way,
wash in between
my fingers. She
says the wash-
cloth is too
wet, too cold,
too soapy. The
towels are too
heavy. You don’t,
she spits, cover
your mouth. Go
home, you should
not be here to
see me like this.

***

Lyn Lifshin is the author of over 100 books, and her work has appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, The Literary Review, New York Quarterly, and Ploughshares, among many others. The above poems are included in A Girl Goes into the Woods: Selected Poems and are reprinted here by permission of the author.

A Review of Lena Divani’s Seven Lives and One Great Love: Memoirs of a Cat

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Lena Divani Seven Lives

A Review of Lena Divani’s Seven Lives and One Great Love: Memoirs of a Cat
Translated from the Greek by Konstantinos Matsoukas

By Jennifer Dane Clements

Forget, for a moment, the ubiquitous internet cats. Put aside the grumpy one, the cross-eyed one, the dwarf one with extra toes, the one who slides through empty boxes. Let’s get the hard part out of the way: This is a novel from a cat’s perspective, offered up at a time when cats have gone strangely viral. But unlike so much hipster-cat culture, this work takes itself seriously.

Indeed, Lena Divani’s Seven Lives and One Great Love: Memoirs of a Cat (translated by Konstantinos Matsoukas)—smart, earnest, and not without a healthy dollop of  whimsy—comes closer to anthrozoology than anything to do with a cheezburger.

Welcome to a world in which humans are given names like Madam Sweetie or The Damsel, and our protagonist—a stark white stray on the last of his lives—is called Zach. Cultured and articulate enough to merit entry into the feline intelligentsia, Zach leads the reader through his consciousness with the cadence and tone of a Liam Neeson or Jude Law, something deep, whisky-stained, and British. Perceptive, literate, and not so subtly arrogant, our narrator understands from the moment he’s born into a feral cat colony that he’s destined for greatness, and in his first breath decries his mother and his siblings as lesser-than.

Zach sees himself as a muse in the making, seeking to position himself as the newest entry into the canon of cat/writer relations: “According to all credible sources, all writers, great and small, talented and mediocre, have been good friends to us. Edgar Allan Poe, Colette, Balzac, Patricia Highsmith, Emmanuel Roides, even the demented Philip K. Dick, they all drew inspiration from us.” His literary aspirations lead Zach to accompany two well-to-do writers in their Athens flat, where he attempts to edge his way into their hearts and writings.

But humans are a challenging breed: We overcomplicate, we go against nature, we don’t open ourselves to others. “Your delusion that you are masters of this universe has become plain ridiculous, already,” Zach tells us. “You have made your life unlivable. You’ve become suspicious. You are scared to touch humans in case they bite your arm off. You are friendless. And thus, you have need of us. Whereas we once approached you for food, you now beg us for some sustenance for your deprived soul.”

Yet Zach has mythologized these complexities in such a way that he wants nothing more than to earn human love. He indicts mankind in one breath, then romanticises his particular human in the next.

And therein lies the heart of Seven Lives: That to love is to observe, often without understanding. To let those observations not interfere with affection but to strengthen it, to challenge its simplicity, to acknowledge imperfections as a part of the adored. That perhaps those we love most are always a foreign species, in one way or another, subject to study and examination through the curious act of loving.

The cat’s love in Seven Lives is pure and fearless, but never uninformed. We readers could take from this a lesson or two: how the smallest of encounters can mark others in profound ways; how we may judge in abstractions and love in specifics. In its quirky, unapologetic way, Divani’s novel is a lesson in considering the needs, the wants, and the perspectives of those utterly unlike ourselves, and how that consideration makes us yet more capable of empathy, more capable of becoming increasingly attuned to our own experience. And ultimately—if we may say so without insult to our feline friends—more human.

Lena Divani, Seven Lives and One Great Love: Memoirs of a Cat. Europa Editions, 2014: $15.95.

***

Jennifer Dane Clements received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language & Art. A writer of prose and plays, she has been published in WordRiot, Nerve, and Psychopomp and has had plays produced by Capital Repertory Theatre (Albany, NY), Creative Cauldron (Falls Church, VA), and elsewhere. Clements currently serves as a prose editor for ink&coda. More at jennifer-dane-clements.com.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SPLIT

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from SPLIT
By Cathy Linh Che:


THE FUTURE THERAPIST ASKS ABOUT RAPE

This morning, I watched a woman shatter
the thin ice on the pavement. I made the bed,
tucked in the sheets, and in the window,
I saw reflected my mother’s face.

Men in my life walked in and out of the rooms,
tramping snow. My mother shushed me,
and my father with his powder keg hands
pulled up a pair of clean black socks.

It isn’t what you think.
My father was a soldier.
He taught me nothing about men.

They are an empty barrel.
You’re not supposed to look into
a gun you dismantle

to try and see its parts.



HOME VIDEO

There are flowers on this bed, an elbow planted by an ear.
No, you cannot touch this breast. No darkness, no shatter,
and no, no pendulum. The past is a blood clot lodged inside
your lung.

                                                  *

In the living room, shapes move against the wall. You are
wearing a thin dress. You watch Beetlejuice while he moves
his fingers over your white underwear. You watch the screen
and see his fingers. Your brothers are in the room, but they
never seem to notice.

                                                  *

Behind the lens is the father. Mother offstage calls, Con gai
nay. On the phone, Con gai thuoi, which means, This girl. This
girl’s rotten. This girl like swollen fruit. She cuts off the
bruises. She teaches me to cut.

                                                  *

He rises to the surf. It detonates with a sheering crash.
Inside each wave is a barrel. In each barrel is a vacuum that can suck
you in, spin you round, snap your bones if you tumble the
wrong way.

                                                  *

If I say, I have been touched. If I say, by my cousin, then, a
neighbor boy and then another. If I say no, I didn’t want it
from my first boyfriend. There was blood and membrane
and he didn’t believe me. If my body can be a box. If I can
close it up. If it has to be open. Who will touch me again?



POMEGRANATE

I open my chest and birds flock out.
In my mother’s garden, the roses flare
toward the sun, but I am an arrow

pointing back.
I am Persephone,
a virgin abducted.

In the Underworld,
I starve a season
while the world wilts

into the ghost
of a summer backyard.
My hunger open and raw.

I lay next to a man
who did not love me—
my body a performance,

his body a single eye,
a director watching an actress,
commanding her

to scintillate.

I was the clumsy acrobat.
When he came, I cracked open
like a pomegranate

and ate six ruddy seeds.

I was the whipping boy.
I was thorny, barbed wire
wound around a muscular heart.



Today’s poems are from Split, published by Alice James Books, copyright © 2014 by Cathy Linh Che, and appear here today with permission from the poet.


SPLIT: “Che effectively weaves the trauma of the Vietnam War into her own personal trauma, making herself a war victim—only her war is not against enemy combatants, but against her past.” —The Philadelphia Review of Books

“Cathy Linh Che’s first collection, Split, is a brave, delicate, and terrifying account of what we do to each other. Here’s a voice that has to speak. Split crosses borders, exposing truths and dreams, violations of body and mind, aligning them until the deep push-pull of silence and song become a bridge. And here we cross over into a landscape where beauty interrogates, and we encounter a voice that refuses to let us off the hook.” —Yusef Komunyakaa


Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James, 2014), winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Poets & Writers, Poets House, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, and the Jerome Foundation.


Editor’s Note: Words—my words—seem ineffective here. But I was deeply moved by this poet, by this book, and so I will try. Split is a sacrifice; raw and unrelenting. It is blood and memory and gasoline. It is the truth no one wants to hear, that we all need to hear. But it is more than the phoenix choking on ash, thrashing to be free. It is lineage and heritage, truth offered up in the name of a history, a family, a self. This is a stunning book by a bold and dedicated poet, a book that dares us to look, listen, and speak up.


Want to see more from Cathy Linh Che?
Official Website
Buy Split from Alice James Books
Fireside: A Kundiman Blog
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Poets.org

Finding Courage: My #YesAllWomen

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amugigi

Finding Courage: My #YesAllWomen

by Amy Gigi Alexander

In the past few weeks many things happened which influenced my state of mind. Maya Angelou died, and popular media exploded with stories and quotes from her life. The New York Times ran an article about the dangers women face when they travel: an article that spoke a truth that is rarely spoken. A misogynistic, mentally unwell man went on a shooting spree in California. People responded to the shooting with #YesAllWomen: a platform of discussion and intention around the treatment of women worldwide, calling for change.

I felt depressed at Maya Angelou’s death. I never met her, I only read her books. But I was disappointed that I would not meet her, that her living voice was gone. Most of all, I was overwhelmed by the challenge of how to pay homage to such a woman. A woman who was so real, so true, so honest she deserved the same back from me, from the world…not just a list of top ten quotes. I thought I should share something here which required the same honesty I had learned from her. A thank you in the form of a story deep and wide.

The New York Times article on the world of difference women face traveling compared to men made me think about how I always read essays and blogs which are encouraging women to travel, but that don’t really spell out: here is what you will face when you are somewhere else. How we don’t really talk about those dark things, because we don’t want to live fearfully, we want to go.

My response to the misogynistic rants of the shooter were twofold: first, I was surprised at my acceptance of it, that I was not outraged, only saddened, for these kinds of events and points of view have become almost expected. It frightened me that I did not find it unusual, but instead fell into a state of uneasy grief. But then quite quickly there was a turnaround within me and within the outside world: #YesAllWomen, a movement of women’s voices sharing stories and calling for an end to the misogyny which runs rampant in our culture filled my social media feeds with opinions, essays, calls to action.

Somehow these four events blended, and I found myself writing a personal response to them, a collective one, a little essay that honors Angelou with truth and talks about travel as a way to bridge the gap between how I’m treated because I am a woman and how I respond to that challenge.

Here it is.

Women often ask me if I’m afraid of getting raped when I travel solo. The answer is yes. I am. I am terrified of being raped.

But it’s a more complicated answer than simply yes. I was raped in my late twenties by a man I barely knew. He broke into my apartment, raped and tortured me for days: I barely survived it. The rape was brutal, leaving me severely beaten and in shock. Afterwards, people, even those very close to me, asked me what I had been wearing, or what I done to encourage him. I had done nothing at all, but this seemed to make little difference in the minds of people.

Afterwards I shut down almost entirely: I stopped eating, I spent my days in bed sleeping, I watched as my body seemed to fall apart, disintegrate. Suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, I hallucinated my rapist constantly, lived in a state of half aliveness, just breathing.

The house where I was staying had a long bookcase in the hallway, and one day, wandering down the hall, I chose a book with a bright yellow cover. It was Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I don’t remember why I chose it, but I think it may have been a simple reason: on the cover was a bird in cage, and I felt like that bird.

I took it back to bed and read it over and over: here was someone who understood. Understood raw, numb, closed. Understood that I was afraid to leave the house. Understood silence, chatter, madness.

Angelou had written more than a book: she had come to life, and now she sat on the edge of my bed, stroking my hair, and I did not mind she was there.

Slowly, over months, I began to feel better: I began showering, I cut my hair, I changed the bed sheets, I ate, I dreamed, and finally one day I left that house, and went out into the world again. I was still closed, still terrified, still hurting, but I knew I had to become someone more than I had been being.

“I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it.” —Maya Angelou

It’s been more than sixteen years now, since that rape. I never talk about it, although I write about it. Sometimes people treat me differently when they find out I’ve been raped: they don’t know what to say, or they use it against me. A few men have treated me like I was dirty or tainted, or too troublesome to have a relationship with. Some people have told me I was being a victim when I have talked about it, other people have broken down in front of me and told me their stories of being raped. Some people feel sorry for me, other people get very uncomfortable. Talking about it often feels like an exercise in powerlessness: everyone has an opinion about it and strangely there does not often seem to be room for my own. But here I can share my opinion, and it is this: it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I wish sincerely that it had not happened at all. But since it did, I had to use it the best way that I could, I had to find something good to come out of it, otherwise I think I would have never left that bed, and just slowly starved to death.

“Stepping onto a brand new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation, which is not nurturing to the whole woman.” —Maya Angelou

It made me tougher. It forced me to think harder about who I was as a woman and what I wanted as a woman. My womanhood, my personhood, my life. It made me fight for myself in a way that reached deep. I had to do it, for there was no one else to do it for me.

It meant a daily practice of overcoming for years: nightmares, recoiling from touch, folded. Slowly it moved from overcoming into flying: soaring high above my old self, above the rape, above what society said I was. It made me draw on a courage that I had not known I had.

“Having courage doesn’t mean we are unafraid. Having courage means we face our fears.” —Maya Angelou

Traveling solo as a woman is an act of independence: it says, I can be here, despite whatever you may think. I am free to go where I want to go and experience more than what you may believe I should. One reason I prefer to travel alone is that it is a courage-building exercise: it is not for the faint-hearted, it is for the Joan of Arcs, the Warrior-goddesses, the Valkyries. It took me a long time to get to the place that I actually enjoyed it. When I first started intensively traveling solo, I was so afraid I could hardly sleep, scarcely able to enjoy the travel itself. But I’ve experienced firsthand how traveling can make me whole, and it is through travel that I found myself again.

Even though I travel alone much more comfortably now than I did ten years ago, I still have fear. I still have doubt. I still ache for the ease of a tour, a perfectly planned vacation with a guide, no decisions, and minimal risk. That ache is just a small ache, however. An impression, fading. For I am well aware that to have the kind of richly varied and adventurous experiences I seek, I need to travel alone. For its only in traveling alone that a strange partnership is forged within me: a balance of vulnerability and power.

It’s not all roses traveling alone. I’ve had my share—perhaps more—of danger, of close calls, of almosts.

The time I was locked in a Honduran border patrol office and the official took off his clothes, telling me that he was going to rape me. The time I was on a crowded Calcuttan street and a group of men groped me. The time a Columbian taxi driver refused to let me out of his cab and drove me around for hours, talking dirty to me. The time I discovered my hotel room in Bangladesh was full of peepholes and I had been being watched for months. The time an Englishman, the husband of a dear friend, offered to take me on a day tour of London and instead took me to a hotel, and I when I refused to go in with him, he held my wrists so tight he bruised them. The time in Spain, along the remote trail of the Camino, that a man forced himself on me, trying to kiss me, holding my arms down as two other men laughed. The time in Bihar that I couldn’t stand being cooped up anymore in the compound with the women, so I went on a walk and found myself surrounded by a crowd of angry men who wanted to teach me a lesson since I had wandered out without a headscarf. So many more stories I have: countless leers, jeers, stares, fondles, lingering touches I had not asked for.

When these things have happened to me, I have done whatever I needed to do to escape. Smiled. Prayed. Yelled. Pushed. Fought. When it was possible, I have tried to search for the humanity in each man, and in doing so, helped him to see mine. When I saw that the Honduran border patrol officer was actually going to rape me, I knelt on the ground in front of him and prayed the rosary in Spanish. When the Columbian taxi driver would not let me out of his cab, I asked to see pictures of his children, encouraged him to tell me his life story. Other times, I have left the scene running so fast I barely touched earth, shaking and angry, wondering if I should go home and stop going places.

Sometimes I have locked myself in my hotel room for days, too afraid to go out. But when the hurt passes, I open the door and go out again, into the city, the village. I am a fighter, I am doing battle. I refuse to miss out on what is extraordinary, what is beautiful, what is important, simply because in that place, there will be a handful of men there that have a different idea of who I am and what my identity is as a woman.

There have been so many articles written about what to do when you prepare for solo travel as a woman. How to dress, how to walk, how to wear your hair, how to ask for directions, how to take a train. Where to sit, where to eat, where to go and not go. I’m not going to write any of that here. It’s obvious to me that when I travel somewhere else, I’m going somewhere else. Therefore there are always a plethora of customs and beliefs which must be paid attention to, rules to break and rules to follow. I don’t like some of rules in other places, but I feel like I’m changing things for the better, for women everywhere, just by going.

“Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in-between.” —Maya Angelou

Traveling solo can be a lot of different things. But it’s not limited to fears and challenges. It’s also this wonderful high, this sublime conversation with yourself: you are actually here, doing this, alone. This is, for me, the greatest achievement of my life: I can get on plane and go anywhere on Earth and have a marvelous time. Every time I do it, I’m terrified. Yet slowly the fear takes leave of me and I begin to take on the colors and patterns of a new place. I’m not limited by my fear of rape, of having been raped, of wondering if it will happen again and what I will do if it does. I’m trying to encourage other women to just go, to not plan, to take charge of their own experience of the world. I’m calling the world out, I’m calling that rapist out, I’m calling men out, I’m calling women out. I’m saying, I am here.

This is my tribute to Maya Angelou, a truth-teller, a sooth-sayer, a woman whose words got me out of bed and out the door into the world.

This is my answer to all the questions I get about traveling solo as a woman.

This is my #YesAllWomen.

***

Amy Gigi Alexander is a writer of memoir, fiction, and stories about place on her website,www.amygigialexander.com. She lives in California and is finishing her first novel. Follow her on Twitter: @amyggalexander

[The above piece originally appeared at World Hum and at Alternet in substantially shorter form. The full piece is printed here with permission of the author.]

Master of Disaster/Breaking in the Fold

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sabra

Master of Disaster/Breaking in the Fold

by Sabra Embury

Passing a glass-walled room, Oscar waved to an orangutan trying on designer jeans. “Use the sandblaster, Tina,” he said into a mike. He pushed a button releasing a snow cone from a shaft onto a refrigerated plate. Tina tossed the jeans aside, and with her favorite hammer in hand moseyed to the snack bar located in the corner of her furnished studio.

Oscar made his way to the end of the hall. Swiping his badge on a scanner, a green light rolled a bolt in the door in front of him, letting the handle give to a pull. Inside, Oscar took a pair of Ray Bans out of his lab coat and shielded his eyes. He flipped a switch on the wall beside him. A giant dangling bulb beamed from dim to bright, bringing with it a mob of gargantuan moths fluttering from a box of botanicals bloomed by sunlamp: sunflowers, lilacs, snapdragons, zinnias. Oscar made a mental note to cut down on the steroids filtering through the water in the sprinkler system. He reached for his walkie talkie attached to his hip by a harness. “Two boxes of Rubbish in 220, please.”

Today Oscar was working on distressing cabled pullovers for a company called Rubbish in both taupe and black: a relaxed, cable-knit sweater, threadbare and patched for a trendy, rugged-looking style. “Last time we put the pigs on this we had to turn the sleeves into tube scarves,” he thought, massaging his temple.

As the creative engineer of a textile distressing factory, brainstorming strategies for wear & tear seemed simple enough, but the fact was: fabric disastering, or “the art of the perfect fray,” had as many (if not more) stresses as any office or retail job might. The Stinky Floor for instance, which Oscar had nicknamed, held menagerie of livestock and other more exotic creatures. Officially titled: The Coarse Organics lab, it was a holding cell to a plethora of pigs, print parched piranas, and a vicious murder of crows who had a taste for denim a la mode “aka” jeans carefully daubed at the knees with vanilla bean ice cream. The crows cawed with smiling eyes whenever Oscar entered their sanctuary. And nevermore would he forget to leave anything edible in his locker. 48 stitches and a glass eye swore no chewy-chunked granola bar would ever see the Stinky Floor again.

When the boxes of cable-knits arrived, Oscar pinned them to a string of white christmas lights suspended above the grey concrete floor like a clothesline. He spritzed the sweaters with a sweet-smelling spray and waited, dimming the moth-orbited light with a switch.

One-by-one the gargantuan moths made their way from the dimmed bulb to the string of shimmering christmas lights, landing on the sweaters beaded, glistening damp with man-made nectar. Fluttering their grey wings in gentle swooshes, the moths began to graze the 100% acrylic sweaters, fraying then gently at the cuffs and ribbing. Scribbling figures onto his clipboard, the master of disaster pondered textures strong, light and soft.

***

Sabra Embury is a book critic for Brooklyn’s L Magazine and is a regular contributor at TROP, an online literary magazine based in Los Angeles. Her writing can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, Tottenville Review, NANO Fiction, and other places. Follow her antics on Twitter @yrubmEarbaS.

A Review of Brenda Hasiuk’s Your Constant Star

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Constant Star_Hasiuk

A Review of Brenda Hasiuk’s Your Constant Star

by Will J Fawley

Brenda Hasiuk’s YA novel, Your Constant Star, opens the first of its three sections by introducing readers to Faye. Adopted from China by a Polish mother and a Scottish father, Faye is “pretty much happy ho-hum.” Still, she possesses a lingering feeling of displacement in light of being adopted, especially in regard to the frequency and state of child abandonment in China. Faye provides many lovely cultural details throughout her narration, such as the Chinese story of lovers being connected, however far apart they may be, by a red string. These details make Faye a believable and compelling character.

Next readers meet Bev, Faye’s self-proclaimed sort-of friend. Bev is pregnant and has decided to give her child up for adoption. She has recently returned to Winnipeg after living in Vancouver for many years, and is reconnecting with her childhood and with Faye. Much of the novel’s second section follows Bev in her attempts to choose the right adoptive parents for her baby, with Faye tagging along for the ride.

The third section is dedicated to Mannie, the father of Bev’s baby. He seems completely lost, though readers learn that he has given up carjacking and dealing to make pizzas in order to earn legitimate money that will help support his future baby. Bev doesn’t want him to know who the adoptive parents are, and part of Mannie’s quest concerns his efforts to contact Faye and learn of the whereabouts of his son after the adoption takes place.

There is a gravitas about the book that is still with me. I enjoyed the first two sections, but the third was a bittersweet sucker-punch that made it all meaningful and terrible and beautiful. We are left with the idea that “what’s most beautiful and what’s most brutal are just two halves of the same whole.”

Overall, this is a book caught in liminal spaces – between beautiful and brutal, between cultures, between times, and between genres.

As for the cultural divide, there is a clear focus on globalization. It seems like no two characters in the novel have the same background. They are Chinese, Polish, Scottish, Métis, Russian, Argentinean, Pilipino, and they are all, with one exception, Canadian. Characters are constantly being whisked around the country and around the world to China and Russia, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver. Still, this is a very Canadian novel, a very Winnipeg novel. It is a novel about Canada and how the country, and Winnipeg itself, is a melting pot of cultures from around the world.

This is also a novel that spans not only distance, but also time. It is full of flashbacks and daydreams. Present events always seem to be fuelled by memories. Hasiuk weaves a web of time that pulls the reader through these characters’ lives, giving us an intimate look at their complexities. The flashbacks are so many and so smooth that the present becomes a bridge between memories, the reader scarcely realizing they’ve crossed it until they are on the other side, looking back. Though this could be confusing or slow the pacing, Hasiuk handles these instances beautifully, successfully adding layer upon layer of depth to these characters and their histories.

And as for the genre divide, Kirkus Reviews published a piece in which the book’s YA classification was questioned, because so much depends upon the teenagers’ parents and situation in life, leaving them little room to act. And while these characters may be affected by the past, they feel liking living, breathing teens in the present. Certainly it’s important to remember that people are a culmination of their pasts and their families, and therefore what Brenda Hasiuk provides in Your Constant Star is an honest look at young people’s lives.

The novel reads very clearly as one for young adults, a book about the struggle of young people finding their place in a complicated, globalized world in which they have been displaced since birth. Each character is halved by culture, by distance, by borders, and is searching for their true self at the other end of the red string.

Brenda Hasiuk, Your Constant Star. Orca Book Publishers, 2014: $12.95

***

Will J Fawley is a writer and blogger living in Canada. He blogs at The Wildest Edge.

Signage

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Signage

by Hannah Stephenson

Stores die with the same velocity as bugs.
One day, humming, clicking. Shiny doors
parting like beetle wings. And then, gone.
Emptied out. A shell. The sudden voicelessness
of the SupeRx, its sign darkened and waiting
to be pried from the building. The town talks
about it. This is how they mourn. And when
the people of the town encounter those
they know working a till at the grocery store,
or behind bank glass, SupeRx gets stuffed
into the quiet between them. Always Did you
hear about the SupeRx, mmhmm, isn’t it
a shame. That a strange, new business
can rise to its feet in a body not belonging
to it. Blue signage plastered over yellow.
Shameful, the brutal reincarnation
of buildings. It’s a pharmacy again within
the month, sentenced to revisiting sickness,
the earnestness with which we fix ourselves.

***

Hannah Stephenson is a poet, editor, and instructor living in Columbus, Ohio (where she also runs a monthly literary event series called Paging Columbus). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Hobart, Poetry Daily, and The Nervous Breakdown; her collection, In the Kettle, the Shriek, is now available from Gold Wake Press. Recently, she served as Editor for The Ides of March: An Anthology of of Ohio Poets (Columbus Creative Cooperative), and she is co-editor (with Okla Elliott) of the biannual anthology New Poetry from the Midwest (New American Press). You can visit her online at The Storialist (www.thestorialist.com).

[The above poem is from In the Kettle, the Shriek and is reprinted here with permission of the author.]

Notes toward a Writerly Education—Or: Can We Please, Please, Please Have a Different Debate

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Notes toward a Writerly Education—

Or: Can We Please, Please, Please Have a Different Debate

by Okla Elliott

1.

I can think of few current cultural debates more frustrating and fruitless than the one over MFAs in creative writing. There are problems with the ways writing programs are run, and there could be a productive discussion about how best to help a writer develop in our educational system, but the incessant repetition of tired talking points on both sides of the argument does nothing to ameliorate the actual shortcomings of writing programs and does nothing to further the conversation about writing pedagogy or personal development as a writer. My primary goal here will therefore be to move us beyond the well-worn rhetorical ruts this debate has been stuck in for over three decades now. But before I attempt to move us past the current debate, I feel I should summarize the key points as I see them. I will then summarize the key retorts to these points. As it turns out, there aren’t that many ways people choose to attack writing programs, and the same tactics are perennially recycled. Here are the three main complaints about writing programs, as I understand them, and the basic retorts to these complaints.

2.

Complaint #1: Creative writing programs homogenize writing, making all writers who attend such programs into identical (or insufferably similar) writers. The basic idea here is that we all have an inherent uniqueness to our writing, but then writing workshops sap our originality, making us into cookie-cut reproductions of our professors, who were in their turn cookie-cut by their professors—and on, and on throughout the generations of creative writing students who become creative writing faculty.

Retort #1: This is perhaps the easiest to refute, since it only takes a few moments of empirical research to prove the inaccuracy of this claim. David Foster Wallace and Richard Ford both have MFAs, as do Andrew Hudgins and Marvin Bell, as do Kelly Link and Donald Ray Pollock. If you honestly maintain that these people all write the same, you have lost your mind. And I came up with that list off the top of my head in about seven seconds, without consulting my bookshelf or the internet. It would be an effortless task to make a list of hundreds of authors who have degrees in creative writing, yet who have little more in common than the fact that they write in the English language. My own forthcoming novel, The Doors You Mark Are Your Own, is a collaboratively written, Brechtian, post-modern, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic story wherein trains are nearly deified and a tyrannical Mayor Adams takes orders from three oracles who can see the future (if in fact they are not a hallucination of Mayor Adams). You know, the same book everyone with an MFA is writing according to those who recycle Complaint #1.

Complaint #2: The second most frequent charge I encounter is that writing programs perpetuate an environment wherein nepotism determines success more than talent and determination. A degree in creative writing, we are told, has become a sort of license to practice; editors only publish work by people with writing degrees; professors give their students opportunities others never enjoy; and so forth.

Retort #2: This one is a bit more difficult to respond to, largely because it has so many movable parts—some accurate, some slightly muddled, and some utterly inaccurate. Let’s get the easy one out of the way and admit that going to a writing program will indeed open up opportunities not necessarily available to those who do not attend a program. This is pretty much unavoidable and, ultimately, only to be expected. The professors at these programs, like professors in every academic department, have a duty to help their students succeed professionally (just look at the internships one might get as a physics major or clerkships one might get via connections as a law student). It is therefore merely part of the reality of attending any academic program that it will help with the professionalization process. Also, these students have usually chosen a life of graduate-student poverty over having a regular salary, so part of their payoff ought to be some help achieving a profession in their chosen field.

But let’s not overstate the situation. It’s not as if every MFA student ends up with a three-book deal with Knopf because of a faculty member’s connections. Usually this help takes the form of writing recommendation letters for summer retreats, grants, further graduate school, and jobs—and blurbs for books you publish due to your own pluck and talent and determination. I have benefitted in all of these ways, but my journal publications and my books have come about without any paving of the path by faculty connections.

As for the claim that journal editors and book publishers only publish people with writing degrees, we can again dismiss this with simple empirical investigation. Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, and William T. Vollmann are three of the most lauded and applauded authors in the US today, yet none of them have a creative writing degree (in fact, of these three literary stars, only Oates has a graduate degree of any sort—an MA in English from the University of Wisconsin). And simply pick up any issue of any journal. Will you find a fair number of people with writing degrees? Of course. It would be weird if you didn’t, since people who dedicate their education to creative writing might end up doing some of it. But you will also find people with a wide range of educational and professional backgrounds, ranging from lawyers to nurses to social workers, and probably a ton of people in the barista or bar-tender business.

Complaint #3: It is often claimed that creative writing programs exploit their students, either by charging them outrageous tuitions for a degree that doesn’t necessarily lead to gainful employment or by exploiting their labor via teaching assistantships. In effect, the argument here is about the corporatization of academia and about these programs being cynical money-making machines.

Retort #3: This one is a bit complicated as well, again because there are several moving parts. There are programs that offer little or no funding, and even more insidiously, there are programs that offer funding for the first year but do not guarantee further funding, thus creating a situation where a student might have to choose between large amounts of debt or dropping out of the program.

There are, however, dozens of programs that fund quite well, offer health insurance, and give their students excellent training in research and teaching. It is incumbent upon applicants to these various programs to assess their own financial situation and to decide accordingly. If you happen to have just inherited a million dollars, then by all means pay the tuition at any MFA program you want. If, like most of us, you need a tuition waiver and a research or teaching assistantship to afford your graduate education, focus solely on those programs that guarantee funding for your entire time in graduate school. There are, as I mentioned, plenty of them—many more than a prospective graduate student should apply to, so 100% of your applications could be to programs that fund. You might need to send out a few more applications, since programs that fund are more competitive, but the added cost of application fees will be more than balanced out by years of tuition waivers and the monthly salary of an assistantship.

3.

Before moving on to the much more useful discussion of how we might improve writing programs, I want to make a plea for everyone to stop engaging in the old, tired debate that keeps us running in circles. This debate, like so many cultural debates, feels more like a prepared script with the roles and lines of dialogue already set in stone with the various participants picking a role and simply repeating the same tired scenes in this not very interesting drama.

4.

So, instead of perpetuating the tired antagonisms between pro-MFAers and anti-MFAers (which has to be the least interesting debate going on anywhere on the planet today), we should be asking ourselves the following questions: What elements should be included in a writing program? Would these elements differ between genres and/or between the MFA and PhD—and if so, how? What would former students like to see changed from their own experiences? What do those of us with writing degrees wish someone had told us or showed us? How can we best educate writers to become the best versions of their writerly selves? How can we give writers the professional skills to survive in today’s market?
It would be impossible to answer all of these questions in the space provided here, but I do think we can offer some general guidelines and even some specific policies that would improve writing programs in myriad ways.

I’ll list four possible changes to writing programs, fully acknowledging that they by no means exhaust the possibilities for improvement. I hope, however, that they are productive starting points for a more fruitful debate about how writers might best thrive in our educational system.

Change #1: MFA programs ought to have reading classes taught by outside faculty. These professors would design the classes with the knowledge that the students are reading as writers, not as Foucault scholars or psycholinguists or what-have-you. I would want a Comparative Literature professor to teach a European or Asian literature course for writing students, but I don’t see the utility in forcing them to write a scholarly paper if they have no interest in ever doing such professionally. If the students want to do that, they can take a regular scholarly course (and I heartily suggest that creative writers do so). The reason I want these courses taught by scholars outside the MFA faculty is that their knowledge of the language and culture and literary tropes particular these other traditions can be invaluable for a creative writer to think about.

Change #2: As a corollary to my last point in #1, I would have MFA and PhD programs offer translation courses. These might be taught by faculty in other departments or by core creative writing faculty, if someone on faculty does translation. There are many reasons for offering translation courses, foremost among them being that there is so much wonderful literature going untranslated. By having students translate the work of others, programs would be offering further opportunities for publication, teaching, and grant acquisition. Also, the students will learn how to write by working in the shapes and feels of these foreign authors’ writing. And, finally, translation keeps a national literature healthy and growing.

The historical importance of translation for English language poetry is undeniable. Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, invented blank verse in order to translate Virgil’s Æneid in 1554, because the Latin original was unrhymed yet metered, and no equivalent existed in English. Blank verse, brought to us by a translator’s ingenuity, allowed for Shakespeare’s plays to be written as we know them. The sonnet (sonetto or “little song” in Italian) was created by Giacomo da Lentini and enjoyed a boom among Italian poets such as Calvalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch in the mid-13th and early 14th centuries. It was not until the 16th century that sonnets began appearing in English, in translations from Italian and from French. And the list of gifts translators have brought English poetry goes on—couplets, villanelles, sestinas, and, some have argued, even free verse via attempts to translate Chinese poetry. In short, translation enriches the student on several levels and enriches our literary culture in equal measure.

[Side note: One possible way to conduct a translation workshop would be to pair a foreign language student and creative writer together, with the former’s task being to get at the source language and the latter’s task being to shape the English translation into aesthetically sophisticated literary language. I do not mean to suggest this is the only way to run such a workshop, but it could be fruitful for both students.]

Change #3: A study abroad option could be offered by writing programs. This time abroad should culminate in a portfolio of nonfiction travel writing, fiction set in the location, or poetry that somehow incorporates the culture/location. The idea here is that incorporating this new cultural material will broaden the students’ range of writerly materials and techniques. Funding could come from finding a partner institution in the host country where the students could teach English as a second language, thereby broadening their teaching CVs as well. I would suggest that MFA programs limit the time abroad to one semester, while PhD programs could have options of either a semester or a year. I suggest this out of practical concerns, given the respective lengths of MFAs (2-3 years) and PhDs (5-7 years).

Change #4: This proposed change perhaps applies to graduate education in general. I would like to see more graduate certificates and graduate minors offered, in fields such as psychology or history or Latin American studies, etc. This could help students of political science or German as much as students of creative writing, but let’s limit ourselves here to creative writing. If a student wants to become a historical novelist, a certificate in history could be quite useful; if one wants to write polemical articles about current affairs, a certificate in law or perhaps political science could prove helpful; if one wants to go into editing/publishing, perhaps a certificate in design or non-profit management should be pursued; and, as a final example in a list that could go on almost indefinitely, if one wants to write science fiction, a certificate in the newly burgeoning field of neurohumanities might be a wise choice.

Aside from the obvious expansion in writerly possibilities these certificates would provide, if we make them central components to writing programs, people with undergraduate degrees in things like geology or philosophy or animal sciences might be more prone to attend writing programs, thereby greatly diversifying the kinds of writing produced. We could also have graduate certificates in creative writing for people in other programs, such as comparative literature or translation studies, where skill with producing aesthetically pleasing language likewise has value.

5.

Now I would like to invite readers to reimagine what we expect from writing programs. I am not suggesting that we all settle on one opinion on the matter, but rather that we allow for a proliferation of opinions on the matter beyond the current conception.

Reimagining #1: Even though I tend to operate on what I’ll call the greatness model of literature— i.e., I judge the merit of writing by how awesome it is—I see no compelling reason for this to be the universal model. Why isn’t a model that aggrandizes people of whatever success/talent level working through and enriching their lives with literature just as valid? In fact, we’d probably have a much better and happier world if we thought that way. And there are other possible models as well, such as one that privileges the process of collaboration and judges the merits of a work by how many people are involved and made happier and wiser by the process.

Since I am a both/and as opposed to an either/or kind of thinker, I propose we bring in all of these models and let them co-exist, thus obviating complaints about mediocre products by writing students. The final product is not necessarily the most important part of writing, so let’s stop fixating on it so much. Also, even if we prefer the greatness model, who says writers can’t produce some horrible stuff at one stage of their development and then create genius-level awesomeness at another stage? In fact, that seems to be the way it goes even for the greatest among us.

Reimagining #2: Creative writing programs may not crank out a new Kafka or T.S. Eliot or Joyce Carol Oates every semester, but they do crank out readers of such writers. In fact, I daresay that the vast super-majority of poetry and short fiction collections are purchased by creative writing students in BFA, MFA, and PhD programs around the country. So, we need to think about how many readers of contemporary literature these programs create. So, in this case, I am advocating for a re-evaluation of what we expect from such programs. If your standard of success for MFAs is that everybody with an MFA is on the level of Norman Mailer or Margaret Atwood, then, with all due respect, you need to rethink your position. If the student comes out with a greater appreciation of literature and an apartment lined with books, then that’s a grand success to my mind.

6.

I’ll close by saying that there is no such thing as a perfect education in any field and that there isn’t a single best-possible education for every student. But even if we admit these two insoluble facts, we should not simply throw our hands in the air and declare defeat. We can have better educational paradigms and more flexible programs of study, and we can design educational possibilities that allow writers from all walks of life and from various educational backgrounds to thrive.