Student Picks: Brunt, Keane, Wolfe

Shawna-Lee Perrin-- Tinkering away at my thesis this semester, a quote by the Mountainview MFA’s own Mark Sundeen guides much of my work: “All literature is longing,” he said. Using this statement as my Rosetta stone for writing, I keep thinking about Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt, which I read last spring.

The novel, set in 1987, is narrated by a kid named June. June grapples with the confusing, sometimes scary, world of being a girl at fourteen; not fitting in at school, an ever-widening chasm between her and her family, and starting to see adulthood looming on the horizon. She also recently lost her Uncle Finn, the person she was closest to in the world, to AIDS, a disease about which little was known at the time.

June’s ache at the loss of this connection is central, matched only by that of Finn’s longtime partner, Toby, who reaches out to June after Finn’s death. Together, they navigate grief, fear, and memory, finding a profound, though different, connection with each other.

Brunt harnesses such an atmosphere of heart-twisting longing that it’s often painful; that pain is one that I strive to inflict on my readers.

Margaret McNellis-- Of all the books on my reading list for my first MFA semester, Fever by Mary Beth Keane excited me the most—and it did not disappoint. Set in the early twentieth century, Fever describes the experience of Typhoid Mary beginning with her arrest. Keane artfully includes flashbacks to develop Mary’s character so that the reader sympathizes with her plight.

Speaking of careful story-weaving, Keane also incorporates the theme of addiction into Fever. For Mary, her addiction is cooking and everything that goes along with it: the creativity and the prestige among the working-class residents of Manhattan. For her lover, Alfred, his addictions become a hurdle for them both as he first deals with alcoholism and a subsequent drug addiction. 

Keane expertly paints a vibrant vision of New York City at the turn of the century, filling in the details of Mary’s world in a beautiful economy of language that enveloped and transported me. I couldn’t put this book down; my only regret was that it took only two days to read. I wanted so much more, even though Keane tells a compelling and complete story.

C. A. Cooke-- If you're looking for a book with multiple levels of theme and plot, but don't have six months to dedicate to David Foster Wallace, you will enjoy Gene Wolfe's novel, Peace. 

On the surface, the book seems to relate the life of an old man in the Midwest. As you continue through the narrative, you discover Wolfe is hinting at a story behind the story... One which is dark and sinister. Wolfe never directly tells you what is hidden. Rather, he hints at the darkness through the anecdotes and stories the characters tell one another, which shadow the courses of the narrator's life. At just over 250 pages, Peace is a novel which you can read in an afternoon, and come back to later to plumb its depths further. It is a story which will haunt you in all the right ways.

Does Intellect + Inspiration = Good Writing?

by Terri Alexander

It’s inherently funny to apply a mathematics equation to any creative process, and particularly to writing. The intellect component is pretty straightforward, but the inspiration piece is often amorphous, unreliable, and deeply individual. Yet, we can tell when our work is inspired, and we can definitely tell when it’s not.

In a 2009 TED Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert shared her experience in a presentation entitled, “Your Elusive Creative Genius.” She was coming off the wild success of her book, Eat Pray Love, and felt immense pressure to produce another work of equal or greater measure. She was terrified, so she dove into research, looking for comfort and answers.

Gilbert found that in ancient Greece and Rome, it was believed that inspiration came from a divine spirit called a “daemon” or “genius.” The artist was just the conduit. When the concept of rational humanism became accepted, around the time of the Renaissance, it caused a shift in how genius was seen. It evolved to be understood as a human quality. Now, all of the pressure was on the artist instead of some divine spirit. Gilbert’s solution is to “take the genius out of you and put it back out there where it belongs.” She posits that doing so protects you from the results of your work, whether that is success or failure.

Consider the authors who have struggled with alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, suicide – Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace. The list goes on and on. It’s heartbreaking to think about all of the works that weren’t written by these and other literary greats due to their suffering. Consider the how-to books, the motivational quotes, the general angst that surrounds writers and other creatives. It’s a perilous endeavor.

If we are to subscribe to Gilbert’s solution, it means we must surrender inspiration to something outside of ourselves. That can be terrifying too, but ‘getting out of one’s own way’ can also be very freeing. I like to imagine it this way: I’m dangling from a bridge above a great precipice. The bridge is my ego, my need for success and praise. I loosen my fingers from the bridge and let go into a free fall.

Ironically, Gilbert’s advice reminds me of the wildly successful “12 Step” program started by Alcoholics Anonymous and now used in many areas of addiction and self-help. The first step is admitting we are powerless, which most of us can attest to feeling at times when seated in front of a blank page with a blinking cursor. The second step is to believe in a power greater than ourselves, an echo of Gilbert’s sentiment. For some of us, this is second nature, and for others, it’s a place we’re not willing to go.

Whatever our faith or lack thereof, surrender can be challenging because it’s at loggerheads with what it means to be human, particularly in the self-determination of Western society. We’re hardwired in so many ways to do the opposite of surrender. Gilbert admits that her solution may simply be a protective construct, but she truly believes it has the potential to improve the mental and physical health of writers and enable them to create inspired work.

Consider how you feel when you write one really great sentence. Or, are suddenly hit with an amazing idea for a story. Where did the words or idea really come from? Wherever we think inspiration comes from, most of us can agree that writing is hard and brave. No mathematical equation will clarify that. I take comfort in Elizabeth Gilbert’s idea that there is a genius living in the walls of my writing studio, feeding me words and quelling my fears.

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Terri Alexander is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Writing After Tragedy

by Michael Hendery

It starts with simple declarations. Active shooter on campus. Gunman attacks nightclub. Explosion near finish line. These alerts course through social media and across the chyrons of news channels. Think about how your body responds. Some catch and hold our attention, usually those with the most cinematic tension. Guns. Wreckage. Americans. As more news ekes out, we are looking at once for signals of a resolution and the sobering digits of a body count. The writing aims to convey basic facts, a sense of scale, and to capture the changing textures of emotion as they surface. Reporting is valued more for its immediacy than its accuracy, providing readers with evolving portrayals of terror, allowing them to participate in a shared traumatic experience via tweets and hastily-written news articles.

The following morning, after the initial shock has waned, the writing begins to take on a new purpose, one that attempts to identify the antecedents to the massacre. Key constituents are proposed; a gunman’s last Facebook post, his ideological ties, any of the clues that might have been seized upon had we only been more cognizant. As humans we look for this structure, a causal lineage that helps us rationalize and assess. Perhaps something preventative could have been done. This fantasy of control becomes the new focus, and in doing so, we begin to move away from the profound pain, sadness, and fear evoked by the exposed fragility of human life. This is the psychological turn. We are not feeling the harrowing helplessness of inaction. We are now in pursuit of remediation. We are no longer in awe or mourning.

The rush to find answers and initiate action has become predictable in the days and weeks following mass murder, but at what cost do we accelerate into such concrete ways of thinking? After decades of terrorizing gun violence in this country, there remains no congressional consensus on assault weapons policy. Opposing viewpoints are deemed delusional one way or the other. There has been no reduction in the number of alienated individuals willing to shoot strangers. The only significant development around this issue seems to be that we are no longer surprised when it happens. We have become inured. What role do writers play in this process? What stories can we tell that might disrupt the expected narrative, and ultimate fruitlessness, of the post-tragedy time period?

While language can expose and clarify our thoughts and feelings, words too can conceal our experience. Consider how language intersects with emotion. In response to stimuli, be it breaking news or banal interactions in our daily lives, our bodies react with sensations linked to fear, anger, and other core emotions before any words enter our consciousness. Our internal language—questions such as “what is happening in my body right now?”—can be used to welcome these emotions, an invitation to deeper, unfiltered experience that, though it may test the bounds of our comfort, can also deliver us a natural working-through of competing feeling states. This takes time and focused energy, two resources that most of us feel are in short supply in the modern age. And so, our language can also be used to distance ourselves from those sensations that seem too powerful, complex, or unsettling to bear. Questions like, “why is this happening?” or “what can be done?” act to disconnect us from our sensory experience, often inciting a new feeling of restlessness and a premature call to action. As meditators over the course of millennia (and more recently, psychologists) have taught us, a protracted suffering occurs when we cling to some desired outcome rather than more thoroughly experience conditions as they are, with all of the challenging, conflicting emotions that arise as we pay careful attention.

Articles written in the wake of tragedy too often engage in questions of Why? and What can be done? This form of writing creates spurious order by weaving together loose strands of presumed cause and effect into a discernible, yet illusive, tapestry. Meanwhile, a much-needed emotional gestation is overlooked, an organic mourning process that grapples with our inevitable mortality and colors the world in discordant hues. What if our writing acted more as midwife than pathologist, aiding in the delivery of untidy creations, soiled and screaming, but ultimately more closely connected to the authentic human experience? In those now-familiar period following a massacre, perhaps we can trade our fantasies of certainty and invincibility and give voice to the inescapable vulnerability that all humans encounter in times like these.

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Dr. Michael Hendery is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor in the psychology department at Southern New Hampshire University. He is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Faculty picks: Oliver and Sedaris

Katherine Towler-- I am writing fiction these days so I have been reading mostly nonfiction. Sometimes (but not always) it’s helpful to read in other genres besides the one you are wrestling with. Upstream, Selected Essays by Mary Oliver (Penguin Press, 2016) is the sort of book that calls for slow, careful reading and asks you to become as still and observant as the author. Most of the essays collected in this volume, published when Oliver was 81, have been previously published. As a selection of the best from previous books, Upstream is a gorgeous introduction to her prose and the subjects that merit her unflinching attention. These include astute pieces on the work of Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Other essays chronicle Oliver’s construction of a small writing studio in the back yard from materials salvaged at the dump, and her rescue and care of an injured black-backed gull who takes up residence in the bathtub. Oliver’s devotion to nature, a theme in her poetry, is given even more room in these essays, short and compact as they may be. The natural world is the subject she returns to most consistently, rendering her encounters with the animals and plants she meets on her daily walks in language so taut and revelatory, sentence after sentence take the breath away. Here’s a sample: 

“Through these woods I have walked thousands of times. For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house. . . .  Eventually I began to appreciate – I don’t say this lightly – that the great black oaks knew me. I don’t mean they knew me as myself and not another –that kind of individualism was not in the air – but that they recognized and responded to my presence, and to my mood. They began to offer, or I began to feel them offer, their serene greeting.”

Craig Childs-- After having assigned the same David Sedaris book, Naked, enough times, I decided to move on. This time I went for When You Are Engulfed in Flames, his 2008 book of essays recounting awkward moments of his life, turning anguish into snickering laughter and gut bomb roars. The subject revolves around his midlife crisis. He writes, “How had 9,125 relatively uneventful days passed so quickly, and how can I keep it from happening again?”

Yes on all counts, he’s a master humorist, his word-by-word articulation is as smooth as butter, his playfulness with grotesqueries of humanity is outstanding. But I’m not here to review the thing. I’m here to tell you that in the end, all I could think was, that was easy.

Easy to write, I mean. The book seemed manageable, clearly defined. I could see the outline, the number of subjects, how many points needed to be hit in each essay, how many live moments and conversations versus backstories. I know it wasn’t easy. Unless Sedaris is super-human, he sweated over the thing until he couldn’t see straight. Reading how neurotic he is, this would be unavoidable. Yet the final result was…easy. He succeeded with the magic trick. Crazy but wholly capable. Read it with structure in mind, you’ll see what I’m talking about, and enjoy those succinct and biting passages of his: “mess with me, and I'll stick my foot so far up your ass I'll lose my shoe.”

5 lists of 10

by Daniel Johnson

Offered without explanation: some recommendations from Assignment’s Managing Editor, just in time for holiday shopping season.

My ten favorite books I’ve read this year, in no particular order:

1. The North Water by Ian McGuire

2. The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

3. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

4. Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love and Money by Rebecca Curtis

5. The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt

6. Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash

7. I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy

8. Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

9. History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

10. Autumn by Ali Smith

Ten anthologies/collected works I always find myself recommending to non-writer friends, or new writing students:

1. New American Stories ed. Ben Marcus

2. Best of Young American Novelists 3 by Granta

3. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

4. A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry ed. Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley

5. Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story ed. Lorin Stein

6. 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology ed. Beverly Lawn

7. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

8. Park City: New and Selected Stories by Ann Beattie

9. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

10. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (if only for that wonderful cover art by Charlotte Strick)

Ten articles by writers or about writing I’ve recently printed out and filed away so I can read them even after the machines take over:

1. “My Holy Land Vacation: Touring Israel with 450 Zionists” by Tom Bissell; Harper’s  

2. “My Writing Education: A Timeline” by George Saunders; The New Yorker

3. “The Kekulé Problem: Where Did Language Come From?” by Cormac McCarthy; Nautilus

4. “The Black Journalist and the Racial Mountain” by Ta Nehisi Coates; The Atlantic

5. “The Seventy-Four Best Lines in The Devil’s Dictionary” by Anthony Madrid; The Paris Review Daily

6. “They Could Be Heroes: Today’s Biggest Novelists Are Throwbacks to a Simpler Time” by Sam Sacks; New Republic

7. “Contest of Words” by Ben Lerner; Harper’s

8. “Let’s Take Down the Patriarchy With Storytelling” by Lauren Duca; Teen Vogue

9. “The Complete Sentence” by Jeff Dolven; The Paris Review Daily

10. “John Ashbery’s Whisper Out of Time” by Ben Lerner; The New Yorker

Ten literary(ish) Twitter feeds well worth your follow—some for industry news & insight, most for laughs:

1. @MobyDickatSea – quotes from Moby Dick that always seem quite poignant as responses to the political dumpster fire of the day

2. @Mcsweeneys – Official McSweeney’s Twitter Account

3. @rgay – Roxane Gay

4. @laurenduca – Lauren Duca

5. @NYTMinusContext – “All Tweets Verbatim From New York Times content,” posted without context.

6. @nyercartoons – “Daily Cartoons from The New Yorker”

7. @NicholsonBaker8 – Nicholson Baker

8. @jamiattenberg – Jami Attenberg

9. @pronounced_ing – Celeste Ng

10. @JoyceCarolOates – Joyce Carol Oates (when she’s not trolling the internet with news of Cormac McCarthy’s fake death)

Ten books on my shelf that I intend to read before year’s end, in no particular order:

1. The Sellout by Paul Beatty

2. The Changeling by Victor LaValle

3. Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country & Other Stories by Chavisa Woods

4. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

5.  A Life of Adventure and Delight by Akhil Sharma

6. Compass by Mathias Enard

7. Problems by Jade Sharma

8. How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas

9. Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides

10. Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang

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Daniel Johnson is a graduate of The Mountainview MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He is currently an Editorial Assistant at Bedford/St. Martin's Press.

Review: Boy With a Knife

by David Moloney

On April 12, 1993, in a Dartmouth High School classroom, Karter Reed stabbed Jason Robinson in the stomach, an act that would take a brother, a son and athlete from his family, and also send a sixteen-year-old Karter Reed to an adult prison for twenty years.

In Jean Troustine’s most recent book, Boy With a Knife, she recounts her over one hundred letters and subsequent relationship with Karter Reed. The relationship between Trounstine and Karter is a perfect match, though Karter was the one to reach out to Trounstine. Trounstine has been involved in women’s prisons for over twenty years and teaches Voices Behind Bars: The Literature of Prison, to students at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, MA.

Although at the heart of this book is Karter’s fight for justice, there is also a great deal interwoven throughout Karter’s story about how this country deals with juvenile offenders, particularly violent ones. Trounstine writes, “On average, approximately 250,000 youths are currently processed in adult courts each year.” The history of incarcerating juveniles as adults is well detailed and explored by Trounstine, most effective when the hard facts, history and academic studies are braided within Karter’s own juvenile–then adult–journey through the process of trial, incarceration, rehabilitation, and the parole board. But Karter’s story itself can get buried beneath the studies and history at times. For instance, when Karter is awaiting his parole board hearing, I wanted to know the outcome rather than the history behind the parole board.

A good deal of criticism on this book has been its one-sided portrayal of Karter’s fight for justice without any attention paid to the victim’s story. While this is valid, the perspective Trounstine takes is not warped, or without empathy. The book has less to do with the act itself than the institutional flaws of juvenile incarceration in this country. And Trounstine clearly stands on one side of the argument on whether juveniles should be incarcerated as adults. If you’re looking for opposing arguments on the subject, you won’t find it here. She writes in the Introduction, “Karter’s story itself makes the argument why we must stop incarcerating juveniles in adult prisons. Kids are hardly incapable of change.” Trounstine uses facts, as well as other state’s models, such as the Missouri Model, “which stresses therapy instead of punishment,” to sustain her argument.

At a recent reading for the book at River Run Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH, protestors sent posters to the store denouncing the glorification of Karter in Boy With a Knife. The idea Trounstine glorifies Karter is misplaced. Karter just happens to be a juvenile sentenced as an adult, who became rehabilitated, and who contacted Trounstine at an opportune time. The relationship sparked a book necessary for an ethical conversation that needs to happen, regardless of which side you position yourself on. 

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David Moloney is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  He currently teaches writing at UMASS Lowell and Southern New Hampshire University.

Student Picks: Jonhston, Cataluna, Jansson

Laura Brashear-- People go missing every day and under different circumstances. When it makes the news, the audience takes pause and moves on. In his novel, Descent, Tim Johnston commands attention and opens the darkest fears in humanity’s hearts and minds. 

Eighteen-year-old Caitlyn is a star athlete about to embark on a new journey in life. Before starting college, her family takes a trip to the Colorado Rocky Mountains. During a morning run, she is abducted. The only witness is her younger brother, Sean, left only half conscious by the abductor’s vehicular assault. 

Johnston employs gorgeous prose to build empathy for his characters. He chronicles the three years following Caitlyn’s abduction. He captures the heartbreaking cycles of hope, desperation, and devastation, allowing the reader to fully experience the loss of Caitlyn and the breakdown of her family. 

“And in the far distance above the highest pines stood the snowy crags of the Rockies, fantastic in scale and burning in the lights of their own immensity.” Descent draws the reader into the dangerous beauty of the Rocky Mountains, maintains interest through the journey of the characters, and provides an ending that makes the journey worthwhile. 

Amira Shea--  In stressful times, I like to return to certain books for comfort, and Three Years on Doreen’s Sofa is a perfect example of literature as hot tea or a warm sweater. There is a familiarity to the setting, the cadence, and the subject; Lee Cataluna is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and journalist from Hawai’i. Her work is centered on the islands and presents characters that are relatable on both the macro and micro levels. You don’t have to live in Hawaii to understand Doreen, the take-no-shit mother trying to provide for her family, or Bobby, her half-brother/cousin, recently released from prison, whom she reluctantly allows to crash on the couch in question.

Cataluna uses Hawaiian Pidgin English throughout, which, similar to Junot Diaz’s use of Spanish in his work, gives the characters a palpable authenticity. From the opening sentence, “Fricken Doreen didn’t even stop the truck,” I knew this person. It’s told entirely from Bobby’s viewpoint, giving us an inside look at all of the factors that go into making poor life choices. Without delving into sentimentality or providing a tidy, happy ending, Cataluna still manages to provide a story that can make a tough day feel a little better. 

Garrett Zecker-- I recently read two titles by Swedish illustrator and writer Tove Jansson (whose Moomintroll has worldwide appeal). Thomas Teal's translation of Jansson's beautiful, utilitarian writing in Fair Play and Summer Book presents a captivating insight into human relationships.

Both books are written in brief, episodic vignettes. Fair Play covers the cathartic, rewarding, loving contentment that comes between two women sharing an apartment in later life. They bond over independent art projects, share their frustrations, and indulge one another with late-night VHS marathons - a definitive portrait of that one perfect relationship we all strive for, free from jealousy and longing - a love story of friendship. Summer Book is a bright novel of awakening. An energetic six-year-old girl and her wise grandmother summer on an island. We are witness to an awakening of place as much as the awakening of self and body. The Cat is a sublime commentary on the complexity of love and expectations in an allegorical tale of domestic husbandry. 

Jansson's sisterhood, independence, wild abandon, discovery, and true intimacy tempted me to finish them in one sitting. Her prose is a joy to read, simply because it's easy to see oneself in the mirror of her breathing stories. 

Every Word a Choice

by Eddie Dzialo

When I got out of the Marines, I couldn’t make decisions. Even making a sandwich was too difficult. I’d become overwhelmed with the choice of meat or bread. I was conditioned to map out the consequences of each action and to fear the repercussions. Frozen with an inability to choose, I spent the better part of a year locked in my studio apartment.

When I was deployed, I was always deciding. In the summer of 2009, I was in southern Afghanistan, in charge of a platoon of Marines and forty-something Afghan National Border Patrolmen. We lived in a small outpost surrounded by mesh containers filled with sand and rocks, designed to keep out shrapnel, mortar rounds, bullets, and cars weighted down with explosives being driven by suicidal zealots. I spent most of my time studying maps, trying not to let anyone see how scared I was. Though our unit had taken casualties, as the platoon commander, I was more worried about the consequences of my decisions and the impact they’d have on other people than I was about facing my own death. During a patrol, if I picked the wrong route at the wrong time, someone’s kid, father, or brother could walk over an Improvised Explosive Device or enter into an ambush, unknowingly. Keeping other people alive required an unknown ratio of skill and luck, and I still avoid thinking about which one I had more of.   

Each day was a challenge. On our first patrol, as we walked through the streets, people shot mortars and rockets at us before opening up with machine guns. Afghan soldiers threw their weapons in the streets and hid in a ditch. Later that night, as we moved through a wheat field, we got caught in a coordinated ambush and shot our way out. Though part of me feels like I don’t deserve it, I was given a medal for what occurred after we were attacked. When I look at the framed medal that hangs on the wall at my parent’s house in Cape Cod, I think: Skill or luck?

On another day, I was ordered to call in an air strike on a person who had supposedly killed a Marine the previous week. An intelligence report said he was standing on a bridge, alone. My hand shook as I sat on top of a Light Armored Vehicle, tracing out the blast radiuses of various ordinances, ensuring that they wouldn’t land too close to our position, using nothing more than a marker and a laminated map. I focused on numbers and grid coordinates rather than that I was about to kill someone. As the person on the ground, if I radioed the helicopter pilot and said, “Cleared Hot,” then I was legally responsible for everything his fired rocket did and who it did it to.

Ok, this next part has never left me: Right before I was going to say, “Cleared Hot,” I cancelled the whole thing by saying “Abort” on the radio three distinct times. Though there might have been an obvious reason at the time, now I can’t remember why I did that. But as the pilot flew over the intended target, never firing a round, he called back and said that there had been a child on the bridge.

It took writing to get me out of my studio apartment and to teach me how to make decisions again. Every sentence is a decision. You don’t need an idea to write a story, a novel, even a blog post; you need hundreds of ideas. And with each new idea comes a choice. I can wonder what this draft would look like had I made other choices, agonize over each word omitted, but I am able to choose again. One word at a time, I am able to accept my choices.

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Eddie Dzialo is a current degree candidate at Southern New Hampshire University's Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Building the Castle, Building the Rock

by Garrett Zecker

One traffic light blinks at the center of Orange, Massachusetts. I drive through the factory town after our writers group meeting. The tiny downtown echoes a history shared by all post-industrial cities in twenty-first century middle America. The environment changed many decades ago from a center of industry producing Minute Tapioca, New Home Sewing Machines, and Grout automobiles to a graveyard of beautiful, abandoned brick buildings.

This particular drive presents something quite different than the many other times I’ve passed through. I coasted over the bridge to the soft roar of the dam and barely notice some strange alterations that tip everything at a slight angle. The signage and windows have been refurbished. The Orange Pizza Factory became Castle Rock Pizza Factory. Pastel Buicks and Oldsmobiles from fifty years ago line the streets and sparkle in the lamplight. Everything is eerily different, as if the veil of today has been lifted to reveal a lost decade when the city's motto of 'the friendly town' was first coined.

I shift into a different town a half-century into the past. While everyone slept, crews dressed the city for a new television adaptation of Stephen King's fictitious New England town. The cast, aside from the principal roles, came from a casting call that pulled from the surrounding communities. The town hall and police station sport new facades showcasing the name of their downeast counterpart. My neighbors stroll the streets, simultaneously themselves and their doppelgängers, overlapped in dizzying double-exposure.

I remember the twelve-year-old me: twenty years ago and a hundred miles east. I’d venture up the stairs of the Tufts Library after exhausting their fiction collection in the basement children's section. I needed a new fix. I wandered the adult stacks. Approaching the shelf bearing Stephen King's recognizable name felt like an obligatory rite of passage. I chose the skinniest volume on the shelf, Carrie. I felt like I was getting away with something lurid as the librarian charged the book out to me, the metal 'Ka-Chunk' of the Gaylord Model C Book Charger punching my newly christened adult library card like a weapon. I read it in a night. I ignored my classes the next day in school, scribbling stories through my lessons. Stories of cruel parents, the private bloody mysteries of the girls in my class, and of the potential of delicious justice punishing every last classmate that ignored or treated me with even the tiniest of cruelties. In the ensuing years, like all eager young readers, I enthusiastically buckled down with the Torrances, adventured with Deschaine, stayed up with Ralph Roberts, and found justice with John Coffey and Andy Dufresne.

Driving through Orange's fully-immersive space built from the imagination of my adolescent literary idol is as magical as building my own fictional worlds. Both places are several places at once. The film crew of my mind overlays my familiar environments with an onion skin of words, just as those people I cherish are re-cast as bloodthirsty queens, cynical husbands, or expatriated poets in search of fame.

The realities we build in fiction are simply collages of our milieu, painted over with language and modified decorum. We only recognize the sets and the players slightly askew from the authentic on our disorienting dusk drive through a town just a few miles from our own. I find it hard to delineate the difference between the magic King wove in my young mind and the magic I feel driving through Castle Rock today. Both invoke a version of reality that speaks to me in time, place, and character, in a place that looks and feels a lot like home.

The beauty of the work we do, as writers, lies in the permanence of the version of our reality that we build. The world continues on its unpredictable path, but our written constructions exist at the same time. We close one eye to revisit the concrete version of a world that never existed.

By mid-winter, the crews and the signage will be gone. The people of Orange go back to slogging away at their lives with rugged determination. The classic cars return to the lot at Wilson's Customs the next town over. Yet friends will still pause and chat while managing a fat, overflowing ice cream cone from Miller's. The music and laughter from R.C.'s pub will still dance out the door and across the bridge. A man will drag on a cigarette and cough while another casts a line from his fishing pole. Maybe the patriotic bunting and cosmetic attention will last, and Castle Rock's shine will linger. But what I am certain will remain is the memory of the truth and magic that exists when we visit our fictions and meet this altered version of our neighbors and ourselves.

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Garrett Zecker is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview low-residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Photo by Diane Kane.

Last Week/This Week: Growing Pains

by Ashley Bales

It’s a point in the semester where my focus is so splintered between responsibilities, deadlines, grading, that directing any of that focus to my own writing seems unattainable. This is the point in the semester when I tell my students it's time to buckle down and focus. I’m at my most hypocritical, running in circles just trying to keep up with them and knowing that even if I could find a minute to sit down and think about where the hell I left my characters that I wouldn’t have the energy to take them anywhere productive. Criticism, creation, research, all hard work. Not in terms of wielding a sledgehammer, but difficult to work up to the degree of focus necessary to pull together each of these elements, to synthesize and allow them to flow from brain to fingers and thus produce something compelling, universal, personal—whatever comprises that list of values we associate with good literature. I tell my students to keep working and I give up on my own work until December, when the end of the semester is in sight.

Even though I mourn this mid-semester slump in my own productivity, I recognize the value in this splintering. I engage with a wider range of topics and people than I otherwise would. I apply my perspective to different problems and augment it with new information. When I’m able to retreat back to that indulgent space inside my head, where I’m able to write, the surroundings have changed.  This is what learning gets us.

Our universities challenge students and instructors alike to continually break and reform their worldviews, worldviews that are never so self-centered as in those first teenage years away from home. Freshman come to university wrapped up in their adolescence and ultimately will graduate with their prime successes still concerned with identity construction and their own sociality. But they’ll also collect some potent drops of information that may diffuse into their deeper tissues, pull them outside of their selves and allow them to see the world through variously tinted lenses.

Marilynne Robinson, for the New York Review of Books, wrote an impassioned defense of the value of the humanities in an era where American anti-intellectualism is particularly vitriolic. She traced the success of the humanities to their origins in the 1500s, when great thinkers proclaimed their virtues in language imbued with the extravagance of humanist idealism. Support for the humanities recently has been lost not just under the pressures of anti-intellectualism, but increasingly as policy changes (in the form of decreased investment in education) have institutionalized disparities in access that reinforce exclusionary elitism. But the humanities themselves are not to blame and still possess power to unite disparate perspectives and foster exploration.

As a civilization, as a species, we are living through our own troubled adolescence. Humanity hasn't gone through enough mid-semester, mid-century, mid-millenium cycles to know what splintering and struggle can achieve. Or if we have, we haven’t learned our lessons well enough. It is during these times of pressure that were able to rebuild our brains, achieve new understanding, but if we’re unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, know we will come out of this better than before, it’s easy to lose hope. We’ve got growing pains and not enough experience to know if they’ll ever end. It is a debasing, wrenching process and it is our responsibility to make choices about who we want to be when we come through it, but I have to hope we’ll get there; as Robinson concludes: “And yet, the beautiful persists, and so do eloquence and depth of thought, and they belong to all of us because they are the most pregnant evidence we can have of what is possible in us.”

For some explorations of your own, check out Claire Messud’s interview discussing her own exploration of adolescence in her new book Burning Girl, and Eileen Myles’ joyous and accidental discovery of beautiful writing in Stafford’s The Mountain Lion.

This week on the blog, Garrett Zecker stumbles upon an old literary idol, and new pieces from Eddie Dzialo and David Moloney.

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Ashley Bales is a current student of The Mountainview low-residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.

Faculty Picks: Johnson, Stegner, Welty

Benjamin Nugent--In “Strangler Bob,” the short story by Denis Johnson published in this week’s New Yorker, you find Johnson trotting out his courtly mode. It’s kind of Blanche DuBois cum Bertie Wooster, but he metes it out in such small doses that it never feels like camp. He uses it in “Dirty Wedding,” when the narrator laments, “These days had reduced us to the Rebel Motel.”  Also in “Two Men,” when the narrator bemoans the break-up of his gang: “Later on one of them got hurt when we were burglarizing a pharmacy, and the other two of us dropped him bleeding at the back entrance of the hospital and he was arrested and all the bonds were dissolved.”

In “Strangler Bob,” which takes place in jail, the narrator, Dink, says of a fellow inmate: “This time he’d been arrested for giving a man some well-deserved punishment in the dining area of the Howard Johnson’s, which he described as the wrong kind of restaurant for that.” Dink deems a prisoner who shares a low-grade hallucinogen “most generous.”

Joining Dink in Johnson County’s facility is Dundun, who also features in Johnson’s older story “Dundun.” Dink describes him thus: “Dundun’s mental space, customarily empty, had been invaded by an animal spirit.” Imagine if Johnson had gotten self-conscious and replaced the elegant “customarily” with plain old “usually.” The paragraph would have been mauled.

It’s a classic Mark Twain move, to write of coarse individuals as if they rated great tact. But see also Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, where the narrator says, “The people of Fingerbone and its environs were very much given to murder.”

Richard Adams Carey--"In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather."

Those are the wrenching last words of Wallace Stegner’s 1972 novel Angle of Repose. The narrator is Lyman Ward, an aging historian, divorcee, and wheelchair-bound amputee. His grandfather was Oliver Ward, a brilliant engineer who took his cultivated, Eastern-educated wife Susan from mining town to hardscrabble mining town throughout the West at the end of the 19th century.

Lyman is devoting his retirement to writing the biography of his grandmother, an artist and illustrator, and of her loving, strenuous marriage—a union blighted by tragedy and recrimination in its final decades. Lyman has recriminations himself against his former wife, now abandoned by her lover and extending overtures to him. The novel is chiefly the epic story of Susan Ward, her family, and the frontier, but the present-day (1960s) struggles of her crippled, solitary, angry, but eminently humane grandson play in gorgeous counterpoint to the main plot.

Lyman Ward lives alone in his grandparents’ last home in northern California, and his description of being bathed by the neighbor lady hired to help take care of him is harrowing in its depiction of the indignities of age and disability. But the novel as a whole glows with all the courage, endurance, mercy, and love we can hope to shore against our frailties.

Justin Talyor--I’m living down in Hattiesburg this school year as Writer-in-residence at University of Southern Mississippi, and have taken the appointment as an opportunity to get re-acquainted with Southern literature. I've been revisiting Barry Hannah and William Faulkner, exploring the early novels of Harry Crews and Thomas McGuane, teaching Lydia Peelle's excellent collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing in my contemporary lit seminar. But the greatest revelation has been Eudora Welty, who lived and wrote just up the road in Jackson. I did not know her work at all before I got here and have been making my way through her Collected Stories, vacillating between profound shame at how long I managed to stay ignorant of her and profound gratitude for the fact that I get to discover her now, while living in her home state. 

I started at the beginning of the Collected, with A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, published in 1941. The Wide Net and Other Stories followed close on its heels in 1943. I’m midway through The Golden Apples now, which appeared in 1949 and so finished out an astonishingly productive decade. I love these stories. Welty's use of voice, her sense of history and place, her delight in the grotesque, are easily in league with Faulkner. Moreover, I find her largely free of the pathological Southern sentimentalism that nags at even his greatest work (and smothers some of it). You can draw lines from Welty not only to the aforementioned Hannah and to Flannery O'Connor, but to Joy Williams and--in a story like "Moon Lake", for instance--even Christine Schutt. But the writer of whom Welty reminds me most strongly, especially in those early books, is Nathaniel Hawthorne. Stories like “A Visit of Charity,” “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” “Old Mr. Marblehall,” and “The Wide Net” put me in mind of Hawthorne’s earthy, sinister, proto-Kafkan tales such as “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and especially “Wakefield.” And one great thing about reading a Collected Stories is being able to trace the arc of its author’s development. As much as I admire and enjoy those flinty, mysterious first two books, to read The Golden Apples is to watch a natural born talent achieve true mastery of her form.  The seven connected stories it contains feel less imagined than lived, or better still, dreamed into being, as in this paragraph from “Moon Lake”:

“Luminous of course but hidden from them, Moon Lake streamed out in the night. By moonlight sometimes it seemed to run like a river. Beyond the cry of the frogs there were sounds of a boat moored somewhere, of its vague, clumsy reaching at the shore, those sounds that are recognized as being made by something sightless. When did boats have eyes--once? Nothing watched that their little part of the lake stayed roped off and protected; was it there now, the rope stretched frail-like between posts that swayed in mud? That rope was to mark how far the girls could swim. Beyond lay the deep part, some bottomless parts, said Moody. Here and there was the quicksand that stirred your footprint and kissed your heel. All snakes, harmless and harmful, were freely playing now; they put a trailing, moony division between weed and weed--bright, turning, bright and turning.”   

Kingdom Hearts: Revisited

by Daniel Johnson

As is the case in most video games, I am the chosen one. I alone possess the inherent ability to wield a weapon that not only forever banishes the darkness or opens the door to the light, but also spectacularly bashes skulls and brains them into oblivion. In the case of Kingdom Hearts, the cult-classic Square Enix/Disney roleplaying collaboration, which just celebrated its fifteenth anniversary last month, the storytellers went literal: my weapon is a giant, magical key. My character’s name is Sora (a boy in search of his friends); I am accompanied by Donald Duck (a mage) and Goofy (a jankily-armored knight). We three are responsible from saving the Disney and Final Fantasy universes from eternal night by locking the door to Kingdom Hearts, an ambiguous realm of unknown populace, the unleashing of which would cause some kind of apocalyptic consequence. 

In the fifteen years since its release, I’m on my umpteenth replay, and I’ve arrived at the moment I consider to be both the most supremely jarring and exhilarating of any in the game. Donald, Goofy, and I have landed at Hollow Bastion—a decimated crystal canyon on the outskirts of Maleficent’s stronghold. We beam down into a ravine, and a on the floating platform beside ours stands a haggard and bloodied Beast (from Beauty and the Beast), somehow still on his feet. He’s flailing himself at Maleficent, demanding she release Belle—one of the Seven Princesses of Heart—from captivity.

Some background: Maleficent is the nefarious general in command of all your favorite Disney villains—Hades, Jafar, Ursula, the Queen of Hearts, etc. Together, with Death Star-like effectiveness, they’ve been consuming and destroying worlds. In this franchise, “worlds” are equivalent to the individual universes of Final Fantasy gameworlds, as well as the individual universes of classic Disney animated films. In destroying them, Maleficent gets ever closer to unlocking Kingdom Hearts and drowning us all in rapture. Our quest, then, is twofold: play through the narratives of Disney movies and “lock” those worlds from Maleficent’s grasp, and save the Seven Princesses of Heart, whom Maleficent has kidnapped in hopes of transforming their cardiovascular purity into a lockpick of sorts that will open the great Kingdom doors. Somewhere within Hollow Bastion, presumably in a damp cellar dungeon, Belle and the other six Princesses sleep.

Now, according to the game logic I’d come to understand, most movie-specific Disney characters reside only within the Kingdom Hearts representation of their filmic universes, save for Maleficent, who is fairly omnipresent. They can’t leave their realms. And yet, here I am, in a landscape unique to the Kingdom Hearts gameworld, standing beside Beast, to whose world I’ve never traveled nor heard mention, and of whose existence in the Kingdom Hearts universe before this moment I was totally unaware.

So just how, I still wonder, did Beast make it to this crystal ravine before we did? I’d spent real-world days, game-world years saving the timelines of other Disney movies, upgrading weapons, hunting scattered Dalmations, flying my ship through the cosmos, all to arrive here, where the three universes—Final Fantasy, Disney, and Kingdom Hearts—collapse. So then what of Beast? Where was his spaceship? Where’s his keyblade? Where are his comrades, sent by King Mickey, who aided him along his journey?

When I was thirteen, it was precisely the unanswerability of these questions that made his appearance such a galvanizing narrative moment: Surely, I am to believe that Beast’s love for Belle was as potent as any preordained, messianic quality bestowed unto Sora. It allowed him to bellow and claw his way out of a reality in which he would be forever without Belle, shred through the previously unshreddable curtains of quantum physics, and materialize, like us, in this moment, prepared to give his life for an outside shot at her safety. It’s as disorienting and heroic a moment as I’ve yet countered in any game since.

Fifteen years removed from my first play-through, however, I wonder if the unanswerability of Beast’s arrival suggests a far more damning conclusion about narrative as it functions within the Kingdom Hearts universe: it might really just be a bloated clusterfuck of content. We’ve seen the previously closed-loop narratives of at least seven animated Disney films disrupted and rewritten; we’ve seen Final Fantasy characters reappropriated from their universes into Disney’s (how and why exactly are Cloud and Sephiroth hanging out at Hercules’s Olympus Coliseum—civilly!—and why aren’t they trying to either kill each other, or band together to restore their world?). Perhaps most egregiously: when Sora, Donald, and Goofy are trying to save a Disney gameworld, the narrative dilemmas are almost exclusively the conflicts from the corresponding films. How is it possible that we celebrated this concept and its story as sophisticated and original, when so much of it is blatantly recycled?

If we’re being forgiving, one of the allures of Kingdom Hearts is this fascinating narrative puzzle. But unfortunately, the answer to all these larger questions—down to the granular, nagging question of Beast’s arrival at Hollow Bastion—likely don’t reside in any analysis of the storytelling and can be resolved only when we consider Kingdom Hearts not as story, but as product: combine the fiercely devoted, global fandom of one of the most iconic video game franchises to ever hit the shelves with the nearly worldwide Disney audience, and it’ll yield enough gold coins to buckle the substructure of Scrooge McDuck’s money tower, even if the story is some cobbled-together franken-narrative that makes little sense under thoughtful scrutiny.

Despite my story-driven-gamer impulses, measuring Kingdom Hearts’s value as a video game solely through an assessment of narrative quality is profoundly reductive. The quality of a video game, like the quality of most works of art, can only be measured in sum. A narrative analysis speaks little to Kingdom Hearts’s fluid battle system, its somewhat radical (for 2002), if slightly cheesy, interpretation of gender and friendship (as wonderfully outlined in the indie press Boss Fight Books’s Kingdom Hearts II volume, written by video game critic Alexa Ray Correia), or its innovations in video game voice-acting. These aspects of the franchise hold up, especially when you consider the game as a technological artifact.

Beast never really explains how he got there, likely because Maleficent beats him down with a disturbing laziness before she retreats to her castle. He just says, “I simply believed. Nothing more to it … So here I am.” He then uses what breath he has left by asking us to help him onward, and we do. How could we not? This magnificent and terrifying creature has broken every rule in the game’s logic. We could ask him questions, but we know why he’s here. Perhaps the how—when it comes to a game founded on a culture of charging players to believe strictly by suspending disbelief—is ultimately irrelevant.

And yet, acknowledging the narrative gap of Beast’s journey to Hollow Bastion remains a thrill simply because I get to bridge it, and reintroducing myself to the texture of my thirteen-year-old imagination capable of doing so is, sometimes, almost necessary. I see him throttling through game-space like a rogue meteor; I see him stalking Maleficent and pouncing into her intergalactic portals at the last second; I see him aboard The Jolly Roger with the lapels of Captain Hook's naval jacket bunched in his claws as he demands answers with fanged desperation; I see him cross-legged by a small fire in the clearing where he fought all those wolves in the original film, one of Belle's hair ribbons clutched in his paw, gazing into the flames and begging—believing—the twilight above would take him either to Belle or to his death. 

It’s like Tom Bissell says about the eccentricities of game developers in his essay “The Grammar of Fun” (Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter): “these are boyish affectations, certainly, but boyishness is the realm in which these men seek inspiration, not a code by which they live.”

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Daniel Johnson is a graduate of The Mountainview MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He is currently an Editorial Assistant at Bedford/St. Martin's Press.

Partnering with Punk

by Shawna-Lee Perrin

I heard The Sex Pistols for the first time in 1986, when I was 15, 10 years after “Never Mind the Bollocks” came out. I’d seen pictures of punks in Rolling Stone, so I knew what punk looked like: colorful or elegantly void of color, ragged with strategic safety pins, sneering yet laughing. But, as a kid in small-town southwestern New Hampshire, I didn’t really know what punk felt like. I hadn’t even heard it.

One sunny Friday, my Mom picked me up from school and had some errands to run, so I asked if I could buy a new cassette tape. I ended up going home with “Never Mind the Bollocks.”

Sitting in my room with the new cassette, I was nervous. What if I didn’t get it? Like when I listened to that Grateful Dead tape my friend loaned me, and ended up confused, and a little irritated. This was problematic, because I’d already decided I was a punk rocker and not ‘getting’ The Sex Pistols would mean I wasn’t a rebel, a god-damn nonconformist like those sneering older kids in Rolling Stone. Then what? I sure as hell couldn’t go back to cheerleading. I’d been kicked off the year before and, anyways, I fucking hated it. I couldn’t go back to the basketball team; I was too nervous about sweating in front of people. I took a deep breath, and hit PLAY.

There was violent bellowing not quite like anything I’d heard before, but there was also a distinct familiarity. I loved it! Thirty one years later, I have a word for that feeling that I didn’t have then: resonance.

That same night, I went to a dance. I met a tall, cute boy, and told him about The Sex Pistols. He had to hear them. They’d blow his mind. They were punk rock! We exchanged phone numbers, and I never heard from him again. Nowadays, I bet he sees Norah Jones or something every chance he gets.

I never did commit to what had become the punk rock uniform. In a place where not much was objectively scary, it was scary to attract that much attention. I wore more black and white than my peers, and some pretty weird mismatched earrings, but nothing too confrontational.

I never got to see the Pistols – they exploded and fell apart long before I was going to concerts. But I did get to see John Lydon’s (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) dark-disco band, Public Image Limited, in a small venue in 2010. I was just thrilled to be in the same room as Johnny, and would’ve been happy with a good-enough performance. Instead, I got extended, deep grooves, snapping percussion, and gorgeous caterwauling from the man who had started it all. It was life-affirming. It was magic. It was fucking punk.

Since then, I’ve seen punk in many different forms. It’s not dead, but it’s not everywhere; I’ve seen it in the corners of YouTube, in small venues in rural towns or urban parts, in fiddle tunes and Alabama ghost music, and friends’ living room jams. It’s there. I realized it’s always been there, long before the Sex Pistols. It’s an energy, a thrum, a too-hard punch on the shoulder, followed by a raspy “I fucking like you. Come with me.” And I follow. Always.

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Shawna-Lee Perrin is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Fruit Snacks and Marlboros

by Eric Beebe

Growing up with my grandparents next door made them the de facto babysitters for my siblings and me. Their house is a white Colonial with a wraparound porch, attached to a barn used for storage. We’d take a short walk down a “secret” path in the tree line that opened to my grandpa’s vegetable garden and the metal lattices of my grandma’s grapevines with clusters of berry bushes behind them. My brother, sister, and I would help pick berries in the summer for jam, only to eat half of them out of our buckets. As the seasons changed, the wafting scent of fresh grapes would summon us back through the path to do the same to them, rolling the fruit in our mouths until the skins peeled off and we sucked their cores down like hard candy before spitting out the seeds.

Between careers in aviation and politics, my grandpa was often out of the house, which made it my grandma’s domain. It could have been another country. We lived by different laws under her watch. “I’m not your parents. Do what you want, but don’t piss me off,” was one of her lasting mantras, but she was far from neglectful. In her wisdom, my grandma devised ways of containing us, whether it be in front of a TV running Batman: The Animated Series, in a room full of toys collected since the 1960s, or equipped with markers and paper that always seemed thicker than other kinds and smelled like old books. She’d sit at one head of the kitchen table, behind a perpetually soiled ashtray and a Christmas mug full of coffee. At her side, we’d gorge ourselves on the snacks she stocked and beg her to let us light her next cigarette, so we could play with the lighter. Burning Marlboros became the smell of a tranquil freedom, and strawberry Gushers its flavor. To this day a pack of gummies or a stroll past the right smoker takes me back as fast as any madeleine ever did for Proust.

The times my grandpa was around, he was usually focused on work. He’d tolerate our use of his copy machine for prints of hands or any action figures that fit under its cover, but only for so long. A couple of times, he invited my brother and me to help him clear out brush around the property with sharpened steel swords that stood as tall as I did, which he kept in a closet of files and old military garb. At my grandma’s behest, he’d monitor us in their musty basement, while we crafted weapons of our own. I still have a pair of homemade nunchakus and my first sword: a dowel rod sharpened on one end with a floral brass cabinet handle for a handguard. My brother and I would square off, each with our own sword in hand, exchanging taps. Lunges weren’t allowed on account of the pointed tips. We were careful not to damage any nearby furniture or knock any tchotchkes from their places on the mantel. My grandma used to tell us her favorite methods for murder and body disposal, and she made frequent jokes about poisoning our food. No matter that the threat was in good fun, we heeded her warnings.

In adolescence, my visits were filled less with crafts or sword fights and more with Grand Theft Auto, since my parents wouldn’t allow it in our house yet. At one point, my grandma tried to teach me her skills in stained glass art, but I gave up after burning my finger on a soldering iron. As bans on certain video games lifted and I learned to drive, I visited less and less, to the point that one winter she believed a telephone scammer claiming I was in a Brazilian prison in need of bail. She’d tried to call my cellphone, but I slept through the buzzing.

Now, my visits come mostly to retrieve the family dog, whose aging bladder requires more attention than work schedules allow. Mornings, before I leave, the sight of a leash sends my dog into such a frenzy that she forgets her hip dysplasia and bounds up on two feet, until she’s on her way to visit Grandma. Sometimes, she runs there herself, if left outside unchecked. Her excitement—waxing with age, instead of waning—reminds me of the simple joy that used to draw me over. I think to myself, maybe today I’ll visit longer, but later I’ll remember the writing I have to get done or the plans I’ve made, and best intentions dissolve, leaving a sense of hurry and guilt.

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Eric Beebe is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Last Week/This Week: Plath, Thoreau and video games

by Ashley Bales

A new volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters were released, a piece of news I discovered first through criticism of the UK edition’s choice to depict Plath as “a blonde in a bikini,” and second in a blurb from Sehgal’s piece in The New York Times discussing Frieda Hughes’ (Plath and Hughes’ daughter) defense of her father. Of the things I care about regarding any publication with Plath’s name on it, low on the list are her beachwear choices and her relationship with her husband.  As for so many young women, Plath was an icon I couldn’t spend enough time with--pouring over her novel, poems, and journals--but I’ve never particularly given a shit about her relationship with Hughes. I’m interested in her writing, not her biography, or her celebrity.  Celebrity is the real issue here and the treatment of female celebrities in contrast to male.  You certainly don’t have to think hard to come up with some male literary suicides where popular interpretations of the act don’t rest on victimization. If Plath was a victim, it is the least interesting thing about her and I would rather remain ignorant of the details than let it shape my interpretation of her work.

Is it indicative of certain continually depressing realities that Faber (the UK publisher) chose a bikini-ed image for their cover? Sure. Is there value in using Plath and Faber’s presentation of her work as exemplar of these issues? Potentially. Does it also place feminist debates before celebration of Plath’s work? Certainly, and I can’t help but mourn the continued need to celebrate successful women for their sex before their substance.

On the subject of journals, Wulf, writing for The Atlantic, discusses Thoreau’s “real masterpiece… …the 2 million word journal he kept until six months before he died.” It depicts Throreau’s struggle with balancing literature and science. Thoreau criticized scientists for their unengaging reports. He believed Linnaeus’ binomial nomenclature was poetry, and stated that “Facts fall from the poetic observer like ripe seeds.” Easy for him to say. There is certainly no limit to the poetic details that can be pulled from nature and the more you study the natural the world the more beautifully specific and interconnected these examples can become. The conflict comes in how scientists define rigor and bias, how can you explore the poetry of specificity when metaphor and symbolism are deemed misleading distractions?

For a student interested in a writer’s mind and process, journals are precious; so much more valuable than curated autobiography or criticism’s contextualization. And to avoid hypocrisy, here is Plath, speaking through her journals from the summer of 1958, when she was 26, two years after graduating from Smith College and two years before the publication of her first poetry collection, The Colossus:

Paralysis is still with me. It is as if my mind stopped and let the phenomenon of nature-shiny green rosebugs and orange toadstools and screaking woodpeckers—roll over me like a juggernaut—as if I had to plunge to the bottom of non-existence, of absolute fear, before I can rise again… …Lines occur to me and stop dead: “The tiger lily’s spotted throat.” And then it is an echo of Eliot’s “The tiger in the tiger pit,” to the syllables and the consonance. I observe: “The mulberry berries redden under leaves.” And stop. I think the worst thing is to exteriorize these jitterings… …Defensively, I say I know nothing: lids shut over my mind. And this is the old way of lying: I can’t be responsible, I know nothing. Grub-white mulberries redden under leaves… …Humbly, I can begin these things. Start in two realities that move me, probe their depths, angles, dwell on them. I want to know all kinds of people, to have the talent ready, practiced, ordered, to use them, to ask them the right questions. I forget. I must not for get, not panic, but walk about bold and curious and observant as a newspaper reporter, developing my way of articulation and ordering, losing nothing, not sitting under a snail-shell.

This week on the blog, Eric Beebe writes about childhood memories of his grandmother, Daniel Johnson explores video game narratives, and Shawna Perrin discovers punk-rock.

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Ashley Bales is a current student of The Mountainview low-residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.