Guernica

by Mickey Fisher

I wish I’d brought headphones with me. There’s a song I know of that I always thought I’d listen to, here at the end. Nobody plans to be half a world away at times like these, so I sat alone and waited out the night. So the chorus goes.

I sit by my dad’s bed and stitch memories together.

We were all going on a road trip; this was before my mom divorced him. I was in the area of six years old, and sitting in the back seat with Clay. My dad was the only one not in the car; he was looking for something in the house before we left, sunglasses, maybe. I leaned over the center console, plucked his Marlboro Reds from the dashboard, and placed them on top of the rest of the trash in the little plastic bag that we used for car waste. I didn’t bother hiding the cigarettes under the tissues and wrappers that were already in the trash. I figured I’d be in enough trouble as it was. He came out to the car and asked us where his cigarettes were. His voice was already half-raised. My eyes gave the answer away. I thought he’d yell at me, but instead he said, “I know they’re bad for me.” Then he took them out of the trash.

A wedge of light from the hallway fluorescents cuts into his room in the rehab center. There’s no door to block it. No doors means that nurses can flit in like moths if they have to, administering food and water and drugs. I sit outside of the light’s path, next to him. I can’t tell if he’s conscious or not. If he is, his eyes are pointing at a TV set that’s turned off for quiet hours. Who knows what he sees.

He promised a blue Mustang to my brother and me one Christmas, when we were no older than ten. He wasn’t there to promise it to our faces, but he wrote out a note in wobbly black pen on a piece of note paper. He had a friend, he explained, who was going to sell the blue Mustang to him, and then he’d give it to us. I believed that he intended to. Our mom told us not to get our hopes up, and we didn’t.

I smell a false smell of vodka. I’m cycling between holding his hand and using too much hand sanitizer. I’d never known him to like vodka; he’d preferred Budweisers. When we’d worried about the beers, we should’ve been paying more attention to the cigarettes in his shirt pocket. The machine dispensing the sanitizer growls at me as I stick my hand underneath its sensor again.

After I graduated from college, I got a call on a rainy Friday on my way in to work. My dad was sick. I became his proxy. His initial illness led to the discovery of something worse. I got him into Mass General, the best-case scenario. I’d visited him on sunny Saturdays in Boston, watched horror movies with him in his room. I’d pushed him in a wheelchair to the meeting with the specialist, who’d told my dad that if he refused treatment, he’d be dead within a year. He’d refused that treatment thirteen months ago.

I check Facebook, the hotline to Clay. My brother is stationed in England and organizing a flight home with the Red Cross. I’d sent him the rehab center’s number and was waiting for him to call their phone. He wants to speak to our dad before he passes, and I don’t want to see how high the charges will be on my own line. There are no bright red notification badges interrupting the bold blue header of the site. I close the app.

A thin blue curtain hangs between my dad and his neighbor in the room. I hear the other man breathing in his sleep. I hear the calm beeping of machines. I do not hear the ring of the phone at the reception desk. Not yet. So I sit alone and wait out the night.

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

Student Picks: Davis, Melville

Margaret McNellis--Versailles by Kathryn Davis follows Marie Antoinette from her marriage to Louis XVI to the end of her life at the mercy of the revolutionaries. Davis delves into Antoinette’s spirit, exploring what it might have felt like to be in her shoes—not the Antoinette that lives on through the historically inaccurate phrase, “Let them eat cake,” but rather through the eyes of a bright young woman required to fit into a confining role. Simultaneously, Davis presents the recent history of the French Monarchy, from the Sun King (Louis XIV) to Louis XVI through a discussion on changes to the architecture, landscaping, and design of Versailles.

In addition to all of these fascinating and beautiful details, what struck me was the structure Davis employs. While most of the story is told through first-person point of view, narrated by the Queen herself, interludes are presented as scenes in a play, providing insight into other characters’ points of view about Antoinette, Louis XVI, and contemporary French politics.

Ashley Bales--This year faculty member Lydia Peelle participated in a marathon reading of Moby Dick, that takes place annually at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I first heard about this marathon reading from Lydia a year ago, so when I took my copy off the shelf to get me through the holidays, her description of these celebratory readings was in my head. As I sat reading, watching my husband string Christmas lights on the tree my father had decided to let us decorate that year, I tried reading a sentence or two aloud. The words rolled off my tongue--round words, old words--and I ran out of breath before the first period. After Christmas, my husband, my brother and I drove 13 hours north from San Jose to visit my mother in Seattle. A week later we drove back and instead of podcasts or burning through an audio book, I practiced my breath control and read Moby Dick. It was wonderful to feel the language in those long, rhythmic sentences, feel Melville change the cadence with the lowering boats, adjust to Queeaueg's dialect, attack the consonant "Moby Dick" in Ahab's drawl. I didn't get through it all on the drive, had to finish it silently on the flight back home to New York. In those final ferocious moments I wished I could have made myself breathless with Melvilles words.

Hear Lydia Peelle talk about the annual marathon in this interview with NPR. 

The Dress

by Dominique Heuermann

The dress was a sexy jet-black velvet, cinched in all the right places, meant to make you look like a sex kitten, a vixen. She didn’t dare ask what size it was or if they even carried hers. Running her fingers along the neckline, down the sides, along each perfectly hemmed cinch, she felt the crush of that soft, luscious fabric bend to the pressure of her touch. When she pictured herself holding a cocktail in that dress, hand to her chest laughing with radiant red lips that demanded attention, it seemed like a scene from a movie. A woman walked by giving her and the dress in her hand a questioning glace. Instantly, the perfect scenario of red lipped laughter and sex kitten status melted into one of shame. Images of her body bulging unflatteringly made her burn red with humiliation. She sighed with self-loathing and walked from the store empty handed. So many attempts at better diets, exercise, with various levels of failure and success. It didn’t help that she had always been skinny and fit…until she had children.

You’re no sex kitten, she told herself, you’re all cow.

At 37, with more desire to know herself and the limits of her body, she was stuck with one that needed quite a bit of fine tuning. Flabby arms, cellulite, fatty, stuffed trunks for legs, and a mid-section that could do with a bit of crossfit. She had a pretty face and nice eyes, but it was difficult to be satisfied with any part of herself.

I just don’t add up she would say to herself in the mirror.

It didn’t matter that her husband loved her bits and beauty equally. It didn’t matter that she was called beautiful by those who knew her. She thought they were only being polite anyway. Whatever she was missing was all summed up in that dress. That dress represented confidence.

Confidence, what an elusive concept.

Her confidence had eroded the very first time a boy at school called her ‘big’ because of her height, and then again when a girl in ninth grade called her a sasquatch. The P.E. locker room became a battleground to keep any last shred of self-esteem. At 19, diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, she found out her body was its own worst enemy. It would be in a constant state of hormonal imbalance and weight gain. With her first pregnancy at 22, when her doctor called her “hugely fat” after gaining 80 pounds, despite carefully watching her diet, confidence slipped away even more. Her second pregnancy, a year after the first, saw her gaining even more weight and taking twice as long to lose it. By the third and last pregnancy, she just couldn’t shake the extra pounds. Her children were now 15, 13, and 8, the years had gone by but the weight remained. It not only weighed down her body, but it weighed down her soul.

I’ll never be the person I was before, she cried into her journal, she’s gone and been replaced with the person who ate her.

During a particularly grueling self-hate session on the treadmill, mind focused on calories burned and the calories consumed, she failed to notice her 15-year old watching her from the doorway. When she eventually looked up and caught her eye, her daughter looked sad and confused.

“Why do you look so angry when you work out?” her daughter asked.

“I’m mad at myself.” She replied.

“Why? What did you do?”

Her words turned to bile in her throat. What was she going to say? How could she say she was angry with her body, when her daughter’s own body mimicked hers? She wouldn’t start that downward spiral in the one she loved the most. She refused to do that, so she lied.

“I’m angry the dress I want isn’t on sale anymore, and I should have bought it when I saw it.”

“The black velvet one?”

“Yeah. It’s ok though. It might not be the right kind of dress for me anyway.”

“Why not? You would look like one of those old movie stars, but with better hips and boobs.”

“And here I was thinking I would look like Miss Piggy.”

“Who’s Miss Piggy?”

“Never mind.”

The next day, she made a straight path past the pin-up mannequins and vintage dresses, back to that black velvet sex kitten dress and plucked it from its spot on the rack. A salesperson approached her and she didn’t hesitate to ask for her size, which she was told they most definitely had. In the dressing room, she kept her back to the mirror while she wiggled into the soft velvet. Pulling up the side zipper, she breathed in shakily. Here we go, sex kitten or Miss Piggy?

She turned around slowly and realized she didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror staring back at her. Her daughter was right. Gone were the worrisome spots of cellulite and fat trunk legs. Gone was a middle in need of crossfit. The woman in the mirror was her, only better. Better with age, better with maturity, better with appreciation for who she had become.

As she was handing the salesperson her credit card, her phone buzzed with a text message.

“Mom, did you get the dress?”

“Yes,” she texted back. “Now I’m off to find some red lipstick.”  

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

Ridiculous Boots

by Kirah Brouillette

I wore a pair of Ridiculous Boots to my January writing residency in New Hampshire’s North Country, near Mt. Washington. It was -22 on the day I left Portland for Whitefield, so I packed an emergency bag, my snowmobile suit, my insulated Kamiks and a balaclava, too, just in case.

But with their black velvet uppers, waxed laces and three inch platform heels that made me walk extra tall, my Ridiculous Boots didn’t fit in. They looked more like the kind of thing a retired stripper might wear, not a country mom from Maine.

Naturally, I couldn’t resist them.

“These boots are ridiculous in the best way, aren’t they?” I asked my husband as I was walking out the door. I pointed at the Ridiculous Boots. I hadn’t worn anything like them in years. He didn’t respond, so I hunched over and folded myself up small, lifting my right foot up so he could see the boot better.

 With his nose scrunched, like something stank, he glanced down, then back up at me and said, “Yep, totally ridiculous.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking. His face was inscrutable. We used to share a bone dry humor, regularly passing jokes between us. But now our exchanges felt vaguely—if at least equally—injurious instead.

Ok, fine. I thought. You’re right.

They were not the kind of boots a mom like me should wear. Were they the kind of boots I used to wear? Well, yes. But neither of us had seen that version of me in almost a decade.

That woman hitchhiked. That woman lived on some distant tropical island, wearing nothing but a bikini and muddy Chacos while she macheted a fresh mountain path down from the road to the secret beach below so she could write in peace, away from tourists. That woman had abs, sometimes.

Instead, I was a woman who drove a drastically used Subaru. I was a woman who sometimes shopped at the Dollar Tree for deals on crackers and binge-watched Bravo reality shows when she was depressed. Instead of a machete, I used a broom to clear a crooked path through piles of clean laundry and Legos in the hopes of liberating the last chocolate chip cookie for myself before my kids found it. I was pear shaped.

But I bought The Ridiculous Boots anyway, on a whim, when I saw them recommended for me on Amazon.com while I shopped for diaper wipes and Pine Sol. They were Important Boots, too, I realized as I added them to my cart. They were the first high heels I’d allowed myself to own since marrying my husband, a respectably-sized man of 5’7—next to my 5’9 ¾—whose height had become a symbol for our incompatibility..

I was, after all, well-trained from a young age to believe my height was problematic for everyone around me.

“You’re too tall,” my mom used to say to me when I was a girl “What will the boys think?” Then she’d pinch a soft hunk of my lower back between her bony finger tips, causing me to shout out in pain and bend down to her level where she would hiss into my ear, “Stand up straight if you’re going to be so tall. Ridiculous.”

Luckily for me, The Ridiculous Boots made me taller than I’d been in years, so I could fall harder than I had in years.

***

They say that emotions, particularly those related to trauma of any kind, are stored in the body like a computer stores information on a hard drive—your body systems retain a physical copy of the painful memory, like an imprint. Over your life, this pain can resurface accidentally, in unusual or destructive ways if it’s not brought out and healed with intention. And it’s not always old pain, either. Even the most recent and delicate emotional trauma can trigger a systems collapse.

When I bought my Ridiculous Boots, I already knew this theory well. I was intimate with the draining, dramatic process of releasing trauma from the body. In my own daily yoga practice—something I’d used to heal the PTSD my childhood left behind—I’d learned first-hand how unearthing buried emotions through movement could cause a physical illness to erupt alongside the healing. After all, I’d spent most of the previous two years (as my marriage struggled to survive) chasing the symptoms of Systemic Lupus Erythematous, a disease my rheumatologist partially blamed on “unresolved systemic stress.”

I wasn’t thinking of any of this later on that week in New Hampshire, when I stomped out of my peer workshop one morning, fuming over an exchange with a teacher that had reminded me of arguments with my husband, my mother. I stomped so hard and so thoughtlessly that my Ridiculous Boots and their sky high heels skipped a beat, and slipped, sending me down.

 As I crashed to the floor and my chin bouncing off the hardwood, I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t thinking of the heavy sadness in my marriage that weighed each doomed footfall I’d taken before I fell. I wasn’t thinking of all the broken promises we’d made to each other when my knee took my weight and made a loud crack. I wasn’t thinking of how afraid I was of a life alone when I felt those long-held, bitterly hot emotions in my chest burn their way up and out as tears.

And once they started, they could not be stopped. All I could do was think, then. So I sat surrounded by friends and mentors with one leg hefted onto a pile of pillows and covered in bags of ice while I cried out all the stories: the mean mom stories, the sad state of my marriage stories, the personal failure stories, my fears for the future stories.

After a while of all that crying, something miraculous happened: I felt better. Even my knee. So I laced up my Ridiculous Boots and with the help of friends, kept walking tall.

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

Student Picks: Stevens, Doe

Melissa Alvarado Sierra--After graduating with an MFA in fiction, Nell Stevens is offered a grant to go anywhere in the world for three months to write her first novel. Instead of scouting for a lavish locale in places like Italy or France, she picks the bare, freezing, and gloomy landscape of Bleaker Island, population: 0. Bleaker House begins with a clear declaration of the hybridity of the work, which was completed in absolute remoteness in the Falkland Islands.

The story follows the author’s quest for what she calls “the life of a writer,” something she believes is rooted in isolation. Stevens weaves short stories, novel-in-progress excerpts and her experiences on the island to show the passion and madness involved in trying to write something of value. At the end of her stay, Stevens fails to produce a novel and instead finishes what is at once a travel book, a work of fiction and a memoir.

Her knack for observation, introspection, and persistence make Bleaker House a study on what makes someone a bonafide writer; Stevens concludes it’s the result of not only learning the craft, but also venturing into the unknown to understand the world and yourself a little more.

Shawna Lee-Perrin--With Under the Big Black Sun, John Doe did something unusual in the world of creative nonfiction: he got his friends to help him with the narrative. The resulting effect is something like a novel-in-stories, or a quilt made of old concert t-shirts, each voice filling in some important part of the larger picture.

Doe wrote just over one-third of the book’s 24 chapters, giving it a nice thread of consistency. The rest are first-person accounts from different people in the same era and geography, when LA punk was getting up and going in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. While some are technically better writers than others, each perspective serves the book’s greater, Impressionistic impact.

We get stories from Doe and his muse and bandmate, Exene, in chapters 1 and 2, setting the framework. But the other chapters offer us a much richer, more nuanced view of the scene: the voices in this collection run the gamut from feminist, queer, Latino, working class, and yes, some angry white kids. What unites them all is a sense of finding their own unique, inimitable voices and a supportive community in a world they previously thought couldn’t care less about them.

Why do we care about grammar?

by Jillian Avalon 

As writing students, we spend a lot of our time in the classroom considering craft and its various elements. These elements range from dialogue and scene to complicated balancing acts like narration and metaphor, and these elements are crucial tools for our writing toolbox. But no toolbox is complete without a hammer, and while it isn’t glamorous or even pleasant, grammar is just as critical an element as any of the others our teachers spend time on. Grammar skills are often more assumed than taught at universities, but not all of us have a sufficient, shiny hammer in our toolboxes.

I recently taught a grammar workshop to my grad student peers and in preparing my materials, I stressed over the lack of shared experience in the subject. We all came to the MFA with various experiences as writers, as students, as people. Some of us studied grammar for an English degree, but others of us don’t have English degrees. Likewise, some of us learned primary school writing when grammar and sentence diagramming were staples; others of us are products of a more liberal approach to the basics. I decided to test my methods on someone who had no knowledge or desire to learn grammar, in hope that teaching her would mean I could reach all comers in a single lunch break: I tried to teach my sister how to diagram.

ME: So here’s your sentence: I love pizza. Let’s start simple. Where’s the verb?

SISTER: (Points to pizza)

Disheartening is the best descriptor. I decided my sister was maybe not the best starting point, as after a brief recap of parts of speech she continued to get them muddled. Thankfully, everyone in my workshop had the base knowledge of grammar required for diagramming. But my attempts to teach my sister did make me think about a question I get frequently as an English teacher: Why do we teach grammar?          

I’ve seen other writing students ask this; some of them even teach English, like me. Sometimes it’s diagramming specific, sometimes it really is “Why do we care about grammar?”

We all recognize the importance of grammar as writers, but it can be tempting to shrug it off as unnecessarily hampering, a bar to our creativity, an antiquated set of rules. In some cases, we should feel free to brush off some of the tiny particularities of grammar. Breaking rules of punctuation or capitalization or even agreement can be powerful tools and statements in creative work. Provided, of course, that we do these things purposefully.

Beyond the outwardly obvious pedantic correction of others’ mistakes, understanding grammar makes me a better writer, a better reader, a better communicator, a better scholar, and a better linguist. Grammar isn’t about knowing a set of rules and sticking to them rigidly (although it can involve that), it’s about knowing how people communicate in various registers, recognizing the differences, and adjusting to those differences. It’s about recognizing and adapting to the change of language over time and place. It’s about thinking about the evolution of our words from where they entered our language to how we use them in our own work. While grammar is flexible and can be bent to create endlessly creative sentences, understanding the standards of that grammar bending is essential to clear and effective communication with a reader.

I may not be able to teach my sister the parts of speech in an hour, but I can refine my knowledge of British conversational verb structures to write British characters. Likewise, you may not master commas (really, who has time for all the uses of commas?), but maybe you’ll master the use of commas for subordinate clauses. Yes, there’s a lot of grammar, but if we all take small steps toward learning the basics and build from there, we’ll be better readers, better communicators, and better writers, one comma at a time.

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

Hidden Voices

by Arun Chittur

“Your story matters … because everyone’s story matters,” challenged my instructor as I struggled through my last MFA workshop.  I’d heard that before, and always agreed.  Yet I denied the idea for myself, convinced instead that one must have “expertise” before sharing any part of themselves.  I wonder now if such an argument is meant to reinforce the need for more heady discourse, or to discourage those voices deemed unnecessary to a larger, more dominant narrative.

In my last days as a student, two sentences into this post, a notification appeared on my screen.  It was a news headline I would have ignored, except for two words: “shithole countries”.  The President of the United States had asked a meeting of legislators, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”  As a critical reader in the post-2016 media era, I assumed (hoped?) that the headline was overblown.  Fabricated.  Extrapolated obnoxiously out of context.  Something had to be missing.  Then I watched Rupert Colville’s response as spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.  Then several members of Congress.  Several citizens of Johannesburg and Nairobi.  The President singled out Haiti, El Salvador, and “African nations,” apparently expressing preference for immigrants from Norway.  As one cable news anchor put it, “… people from Norway, with Nordic descent.  White people, in other words.”  I fought through a series of emotional responses, most of which have become second nature in the previous 12 months.  Of those, a standard passivity was replaced by a rush of anger.  I expect comments like this now, comments dividing the worlds of white and otherwise, European and otherwise, “Normal” and otherwise.  I could have dropped back into acceptance and moved.  That would have been easy.             

What comes to mind when you think of a “shithole”?  Large urban areas stricken with poverty?  Whole families living in one-room dwellings without access to clean water or reliable food sources?  Or perhaps rural areas so cut off from the world that the newest car you can buy was made when Eisenhower was president?  Where every scene in the big city looks not like New York in 2018 but 1968?

There are pockets of Mumbai, India—a sprawling metropolis home to millions—where the dream isn’t for the perfect job, the perfect mate, or even a shot at college.  It’s to eat one meal a day, and for the hope that your own waste will not return in the form a mortal disease.  This same country, currently the world’s largest democracy, is also famous for its network of post-secondary engineering schools.  My father emigrated from India to the United States in 1979 to complete work toward a PhD in chemical engineering.  He was funded through a government loan that forced a choice upon graduation: (a) return to India and your loan debt would be forgiven, or (b) you could repay the loan and remain in the U.S.  My father chose the latter, winning naturalization as an American citizen and placing his life in the hands of the American Dream and the trust it invoked so confidently back then.

Cuba is famous for its scenery and artistic culture, a popular vacation spot for many Canadian and European tourists.  It’s also famous as the capital of a country long lost in the 1950s following the demise of one dictatorship in favor of another and a subsequent American embargo.  Despite tourism revenue, Cubans have struggled to keep up with the rest of the world—especially since the fall of Cuba’s primary benefactor, the Soviet Union.  Most of the island’s people struggled to access the kind of medical care, education, and commoditized technology that swept much of the world in the twentieth century.  My mother’s parents brought her to the U.S. from Havana as they fled paradise for the unknowns of a foreign land.  Determined to make her own life as an American, she grew up to follow my grandfather into medicine—into helping people.  As a naturalized citizen, she graduated as a chemist and became a hospital laboratory analyst, testing patient samples hoping to find what ailed you quickly enough to save you from it.

My parents both came from oft referred-to “Third World” countries.  When our President takes offense at the immigration of citizens from “shithole” countries, he takes offense at the journey my parents made just for a taste of the American Dream.  He takes offense at the circumstances that drove them here, into the arms of a country that once sought to embody the call on Lady Liberty’s tablet.  For millions worldwide this country has been the last, best hope.  In my life, it has proven itself the only place a Cuban woman and Indian man could rise to the heights of their own potential and make a life next door to any other American family; and could give birth to a son with relatives tens of thousands of miles apart and raise him as an ‘American’.

What makes us “exceptional”?  What qualities underwrite a state endowed with a responsibility to lead the world?  Watching our evolution in the past two years, I’ve come to believe that our self-perceived political and moral supremacy isn’t drawn from a superior political system, nor a respected level of experience acting on the international stage.  It’s drawn from the diversity of our people.  As Americans, we live with a turbulent past, a history rife with suffering and exploitation.  Yet we have transcended before, moving through history still attracting the young and old from all corners.  The world could follow us because others could see themselves in us.  And now?  Promises of shelter and opportunity made in the past are becoming promises broken, dreams cast away to be cared for anywhere but here.

It is easy, I think, to dismiss the President’s words as racist.  It is easy to dismiss them with a passivity designed to enable life to go on.  But that passivity incurs the risk of losing sight of what was most important all along: America as a ‘beacon’ of hope and freedom.  As I reconcile the latest headline with the end of my academic journey, my most important lesson crystallizes into view.  As writers, we appreciate the chance to engage in our art without fear of political reprisal.  Even without publication, we have our words.  When I started my MFA, I debated whether the ambition to publish was the right one, whether my voice had enough authority to earn its place.  But to follow that logic, to favor academic discourse over all others, silences those voices deemed unnecessary by the dominant narrative.

Beginning anew two years later, I am convinced that such an ambition is right.  Not for fortune or fame.  Not for an ephemeral notoriety some know and fewer understand.  But because a democracy—any participative government—is based on voices.  My instructor was right.  Every story matters.  Every voice.  Every vote.  The urge to express in writing is an urge to articulate a story that is already part of our fabric, no matter its origin or what the owner looks like.  Writers of all stripes stand ready, willing, and able to articulate on behalf of not only themselves but those who cannot speak for themselves.  We provide words for the countless made silent by the will of the few.  It is our prime responsibility to ensure all sides discourse freely and responsibly, above the noise of those who would prefer a single storyline. 

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Arun Chittur is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He currently teaches organizational leadership and pedagogy in Nevada.

Student Picks: Offill, Rushdie

Jemiscoe Chambers-Black-- Have you ever had something remind you of your toddler years and make you not want to share? That’s what Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation did to me. It’s the book that I clutch to my chest and scream, “Mine.” However, it’s so beautifully written, I have to share.

Dept. of Speculation’s structure is written in short paragraphs of randomness that become gorgeous prose. The novel follows a writer who vows never to get married because she is too busy becoming an “Art Monster.” But she ends up falling in love, getting married, and eventually having a baby, and in her confliction and honesty, I’m moved. There are many delicious moments in this book that spill off the page when the inner thoughts of this career woman turned stay-at-home-mom pour out:

“What did you today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.”

Eventually, her husband has an affair, and the reader is taken on a journey filled with love, family, sacrifice, and eventually forgiveness. So, while I’ve shared this gem, know that no one can borrow my copy. I really recommend this book, but get your own.

Kirah Brouillette-- On a whim, I re-read Salman Rushdie’s infamous novel The Satanic Verses, the magically real story of two morally bankrupt Bollywood actors, Gibreel and Saladin, who die in a terrorist plot and are later reborn as an angel and Satan. With an embedded storyline around the prophet Mohammed that offended some Muslims enough that violent protests followed and the author himself was put under a fatwa by the Ayahtollah Komeni in 1989, it can be a tall order to finish.

What gets you by though, is the purity of Rushdie’s prose; the way he uses cadence and free punctuation to draw you into this foggily familiar world – a world where realism meets the magic of literary allusion, all bound by rising emotion shared between all characters, in both worlds at once.

“Is there a Devil. After that the glass – baprebap! – began to shake ... slowslow at first, then faster-faster ...  until it jumped ... fell down on its side and ... into a thousand ... pieces, smashed. Believe, don’t believe ... but thenandthere I learned my lesson: don’t meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend.”

Sunflower

by Todd Richardson

As a devout atheist, I don’t believe in the supernatural. But when my friend offered a free tarot card reading, I thought I’d entertain the idea, just for fun. I met her in a square room filled with photographs yellowed with age. A circular table stood in the center. I took a seat across from her.

She looked me in the eye as she unboxed the cards. “Are you open to this?”

I shrugged, “Sure.”

She held my gaze as she spilled the cards face-down on the table. She swirled them, her hands gently floating over their surfaces as she churned the deck. “Is there some paperwork that you need to finish?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Something for work?” she asked.

“I’m still waiting for a teaching contract.”

“It’s coming on Thursday.”

“Sweet,” I said. Lucky guess, I thought.

She told me to pick five cards and place them in order on the table without turning them over. I chose from the pile at random. She flipped them over one at a time. A woman. Swords. Cups. The moon. A sunflower.

She pulled the first card—a man surrounded by cups—toward her.

“You have a financial opportunity coming,” she said.

“Great,” I said. How cliché, I thought.

“Three months, maybe. Watch for it.”

“Sure.”

She tapped on the card with a picture of the moon on it. “The moon means you have someone watching over you. Was there someone important to you who passed away?”

“Not really,” I said. My thoughts drifted toward my grandpa, who died when I was fourteen.

“I’m getting a grandfather?”

I nodded in confirmation. C’mon, I thought, who doesn’t have a beloved grandparent they hope watches over them?

“He’s sending me an image of boots,” she said.

“What?”

“A pair of old, leather boots.”

“Nope,” I said.

She paused. “No, it’s definitely boots.”

Don’t make me put my boot in your ass, I heard his voice echo in my head. I smiled. “That used to be his brand of heartfelt motivation,” I told her. “He used to say he’d put a boot in my ass if he thought I needed it.”

“He’s telling me that he’s there for you, to give you that boot in your ass when you need it,” she said.

I chuckled. Ok, that was pretty good, I thought.

She dragged the three remaining cards closer to her: the sunflower, the swords, and the woman. There was a pause before she spoke again.

“The sunflower means fertility,” she said. She looked up and my throat tightened. My wife and I had a miscarriage, but my friend knew that. I’d told her about it weeks ago.

“You’ve been through something horrible,” my friend said. She reached across the table and placed a gentle hand on my forearm. What did she see? I thought. Could she see the toilet bowl full of blood, the frantic drive to the ER, me wringing my hands like a damp wash cloth as the nurse pressed an IV into my wife’s vein? I swallowed hard.

“Something good will happen.” She gave me a knowing look. “I see a seven. Seven weeks, maybe. Seven months. I’m not sure. Just be strong.” She pointed to the card with swords on it, looked at me, and smiled.

“Whenever the good news comes, your wife will become a warrior.”

“She’s already fierce.”

“She’ll be even stronger. Just wait. You’ll see.”

I thanked my friend and left. I spent the rest of the day full of equal parts doubt and hope. I wanted to believe my grandfather was beaming down at me. More than anything, I needed to be a father again, to feel whole in a way that only the baby had made me feel. But I was skeptical. Mystic cards held no sway over the forces of the universe; life was determined by choice and chance, not fate.

I woke up the next morning. It was Thursday. My teaching contract sat in my inbox awaiting my signature. Son of a bitch, I thought and began praying. I don’t know about God, or the cards, but I prayed for seven—seven days or weeks or months—prayed for the day my sunflower will come.

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

Black Belt or Novel?

by Margaret McNellis

“Don’t hurt me!”

That’s typically the first response I get when people find out I have a third-degree black belt.

“Do you have to register your hands as a lethal weapon?”

That’s usually the other question someone asks. In case you’re wondering, I don’t go around hurting people and it’s a myth that martial artists have to register their hands as weapons. I’m pretty sure a police department would just laugh at me if I called up asking to register my hands. The other response I commonly get is wide eyes and dropped jaws. This, I think, is based on the fact that not many people get black belts.

Can I let you in on a secret? Black belts aren’t so elusive. If you put in enough time and practice, and you want something enough, then you too can have a black belt. In that way, the martial arts is a lot like creative writing.

I wrote my first novel in 2008. I’d been studying with the Long Ridge Writers Group, which offered one-on-one mentorship for both fiction and nonfiction study. All of my original stories (I used to write a decent amount of fan fiction) hovered around the one-thousand-word mark, and I didn’t think I had it in me to tell a longer story—at least not until another Long Ridge student told me about National Novel Writing Month. I signed up, and thirty days later, I had a 50,000-word fantasy story about disillusionment with organized religion.

I’d like to take a moment to emphasize that writing at that pace didn’t produce anything publishable. I don’t want to give the impression that pumping out a book that fast is really all it takes, because it takes so much more.

I kept participating in NaNoWriMo, and even served as the municipal liaison for my region for four years, but in 2014, I wanted something more. I enrolled in SNHU’s MA – English & Creative Writing program with a specialization in fiction. More than any workshop, that program started to teach me how to write well. It was, for me, the equivalent of getting my green belt.

I earned my green belt after a three-hour test next to a marshland that produced a never-ending supply of biting green flies. I survived the test—and the pests—and beamed at my instructor-friend when he told me getting my green belt meant I was a serious martial artist (green belt was considered the first of the advanced ranks at my dojo). Earning my MA in 2015 felt the same, but I craved more.

Now, as a second-semester student in SNHU’s Mountainview MFA program, I feel like I’m approaching black belt again, except instead of a six-hour test of physical strength, knowledge, reflexes, and the ability to resist mind games, I’ll be submitting my thesis, a historical novel set in the seventeenth century, in just over one year.

On those days when I find it hard to write, when the blinking cursor mocks me, or when I feel like the ending of my story is completely predictable and therefore foolish, I think back to all of the martial arts tests I’ve taken and I write. One word after the other, just like one kick after the other until I’ve reached one thousand kicks, one thousand words, then another thousand, then ten thousand, until I have chapters upon chapters and a finally a novel.

If you put in the time and practice, and want it enough, then you too can write a novel. And you can make a good one, one that says something about what it means to be human, one that makes readers question their world…but it won’t come easy. It won’t be like getting your white belt when you sign up for martial arts lessons. It’s going to take a sacrifice, it’s going to take something from you, and you have to be okay with giving into the process.

Perhaps the best part about telling someone I’ve written a novel is that they don’t cringe or ask me if I’ve had to register my LAMY fountain pen with some government agency. I’m kidding—the best part is knowing I’ve breathed life into characters, into a world, into art, into something that will hopefully leave a positive mark on the world someday.

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

Student Picks: Doerr and Mitchell

Arun Chittur-- I’m a longtime skeptic of historical fiction because of its reputation for overworked description, academic focus on timeline, and characters concerned more with events than their own lives. Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See corrected my long-time drought. 

Doerr introduces readers to Marie-Laure, a young, blind French girl, stranded after her father falls into Nazi captivity, and Werner, a German orphan who finds friendship and structure in Hitler’s army; the book relies on the unlikely thread between these two ostensible enemies.

Doerr’s structure invests readers in each character just long enough, making use of short, single scene-based chapters to bring us in personally. The book is then broken into multiple parts, each a different time period around or during World War II. The timeline slides backward and forward, leading one to believe the plot too difficult to follow and to assume the book will return to the shelf half-read. Alas, you’re left with more questions and no choice but to press on, hoping for answers.

The chapters show one moment, one place, one emotion. Then as soon as your heart subsumes the character’s, perspective changes, and you begin again, always longing to understand the world around you still cannot see.

K. A. Hamilton-- "This book does not contain a misprint on page 39," Amazon warns, a foreshadowing of the form-bending journey to come. On its surface, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a collection of found documents, torn apart at their middles and nestled within one another. Going deeper into the journals, films, and manuscripts, it’s a story of karma that follows a chorus of souls over six different lifetimes.

Belief in reincarnation is not a prerequisite for the audience, as the cyclical themes of subjugation and justice are universally human. In fact, the premise is never explicitly stated; it only exists as a mounting sense of connectedness between the people of each era. In this novel that spans period and genre, Mitchell demonstrates the subtle power of what’s left unsaid. There is an electric urgency to the message, and a call to action that is impossible to set aside when the book is done.

Finding Ourselves on Amazon

by K. A. Hamilton

A rock salt lamp. Fibonacci earrings. A triceratops-shaped taco holder. It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself with a cart full of merchandise that would never make it past the threshold of: “proceed to checkout.” But as I cleared the items out of my cart, it was the first time I asked myself: “how did I get here?”

It seems like every modern artist has their own cautionary tale about screen time. I don’t mind indulging in a little daily distraction, but the near-manifestation of it, the possibility that my procrastination could show up in a corrugated cardboard box was frightening to me. So I hit the “back” button to retrace my footsteps.

I found myself on Amazon’s “Interesting Finds” page, a shopping-meets-Pinterest-style collection of curated goods. I must have lost myself in the spinning of the mouse wheel, because the scroll bar was the size of a pea. As I ascended the page, a stream of material goods flowed by without description, even defying description. It struck me that this wasn't stuff that a person could ever truly need, like a pack of underwear or a replacement cutting board. This was the stuff you bought for your quirky co-worker, or the family member who already has it all.

When I reached the top of the page, a friendly dialog box invited me to “heart the things you love.” A scatter of gray, heart-shaped icons served as evidence that I had indeed made my own affectionate marks. But in my defense, in a stock white world with zero sense of scale, anything seems possible. Including the idea that you might love a plastic taco holder shaped like an extinct ornithischian.

That was where I ended my investigation, closing the tab and getting up to do anything that I could deem more wholesome than “being on the internet.” And yet, I felt a lingering connection to my hearted stuff. The great retailers are collectors of behavioral data. Sales motivations aside, they know something about each of us, and about all of us. When you think about it, what more is this collection of “stuff” than a photomontage of our Ids?

Here is what Amazon seems to make of me: I like cats, and to a slightly lesser degree, dogs. I like plants, but I really like tiny plants that come with minimal dirt. I seek the kind of Zen that I can put on display, preferably with an infusion of technology. I like to think I have time to knit. I enjoy irony with my coffee. I’m nostalgic for my horse/dinosaur/fantasy days. And I still dream of space.

I'm proud to say that I haven't caved to any of these purchases… yet (except for the cat mug I bought for my quirky co-worker). But there is a sense of inevitability about it all. The things that I’ve “loved” continue to dog my online travels, targeting me from places where ad blockers have no sway. I know the internet is shaping me even as I’m shaping it back, nourishing its needs with indicators of my own. It’s harmless and it’s not. Like pennies dropped into a well, you never really shake the wish.

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K. A. Hamilton is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Christmas on the Spanish Steps

by Mojgan Ghazirad

Fifteen years ago when I came to Canada as a student, I remember one of my Iranian friends who had come a few years earlier asked, “Are you going to put up a Christmas tree in your house?” We were walking together in Vancouver’s Broadway Street, ornate wreaths were attached to every light post we passed. Crimson little globes glittered in between the glabrous leaves of holly that embellished the glass vitrines of stores and coffee shops. The Christmas celebration, golden and glamorous, kept me in a state of wonderment and awe. I was new to North America and the festivities around the New Year in the Western world. And so was my daughter, age seven, who kept asking me if we were going to get her a Christmas tree where she could hang the tiny ornaments she’d received from her friends in school. “No, we will continue to enjoy from afar,” I said to my friend as we entered a cozy coffee shop to have hot cider and a cinnamon roll. He laughed out loud at my resistance and said, “Well, I’m sure you will, just like us. After a few years you’ll surrender to your kids.”

A week ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Rome for the first time in my life. Rome, with the magnificent Vatican City, seemed the most desirable city on earth to be in at Christmas time. I strolled along the narrow cobblestoned alleys flanked by hundreds of little pizzerias and pasta houses and coveted the spirit of celebration wafting its way in those tiny shops and restaurants: a waiter erecting a tall branch of spruce at the corner of a pizza house, a young girl with a red and white checkered apron placing gingerbread Babbo Natale in the display window of a gelato bar, a rosy-cheeked little girl pulling her mama’s hand for a red rain boot with a snowman on its vamp.

I remembered my kids asking about Santa and Christmas, and their questions about exchanging gifts. Every time, I came up with an answer explaining that we, as Muslims in America, do not share the same beliefs as Christians, trying to persuade them to turn their eyes away from the glittering gifts. As an Iranian, I told them about Yalda when we get together with friends on the night of December 21st, the winter solstice, and celebrate the victory of light over darkness on the longest night of the year. I clung to the celebration, arranging a colorful table with bowls of nuts, watermelon, pomegranate seeds and sweets and I let them stay awake until late at night. We read the poems of Hafiz and, most importantly, I offered them gifts that were not part of the celebration. I struggled to compensate for the presents they never received under a Christmas tree.     

Last year on Christmas Eve, I was invited to a feast hosted by a friend of mine from high school who I serendipitously found after thirty-some years.  When I arrived, her twin boys were playing with a remote controlled electric train that chugged under the Christmas tree and emerged clickety-clacking and whistling from the other side. They couldn’t speak Farsi and greeted me in English with perfect American accents. My friend had made fesenjoon, an Iranian dish made with walnuts and pomegranate molasses, to celebrate Christmas ‘Iranian style.’ As she ladled fesenjoon on my plate of basmati rice, she asked the same question I’d encountered fifteen years ago. “Do you put up a Christmas tree in your house?” I smiled and praised her artfulness in making such a delicacy with ingredients so scarce in America, trying to divert the conversation to the tasty side of the evening. My friend talked about a visit they had paid to the Washington National Cathedral a few days before. In St. Mary’s chapel, one of the twins had approached her and asked about the figure of Christ on the cross. “Who’s this man on the cross?” he’d simply asked. My friend had given some information about Jesus, which of course, didn’t sound exciting for a five-year-old with no religious upbringings.

After dinner, the twins gathered around the Christmas tree to play with the rattling train. As I helped to stow the remaining food in the fridge, my friend said, “Even if we were brought up in secular families, we were taught the foundations of Islam in school. At least we knew how to pray when we were in dire straits. We had something to hold on to. But my kids, they don’t even know the concept of god.”   

In Rome, I saved the visit to St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City for the last day. There in the Basilica, I melted in front of the Pieta by Michelangelo. There was a peculiar gaze in Mary’s face that seemed different from all the statues that embellished every corner of that magnificent Basilica. “Ecce Homo,” she whispered in my ears. “Behold this unblemished, paragon phoenix of life.” People posed in front of the Pieta, took selfies with their mobile holders jutting out, smiling, craning their heads toward each other, hugging, pointing to Mary and Jesus in her hands. I wondered if they’d heard the words she whispered in the silence of the Basilica. The agony that was etched in Mary’s eyes was a mere reflection of the beholder’s own knowledge and past experience. Only those who knew her aching story could fathom the anguish that was carved in her outstretched arms as she held her son on her lap. I wondered if my kids would have realized what it meant to hold the weight of a complete human being in one’s hands.

At night, I walked all the way from St. Peter’s Basilica to the Spanish Steps to see Rome in her nightly beauty. On one of the landings between the flights of low steps, the city workers were erecting a grand Christmas tree. They had barred the landing with florescent warning tapes, only permitting people to pass through a narrow rim. Tourists glanced at the giant tree as they trudged up the one hundred and thirty-five steps toward the top of the hill. Rome glittered with her shiny cathedral domes and bejeweled streets. Fifteen years and I still revered Christmas from afar. I still wouldn’t erect a Christmas tree in my house, believing there should be a meaning bound to any ritual we add to our lives. What role does an emblem play for us if it’s hollowed out of the historic connotation it has? What will my children learn from me if I put up a Christmas tree in our living room? Wouldn’t their festivities be a mélange of Christmas and Yalda, amalgamated together, inane and empty of a spirit that can redeem their souls when they are lost?

Fifteen years have passed and I moved from Canada to the United States more than a decade ago. Every year, I take my kids to the Ellipse in front of the White House to show them the National Christmas Tree and the fifty decorated trees that represent each state in the country. The mirth of Christmas has seeped into our lives in a subtle, inappreciable way. We share the joy with the Christians of America at the end of the year. There is so much to learn and admire about the essence that flows through the rituals of this holy celebration. But to strip the meaning from the Christmas tree and adorn the barren branches with gilded ornaments, just to be the same as our neighbors, this is what I refuse to do. Our identity is highlighted by the differences we recognize in one another, by appreciating the agony of Mary marveling at the magnitude of her Son’s sacrifice for humanity, and by realizing the glory of a culture that celebrates the triumph of light over darkness on the longest of nights. The luminous candles on the Christmas tree remind us of the birth of a star and the ruby seeds of the pomegranate we savor at Yalda resemble the glow of life. These symbols convey a lore we believe can walk us out of darkness and lead us to the eternal bliss.

I looked down the Spanish steps at the newly erected Christmas tree and admired its halo of light. A fine snow dusted the emerald pine needles and made it glow. The Christmas tree looked beautiful from afar.

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Mojgan Ghazirad is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  

Student Picks: Bowden, Machado, Egan

Zak Podmore-- As someone who's spent a decade actively seeking out Southwestern authors, I was surprised to find a new writer at the top of a list that rattles around in my sunbaked Utah brainpan this year, a list I like to call "The Best Desert Writers Ever." Even more surprising was that the author, Charles Bowden, was only new to me. He died in 2014 at the age of 69 after a prolific career. I've devoured six of his books so far, all of which deal in varying degrees with violence along the U.S.-Mexico border (think Cormac McCarthy turned journalist).

Easily my favorite is Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America, Bowden's amorphous, genre-defying 1995 masterpiece that slides between reportage, memoir, history, and natural history. In a grinding, lusty tour that takes us from the age of Red Cloud and Sitting Bull to 1960s Tijuana whorehouses, from Argentina’s U.S.-backed Dirty War to the five-day wedding bender of a Mexican drug lord, Bowden explores the concept of “soul-death” with moral outrage, trenchant wit, and plenty of dark humor. It’s a hell of a ride but Bowden is a more than capable guide, whether through skid-row nights or the vast Sonoran wilderness.

K. A. Hamilton-- Released this October, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Machado could not have been more aptly-timed. If 2017 was the year of the “silence breakers,” Machado’s book is about the silence. Her collection of stories exposes the consequences of having a female body so delicately as to leave the experience wholly intact.

In addition to an expert storyteller, Machado is also a weaver of form. One piece is told in the format of an episode guide to Law & Order: SVU, while another instructs the reader on how to adapt the tale into an oral telling, complete with recommendations on voices to use and actions to be taken in front of the audience. At one point she advises: “give a paring knife to the listeners and ask them to cut the tender flap of skin between your index finger and thumb. Afterward, thank them.”

It’s difficult not to feel a visceral connection to the experiences of Machado’s characters. To read Her Body as an open-minded outsider is an act of empathy; from the inside, one of catharsis.

Shawna-Lee Perrin-- I’ve been a little obsessed with Jennifer Egan’s writing this year. Most recently, I read her debut novel, The Invisible Circus, and the most accurate word I have for its effect on me is haunting.

The older sister, Faith, spent her short life chasing and creating magic, but ultimately ended her own life under mysterious circumstances. Her little sister Phoebe has spent the almost-decade between then and where the novel begins being cautious, sad, and socially isolated. Phoebe’s drive to understand her sister’s tragic end propels her to travel Europe solo, going where Faith went, seeking out her final journeys.

Egan depicts two very different experiences of coming-of-age: Faith’s insatiable lust for adventure and dramatic change couldn’t survive adulthood, while Phoebe’s extreme caution and nostalgia for her own past threatened to lock her away from the world forever. As Phoebe discovers truths about her sister and the people who loved her, the romanticism is yanked away; at first, this unfiltered view of her past is blinding, but as her vision adjusts, she can finally clearly see her way forward. Both paths toward adulthood are painful and dangerous, and Egan depicts both in vivid color.

Looking

by Ashley Bales

I was at my least constrained on the subway. My mother would drop me at the Wonderland Blue Line stop and my high school’s van picked me up at the end of the Red Line. In between, I was as physically and socially liberated as I’d ever been. I was 14 and getting my first taste of the freedoms that would come with adulthood.

It was that critical moment of early adolescence when you begin to see yourself as socially independent from the nurturing institutions of family and school that up to that point have allowed you to move through the world without being aware of it.  And thus the conflicts of adolescence are born. These same social institutions are not ready to give up their control, while the adolescent’s burgeoning independence stretches their limits.

I would put on my headphones—riled by the anger and energy of early aughts metal and grunge—and stare at people. I thought I was challenging them, judging their meek adult choices. They wouldn’t even return my glance, or would look away. I cherished those averted eyes like victories; sure I’d won something in the exchange. Now, if I picture myself then, my stares would have looked only like a child’s: unselfconscious and ignorant of social norms. I was challenging no one, except perhaps myself—to engage with the world in the meekest way I could, by looking. 

But at some point between 14 and 15, something changed. Sometimes, not always, perhaps not even often, but often enough, men looked back. When they did, my vulnerability was unquestionable, even to myself. I stopped looking.

I was a late bloomer. Apply that as broadly as you like. At 15 I’d only just gotten my first period and was not yet sufficiently endowed to understand the benefit of bras. What changed my stares from being a child’s to an adolescent’s was all in the styling. I’d made timid inquiries into my peer’s social graces and begun putting mascara in my eyebrows, along with anywhere else that seemed appropriate.

The first time a stranger told me to smile I was transferring at South Station. I smiled, surprised to feel seen. The same man would tell me to smile repeatedly over the next year and I learned not to look at him.

The only thing unique about this story is perhaps the degree of social freedom I felt possible at 14. A more socially adept 14 year old, one better enculturated into the expectations of girlhood, would not have been so surprised at the attention. And even for me, it was a lesson quickly learned--my desire to stand out tempered by a growing understanding of what it meant to be seen. 

That same year I had my first kiss, my first boyfriend, had sex for the first time and none of it was as empowering as riding the subway and looking freely at the world around me.

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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.