Beside Each Other

by Arun Chittur

Three months ago, our office manager mounted a 60-inch television on the back wall of our small cubicle farm. It received a lackluster reception and inconsistent use in its first couple weeks. Then the Olympics started.

“What country is he from?” Jeremy shouted, half-hidden behind his cubicle wall. The office was glued to a broadcast of men’s biathlon, the fifteen-kilometer “pursuit” event.

“I don’t think it matters!” Mike shouted back, his eyes locked on the screen.

Fifteen men on skis and clad in a rainbow’s worth of skin-tight suits fought through a series of snowy embankments and shooting stops. If an athlete missed one of the five targets at a stop, they detoured onto a penalty track, extending their race distance. The grueling event no doubt required years of dedicated training. The presumptive frontrunner and next four competitors all hailed from Northern Europe. In fact there wasn’t an American in the field. And yet my office of red-blooded, American men were rapt with attention.

The Olympics, both summer and winter, symbolize the world’s potential to wrap itself in a common experience at the expense of political conflict and protracted spats that otherwise define us. The Pyeongchang games served to test the world’s resolve to support the athletes despite tension that had developed between the United States and North Korea, not to mention between the United States and several other nations, on a host of issues. Anticipation intensified when South Korea announced a joint women’s hockey team with the North and its intent to march under a single, unified Korean flag. Though some denounced South Korean officials for weakness in the face of Kim Jong-un’s “charm offensive” and incurring risk to the South’s medal chances, South Korean President Moon Jae-in defended the decision as a significant step toward improved inter-Korean relations. It is hopeful that such steps can be taken despite a traumatic history.

I’ve been watching the Olympics for a long time. In 2008, I watched Michael Phelps dominate swimmers in Beijing’s luminescent Water Cube. As a high school track runner in 2000, I followed the Olympic marathon more closely than the Super Bowl. When the 1996 games brought Olympians to the Deep South, where I grew up, my parents took me to the soccer opening qualifier between the U.S. and Argentina in Birmingham. The U.S. lost, but most of the fun came from seeing hundreds of national flags crammed together in the same stadium famous for hosting sacred Alabama-Auburn football games. I love these experiences, seeing the potential we have to care for others who share neither a language nor a national origin. So how do the Olympics seem to sew together, albeit temporarily, fissures that are intractable before and after? What is it that makes us forget our distrust of others to focus instead on  sports we’d never hear of except during those magical three weeks?

I don’t know, but I have a guess. It’s the same reason President George W. Bush received applause in a Democrat-dominated New York shortly after 9/11, standing in Yankee Stadium. It’s why NFL fans are divided over the display of political expression before and during games. And it’s the same reason my hometown of Columbus, Ohio is suing to keep Major League Soccer’s inaugural team from moving to Texas. It’s the power of sport. Not one, but all of them. Competition predicated on a skill honed through deliberate action.

Professional athletes may attribute their success to talent, but even the talented supplement their luck with practice to reinforce skills necessary for long-term success. Men and women of all colors and dimensions practice and compete alongside each other in a variety of sports. College football, a religion around the country, includes players from Hawaii and Africa. It’s normal in Major League Baseball for fans to cheer a Domincan Spanish-speaker as much as a native English-speaker from Indiana who’s never owned a passport. Sports brings out the best in our competitive nature, something that leads many of us to negate personal biases and fears that rule our lives. The effect is magnified when the Olympics come back around, uniting fans not around a city or region but worldwide. Each country roots for its own but you’ll just as easily find spectators rooting for another country’s athlete because of their story, how many Olympics they’ve attended, or simply because they’re fun to watch. Which leads to another question: what prevents us from harnessing this magic—that is so easily attainable, even predictable—the rest of the time? Why is it normal that we’ll return to our corners and raise our defenses as soon as the torch is extinguished or the clock reaches zero?

Therein lies the problem.  The community we are able to create around the Olympics is always within our potential irrespective of the divisions that came before.  Yet we seem to choose not to allow such a community to exist at other times.  It must then be a choice.  We root for our favorite professional athletes on one night then demonize their entire race the next morning.  I believe we can control these impulses.  We can change them.

The ‘stress’ we feel watching our team on the cusp of a championship or playing its arch rival isn’t like other stress, and doesn’t compare with outright fear.  Win or lose, everyone walks away having represented their communities well.  We love watching sports, communing over food and games and making plans to do it again.  When we fall victim to old biases—racial biases—we allow ourselves to be afraid.  We allow fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar, to get the better of a rational mind and override impulses that guide us through sporting events.  We allow a news story or political speech to affect how we see one another, to overtake the power of our shared humanity.  Life must be about the lives we all hope to live together, not the lives we hope to live in spite of each other.  Life must be about what we can do beside each other.

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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: Everett, Zumas

Phil Lemos-- Once upon a time, a woman named Portia Poitier bore a son, and not wanting him to be confused with an acting icon, she named him Not Sidney Poitier. So begins the Percival Everett novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier, as well as the life of the titular character. 

It’s not long before Not Sidney’s mother dies, and a secret is revealed—despite residing in lower-middle-class Los Angeles, she owned a fortune in stock from Turner Broadcasting Group, which draws interest from Ted Turner himself, who adopts Not Sidney. As the fictitious memoir evolves, Not Sidney finds himself not only passing for the famous actor’s doppelganger, but also finding himself in plights absurdly similar to situations Poitier’s characters faced in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night and Lilies in the Field.

The novel’s in-joke is, inevitably, doomed to get tired fast – every time Not Sidney introduces himself to a new character, a dialogue as familiar as an Abbott & Costello routine erupts. That said, as a study in absurdist satire, sharp dialogue, and a critique of just how our own identities are informed, I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a worthy and hilarious read.

Margaret McNellis-- Red Clocks by Leni Zumas has been compared to Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale for its dystopian elements, particularly concerning reproductive rights. Red Clocks is especially chilling because it could be possible in the near future. The world Zumas builds is not so different from our own, with differences only in policy—except those differences have both broad and deep consequences. Zumas masterfully presents this world through the eyes of four main characters—five if you count the story within a story.

While the first fifty pages or so can be challenging, this book is worth sticking with, and at that point, it gets easier to connect with the many characters’ points-of-view as their lives begin to intersect in both comfortably predictable and surprising ways. With as many chilling moments as there are heartwarming moments, Zumas crafts a story that presents an America so different, and yet so similar, to our own contemporary nation.

He Liked Cheese

by Josh Zinn

A friend of mine died last month.

Truth be told, he wasn’t “mine” so much as he was tangential––one of my husband’s best friends whom, over the eight years we’d known one another, I’d grown to care for immensely.

He passed away unexpectedly, in that sudden, numbing, “should-we-cancel-tonight’s-dinner-party?” fashion where processing the shock of what’s happened feels insurmountable, so the easiest thing to do is tuck the pain away and stay on track with the day’s agenda: buy wine, make sure we get those garlic n’ herb crackers everyone likes, and try (in vain) to get all the dog hair off the couch before guests arrives. Fill the hole, rinse, repeat. It’s not that you don’t care. It’s that you care too much to accept part of your life is now bound to a path which ends in sadness.

That evening, seated amidst baguettes, brie, and the beginnings of bereavement, those of us who’d known him began asking the how’s and why’s which always come in these times. Could any of us have stopped it? Had we let him down? Was he at peace when it happened or, god forbid, was he scared? Of course, no one knew for certain––we weren’t questioning with the expectation anyone had answers––but that didn’t curb our casual speculation between bites of muenster and sips of Chablis. Like Trump, Game of Thrones, and impending summer weddings, the mystery surrounding our friend’s abrupt demise––this horrible, tragic, raw thing all of us had internalized but no one seemed prepared to deal with––became yet another topic to discuss over finger foods. As big as our collective pain was, turning him into small-talk was the best anyone could muster.

I’m no stranger to death, but death never stops feeling strange to me. Over the past decade I’ve lost my mother, grandmother, uncles, as well as several good friends––at least one a year for the past five (but who’s counting?) Some of their exits have been peaceful and expected. Others, jarring enough I’ve since become conditioned to answer every phone call I receive with trepidation, fearful the frog now permanently lodged in my throat will leap forth the moment I’m told to prepare for another season of sorrow. If we’re talking semantics, then, yes: like everyone else in this world, I know death eventually awaits me. That’s fine; it’s part of the process. What bothers me is that, in the here and now, I’ve become far too used to waiting on it.

No one told me this part about growing up––that life inevitably settles into one long, dragged-out goodbye. When I was a kid and even well into adulthood, I can recall cheerfully bragging, “I’ve never known anyone who’s died!” as if having been spared the experience of grief was proof of my own specialness. Though I’m sure, at the time, I believed I was merely hunting for facts to stand out in the crowd, in hindsight I can’t help but wonder if somehow there was a sense of what was to come: an avalanche of loss ready to bury the people I love six feet under. I can’t help but question whether the universe was trying to tell me to take stock of my life, saying, “Hey, kid. Yeah, these people may piss you off, but try to enjoy them. This ain’t gonna last.”

That’s what death does. It makes us question every moment, every interaction we’ve had with someone, leaving us asking, “Was it enough? Was I enough?” Death funnels voices into one-sided conversations––our arguments and apologies falling on the deafest of ears––where the only thing we can be resolute about is our perpetual lack of resolution. It is a destroyer, a haunter, a gatherer of memory, and, aside from being loved, it is the single most overwhelming and powerful force I have ever encountered. In the short span of ten years, death has reshaped my life, decimating my sense of security and self, then taunting me to rebuild in spite of. Have no doubt, my heart still runs. Years of goodbyes, however, have made sure it runs with a limp.

“I like cheese.” If you were to look at our friend’s Facebook profile, those are some of the first words you’d see. Sitting around the table that sad February night, stuffing faces to make up for our loss for words, I don’t think it was lost on any of us that, in our own pasteurized and aged-for-six-months way, we were paying tribute to the gem we’d lost. Like all those loved ones who’d left us along the way, we quietly wondered to ourselves how our world would go on without them. That was the rub, though: we still had our lifetimes to figure it out.

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Josh Zinn is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  Currently, he is working on a collection of comedic, autobiographical stories about mental illness.

Holding Hands

by Mike Helsher

Somehow I mustered the courage to ask out the prettiest girl in my eighth-grade class. Dianne was her name. She had the fancy pixie haircut that was popular in the early 70s, and big—and I do mean big, almost anime-sized—eyes. Perhaps my memory is a little tainted in this regard, like it was about the size of some of the fish I caught at the local pond back then. But anyway, I chased her through the playground after school, cornered her and yelled, “Will you go out with me?”

 “Yes!” she screamed, and then bolted away. 

A four-year relationship grew out of that oh-so-romantic beginning.

For our first date, we agreed to meet in the woods near a pond to go ice skating. It was a biting-cold day and the trail was icy. Bare white birch trees were watching me with what looked like thousands of black eyes peering from their peeling trunks as I clapped and slid along the trail in my flat-soled penny loafers. Nervous, I had forgotten to put on my snow boots before I left home. Or maybe I wanted to look fancy in my nice shoes. Either way, it was a bad choice. I made my way along the trail with arms hung out from my sides for balance, slipping and sliding, but didn’t fall. I was relieved to stop at a trail intersection and watch, as Dianne walked steadily toward me from the other direction, confident in her stride with her big round eyes, an enormous white pompom bouncing atop a ski-hat, a multi-colored plaid wool overcoat, and white figure skates slung over her shoulder.

“You better not try anything or I’ll cut you with my skates,” she said.

Sparkling white teeth gleamed from a crooked, mischievous smile. But the only thing I wanted to try in that moment was to not fall on my ass. Even though I was wearing the stupid shoes, up to that point, I could keep my feet on the ground. But now, in her presence, they just whipped right out from under me. My tailbone hit hard on the ice. Her laughter echoed through the bare birch trees that surrounded us, still watching. I squelched the pain—instilled manly pride has its benefits, I guess. A dopey, not-so-debilitating kind of shame ran through me as I scrambled to my feet. But before we could get to the shore of the pond, we had to descend down an icy hill. We made it about a hundred feet and whoosh, I fell again. This time I just lay there on a bed of slushy footprints that had frozen solid, as she belly-laughed at me. I slid and wobbled down the icy hill in my stupid, shiny black shoes with a penny sewn in the tongue, and fell a few more times before we reached the bottom.

We sat on a fallen tree by the shore of Round Pond to put our frozen skates on. We were in the middle of a cove on the back side of the pond, far away from the crowds that would gather out near the pump house on the other side; where the Haverhill Massachusetts Fire Department would sometimes hose the ice down to create a new, glossy-smooth surface. Skates laced, we cautiously glided out to the middle of the cove. Getting used to the smooth flow of ice skating takes a while, especially when you’ve just stuck your feet into what feels like two blocks of ice.

Now it was her turn to fall. She pushed hard a few times with the spiky toes of her figure skates, leaned to one side, spread her arms out like a gliding, turning seagull, flapped her mittens, and yelled, “watch me turrrrrrn!”  Her legs swooped out in front of her. Boom, her butt bounced onto the hard ice. She didn’t have any instilled manly pride so she yowled loud and clear across the pond. There was a little bit of giggle in her tone, though, which made me laugh. She looked up at me with the anime eyes and a puckered side-pout. I helped her up. By that time I had been playing hockey for four years so my skating skills were more than good. And, though still a little stiff from the cold, my feet were warming up.

“Well, you skate way better than you walk,” she said.

I tried to help her to stand up, but it was like she had forgotten how to skate. I had my arms under hers. She wrapped her arms around my neck and I held her up as best I could, but her legs kept dropping out from under her. Eventually, she found her balance, and then pushed away from me.

At that point, I was overtaken by the same impulse I had on the day I asked her out. I darted after her. She skated away screaming and cawing like it was her first ride on a rollercoaster. I got a hold of one of her arms, swung her around, launched her off at high speed, and laughed as she did the flapping chicken thing with her mittens again, wobbling, but not falling this time. She skated back to me and we took turns swinging and launching each other. My toes were tingling back to life. I could feel my body cracking a sweat under my long-johns after a while. Over and over again we swung and launched each other until we were huffing out clouds of frosty breath.  

Worn out, we circled slowly, moving closer. And before I knew it, there we were, alone in the secluded cove on the back side of the pond far away from the crowd, just the two of us cruising around on skates together—holding hands.

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

Thoughts on the Hijab on International Women's Day

by Mojgan Ghazirad

Cool breezes of early fall flapped the olive curtains behind him. We were sitting in front of each other in an empty classroom, a desk full of books separating the two of us. I felt nervous about the first job interview of my life. I had recently graduated from high school and Seyed was interviewing me for a teaching position in my own high school. A young radical Islamist in his mid-twenties, he recruited new teachers for the school.

With his quasi-hieroglyphic handwriting, Seyed added a few more books to the long list he’d prepared and handed the paper to me.  He capped his royal blue ink pen with a sharp click and settled back with crossed hands in his seat. He glared at me through his square-framed glasses, waiting to hear something in the final minutes of the interview. I browsed the list. Half of the titles on the list were in Arabic. I wondered how he expected an eighteen-year-old Persian girl to read a complex text in Arabic. I stammered a thank you for the comprehensive list, hoping that would end the uncomfortable encounter.

Seyed took a deep breath when he noticed my unwillingness to ask a question and said, “There is something else, I’d like to say before you leave.”  He brushed the black beard on his protruding chin. “I’ve heard some of your friends who’d been accepted to teach are still appearing without hijab in social gatherings. Don’t you think it’s an act of hypocrisy to behave like a good Muslim in school and appear different in private meetings?”

I wasn’t sure what to answer, but I knew exactly why he was alluding to hijab in his speech: I didn’t wear any type of hijab at home or at friendly gatherings. I liked painting my nails with faint nail colors and wearing colorful scarfs out of school. Nobody wore hijab inside the house in my family and it never occurred to me I needed to cover my hair in front of my male cousins. To me, hijab was the compulsory veil we had to wear in the streets.

On my way home, I got off the metro bus three stations before my usual bus stop. Walking had become the habit of stressful days. I breathed out the anxious thoughts as I trod home through Haft Hose Park. The pines in the park, covered with pinpoint leaves, blushed among the deciduous trees. Plane trees, crouching with their bare boughs, looked homely in that picturesque beauty. I pondered the conversations we’d had during the interview. I wasn’t worried about getting the teaching position at the school. It was supposed to be a volunteer job before I started medical school. What worried me was the notion of hypocrisy in his speech. Was I not a true believer because I didn’t wear hijab?

After the interview, I decided to cover my hair in every circumstance. Seyed’s words had a huge impact on me. I trusted the man whom I believed to be an Islamic scholar. I threw away all my pink and ivory nail colors and wore black scarves everywhere, religiously. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite in my heart. I started to believe a Muslim woman should attire herself in public the same as she appears during her prayer to Allah: clothed all over her body. I felt if my hair was uncovered and visible to strange men, I was committing a sin. I didn’t wear hijab because of the tradition that ran in my family. I chose to observe hijab because of the trust I had in the words of the scholars who established my system of beliefs.

The uncoupling of hijab from my moral ethics happened years after living outside Iran. Erasing hijab from the ideology I was brought up with was not easy, like taking a central pillar out of a high-rise building. It took me many years to uproot the tenets that were sewn into my mind about hijab and to realize wearing a scarf had nothing to do with being a devout Muslim or a good human being.

Today, on international women’s day, I think about the movement started a few months ago by Iranian women who live inside Iran. The Girls of Revolution Street are the women who stand on telecom posts or benches in busy streets, take their scarves off and flag them on a stick in protest to compulsory hijab. Almost all of them have been arrested for breaking the law and appearing scarf-less in public. Aside from their bravery and innovation in protest, they demonstrate the fundamental failure of a government that has struggled to rule Iranian women for many years.

The culture of hijab was endorsed and emphasized in Iran after the Islamic Revolution, and what used to be a tradition in some families, ended up becoming propaganda for the new government. For four decades, the Islamic scholars of the Republic have enshrined hijab as the most sacred value a woman could achieve in her lifetime, making her feel guilty and sinful about uncovering her hair in public. But The Girls of Revolution Street prove how deeply a government-backed doctrine has plunged into bankruptcy.

As an Iranian woman who has wrestled with the concept of hijab for many years, I admire The Girls of Revolution Street not only for their bravery, but also for their ability to withstand the stifling pressure the Islamic Republic has put on them to impose its doctrine. They are the embodiment of hope and bravery for many Iranian women like me. They have resisted four decades of ideological hammering that wants to forge them into law-abiding, hijab-observing citizens. I envy them because they never see themselves as hypocrites. They are sincere in their protest and the protest reveals their honesty, in their desires and their beliefs. These girls have plucked hijab out of the moral values of Iranian women, showing to the world that what matters most to them is not wearing a piece of cloth on their head, but the freedom to choose.

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

Belong Here

by Curtis Graham

I smoke.

Brakes scream nearby with the intensity and duration of an Incoming.

An incoming what, I can’t say. I’ve never been bombed, not personally, not directly.

I just know it when I hear it

And I know I look too long. I peer, even after it’s just brakes again.

I have no right to write about some things.

A cigarette gives you enough time to think about nothing and everything.

There is a quiet waiting, and at the same time, a coming about.

I consider the language I’ll use to write this poem.

The thing is not even a thing, but I catch hurled accusations like a grenade.

Posturing and pretension.

I throw the grenade to myself

From my one hand to my other.

Look here, feel me—a toss.

Stop looking, leave me—a catch.

I left the side door propped, to let myself in.

Instead I walk around front, where other people go. I fish my keys and hover the fob over the red eye.

It buzzes and clangs and spits the door open just enough

For me to walk in

Like I’m a part of something.

Like I belong here.

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

On the perils of not having a mobile banking app

by Phil Lemos

A couple weeks ago I started a new job.  When I was in the HR office signing reams of paperwork, including a direct deposit pay sheet, they told me for the first pay cycle I might receive a paper check.

This morning I trudge downstairs to check the mail and see, as predicted, a check from my employer.  I glance at the grey skies outside.  The check, of course, would arrive on a morning when we’re expecting a foot of snow. Honestly, I’d rather stay holed up in my apartment.  But the only thing I want less than being out and about during a snowpocalypse is to have a paper check lying around, undeposited.  The nearest branch of my bank is about 10 minutes away. I make a dash for it. 

I walk into the branch, endorse the back of the check and walk up to the teller.  Even in the era of automatic bank transfers, it seems like such a simple task.  Sign, hand over, receive deposit receipt.  In and out.

There are three people in line in front of me, engaged in various transactions and running into various snags in the process, which lengthens my wait time.  After 10 minutes, I draw Sasha in the bank teller window lottery.  Sasha looks at the check, asks me a couple of questions, glances at the computer screen in front of her, and I think I’m on my way when she asks:

“It appears you don’t have our mobile check deposit app,” Sasha says.

Yeah…so what?  I’m here.  It appears I don’t need it right now.

“If you had it, you could take a picture of your check and deposit it electronically,” she continues.

I don’t say anything.  All I want to do is deposit this check and get home before the roads become too slick.  I look behind me, out the window, and I see the first snowflakes begin to fall.

“I’ll go print the form out so we can set it up for you,” Sasha says.

“Honestly,” I say, “I just want to deposit this and leave before the storm hits.”

“Oh, no, it’ll be really quick.  I’ll be right back.”

“I SAID….”

Sasha freezes.  The teller in the other window, stops in the middle of her transaction to look at me.  The other customer, an older lady who clearly also doesn’t have the mobile app but isn’t being trolled about it, looks at me, petrified, as if thinking, “This is how my life ends.”  Someone who appears to be a branch manager type, who had just emerged from an office, freezes in place.

I glance upward and, for the first time, notice that I’m also wearing a winter hat and, inexplicably for such a gloomy day, sunglasses that I forgot to remove upon entrance as per bank branch protocol.  

“Is everything OK?” the other teller asks.

I lower my voice slightly. 

“I said…I want to deposit this and go home before the snow gets out of control.  We can sign me up another time.”

Sasha forgets about setting me up with that app.  She completes the transaction and hands me a deposit slip.  Nobody in the building has uttered a word since I spoke.  “Thank you,” I say, as I leave the branch.

I’ve weaponized my voice many times before.  My voice carries, and I have a way of treating every life obstacle, such as maintaining proper work flow, or impending snow, like a crisis-level event.  At my old warehouse job, I yelled so loudly the entire building could hear, and was asked on more than one occasion if I have Viking blood in me. This weaponization is not something I’m necessarily proud of, and I’ve had uncomfortable meetings with everyone from my bosses to HR to discuss it.

I get home, safely sheltered before the snow slickens the road.  A couple of days later I receive an email.

“As a valued customer of The Bank, your feedback is vital to help us improve the services we provide. You are invited to participate in a brief online survey regarding your recent visit.”

I rate my recent interaction with Sasha with all 5’s (“indispensable service”).  Two days ago, I would’ve hit the radio buttons on the opposite end of the spectrum.  But I’ve had time to think about how I conducted myself.

Also, I really need to download that mobile banking app.

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

Student Picks: Wasserman, Curtis

K. A. Hamilton-- Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire is the story of teenagers struggling to reclaim their identities from the grips of small town life. The central character is at once a daughter, an outcast, and a rebel, and impossible to refer to by name without taking sides. She is “Hannah,” “Dex,” or “Hannah Dexter,” depending on who you ask, and the prime battleground on which Kurt Cobain-worshipping Lacey and popular Everygirl Nikki wage their intimate culture war.

To read Girls on Fire is to experience the cautionary tale firsthand. Wasserman presents raw teenage realities a la carte, free of the morality-story garnish so commonly heard on the news. With startlingly clear technique, she humanizes figures we’re so often warned not to empathize with. By keeping close, readers are allowed to let go of the “why” just long enough to remember the “why not,” and maybe even recall “how good it felt to burn.”

Jemiscoe Chambers-Black-- We’ve all heard that “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” and my literary mind feels we should turn to literature for this history. There is no better book for that than The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis.

It follows the Watsons, who make their way from Flint, Michigan to Birmingham, Alabama because their son has been getting into trouble, and his parents think staying with his grandmother may be the change he needs. But 1963 is a turbulent time in the South, and Curtis weaves fiction with the historical event of the September 15th, 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. The event in this book is almost 55 years old, but racial tension still exists, and places that should feel sacred or safe, are instead places where children are met with fear, hate, and violence.

If you’re a parent, read this with your children. If you’re a teacher, share this with your students. If you’re neither, but a human, read it anyway. Start the conversation that Curtis sparked: one that asks how we can change and make sure that violence is not so easily accessible, especially when our children are the target.

As a woman

by K. A. Hamilton

The other day, a colleague asked if I could give feedback on some of his writing. I said I'd be honored, and meant it; solicitation of opinion means a lot to me, especially from other writers. But then he became uncharacteristically quiet, muttering something about characters.... voice… point of view... and how he'd really like to get my opinion of it as a woman.

Ah.

If you're a female who is even vaguely associated with books, you've probably been there. It's a question oft-accompanied by a hesitant tone and downturned (but eager) eyes. I think most writers intuit it as an inherently impolite query, and they're not wrong. It's a little like inviting someone out for a beer, or a first date, or any other activity where interpersonal boundaries are meant to come down. Beta-reading is a situation that requires vulnerability of both the ask-er and the ask-ee.

Why? Because it’s a request for review of content, not craft, which can reveal elephant-sized rifts in worldview. Creative writers know this all too well, and have developed an entire pedagogy to avoid being overly-direct. Instructors are taught to employ the “sandwich method,” swaddling criticism in twice the compliments. In workshops, we blind ourselves to everything but technique – and rightfully so. An honest assessment of “likeability” could only end in bloodshed.

Yet sugar-coating the female (or any other target group) experience is counter-productive, for both author and reviewer. So what can you do when asked? Options include a) saying “no,” b) sidestepping and defaulting to craft, or c) changing your number and never showing your face in town again. But about option d): “yes?” Then it’s time to get personal.

In an honest review, I feel some disclaimers are needed. First is a notice to the writer: in this realm, there is more value in candor than encouragement. This lets them know that the breach of code is made with their growth in mind. The second is a big fat reminder that your feedback is rooted in your own experiences only, and does not represent that of every member of your gender/race/orientation/fill-in-the-blank. (I’ve had times when I felt I was being asked for permission, or to supply some kind of “kid-tested, mother-approved” checkbox. Not only would I have withheld it in those cases, but it was also never mine to give.)

But what if you’re the one soliciting this sort of feedback? You’re reading this blog post and now it all just seems so complicated and awkward… should you even ask? My answer is an emphatic yes. However, I have some equally-urgent disclaimers for you. First, consider who you’re asking. Do they seem comfortable talking about their beliefs in your company? Are they a peer on even footing, who is capable of declining? Do you think you’d have fun getting a beer together? If the answer to all of these is “yes,” then you have yourself a candidate.

But the work doesn’t end there. The next step is listening. When you received feedback, keep this in mind: if your beta-reader says things that are difficult to hear, they almost certainly know it and are trusting you not to freak out. Congrats, you’re on your way to a beautiful friendship. If something is hard to take and you absolutely must say something to the contrary… don’t. Bite your tongue and say “thank you” instead. Later, after you’ve had some time to think about it, find a way to phrase it as an open question (bonus points if you research the answer on your own time). You may be surprised at what you learn. Art imitates life, and there is much in the world to be critical of. Your beta-reader does not have the luxury of compartmentalizing literature and day-to-day experience, because the two often perpetuate one another. Whatever they say, don’t take it personally. But do try to internalize it.

I wrote three full pages of feedback for my colleague: two “as a writer” and one “as a woman.” The more I reviewed according to my experiences, the closer I got to revealing myself not just as a woman, but as… me. I sent it on a Sunday, crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t make Monday awkward. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. But we’re opting for coffee instead of beer.

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

My Life as a Serial Linguist

by Eric Beebe

This week, I’ll leave for Spain to visit my sister on her semester abroad. She took French in high school, and I took Spanish, so the months leading up to her trip were filled with half-hearted agreements to compete with each other on Duolingo for supremacy. She upheld at least her end of the bargain, but I continued a shaky track record in the study of foreign languages.

I studied Spanish in high school to look well-rounded on college apps, the same reason I tolerated three seasons of football and volunteered to direct traffic at a Republican Party cookout my grandpa helped organize. German had been my real interest, but it wasn’t offered. So I undertook Spanish with all the effort a disinterested teen pressured to look good on paper could muster, taking three years before I would’ve had to sign up for AP and actually attempt fluency. I was content with my limited use of it in things like making Xbox gamertags (xOSO FUERTEx) and masking anxieties in social interactions (because sometimes hola is just so much easier than hello).

My lack of dedication felt vindicated when the first country I traveled to out of high school was Poland. I didn’t bother to learn much Polish either before my month there. What I did learn, thanks to a handbook my uncle bought me, was how to say “kiss me” (pocałuj mnie) and “do you want a massage?” (czy zrobić ci masaż), my uses of which were limited to shouting in my host-brother’s friend’s back yard after taking twelve–plus shots at his house party, before I started puking on a tree. I did pick up the basic yes, no, excuse me, etc. and familiarized myself with their phonetics, but training myself to recognize “dz” as “j,” “j” as “y,” “y” as “i,” “i” as “ee,” and so on was far from communication. I entertained thoughts of learning Polish and practicing online with my new friends to catch up after I left, until I actually left and felt no more motivated than I had for Spanish.

The problem I saw was I had no inherent link to either language. German had interested me because of my German/Nordic lineage, but I’d heard of no Polish relatives, and the only Spaniard I knew of in our family tree was Valeriano “The Butcher” Weyler, who’d earned his moniker using concentration camps to try quelling Cuban rebels in the 1890s—not exactly the kind of relation I wanted to embody. So come sophomore year of college, I asked my parents for books on Old Norse for Christmas, and the following summer I sought out a world expert on the subject for advice on teaching myself. I spent a day and a half with my sources and copious snacks—long enough to learn novelties like how the transition from þing ("meeting") to “thing” gave the phrase “I have a… thing then” meaning and cognates like land (“land”) and bok (“book”). Then I burnt out, around the same time I must have run out of Girl-Scout Cookies, and barely touched the material again.

But that fall, I felt my first great pull to Spanish when my lit seminar spent a week covering Pablo Neruda, with special attention to faults in translations of his work. A self-proclaimed hopeless romantic, I obsessed over his Cien sonetos de amor. My professor invited someone to try reading one poem in the original Spanish, so—buzzed on pre-class whisky and thinking Spanish classes from four years back would help—I volunteered. He stopped me, rightly, after the first line to save me from further embarrassment. I hated myself for losing so much of my Spanish I couldn’t even stumble through, and I told myself then I’d relearn Spanish. But Austria got in the way.

I spent the following spring and summer priming myself on German for a semester in Vienna. Once I got there, I was proud to be counted among the advanced students in my German class—for beginners. Even so, by the end of the term I felt steamrolled by the curriculum. When first ordered, “Ich möchte ein Weihenstephaner, bitte,” at what would become my favorite bar, I felt relief when the bartender shouted back in a thick Liverpool accent, “I don’t speak fucking German! Say it in English.” Still, I pestered the locals I befriended with drunken attempts at stringing sentences together, and, by the morning of my flight home, I was thankful to have picked up enough that my Turkish taxi driver and I could find a common-ish tongue.

After college, I briefly entered a daily regimen of German, Spanish, and Polish practice back-to-back but found only slightly more success with that than I had with Old Norse. This has remained true to the present. So has my desire to return to each, flawed as it may be. As my visit to Spain nears, I wonder what effect it will have on me. I can hope to arrive and be caught up in the hum of Spanish life, coaxed all the more by whatever fragments of its language still shelter in my brain. I can hope they’ll come out to breathe, even if it takes a little booze or they’re met with insistence that the locals’ English is better. I can hope I’ll choose to learn all over again.

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Eric Beebe is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He currently works as a substitute teacher for grades K–12 in New Hampshire.

Faculty Picks: Reed

Justin Taylor-- Generally speaking, I always advocate for more poetry in the prose writer's reading diet. It is a great way to learn the weight of words, the value of lines. Even relatively expansive or dense poetry still has the virtue of concision, and most important of all it reminds us that there are other forms of logic and progression than simply, What happens next? Lately, I've been reading Indecency, Justin Phillip Reed's debut collection, which is about to be brand-new from Coffee House Press. In the words of Dawn Lundy Martin, "Reed's deft craft is so rare, so precise, and driven by language whose surface is texture like teeth, that it seems like freed speech into the ache of repressive histories, white gazes, and uninvited invasions." I find myself very drawn to this idea of "freed speech": how can we liberate our language from the bondage of cliched usage, lazy thinking, and harmful or retrograde presumptions--and aren't these really three ways of saying the same thing? Reed's poems are fierce and fast-moving. They are searching and raw. "what question / does the self ask at the body's behest / that time won't wring from the body itself?" he asks in "Performing a Warped Masculinity en Route to the Metro.” 

In "A Statement from No One, Incorporated," the poem's epigraph is granted unusual placement: above its title. The line is: "what is it when a death is ruled a homicide but no one is responsible for it" and it was written by the essayist Hanif Abdurraqib in response to the risible Kafkan determination by Baltimore officials that Freddie Gray, who died of injuries sustained on a so-called "rough ride" in a police van, was the victim of a homicide, but that no particular person was responsible for committing it. This is, of course, both a legal and moral impossibility. In the poem, the responsible non-entity is “incorporated”, i.e. made real, though still not human, since--despite dubious claims to the contrary--corporations are not people. Reed’s corporate entity, then, is an infernal creation—embodied but having no particular body, and therefore no locus of humanity, since whatever else we are, we are our bodies first and finally. The thing speaks in a bloodless collective voice; whining, "We are not responsible. We have not / the capacity to respond, cannot take / your call, are not obliged." Later, it ponderously intones that "We need to have a deeper dialogue / about the need for deeper dialogue[.]" 

But it would be a mistake, in heeding Reed's outrage and his sense of urgency (and heed it we should) to hurry past the beauty in these poems, of which there is plenty to be found: potent word play, intricate rhyme, and stray lines like "a smeared sweet on his cheek in the parenthesis of a grin" or "the dense streets clapped into a quick-descended stillness." Kadijah Queen says rightly of Reed's work that, "there is no separation of sound from the language it travels in, from the body that produces it, from the experience that evokes it." Indecency includes many poems in traditional structure, right alongside radical formal innovations. There are brief prose poems floating in oceans white space--"(in which all this white is my gaze)" he writes wryly--and work that extends the tradition of concrete poetry. "Portrait with Stiff Upper Lip", which I've taken a picture of and have included below, simply cannot be read "normally." The sculptural design forces our eye to move in directions to which we are unaccustomed to moving over the printed page: up instead of down, for example, or back and forth instead of one and done. You have to "read" it the way you would a piece of visual art, which, as Reed’s title makes clear, is part of his point. Whether you're looking to discover a new writer, some wild new approaches to style, or you just want to get more poetry into your reading life, I recommend Indecency. 

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

by Danielle Service

When I was ten I made friends with two grey mice living in the cockpit of the well-weathered 1972 Sunfish Sailboat my parents stored under their camp in Millsfield, New Hampshire, thirty miles from the Canadian border. The camp had no electricity and stood on log poles. I stumbled on said mice by accident, while hiding from my brothers’ squabbling and roughhousing. The whoomp-whoomp of the boys’ footsteps echoed above my head as I whispered “hello mice”. They were my buddies.

Three days of consecutive visits and we reached an understanding. Then my dad pulled out the blue-and-yellow Sunfish sail and caught me whispering to vermin amid the spiderwebs.

“They’ll infect the camp,” he said. “You could get sick.” I protested. Cried. Ran into the woods as Dad pulled my mice by their tails from the cockpit. I turned back once and saw Dad fling them into Millsfield Pond. Horrified, I watched them sail through the air in perfect arcs toward the water. As my sobs caught up to my legs running away, my youngest stepbrother called out: “That’s life, Danielle!”

The thing I have never been able to reconcile about this story is that everyone in it is right.

My father was right: the mice were vermin.

I was right: the mice were my friends.

My stepbrother was right: Death is life. We kill to live. And – though mice aren’t food – we kill to eat. But I have not made easy terms with this.

I grew up in a family of hunters who respected animal life enough to pursue them in their natural habitat on honest terms. People at school wrinkled their noses at the dead deer hanging in our garage, then went home to eat thick bloody steaks they’d purchased at the store so as not to have that blood on their own hands.

And as an adult, I ignored the ethical implications of eating meat for years. I taught in the suburbs and bought my food at the supermarket. The concept was too inaccessible, until I started practicing yoga in 2009. As my practice grew I learned of the yogic precept of Ahimsa, or non-violence – first toward ourselves, and then against all beings.

In the summer of 2015 I was washing a chicken in my sink and as my hands caressed dead skin I thought really? this died? so that I could eat?

And I pushed that thought down, uneasily, over and over again until I started teaching yoga in earnest this November. Hungry one night after class, I thought “Burger King would be good.” My mind flashed one image: a cow screaming as a knife whistled through its neck.

Fuck this, I thought. It’s not worth it anymore. I’m becoming a vegetarian. And I did.

I was a vegetarian at Thanksgiving when I didn’t eat the turkey. I was a vegetarian through the holidays, checking labels, refusing anything with gelatin. I ate more vegetables and cheese and I tried Tofurkey and sofritas. I was no longer consuming the pain and fear of an animal. I felt such relief. Some yogis believe one is not practicing yoga unless they are vegetarian. Silently, I agreed. I felt an odd self-righteousness that I tried not to convey and yet, in January, two months post decision, I could not deny that I felt odd. I was lightheaded and eating too much sugar. I dreamed about meat. I considered borrowing a rifle so I could go shoot an animal, skin and smoke it myself, and have the honest transparency of the hunt. But instead I found myself ordering a tuna sandwich at school. The dam burst. I went to Chipotle that night, ate chicken. The next day I bought turkey. My teeth gnawed the flesh I’d fought so desperately to evade for Ahimsa’s sake. The worst part was that I didn’t feel nearly as bad about it as I thought I would.

How many animals have died so that I can live? On a cellular level my body craves flesh. Perhaps this is merely a matter of acceptance. Maybe it’s different than wantonly slaying two inedible mice living peacefully in a sailboat. Perhaps I didn’t do vegetarianism right, or there’s a hybrid method of local sourcing and ethical slaying that honors a yogic philosophy. What I do know is that our current systems disconnect us from each other’s lives, mark us for failure, though the point is connection in universal synergy.

Those mice were my friends. But they are gone.

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Danielle Service is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. She currently teaches seventh grade Language Arts and yoga in New Hampshire. 

Current and Future Questions

by Eddie Dzialo

I am worried about the day my daughter will ask me if I’ve killed someone. No one has ever asked. Not even my closest friends who swam through Jameson with me when I first got home from my deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. She’ll ask around the time she’s old enough to be curious, but young enough to have no filter. Of course, then, I’ll tell her that I didn’t and that I love her. But some of that will be a lie, because I don’t know if I’ve ever killed anyone. Nothing about the type of combat being fought in Afghanistan is that definitive.

The Taliban wore the same clothes as the people we wanted to protect. Sometimes pregnant women were a means to hide explosives; dead dogs on the side of the road were packed with nails and ball bearings. Things weren’t as absolute as the Shoot/No Shoot drills that we’d rehearsed in training, and no one had promised that they would be.

During the first month I was in Afghanistan, we were in a firefight for four hours, and I never once saw a single person who had been shooting at us. We moved, they moved, and then at some point, they dropped their weapons and blended back into the huts. On another day, my buddy’s platoon—a kid from the south shore of Massachusetts—got attacked, and my platoon helped corner the attackers into a section of the city. We fired rockets, detonated walls with C4, had helicopters flying overhead, giving us additional viewpoints. But like the four-hour firefight that preceded it, the attackers eventually dropped their weapons, and they likely stood next to innocent civilians who were trying to get away from both sides.  

Throughout all this, I never saw a dead body. When we were being attacked, I saw bullets kicking up dirt around Marines who were too brave to run away; I heard rockets and mortars landing, but I never saw if anyone had been impacted by the things we did. It would be easy for me to say that because I didn’t see anything then it didn’t happen. No one got hurt. They fought; they ran. But I’d been told that the people who were attacking us often took the dead with them before fleeing. Another friend of mine, from another platoon, went into a room after a firefight, and there had been fresh, ungodly amounts of blood on the walls and floor, but no weapons, clothes, or people.

Once, on the morning after we were attacked, a man approached my company. He’d been pushing a wheelbarrow, and in that wheelbarrow, was another man who was badly mangled, barely alive. The man told us that his friend had been mauled by a tractor and was asking for help. The only thing we could offer him were prayers. But was he telling the truth? Had he gotten hurt by a tractor or had it been from artillery rounds? Honestly, I don’t know.

It’s those situations that will make things difficult on the day when my daughter will inevitably ask me if I ever killed anyone overseas. When she’s young, I will tell her that I didn’t and that I love her. And when she’s older, I’ll probably tell her the same things that I’ve written here and that I still love her. As for me, I will likely leave this world not knowing if I ever took someone else’s life. Maybe then I’ll know for sure.

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

Student Picks: Johnson, July

Eddie Dzialo-- To read Denis Johnson is to embed yourself in someone else’s struggle. In Johnson’s final book, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, I couldn’t help but feeling that I was getting implanted into the author’s own acceptance of mortality and death. The stories in this collection focus on addicts, divorced men, convicts, men on their deathbeds; Johnson himself had been married three times, had been sober since the early eighties, and was in the later stages of his life.

In the title story, the protagonist says, “...I’ve lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to.” Sadly, this was also true for Johnson. Because some of the people in this book are writers or poets, it’s easy to imagine Johnson as being a character in these stories, reflecting on his past. And he does so with humor, honesty, and a command of language that makes this collection something surreal, something eternal. 

Shawna-Lee Perrin-- When I think of Miranda July, I think of the kinds of films that I put on my watch list, and after months, decide I should watch it, start it, decide I’m not in the mood yet, and turn it off. Yet, still, there’s something magnetic about her.

So when I found out she was also a novelist, I was intrigued. The First Bad Man describes a neurotic, 43-year-old woman named Cheryl living on her own, pining after an older, self-obsessed man, and looking for a kindred spirit in the faces of strangers’ infants. Her life is thrown into chaos when her bosses’ twenty-something-year-old daughter moves in and displays total disregard, even hostility, for Cheryl and her strange little life, which unravels quickly.

July commits completely to her narrator’s voice, which follows some truly bizarre streams of consciousness that I found myself reading multiple times because I couldn’t believe the crazy things I just read. Cheryl follows her own internal logic, which only makes sense to her, and probably not many others. That July can pull readers along with this is a testament to her enviable skill as a writer. This is the Miranda July I signed up for.

Passing By: Thirty-seven words and eight entries

by Garrett Zecker

I teach a workshop with mainly seventeen and eighteen-year-old writers. I recently assigned a short task: write your name and age at the top of the page, then write a piece about yourself using only the exact number of words of your age. I completed the task along with them. While I had twice as many words to work with, when I listened to them share their work I realized that I had little more insight than they did. Below, I have reproduced my activity and interspersed each line with an excerpt from a journal entry. These dated excerpts interlineate an experience from the ensuing years since I was my student's age. 

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I keep journals 

April 5, 2000 (18) – I made an appointment to see a counselor. I will tell him about the last time I saw a counselor and that none of it really helped. It was all about talking about how the world treats me...but it didn't stop the world. 

I record an imperfect life 

November 29, 2006 (25) – Every day it seems I am looking at the work I am doing, the work to come, the payoff and potential rewards, and I think how I am twenty-five and do not want to be stuck with some of this or have to settle. 

Days, joy and torment, all words 

January 19, 2010 (28) – The clinic was at a library – a nice one – and I waited inside. 

Imagine, a manual 

August 30, 2011 (30) – I cried on stage in front of hundreds of people. It was a pure sorrow. A sorrow arisen from the show being over and so much of my life having passed and at joy. The joy of having had something so wonderful and amazing I helped create. Something beautiful and true with so many amazing people. 

"How To Be A Man" 

June 17, 2013 (32) – I am scared. I am an impulse. I am darting back and forth in a cage like a tiger. I am dying and I have never been happy. How much time do I have left? I'm a terminal case. What is the struggle for? What? 

Words fail often as my heart 

August 6, 2013 (32) - I remain frustrated, feeling like I am doing all the work, and thinking how resentful I am in ways that go all the way back to the beginning. The apartment. The jealousy of my friends. No need fulfilled unless I take care of it. Money. My brain starts despairing, thinking of ways of being satiated... 

My audience my mirror 

November 9, 2016 (35) – It's Carl Sagan's birthday and I really miss my friend. 

Books buried beneath the earth 

14 November 2017 (36) - I've needed to simplify. A lot. And I am trying and trying not to mess everything up, even at the expense of things I really, really want and need. And then I also want my heart to be quiet and still. To not be so anxious and mean and irritated at absolutely every last thing. 

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