The Curriculum, The Canon, The Clock

by Garrett Zecker

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There's never enough time to read the best books. We all know it. We all want time to read and think deep literary thoughts, but my reality is filled with the mundanity of appointment reminders for my eight-year-old’s orthodontist. I stowed the card in my pocket before dawn and I removed it with my keys well past midnight. I realized almost immediately that I couldn’t make it when I booked it three weeks ago. Nescio's Amsterdam Stories kept me company in the waiting room during his exam. Nescio had my attention, not the appointment date. This appointment is Monday, and the clock just struck Saturday morning.

We want to read the best books, the books best suited to improving our craft. In college we hammered away at ambitious collections, with a focus on thought and lenses of interpretation rather than the concrete nature of the unit tests that hounded our youth. After our formal education, only a few of us revisited these texts as an adult, and even non-writers have difficulty where to begin. At one time I wrote for an online service where anyone could pose questions to volunteers who had been screened as experts in their field. Many questions often began with, ‘I want to read the great books, but I don’t know where to start.’ There are as many great answers to that question as there are completely inadequate ones.

My approach has been to find well-curated lists, oftentimes featuring books I never would have picked up otherwise. I tick a new obscure book off the list, hit the public library, and open it. I learned to explore whenever I can, from listening exclusively to audiobooks when I drive to making sure I am always carrying a text for that three-minute wait at the coffee shop. Much like my habit of scribbling upon little scraps during those blank little moments of the day, I keep a curated book at the ready at all times. No matter the list, no matter the book, I train my voracious, never ending appetite for words like a tireless Olympian.

I've adventured through lists as notable as Modern Library's 100 Best and as controversial as the Esquire 75. The lessons on writing and close reading present in Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer opened an astonishing new list as book after book of notable prose passed by to culminate in an incredible bibliography as beautifully suited to wonderment as it is to modelling perfection. Each issue of The New York Times Book Review that arrives on my Sunday doorstep leads to a binary fit of rapturous longing and suffocating anxiety. How is it ever possible to even touch upon our exponentially-growing choices? What about old dog-eared favorites? Toward the end of his original thirteen-part television series Cosmos, Carl Sagan delivered a curious message about time and the canon. In an episode entitled The Persistence of Memory, in only ten or so paces he indicates the one-tenth of one-percent of the New York Public Library’s millions of volumes that it’s possible to consume in a lifetime. He concludes, “the trick is to know which books to read.”

The need for a book in my hand, a pen in my pocket, and my characters whispering behind my eyes have become as autonomic as breathing, but just as necessary. The orthodontist will always be there, but my writing won't without persistence.


Last Week/This Week: highs and lows

by Ashley Bales

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There’s a funny thing about living in times where horror and tragedy are around every corner; media hops along, led around by the nose from one horror to the next, and it becomes harder and harder to find conversations focused on furthering literary interests that don’t stray into the mix.  Here lies the conundrum of conformity vs. individuality in the social media age.  How to rise up from beneath the dog-pile of commentary and proclaim: “But my voice! I deserve attention!”  It takes a mighty voice, indeed.  The most a lowly MFA student, slaving away at weekly blog posts, can manage is a meager belly-flop, more pratfall than splashing glory, onto the mess.  I demure.

But the conundrum got me thinking about the variety of dialogues accessible in our troubling times. There are venues for engagement—and for god’s sake, engage—but there is additional loss accrued in abandoning personal commitments: to craft, practice, discourse not pre-occupied with the current socio-political moment, enjoyment in a sunny day.  These are privileged commitments.  The value of directing our privileges towards engagement cannot be understated, but we must allow ourselves time to explore individual voices amid the collectivism.             

 

I went to the opera this week.  Actually, I went to two operas, which, despite being in the cheap seats, puts me in the 1% of something.  The first opera, Norma, premiered in 1831 when its composer, Bellini, was 30.  Walt Whitman was a particular fan of the opera, as I learned from Barone’s piece in the Times.  Relevant because Whitman is the subject of Aucoin’s (age 27) opera, Crossing, which finished it’s run at BAM’s Next Wave Festival yesterday.  Whitman saw Norma in 1853, when he was 34, two years before he referred to it in Leaves of Grass, and nearly 10 years before he left New York to find his wounded brother and spent the next year volunteering as a nurse in a Union hospital outside of D.C.  Whitman recounted these experiences in Memoranda during the War, which served as Aucoin’s inspiration and source material for Crossing.

There is no explicit connection between Norma and Crossing, but operatic tropes run deep.  Norma is the story of love and betrayal across battle lines (Druid v. Roman) and Crossing focuses on Whitman’s love for a patient of his Union hospital who turns out to be a Confederate deserter.  In my program notes, Aucoin informed me “…Whitman considered opera the pinnacle of human expression...” and, he adds, “…opera is a primal union of animal longing, as expressed in sound, and human meaning, as expressed in language.” 

Only amid the pomp and drama of operatic tradition could Norma’s climactic “Son io” (“It is I.”) –sung at volumes shattering even across the soaring expanse of the 3,800 seat Metropolitan Opera House—be deemed understated.  The Met’s always excellent program notes describe Bellini’s choice to “…strip away the orchestra entirely, leaving Norma’s voice bare and exposed…” as “…simple and honest…” I love opera for its extravagance.  As a writing student, however, I am warned to be cautious of melodrama.  Opera doesn’t play by the same rules; perhaps Whitman didn’t either.

Aucoin drew his opera’s title from Whitman’s poem, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.  It was written prior to Whitman’s time in the hospital and long before the publication of Memoranda during War, but Aucoin chose it for the line: What is it then between us?  This line opens and closes the show, asking the viewer to question what separates us, what draws us together: audience and viewer, author and reader, Union and Confederate, more timely political dualities.  And Aucoin, too, adapts Whitman’s words to present concerns:

You—America—contradictory, confus’d, ill-assorted, cruel and generous mother!...
…I have asked—is this humanity—these butchers’ shambles? I have asked—will the devils in us win the day?
I have asked what the bond is between us.

 

This week on the blog, Phil Lemos considers what novels best embody the most loved and notorious US presidents, Garrett Zecker discusses the daunting task of choosing what to read, and David Moloney talks storage units.


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

Faculty Picks: Urrea, Luisella, Lacy, Ward

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Mark Sundeen-- With each day's news force-feeding us another rotten plum, my appetite for diversionary arts has waned. What’s the point of writing in this moment if you’re not grappling with the white supremacy that has crawled out of its hole, onto the streets, and into the oval office? This month I’ve read and assigned two books that confront the way this country treats people of color as less than human. 

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The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea recounts the horror of Mexican migrants led to their death in the furnace of the Arizona desert, after the easier routes to El Paso and San Diego were blocked by walls. This militarization of a friendly border is largely caused by the narcotics trade, which of course exists to serve its American customers. 

Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luissella navigates the legal labyrinth that holds Central American children, refugees from the gang wars that can be traced back to US military ops in El Salvador and Honduras during the Reagan years. 

The border is deeply complex, and racism is not its only evil. But if these aspiring Americans were blonde Canadians they would not languish in court or die beneath a mesquite shrub.

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Lisa Janicki-- Much has been written in recent years about our unruly expectations for lifelong romance: how can just one partner/lover/co-parent fulfill our every desire? It seems we’ve become unreasonable, and we’re therefore never satisfied. Enter the premise of Catherine Lacey’s novel, The Answers, a story about the Girlfriend Experiment, wherein a research team hires a lineup of women to satisfy the various needs of Kurt Sky, an actor/filmmaker/asshole whose life of fame has (according to him) made it impossible for him to experience love. The Intimacy Girlfriend sleeps with Kurt, the Anger Girlfriend hurls dishes at him, the Maternal Girlfriend comforts him and wears linen. Mary, the protagonist, is hired as the Emotional Girlfriend, which requires her to be loving and attentive without presenting a distracting amount of her own personhood. If the premise makes you cringe, I get it; I cringed too. But it’s Catherine Lacey, and I’d follow her anywhere. 

The Answers is a powerful and gorgeous meditation on the compartmentalization of self. While serving as Emotional Girlfriend, Mary also undergoes experimental new agey treatments for a lifetime of physical ailments and psychic bruises. It’s a novel about love, but also about the curious way illness intimately acquaints us to our bodies, even as it alienates us from them. Lacey frolics in the interplay between the corporeal and the psychological: “her skull felt like it might shatter in her head (and what is anyone’s head but a history, a house for all your history).” She gives us a book that rattles heart, mind and bones. 

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Robin Wasserman-- I can't stop reading the news. I mean can't in the sense of compulsion, the sickening inability to look away. But I also mean it as an injunction, a reminder that I can't stop, no matter how much I might want to. I mean I can't – cannot, but also must not – look away

It's not the job of fiction to report current events. But maybe it is the work of fiction to report current events; to say, this, now, is the world and its people. This is the feeling of someone else's pain. Don't look away

This is what Jessmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones demands of its reader: an unflinching gaze. Look at fifteen-year-old Esch, poor and pregnant and desperate for someone to love. Look at her brothers, each clinging to his own strategy for surviving a hard life in the Mississippi bayou. Look at the fierce devotion binding them together. Look, hard, at the storm that will tear their home and their lives apart, “the flailing wind that lashes like an extension cord used as a beating belt,” “the rain, which stings like stones, which drives into our eyes and bids them shut... trees and branches breaking, popping like Black Cat firecrackers in an endless crackle of explosions, over and over and again and again.”

I don’t know whether this is the best time or the worst time to read a novel about a hurricane, but it turned out to be the right time.

And everywhere there are people, looking half drowned; an old white man and an old black man camping out under a tarp spread under a lone sapling; a family of Vietnamese with sheets shaped into a tent over the iron towing bar used for mobile homes, plywood set under the draping to make a floor; teenage girls and women foraging in the parking lot and hollow shell of a gas station, hunting the wreckage for something to eat, something to save. People stand in clusters at what used to be intersections, the street signs vanished, all they own in a plastic bag at their feet, waiting for someone to pick them up. No one is coming.

Don't look away: https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos/

Paperboy Summers

by Daniel Johnson

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I worked as a Norfolk County paperboy for the middle two of my four undergraduate summers. Seven nights a week, I reported to a warehouse our private courier service had leased from a scrapyard that stripped decommissioned Desert Storm tanks for their metal. There, I and about fifty other paperfolks waited for the box trucks to unload pallets of Milford Daily News bundles, reported to our allotted bagging stations, where we folded, rubber-banded, and stuffed. Women often brought their children, who’d sit on the powered-down tanks along the fenceline, take selfies, and pretend to blow each other to smithereens. They used their hands to play-act chunks of themselves exploding from their stomachs, raining all over the parking lot.

I delivered to cul de sacs, apartment complexes, trailer parks, neighborhoods of one-story ranchers, neighborhoods of mansions, a strip mall with a yoga studio. I smoked weed, drank Gatorade, and hallucinated—or didn’t—small hordes of skunks on suburban lawns while I drove and frisbeed Milfords onto driveways. At least some of the skunks were real. In the blue-blanched moonlight of summer, their white stripes shone a magnificent silver.

I was often the only one on those roads that time of night. For a while, I listened to the audiobook of Moneyball in the car. When I got home just after sunrise, I continued to read the hard copy until I fell asleep.

The man whose bagging station was across from mine always wore a dirty, gravy-stained Philadelphia Phillies shirt and listened to late-night Phillies talk radio on a portable AM/FM. I referred to this man as Philly Joe. His was a team that, according to pundits, wasn’t exploiting the market of undervalued players. They didn’t care for patient hitters. They wanted spark-plug, scrappy guys who swung at everything. They were the anti-Moneyball.

My goal in reading and rereading the book was to gripe with Philly Joe about how terribly his team handled the trade deadlines those years. But my working memory was so shot from fatigue that, when called upon, my ability to use Moneyball as framework for conversation short-circuited.

Philly Joe was a life-longer. I remain certain of this. He was a faster bagger than I. He was first in line for his bundles, first out the warehouse door. He worked three routes. He brought a shopping cart to transport all his papers, and placed his radio in the child seat as he rolled on out to his car. He was huge, and he was a wizard.

I didn’t see many friends. I was asleep when my family ate dinner. I spoke very little. Of anyone, I remember Philly Joe most from those two summers—the best of my life.

I miss so terribly those nights among the skunks. There’s something comforting to living in total circadian discord with the rest of your social circle, with justifiable reason enough to bail anytime you were overambitious enough to promise plans. You let yourself feel the high of cancelling without the comedown guilt. You’re tired, after all. You’re fucking nocturnal. You stalk around your county all gangly and mantid-like while everyone sleeps, lobbing newspapers onto doorsteps and car roofs. Then you zonk until long after sundown. What could anyone possibly want from you?

That part was the most exhilarating of it all: being so deliberately and somewhat manically lonesome during the late-adolescent peacetime of a summer break. I was itinerant. What did I want from me? Not much. Maybe: A Sunday off; a date with the girl who showed up to fold Milfords in her magenta pajamas (I guess I remember her too); better coffee with the early bird special at King Street (my dinner); to remember and regurgitate just a few sentences of Moneyball; to be left alone by the light of the cinderblock window in my basement, where I slept on an air mattress because there was too much daylight in my bedroom; for Philly Joe to ask me this very question—What is it you want, son?—just so I could tell him: I’m good. Instead, we’d just listen to his radio and shake our heads at the bewildering refusal of his team’s front office to grow up, move into the new age. It had been the patient hitter’s game for a while, after all.


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

From Plaza Motel to Home School

by Mark Freeman

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The choice to home school my daughter had nothing to do with differences in philosophical opinions on academics or a concern about the quality of education from our public schools.  It was just because I didn’t want her attending school in a motel.

The Plaza was the only space large enough—and empty enough— to house the students and staff for the coming year while the school underwent a much maligned renovation that the town had finally approved after a vitriol filled, protracted bond process and vote. My family took a tour of the motel/school during the open house at the end of last school year. I had encouraged my daughter to remain open minded on the prospect of attending school there, but had also given her the options of home schooling, or looking into a private school for the year—a financially unfeasible solution, but one we were willing to explore. After our walk through, it was a unanimous decision to home school.

There were many reasons for this decision: the small space the lack of an outdoor area for recess, or to just anywhere to be outside (the school would later fence off a small—and the only—green/grass space behind the hotel parking lot), my daughter’s dust allergy versus the wall to wall carpeting; the lack of natural light; the fact that the ‘school’ would be on the second floor of a strip mall over a wine shop, bar, sporting goods store, bank, and just down the strip from a restaurant and ice cream stand, laundry-mat, dollar store, Sears outlet, and drug testing clinic. Maybe, the biggest factor for me—and the one I haven’t shared with my daughter or the school—is the fact that it was a fucking motel. I’m not the kind of person who believes in vibes, or auras, but the slimy immutable motel essence that would cling to my kid every time she came home, that I could never fully cleanse from her tiny, pure soul, would be too much for me. I walked the motel, looked in the rooms, wandered the single hall, and it was no different than any other shady motel I’d seen. Like the one back in my home town, along the strip across from the beach that advertised—with impunity—on their brightly lit sign by the road, half-hourly rates. 

Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t want my kid attending school in motel rooms previously occupied for lunch time trysts, allured affairs, or drug binged weekends.

Now I fully acknowledge our privilege in making this decision. My wife works hard and—after years of busting her ass as an underpaid, under appreciated teacher—has finally moved into administration and makes a decent salary. It allows me the opportunity to be home for my girls during the summer, home with them when they’re sick, driving them to and from school, or to the barn for riding lessons, or to soccer practice, which I have the privilege of coaching. It also allows me the time at home, while they’re in school, to write.

I haven’t written much since home-schooling began. I miss it. I feel an urgency bordering on desperation to tap words onto my screen, but there is a compelling argument, most days, to wait. A small hand slips into mine over breakfast. A body tucks into the crook of my arm to review math problems, questions about reading and writing mythology and allegory, conversations about protests and anthems, racism and cultural appropriation, climate change and natural disasters. 

One month into this year of home schooling and I am convinced of two things: the first is that I may not write much more than 700 words at a time on topics ranging from stay-at-home-dad to home-schooling, and second, that I will never be more grateful for seedy strip mall motels with wall to wall carpeting.


Last Week/This Week: time for debate

by Ashley Bales 

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Deadlines are the absolute worst, also essential. As someone who both imposes deadlines, in my role as instructor, and needs to abide by them, in my 27th consecutive year as a student, the worst case scenario is the co-occurrence of my student's deadlines and my student deadlines. This is the lovely position I find myself in this week. 

I wanted to write about the drama that might ensue if James Wood and Jonathan Dee sat down with Jenny Erpenbeck to discuss her novel Go, Went, Gone. I would already be breaking with convention by discussing Wood's review from two weeks ago (and not last week), and Dee's review from last month's issue of Harper's, but the disagreement is too juicy, too packed with the trappings of overblown criticism to not dive in. Wood's review is celebratory, while Dee seems to be in full-on crisis mode, using Erpenbeck as an example of all the shortcomings of the novel as a form, realism, and socially conscious art in toto.  

I, unfortunately, don't have time to discuss Dee's criticism of Erpenbeck's character driven consideration of the refugee crisis in Europe: "...to break a movement of millions down into a representative six or eight detailed and tragic personal narratives is not to “explain” or to “humanize” that movement but to fragment and thus diminish it."  Nor do I have time to counter his conviction that Erpenbeck is not aware of her main character's guilt of "the evil of banality," as Wood states.  And I certainly don't have time to read Erpenbeck's words myself.  I have a stack of student proposals and 30 pages of my own to polish and hand in. 

No, I don't have time to understand this horrifying quote from Wood:

Her narratives are rigorous, partial to the present tense, and untempted by the small change of contemporary realism (abundant and superfluous dialogue in quotation marks, sharply individuated characters, tellingly selected detail). 

I do recommend you, reader, whoever you are, if you exist, read and consider for yourselves. Imagine yourself a silent fourth, sipping a bourbon in a deep armchair and hearing appropriately strident voices raging at oppression while "residing among the oppressors..." (Dee), debating how to "make Germany... beautiful again" (Wood), while Erpenbeck presents her novel, full of its own voices and conversations.

This week on the blog, Mark Freeman decides not to send his kid to school in a motel, Laura Dennison explores the difficulties of writing mental illness and Daniel Johnson remembers his time as a paperboy.


Ashley Bales is a current student of Southern New Hampshire University's 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.

Student Picks: Alexie, Bronte, Egan

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Brandy Vaughn-- I was first introduced to the writings of Sherman Alexie during a reading assignment; I live in the Pacific Northwest and my mentor thought I might enjoy reading Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fist Fight in Heaven. I enjoyed Alexie’s writing so much, I checked out The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian.

In this book, Arnold, the hilarious teenage narrator, is based in part by Alexie’s experiences growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. Arnold had me laughing and crying with him as he goes through some of the usual coming-of-age stuff. Despite the impoverished life Arnold lives, he still finds hope and wants things to change. I found myself cheering him on. The realistic depiction of reservation life is filled with sorrow, but there is an abundance of joy - which Arnold calls "metaphorical boners" - there for the taking. 

I grew up in Spokane, the surrounding small towns and areas he mentions, and have been to the Spokane Reservation, which also makes this book close to my heart. Alexie's writing is beyond a doubt binge-reading worthy.

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Terri Alexander-- I was probably 12 or 13 when I first read Wuthering Heights, and I remember being enthralled with the love story. I could see Catherine silhouetted atop a desolate moor, her hair and dress blowing in the wind, her heart torn between two men. 

Reading it this time, I was shocked by the violence and cruelty. Heathcliff’s revenge dominated the narrative. I realized our current penchant for dystopian fiction has got nothing on Emily Brontë’s dark world of ghosts and torment. In one scene, the bereaved Heathcliff has Catherine’s grave dug up so he can stare at her rotting corpse. He has a side panel of her coffin removed so that when he is buried next to her, with his coffin’s side panel also removed, their souls can mingle in the earth. 

And that isn’t what shocked me most. This was written 170 years ago by a woman in her 20s who lived in the isolated countryside. She didn’t have an MFA, or the Internet. She couldn’t even publish under her own name because she wasn’t a man. Yet, Brontë wrote a novel with intricate plot structure, a narrator with questionable motives, parallel motifs between generations, and conflict between society and nature. And I discovered in this second reading of Wuthering Heights an admiration for all that Brontë overcame despite the odds stacked against her.

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Shawna-Lee Perrin-- I’ve had Jennifer Egan on the brain lately; I’m working on a close reading of A Visit from the Goon Squad, and looking forward to her newest novel, Manhattan Beach, coming out in just a few days. As anyone who's read Goon Squad knows, Egan is a gorgeous novelist, a maven of voice, character, and convention-busting narrative time jumps. But a lot of people aren’t aware of Emerald City, Egan's collection of short stories published in 1989, which I had the good fortune to stumble upon this summer.

In these eleven stories, Egan begins by introducing us to a malcontent family man traveling abroad who becomes obsessed with a man he’s certain stole thousands of dollars from him years before, and ends with a shy 14-year-old girl in 1974 New York City on her first acid trip, pondering her identity and role in the circle of friends she adores. In between these stories, we also meet models, photographers, married people with secrets, divorced people trying to move on, kids with adult-sized troubles, and more. Egan treats her characters tenderly, yet with unflinching honesty, and grants them chances to transform. And the beautiful part? They do.

The Leaves are Dying

by David Moloney

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Our maple trees have been diagnosed with a fungal disease, causing ugly tar spots on their leaves and premature defoliation. As much I, a New Englander, root for summer’s demise, I don’t welcome any afternoon raking sessions, let alone before pumpkin beers hit the shelves. Year after year, our foliage is a tourist attraction; the vibrancy of decay—a draw for out-of-towners not privy to drastic change of season. As a life-longer, I hardly recognize the gradual change of a season anymore, and certainly don’t rightfully appreciate it. Maybe it’s the every now and then reneging that, yet charming, promises the coming season too soon: a snowstorm on Halloween, beach day in March.

The disease, more specifically Rhytisma acerinum, is caused by extended periods of wetness—this same wetness that brought on our lushest summer in thirty years. The bloom and bounty of flowerbeds and tomato gardens were a result of over 130 inches of rain. But now our lawns are littered with infected leaves, curled into themselves, sickly marked like smoker’s lungs. My frequent resentment of homeownership is inflamed by walking my daughter to the car. We feel the leaves dumping on us from above unseasonably early—an effect of this illness.

Regardless of the current state of the maple leaf, I am not ready to rake a single one. To even begin to amp myself up for the loathed yard chore, I need to come to terms with the very idea of a society that necessitates raking. What did they, as in homeowners, do pre-rake, pre-yard waste management trucks, pre-leaf vacuum services? Surely, the leaves didn’t suffer. It must be a purely ascetic reason for collecting the leaves, a menial task that holds great importance within our communities. Homeowners must all take part, collectively, gather up all the dead leaves and bag them in the overpriced, thirty-gallon leaf bags, or if you have kids, the plastic Jack-O-Lantern ones that serve two purposes: a stash for leaves and a yard decoration. I have yet to hear a reasonable argument for raking. But I won’t Google why we do it. It’s the same reason I won’t look up why we draw hearts the way we draw hearts. I’ll still do it regardless of my findings.

Where I live, there is a considerable obligation to rake, especially when you share a lawn with a neighbor, as I do. Ron, my neighbor and weekly backyard drinking partner, is relentless on his lawn’s cleanliness. He mows at the precise time before the grass gets to a length where unevenness is evident. He rakes frequently enough that I’m comfortable saying he is ahead of the trees themselves, ahead of this disease. Only errant leaves from slacking neighbors find their way onto Ron’s lawn. And they don’t remain long.

Now, on top of this reluctance to rake, there’s a shoddy rumor the disease can leech into your lawn. By the spring, there’ll be nothing left of all our summertime efforts: the watering, weed-whacking, patterned mowing. It’ll all be for naught. This has spurred compulsion by many lawn hobbyists, the ones on my street included. They’ve taken to daily raking. A local weatherman (not sure why he’s the expert) delivered advice on tar spot prevention: elbow grease! Get out there and not only rake every leaf, but destroy them all.

Each day after work, as I park out front, I have a clear view of Ron’s conjoined lawn; an unspoken agreement that an oak tree divides our landscaping responsibilities, the property line noticeable by the differing grass length and leaf accumulation. I have a moment where I don’t turn the engine off or the radio down. I think about the weatherman’s advice and I welcome the destruction of the trees themselves at the sake of my lawn, and why stop there. Or, I can drive away and find a night job bartending in avoidance of dealing with the leaves.

I don’t find Ron’s devoutness in yardwork inspiring. It’s terrifying. I worry about my failings, not only as a neighbor, but as a man. If the leaves accumulate and begin affecting other yards on the street—the wind sweeping my sick leaves into yards absent of trees, other men out in flannel shirts raking, playing the part, looking up at my house and cursing, hoping to find me outside in the middle of the day getting my mail in my pajamas—I might be destroyed along with the lawn. And what if one gets fed up enough to invade my yard and clean it? I couldn’t then stroll out as if I were planning on raking at that very moment. I’d be punished and bound to watch an angry baby boomer with a bad heart furiously slay my very being as I hide behind a curtain.


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

Hope From Falling

by Eddie Dzialo

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After I jumped out of a plane for the first time, I didn’t sleep for two days. The experience was something I needed to repeat. That was in the summer of 2010, five months before I left the Marines. I had deployed twice and had just assumed command of an infantry company. When I wasn’t at work, I went to Phish shows, surfed, and studied for the Treasury Enforcement Agent Exam to pursue a career in the Secret Service. The exam always got pushed aside in favor of the other two things. But each day seemed flat. I held onto a deep concern about what life was going to feel like after the military. To counteract that, I gambled on football and tried to surf through a hurricane. Deployments are filled with a devotion built around comraderies, something I knew I would never experience in the same way again. Because I’d been the platoon commander, ripe with my own shortcomings, the men probably hated me. But I loved them.

I wasn’t seeking any answers because I didn’t think they existed, but the girl I’d recently started dating suggested skydiving and I said we should do it. When? Next weekend. Part of my sudden agreement was to enforce some narcissistic, macho image that I had of myself, but a lot of it had to do with how much I wanted to be around her, even if it meant riding up on a plane and not being on it when it landed. To prevent myself from appearing vulnerable, I never told her that I was scared of heights. When I was young, I got so physically upset on a kiddie Ferris wheel at Funtown Splashtown USA that I made them stop the ride and I’d been older than everyone else on it. My father still laughs about it.

On the drive to the drop zone, my legs went numb. When we were signing our waivers, I watched people getting on the plane wearing shorts and t-shirts, and their parachutes were like little backpacks. The smaller the parachute, the faster the descent after it opens—if it opens. After we took the class about jumping and practiced going out the door, I went out behind the hanger and puked. The girl I was with didn’t seem bothered by the inevitability of having to physically hang out the door of a plane for the first time. Because we were doing a tandem jump, she got paired up with a guy in his twenties, and I was set up with an older guy who waddled.

As we ascended with thirty other people, I focused on breathing, giving the appearance of control. The air smelled cold, people checked each other’s equipment. For most of the ride, I wanted it to end; I’d jump, share the videos, tell stories about it. But that changed when we reached altitude. People started chanting in unison like drunks and doing drum rolls on their knees. Seeing their faces made me realize that I’d been the only unhappy person on that plane. After the door opened, people gave one another a specific handshake before they jumped. Someone turned to me and showed me what they were doing. That was the sort of bond that I’d been missing since returning home. 

Stepping out of a plane is an act of devotion. Nothing else matters during freefall. Because it’s so consuming, it’s not possible to think about anything else. Falling gave me the sort of calm that I’d lost over two deployments. There’s a spirituality to skydiving, a state of peace that I didn’t know was possible.

I went back the following week with the girl I was dating and started the process to get my license. Life was unpredictable again, full of hope. Our kinship was brightest in the moments right before we jumped. I am married to the girl I jumped with that day, and now our daughter likes to climb on my parachute rig.


From Fetish Flicks to Film: How Writing Saved My Taste in Movies

by Eric Beebe

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My favorite movie used to be Hobo with a Shotgun. In high school, a newly-finished basement, complete with home theater, made my house the ideal destination for movie nights. Friends were actually content enough in the setting that they obeyed my parents’ stringent warning against breaching the liquor cabinet just feet away, behind the fully-furnished bar. We’d scan Netflix for the most absurd movies we could find. If we didn’t get our fix of shock, we’d break between movies to search the internet for worse: fetish porn like “One Priest One Nun” or even real-life execution videos when our wandering led there. When a less-frequent visitor showed me the infamous “2 Girls 1 Cup,” I laughed while he fought back the nausea.

I took pride in labeling our weirdest discoveries as my favorites and looked forward to any opportunity to flaunt my  preferences. It made me feel distinct from the majority of guys I knew who favored sports movies, which I hated, and flashy fight sequences, which I also loved too much like they did. I craved distinction but lacked the taste to distinguish myself.

 My English teacher started suggesting movies to me like Guy Ritchie’s masterpiece Snatch. It quickly shot to the top of my list. I’d yet to learn terms like “MacGuffin,” “caper,” or much else, but the ways in which a botched diamond heist built up multiple plot lines and comedy around a single stone enthralled me. It wasn’t just distinctive; it was good, really good. There was artistic genius at play that I might not have understood, but I felt it.

After graduating and beginning to study creative writing in college, I noticed my old favorite movies didn’t cut it for me anymore. The techniques I was learning in class stood out to me and gripped me more than action shots and shock value.  I loved the use of metafiction in Seven Psychopaths. I loved the surrealism of Riggan’s delusions in Birdman.  Hell, I even loved The Lobster’s skewering deconstruction of human interaction, no matter how uncomfortable sitting through it made me feel. Fresh takes on themes and deft use of writing techniques stuck with me more than fight scenes or shock for the sake of shocking.

As my tastes became more focused, they became more exclusive too. I groaned when my family voted on Jupiter Ascending for a trip to the movies together. After watching American Hustle with friends, I was the lone voice of praise amongst comments of “what the fuck was that?” I found it harder to enjoy as many movies, but I felt a more potent appreciation for those I did.  Before I left home to study writing, I joked with friends from my rural hometown that I was going to college to be “one of those assholes sipping wine, wearing an ascot, talking about how the color of the drapes represented the main character’s struggle for his father’s acceptance.” I had the spiel memorized. I pulled it out at parties. The caricature got some laughs and distracted me from the unsettling truth that I might not be the same person the next time we met. Learning, if it sticks, changes you. All we can hope is that we come out on one end of a class, degree, or experience happier with our new understanding, despite the parts of us it cost.

I have been.


Last Week/This Week: Escapism, Collection, and Research

by Ashley Bales

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Sometimes a retreat into oneself is necessary for any successful re-engagement, though these days escape can bring with it tidal waves of guilt that rush you back to the captive present with little more than a mild drenching of respite.  To me, John McPhee’s new book of assembled New Yorker essays, Draft No. 4, on writing brings with it the sort of late summer downpour that keeps you locked comfortably indoors without threatening disaster.  It is an unforgivable vice as an aspiring writer to read more books about writing than the writing itself.  As with all my vices I’ve set limits, but some morsels are too irresistible. 

Paris Review Daily reported on the first annual Honey and Wax Bookseller’s book collecting prize and it struck me how inextricable the link is between collecting and research (though the researcher in me is driven to point out the likely effects of selection bias).  There are lots of ways to love books, but compulsive collection isn’t my favorite.  These collectors are described milling their collections for information: accounts of working women in romance novels, accounts of natural disasters.  Their books are tools, which makes a certain sense.  A prize for book collecting is ultimately about objects first and content second, any ephemeral psychic value becomes flimsy in comparison.

Doholt’s essay “On Cruising a Writer’s Oeuvre” identifies a more valuable sort of collection; one that fulfills the writerly value of exploring a perspective. What could keep me from flitting between texts, abandoning them to move on to the next more compelling, potentially more compelling, more enlightening, more beautifully sentenced, more psychically satisfying?  I suffer from the researcher’s compulsions and the writer’s priorities.  Doholt suggests focus.  Direct that drive for collection towards an author’s works instead of books and you’ll unlock both the technical successes of their oeuvre and an appreciation of your own readerly tendencies.

Which brings me back to my guilt in putting down Sally Rooney in order to pick up John McPhee.  There are lots of ways to learn how to write, and while the most explicit may feel like short-cuts, I’ll never write well until I better understand those readerly tendencies.  The task is gargantuan.

This week on the blog Eric Beebe discusses how learning to write changed him, Eddie Dzialo considers the therapeutic value of skydiving, and David Moloney deals with an accumulation of leaves.


Ashley Bales is a current student of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.

Faculty Picks: Habash, Alexie, Yuknavitch

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Marcus Burke--  In high school the wrestling team practiced on the other end of the field house and it was a regular occurrence to glance down the gym and see a wrestler hugging a trash can throwing up or to see a sign on the gym door warning us to stay away from the wrestling mats because of an outbreak of MRSA or Impetigo. Being slightly horrified of these skin conditions, I headed those warnings and stayed away, but Gabe Habash gives readers a convincing glimpse into the head of a hardnosed obsessive athlete. As a former division three college basketball player I’m often asked about writing and how it compares to basketball and my first thought is that in both endeavors you’ll need to be pretty obsessed with what you’re doing and also be okay with spending a lot of time alone and be able to deal with all the strange habits developed in that alone time, and these three things are captured incredibly well in Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash.  Division three athletes know that for the most part they’re not going to be pro’s and are mostly playing for the love of the game, though, there’s always an exception to the rule. There’s always that extreme guy on the team that hasn’t considered many other facets of his/her life besides being an athlete and Stephen Florida would be that teammate.

We follow Stephen through his senior year of college as he quests after his last opportunity to win a division four championship and his take no prisoners approach in doing so. In Stephen’s pursuit of championship glory, he pushes away the few people that care for him as he’s must accustom to caring about wrestling.  As I read this book I felt like I’d met several Stephen Florida’s while I was still in my playing days. What I most enjoy about this book is seeing Stephen blindsided by the reality that he would have to find something else to do with his life the following year, regardless of the outcome of his wrestling season. There’s a fine line between being crazy and the pursuit of being great and Stephen Florida walks this line well.

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Katherine Towler-- Sherman Alexie’s powerful memoir You Dont Have to Say You Love Me (Little, Brown, 2017) is as much a record of excavation as it is a narrative. Alexie circles again and again around the death of his mother from lung cancer, each time looking for new understanding, each time exploring another facet of his grief and culpability in their failed relationship. “This mourning has become a relentless production/And I’ve got seventy-eight roles to play” he writes in one of the poems that make up almost half the book. Alexie is brutally honest about the love and hate he feels simultaneously for his mother as he struggles toward a clearer view of her and himself. A powerful woman who was one of the last speakers of Salish, the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribe’s language, she was also neglectful and abusive. Like Alexie, she was a product of the systematic racism practiced against generations of Native Americans, something he reports not as an excuse but as simple fact. He chronicles this inheritance in unflinching terms, revealing the extreme poverty of life on the reservation, the alcoholism of both his parents, and his mother’s untreated bipolar disorder, from which he also suffers. The unorthodox structure of this book – short, episodic chapters interspersed with poetry – becomes hypnotic, an incantation that reflects the inability of those whose cultures and families have been destroyed to create a coherent narrative of their lives. In the end, though, this is not a book that rests on blame, and that is Alexie’s triumph. It is a searing confrontation of hard truths and a celebration of survival.

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Amy Irvine-- After a summer of reading for research (Eurasian burial mounds preserved in permafrost) and reading with my middle school daughter (Judy Blume, on bras and wet dreams), I tumbled into The Book of Joan, by Lidia Yuknavitch. This is dystopia at its best—the eco-fem dirge of The Handmaid’s Tale meets the visceral requiem of The Road. Chelsea Gain calls Joan “transgressive and badass and nervy and transformational… a Katniss Everdeen for grown-ups,” and I agree, except you could hate science-fiction and still fall in love with this book, purely for the prose that is exquisitely, fiercely, poetically carnal. This is also a book that—while looking ahead to a time when both earth and humans are hopelessly neutered and our skin is the last place to carve out, literally, a story—has the rearview mirror trained on a Saint who wielded both sword and faith in a way that still sets souls ablaze. Meaning the passion of mystics persists—even when all other human traits dry up and blow into a sky that has become a swansong. When future students say, “I wanna write sci-fi” this is what I’ll point to and say “Pastiche this!”

The Euphoria of Slime

by Daniel Johnson

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Last week, my girlfriend sent me a link to a string of tweets from a third-grade math teacher at a Brooklyn elementary school detailing the events of a sting operation that went down in one of the girls’ bathrooms earlier that day. The bathroom, administrators had learned, was a local haunt for proprietors and customers of neither drugs nor cigarettes nor Pokémon cards nor Trolli gummi worms, as in my day, but homemade specialty slime: butter slime, fluffy slime, cloud slime, slushie slime, smoothie slime, glossy slime (standard slime), floam, icee slime, fishbowl slime; slime that smelled like bubblegum, chocolate, Swedish fish; slime stuffed with regular beads, styrofoam beads, and glitter. The foiled slimelord, according to the tweets, was named Griselda, and she not only “had the game on smash,” but also “had mad flavors too.” 

The idea of slime as a “game”—rife with hallway territory wars, slime-slinging middlemen, customers who drool over the newest, dankest flavors—is just plain delicious, and far more malfeasant than my original association with the phenomenon. I first learned of it months ago, also via my girlfriend, who, as a way to relax and often before bed, watches videos in which disembodied hands create and play with all sorts of these specialty slimes. She has her favorite “slimers,” and has purchased small quantities of their products, which arrive in clear plastic tubes or Tupperware containers, sometimes accompanied by a piece of candy. Some she keeps in her desk at work, some at home. For her, slime isn’t far from hand-occupational therapy. It both calms and thrills her. 

We’ve watched some videos together. Their allure is both hypnotic and meditative; watch enough, and you’ll notice the distinct and mindless rhythm to the mixing, folding, and swirling. It’s a sensory experience unto itself, separate from the tactile rapture of actually playing with the stuff. I find the suction squelch of slimer fingers depressing into and releasing from a dollop of floam to be downright euphoric. My girlfriend explains her affinity for the videos, in part, as “an ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) thing.” Which is to say, the effect is not unlike auditory-tactile synesthesia, whereby certain sounds induce the sensation of touching or, perhaps more importantly, being touched. 

Consider, too, the strangely pleasing language and verbiage surrounding slime and all you can do with it: glob, blob, jiggle, squeeze, ooze, gum, flub, goo, smush. The almost universal absence of hard Anglo-Saxon consonants echoes the smooth, quieting effect ten minutes with a handful of butter slime might have on a disquieted mind. 

Like so many other video crazes—unboxing, pimple-popping, etc.—there's a vast subculture dedicated to the slime frenzy on Instagram. From what I understand, the community can get hostile and petty. Many slimers are simply entrepreneurial teenagers (often younger, like Griselda) who are quick to accuse people of stealing their ideas, poaching followers, using cheap materials. And I get it. For some of us, theirs may be a therapeutic—albeit a Nickelodeon-nostalgic and super funky—product, but that’s reductive; for slimers, slime is both an amorphous art form and an increasingly lucrative economy. How can anyone be taken seriously as an artisan slimesmith in such a competitive landscape if she can so easily be ripped off by the latest Elmer’s Glue-and-glitter-using copycat? Not long ago, a twenty-three-year-old slimer made enough money off her product to retire and purchase a six-bedroom home. Marketwise, there’s no ceiling here. 

And yet, as with fidget-spinners and booger-balls, specialty slime is just the latest glorious novelty added to the treasure trove of infuriating shit teachers have to confiscate and feel too old to understand. The string of tweets has since been deleted, but the third-grade teacher reported that none of the students were disciplined, despite the significant haul seized in the sting. I like to think Griselda—what a wonderfully villainous name for the folk symbol she’s become!—is battening down the hatches, returning to her basement laboratory, and scheming up a superslime that’ll bring the school administrators to their knees, make all the other slimes look like garden-variety flubber, smash the game anew, and hit the online markets before Christmas. I’ll buy that one myself. 


Daniel Johnson is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and NonfictionHe is currently an Editorial Assistant at Bedford/St. Martin's Press.

Plenty

by Curtis Graham

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A man in his forties

Comes to see my apartment

Today, to see if he wants to

Live here when I am gone.

He squirrels in place

In his black sneakers and

White socks. He tugs the

Belly of his untucked work polo.

 

He looks around and says,

Plenty of room here.

I mean you don’t need much stuff.

You really don’t. I mean,

What do I have at home. A TV stand.

Couple dressers, right. Bed.

What more do you need.

 

We talk about leaks

And a painting hanging on

My wall. He stuffs his hands

Deep inside his pockets,

Halfway up the arms. He leans weight

On either foot and talks to me.

 

Shit, plenty of room here.

More than my studio.

I don’t have much, especially

After the divorce. Ha ha. Ha.

You know, half’s gone, but really–

People says to me, Hey Bill

Why don’t you get a table so you can

Eat in the kitchen, and I says

When am I ever not eating

In front of the TV. Right?

Never, that’s when. You don’t

Need a table. It’s like I said.

 

He looks around the space.

Beige matted carpets,

Spackled ceiling

Cracked with leaks, peeling in swaths

Like snakeskin.

Tiny black mold flowers growing

On the sills. The screams of pumps

And boilers behind thin walls.

 

It’s like I said. He shakes my hand.

What more do you need.


How Writing a Novel is like Managing a Warehouse

by Phil Lemos

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I’m writing a novel.  Occasionally I get asked what that’s like.  I tell them it’s exactly like managing a warehouse.  

I work graveyard shift four nights a week as an assistant shift manager at a warehouse near where I live.  Running a warehouse involves unlocking the doors every night, plotting out a game plan for how to tackle the expected volume, and putting all the associates in the right places to maximize flow and efficiency.  Then you record all this information on your laptop so you don’t lose any critical information.  This all happens before the rank and file enter the building.  Once everyone arrives, you make a few announcements, turn on the conveyor belt and the shift begins.

No matter how meticulously you plan in advance, it’s inevitable that the night descends into chaos.  A handful of people won’t show up for their shifts (this number climbs to considerably more than a handful if the Patriots played earlier that evening), leaving gaps that you have to fill.  It’s inevitable that a giant box containing laundry detergent, paint or chlorine will fall off the belt and spill all over one of the aisles.  Twice a week the conveyor belt jams or breaks down.  Sometimes it’s an easy fix.  But conveyor belts can be temperamental, and often you find yourself calling the warehouse engineer at 2am to get him in and troubleshoot it. 

From their first couple of shifts, every employee thinks that they, too, can run the warehouse.  They spend all their time complaining about what the managers do wrong – how we push the volume too fast, too slow, run one line faster than the other, purposely give them shitty scanners that always crap out on them (even though they themselves hit the wrong button and caused it to crap out), screw them over by putting them in the hard aisles or making them work with the shitty employees.  While they do this belly-aching, all the packages that they’re supposed to be picking up slide past them on the belt. 

The three days a week that I’m not working at the warehouse, I cram in as much time as possible working on my novel.  Writing a novel involves unlocking your imagination, mapping out a skeletal version of your manuscript’s structure, and organizing the chapters properly to maximize flow and readability.  Then you record all this information in your laptop, before you forget all the ideas you came up with.  Once you’re properly situated in front of the screen, you pump yourself up, turn on the creative portion of your brain, and start tapping at the keys.

No matter how hard you try to motivate yourself, it’s inevitable that your writing session descends into chaos.  Your creative side won’t come up with enough ideas to advance your story or develop character (or you’re just not in a writing mood because the Patriots are playing), leaving plot holes that you have to fill.  You’ll spill your drink, forcing you to put your ideas aside and grab some paper towels before your laptop electrocutes you.  Or your file will become infected with a virus.  Sometimes you can shut down and restart, but laptops can be temperamental, so you find yourself running over to Best Buy to see if the Geek Squad can save your work.    

From the moment they hear me talk about my manuscript, everyone thinks they, too, can write a novel.  They’ll come up to me and say, “Oh yeah I’m gonna write a novel one of these days,” as if all you have to do is spend a weekend typing a bunch of words and voila, it’ll be in stores the following Tuesday at midnight.  They’ll spend this coming weekend doing exactly that, until they realize that it takes hard work and determination, and they don’t have the patience to devote an insane amount of time to writing 300 pages of prose in a coherent, engaging format.

So, there you have it.  Managing a warehouse and writing a novel couldn’t be more similar.  And explaining this to would be novelists and managers tends to scare both off the task.  Which is probably a good thing.