ALR Reading Series Excerpts

Shout outs to our wonderful readers, Young George for the wonderful photos, and Simone Lounge for hosting us yet again.

Poetry by Chelsea Wagenaar

"Matins"

This morning’s matins are dream-based, fear-infused,
a first groggy plea not to still be waiting tables,
not to have my teeth break off and spew out of my mouth,
not to be coiled and bound on a precipice, awaiting
the promised superhero. He’s probably been detained—
perhaps stumbling heat-ravaged through the furnace
of lower Texas, or on a South American vacation,
unable to turn his eyes from the glaciers of Patagonia,
cerulean and windswept, terrible. The city of ice
reminds him of another, a city of glass towers
they’d called it, which he’d swooped in to rescue
from gangs and mafias, only to find all the ornithologists
wandering the streets stunned, mute, gathering
the stilled bodies of white-throated sparrows
from the sidewalks. Their shattered anatomies.
A whistle trapped in each throat, the world
that much quieter.
                         Cold coffee this abandoned morning,
straggling rain, thumbed out sun. Vagrant tongue,
I’ve followed you here, your far-fetched horizons,
your tall tales. Too often you return empty.
O Lord, there are even elegies for the guilted sidewalks,
small laments that throb to be heard, so what
is your reply? Word made feather. Made glacier.
Made flesh—that your eyes are fixed here,
your ears lashed and ragged with the tatters of prayers.

Nonfiction by Courtney Craggett

from "The First Day"

We were travelers, all of us running, running either from or toward – running from a bad economy, family obligations that had become too heavy, religions that were no longer our own; running toward love, adventure, cheaper master’s degrees, cultural enlightenment. And there we found ourselves, bound together in a new culture, in a new language, trying to make sense of everything and find our place in a world that was suddenly much larger than it had ever been before.

There was Caitlin from Boston, never afraid to speak her mind and at first a shock to my Texas-drenched sensibilities. There was Kristin, who said she came to Mexico and felt like she’d found her true nationality. There was Sarah. She wore a brand new engagement ring and was planning for her wedding next summer. There were Cynthia and Nikki, both from Mexico and the US, neither one exactly sure of where she belonged, so both of them here for now. There were others, too – Shannon and Angela and Claritza and Caro and Sebastian. I didn’t know any of them then, but in the year ahead I’d go wedding dress shopping with them, watch three of them get married, attend baby showers for another three, help one down the stairs when she sprained her knee, road trip to Acapulco with a few others, bake cupcakes, make dinners, celebrate holidays, watch movies. But all of that came later.

The air was sharp on that first morning. Back in Texas my family was gearing up for another 105-degree day, but down here, two hours south of Mexico City, the mountains had snow on them and the wind raised goose bumps on my arms. Although my roommate Kay and I had been to the high school a few times, we’d never taken the bus. Up until now school administration had driven us around. Como podemos llegar a La Paz, we asked a few men on the corner of the 31. “How do we get to La Paz?”

Poetry by Mark Wagenaar

excerpt coming soon!

An Interview with Rose McLarney

Justin Bigos: Rose, there are many things to admire in your forthcoming, first book of poems, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains. The book contains voices, and yet I sense a voice; stories, and yet I sense a story. You have a poem titled “Ars Poetica,” and another titled “Poet,”but there are many poems in this collection that could stand for the whole, the way a leaf of a fern looks like a fern. It’s a big question, but can you talk a bit about how you see these poems speaking to each other? And how did that help you arrange them into the pages of a book?

Rose McLarney: These are my ambitions for The Always Broken Plates of Mountains: A cast of speakers, like a chorus, express the thoughts of people who share a rural background and landscape. The landscape is more than the physical setting in the Appalachian mountains—it’s an atmosphere created by weaving together stories of both personal and larger cultural loss. The poems are not only about romantic love, but perhaps more significantly, about faithfulness to place. Though the perspective in this sequence varies, the poems are united by a characteristic voice. The voices are alike in that they are understated and musical, with tendencies to defer and deflect, as were the voices around me as I grew up. The voices are also united because they speak of love and loss, experiences that are so utterly un-unique that perhaps the only way they can be interesting is to use them as points of commonality.

At least that’s what I hope happens in the book. A significant time for me as a writer was a morning when I was shuffling through my many poems and began to think that they weren’t necessarily redundant because they addressed the same themes, or necessarily at odds because their speakers were different, but that they could work together. Now, reading and writing poems in series and sequences is a kind of acknowledgment that, though poetry can look so concise and definitive, you can’t express a thing well enough all that quickly or easily. Or I can’t. Sequences give me a chance to make the admission that I may never articulate what I want to completely, yet show my continuing best efforts.

Of course, while series allow me to try out different iterations of an idea, they are also limiting. A number of the poems I write just wouldn’t fit in this book. (For instance, some of my greatest pleasures are rather exotic cooking and experimental music and those subjects have no home in The Always Broken Plates of Mountains.) I’m well into working on my second book and, for it, I am trying to write distinctly different poems about another country, another continent, from another point of view, and there will be poems that won’t find company in this collection either.

In answer to your question about how the poems are arranged in the book, they are grouped by and progress through an arc of tones (though nothing as neat as a plot triangle). My intention was for the book to feel as if it resolved—even if the resolution at which it arrives is a message about disappearing, keeping quiet, being still. (Those may be some of the predominant messages I got from mountain culture. I don’t want to romanticize it. Of course, that instruction in humility may have also prepared me to inhabit personas.)

ALR Graduate-Student Reading Series 10.21

Jaimy Gordon and the polyvocal world of Lord of Misrule

Award-winning author Jaimy Gordon visited UNT last Tuesday. In her Q&A with students and faculty, she described her writing as simultaneously "all about voice" and tightly plotted and carefully structured. She described the writing process as one which uses imagination to create or locate narrative in the raw material of the observable world. This creation comes though on the page via a "massaging" of language, sometimes using "a voice that's trying to replace the real world with its idiosyncratic output" in a technique that Gordon calls "heightened first person." Gordon also stressed grounding a story in the literal world and creating a plot that unfolds towards a central event that connects all of the characters. The story, she said, should function on two levels: a surface story that contains a deeper undertow or undercurrent of thematic depth. Although she draws from folktales, fairy tales, opera, and a host of writers stretching from present day to the seventeenth century, Gordon keeps her own writing in Lord of Misrule, winner of the 2010 National Book Award, solidly planted in the universe of its racetrack setting.

Author Andrei Codrescu, one of the fiction judges for the 2010 National Book Award, states that Jaimy Gordon has "an incredible command of other voices, and a sense of music in language that is unequaled.” Lord of Misrule is praised as “moving and lyrical,” possessing prose that is “moody, poetic, darkly funny,” with language that is “so textured that her pages seem three-dimensional.” In the world of Lord of Misrule, racetrack slang mingles with gangster dialect and the ingredients for “horse goofer dust,” a magical concoction that guarantees a horse to win—but also results in that horse’s destruction. A polyvocal novel, each section of Lord of Misrule shows us another facet of the world of horse racing: owners and trainers, groomers and jockeys, gangster financiers and, of course, the horses themselves, who speak though their intricately described gestures on and off the track. 

Lord of Misrule is also a page-turner, masterfully constructed of unexpected reversals of fortune. And as Jaimy Gordon states in an interview with Bret Anthony Johnston, she “believes deeply in plot, or rather in whatever attribute it is of novels that makes a reader need to know what happens in the end.” Horse racing presents an obvious arc: who will win? And in the hands of a lesser writer, a horse race’s outcome might be the central question of the book. But by the time we get to the arrival of the Lord of Misrule, the titular horse, we’ve already been through three races, and a kidnapping, and watched as each voice, gesture, and description, using language high and low, spirals around a tightly constructed core. The Lord of Misrule appears in the final section of the novel, a demon horse brought in to run a fixed race. The melee of Gordon’s close-third perspectives unites to watch him arrive in third person plural: “They were all looking for a van like a Chinese jewel box.” In this van— a vehicle in fact disappointingly ordinary—is the horse, who possesses a head that is “calm, black and poisonous of mien as a slag pile in a coal yard. He had a funny white stripe like a question mark on his forehead.” The horse’s arrival is big news, “they looked at each other and they thought, this is big, and how can we get a piece of it, we’ll take anything, even a hoof paring, sawdust, loose change.” But The Lord of Misrule could care less about their adoration, providing a stark contrast between the stuff of dreams and the more mundane ingredients of hard realities. Upon arriving at the run-down Indian Mound Downs, he throws back this same head and “snorted out dust and rolled his eye at the other cheap horses. His black tail arched and, ugly as Rumpelstiltskin, he let drop great soft nuggets, part gold, part straw, all the way down the ramp.”

Please join us on Thursday, November 3rd for our next visiting writer, poet Carl Phillips, who will participate in a Q&A in LANG 314 at 4 pm and give a reading in the Golden Eagle Suite of the University Union at 8 pm. Phillips' most recent book, Double Shadow (FSG 2011) was just named a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in poetry.

Hey, here's some stuff I read

I think it's important in a literary landscape that seems sometimes obsessed with its own image as ever-dwindling and unnecessary to talk about and celebrate the success stories.  Here's one: Can Harper Perennial Reinvent Publishing

And if you're a fan of David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr, Jeffrey Eugenides, or Jonathan Franzen, or if you are the kind of person for whom lit. gossip is a weird kind of catnip, then you owe it to yourself to read this: Just Kids.

And... that's it.  I'm sure Laura will be by later to be a much better blogger than I.

Phillip Lopate on the Genre of Creative Non-Fiction

Last Wednesday, prolific author Phillip Lopate visited the University of North Texas. He gave a reading and participated in a Q&A with students. Lopate is one of the giants of CNF, editing the anthology The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday-Anchor, 1994), which is a required tome in all nonfiction classes. He is equally at home in the genres of fiction and poetry; his three most recent books are Two Marriages (novellas, Other Press, 2008), the nonfiction book Notes on Sontag (Princeton University Press, 2009), and At the End of the Day: Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010). Despite, or perhaps because of, his facility in "writing across genres," Lopate defended CNF as a distinct genre with its own rules and quirks, although arguably one that lacks the kinds of systematized studies or theories that unpack fiction and poetry. Although CNF is older than most give it credit for, it is often viewed as the younger, less sophisticated (though maybe more fun!) sibling of fiction and poetry. Fake memoirs! Real memoirs about trashy subjects! Fake memoirs about trashy reality stars!

Lopate offered an interesting insight about the state of CNF today, namely that it faces pressure to be "more like fiction, " containing dialogue, scenes, and action. He urged against inserting short-story-esque "epiphanies" or the more formal structures of poetry into the CNF form, allowing instead for an essay to follow an "interesting consciousness" as it tries to make sense of the world. In this sense, CNF brings the personal into the writing process, dramatizing the very nature of being and bringing writing back to the point were it was said to veer away from authorial intent.

But when I taught UNT's multi-genre introductory level creative writing class last spring, this fictionalization and depersonalization of experience is exactly how the multi-genre textbook that I used (Heather Sellers' The Practice of Creative Writing) instructed one to transition between CNF and fiction. Tell your students, it said, to place the events of their life into a narrative arc. Lopate didn't say to dispense with narrative arcs altogether (he did say that an essay must contain a sense that we are "getting somewhere"), but above this he championed the meditation on life, what he termed the "drama of consciousness" or thinking itself "enacted" on the page. It's a bold approach that invigorates "telling," that venerates an "amoeba-like structure," and that allows for a new kind of writing process: "working something out on the page that translates into excitement for the reader." CNF, Lopate argues, can combine the "character and story" of fiction with the "leaping from thought to thought" characteristic of poetry. But the result of this combination is a genre of writing all its own, a new way of communicating with the world and a new method for puzzling through the tensions of existence.

Please join us this afternoon (10/11) for a Q&A with our next visting writer, Jaimy Gordon, at 4 pm in room 317 of the Language building. Jaimy will also be reading tonight at 8 pm in the Golden Eagle Suite inside the University Union.

An Interview with Laurie Saurborn Young

Justin Bigos: First, congratulations on getting your first book, Carnavoria, accepted by H_NGM_N BKS. What was your experience of sending out your MS, and how did you decide to send to H_NGM_N?

Laurie Saurborn Young: Thanks very much, Justin. It was a long slog and a learning experience. I sent it out to well over 150 small-press contests and open reading periods since I graduated from Warren Wilson in 2008. I never got the guts up to query bigger publishers like Copper Canyon or Graywolf. The more I worked with the manuscript, the more it became my own. I was constantly writing and adding and subtracting poems—I learned more firmly that poems and manuscripts are not static entities; that I’ll be making changes until the editor rips it from my hands. And the work became stranger. It’s not conventional, and at times I truly despaired of ever finding an interested audience. Though I got a couple of nibbles early on, as I continued adding new poems and removing others, the nibbles disappeared.

Once I referred to this phase (of not having a book out) as “limbo.” This was at a dinner here in Austin for the poet Harvey Hix, who taught at UT in the Spring of 2010. As I recall it, he said, “That’s a nice way of putting it. It’s more like hell.” A couple more rounds of sending it out into the Vacuum of No Reply and I changed my “limbo” to his “hell.”

Ultimately what I think was most valuable was that I became more certain of my own voice, more confident of my approach. It also taught me how to persevere, and made me certain both of myself as a poet and of my poems. When the rejections came in, I didn’t say, “Oh my God, how can I change this so someone will like it?” There is no way to predict which editor or committee or guest reader will like whose work, so that’s a non-productive, exhaustive line of thinking. Poetry is not about pleasing people (and this is a southerner talking). For me, it’s about finding readers and listeners interested in what the poems are saying—or what they interpret the poems as saying (something over which the poet has little, if any, control).

When Nate Pritts, editor of H_NGM_N BKS and fellow WW alum called me this past spring and asked if the manuscript was still available, I was absolutely thrilled. A couple of weeks earlier I read Matt Hart’s Wolf Face and Alexis Orgera’s How Like Foreign Objects. Honestly, H_NGM_N was the place I truly wanted to be published—but I didn’t hold out any particular hopes, given my pile of rejections. I love the books H_NGM_N publishes, and am extremely thankful to be included in their line up. But then I started right in on my second manuscript. Now it’s out in the world for the time being and I’m working on a third. I like hard deadlines, and I like sending out a manuscript and not knowing what will happen. Hope and feathers, as Dickinson would say. Reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at an early age definitely helped motivate me, though it took a while for me to build up my confidence. Time passes whether I write or not. I’ve decided I’d rather it pass while I’m engaged in this productive, invigorating, challenging art.

Insideout

by M. Sweeney

John stands shaving at the morning mirror, sunlight burning a molten oval in the frosted glass at his side. He slaps too heavy with the razor, distracted, ruing the inexplicable erosion of closeness with his girlfriend, Jeannie, of late. It escapes any logical analysis. None of it should be happening. Yet all of it is happening. He might as well wish his whiskers would grow back in again.

Some odd shuffle in the sunlight and a massive double take–they WERE growing in again. Surely that’s an illusion? No! Each hair stiffening out to right angles, creaking in its follicle, then slipping back into it like spaghetti sucked between lips.

What the blue murdering…?

Then, absurdly he hears the tune, the Finnegan tune, playing in his mind, but too loud, as if echoing in a bucket. It’s playing on a violin, a manic violin…someone sitting on the pan behind the door fiddling away like a lunatic. He boots the door. Nothing.

He went fishing with a pinnegan.

His hands shake as he holds the razor. “Not happening. None of it happening.” The hairs draw back from the razor, every one of them, burrowing under his skin. He tries to brush his teeth but he keeps losing track, has to start over. Begin again. The sun burning in the window.


He grew fat and then grew thin again.

He escapes the bathroom, fear clutching at his windpipe, decides to phone Jeannie. His ear burns from too much sunlight. Or is it the receiver? It seems like he’s called her already. Perhaps many times. His heart lurches, edge of panic. She’s already speaking.

“Yeah, who is it?”

“It’s me Michael. Michael Finnegan.” He stares at the mouthpiece in horror. He didn’t mean to say that. It just sort of…

Crackle on the line. “John? Honey?”

He tries to speak but never gets started. But always gets started. And is already finished.

Then he died and had to begin again,

“John, you don’t sound so good, I’m coming home.”

He tries to reply.

*Click.*

But the words are good. Goood words. There’s hope in the words. Real sunlight, not like the bathroom.

She arrives at the door. It’s still there but fading. Life is returning with her.

“The bathroom” he bleats, pathetically, touches his face. “Just there, round the side, my chin, chinnegan.” Tears press but don’t emerge.

She takes his face in her hands. “John, honey, are you ok?”

Something about her touch grounds him, a lightning rod. He sucks a deep breath.

“Yes…yes. There was something, It came out. But it’s in again now.. In again for good.” Breathing easy now, clearly now. “Look, just promise me we won’t lose track of each other again.”

Book Review Friday

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

by Danielle Evans
Riverhead, 240 pp., 2010
Reviewed by Jessica Hindman

“Me and Jasmine and Michael were hanging out at Mr. Thompson’s pool” (1). So begins “Virgins,” the first story in Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, a brilliant debut collection that showcases Evan’s stunning ability to unearth racial and sexual complexities with deceptively casual language. In this first sentence, Evans creates a setting that could not seem more blasé: three teenagers “hanging out” by a pool. But under the surface of suburban normalcy, racial and sexual dangers lurk. As the story progresses, we find out that the seemingly simple act of lounging by Mr. Thompson’s pool is in fact a result of complex racial, sexual, and class hierarchies:

Mr. Thompson was retired, but he used to be our elementary school principal, which is how he was the only person in Mount Vernon we knew with a swimming pool in his backyard. We—and everybody else we knew—lived on the south side, where it was mostly apartment buildings, and if you had a house, you were lucky if your backyard was big enough for a plastic kiddie pool. (6)

In other words, Mr. Thompson is offering a favor to the lower-class narrator—Erica—and her friends. And despite their young age, Erica and Jasmine are already wary of male favors:

“We hung out with [Michael] because we figured it was easier to have a boy around than not to…When you were alone, men were always wanting something from you. We even wondered about Mr. Thompson sometimes, or at least we never went swimming at his house without Michael with us.” (6)

Evans is so subtle in establishing the dangers that surround her characters that the reader barely notices as she slowly raises the stakes. When the three teens decide to use their fake IDs to go clubbing in New York City, the danger seems more of the suburban variety (getting caught by their parents) than the late-night-news variety (rape or murder). But as the story progresses, the two types of dangers—the urban and the suburban—become increasingly conflated. At the end of “Virgins,” neither Erica nor Jasmine is still a virgin, but Erica has lost her virginity in a familiar suburban setting, while Jasmine has disappeared to have sex with strangers in the Bronx. The move from the suburban to urban and back, however, is ultimately inconsequential; neither of the girls has encountered sex in a safe, premeditated, or fulfilling way. Here Evans demonstrates the absurdity of presuming that the suburbs offer black teenagers a safer alternative to the city. The girls’ parents are working so many shifts (presumably to afford a suburban existence) that they fail to notice their daughters’ transgressions. And even though no one in the story says so directly, we know implicitly that the sexual stakes for white girls in this suburb are much lower than they are for Crystal and Jasmine.

Indeed, Evans’s writing is at its strongest when she shows how typical suburban high jinks swiftly become more ominous when the characters in question are minorities. The story, “Robert E. Lee Is Dead,” follows the relationship between Geena—a popular cheerleader who gets kicked off the squad for low grades—and her friend Crystal, who has managed to become valedictorian despite the school’s racial prejudice. When Geena asks Crystal to participate in a senior prank, Crystal points out that “White kids do senior pranks. When we try it, they’re called felonies” (220). Crystal ends up participating in the prank anyway, but when the prank gets out of hand and the two girls accidentally set the school football field on fire, Geena insists on taking the blame. The last image of the story is of Crystal running from the scene of the crime:

“I stared at Geena for a long second. Then I took off running, stopping in the middle of the parking lot to take off my heels. I kept running, the asphalt stinging my feet through my panty hose. Halfway up the hill behind the school, I stopped to look back, vaguely recalling Sunday school and Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. Already I could hear sirens in the distance. I watched Geena sitting on the curb beside the pay phone, fists curled backward into cushions for her chin. She looked small and still and ready. I turned then, shut my eyes, and ran breathlessly toward the dam. I didn’t stop again until I had crossed the bridge and hopped the fence that took me back to Eastdale. On the other side, I stopped to catch my breath, and then kept running, knowing even then that a better person would have turned around.” (229)

At the core of this story, and the entire collection, is a moral question: How can blacks who have attained academic and worldly success live in a world where too many black teenagers literally get left behind on a curb? Evans prose here is stunning in its ability to show the pain of separation that occurs in the suburbs when upwardly mobile black youth leave their less fortunate friends to deal with the all-too-familiar consequences of racial inequality. Indeed, the title of the collection comes from a Donna Kate Rushin poem, which Evans includes as an epigraph to the book. In the poem, Rushin writes, “I’m sick of mediating with your worst self/On behalf of your better selves.” Evans’s stories are masterful portraits of characters who want to become their “better selves,” but who, for many reasons—racism, sexism, guilt about the others who are left behind while they enjoy newfound success—are never quite satisfied with their progress.

Flash Monday

A Sleeve Made of Hearts

by Zach VandeZande

Her job in those days kept her downtown pretty late, so I got to wandering around out of doors. It started out as sitting on the porch with a beer or two, looking the way a stray animal might, some possum or unwanted cat. The house, it was too big for me to be in it alone, I kept checking for intruders or ghosts, and anyway she was the one who wanted to move out here to the suburbs.

And eventually, yeah, I started walking around, and I started knocking on a few doors, got to asking questions and pretending like I was taking the census. A neighbor would open her door and I would say Excuse me, but do you think that love is just the selfish need to have your jokes laughed at, your bed shared, to have someone know as much as they can of you and still say Okay, yes, I want you to hold on tightly, and I will do the same? Answer on a scale of one to five. Five being strongly agree. So what if I’d had a drink or two? I’d still be professional, I’d still lean in all serious with my pen and my clipboard and wait patiently for them to consider the question. And I’d listen, really listen, to what they had to say.

In this way we got to know each other, the neighbors and me. But she found out about it and got mad, asked me to knock it off. I quoted Walt Whitman back at her—I’d been reading Walt Whitman on the porch sometimes. We secretly thought each other snobs. Different kinds of snobs, but still, it was a rough time.

Suburbs, they’ve got a breaking point to them, and it comes from within, it comes from the dull edge of shame in each resident. That’s the whole point of a homeowner’s association, to keep the chaos out, to keep that awful feeling of shame away. Also black people, probably, depending on the neighborhood. So what if they got involved? So what if I got citations in my mailbox? Quelling the human heart isn’t a noble thing was my thinking. So when she threw in with them, yeah, I took it kinda personal. So maybe my survey questions became a little hostile, maybe I threw up some whiskey on Miss Applebaum’s rose bush, maybe I lit a lawn or two on fire. The point is, and I’m marking it five on a scale of five, the point is I did it in defense of love.