the Prairie Schooner blog

Thanks for Contributors

Beth Bachmann, winner of 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.
Walter Bargen, Days Like This Are Necessary: New and Selected Poems, BkMk P /UMKC, 2009. And the William Rockwell Nelson Award for poetry.Theban Traffic: Poems, WorldTech Communications, 2008.
Chana Bloch, Blood Honey, Autumn House Press, 2009. Winner of the Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress.
Jericho Brown, Whiting Award. Please, New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008.
Margaret Chaula, What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps, Katsura P, 2009.
Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover, translators, Selected Poems of Freidrich Holderlin, won the PEN USA Translation Award.
Matthew Gavin Frank, Sagittarius Agitprop, Black Lawrence P,2009.
Ray Gonzalez, Cool Auditor, BOA Editions, Ltd., 2009.
Marilyn Hacker, translator, He and I, by Emmanuel Moses, Oberlin College P, 2009.
Bill Lavender, transfixion, Garret County and Trembling Pillow P, 2010.
Patti M. Marxsen, First Prize winner, All Nations Press Non-Fiction Chapbook Contest. Beyond the Village: Essays Out of Switzerland, All Nations Press, 2010.
Constance Merritt, Two Rooms, LSU P, 2009.
Lori Ostlund, 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Book of Seventy, U of Pittsburgh P, 2009.
Donald Platt, Dirt Angels, New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2009.
William Reichard, Sin Eater, Mid-List Press, 2010.
Jack Ridl, Losing Season, University P of New England, 2009.
Colette Sartor, short story “Lamb” published by Prairie Schooner, named to “100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2008” in Best American Short Stories 2009.
Maurya Simon, The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St.Jerome and St. Paula: A Novel in Verse, Elixir P, 2010.
Charles Harper Webb, Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems, U of Pittsburgh P, 2009.
Jeff Worley, Best to Keep Moving, Larkspur P, 2009.

Documenterror?

Just back from Paranormal Activity which I admired for its convincing stabs at veracity. I don’t believe in ghosts but I do believe in people who believe in ghosts, and many of the film’s chills arise from the characters’ rational articulation of their heebie-jeebies. The girlfriend feels genuinely haunted, the boyfriend genuinely conflicted, leading to a domestic disharmony that threatens to eat at their centers just as effectively as the undead would.

 

Paranormal Activity brings to mind Orson Welles’s notorious radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, broadcast 71 years ago today. Just as Paranormal Activity is presented as found home-movie footage--the doomed young couple compiling video evidence of their suburban home’s night visitors--the drama of Welles’s broadcast hinged on a series of fictionalized news reports of martian attacks. District 9 of a few months back took a similarly cinema verite approach to focus on the dangerous hazards of alien displacement. (Here’s a nifty top-ten list of horror flicks posing as documentary.)

 

Benjamin Percy, who’ll be teaching in the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference next summer (June 12-18, 2010) examines the elasticity of truth and documentation in his short story “April 20, 2008”; though Percy doesn’t quite take the Blair Witch approach to his portrait of a gentleman on the edge, he does disturb with some perversely manipulated Wikipedia entries.

 

Have a safe and scary H’ween, kids. 

Paul Lisicky and the Boomer Issue

Author Paul Lisicky (who contributed to the current Baby Boomer issue of Prairie Schooner) talks with us about micro-fiction, literary hybrids, and The Devil in Miss Jones, among other things:

 

PS: There are a number of micro-fiction sites online (such as the sleek fifty word fiction, a venue for what one might call micro-minis). Your work has appeared in flash-fiction and micro-fiction anthologies. What is the current state of the genre?

 

Paul Lisicky: I just finished reading James Wood’s rave of Lydia Davis’ Collected Stories in the New Yorker. Among other things, he calls the book “one of the great, strange American literary contributions” and compares her to Flannery O’Connor, Donald Barthelme, and J.F. Powers.  Does that translate to the form’s coming of age? Mainstream cred? I’m not sure, but it isn’t news that the short from is everywhere these days, both in print and on-line. I think readers are hungry for something new, something that doesn’t feel like it’s repeating the same old patterns. Of course there are probably curmudgeons out there linking the trend to the decreasing attention span in the age of the Internet but I think the explanation is more complicated than that. A good short might ask the mind to work harder than a story of more conventional duration. And maybe that’s central to the appeal of the form: the puzzle and play of the reading experience. It’s like reading poetry. If you’re not paying attention, the work’s going to go right over your head.

 

PS: What are some particular qualities of the short-short form that appeal to you, as a reader and as a writer?

 

Paul Lisicky: I’m drawn to any kind of work that invites me to reread it again and again. Compression, musicality of language, potency of image—those things are important to me. The best shorts feel like they’re making themselves up, at least structurally. Part poem, part story, part essay. There’s something compelling about participating in that energy, or more precisely, watching a hybrid come into being.

 

I just wish we had a better name for them. I can’t think of short-short without thinking, I don’t know, Daisy Dukes. 

 

PS: Your story, “What Might Life Be Like in the 21^st Century,” appears in the Baby Boomer issue of PS. So here’s an impossible question to answer: How has being of that generation informed your fiction?

 

Paul Lisicky: Well, I was a teenager at the height of the era depicted in The Ice Storm. By that I mean I saw sexual mores changing overnight. My father, for instance, was someone whose look couldn’t have been more conservative during my childhood: big blocky glasses, flat-top crew cut. And he became someone else in the matter of a month. He grew his hair long, exchanged his old glasses for wire-rim aviators, and started wearing patterned shirts. I remember my parents deciding to see Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones, which in those days played in the cinema at the shopping center down the street. And that seemed like a perfectly fine thing to do. They were like new people. That seemed huge and bewildering to me at the time. I think most of my writing has been about the tension between control and letting go of the old systems that have constrained us. Which is an ongoing story, of course.

 

PS: The writer Francisco Goldman once wrote that “First novels, as I understood it back when I first dreamed of writing one, were for getting back at everybody you hated in high school.” Your short story, contrarily, is a reflective meditation on a high school experience, the narrator glancing back at a particularly difficult moment for the narrator and his mother. Yet the narrator seems to almost cherish this miserable moment, and the insights it eventually offers him. How did you arrive at this particular story, and this particular moment? What was the genesis?

 

Paul Lisicky: In seventh grade I actually worked on a school project called “What Might Life Be Like in the 21^st Century.” The mother was based on my late mother, and Mr. Science was inspired by my teacher, Mr. Fitzgerald. There also was a science fair, but for some reason, I wasn’t there. Mr. Fitzgerald was one of those strange male junior high teachers who made a habit of pinpointing the freaks and gayboys in his class and doing what he could to get them to conform. But what interested me, in memory, was my mother. Why would she pass on his words to me, especially without any overt resentment of him? That wasn’t like her; she was incredibly protective of her sons. I thought of Mr. Fitzgerald’s blue eyes and black hair and wondered, could my mother have been attracted to him on some level? For some reason that notion struck me as poignant, especially from the distance of so many years. That speculation became the kernel of the story, which is otherwise an act of imagination.

 

PS: What are you working on now? 

 

Paul Lisicky: I’ve finished a short novel called The Burning House, which is making the rounds, as they say. And I’m also completing a collection of short prose pieces, Unbuilt Projects, which will include “What Might Life Be Like in the 21^st Century.” Its main subjects are memory and identity; a number of the pieces think about my mother’s struggle with dementia. Finally, I’ve just started a memoir that wants to dramatize a 26-year-long relationship between two writers: me and my late best friend.

 

 

Paul Lisicky is the author of the novel Lawnboy and the memoir Famous Builder. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Subtropics, Hotel Amerika, Boulevard, Flash Fiction, and many other anthologies and magazines. He lives in New York City, where he teaches at NYU; he has taught at Cornell University, Sarah Lawrence College, Antioch University-Los Angeles, The University of Houston, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference. He blogs at http://paullisicky.blogspot.com/.   

 

 

 

 

Tongues Tied

I was banned in Rhode Island. An anthology of essays—When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School—to which I contributed an essay titled “Scoliosis and an Ogilvie Home Perm,” was challenged as a Cumberland, R.I., high school reading assignment because, it was noted, the entire collection is filled with essays that are “lewd, contain profanity, and references to bestiality.” (Banned Books Week, which wrapped up a few days ago, included the anthology on its list of 85 books “challenged, restricted, removed, or banned in 2007-2008.”) Though I would never cop to bestiality, I do regret that my essay was not the catalyst for this controversy. That distinction belongs to “How to Kill a Boy That Nobody Likes,” by the decidedly un-homicidal and utterly likable Will Clarke. (The essay references subliminal advertising techniques, crediting a soda-pop company with airbrushing the ice cubes in its ads with deviant sexual acts.)

 

I’m grateful to Will for getting the entire team of essayists benched for the season, as it makes for amusing cocktail party chatter. But when my hometown high school forbade the English teacher from continuing to read from my first novel aloud, due to the unladylike tongue of one of the book’s more profane characters, it wasn’t quite so amusing, as I was about to visit the school to speak to the students. It was a little queasy-making, frankly, and accurately recaptured that old high-school fear that everyone is talking smack about you behind your back.

 

Prairie Schooner and the UNL English Department have swell representation in this incendiary text. John McNally, the book’s editor and contributor, received his PhD from UNL. Sean Doolittle (whose essay “Space Cadet” details his time in a junior academy for police-department hopefuls) is also a UNL alum. K.L. Cook, winner of the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction for his collection Last Call, contributed an essay of danger and loss, “A Nova, an Eyelash, a Snoring Man: Notes on Adolescent Summers.” Poet and Prairie Schooner contributor Aimee Nezhukumatathil includes a “bizarro she-mullet” in her essay, “A Herstory of Hair.”

 

Among the many other fine contributors are Kelly Braffet, Elizabeth Crane, Owen King, and long-time online lit commentator Maud Newton, whose essay, “Confessions of a Cradle-Robber” tells of her summer between eighth and ninth grade, when she was “mad with lust.”

 

And when else, as a species, are we more mad with lust, and more mad in general, than when we’re confined to the repressive halls of adolescence? School libraries tend to get hardest hit by parents driven to remove books from places where their brats might get big ideas in their little lice-ridden heads—or, where their kids might seek guidance on topics that make their parents antsy. (You can even visit an interactive map that pinpoints where schools, libraries, and bookstores have been targeted for challenges, allowing you to plot out an autumn tour of bed-and-breakfasts in lands of intolerance.) The naughty librarians of the savvy Banned Books Week organizations offer peeps of the inappropriate with their blurbs for banned books, culled from the actual statements of offense: “peppered with profanities,” “amoral, abnormal contents,” “adult situations like flirtation with a teacher,” “references to the male and female anatomy,” “homosexual story line sugarcoated with cute penguins.”

 

Though book banning is, in some ways, a quaint notion, and gaining access to books is not exactly tricky (I’m downloading the e-book of banned-book Prep, by Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference faculty Curtis Sittenfeld, as I type this sentence), for many readers, the public or school library, especially in small towns, is a vital resource. So if a young person was in need of a homosexual story line sugarcoated with cute penguins, a library would be a safe place to seek it.

 

And authors themselves aren’t always amused by (and don’t always benefit from) book-banning and other acts of suppression. When Amazon.com, due to what the company called a cataloging error, removed books with gay themes from its ranking system, it made thousands of such books invisible, while pleasantly drawing attention to one author’s new book in particular. You can read an interview with the author here.

Kindlenoia, Kindliana, and Kindlepathia

As my first blog posting in my new role as PS online editor, it seems apropos to ponder the rabid conversations regarding the rise of the e-book (not to be confused with e-literature, which we’ll get to in just a smidge). The Amazon Kindle, the free Barnes and Noble eReader (for your computer, iPhone, or Blackberry), and other avenues of paperlessness have provoked both ire and slavish devotion, sometimes within the same consumer. The resulting debate has been rather rigorously shaped around e-books vs. non-e-books, with most of us diehard romantics growing faint at the suggestion of digital ink, sending us dashing to our bookshelves to inhale the pulpy mildew and to fondle our books with a fetishist’s angst.

 

But the cockeyed optimists among us believe that the Kindle and its cohorts will rescue the novel from its much-chronicled demise (a death that I believe was first foretold in the year 1688, with the release of one of the earliest novels ever, Oroonoko , by Aphra Behn—novels were swiftly derided as lowbrow brain-suckers), by putting the book within the sexy proximity of electronica, which, we hear, is where all the funnest parties are.

 

Regardless of which side of the debate you take, this argument has (arguably) positioned “the book” closer to the forefront of the cultural conversation; or, at least, one could say the book has come closer to the forefront since the e-book put chewing gum in the book’s hair and sent it sobbing across the playground. Inevitably, the more e-readers are embraced by the reading public=the more bookish conversation and better the appreciation of the beauty of the book’s complex simplicity. (Also, look for more fiction writers and poets to eschew electronic reproduction by incorporating highly graphical elements, in the manner of Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas and Lily Hoang’s Changing , and projects like Les Figues Press .)

 

Now, e-literature is another story: The current issue of PS includes poetry by Ed Falco, a pioneer in the development of hypertext and digital writing. Though his three poems in the fall ’09 Baby Boomer Issue —“In America,” “April 10, 1988,” “After, Climbing Dragon’s Tooth”—are decidedly un-digital (though I wouldn’t call them at all traditional, neither in structure nor content), his own hypertext and his endeavors on behalf of the publication of hypertext are available online. Falco is the founder/editor of the new river: a journal of digital writing & art (the spring ’09 issue of which includes work by another PS Baby Boomer Issue contributor: Denise Duhamel), and some of his digital work is available here . (And you can either purchase a lovely hardcover edition of his novel Wolf Point, or shove it into your Kindle .) For a podcast interview with Falco, and information about his most recent novel, Saint John of the Five Boroughs , visit Unbridled Books .   

 

So how do we reconcile our adoration of our favorite bookseller (an early 20^th century Brooklyn bookstore was described lovingly—tobacco-smoke and all—in Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop , which is available for free on your B&N eReader) with our impulse to be early adopters of new media? The best bookstore-friendly practice is to download the books unlikely to be found on bookstore shelves: my most recent downloads include The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson; Telling Fortunes by Tea Leaves: How to Read Your Fate in a Teacup by Cicely Kent (1922); and The Book of Repulsive Women by Djuna Barnes. (Full disclosure: despite years of debate among scholars seeking exactitude and revision in the publishing history of James Joyce’s Ulysses , the version I have is a Project Gutenberg freebie which is described as “ based on the pre-1923 print editions .” Based on ? Gulp.)

Changes One

But only in our social network. Timothy Schaffert has taken the reins of our online media, and you can follow conversations on Facebook, She Writes, fictionaut, and listen for his tweets on Twitter. The internet can make you seem to be in so many places at once!

And I should point you over to Lisa Romeo's blog. She has an interview with Guest Editor Grace Bauer coming up shortly--with a contest!

Lastly, the new issue is up on our official website, so you can read some of the rather amazing amazingness that makes up the Fall issue.

(And a quick teaser: watch for us on Poetry Daily.)

Watch This Space

We have some changes rolling toward us--not sharp shocks, of course, but some adjustments to our online presence. As you might expect, this is a tease, so I'll leave the announcement at that for the moment.

Two things I'd like to draw to your attention. First, the occasional William Saroyan International Prize for Writing is accepting entries until the 31st of January 2010. Prose is the style--fiction and non-fiction are both considered. There's a $5000 award up for grabs in each genre. Rush over to this site for full guidelines.

Secondly, and far closer to home, our Fall issue is out. Grace Bauer is the Guest Editor, and she's rounded up an all-star constellation of grooviness and sharp-eyed insight. I just can't help using that word when it comes to our baby boomer issue. We don't have the table of contents and selected pieces up yet, but I thought I'd put up the cover image--though I warn you step away from the monitor.

Award-Winning Weekend

It's a holiday, so hoist a beverage of your choice with me and celebrate Lori Ostlund for winning one of this year's Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards. Her book, which looks like this ,

has a tasty little story in it titled "Idyllic Little Bali." Why do I mention this? Oh, I don't know. You can read other excerpts at her website, but it's a holiday and you'll want to be away from your computer, right? So pick up a copy. Or two, and give one to a friend. And if you see this woman:   

 

congratulate her on a fantastic award!

The Continued Work of our Previous Contributors

Cynthia Atkins, Psyche’s Weathers, WordTech Communications, 2007

Mary Jo Bang, The Bride of E, Graywolf P, 2009

Bruce Bennett, Subway Figure, Orchises P, 2009

Marilyn Chin, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Norton, 2009

Paul Eggers, The Departure Lounge, Ohio State UP, 2009

Patricia Fargnoli, Then, Something, Tupelo P, 2009

Sherrie Flick, Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel, U of Nebraska P, 2009

Meredith Hall, Without a Map, Beacon P, 2008

Kevin Hart, Young Rain, U of Notre Dame P, 2009

Julie Kane, Jazz Funeral, Story Line P, 2009

Marilyn Krysl, Swear the Burning Vow: Selected and New Poems, Ghost Road Publishing, 2009

Steve Langan, Meet Me at the Happy Bar, BlazeVOX, 2009

Kathryn Ma, All That Work and Still No Boys, U of Iowa P, 2009

Hilary Masters, In Rooms of Memory: Essays, U of Nebraska P, 2009

Jennifer Militello, Flinch of Song, Tupelo P, 2009

Debra Nystrom, Bad River Road, Sarabande Books, 2009

Lisa Olstein, Lost Alphabet, Copper Canyon P, 2009

Mark Perlberg, Waiting for the Alchemist, LSU P, 2009

Marc J. Sheehan, Vengeful Hymns, Ashland Poetry P, 2009

Abbott Small, Into the Turquoise, 2009

Michael Spence, Crush Depth, Truman State UP, 2009

Dabney Stuart, Tables, Pinyon Publishing, 2009

Kristen Tracy, Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus..., Delacorte P, 2009

The Expanding Universe

In an economy of sometimes riveting contractions (just exactly how much smaller is the banking industry these days?), at least one small publisher is holding back the push. C&R Press had come to our attention because they've published a few of our contributors, but I encourage you over the weekend to peruse their titles and pick up a few. And I hope it will be at a local bookseller, but I suppose they won't hold it against you if you use another outlet.

You can see one of our mutual poets do a reading here.

And you can tell us about your favorite small, passionate publisher in the comments. Please do, actually. We'd love to hear about them. It makes our days a bit more lively.