the Prairie Schooner blog

Japan, ever-present

Reflections on memory, history, culture, and hybridity in the wake of Japan’s recent earthquake and tsunami, by Mari L’Esperance

“The pain of one part of humankind is the pain of the whole of humankind. And the human species and the planet Earth are one body. What happens to one part of the body happens to the whole body.” —Thich Nhat Hanh (in a letter posted on the web in response to the earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan)

When a writer must contend with what lies beyond her control (and that is, of course, much of what she experiences in life), what is left for her to do? Certainly she can deny it or choose to accept it. Often she must also write about it—must make meaning, through language, of events and her internal responses to those events that elude meaning, refuse to be explained or adhere to logic. For this post I’d initially thought to write about my mixed heritage (Japanese, French Canadian-American, Abenaki Missisquoi Indian) and how this racial and cultural “hybridity” inevitably influences me and informs my poetry in ways that are often impossible to name. Although compelling in theory, it was a soupy, unformed idea, at best. Over the ensuing weeks I played with it some more.

Then, on March 11 an 8.9 earthquake and devastating tsunami struck the northern Pacific coast of Japan, irrevocably changing so much for so many. As news and images of the destruction streamed through and across the Internet, I became aware on a felt level that more than the earth’s axis and an entire coastline and its inhabitants had been violently transformed. Physically, psychically, and emotionally, something in me had also shifted, broken open (like the earth herself?), and begun to rearrange and reform itself, and continues to do so days later. Such shifting and reorganizing occurs all the time for any one of us, mostly beyond our conscious awareness, and speaks to the hybridity inherent in all experience—across time, locations, identities, relationships, and cultures—as our individual and collective psyches rearrange and reshape themselves in response to a myriad influences, both internal and external, chosen and imposed.

As it was for many others, my initial response to the events in Japan was one of horror and disbelief; then a gnawing, obsessive panic (Was my family safe? Were my beloved temples and shrines unharmed?) was followed by deep sorrow and a pervading sense of hopelessness that threatened to overwhelm me. For me, Japan is mother, literally and symbolically; place and parent are one and the same, indistinguishable, interchangeable. Japan is the place of my birth and my late mother’s homeland and holds tremendous meaning for me—culturally, spiritually, aesthetically, and emotionally. My motherland had suffered a tremendous rupture and, on a psychic level, so had I. Immediately after the quake and in the hours and days following, I found myself feeling queasy, light-headed, destabilized, disembodied, and otherworldly. In my own way I, too, felt like I’d taken a full body blow from a giant, internal wave and had been sent reeling, tossed about in the wake churned up by my rattled psyche.

Since the earthquake, I’ve communicated with family and friends in Tokyo, Kamakura, and Yokohama, mostly via Skype and Facebook (which I will never complain about again). With phone service down and electricity out or only intermittently available in many areas, the Internet was a critical lifeline after the quake. Thankfully, my loved ones are well and safe and I’ve been reminded of what an interconnected world we now live in—how we perceive and metabolize one another’s lives and experiences in ways we could not have dreamed of before the arrival of the Internet. A crisis of this proportion also reminds us immediately of how interdependent and interconnected we are and how we take so much for granted under “normal” circumstances: fully stocked grocery shelves; ample water, electricity, and gas; smoothly operating transportation and communication systems. A disruption in any of these exposes us to our vulnerability and helplessness.

The quake and tsunami shook me awake and got me thinking about hybridity in a different way than I’d initially considered. It stimulated my thinking about hybridity of experience and psychological phenomena across history, generations, and cultures. I thought about trans-generationally transmitted trauma and how such trauma is re-experienced by successive generations in different and similar ways and also affects the world at large (Hurricane Katrina comes to mind as an example). In recent days I’ve considered how the earthquake and its aftermath have not only affected me personally, but are affecting a generation that survived World War II (such as my 73-year-old uncle in Kamakura, who vividly remembers the traumas he endured as a boy in that war), as well as subsequent generations who did not directly suffer war trauma, but have experienced flavors of it through their parents and grandparents and in the days since the quake. During World War II the constant air raids, disease and food shortages, the massive firebombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities that killed tens of thousands and destroyed entire communities, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with their deadly legacy currently playing itself out at the stricken nuclear power plant in Fukushima, and widespread devastation and deprivation seared the psyches of the Japanese people for decades to come. (To get a sense of this experience, I encourage you to watch the gorgeous, poetic animated film “Grave of the Fireflies” or “火垂るの墓, Hotaru no Haka” [1988], pictured at left, which film critic Robert Ebert has called one of the “greatest war films ever made”; it will break your heart.) When I see images in the news of entire communities and miles of coastland wiped out by the tsunami, leaving a sea of rubble in its wake, or of bewildered, displaced seniors warming their hands around a kerosene stove, I’m reminded of the war and how these experiences are all connected in our psyches, in our very cells.

After the earthquake my mind made an intuitive sweep of Japan’s rich and turbulent history. I thought of the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” (in Japanese, 黒船, kurofune—so called for their menacing black hulls and smokestacks belching clouds of thick, black coal smoke) on July 14, 1853 at Uraga Harbor (part of present-day Yokosuka) in Kanagawa Prefecture. Watching post-quake news and seeing black smoke rising from burning boats, buildings, and damaged oil refineries naturally reminded me of these early assaults, like a series of great waves, from the west on Japan’s cultural and psychic integrity. Although I was not alive when Perry’s ships dropped anchor off Japan’s coast over 150 years ago, the psychic memory lives in me on a cellular level, as it does in every person of Japanese descent. The same can be said for post-tsunami images of raging fires left to burn themselves to ash—images which took me back to the firebombings of World War II: sweeping, out-of-control flames raging red and orange against total blackness. I recalled my mother’s life during the war; at the time a school girl in Kamakura (located on the coast a 50-minute train ride southwest of Tokyo), she’d recount for me having nothing to eat for weeks on end but rotting sweet potatoes, walking to school in winter with her feet wrapped in rags, and terrifying air raids at all hours of the day and night. After the earthquake my uncle in Kamakura told me he was in Tokyo (where he’d traveled to pay his respects at the family cemetery plot) when the quake struck. As trains were stopped for a time, he couldn’t get home until early the next day, then had to walk a good part of the distance because his local train line was still out of commission. He said the journey reminded him of walking with his father (my grandfather) from Tokyo to Kamakura during the war when trains had been derailed by air raids and power outages.

Hybridity is not simply an intellectual, academic construct; it is real, ever-present, and permeates all of us on many levels, no matter who we are, no matter our experience. As a Hapa poet, I find these ever shifting layers and dynamics provide infinite richness and depth for my imagination and my poems. The Japanese hold interdependence and interconnectedness as core cultural values, just as Americans value self-sufficiency, independence, and individualism. Despite all that their small island nation has endured over the centuries, it is these values and the cultural and social integrity of the Japanese people that will carry them through one of the greatest natural disasters in human history. And, by virtue of our shared humanity and natural impulse to reach out, connect, and comfort, we will help them as well as continue to hold them in our minds and hearts.

 

About Mari L'Esperance:

Born in Kobe, Japan, Mari L’Esperance is a Hapa poet whose first full-length collection The Darkened Temple was awarded the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2008. Jane Mead has written of it: “… L’Esperance enacts the process of defining a self out of fragments of cultural and personal history, the traumatic disintegration of that self, and its subsequent painful rebuilding: by turns narrative, chantlike, fractured, and lyric, these tender, terrifying, and frank poems fight their way into song.” An earlier collection Begin Here was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. L'Esperance's poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Poetry Kanto, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Whale Sound, and elsewhere and have been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University and the recipient of fellowships from the New York Times, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L'Esperance lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

Fresh Air

As you might expect, many of us here in the office are fairly devoted listeners to National Public Radio (in fact, one of our Senior Readers in Non-Fiction, Kelly Grey Carlisle, has a spouse who is an announcer on the local affiliate network). Over the Memorial Day weekend, the teaser for Fresh Air mentioned a reading of poems by a military wife. There are many, I'm sure, but I kept thinking that a former colleague (a past Book Prize Coordinator and Senior Reader in Poetry) fit that description.

And I was right.

You can still click over to the Fresh Air site and listen to Jehanne Dubrow read and comment on three of her poems from her book, Stateside. 

She's also a contributor, and you can read some fantastic poems in the Summer 2009 issue. If you still have that lying around.

Our Own Red Carpet: Prairie Schooner Awards

Each year, we look over all the work we've printed and single out for special attention work that we think is particularly fine. This task is, in many ways, like trying to pick your favorite child: we really love all the pieces that we publish. But going back through the year's stories, poems, and essays is not so bad a project, and we always find pieces we'd like to share again. So join us in celebrating these fine writers:

The Lawrence Foundation Award of $1,000 was won by Lori Ostlund of San Francisco, CA for the story “Idyllic Little Bali” from the Summer issue. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Chico. She received the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for her collection The Bigness of the World (U of Georgia P), which includes ‘‘Idyllic Little Bali.’’ Other stories from the collection have appeared or are forthcoming in the Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Hobart, and Blue Mesa Review. For eight years, she and her partner owned an Asian furniture store in New Mexico and took yearly buying trips to Indonesia, where her prize-winning story is set.

 

The $1,500 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award was won by Robin Becker of Boalsburg, PA for her many poems that were published in the Summer and Fall issues. Her sixth collection of poems, Domain of Perfect Affection (U of Pittsburgh P), was a finalist for the Audre Lorde and Lambda Book Awards. She writes a column on the poetry scene, ‘‘Field Notes,’’ for the

Women’s Review of Books. She’s currently completing a new collection of poems called ‘‘Snow in Summer.’’ This prize is made possible by the generosity of poet, publisher, and philanthropist Glenna Luschei.

 

Alicia Ostriker won the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing of $1,000 for her six poems in the Summer issue. Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic. Her most recent book of poetry is The Book of Seventy. Her 1980 poem sequence The Mother/child Papers has just been reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is also the author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. She teaches in the Low-Residency mfa program at Drew University. The Faulkner Award is supported by charitable contributions to honor Virginia Faulkner, former editor-in-chief of the University of Nebraska Press and fiction editor at Prairie Schooner.

 

Linda Pastan is awarded the Edward Stanley Award of $1,000 for her four poems from the Winter issue. Her twelfth book of poems, Queen of a Rainy Country, was published by Norton. She received the Ruth Lilly Prize in 2003 and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award. From 1991 to 1995 she was poet laureate of Maryland. Her next book will be Traveling Light. Charitable contributions from the family of Edward Stanley, a member of the committee that founded Prairie Schooner in 1926, make this award possible.

 

 

The Bernice Slote Award of $500 for the best work by a beginning writer was won by Marly Swick for her story “Nothing Extra” published in the Fall issue. She has published two story collections and two novels: A Hole in the Language, The Summer Before the Summer of Love, Paper Wings, and Evening News. Her short fiction has appeared in O’Henry Prize Stories, Atlantic Monthly, Best of the Best of the South, and other magazines. The Slote Award is supported by the estate of Bernice Slote, Prairie Schooner editor from 1963 through 1980.

 

The Annual Prairie Schooner Strousse Award of $500 goes to Rebecca Aronson of Albuquerque, NM for her two poems from the Winter issue. She has poems recently published or forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Gulfstream, and Satellite Convulsions (Poems from Tin House), among others. Her first book, Creature, Creature, came out from Main-Traveled Roads Press. The Strousse Award is given in honor of Flora Strousse.

 

The Jane Geske Award of $250 is awarded to Stephen Dunn for five poems from the Spring issue. He is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, including What Goes On: Selected and New Poems, 1995–2009, in which the poems in this issue appear. His Different Hours won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. He lives in Frostburg, Maryland. The Jane Geske Award is given by Norman Geske in honor of his wife, Jane Geske, a lifelong supporter of Nebraska’s literary arts.

 

David Graham wins the Hugh J. Luke Award of $250 for his two poems in the Fall issue. He is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Stutter Monk (Flume P), and an essay anthology coedited with Kate Sontag, After Confessions: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf P). He lives in Ripon, WI.

 

There were ten winners of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards of $250 each. These awards are made possible through the generosity of Glenna Luschei.

 

Lee Zacharias, of Greensboro, NC, for her essay, “A Grand Canyon,” in the Spring issue

Caitlin Horrocks, of Grand Rapids, MI, for her story, “Steal Small,” in the Summer issue

Susan Aizenberg, of Omaha, NE, for her three poems in the Fall issue

Sarah Kennedy, of Fairfield, VA, for her two poems in the Winter issue

Breja Gunnison, of Beloit, WI, for her story, “My Life Among the Bodies,” in the Winter issue

Joy Ladin, of Amherst, MA, for her essay, “The God Thing,” in the Winter issue

Jason Brown, of Tucson, AZ, for his short story, “The Flood,” in the Summer issue

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of Freedonia, NY, for her two poems in the Winter issue

Emmanuel Moses (tr. Marilyn Hacker), of Paris, France, for four poems in the Winter issue

Paul Lisicky, of New York, NY, for his short story in the Fall issue.

These States of Poetry

Over on Poemshape, Patrick Gillespie has some interesting takes on the state of poetry. He’s a thoughtful guy, and the article he’s written is interesting, but I kept disagreeing with the piece. I want to sort out some of my reactions, and I thought it might be useful to share those reactions here.

His first concern is that you couldn’t stop someone on the street and get them to name a contemporary poet. He notes, via John Barr, that poetry is not part of any mainstream conversation. He also frets that About.com’s Top Picks doesn’t yield a Top Ten list for poetry (though a few of the top lists do include poets and poetry books).

He moves on to what prompted his ruminations: the recent death of Ruth Lilly, she of the drugs and poetry (a “you’ve got peanut butter in my chocolate” combination if I’ve ever heard one). He argues that her gift to the Poetry Foundation artificially revived a moribund enterprise and that—given its declining state—the better option would have been for her not to have given the money. He asks, rhetorically, that if poetry is so great a thing, why did it need the Lilly money to survive? He suggests that the Foundation, and the art of poetry itself, needed to die (if you will) so that others may live. He then laments Harriet Monroe’s original intent for Poetry, that poets could find an audience without being beholden to newspapers that demanded sentimentalized fluff. And it’s here that the argument lurches for a moment. It turns out that Gillespie wants a return to the marketplace that Monroe and her contemporaries saw at the time and were dismayed by. His contention is that market forces will make poets write for an audience composed of…It’s a little unclear. But they’d have an audience if they wrote well.

Right now, though, Gillespie says, the only audience for poetry is poets. In particular, poets in academic settings or who underwent academic training. So poets should be thrown out of the academy and made to face the mob rule of public opinion. He invokes Darwin by insisting that only the fittest would survive.

And right there is my deepest suspicion of the piece. Is the marketplace a Darwinian space? How does poetry evolve? How does survival of the fittest apply to art?

My first concern is that Gillespie uses “fittest” to mean “best.” That’s a problem with understanding Darwin and natural selection, but I’ll leave that aside. What’s hard to understand is how poetry is to attain any kind of fitness, or how an audience is to decide on best. My further concern is that the marketplace isn’t, in fact, a Darwinian space. Evolution, natural selection, these are blind processes. Better mousetraps, better poetry, larger supersizes, these are designed, and then the audience is manipulated—or at least the attempt is made. And sometimes a product survives, and sometimes it doesn’t. But does that survival express a fitness to a local niche? I have a hard time thinking that it does. And certainly not in the way that a finch beak evolves in reaction to the changes in food sources for the finch. On the other hand, the Poetry Foundation found a way to reproduce and continue.

He cites the great artists who have survived, but I think it’s important to note that we don’t know who we’ve lost. We almost lost Bach, for instance, and Van Gogh. Is Howard Finster a great artist? Henry Darger? But we can get into a long argument about canonicity and privilege that might be a dead-end for this discussion.

I worked for a while with Ted Kooser on the American Life in Poetry (paradoxically, a program funded in part by the Poetry Foundation) and got to drive Stephen Dunn and Billy Collins around for a reading in a different place and time. Kooser’s beloved here, and his ALP project can be found in hundreds of newspapers (and all over the Web). Dunn reads a bit like a poet of his generation: fascinating little essays framed by sharp detail. Collins played to a packed house and made the assembled teachers, students, and locals laugh as well as cry. Kooser, Dunn, and Collins all have academic backgrounds and have found an audience.

So I wonder. Is our culture too obsessed with the easily consumed? Fast food. Light beer. One of the commenters on Gillespie’s post noted that the UK has a very different relationship to poetry. It’s fair to wonder about a culture that doesn’t favor the meditative, the reflective, the contemplative. What kinds of pressures does a large, potential audience of that character put on its poets? Perhaps it drives them into academies.

From here, we get into a quickly twisting kaleidoscope of hypothetical scenarios. I want to assure Gillespie and others that poetry—even outside the academy—seems to be doing well. At least, if the number of books, presses, online spaces, slams, and zines is an indicator. Poetry might not be part of the larger cultural discussion, but I’m encouraged that highly placed politicians read poetry.

But I still can’t TiVo it.

 

Choices

I would have named this post "potpourri" or "cornucopia," but those both seemed like bad ideas, really. But there are...things...happening in the spaces beyond this office that I wanted to draw your attentions to.

First, we have William Kloefkorn's poetry up on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Kloefkorn's an old friend of Prairie Schooner, and a great literary representative from Nebraska.

Second, we have a very favorable review of the Fall 2009 issue--the Baby Boomer issue, in case you had nodded off for a moment--over at NewPages.com. They do great work for writers, editors, and readers, and you owe it to yourself to head over there. I would suggest daily, but I'll let you pick your own frequency.

Lastly,a bit for our more academic parts of the audience. Louis Menand has a long piece in Harvard Magazine about professionalization and the PhD. It's not really shocking, or surprising, or much of a revelation, but the man's articulate as hell, and he's fantastic and synthesizing information, so it's worth a read. I think the only thing he misses is the rise of white collar trade schools that have a thin veneer of humanities education, but I might have been reading too fast.

As always, I'd be very interested in our readers' reactions to any of these quick clicks.

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.

Another Little Piece of the Future

From from the Fall issue's Guest Editor Grace Bauer:

Like many, I watched some of last week’s Woodstock anniversary specials -- amazed that so much time had passed, amused to see some of the people who had been there (including the perfectly adorable middle aged mom and pop couple who had once been the two disheveled kids wrapped in a ratty quilt on the Woodstock album cover) talk about what it was like, how it had affected them. There are, apparently, many people who were not actually there who claim they were – or actually seem to believe they were. Graham Nash told an interviewer that if everyone who now claims to have been at Woodstock actually had been, he thinks the axis of the earth would have tilted

I definitely wasn’t there – which took me a few years to get over. Still in high school at the time, I (along with a few friends) had actually (miraculously) convinced my parents to allow us to attend a summer rock festival.Not just a concert, mind you, but an entire three day deal. There was a lot of talk on the east coast about two in particular – one in Atlantic City,New Jersey (at the race track) and one in some town nobody had ever heard of way the hell in upstate New York>. Surely, we thought, Atlantic City was going to be where the real action was. So much for being “in the know,” having our fingers on the pulse of freakdom.

Not that the Atlantic City Pop Festival wasn’t great. It took place just two weeks before the concert that went down in history and many of the same bands that played Woodstock were there – Joe Cocker, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Janis. Alas, no patriotic Hendrix toasting his guitar, no Crosby, Stills and Nash (they were on the bill,but a no-show), though there were the Byrds, Canned Heat, Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth, Dr. John, Frank Zappa (who I was in love with at the time), and Joni Mitchell, who for some reason ran off the stage crying about three songs into her set. And many more. I can’t say I actually recall seeing them all, but as someone once said, anyone who remembers the 60’s too clearly wasn’t really there.

One thing I do recall was seeing Janis Joplin. Not just because she was great and an idol, but because I saw her while sitting on the shoulders of a Hell’s Angel. This was not exactly by choice. Along with my friends, D and P (names withheld to protect the almost innocent), I was working my way to the front of the crowd, determined to be as close to the stage as I could be for this particular act, when suddenly I felt myself being lifted off the ground. I looked down to see it was a huge hulk of a bearded guy in full biker colors doing the lifting, and sensed that this was what has since become commonly referred to as “an offer I couldn’t refuse.” And so I accepted my perch, and the look-her-almost-straight-in-the-eye view of Janis it afforded me, with – dare I say it – grace. I was half convinced I was going to be killed or kidnapped or god-knows-what by nights’ end, but took comfort in the fact that I could die happily, humming “Piece Of My Heart.” Much to my surprise though, after Janis took her bow and left the stage, the hulk proved to be a bit more angelic than hellish. He set me back down on the ground and said “there you go, little lady.” And D and P and I went running off to safety. I’m assuming he was not one of the Hell’s Angels hired to keep the peace at Altamont, the anti-Woodstock concert that happened just a year or so later.

So, you may be asking, what does any of this have to do with Prairie Schooner? Well, it’s the forthcoming Boomer Issue, of course.(Oh, you hadn’t heard? Well, you have now!).In the insightful (incite-full?) overview of “boomer poets” included in the issue, Dorothy Barresi talks about a kind of “iconic nostalgia” she finds in the work of many boomer poets.

Woodstock was certainly iconic. And much of what I saw on the specials aired on TV last week was certainly nostalgic. Many people said they still saw Woodstock as an important, defining event. One young woman, definitely too young to have even been born at the time, proclaimed that she thought it might have been the most important event ever, which makes one wonder if she had perhaps not heard the announcement about avoiding the brown acid that came from center stage in the Woodstock movie.

While I may have been too out of the loop to know that Woodstock was going to be the event of the summer in 1969, I think 2009 is a good time for a boomer issue of Schooner.

Look for it soon. Peace. Love. Dove.

Writers in an Adventure with Zombies!

It's mid-afternoon. The new and returning graduate students keep stopping by. The budget is twisting its way deeper into my brain, and I keep thinking that I can't think of anything to add to anything right now. And then I stopped at the keyword "brain."

Did you know that there was such a thing as zombie haiku in the world? You do now. And some of it was written by Billy Collins.

You could add more zombie haiku in the comments. But there's a paucity of pirate haiku in the world. And in the comments. I'm just mentioning this.

Locavore Culture

While listening for perhaps the 117th time to Michael Pollan talk (this time--and for about half the recorded listenings--on NPR), I got to talking with my wife about the possibilities of locavore culture. I'd just been to see Ladette Randolph read at a local bookstore, and we'd been putting plans together with friends for the First Friday Art Walk and (guilty pleasure and people-watching opportunity) Rib Fest. It struck me that local culture and community are as important as local foods. In the Great Metropolitan Centers, the possibilities are orders of magnitude greater, but who knows what potentials your neighbors are hiding. Will I avoid going to speakers and cultural events that aren't local? No. But one nice thing about a university town is that my neighbors will show up to these events, and we'll keep the insights--like dollars--in the community. All this thinking about what a town or city or magalopolis might offer sent me further, too, into thinking about the distinction between quality of life versus standard of living.

So what does your community have to offer? What keeps you engaged as a locavore of culture? And will your quality of life survive if you lose a bit of standard of living--maybe if you switch from a car to a bike (I had to circle back to Pollan somehow)?

This Is a Public Service Announcement

There are two other PSAs I'll be happy to post as well. And I'm here to remind you that our prize-winning books from last year are available from UNP. Note that one of the books is a book of short fiction. The Press will be happy to make sure you have a copy for your short, too short, summer.