the Prairie Schooner blog

Blurred, Fuzzy, Human Brains: Celebrating Short Story Month

by Timothy Schaffert

“A work printed in the literary magazine has only two destinations: the book or oblivion.” –Karl Shapiro (Prairie Schooner editor, 1956-63), in a symposium held at the Library of Congress in 1965.

When pressed on this issue by his fellow panelists (“Surely it’s damn good for a writer to be published and to be read by serious readers and serious writers whether or not his particular work is going to be put into hard cover,” huffed Jules Chametzky, then-editor of the Massachusetts Review), Shapiro did “stand corrected.” He went on to say, “I have come back to the old-fashioned, possibly reactionary point of view, that the function of the little magazine is greater today than ever before; more than ever it has to resist the bait of joining society.”

And there you have the conventional sense of the modern short-story writer’s plight: either pursue oblivion willingly and willfully or have it thrust upon you.

We’ve discussed in this space previously the industry of declaring literature dead (or, at least, declaring it to be in a zombie-like state of obscurity), and its sister-industry of proclaiming a literary Renaissance. The short story has been in a restless waltz of DOA and resurrection for a near-eternity; and the analysis of this phenomenon has become an industry in and of itself—not just on this blog, but in the very literary journals accused of courting the oblivion it debates.

In 1972, Samuel F. Pickering penned “The Short Story and Its Ex-Readers” for the Sewanee Review (a publisher of short stories for non-ex-readers), in which he performs a bit of an autopsy on the short story form. Pickering cites past articles that performed “last rites over the genre,” including a 1917 piece titled “The Senility of the Short Story.” (In that one, critic Herbert Cory blamed “creeping O. Henryism.”) Ultimately, Pickering indicates that “if the short story is not dying, it is ailing” but he concludes: “the short story (to bring Poe back to mind) has survived several premature burials.”

Often the unexpected popular success of a story collection will incline short-story defeatists toward a sunny disposition. With the Pulitzer (and HBO deal) awarded to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which Will Blythe refused to categorize in his Times review (“Whether it is a novel or a collection of linked stories is a matter for the literary accountants to tote up in their ledgers of the inconsequential,” he says), there might be life in the old girl yet—we’ll likely be sent back to the deathbed to take the story form’s pulse. (Accountants, nurses, undertakers—literary analysis seems to employ a great many vocational metaphors.)

It wouldn’t kill us to be optimistic. With online literary efforts aggressively celebrating the form, past and present, short stories are everywhere, sometimes popping up on your various devices before you’ve even realized you’d like something snappy to read. (Apps like Storyville assist.) I would venture that the fragmentary nature of reading online better trains our habits for the short story form, but this veers too closely to Pickering’s un-prescient suggestion in 1972 that “television-viewing conditions people to thinking or being entertained in thirty- and sixty-minute segments.”

Which brings us to Short Story Month, one of those aforementioned celebrations. Originally orchestrated by Dan Wickett, of Dzanc Books and Emerging Writers Network and any number of other endeavors (he’s a bit of a literary revivalist minus the tent), SSM threatens to take on a life of its own. Prairie Schooner will try to do its part by spotlighting stories from the archive throughout the month of May on Facebook and Twitter (@TheSchooner) (and we’ll occasionally elaborate on our selections here on the blog).

We kicked off virtual festivities this week with Eudora Welty’s “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” (PS Winter 1937). In Prairie Schooner Caravan (University of Nebraska Press, 1943), an anthology of classic Prairie Schooner pieces, Dorothy Canfield Fisher (a social activist, interestingly) writes in her introduction of Welty’s “exquisite and perfect” story: “That highly gifted author never wrote anything better than this study of blurred, fuzzy, human brains—both those inside poor Lily’s skull and those not much more clear-cut, inside the heads of the three humanitarian ladies bent on taking care of the friendless moron.”

A lively performance

This is the first in our occasional series featuring writers writing about favorite magazines that have gone out of print. Sally Brown Deskins writes about Contact, a San Francisco literary journal, as she prepares for an evening of literature and performance: “Lit Undressed: The Spirit of the Female Beats” (RNG Gallery, Omaha, March 31, 8pm), a benefit for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts; and accompanying art exhibit, “Les Femmes Folles.”

It has been called “a noteworthy conservative literary magazine,” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti; a San Francisco magazine that ran “astronomical projections of red ink…dropping around $70,000 in the five or six years of the magazine’s existence,” by historians; a “beautiful, prestigious avant-garde quarterly,” by Anne Lamott; and a magazine published “so the Beats could be shown how to write proper prose,” by its publisher. To me, Contact:  The San Francisco Collection of New Writing, Art and Ideas (1958-1963) is insight into the creative mind of my grandfather, a man I never knew, Contact publisher and editor William H. Ryan.

There are only a few collections nationwide of the publication, and only a few people who’ve written about the “flamboyant man, insane, brilliant, wildly funny, sometimes a royal pain in the neck, and just about the most loyal friend any of us have ever had…devoted to the publishing of great, good writing” (Lamott, 1986). 

Through the grace of my mother who recently gave me a box of Contacts she’d kept since my grandfather’s passing in 1986, I now explore through his creative eye what he considered important and inspiring, to grasp even a little of who he was.

Apparently he was a man who picked up a publication that had been on hiatus for more than a decade, a magazine originally published for the first time in 1921 by William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon (a biography of whom was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1959: Robert McAlmon:  Expatriate Publisher and Writer, by Robert E. Knoll). The name of the original “was to signalize a new concept of life among literati, about the denizens of the moderns with whom we were acquainted, in whom lack of contact with life was most typical in our opinion.” Contact broke-up in the 1930s, with poet McAlmon continuing the tradition as The Contact Press in Paris and Williams hanging around busy with home life.

In the meantime, my grandfather was born in Des Moines in 1928 and after many college and a few military stints, landed a job “when I happened to use the lobby of the Popular Mechanics building for shelter and ended up working there.” After a move to California, he “spent a good deal of time working for the stumbling, new, amusing and amazing television industry,” and worked for another now-defunct magazine, Pre-Sell, in San Francisco in 1957, the same year Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” at City Lights Bookstore.

Soon thereafter, he opened Tides Bookstore in Sausalito and re-instigated Contact, describing it in the first volume:

…Contact does not intend to take sides—not literary sides, not political sides, not moral sides—except that we are on the side of Humanity, whatever that means. Presumably, however, we would publish an inhuman author should he present us with a magnificent work of inhumanity. We will publish fiction, articles, poems, plays, photographs, drawings, cartoons—anything, anything that makes contact with the ugly, agonizing, beautiful, satisfying world we’re caught in. That world extends from the remotest chamber of the human spirit to outer space; so we shouldn’t find ourselves fettered with limitations.

Indeed, these magazines are rich in diversity of writers and artists, from prisoners to award-winning playwrights—and genre and subject matter, from dancing, artistry and childhood to death, religion and capitalism. 

The first volume introduces Contact with a seemingly juxtaposed array of work: poetry, a spread of Van Gogh drawings, humorous letters from a Japanese professor and from author Norman Mailer, an explanative essay on the trendy Zen religion, two modern romantic short stories, and two plays printed with scribbles, notes and cross-outs, for the readers to view the writer’s process.

The second and third volumes are full of the same splendidly diverse contributions from knowns and unknowns—“The Final Revolution” about the “technicization going on in many, many fields”; an essay by John Updike, “What is a Rhyme? (T.S. Eliot, with Customary Equanimity, Confronts Mother Goose)”; an anti-nationalist essay, “The Decline of the Left,” by C. Wright Mills.

Women writers showed their stuff in the third volume including a humble, subtle poem by Denise Levertov, “Under the Tree,” of drinking wine under one tree “among the dark multitude.” The third volume closes with drawings, “Etching and Dry Point” by Beth Van Hoesen.

The next three volumes from 1959-60 begin with the cover featuring a photo of Louis Armstrong, “A Goddam Jewel.” The work in these volumes continue to display the editor’s insight and amusing vibes with “Inner Liberties,” (Peter Viereck, Volume Four); “I Stink” (Allen Sharp, Volume Four); “Socialism Reconsidered” (Norman Thomas, Volume Five); “Mafia of the Heart” (Nelson Algren, Volume Six); a couple of poems by Tom McAfee: “The Matriarch” and “Youth and the Tragic View” both from Volume Four.

Illustrations capture each story’s essence, whether silly, reflective or political. “The Red Chair” by  Sally Haley, accompanies a poem by the same name by Dachine Rainer, part of a project by the Portland Art Museum, combining poetry and painting. Wrote Contact: “…Not only did poet and painter gain insights into the problems of an allied but deeply different craft—the exhibition proved also that the excitement generated by the exposure to other art forms is one of the best kinds of creative stimulus” (Volume Four).

Of particular intrigue is the spread in Volume Six: “Art of the Imprisoned:  This portfolio was selected from nearly eight hundred paintings and drawings viewed by the editors at Folsom and San Quentin state prisons in California. We thank the custodians of these Institutions for their cooperation.” The ten pages of prisoners’ selections show black and white drawings of emotive line quality (one showing nude men seemingly forced into group showers), peculiarity (one with a woman’s body, a horse head and feet, and a dragon tail), and loneliness (one of an empty neighborhood street; two of faceless embraces). Completing the series is a haunting poem written by Caryl Chessman, who was executed May 2, 1960 at San Quentin, entitled “The Images of Execution.”

The entire Volume Six revolves around this notion of “The Criminal Man” with contributions from formerly and presently imprisoned writers such as Alvah Bessie, one of the members of the infamous blacklisted “Hollywood Ten.”

Wrote the editors of the edition: “… more than learning, we have been moved.  Moved by the material we are publishing here and moved also by some that we couldn’t publish—letters, conversations and tours of our institutions and punishment. We hope to move you through contact with our collections of new writing, art and ideas.”

Instead of an editor’s letter in Volume Nine, there’s a telling introductory statement by John Erskine, entitled “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.” He wrote: “…If I give you poison, meaning to give you wholesome food, I have—to say the least—not done a good act; and unless I intend to overboard all pretence to intelligence, I must feel some responsibility for that trifling neglect to find out whether what I gave you was food or poison.”

The last year of publication, Contact went monthly. The magazine seemed developed; its writers advertised novels and regular columns. Of particular humor and note is the “safari of editors”—apparently my grandfather and other Contact editors ventured to a ghost town in Nevada called Contact, in an attempt to buy the town and revive the economy with slot machines and establishing an art colony there. It was considered a “lively performance” which “made us (the community) more aware of the noted literary publication” with “irreverence and good humor” (San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 1962, “The Nevada Safari Of Contact Editors”).

Contact, critically and internationally acclaimed at the time, ceased in 1962 after the group went broke; Ryan went on to edit for various publications such as Next, Esquire, Swank, and California Magazine and another of his creations, T.U.B. (The Unborn Book) a newsletter of excerpts from rejected novels. Contact was probably his most notable creative accomplishment, which he began when he was thirty, my present age.

I have gathered a sense of the magazine as a humbling, futuristic success at gathering art, writing and ideas from a variety of people—published and unpublished; American and non; free and un-free. 

To me, my grandfather was absent, ill, but sent letters every once and a while—and he is now a continued enigma, a longing space of my existence. I now know him through his writing. But I know him mostly through the writing of others.

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.

 

The old, weird America

Poet Grace Bauer, who served as guest editor of Prairie Schooner for the “Baby Boomer” issue (Fall 2009), interviews David Wojahn. Wojahn’s Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 was published in the Pitt Poetry Series and named a finalist for the Pulitzer. He is a professor in the English Department of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Grace Bauer: First of all, congratulations on having your poem, “Mix Tape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab,” chosen for this year’s Best American Poetry. I was happy to include it in the “Baby Boomer” issue of Prairie Schooner and am happier still that it will be included in the anthology.

The poem addresses a serious, one might say tragic, situation, and the mix tape of songs seems to be a kind of offering – of comfort? Connection? Maybe hope? Perhaps a reminder of shared, and happier, experiences? Can you talk a bit about the genesis of the poem – and the process of composing it?

David Wojahn: Well, rehab facilities and psych wards are pretty cheerless places, and in the 1980s especially I made a lot of visits to people who were staying in them. So the poem recalls some of those excursions, as well as the peculiar culture of that era—hence the Reagan and Miami Vice references. It was a pretty cheerless era, in my experience…

At the end of the poem, when the “you” gives the woman the mix tape, you’re right in thinking it is meant as an offering, a consoling gesture, however inadequate. You have to remember that mix tapes had a home-grown/hand-made quality about them that isn’t replicated in the digital era. Unlike playlists on i-Tunes, you made them in real time; you thought about the sequencing of the list on both the A and the B side of the cassette; you hand-printed the song list; and cassettes were fragile and temperamental things; the acetate  would snarl or break, the case would melt if you left it in a hot car.

And if you played a cassette on a tape deck or on a Walkman, you could always see how the acetate spooled, getting smaller or larger and circling madly when you fast-forwarded or rewound. Somehow that sense of endless circling became a kind of commentary on the content of the poem and a guide for helping me to structure it. The “you” and the woman of the poem have gone through this hospital routine again and again, it’s a tiresomely circular ritual.

And I also intersperse the narrative structure of the poem with song titles, names of music groups, and song lyrics, and it’s all music I could conceivably have put on a mix-tape in 1980-something. The music references—and it’s a lot of them, Robert Johnson, The Smiths, James Brown, Richard Thompson and a great but forgotten group from the period called the Screaming Blue Messiahs—become a sort of counterpoint to the narrative. But at the same time they act as a skewed sort of chorus: another kind of circularity. My model for this, oddly enough, was Thomas Hardy, who tends in many of his poems to include refrains which are a biting commentary on the poem’s action. So one line of the poem, “the years the years” is there because it echoes a refrain in Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain.”

Mind you, I don’t always think about all this when a poem gets started, but in the revision process it’s something I’m very mindful of.

From the “Buddy Holly” poem in your first book, Ice House Lights, to the “Homage to Blind Willie Johnson” in the “Poltergeists” section of your New and Selected Poems (Interrogation Palace), music and musicians have made regular appearances in your poetry. The list of musicians you’ve “covered,” over the years is an eclectic kind of who’s who. And Mystery Train puts musical icons – and iconic moments in the history of American music -- front and center. Can you talk about your passion for/interest in music and musicians? Are you a musician yourself? What has music given you as a poet? Why do you think you keep returning to that subject matter?

Well, as Lou Reed puts it in a Velvet Underground song, my life’s been saved by rock and roll. It’s been saved by poetry as well. And I say this without hyperbole. Writing poetry is such a pleasure, a consolation, a challenge. And popular music offers me a similar pleasure and consolation. I love rock and roll and subgenres of it such as punk, rockabilly, ’60s soul. And I’m especially drawn to music that for want of better terms gets called roots or Americana: the old ’78s collected in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Hank Williams and the Louvin Brothers, delta and urban blues, brooding singer-songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Jon Dee Graham, and those deliciously feral figures like the late Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu. They’re the dead and the living representatives of what Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America” and they all just enthrall me.

I reference these artists mainly because I feel someone needs to pay homage to them. And because their songs are always playing in my head, they help to shape the poems I write as well. The title poem of my new collection, World Tree, juxtaposes material that comes from Siberian shamanism and popular music; it’s really a sort of autobiography in the form of dead formats—my 45 years, my 33 & 1/3 years, my cassette era, my digital years. The poem is mainly comprised of sonnets, but the songs that get referenced in it seem as important a structural device as the choice to cast the poem in the form of sonnets.

I wish I were a musician, but aside from playing in teenage garage bands, I’m really just a fan.

Poems about music and musicians are well represented in the “Boomer” issue of Prairie Schooner. Part of that was my choice, of course, but my choices were influenced by the work people sent me – and when I solicited “boomer generation work” – a lot of music-related stuff came pouring in. So, it seems like a fair number of “the best minds of our generation” share your/my fascination with the subject. In her essay on boomer poets included in the issue, Dorothy Barresi suggests that sometimes references to music, and other pop culture phenomenon, are part of what she calls an “iconic nostalgia” and “are merely passwords, the magic argot that opens the doors to a club baby boomers already belong to.” She has a point, yet I might argue that for many poets – you included – exploring the history of popular music becomes an exploration of history itself – a lens to explore the larger culture. Can you talk about how you see that exploration working in your own poems? In the work of other poets?

I thought Barresi made some very astute points in her essay, and it’s true that we sometimes have a kind of Pavlovian response when we hear iconic songs from the Boomer era: we may not immediately salivate and wag our tails when we hear a guy in a labcoat ring a bell, but we do all nod and tap our feet when a Stones song comes on the Muzak while we’re grocery shopping. And since pop music is often designed first to be a commodity and only incidentally to be art, Boomers are fertile ground for crass manipulation by advertisers. But I for one feel positively violated when someone uses an Iggy Pop song as the soundtrack of a car commercial.

But pop music has always reflected the coursings of history. The Childe Ballads were often the newspapers of their time, the latest information about topical stories and scandals. But they’ve somehow alchemized over the centuries into documents that are haunting and timeless. Many of Bob Dylan’s early songs of political protest (some, not all) will surely stand that same test of time. That function—to begin in the topical and end in the timeless—is often the function of poetry as well. Homer is, after all, basically a war correspondent; and Hopkins’ “Wreck of the Deutschland” is, as they say, based on material “ripped from the headlines.”

I don’t think I’m unusual in the ways that I let music inform my poems and their sense of public history. I think of the way poets such as William Matthews, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Michael S. Harper have written on jazz, and of the similar way in which younger poets like Dorothy Barresi, Lucia Perillo, David Rivard, Mark Halliday and especially Kevin Young have  used references to blues and rock and roll. 

Let’s turn from “subject matter” to questions about form and structure. Much of Mystery Train is written in fixed forms – especially the sonnet – a choice some might find odd for a series of poems about rock and roll. Can you talk about that choice?

I wrote the title sequence of Mystery Train (which has 33 sonnets, a villanelle, and a bad sestina) during a year when I lived in Spain. Instead of writing poems about bullfights and going to the Prado, I found myself getting very nostalgic about American culture, and so the poems of the sequence started to emerge. I’d been writing longish narratives and getting tired of that mode, so I resolved to write in a shorter form, and the strictness of the sonnet was especially appealing in that respect. And I thought there was an interesting irony to writing about pop culture in a form as venerable as the sonnet. And the sonnet is just such a delightful, comforting and always-fascinating form to play around with. It’s so flexible, capacious, sly.

Can you talk about poets who have used musical forms/structures in their poems – I’m thinking of blues poems, jazz poetry (written for the page) as well as rap/hip hop and more performance-oriented work.

Well, some performance work doesn’t translate to the written page. Blues lyrics and hip hop lyrics have a better chance of making the leap, since they’re forms that follow some pretty strict prosodic conventions, but there’s not a lot of that material that can stand on its own as poetry. But the blues, jazz, and (increasingly) hip hop definitely have influenced the subject matter and certain of the strategies of modern and contemporary poetry. The blues influence you see early on in poems by Langston Hughes like “The Weary Blues” and “Too Blue” and still see today in poets like Terrance Hayes. And there are countless poets who have written about jazz. Poets who try to write poetry reflecting jazz composition are slightly rarer, but there were some terrific poems of the latter sort written in the fifties and sixties by figures such as Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman. Hip hop’s not my area of expertise, but I recently read a terrific book by the young poet Kyle Dargan called Logorrhea Dementia—it’s about alienation, cultural collapse, and urban madness and hip hop’s the secret soundtrack of that book.

Final – and undoubtedly silly – question : if you could be any musician in history for a day, or night, who would you be? And why?

You mean, besides Bob Dylan?

What are the odds on Greta Garbo’s quitting pictures?

by Timothy Schaffert

With the Oscars approaching, we salute Col. Barney Oldfield (pictured here with Clark Gable), who wrote about his career as a movie reviewer in a 1937 edition of Prairie Schooner. “Since 1930,” Oldfield writes in “I Go For Free,” his PS essay, “my records show that the old eyes have scanned 2800 of the Hollywood feature-length pictures, not to mention in excess of 4880 shorts, 76 dramatic stock performances, 117 tent rep performances, 17 circuses, 22 carnival midways, 18 legit shows (in N.Y.C., Chi., Hollywood, and hinterlanding through my home town), and 216 vaudeville bills (units and standard vaude acts). Last year Film Daily said I was the busiest look-see in the country, having ‘caught’ 413 of the 427 eligible films for their critics’ poll within the prescribed year. I have since seen the other 14.”

This commitment earned Oldfield a place in the “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” comic, for having seen every movie released in 1936 and 1937, as a reviewer for the Nebraska State Journal.

Oldfield also proved notorious for his attire, which he describes in his PS essay as “a definite mixture of the deuce turn in a standard vaudeville bill and the movie idea of a song plugger. My coat is usually the type to startle the biblical Joseph, the trousers come fully four inches above the waist, and the shirts are so bad that even O. O. McIntyre once wrote that they were the loudest in the country.”

(In Peekaboo: The Story of Veronica Lake, author Jeff Lenberg writes of a visit Oldfield made to the set of Bring on the Girls in 1945, and Lake’s appraisal of Oldfield’s flashy sports coat:“My God, did you lose a bet to make you wear that damn thing?”)

Oldfield (who was born in Tecumseh, Neb., in 1909) would later host a radio show about the movies, serve in World War II, train war correspondents, appear on game shows, and start a major scholarship fund with his wife Vada Kinman-Oldfield (which includes an award at the University of Nebraska Medical Center to promote innovations in Alzheimer’s research, named for Oldfield’s friends, Nancy and Ronald Reagan. Oldfield repped Ronald Reagan as a publicity agent for Warner’s.) For more photos of Oldfield, with Lucille Ball, Gary Cooper, and other film stars, visit his page at IMDB.com.

Here’s more from the 1937 Prairie Schooner essay:

In one day as many as a score of people buttonhole me to ask if Eddie Cantor gets all that money for the show himself or does he buy the rest of the talent, if Mae West weighs only 115 pounds, what are the odds on Greta Garbo’s quitting pictures, who does the double somersault from horse to horse with the Al G. Barnes circus, how much  money can the guy who runs the weight-guessing machine pick off in a good day…

… Into the office come good-looking blondes, fond mamas with small daughters, soda squirts who have learned the first three lessons in a local tap-dancing school and wonder if there’s a chance for them in the new Connolly picture at Warners, and hasbeen legit actors with scrapbooks which they use to panhandle. Some want to get into the business, some want autographs of actors or actresses, and don’t know how to do it by long distance, and others just want to do you out of photos in the files. A photo of Robert Taylor once made them happy, but it takes Tyrone Power now…

… Grift boys from the circuses that caught up with them, or pitchmen who want the lay of the land, or carney press agents who want to know where to put a fix locally, all come in for tips and favors. Some are swell fellows; others are dopes and strictly on the gouge…

… But to John Public I go for free and get paid a salary for it (the biggest little joke of all). “Yeh, I get in for nothing.” Like hell!

Keeping out of step

Interview with Katie Chase, by Marianne Kunkel

Katie Chase’s short fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, Five Chapters, Narrative, and The Best American Short Stories. She's the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Michener-Copernicus Award. She grew up near Detroit.

MK: Your story “The Sea that Leads to All Seas” (Prairie Schooner, Winter 2010) largely takes place in post-9/11 Chicago. As a story about, among other subjects, displaced homeland, what about Chicago appealed to you as a setting?

KC: It was an obvious practical choice, in that I'd just moved from Chicago after living there three years and I’d heard close-hand of stories like Hassan and Mohamed’s. So much 9/11-related literature takes place, inevitably, in New York, but the effects of 9/11, in a very real and devastating way, reached much further, further even than the second city. Chicago is an extremely livable and diverse city, attractive to many immigrants, with great art, music and literary scenes. It's interesting that you phrase your question the way you do, because I suppose for me, coming from the economically devastated state of Michigan, and for many other young people in the Midwest looking for the economic and cultural opportunities of a big city, Chicago stands as a beacon.

Frequently in the story the main character allows others—both her mother and boyfriend—to rest their heads on her breast. This powerful image not only emphasizes the main character’s readiness for a child, but positions her as a mother figure representing home, echoed at the story’s end when you write that a character who has returned home “belongs to his mother.” Did you orchestrate these head-on-breast moments deliberately or did they emerge naturally as you wrote? 

I did consciously double that image (in the writing, the scene with the dental student came first, and so far as I can remember, emerged there fairly naturally), but I didn't exactly carry its meaning to its full conclusion in my mind, not to the extent you've so thoughtfully elucidated. I thought of it more in terms of character—Larissa sees David as, emotionally, needing her more than she does him; she believes she has the upper hand. Of course, in the scene with the mother, it is Mohamed who “orchestrates” the gesture during the shoot.

Your characters seem so purposely developed and undeveloped, as seen, for example, in your choice not to unveil the dentist’s name until late in the story and through the voice of the main character’s mother. What would you say is the ultimate role of Hassan, a friend of the main character’s ex-boyfriend, whom by the story’s end hangs in a kind of identity limbo when you write, “She has never made of him a messenger, wants to believe him still a friend”?

Hassan, Mohamed’s brother, seemed important as a contrast. His ready presence and his interest in Larissa helps to emphasize that in accepting Mohamed's advances, she made a choice; she wanted him. At the detention center, while Hassan has more or less committed the same “crime” as has Mohamed, that he is not abused, physically, and is released, allowed to stay out his visa, might allow the reader to presume some things about Mohamed's actions while detained. Larissa is an only child, without her father. Above all, it seemed somehow important Larissa have a relationship with a man that was not sexual, but that still blurred the lines. I imagined Hassan’s willingness to be on her side as based, to some extent, on his attraction to her, and I wanted her to feel some discomfort from that.

In this story the main character struggles to make sacrifices and lower her romantic expectations. Can you share some of the sacrifices that you have had to make as a writer? Is failure valuable for writers?

Where to begin? Every day that I wake up early to write before my day job I sacrifice sleep; every weekend that I spend writing I sacrifice fun. In following the writing-related opportunities I've been lucky to have had, I've lived places I never thought I'd live, and up till now, I haven’t settled in a place intending to call it home. I’ve held maybe one job longer than a year, something not exactly helpful in securing employment in this economy. I don't own an iPhone or an iPad or expensive shoes or clothes. I'm being a little facetious, because I don’t really regret any of it and surely it can't all be blamed entirely on writing. But putting writing first has been so central to my life thus far that I can’t really conceive of who or where I’d be without it. I don't know if failure is valuable for writers, but rejection, and being seen as, or even feeling, a little out of step with the rest of the American population, are pretty much inevitable, so you have to be prepared to deal somehow with them.

What resolution might you make for 2011 that pertains to writing?

I'd love this year to finish a draft of the novel I started recently. Resolutions feel too tinged with wishful thinking and too often aren't carried through—and I'm not the fastest, most efficient writer—so I'm thinking of it more in terms of continuing the habit of bit-by-bit, day-by-day.

Be witnesses.

Interview with Philip Terman, by Marianne Kunkel
 
Philip Terman's most recent collection of poems is Rabbis of the Air (Autumn House P). New poems appear in the Laurel Review, Tar River Poetry, and Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. He is a co-director of the Chautauqua Writers Festival.

MK: The first two of your three poems in the fall 2010 issue of Prairie Schooner, “At My Grandparents’ Grave” and “At Auschwitz-Berkanau,” rely heavily on negation. In the first poem, you describe a scene by listing what it does not look like, and in the second poem you deny the poetic quality of images as you are illustrating them. What is gained by avoiding more obviously straightforward statements in these two poems? 

PT: Excellent observation. Both of these poems, of course, make reference to the Holocaust--the Auschwitz poem in an obviously direct way, and the grandparents' poem only at the end, which surprised me as I arrived there in the process of composing the piece. The strategy of “negation” is an attempt to not romanticize, yet both poems, I think, try to say that the natural human connection (in the “grandparents” poem that between the speaker and the subjects and the relationship between the grandparents, and in the Auschwitz poem the appearance of the frog, which reminds the speaker of his daughter)--the source of the poetry--the “presence,” the opposite of “negation” is strengthened.

It seems likely that the “negation” is connected in that way:  it is, as Adorno and so many others have said, “barbaric” to write after such enormously tragic events, but as poets and citizens we must chronicle them in our own way, we must, if the “muse” (or whatever it is that directs our poetic visions) calls our attention to them, be witnesses. Auschwitz-Birkenau is that part of the camp that has been left untouched--the other part, the main camp, has been turned into an archival museum with educational displays, but Birkenau, or Auschwitz II--three kilometers away--is as close to how it was--barbed wire, open fields, the dilapidating barracks, etc, and therefore more affecting to me. It’s of course impossible to stand and walk in that place without being moved, yet there’s also that sense of inexpressibility: you don’t and you do want to articulate a response to being in such a singular place. I wanted to both write about it and resist writing about it, and the contradiction itself is the source of the poem. I wanted to be strict about just listing observations, but that list, in its rhythm of going deeper into the connection the language was drawing between me and Birkenau, more and more became “poetic,” exactly what I was attempting to resist, and thus heightening that tension. The speaker is trying to keep out what is normally construed as “poetic”--i.e, the lyrical, the beautiful, the transcendent--of course, the last thing one wants in a poem about Auschwitz is the beautiful and transcendent. Yet the speaker’s rhythm leads him into connecting the scraps of “nature” and,  therefore, “beauty” that he finds at the end of the poem--the “glassy eyes of the green frog” leads him to remember how he would look for frogs with his daughter at his pond at home, and so “poetry” in its romantic, lyrical, and perhaps nostalgic sense--rears its “ugly” (pun intended) head, and so the speaker has lost: the “beautiful,”  in fact, does enter into a poem that supposedly wants to chronicle “no poetry.” Perhaps it’s simply human to want to find some scraps of beauty even in the most desolate of circumstances, just as the “husbands/and wives would search through//barbed wire for each others’ eyes.”  It’s impossible to eradicate our human capacity for love.

As “At Auschwitz-Berkanau” is an attempt to not romanticize the Holocaust, “At My Grandparents’ Grave” wants to work against the traditional notion that visiting someone's grave has a larger, more romantic “ulterior” motive. I wanted to say that my mother and I only went to the grave to remember her parents--not to romanticize them by turning them into great lovers or sages. Perhaps, in the tradition of W.C. Williams, (“so much depends…”) what it wants to say is that their simple lives—“kibbutzing in the kitchen,” “sewing buttons on a dress”--is itself poetic--that the fact of their survival--in the light of their being Jewish immigrants for Eastern Europe and that they could very well have--had they not immigrated--been victims of the Holocaust--is poetic enough. Again, the “negation” reinforces and provides counter-weight to “presence”—what’s not reinforces what is.

All three of the poems appearing in the issue are arranged in three-line stanzas. What does a three-line stanza offer you as a writer that, say, a four-line or block stanza does not?

 

The three-line stanza, the contemporary non-rhyming (and, one could say, “lazy”) terza rima seems quite pervasive, and I suppose I'm not very experimental in my forms. I envy those who are, and I'm trying to work with alternative ways of presenting lines and stanzas, of using the page space. But I'm usually more concerned with the narrative and music of the poem, and admittedly I often would rather not spend time monkeying around with arrangement. One could, of course, spend hours and hours experimenting with arrangement! I'll admit that that doesn't interest me as much as getting the story and music right (perhaps one characteristic of the more narrative oriented poet). One reason for the three line stanzas, I think, is that there's a natural tendency to think in “threes”--it's a magical number for some reason, and perhaps the poetic urge picks up on that. I occasionally write poems that use the “block stanza,” but those are mostly shorter poems--perhaps no more than twenty lines. If a poem gets any longer, I like to let some air in, and slow it down some, thus making the stanzas and lines more prominent. I also think that how poets use language leads them to gravitate towards certain forms. Also, crafting any regular stanzaic pattern creates some surprises--there's going to be several line and stanza breaks that are more interesting than others and that the form itself produces naturally.

The epigraph to “At Auschwitz-Berkanau” is a quote by Theodor Adorno rejecting the existence of poetry after the Holocaust. You then, through poetry, give new meaning to remnants of, and our cultural memory about, a concentration camp. In contrast to Adorno’s quote, do you have a favorite quote about poetry that you find motivating and affirming?

 

Yes! I find many quotes to be “motivating and affirming”--one is Kafka's “writing is a form of prayer.” Another is from a James Wright poem:  “There must be something beautiful in my body./I am so happy.” Perhaps these two representative quotes together form a great part of my poetics: the spiritual and the earthly.

Congratulations on your most recently published poetry book, Rabbis of the Air (Autumn House Press, 2007). The book’s cover image—of a gnarled tree branch in front of gauzy clouds and a bright blue sky—is striking. How did you decide on the image? As a multi-published author, what would you say is the role of the book’s cover image?

 

Thanks for your observation of the book’s cover. I can say that the cover was designed by Kathy Boykowycz, who is the designer for Autumn House Press. I absolutely love the cover, and she did a wonderful job with that image. The image, to me, reflects the two qualities mentioned in the above response: the spiritual and the  earthy--which I think the book is attempting to struggle with. Though of course the old adage of not judging a book by its cover is true, I think the cover provides opportunities for another art form--and artist--to come into play; to add another dimension to what’s inside. Writing being such a solitary activity, I love collaborating with other artists whenever the opportunity arises, and the cover is an opportunity for that.

You wear many hats—poet, co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, contributing editor for the literary journal Chautauqua and English professor at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. What position brings you most joy and has this changed over your career?

 

I'm excited about each of the poetry/literary projects I engage in. I think of writing as a kind of factory: we need many components to keep it running: the writing of it, of course, (which, admittedly, is my primary concern), but writers need communities--opportunities for networking: classes, readings, journals--and communities need writers to chronicle/witness in creative language what it's like to live in a certain place at a certain time. The literary word is everywhere. I'm particularly interested in fostering writing and writers who may be in the “woodwork,” as it were. All it takes is to provide a space, perhaps a class or two, an inexpensive publication, and writers will appear—often with poems and stories that are as good as anything else written anywhere.  It heightens the quality of life in the community, and lets writers know that they're not alone in their struggles.

A Story About the Type

by Timothy Schaffert

he colophon—the “note about the type” that sometimes closes a book—has a certain musty elegance. It’s best read aloud in your mock Orson Welles, while sipping a Negroni (a cocktail that tastes like a French kiss from a heavy-smoker who’s been sucking a cherry cough drop). Whether the age in which we live is post-postmodern or post-post-ironic, the colophon is a Pepe LePew-ish mix of adorable and arrogant, and certainly contributes to the bookishness of a book—today’s e-books care barely a smidge about the type, with Kindle setting every last word in the too-cute-for-words “Caelicia.”

The colophon’s poetic insignificance—detailing the history of the inventor of the shapes of the letters—seems anomalous to the no-nonsense, practical-minded, plot-driven novel. Therefore, it lends itself well to fictional revision, inviting both reverence and parody, as do so many aspects of our sentimental and lofty literary culture. It may be imprecise to declare colophon-inspired fiction a sub-genre, and examples of it have existed for too long to be considered a trend, but we offer here a brief bibliography of various acts of colophonia:

• Last year’s My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize: The Fabricated Memoirs of Jeff Martin included a colophon that personified the typeface as a boozy has-been.

•  Him Her Him Again The End of Him (2007) by Patricia Marx skews the colophon with a bit of literary vaudeville regarding an un-modern font invented by “the tongueless monk.”

•  Tim Dorsey’s novel of Hollywood, The Big Bamboo, carries its sprightly satire beyond the final page and right into the colophon, which is actually a fake news bit regarding an “epic thriller about rival neo-classical typesetters.” 

• Andrew Steinmetz’s poem “Monograph” (from his collection Hurt Thyself) cheekily examines the various quirks of publisher, printer, and author, from the Library of Congress listing to the unnumbered last pages (“…these blank white pages appear / to represent God…”), including the note about the type that bespeaks “the publisher’s sense of modesty.”

• Though an honest-to-god font, the Fairfield typeface gets a somewhat whimsical treatment in the note about the type of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World by Mike Edison. The note indicates the type’s “loyal following among late-twentieth-century pornographers looking for a high degree of transparency in their printed work.”

• A 2007 entry in the New York Times book blog Paper Cuts examines the “twee” and “borderline obnoxious” nature of colophons, highlighting the playful approach Stacey Greenrock Woods takes in her memoir I, California. The reader responses in the lower scroll-down are worth a read to, and direct you to a few other examples of colophons in literature: Jonathan Safran Foer has a penchant for toying with text, as demonstrated in his novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but his short piece “About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition” features no tricks of typography; Ron Carlson’s short story “A Note on the Type,” that appeared in Harper’s in 1993, is a fairly traditional bit of fiction (regarding a man’s development of a typeface) that many regard a modern classic.

• McSweeney’s  established its signature mix of Marx Brothers, literary meta-fiction, and typographical whimsy early on: issue #3 of 1999 includes a fictional riff on the very real Garamond (both typeface and designer). (The issue also includes a piece by David Foster Wallace that runs along the magazine’s spine.) The 2000 anthology Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor includes phony submissions guidelines, a note about the editor, and a note on the type (a colophon dismissed as “silly” in a review by the Chicago Tribune), all by McSweeney’s editor/founder Dave Eggers. McSweeney’s has subsequently featured a fictional colophon on its website, as written by Ben Greeman, which includes reference to a typeface consisting of “pebbles arranged in a shallow bed of sand and viewed from the top of a tall tree.”

• “A Note on the Type” by Ravi Mangla appeared in the literary journal elimae, and examined the style of “typographer, lithographer, kitemaker and philosopher Jerome Gabriel Mathieu” and alludes to a pulped early version of The Catcher in the Rye.

•  Among the finest examples of this colophon tomfoolery has to be Bruce McCall’s “A Note on the Type,” published in the Shouts and Murmurs section of the New Yorker (Oct 6, 1997). In it, he outlines the history of “Backslap Grotesque Italic Semi-Detached,” then goes on to include “A Note on the Writer of the Note on the Type,” “A Further Note on the Type,” “Added Note From the Writer of the Note on the Type,” and “A Final Note on the Type,” swirling us deeper into a comic miasma of self-reference worthy of S.J. Perelman.

•  Other examples of note: Mark Jude Poirer’s collection of short fiction from 2002, Unsung Heroes of American Industry, includes the story “A Note on the Type,” which attempts to restore proper distinction to a designer named Urg Kis; Alexander Theroux satirized the form in his short “A Note on the Type,” about a type called Rubberfab, that first appeared in Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1991; and Ray Russell published a piece called “A Note on the Type” in Paris Review—previously in the journal, he’d published another bit of literary camp: a lawyer’s letter to an author, outlining the potential for libel.

[With all this in mind, Prairie Schooner will be embarking next year on a digital project to include colophon-inspired fiction, satire, and poetry. Watch this space for details about submissions, etc., or “like/follow” us on Facebook/Twitter.]

The Newbie

Over the years we've had several Schoonerbabies. And now the managing editor, that would be me, is bringing another Schoonerbaby to the office, the two-month-old Wendelynne. I could spend a lot of time describing the various delights of the girl, but I thought you might like a peek at the office as well. So here's a look at the office, and I thought we might add a tiny human figure. To add visual interest and scale, of course, to this photo essay on the last Friday of February.

I'll try to keep the images a bit smaller so they'll load faster. 

The girl rests after getting pushed into the office. The history--and a variety of references--loom above.

I thought you might like to get a look at some of the history of the magazine. This shelf of back issues goes back to the mid 1930s and runs through to the current issue. You can read the magazine from the year you were born, graduated from college, or got your third divorce, depending on where you are in life.

She has a lively, vibrating chair that allows her to command my desk as I review submissions, answer emails, and keep the magazine on its production schedule.

Of course, there's a door to my office so that I can keep an eye on our interns and research assistants as they keep yet other wheels of the magazine rolling along. 

This volunteer is still to young to read the submissions. She's very good with black and white mobiles, however.

The girl and I have different tastes in liquid refreshment, but we both require that our beverages be warmed.

So one larger picture. This is the view outside the office window. The campus extends off to the east.

A hard day behind a desk will wear out even the young. It's good that we have a ready supply of soft, home-made blankets to crash out on. 

I'll put up a review of our AWP experience early next week. 

Good Stuff, Good People

We have a really extraordinary group of people working for us, and if we got into a “we knew ‘em when” mode, we’d all be here until there was an entirely different internet experience available. So we’re going to single out only one person for the moment, because he’s gone and done something that makes most of us get all squinchy with jealousy.

John Struloeff, one of our former fiction readers, has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, one of only forty-two people to do so this year. This is a man who writes long and short form prose as well as poetry, and he was a hell of a guy to hang around with when he was here in our offices.

(And I'll add that there are a lot of other familiar names on that last, so it's a good year for good people.)