the Prairie Schooner blog

Our Best Americans

So the Best American Series released their 2011 versions last month, and there are several Prairie Schooner connections to note.

-Eric Barnes' story "Something Pretty, Something Beautiful" (Winter 2010) was anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories. Way to go, Eric!

-Floyd Skloot's essay "Something to Marvel At" (Fall 2010, read it here) was a notable in Best American Nonrequired Reading.

-Katie Chase's "The Sea that Leads to All Seas" (Winter 2010, read it here) and R.T. Smith's "The Red Jar" (Spring 2010, read it here) were notables in Best American Short Stories.

-Janet Abbott Dutton's "Old Enough" (Winter 2010), Josip Novakovich's "Cat Named Sobaka" (Spring 2010), and Tracy Seeley's "Cartographies of Change" (Summer 2010) were notables in Best American Essays.

It was a pretty good year for us, we thought. This bears this feeling out to a degree, I suppose.

In addition, congrats to some other UNL/Prairie Schooner connected folks, namely, Carrie Shipers ("Ghost Traffic", from Zone 3), Joy Castro ("Grip", from Fourth Genre), and Sarah Fawn Montgomery ("Ekphrasis: What My Grandfather Saw", from Fugue) for earning notable status in Best American Essays. Excellent work all around!

 

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.

 

Between panic and revision

On the occasion of the release of Lit From Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing, co-edited by Dinty W. Moore and Kevin Haworth, we include here an interview with Moore, conducted by Devin Murphy (creative writing PhD student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner) during Moore’s visit to UNL last fall.

 Dinty W. Moore’s memoir, Between Panic and Desire (University of Nebraska Press), was winner of the 2009 Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize. His other books include The Accidental Buddhist, Toothpick Men, The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes, and the writing guide, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. In addition to editing the internet journal, Brevity, he is on the editorial board of Creative Nonfiction and is coordinating editor for the anthology Best Creative Nonfiction. He currently heads Ohio University’s Creative Writing BA, MA, and PhD programs, and is the president of Associated Writing Programs. 

 

Devin Murphy: How do you prioritize your writing life?

Dinty Moore:  It gets squeezed, but even before graduate school I made it a job. I set aside so many hours a week for writing and that’s what I do, and I have to be there. I’m a university guy so it works out that I do that first thing in the morning. I get up, make my coffee, and sit in front of the computer. I do that before I do any other stuff so there is always some space for it. 

Are you working on anything right now?

I’m working on a very short book which is essentially a lot of quotes from other writers for a publisher that specializes in Buddhist books. The quotes themselves aren’t Buddhist, but the book is going to be called The Mindful Writer, so it looks at how those quotes resonate with some of the thoughts about mindfulness.

Then I’m working on another book of nonfiction that is really, really at the very beginning stages.  So when I say I’m working on it I mean I have seven to eight pages written and thirty pages of notes, but that’s where books start. This one is sort of a riff on The Divine Comedy and Dante, and sort of an attempt to do a 21st-century, quirky, funny, weird nonfiction look at heaven and hell, and how our views of that have changed and where they fit into our society now. Since, you know, we are a very different people then we were five hundred years ago. 

Once you finish a book project, does something of that project remain with you and inform your writing, or do you have to clear the slate and start from scratch? Here you are dealing with Buddhism again a decade after you wrote The Accidental Buddhist.

When I finished The Accidental Buddhist—and I was lucky because it did well, it still sells, ten years later, which is a nice thing—I got a lot of offers to do Buddhist books, and a couple of Buddhist publishers approached me to do Buddhist books. And I probably could have carved out a career, and been more successful, at least in terms of numbers of books sold, if I just kept turning out Buddhist books because of branding and audience. But I just didn’t have it in me. One of the things I like about nonfiction writing is that you can have a short attention span. If something fascinates you for three weeks you think about it for three weeks and write a very short essay. If something fascinates you for six months then you just immerse yourself in it for six months and write a longer essay. And if you have two or three or four years of fascination in something and if you have the patience and energy to explore it, then you say, I’m going to write a book about this. But then you turn the page, and say, now I’m interested in something else. So I felt like I said what I wanted to say about Buddhism in The Accidental Buddhist, said more than I wanted to say because I’m not an expert. So I turned down those offers to develop other projects until recently, when this one came up and I thought, “I can do that.”

It was your lack of expertise in The Accidental Buddhist that was the real charm of that book.

Well, I remember thinking about Walter Mitty at the time, and Plimpton did it too. There is a certain energy to not being an expert and throwing yourself into whatever it is and saying, I’m going to try to understand this. The reader can identify with that. If you are trying to reach your reader on a certain level, and you are a wide-eyed, nascent stumblebum, who is just trying to make sense of things, that is a pretty good voice on the page too. 

When you find yourself working on these long projects, when do you know it’s going to be a book, and how do you find your binding element or narrative arc so it’s cohesive and not just a series of loosely connected events?

The moment where you realize it’s a book comes and goes. I’m convinced at the beginning of the book, and then three or six months into it I’m like, “What was I thinking?” Then I rediscover it again. Then I lose it and rediscover that narrative arc. I usually think I have one, then near the end of the project when I finally have fifteen or twenty chapters, and they are still all rough, I realize the one I had won’t work and I’ll have to come up with a new one.

It’s an iterative process. I’m not the first writer to say that. I started as a journalist, then when I got interested in writing literary work and work that would end up in literary magazines, I started writing fiction, and did my MFA in fiction, and it was magical to me to realize that you could start a short story and have no idea how it was going to end and that the characters would dictate to you eventually, if you could find the way into the characters.

It’s not quite the same in nonfiction, but I still have that leap of faith. I don’t quite know what my voice is going to be in this book, I don’t really understand the structure, I don’t really understand what the payout will be that will make a reader or publisher care, but if I work on it long enough, I’ll discover it. Whether it is an essay or a book, that’s the way it works. So instead of the characters dictating to you where the book is going to go, and where it will end, it is the material that dictates where the book will go and where it will end.  But I can’t know that upfront. I think other writers do, but I don’t.

So once you’ve been immersed in it for a long time you can start feeling your way through it?

Both immersed in the material and also immersed in trying to put the material on the page. I love revision. If you give me two hundred pages of rough draft and send me off into a room for a year, I’m the happiest boy on the planet. I’ll revise for the rest of my life if you let me. I don’t like generating new material.

I’m curious to hear you say you don’t like generating new material.

Yeah, it’s hard, it’s scary, and it’s painful. It’s like yanking hairs out of your beard one at a time, one word at a time until you finally have a chapter. Then playing with that chapter is fun, it’s like sitting on the floor and playing with Play-Doh.

In your essay “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge: A Google Maps Essay,” you mention that at this point in your career, you’ve done several immersion books similar to what Plimpton did. And you just mentioned how scary it is to generate new material, but it sounds like that might be one of the most fun parts of your job.

Well, it’s fun to go out and meet people, and it’s fun to have people tell you their stories, and they will tell you their stories. And it was fun to hang out at Buddhist monasteries for The Accidental Buddhist, but then you have to write it up, and that’s what’s hard. You have to make that work on the page.

Now I’m curious what you think the role of courage is, in this kind of writing.

I think in any literary writing the role of courage is important, whether it is poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. In any art form there is a leap of faith that the individual can make a statue, a painting, or write a poem that’s actually going to stand by itself and be worth looking at. The idea that I’m going to start this project without knowing how it will work out, but if I just show up every day and work on it that it will work out…I mean, those are two big leaps of faith. I guess a third leap of faith is somewhere, somehow an audience will see your painting, read your poem, buy your book, which drives so many of us crazy. But I guess that is what is so exciting about it. There are no guarantees. If you loaded trucks for a living, you show up in the morning and load the truck and you know the job is done. But with writing, you load the truck and have to hope someone says that it’s a well-loaded truck before you get the emotional pay off. 

You mentioned other forms of art, and I’ve looked on your Flickr account, and know that you are serious about your photography as well.

I love photography. I think I love it because it’s storytelling, it’s artistic expression, but it’s not my career. It’s fun. I have a good lens and a good camera and I spend a lot of time looking for things to take pictures of that aren’t obvious. I try not to take the average tourist pictures. But beyond that it is just fun. I’m not selling the work, I’m not submitting it to my tenure committee, so there is much less pressure involved. I love taking pictures.

Does that ever feed into your writing or is it just a release?

It’s just a release. I mean, I loved, as a fiction writer, finding a character and imagining what his or her story was. And you do the same thing in nonfiction, you just can’t imagine it, you have to discover it in other ways by talking to or watching people. And I photograph people more than anything else because I like taking pictures of people and imagining what their story is, so I guess there is a link there in my writing.

As entrenched as you are in nonfiction writing, you’ve mentioned starting as a fiction writer several times now. In my research on you, I came across many references you make to your appreciation of Kurt Vonnegut. So how has someone like Vonnegut fit into your writing career?

You know, like everybody in my generation I discovered Vonnegut as an undergrad, and he blew my mind. I thought, Oh my goodness, how can he be so irreverent and so funny and say these things. And I never grew out of it. I now work in a department of English literature and I’m not sure he was taken seriously by a lot of my colleagues, but I still take him seriously. I think he was a genius. I don’t think anyone else can write like him.

Vonnegut has that real dark humor, but I think your writing is really light yet touches on heavy subject matter. Is that something that plays in naturally when you write? Are you trying to bring a dose of humor, or is that your personality coming to the page?  I guess I’m asking about how humor plays out in your work.

I’m going to step back and say that I think that finding your voice as a writer—and I think this is true of all genres, it is certainly true of nonfiction—finding your voice as a writer is really 80 percent letting your natural personality come out on the page, and maybe 20 percent is: I’m writing this, and do I want to dial this up a little bit, and dial that down a little bit. But I really feel like that is the way to find your authentic voice—to find your authentic personality and let it bubble up out of the work.

So I tend to crack jokes. I tend to especially crack jokes when I’m around uncomfortable material, and I tend to have a black Irish humor, which is me in real life. So the extent it shows up in my work—that is just my personality bubbling up through. I feel like I was lucky when I finally figured out how to do that. When I look at my earlier work I see that here I was trying to be Carver, here I was trying to be Thurber, and here I was trying to be Woody Allen, and none of those were me.

Is it interesting to look back on being a student of craft now that your own books on craft are used in MFA programs?

Discovering that there was a craft was kind of exciting to me. I went to graduate school to be a fiction writer, and I was already thirty years old, but I was still very naive. I still had these goofy notions that you were born with genius and being a writer was just having a great idea. And maybe, maybe, maybe somehow I would stumble into a great idea. Then I realized how much of writing I could break down. You can mechanically look at how a scene works, and mechanically look at how a chapter works, and mechanically look at how suspense is built, and to a certain extent how humor works on the page. I was like, oh great, I can actually get better. I can learn this stuff. Though it’s not to say that writing is like being a mechanic, as there is still a lot of mystery in any art form, but what I’m saying is that they are both existent. There is still that mystery of where these ideas come from, but there are also these deliberate steps you make when you are revising a story and you say, Wait a minute, I know how to do this.

So when you are working as an editor and working through the slush pile, what really excites you, and when do you know you have something you want to publish?

For Brevity, it is a slightly different equation because the pieces have to be so concise that they rest a lot on the moment: where do they begin and how quickly does the trouble get complex. For Brevity the pieces rely a lot on language. Every single word choice has to be very sharp. Every single pause and hem has to be edited out because you have only seven hundred and fifty words, often less.

In the longer essay it comes down to subject matter and voice. So I’m reading the first couple pages of an essay and I’m understanding it’s about growing up in a poor rural family in Ohio, or growing up with a sister who had a fatal disease, or I’m reading a piece and realize it is about a broken marriage; I have to ask, Where is the promise in the first page that the writer is going to make me think about this differently? I know having a sick sister is sad, but if all this is going to tell me is that having a sick sister who dies young is sad, where is some other facet—how is the writer going to make me think of this differently?

Then there is finding something appealing in the way the writer is telling the story:  the voice, the sentence structure, the lyricism, the Carver-esque brusqueness, whatever. There is no subject you can’t write about because it’s been written about before, but the minute you pick a subject that has been written about before, which is almost all of them, then you have to think, what is my fresh take on this?  Maybe not at the beginning, as you may discover that fresh take on draft fifteen, but in the end there has to be something fresh. 

I have one final and random question for you.  I’ve read that among all the many things you’ve done prior to getting into writing and teaching, you were a zookeeper.  How did that come into your life?

It was a summer job as a high school kid. It was painting fences at the zoo, and I was pretty responsible. While everyone else was off in the woods smoking dope, I actually painted fences, and the boss figured that out, so he brought me back the next year for the summer. And as each of the zookeepers would rotate off for three weeks for vacation, he’d say: you’re going to go help Leo up at the elephant barn this week, or you’ll be down at the monkey shed this week, or I need you over at the kiddy zoo helping with the goats this week. That went over two summers when I got to be the fill-in zookeeper. Then I got to be the night watchman, who got to take care of the animals when the zoo was closed. So I’d wander around until midnight checking on the animals, giving them their water and their food. It was wonderful!  Especially at night. The zoo at night is when the animals come alive because the sun is gone and the crowd is gone. 

About the interviewer: Devin Murphy's work has appeared in the Greensboro Review, The MacGuffin, PANK, and Many Mountains Moving, among other journals and anthologies. The Linkage of Bone, which appeared in last summer’s Missouri Review, is the title story of his recently completed collection of linked stories.

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!

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.

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