When my grandfather died of diabetes, I was just glad I got to leave camp early. I’d tired of swimming in the brown water of the lake. There were no bathrooms at the camp and the latrine smelled of urine. I had to pee into a hole in the dirt with flies flying all around me.
Sarah Brouillette
Northern Ireland’s continuing political volatility has encouraged conflicting interpretations of its cultural development. Recently some scholars have begun to emphasize a transition from nationalist cultural production to a more liberal and transnational literary practice in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. In the Republic the triumph of a new transnational politics is often associated with Mary Robinson’s presidential election. Its inauguration is dated back to the 1958 ‘watershed’ initiation of Sean Lemass and T. K. Whittaker’s First Programme for Economic Expansion, followed by the establishment of an Anglo-Irish free trade area in 1965, ridding Ireland of its former protectionist policies and opening it to foreign capital investment.1 Joe Cleary points to Robinson’s election as the culmination of a process underway since this time, which entailed Ireland pursuing ‘a policy of dependent development that involved the assiduous courting of multinational, mostly American, investment and the political integration of the country into the European Community’.2 Robinson’s inaugural speech, with its frequent invocation of Irish cultural history and its simultaneous celebration of the introduction of the ‘new’ into the political landscape, emphasizes the existence of a productive relationship between the traditions of Irish culture and the prospect of a united Europe. ‘The best way we can contribute to a new integrated Europe of the 1990s’, she says, ‘is by having a confident sense of our Irishness’, claiming the Irish must take ‘full advantage of our vibrant cultural resources in music, art, drama, literature and film’.3 For Robinson the maintenance of local Irishness is precisely what allows for a productive relationship with an international political and economic system that is not so much introducing the threat of homogenization, as it is solidifying a free market for the exchange of national identities and cultures.
In the North, a perspective like Robinson’s, emphasizing being Irish as a way of being more fruitfully European, and suggesting a willingness to give up some of the strictures of faith in a separate Irish nationality, has not been entirely possible. Writing in 1990 about the Field Day School, a literary movement that responded to the initiation of the Troubles and the events of Bloody Sunday, Seamus Deane denounces the Republic for having ‘surrendered the notion of identity altogether as a monstrous and barren anachronism and rushed to embrace all those corporate, “international” opportunities offered by the European Economic Community and the tax-free visitations of international cartels’.4 He claims that against the Republic’s ‘postmodernist simulacrum of pluralism’, and embrace of the ‘concealed imperialism of the multinational’, Field Day instead promotes the ‘search for a legitimating mode of nomination and origin’ that accords with its interpretation of the Northern Irish conflict as a colonial crisis.5 Thus, even as a more conciliatory point of view has arguably come to dominate both politics and cultural production in the Republic, in Northern Ireland political necessity fed and continues to feed nationalist cultural concerns, a situation that has only begun to change with the recent dissipation of sectarian violence. Given Northern Ireland’s embattled politics, the major questions posed about new authors as they enter the market concern their respective positions on, for example, Ireland’s relationship to England, the Irish diaspora, the EU (which Northern Ireland joined, as part of the UK, in 1973), the prospects for a united Ireland, and the related continuation of violence in the North. A literature uninterested in such concerns is not impossible, but its position never goes unchallenged.
Nevertheless, with the advent and growth of the EU and the general process of transnational capitalization, Northern Ireland becomes ever more implicated in the free market of capitalist cultural expansion and trade, making it less possible for Belfast to embrace a unique culture uninfluenced by foreign elements or influence. The introduction of the Euro as an accepted currency in 1999, for example, marked a significant upsurge in the EU’s attempts at eliminating economic borders in the region. More importantly, transnationalization has presented a radical challenge to the continued traditions of sectarianism and political atavism in the region. The general political situation has become considerably less hostile due to processes that include the role of American interests in securing the groundbreaking 1994 ceasefire and subsequent 1998 Good Friday Agreement; the export of Irishness abroad via increasingly open trade channels and the tourist industry, which now markets a form of Irishness that encompasses the island; and the importation of international businesses and cultural products that belie what Damian Smyth has called the ‘totalising imperative’ of the ‘coinciding complex of nation/state/culture’.6 As a result a number of critics have come to see this ‘totalizing imperative’, representative of the region’s continued emphasis on nationalistic and atavistic cultural rhetoric, as increasingly outmoded.
One key Belfast publisher, Blackstaff Press, has been caught up in this process. In 1995 it was sold to the W&G Baird Group, a publishing and printing empire under director Roy Bailie. In 2003 Corporate Document Services, Blackstaff’s sister company and one of the largest communications firms in the UK, took over managing control. Roy Baillie has in fact been a key player. He is not only director of the W&G Baird Group; he is also a director of the Bank of Ireland and of UTV, and until 2003 he was head of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB). In interview Baillie has drawn attention to Belfast’s ‘post-conflict cachet’, and the NITB encourages the curiosity of those incorporating a political history lesson into their vacations. For example, ‘Living History’ tours and black cab taxi company guides take tourists to locations where some of the worst atrocities of the Troubles occurred, memorializing the political violence that seems to characterize Belfast for an international audience. If publishing in Northern Ireland has been dominated by Blackstaff Press, then fiction about the region has been defined by political content and in particular by the Troubles, which had been the primary subject of upwards of 400 novels by 2003, and at least as many non-fictional accounts.7 Thus Belfast literary production, as exemplified by Blackstaff Press, shares more than personnel with the vacations offered through the increasingly popular heritage niche of ‘struggle tourism’, as both respond to audience demands for what Tim Brennan has called ‘exotica, political expose´, or simple Schadenfreude’
In turn, Northern Irish fiction often responds to the use of violent heritage as an export commodity. Local authors have self-consciously commented on both the dominance of Troubles narratives within Northern Irish literature and the increasing involvement of Northern Ireland’s culture industries in transnational markets. For example, Colin Bateman’s series of comic thrillers, initiated with Divorcing Jack (1995), depict a Belfast journalist who works for the government as an official guide to foreign media covering the movement toward peace in the 1990s. He exposes them to a place set to become a ‘Northern Irish Hong Kong’, a postmodern city whose major export is cultural products like news coverage and mass-market fiction. In Lionel Shriver’s Ordinary Decent Criminals (1993) the American protagonist is attracted to Belfast because of the excitement of nationalist struggle manifest in the Troubles. Glenn Patterson’s Fat Lad (1992) depicts Belfast as a city inundated with the same transnational businesses found in major cities throughout the world – including the bookstore where the protagonist works – but still viewed by tourists as a ‘ghoulish fairground [with] a murderous significance ascribed to every street corner’.9 Such literature raises significant questions about transnational economic integration as it intersects with political history and cultural representation. Has Northern Ireland been enshrined as peripheral to the world economy, reliant on the marketing of reductive interpretations of local heritage and violent history? As local publishers and other cultural producers are absorbed into international conglomerates, does local production suffer, or is Northern Ireland actually a unique beneficiary of global markets for regional identities? Seeking answers to such questions should involve discussion of the relationship between publishing and other culture industries, as well as between literature and the wider economic and political systems with which it often engages.
Robert McLiam Wilson features prominently in most accounts of the accommodation of Northern Irish literary concerns to the region’s changing political landscape. His Eureka Street (1996) was itself marketed as yet another tale of religious strife and violent atrocity set in ‘West Belfast’, according to media accounts one of the most embattled places in the world. It contains its own share of the graphic depictions of violence so prevalent within the publishing culture of Northern Ireland, which exports politically oriented local content to an international market. The cover of its British edition, featuring a large fiery cross, places the novel in some familiar categories: in the literary sphere, the tradition of serious and concerned fiction set in Northern Ireland, and in the world of the mass market, what is known as ‘Troubles trash’, the most common sort of mainstream fiction set in Northern Ireland. Crime novels and thrillers are the key genres, and Blackstaff Press has been a major outlet for these sensationalist works. Eureka Street depicts ‘West Belfast’ (only called that, as narrator Jake notes, by those who have never lived there) as a thoroughly mediated space, a region of the world that shares ‘the status of the battlefield’ with numerous other politicized locales like Jerusalem and Sarajevo: ‘The Bogside, Crossmaglen, The Falls, the Shankill and Andersonstown. In the mental maps of those who had never been in Ireland, these places had tiny crossed swords after their names. People thought them deathfields – remote, televised knackers’ yards’.10 In The Dispossessed (1992), his study of homelessness in Britain, Wilson says that ‘[l]ittle else is famous about Belfast. It has bred no famous painters; no great novels are set in Belfast. It has no great orchestra, its university is not celebrated. The “troubles” have made Belfast a celebrity’.11 In Eureka Street visitors to the city, such as the family of Jake’s ex-girlfriend Sarah, expect and hope to see bombed-out cars and police cruisers, tanks and IRA men with automatic weapons. Jake’s leafy street – Poetry Street – is profoundly disappointing.
Jake’s vision of the city is articulated in noted opposition to the major narratives the media offers. Sarah was stationed in Belfast as a reporter for a London paper that ‘would only run Ulster stories if the details were particularly appalling, if the killings were entirely barbaric’ (p. 73). Those who hold the extreme political positions that lead to such violence are the subjects of sustained satire throughout the novel. In contrast Jake and his friends, Catholic and Protestant alike, are depicted as holding no sectarian prejudices, and as reluctant participants in the culture of violence that characterizes their city. Jake himself is subject to a kind of politicized commodification. As a Catholic from West Belfast, a former orphan and foster child, and a man who received compensation from the government after being beaten by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, he is immensely appealing to middle class republicans who support the revolutionary politics of the IRA and its political wing, Just Us (Wilson’s satirization of Sinn Fe´in – a name members translate as ‘We Ourselves’, but which often appears as the less welcoming ‘Us Alone’). Jake jokingly claims to admire people who ‘get off’ on revolutionaries, people who themselves do not have to do ‘any of the dying’. The representative republican character, Aoirghe, both attractive and repulsive to Jake, falls into this category in his eyes, expressing ‘the impervious faith of the bourgeois zealot’ (p. 99).
In his earlier novel Ripley Bogle (1989) it is also the privileged who seek access to revolutionary fervor, often through affiliation with the working classes. Bogle, poor enough to be indigent, denies all political allegiance, while his firmly middle-class friend Maurice – ‘child of ease, silvergobbed and pretty posh, trying to be Che Guevara’ – dies at the hands of IRA factionalists.12 When Bogle attends Cambridge University his success with women there is also said to be a product of his Irishness. He refers to himself as ‘a piece of Irish rough. Albeit a very polite and acceptably refined one’. He does not refuse the attention this brings; instead, he says, ‘I began to affect something of the air of a Celtic working-class hero . . . though I was bloody glad that I was doing it in Cambridge rather than Belfast’.13 In accord with his tendency to associate himself with his characters, in an article in Fortnight Wilson links his own career history to the attractiveness of the republican North: ‘I’m a writer born Catholic and workingclass, so I’ve done well out of it, and the more battered and croppy boy I behave, the better I do. So I don’t like to bite the hand that patronises me’. On the other hand, a Protestant writer like Maurice Leitch, the subject of his article, suffers for his lack of ‘that cultural credit card’.14 Thus, as the cover of the American edition of the novel suggests – it features a portrait of Wilson – Eureka Street’s Jake is a notable figure for Wilson himself, in that both benefit from the ‘cultural credit card’ propped up by assumptions of authenticity or political positioning that both Wilson and Jake refuse to sanction.
In general, Wilson has taken an interest in the centrality of authors to Irish cultural life. In the reader’s guide to the American edition of Ripley Bogle he wonders at the ease with which James Joyce in particular, ‘the least Mickish of all writers’, is ‘seamlessly incorporated into the global industry of fake Irishness’. Wilson’s identification of Joyce as not overly ‘Mickish’ suggests that the consecration of authors can function despite whatever feelings about Ireland they may have expressed in their works or elsewhere, how much of their lives they actually spent there, or how a more local Irish critical practice scrutinizes both their texts and their allegiances to the formation and stability of the Irish nation. Moreover, Wilson’s identification of a ‘global industry of fake Irishness’ suggests he sees the mythical status of Irish authors as less a product of the necessity of creating and supporting a distinct Irish culture, and more a result of economic motivations that originate with a state-supported tourist culture selling images of Ireland to an international market. Wilson’s satirical depiction of Seamus Heaney in Eureka Street accords with this view.
Perhaps the most famous English-speaking poet to emerge after World War II, and certainly the most celebrated Irish literary export, Seamus Heaney has received the highest of literary honours at the hands of the international community, while continuing to trouble and engage his Irish critics. According to one critical tradition, Seamus Heaney’s work exemplifies the dominance of nationalist romanticism in the literary field.15 He is after all one of the most prominent writers affiliated with the Field Day School, in part a product of the general feeling that art in the region should be an act of resistance against English political domination. Yet in Eureka Street Heaney appears as an opportunistic poet called Shague Ghinthoss, whose primary responsibility is not to the Northern Irish political struggle or the Irish nation in general, but to his own career and success. Ghinthoss first appears one evening at a small Belfast cafe´, at a republican poetry reading Jake sheepishly attends. On first glance, Jake describes him as ‘an inappropriately famous poet who looked like Santa Claus. ... He was a vaguely anti-English Catholic from Tyrone but the English loved him’ (p. 173). It is fitting that Ghinthoss takes the opportunity to read his most overtly republican anti-English work, appeasing the local audience while simultaneously appealing to the English market for literary works that are critical of their own audience. ‘They had a real appetite’, Jake observes, ‘for hearing what a bunch of fuckers they were’ (p. 173).
That show behind him, the poet appears the very next day at a peace rally, where he gives a televised talk about the necessity of reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Spotting Ghinthoss in the crowd, Jake calls him ‘a famous face, or rather, several famous faces . . . a hypocritical Janus-faced tosspot’ (p. 186). The peace march is disrupted by violence. The police intervene after a bomb scare and again at the end of the march when the participants are met by a group of Just Us militants ripe for confrontation. Jake keeps a close eye on Ghinthoss, notably interested in how the famous poet will respond to the dual demands of his own duplicity, forced to mediate between the police and the republican faction. To Jake it seems ‘he didn’t want to lose any glitter with the authorities: there were too many prizes, grants and subsidies available to the genteel and careful Irish poet’ (p. 194). In fact over the course of the book Ghinthoss is honored with a knighthood, and also paradoxically named a Just Us ‘Hero of the Revolution’. Heaney did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, a year after the events the novel imagines. Wilson commented on Heaney’s win in an article in Fortnight, predicting Eureka Street’s characterization: ‘Far from saying to each violent extreme: a plague on both your houses, Heaney has said: a plague on neither of your houses, can I have another honorary degree, please?’16
When Ghinthoss is eventually asked to respond to the violence that ensues after the republican intervention, he claims ‘Sometimes . . . things were better left unsaid’ (p. 207). This cliche´d phrase is a kind of folk wisdom, but given Jake’s earlier commentary it more precisely indicates Ghinthoss’s fundamental desire to avoid compromising his precariously negotiated public face. His words evoke the Catholic maxim ‘Whatever you say, say nothing’, the title of a poem in North, in which Heaney explores ‘Northern reticence, the tight gag of place’, claiming ‘Smokesignals are loud-mouthed compared with us’.17 In evoking this common maxim Wilson references a debate familiar to the Irish literary community about the political posturing of ‘Famous Seamus’. Desmond Fennell suggestively links the maxim to a poetic tradition influenced by New Criticism, one that privileges those writers who consistently obscure the meaning of their works and undermine, through poetic technique, any pretense to absolute statement. If forced by public scrutiny to deal with larger public matters, such as his move from the North to the Republic in the early 1970s, or a fictional situation like the one Wilson constructs around the Just Us attack on the peace protest, Heaney insists on ‘making no clear, quotable statement about it, but dealing with it evasively, non-committaly, peripherally, and with the help of riddle devices – ambiguity, half-saying, inconsequential anecdote and so on’.18 By so doing, Fennell argues, he ‘prevents the harm to his own creative activity which might come from getting involved in media controversy; and escapes the damage to his poetic career which would result from offending powerful or influential people’.19 In other words, he does what Jake accuses him of: he avoids offending those who might be in a position to consecrate his success with official praise.
Both Fennell and Wilson present Heaney’s success as a reward for his ambiguous and evasive politics. Fennell writes as a spokesperson for the kind of politicized Northern Irish critical practice that dislikes art that does not make its meaning clear, and that does not situate itself precisely within available political positions. By way of his critique of Heaney’s success he argues for a more direct communicative purpose for literature, and ultimately for explicit political commitment as acceptable content for a literature of ‘stature’. He attributes to Heaney a refusal to engage with political realities, and a substitution of vague poetic questioning. It is not so much that he disagrees with the politics Heaney evokes – he does not castigate Heaney with the ‘liberal’ label often levied against other Northern Irish writers, for example – but that he cannot discern any explicit political position to sanction or condemn. As an Irish national commodity Heaney’s works express little enough that they are safely consumable, troubling to no one, designed for both local consumption and for the generally cosmopolitan English reading public described by Tim Brennan. That said, the fact that Heaney’s works come with a patina of political responsibility or engagement is equally important. It is the combination of political reference and obscurity of meaning that makes them attractive, Fennell claims.
Wilson’s critique of Heaney differs from Fennell’s in one important way. Whereas Fennell seems to charge Heaney with a kind of poetic obscurantism and avoidance of direct commitment, the motive for Wilson’s satire seems to be anger about Heaney’s refusal to officially denounce republican violence. In Eureka Street Heaney is made to seem the worst of those authors who write not to tell a specific perceived truth, not to advance any real meaning, but to exploit sectarian tendencies by appealing to a variety of audiences or his ‘many constituencies’ (p. 195) at the same time. Critiquing Heaney in a way that accords with attacks familiar to the Irish literary community is a convenient way for Wilson to construct himself as engaged in a different kind of project, one attempting to move beyond the old politics of republican nationalism. It shows that he is aware that those who neither fully embrace nor condemn the region’s violent nationalisms are those most likely to warrant ‘serious’ literary attention and to garner international repute. His portrayal of Heaney may not be accurate, nuanced, or fair, but it expresses a specific anxiety about the process of authoring literary works that respond to local political and cultural debates and that in turn become attractive to an international community. Wilson’s critique of Heaney is in part a liberal humanist critique of nationalist politics. That said, it is also Wilson’s opportunity to suggest that nationalist political struggle and positioning are eminently marketable, and that Heaney deploys such positioning not out of conviction but instead out of devotion to his own poetic career. What bothers Wilson is Heaney’s ostensible fear that committing to either republicanism or reconciliation will exclude him from consideration as a great poet:
Picking up his knighthood, he had spoken of the cloudiness of nationality, the New Europe, and the breaking up of borders. He had smiled twinklingly when someone asked him about the suddenly vacant poet laureate job. At the Hero of the Revolution Dinner and Disco, the very next day, he had told the rapturous crowd how he had always been an Irishman and how he would always be one. No one noticed any contradiction. (pp. 378–9)
In a sense, Wilson attempts to displace Heaney as a monument of Northern Irish literary production in order to erect his own brand of writing in its place. What Wilson sets up as an alternative to Heaney’s anxious careerism is another kind of self-awareness, one that registers a specific market consciousness that is informed by and comments on a transnational Northern Ireland where culture is an increasingly important export.
Wilson’s characterization of Ghinthoss is complemented by his portrait of Jake’s friend Chuckie Lurgan, who clearly represents transnational capitalism in the transformation of the Northern Irish political landscape. Chuckie comes from a Protestant family obsessed with fame, which includes an ancestor who lined up to see Charles Dickens, the consummate literary celebrity, on his first visit to Belfast in 1869. Fame is what Chuckie aspires to, and to attain it he creates a financial kingdom by exploiting the resources available for Northern Ireland’s industrial and cultural development due in large part to the region’s beleaguered status. For example, Chuckie’s start-up capital comes from a variety of agencies both local and international, such as the Ulster Development Board, and the Industrial Resources Board set up with British money to encourage investment in Northern Ireland, and said to be ‘most famous for giving enormous sums of British cash to American motor manufacturers who built expensive factories’ (p. 117). Chuckie’s friend Donal Deasely works for the government, allocating monies from the EU, the International Fund for Ireland, and other real or fictional funding bodies. All of these boards and agencies resemble the Irish Development Agency, as well as Noraid, both of which operated from the US throughout the Troubles at the hands of the Irish abroad, often supporters of the nationalist cause.
Chuckie uses his access to these agencies to market Irishness internationally. The angle Chuckie plays in acquiring funds is the ecumenical one, all his schemes involving bringing the ‘warring tribes’ together at last (p. 153). We are told: ‘Chuckie dreamt of buying Ireland. He could already visualize the estate agent’s description for the Ireland auction’ (p. 154). In Wilson’s earlier work, Ripley Bogle describes visiting Long Kesh (‘the Maze to you Brits’), where his imprisoned uncle was engaged in carving ‘exquisite Gaelic harps’ as ‘clumsy emblems of solidarity’. Bogle describes the harps as ‘spectacularly useless’ until his brother George begins selling them to American television crews at ‘hugely inflated prices’.20 Chuckie’s impetus is similar. He sells, for example, Irish leprechaun ‘walking sticks’ as ‘ethnic accessories’ (actually varnished twigs collected in the fields around Belfast). He imports ‘half-wool Aran sweaters, made by slave-workers in Romania’, which become Irish by ‘sticking a Made in Ireland label on them and shipping them to New York and Boston’ (p. 156). He markets Irish water, supplied in Kansas, but featuring a label with an Irish brook. He admires the so-called Irish utility companies that operate in the competitive US market and trade on the power of Irish nationalists in exile. And he develops a series of Irish theme pubs for operation in Paris.
Wilson’s portrait of Chuckie’s reliance on an Ireland and an Irishness that are primarily for sale accords with critiques of the increasing importance of tourist culture to Irish life throughout the 1980s and 1990s, often said to sell a false version of a pan-Irish identity to tourists too ignorant to ask questions.21 Chuckie’s activities in fact specifically evoke heritage tourism, which has been increasingly prevalent in Northern Ireland in recent years, having been identified as a ‘growth area’ after the 1994 ceasefire. 22 Ullrich Kockel claims that this particular variety of tourism is based on the ‘idea of utilising culture and identity as resources for regional economic development’, and that it has become popular in Northern Ireland and other regions ‘at a time when globalisation increasingly turned large parts of Europe into “resource peripheries”’.23 In other words, as raw material extraction and basic production are increasingly moving to less developed regions, those intermediary economic zones like Northern Ireland rely by necessity on practices like Chuckie’s, selling culture itself and finally ‘primitive’ identities rather than conventionally defined products (hence, I would add, the continued success of the region’s publishing industry). Dean MacCannell’s work on cultural tourism suggests that the term ‘primitive’, for example, responds to the need for
reconstructed ethnicities [that are] increasingly only a response to a mythic necessity to keep the idea of the primitive alive in the modern world and consciousness . . . because there are several empires built on the necessity of the ‘primitive’: anthropology’s official versions of itself [and] an increasing segment of the tourist industry.
MacCannell further characterizes this segment of the tourist industry as ‘the economic base of ex-primitives who continue to play the part of primitives- for-moderns’.24
The culture of rural Ireland is often treated in precisely this way, producing, as MacCannell argues, ‘highly deterministic ethnic forms’ that focus on ‘ethnicity-for-tourism in which exotic cultures figure as key attractions’. 25 Luke Gibbons’ analysis of the promotional material of the Irish Development Agency complements MacCannell’s work. The IDA ‘does not simply acknowledge but actively perpetuates the myth of romantic Ireland, incorporating both modernity and tradition within its frame of reference’.26 Thus, contemporary forms of market globalization and transnational capital exist in symbiosis with what Gage Averill calls ‘the spread of ideologies of local identity that demand products with local specificity’. 27 In that sense, Gibbons writes, ‘neo-traditionalism’ as a ‘fabricated relationship to the past’ exists in conjunction with the sophisticated information technologies and promotional mechanisms typically aligned with modernization.28
Such a conjunction precisely characterizes Chuckie’s business practices, which further evoke what Desmond Bell has identified as the tendency of the Northern Irish ‘tutelary state’ to deploy culture and heritage as ‘potential vehicles of political reconciliation’.29 During a visit to Toronto in 1999 Roy Bailie claimed that tourism on the island was going ‘all Ireland’. Bell notes that after the 1994 ceasefire the Northern Ireland Tourist Board and Bord Fa´ilte (the Irish Tourist Board) cooperated to market the North – especially to the US and the EU – as part of ‘unified Irish tourist experience’.30 In fact in 1999 the two Boards did unite to form Tourism Ireland Ltd.31 According to Bell, and to Chuckie’s own developing political vision, ‘the community relations agenda’ and ‘the heritage experience’ unite to sell a version of Northern Ireland’s past that diffuses conflict by insisting on the legitimacy of each competing interpretation of the region’s historical narrative, and by favouring the marketing of unifying stereotypes as cultural myth.
In turn, if some version of a ‘primitive’ Irish identity legitimizes or supports heritage tourism and marketed identities in Ireland North and South, Eureka Street’s focus on a similar marketing of regional violence – encompassed in the romantic attractiveness of ‘West Belfast’, and Jake’s own beleaguered Catholicism – evokes the newer niche of struggle tourism,32 or what John Lennon and Malcolm Foley have termed ‘dark tourism’, which they discuss as part of the larger heritage or cultural tourism industry.33 The Northern Ireland Tourist Board, formerly run by Bailie, has recently encouraged the state operated City Bus Company’s ‘Living History’ tours of Belfast, which are booked through the Belfast Tourism Information Centre and compete with the famous black cab tours for money spent by those interested in visiting prominent sites of violence.34 The Tower Museum in Derry, opened in 1992, is another example of the state’s willingness to support this politicized variety of tourist experience. Featuring a walk-through exhibit interpreting the history of the Troubles from both conflicting positions, the museum has variously incorporated a real AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle once used by an IRA gunman, a promotional booklet with an image of a masked revolutionary on its cover, and a floor mimicking a paved road, flanked by a loyalist kerb in red, white and blue on the one side, and the nationalist green, white and orange on the other.35
Furthermore, there is a parallel relationship between the phenomena of heritage or struggle tourism and the position of Wilson’s Belfast publisher, Blackstaff Press, within the international market. Founded by Jim and Diane Gracie in 1971, Blackstaff Press has been much praised within the Northern Irish arts community for its ‘devotion to Ulster literature – new and old, up-market and down’.36 From the beginning the press was uniquely situated for success. Jim Gracie was a librarian at the Linen Hall Library in the 1970s, where he also edited Irish Booklore, a journal focused on the history of Irish publishing. Irish Booklore was later subsumed by The Linen Hall Review, which claimed to offer ‘a Northern view on the world of Irish books’, and was run from the Linen Hall Library, which boasts a complete collection of fiction set in Northern Ireland. Advertisements for Blackstaff Press titles appear in most issues of the journal. Thus in its early years Blackstaff was run by people with an intimate knowledge of the history of Irish publishing and the market for works about both parts of the island. In addition, throughout its history Blackstaff has received significant financial backing from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In fact, at times the Council so privileged Blackstaff that critics accused the press of ‘monopoly, bias, and an unrepresentative list’.37 In 1989–90, for example, Blackstaff received more than 90 per cent of the literature budget, despite numerous other flourishing publishers competing for funds. Blackstaff is thus implicated in the sort of insularity noticeable particularly within the Belfast arts community, as the cultural world is loosely controlled by a coterie of workers to the exclusion of other voices. At the same time it has been dependent on a network of relationships with other publishers, acting as agents throughout the English-speaking world, marketing Blackstaff titles that appeal to a general interest in both the culture of Ireland and the Northern Irish political scene. Knowledge about Northern Ireland exported to international markets – from history to anthropology, from studies of religion to literary or popular fiction – is largely produced by one publishing house.38
Widely considered the Northern Irish publisher, the press won the Sunday Times ‘Small Publisher of the Year’ award in 1992, the first time a publisher outside of London had done so. One Belfast journalist called the win ‘heartening, given the pressures from the center conditioning the periphery – particularly through the popular media’, suggesting that members of the local community then saw the press as evidence of a culture thriving amidst external pressures.39 A measure of peace in the region had encouraged the EU’s elimination of trade barriers across the island. In 1994 Blackstaff Press made the unprecedented move of appointing a Southern publisher – Gill & Macmillan – as its distributor. Other Southern firms like Wolfhound Press have since joined forces with Blackstaff to collectively market their titles in the US.40 As stated earlier, a year before the appearance of Eureka Street Blackstaff was sold to theW&G Baird Group.41 Thus as the press became more profitable and developed more secure international ties, it passed into the hands of the major players in the publishing and printing industry in the UK.
Commenting on the publishing industry in the South, Hugh Carter Donahue has drawn a distinction between Ireland and other larger regions ‘where international media organizations dominate publishing and commercial considerations dictate editorial decisions’. Ireland is said to have a small market of informed and frequent readers, such that ‘[e]ditors may see their publications as literary or political advocacy designed to stir controversy or bring attention to social problems’.42 The local is thus significantly privileged, a situation made possible by the fact that, unlike many regional industries, Irish publishing has managed to retain a strong and stable export position. While managing director of Blackstaff Press, Anne Tannahill noted that Northern Irish publishers are ‘caught between the East – West (London – Belfast) axis and the North – South (Belfast – Dublin) axis’.43 Moreover, the sense that publishing activity, like general cultural production, should take a defining role in the political process continues to be particularly strong in the North. Nevertheless, writers whose works are locally relevant to Northern Ireland, and often concerned specifically with the Troubles, are also marketable to an international audience for politically oriented writing that elucidates various regional histories. In an oddly circular way, Blackstaff Press has been incorporated into precisely the transnational market so important to Eureka Street’s depiction of Chuckie Lurgan. In fact Blackstaff is a perfect example of a relatively small publisher that has achieved great success by speaking to the local community, releasing titles ‘mainly but not exclusively of Irish interest’, while also exporting a large number of these titles to an international market and maintaining Northern Ireland’s status as an exporter of cultural products.44
Since 1995, to summarize, it has quite been difficult to describe Blackstaff as a ‘small’ publisher at all, as it became positioned within the solid mainstream of general Irish cultural production. It aimed to address as wide an audience as possible both at home and abroad, often through the promotion of products espousing a generally acceptable, ecumenical, liberal viewpoint, a position for which it is often praised, and about which it boasts. Achieving true publishing success, in this case, required avoiding any strict adherence to a specific political stance, in favour of an ecumenical breadth of interest and concern that nonetheless traded in the popularity of materials about Northern Ireland. It was that ecumenical breadth that arguably made it possible for Blackstaff to garner so much support from the UK’s cultural elite (by way of government grants and partnership agreements with other UK publishers, for example). There is no sense in which a publisher like Blackstaff would want to abandon the political completely, since such content is precisely what many potential readers want, wooed by what Bailie refers to as the ‘post-conflict cachet’ associated withNorthern Ireland. Its locally based content, which could not help but be political, combined with its generally ecumenical orientation in presenting and interpreting that content, combined to make Blackstaff the key Northern Irish publisher. That combination also facilitated the Press’s move from a primarily local base to a position of prominence within a multinational media firm, which in turn made Robert McLiam Wilson’s international success much more likely.
Thus far I have claimed that Eureka Street attempts to assess the new conditions of transnationalism and the reliance on political conflict as marketable cultural content in Northern Ireland. The economic conditions that have made Wilson’s career successful, including the position of Blackstaff Press as the major Northern Irish content provider for a united Europe and an international market, are key contexts for recognizing this critique. What makes Blackstaff Press successful is also arguably what makes certain Northern Irish writers successful. As both his construction of Chuckie Lurgan’s business practices and his depiction of the romance attached to Jake’s beleaguered socio-cultural status suggest, Wilson’s sense is that a generalized nationalist romanticism legitimizes the heritage tourism industry, as well as his own career. National culture and transnational economics go hand in hand. Satirizing Chuckie Lurgan makes this point. Satirizing Seamus Heaney does as well, while also signaling Wilson’s anxious attempt to distinguish himself as an author from what he makes Ghinthoss represent, and to admit he has benefited from the cachet associated with writing as a Northern Irish Catholic from a working-class background.
Eureka Street offers one perspective on a region moving away from colonial dependency. The nation it depicts does not progress from colonial domination to a form of political and electoral independence and organization. Instead, through transnational communications and the EU’s version of the free market, it loses some of its colonial status to become subject to the neo-colonialism of late capitalism. It is a familiar story. In the cultural sphere the situation is analogous. Wilson’s novel does not depict the Northern Irish as moving from dependence on the colonial centre for cultural valuation to some form of ideal self-reference and native cultural development. Instead, it depicts a society that creates a culture funded by both local and international bodies, a culture that exists at all precisely for the world market, to appease the tastes of an international community that includes the English, and that wants a piece of the authenticity of the Irish world. As Heaney’s popularity suggests, that authenticity involves reference both to a ‘primitive’ culture and to one defined by a savage political violence, both to heritage and to struggle tourism.
In the latter part of Eureka Street, Chuckie Lurgan travels in the US, and his trip coincides with the tour of Just Us spokesperson Jimmy Eve. Eve is a clear satirization of Sinn Fe´in’s Gerry Adams, whose visit to the US was one of the most controversial aspects of the 1994 peace discussions and ceasefire. With some hostility, the novel depicts a US audience largely sympathetic to Eve’s views: ‘Eve did television shows coast-to-coast. His hairy, carnivorous smile was everywhere. He talked the language of American civil rights to interviewers too ill-educated in their own country’s history to notice’ (p. 324). Historians have characterized Adams’s visit in similar terms, though as Andrew J. Wilson notes Bill Clinton originally denied Adams entry to the US due to his links to terrorism. Eventually, partly because of the public relations influence of Noraid and a developing sense that the only way to encourage the peace process was through inclusion of Adams in negotiations, he was granted a visa, and went ‘from blacklisted sponsor of terrorism to honored guest’.45 He calls Adams’ appearances in the US a ‘dazzling publicity victory . . . with some newspapers describing him as the Irish Nelson Mandela’.46
While in America, both Eve and Chuckie are said to be selling a hallucination of Irish identity, one cultural and the other political. Chuckie ‘incorporated Eve’s Broadway-hit status into his own spiel’ (p. 327). He alternately assumes the persona of the ultimate Catholic and that of the WASPish aristocrat as necessity dictates. Chuckie and Eve appear together in a televised debate that references the actual debate between Ulster Unionist Ken Maginnis and Gerry Adams on Larry King Live in September 1994. During the debate the narrator describes both men as having ‘sold Ireland long and short, begetting their monstrous perjuries in tandem, united in an hallucinatory jubilee of simulated Irishness’ (p. 328). It is during this televised conversation that Chuckie establishes himself as a thorough critic of all sectarian affiliation, arguing the need to relieve Belfast and the North of their impoverished status instead of focusing on political conflict. His proposed solutions are capital investment and economic schemes, something he assumes his American audience will understand: ‘What America understands is what I understand – making a dollar, cutting a deal. There are no nationalities, only rich and poor. Who gives a shit about nationhood if there’s no jobs and no money? Bread before flags, that’s what I say. . .. Interested Americans should invest in my country. They should give their money to men like me’ (p. 331).
Chuckie’s economic exploitation of a pan-Irish identity eventually becomes a significant political movement in its own right, as his program for change, first explored in that initial debate with Eve, becomes linked to the ‘OTG’ graffiti that is just then appearing around town. The letters ‘OTG’ turn up beside the regular IRA, UDA, and UDP graffiti familiar to residents of Belfast, where politics are seemingly reducible to these abbreviated references to sectarian identities. Urban space in Belfast is policed by the regular forces and paramilitaries, but also by these logos that mark certain locales as controlled by particular alliances. ‘OTG’ confuses Belfast’s citizens because they cannot locate its political meaning. News reports comment on this particular marking precisely because of the confusion it causes. Over the course of the novel Chuckie, Jake, and their friends discuss its meaning and decide that the population of Belfast is the butt of a joke; someone is satirizing their political rituals by decorating the city’s walls with an abbreviation having no larger meaning, thus criticizing the local obsession with allegiance and alliance. The person behind the OTG graffiti produces a kind of situationist art, precisely the kind of satirical critique of local traditions that some critics have lamented as missing from Northern Ireland due to the demands of a more realistic or committed literature. The ‘rigid cultural nationalism’ that Desmond Bell calls Northern Ireland’s ‘dominant regional aesthetic’ is subject to radical scrutiny.47 In turn, Chuckie’s alignment of his own political program with the OTG graffiti suggests a connection between postmodernist satirical aesthetics and transnational capitalism.
Yet there is an important complication in Chuckie’s assumed alliance with the unidentified letters. Chuckie evokes the OTG graffiti in a gesture of co-optation. After his initial television success in the States, when an appearance on a Belfast talk show goes awry Chuckie evokes the OTG graffiti in order to maintain his newfound celebrity by shocking his viewers. It is in this context that he claims that OTG is the name of his new political party, suggesting that he has been in talks with the ‘people’ behind the mysterious graffiti. He has no real connection with any such people and his gesture is entirely opportunistic. Chuckie’s act of co-optation removes the OTG satire, one of the novel’s only examples of viable political art, from the realm of opposition. It is linked instead to Chuckie’s own economic enterprise. He attempts to structure an allegiance between the radical challenge to sectarian politics manifest in the OTG graffiti and the threat he intends to present to the integrity of sectarian violence by promoting transnational capitalism. Does Wilson’s novel thus celebrate the alliance between postmodern satire and transnational capitalism Chuckie’s assumed allegiance suggests, or does it lament the link as just another bastardization of a valuable political act absorbed into the system of political power? Does Chuckie’s form of marketed Irishness validate and inflate the power of the OTG critique, or simply appropriate it? I want to try to answer these questions by way of a conclusion.
The fact that Wilson originally thought to title his novel OTG suggests he saw his work as aligned to the aesthetic project of the OTG satirist. His novel would be his own form of writing on the wall. In fact such a title might have furthered Wilson’s attempt to critique the process through which his own work is marketed as a product with an explicitly political interest or purpose. To think of Eureka Street itself as a critique of Irish cultural politics, similar to the OTG satire that Chuckie appropriates, suggests that Wilson’s novel comments on the way it too becomes another Irish product sold to a transnational market for narratives depicting regional violence. Published by Blackstaff Press, a company owned by a man similar to Chuckie – a man who sits on the board of the Bank of Ireland and is associated with the Northern Ireland Tourist Board – Eureka Street attempts to predict its own future as a text that offers a social critique almost immediately reduced to a singular literary category – Troubles fiction by a working-class Catholic – and absorbed into commodity capitalism.
Yet Chuckie’s brand of patriotism is pan-Irish and ecumenical; he wants to be, he claims, a ‘non-sectarian third force in Ulster politics’ (p. 386), and this is something the book as a whole supports. It seems that Chuckie’s newfound interest in politics may result in support for a less polemical, hostile, or violent politics, and its source is his ostensible desire to bring peace and economic prosperity to the region (things he sees as going hand-in-hand). At times he seems to threaten to turn Northern Ireland into a zone of cultural production for mass consumption, and the Irish themselves into consumers rather than citizens. Chuckie’s initial impetus is, after all, making himself rich and famous, and the industries he capitalizes and develops are said to sell Ireland ‘long and short’ just as Jimmy Eve does, ‘begetting [a] monstrous perjury’ (p. 328). Yet just as Wilson’s characterization of Chuckie’s business practices suggests that Northern Ireland threatens to become little more than an ‘offshore assembly centre and access point to EC markets’,48 he seems unwilling to establish any other possible path for regional change, in part because his point is never really to satirize Chuckie’s political aspirations or pretensions. It is instead to lament that consumers let themselves be duped by the limited national iconography that circulates through the transnational market.
Wilson obviously has a considerable interest in the way what is local to Ireland becomes international cultural content by way of ‘the global industry of fake Irishness’. As I have attempted to show, Eureka Street’s exploration of the entry of newness into Northern Irish political life is intimately tied to concerns and debates within the Northern Irish arts community. The story of Chuckie Lurgan addresses the new Northern Ireland in economic terms, and suggests that people like Roy Bailie – who is, notably, not unlike Chuckie himself – and companies like the W&G Baird Group, representative of successful incorporation into both the EU and the larger market, form a considerable challenge to the continuation of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Thus transnational freemarket capitalism, embodied in Chuckie’s aspirations, remains a viable alternative to a harmful nationalism, even though it continues to deploy a national romance to sell stories about Northern Ireland as quickly as possible and to the highest bidder.
In short, Wilson reads the cultural industries in Northern Ireland in terms of MacCannell’s notion of ‘reconstructed ethnicity’, through which ‘ethnic forms’ are maintained ‘for the persuasion or entertainment not of specific others . . . but of a “generalized other” within a white cultural frame’.49 What are authentically local or native to Ireland are precisely those cultural products that are marketed as such, whether they depict an ideal rural world of shamrocks and leprechauns or the political violence of ‘West Belfast’. MacCannell suggests as much when he argues that an effect of ‘the alleged globalization of relationships’ within contemporary culture is ‘the production of an enormous desire for, and corresponding commodification of, authenticity’.50 A pseudo-authenticity is presumably what sells Wilson’s Eureka Street, as well as his identity as an author, and in the novel it is satirized as the manifestation of a misguided faith in the integrity of the local. To reiterate my point, nationalist cultural romanticism and transnational capitalism are not opposing forces; instead the movement toward what is commonly called ‘modernization’ is simply the progressive exploitation of the former through the cultural industries that perpetuate and subtend the latter. It is this that Wilson is at pains to suggest throughout Eureka Street. He thus attributes a reifying function to the marketplace for literary texts – a function that attaches him to a national mythology he constantly discredits, transforming whatever political viability his work might possess into the product of ‘a piece of Irish rough’ just beleaguered enough to be marketable.
If culture is an industry, what happens to specifically literary forms of production when the culture industries go global? How do globalizing markets influence the way literary authority and value are created and perpetuated? And if, as I have argued elsewhere, authors are becoming selfconscious piece workers within an increasingly rigid corporate publishing culture, selling each item they produce to the highest bidder through the intervention of an agent, how do their fictions admit, refract or negate the anxiety such changes can cause?51 In Eureka Street, finally, neither Chuckie nor his author can concede that continuing economic decline is potentially only compounded by incorporation into the general European community and the larger free market. Wilson satirizes the transnational market that Chuckie exploits, but he avoids fully questioning its value for Northern Ireland’s political and economic stability. Said differently, Wilson playfully critiques the cultural system that sells his texts, but he does not pose any real challenge to the general economics of transnational capitalism that attend his own success. In the world of Eureka Street, a reified pseudo-authenticity or ‘reconstructed ethnicity’, while offering amusing possibilities for assessing aspects of consumerism, nonetheless remains preferable to the ‘real thing’, if the real thing remains a legitimated cultural or political nationalism.
Syracuse University
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend special thanks to Neil ten Kortenaar for clarifying my thinking about Eureka Street.
Notes
1 See Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (London: Prentice Hall, 1997), pp. 69–70; Joe Cleary, ‘Modernization andAesthetic Ideology in Contemporary Irish Culture’, in Ray Ryan, ed., Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics 1949–1999 (Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd.; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 106–7; R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 579.
2 Joe Cleary, ‘Misplaced ideas? Locating and dislocating Ireland in colonial and postcolonial studies’, in Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds., Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 102
3 Mary Robinson, The Inaugural Speech, in Katie Donovan et al., eds., Ireland’s Women: Writings Past and Present (London: Kyle Cathie Limited, 1994), p. 254.
4 Seamus Deane, Introduction, to Terry Eagleton et al., Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 13–14.
5 Ibid., p. 19.
6 Smyth’s phrase appears in his review of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Seamus Deane. See ‘Totalising Imperative’, Fortnight, 309 (1992), p. 26.
7 See Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles Since 1969: (de-) constructing the North (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. 7.
8 Tim Brennan, ‘Cosmopolitans and Celebrities’, Race and Class, 31.1 (1989), p. 9.
9 Glenn Patterson, Fat Lad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p. 203.
10 Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street (New York: Ballantine, 1996), p. 14. Subsequent references to Eureka Street will appear in the body of the text.
11 Robert McLiam Wilson, The Dispossessed (London: Picador, 1992), p. 109.
12 Robert McLiam Wilson, Ripley Bogle (New York: Ballantine, 2000), p. 102.
13 Ibid., p. 204.
14 Robert McLiam Wilson, ‘Rhythm Method’, Fortnight, 331 (1994), p. 45.
15 For a trenchant critique along these lines see David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993), pp. 19–31.
16 Robert McLiam Wilson, ‘The glittering prize’, Fortnight, 344 (1995), p. 6.
17 Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 75, 80.
18 Desmond Fennell, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1, 2nd ed. (Dublin: ELO Publications, 1991), p. 13.
19 Ibid., p. 14.
20 Wilson, Ripley Bogle, p. 43.
21 On cultural and heritage tourism in general in Ireland, see Victor Luftig, ‘Literary Tourism and Dublin’s Joyce’, in Mark A. Wollaeger et al., eds., Joyce and the Subject of History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and G. O’Donnchadha and B. O’Connor, ‘Cultural Tourism in Ireland’, in Greg Richards, ed., Cultural Tourism in Europe (Wallingford: CAB International, 1996).
22 Desmond Bell, ‘Modernising History: The real politik of heritage and cultural tradition in Northern Ireland’, in David Miller, ed., Rethinking Northern Ireland (London: Longman, 1998), p. 299.
23 Ullrich Kockel, Regional Culture and Economic Development: Explorations in European Ethnology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 211.
24 Dean MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 34.
25 Ibid., p. 158.
26 Luke Gibbons, ‘Coming Out of Hibernation? The Myth of Modernity in Irish Culture’, in Richard Kearney, ed., Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988), p. 211.
27 Gage Averill, ‘Global Imaginings’, in Richard Ohmann, ed., Making and Selling Culture (Hanover: University Press of New England; London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), p. 203. Averill’s conclusions about cultural globalization resemble Roland Robertson’s concern with ‘glocalization’. A term taken from Japanese business practice, glocalization refers to micromarketing, ‘the tailoring and advertising of goods and services on a global or near-global basis to increasingly differentiated local and particular markets’. Robertson contests the idea that global culture ‘overrides locality’: ‘we appear to live in a world in which the expectation of uniqueness has become increasingly institutionalized and globally widespread’. See his ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone et al., eds., Global Modernities (London: SAGE Publications, 1995), p. 28.
28 Gibbons, ‘Coming Out of Hibernation?’, p. 215.
29 Bell, ‘Modernising History’, p. 228.
30 Ibid., p. 229.
31 See ‘“United” Ireland puts out the welcome mat’ Toronto Star, 20 February 1999, Travel, p. 1.
32 In fact, official Northern Irish tourism policy has typically discouraged visitors from focusing on the region’s violent history. Given more space I would argue that local intellectuals tend to exaggerate the prevalence of struggle tourism in the region, due perhaps to an anxiety about their own roles in creating narratives that serve prurient interests.
33 John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000).
34 Ibid., pp. 160–1.
35 See Bell, ‘Modernising History’, pp. 233–6
36 Jeremy Addis, ‘This river keeps flowing’, Fortnight, 297 (1991), p. 35.
37 Ian Kirk-Smith, ‘Unpeeling the Parish’, Fortnight, 306 (1992), p. 39.
38 Upwards of 40 per cent of the books read throughout Ireland are what the industry calls ‘local interest’ titles. Thus it is hardly surprising that nearly all Northern Irish firms, from those specializing in literature to those that primarily market gift books, and including Appletree Press, The Guildhall Press, and White Row Press, focus their efforts on ‘local interest’ materials.
39 Kirk-Smith, ‘Unpeeling the Parish’.
40 Finola O’Sullivan, ‘Irish publishers seek more of their own market’, Logos, 6.3 (1995), pp. 121–2.
41 See Ian Hill, ‘30th birthday bash for a fine publishing house’, Belfast News Letter, 14 Sept. 2001, p. 49; ‘Publishing firm turns over a new leaf’, Belfast News Letter, 18 March 2003, p. 12.
42 That said, in the last few years the success of local Irish firms has been fundamentally undermined by the opening of Penguin Ireland in 2002. See Hugh Carter Donahue, ‘Tradition and Technology in Irish Publishing’, Eire- Ireland, 7.3 (1992), p. 16.
43 O’Sullivan, ‘Irish publishers’, p. 121.
44 ‘Company Profile,’ The Blackstaff Press, 9 June 2005 <http://www.blackstaffpress.com>.
45 Andrew J. Wilson, Irish America and the Ulster Conflict, 1968–1995 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), p. x.
46 Ibid., p. 295.
47 Desmond Bell, ‘Ireland Without Frontiers? The Challenge of the Communications Revolution’, in Richard Kearney, ed., Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s (Dublin: Wolfhound Press), p. 219.
48 Ibid., p. 223.
49 MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds, p. 168.
50 Ibid., pp. 169–70.
51 See Sarah Brouillette, ‘Authorship as Crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40.1 (2005), pp. 137–56.
"Zombies in the Classroom: Education as Consumption in Two Novellas by Joyce Carol Oates" first published in Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education, Andrew Whelan, Ruth Walker, and Christopher Moore (Eds.). Intellect Ltd., 2013.
George Romero’s 1979 film Dawn of the Dead features what Kyle William Bishop describes as a ‘Gothic mall’ in which survivors of a zombie apocalypse seek shelter, indulge in ‘a fantasy of gluttony,’ and merge ‘life with shopping.’ The living dead, for their part, gravitate to the mall by force of habit or residual memory and in search of living food. The parallel is clear: humans and zombies alike go to the mall to consume. Following Romero’s lead, Edgar Wright’s satirical 2004 film Shaun of the Dead suggests that if a zombie contagion were to wreak havoc on a modern urban population, the walking dead might be indistinguishable from most commuters, office workers, or cell phone users. Since 9/11, there has been a renaissance in zombie cinema, and enterprising filmmakers wishing to capitalize on the trend might be looking for new spaces in which to explore the theme that humans are already zombies. If so, they would do well to consider a Gothic schoolhouse setting.
Nightmarish schools and menacing teachers already make frequent appearances in literature and film that is Gothic in mood, plot, or theme. To review the history of the Gothic as what Davenport-Hines calls a ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ is to see the suitability, if not the inevitability, of the Gothic treatment of education and educators. Schools and schoolteachers are keepers and transmitters of enlightenment, entrusted to transform childish naïveté into confident rationality, replace infantile illusions with hard facts, and initiate students into a life-long quest for knowledge. At the same time, schools and teachers are figures of power. They decide when children work, when they play, when they take trips to the lavatory, and whether they are prodigies or problems. As a result, they can appear to wield an inexhaustible and inscrutable authority. The conflicted mix of promise and terror associated with schools and teachers makes them appropriate subjects for the Gothic, a genre or mode that registers an ambivalence toward post-Enlightenment rationalizations of cultural authority and power similar to what we see in contemporary cultural representations of schools and teachers.
Previously, I have gathered such representations under the designation ‘Schoolhouse Gothic’ and included under this rubric not only fictional works by writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, David Mamet, Stephen King, and Joyce Carol Oates, but also academic and pedagogical discourse by figures such as Michel Foucault and Henry Giroux. Fiction of the Schoolhouse Gothic takes place in a wide variety of settings (primary schools, high schools, universities, and even non-academic settings that are controlled by teachers or academics), but it is united in portraying Western education, its guardians, and its subjects using explicitly Gothic tropes such as the curse, the trap, and the monster. The non-fiction variety of Schoolhouse Gothic characterizes the academy using themes suggested by such tropes: the tyranny of history, the terrors of physical or mental confinement, reification, and miscreation. In the Schoolhouse Gothic, the academy is haunted or cursed by persistent power inequities (of race, gender, class, and age) and, ironically, by the Enlightenment itself, which was to save us from the darkness of the past but which had a dark side of its own. Traps take the form of school buildings, college campuses, classrooms, and faculty offices, which are Enlightenment spaces analogous to the claustrophobic family mansions, monasteries, and convents of old. According to Chris Baldick, when curse meets trap, the result is paranoia and ‘an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.’ To these products can be added violence and new, monstrous creation. In the Schoolhouse Gothic, a haunted, incarcerating academy transforms students into zombies, psychopaths, and machines. The pervasiveness of the Schoolhouse Gothic implies that our educational institutions are sites of significant cultural anxiety, and the zombie subset of the Schoolhouse Gothic suggests more specifically that schools are places in which teachers and students alike consume and are consumed.
Although Joyce Carol Oates has produced a large and diverse body of work, she is best known for provocative, violent works that examine American culture through the prism of the family, as Wesley argues; appropriate and revise a masculine literary tradition; as Daly contends; and dramatize the divisions of the self, particularly the female self, as both Creighton and Daly maintain. Creighton describes Oates as ‘deeply, if somewhat ironically, subscribed to the traditions of American romanticism’ and, as the editor of Plume’s American Gothic Tales (1996), Oates is no stranger to Romanticism’s dark sister. Further, Oates has returned throughout her career to the school as a source or scene of alienation, abuse, and violence; ‘In the Region of Ice’ (1967), for example, is loosely based on her experiences teaching a troubled young Jewish student who eventually planned and executed a public murder/suicide at a synagogue (she revisited this subject in ‘Last Days’, 1985). Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993) features a group of high school students who, among other things, conspire to publicly humiliate a high school math teacher who degrades one gang member in class and gropes her breasts in detention. In Zombie (1995) and Beasts (2002), Oates develops and enhances the Schoolhouse Gothic by comparing schooling to zombification and using consumption as a metaphor for the effects of formal education. Both novels feature hallmarks of the Gothic such as haunted, paranoid protagonists, claustrophobic spaces, and monstrous behavior. These works portray the academy as a cursed, suffocating place in which various forms of mystified authority make monsters both of those who wield its power and those who are subjected to that power. Considered together, they use the trope of the zombie to suggest that schooling does not enlighten young minds and develop their capacity for higher thought but rather enslaves and consumes them, transforming them into mindless servants, amoral shells, or savage cannibals. Education becomes a form of consumption in which the line between consumer and consumed disappears.
Both Zombie and Beasts liken students to the zombies of Caribbean folklore and of 1930s and 1940s cinema, zombies created and controlled by voodoo priests or, in this case, professors. According to Kyle Bishop, the zombie is ‘a fundamentally American creation’ (author’s emphasis), the ‘only canonical movie monster to originate in the New World,’ and a ‘creature born of slavery and hegemony.’ The American movie zombie originates not in European folklore or literature, as do most monsters of the Gothic, but rather in the complex colonial history of the Americas, especially the Caribbean, as translated into film. The zombie has a ‘complicated genealogy’: it is a figure from Haitian folklore co-opted into narrative by western observers. The word zombie, according to ethnographers Ackermann and Gaulthier, is related to African terms for ‘corpse’ or ‘body without a soul’ and the zombie is a creature ‘deprived of will, memory, and consciousness,’ as well as speech, by a voodoo priest or sorcerer. The zombie is a slave, a silent worker whose humanity has been consumed and whose existence is a living death. Bishop argues that before George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead transformed the zombie into the mutilated, decaying, lumbering cannibal so familiar to moviegoers, the source of fear was not the zombie itself, but rather the one who could create a zombie.
The portrayal of teacher as zombie-maker and puppeteer animates Schoolhouse Gothic, especially in Oates’s Zombie and Beasts. The former novel is told from the point of view of the zombie-maker, and the latter from the perspective of the zombie/student who eventually destroys her master/professor. Zombie takes place in the mid-1990s and is inspired by the life of Jeffrey Dahmer in general and by Lionel Dahmer’s A Father’s Story (1994) in particular, the latter being a memoir that Oates reviewed favorably. The narrative alternates between first- and third-person perspectives in a style that is busy, loud, and juvenile, full of sentence fragments, parenthetical asides, capital letters, dashes, and italics, as well as sketches and illustrations. It is divided into two sections: ‘Suspended Sentence’ describes protagonist Quentin P’s family, his past crimes, and his life on probation, and ‘How Things Play Out’ describes, with an exuberance that is jarringly dissonant, the stalking, abduction, and murder of a would-be zombie that Quentin names ‘Squirrel.’ The similarities between Quentin and Dahmer are myriad – the development of alcoholism at a young age, an ability to seem invisible or to project harmlessness, and so on – but among the most significant is the way that Quentin has failed to distinguish himself academically and lives in the shadow of a well-educated, successful father. Jeffrey Dahmer’s father held a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry and worked as a chemist with PPG Industries, while Quentin’s father holds dual Ph.D.s, and dual teaching appointments in Physics and Philosophy at his university. When Oates re-imagines Dahmer and his crimes in fiction, she makes academia central to the story, more central than it appears to have been in Dahmer’s life. Her character Quentin associates school with humiliation, surveillance, judgment, and control. It continues to exert a powerful fascination for him well beyond high school graduation, and ultimately becomes the source of his darkest fantasies.
School is omnipresent, and mostly threatening, in Quentin’s life. He is a careless, indifferent student at the technical college that his father, who holds a professorial position at a nearby university, regards patronizingly but nevertheless wants him to attend. Quentin serves as caretaker of an apartment that houses university students, and he easily poses as a graduate student himself when he wants formaldehyde. His sister is a junior high school principal whose interest in him surges after his molestation arrest; as Quentin sees it, ‘having a sex offender for a kid brother is a challenge to her, and she is not one to back off from challenges. Like I am one of her problem students.’ He gives letter grades to his experiments: ‘my first three ZOMBIES—all F’s.’ While stalking a young victim who attends his former high school, Quentin remembers how much he ‘hated’ the school and how he ‘wished’ it had ‘burnt to the ground. With everybody in it.’ His therapist is his father’s university colleague, and his questions remind Quentin of being ‘blank and silent blushing like in school when I could not answer a teacher’s question nor even (everyone staring at me) comprehend it.’ Most of his remarks about school are about being watched, bringing to mind Foucault’s description of schools as sites of modern disciplinary control enacted through surveillance strategies and enforced by the figure of the ‘teacher-judge.’ Quentin’s father is his model for all teachers, but he is an ‘impatient’ man, ‘always finding fault,’ as though ‘his only son was a student failing a course of his.’ As an adult, Quentin’s compulsive avoidance of his father’s judgmental gaze becomes an axiom for life: he continually reminds himself to avoid ‘EYE CONTACT’ with anyone for fear that someone will ‘slide down into [his] soul.’ To be looked at is, for Quentin, to be evaluated and found wanting: it is a profound threat to his personhood.
Quentin fears the professorial gaze, but, sensing its power, goes to a large lecture hall at his father’s university and attends a class that marks the start of his quest to create a zombie that will be his slave and toy. Quentin does not seem sure of his motives for attending the lecture, but he takes steps to ensure that his lecturer-father does not see (i.e., judge) him. He listens to his father speak about cosmic rays, black holes, ‘quantifiable and unquantifiable material,’ and mysterious, undetectable parts of the universe disobedient to known physical laws. The lesson that he takes from the lecture is the insignificance of human life: ‘seeing the Universe like that … you see how fucking futile it is to believe that any galaxy matters let alone … any individual.’ In the moment, however, Quentin watches students furiously taking notes and decides that ‘almost any one of them would be a suitable specimen for a zombie.’ Unlike Quentin, who is thinking about the implications of an unknowable galaxy in which even the laws of physics cannot be taken for granted and finding in his father’s words justification for embracing the monster within, the students are mindlessly consuming instruction and information, apparently with no motive beyond pleasing their professor when exam time comes and earning a letter grade that may or may not reflect understanding or engagement. In this, the most important episode in young Quentin’s life, teaching is dehumanizing in both form and content. The student is represented as a zombie bowing before its master and devouring facts like meals, and the lesson is that moral laws are meaningless and that humanity is inconsequential. The predatory nature of the academic is further underscored when it comes to light that Quentin’s father’s mentor, a famous physicist, had experimented on mentally handicapped children by feeding them radioactive milk. The lecture delivered by the father parallels the experiment performed by his own academic father figure: the latter feeds toxic milk to children, while the former feeds psychologically toxic lessons to students. Both children and students are consumed in their acts of consumption.
Beasts portrays education in much the same way as Zombie but switches the point of view from victimizer to victim, saying more about the process of academic zombification by which a student is rendered incapable of reason, judgment, or discrimination. It also dramatizes the return of the repressed as the slave rebels and the consumed becomes the avenging consumer. The novella opens and closes in 2001, but the bulk recounts four tumultuous months in the mid-1970s, when Gillian, the protagonist, was a student at a women’s college in New England. Early on, Gillian learns that her parents are divorcing and reveals her infatuation with a Creative Writing professor named Andre Harrow, a ‘verbose, bullying’ countercultural figure whose name suggests plunder and pillage. Harrow rhapsodizes about the writings of D.H. Lawrence and the Beats, is rumoured to have been arrested in a Vietnam War protest, and behaves in class like ‘the father who withholds his love, with devastating results.’ Gillian is also fascinated by Harrow’s exotic artist-wife Dorcas, who has recently displayed on campus disturbing, controversial sculptures inspired by ‘primitive’ fertility carvings. As the months proceed, Harrow makes a sexual advance towards Gillian, who pushes him away in confusion. He then claims to have been ‘joking,’ thus supplying ‘the narration, the interpretation, for what had happened, as, in his lectures and workshops, he controlled such information.’ In retaliation, however, Harrow begins to bully and belittle her in class while encouraging her classmates to do the same. Ultimately, Harrow seduces Gillian and draws her into a sexual relationship with himself and his wife. During this time an arsonist begins to victimize the campus, and the suspects include Gillian’s poetry workshop classmates and dorm mates, who are also, it is suggested, fellow victims of the professor and his wife.
Oates presents Harrow’s teaching as demeaning, exploitative, and manipulative, calculated to make students desperate for his approval and keep them emotionally, intellectually, and ethically off-balance. After Gillian fails to respond to his ‘biting kiss,’ Harrow stops complimenting her poetry in class and starts patronizing it, prompting other students to join in on the attack. In addition to demeaning Gillian individually, he bullies and insults the class as a whole with voyeuristic assignments and misogynist remarks. He scorns and rejects what he calls ‘nice-girl bullshit,’ instructs the students to write journals in which they scrutinize their ‘emotional, physical, sexual lives’ as if they were ‘anatomical specimens,’ and teaches them not to violate the ‘one cardinal rule’ of his class, which is that he not be ‘bored shitless.’ He demands revealing, confessional journals with ‘a focus upon childhood, traumatic and demeaning memories’ and advises against ‘self-censorship,’ which he refers to as ‘self-castration.’ When Dominique jokingly asks if women can be castrated, he responds, ‘Dear girl, women are castrated. You must struggle to reverse your pitiable condition,’ and Gillian recalls that while the students laughed, Harrow ‘wasn’t smiling.’ Harrow teaches them to scorn conventional morality and speaks approvingly of the ancients, whose ‘gods were passions. Obsessions. Appetites’ that ‘terrified’ them. The theme that Gillian derives from her study of Ovid is that ‘human happiness [is] possible only through metamorphosing into the subhuman,’ and Harrow appears to concur with what he calls ‘Ovid’s judgment on the “human.”’ He also praises D.H. Lawrence, who, according to Harrow, prized ‘sensual, sexual, physical love’ but detested ‘“dutiful” love—for parents, family, country, God’ because in it he ‘saw the “rotted edifice” of bourgeois/capitalist morality.’ Such statements frighten and excite his students, and Gillian later reflects that ‘we, Mr. Harrow’s students, had no way of refuting such logic’ and reports that ‘we believed, or wished to believe, it was true’ because ‘it was believed that Andre Harrow knew “everything.”’ Andre Harrow plainly abuses his power in order to strip his students of their defences and render them vulnerable to his advances. At one point, a student says in class, ‘if I’m a puppet, I intend to choose who will be my master. From now on.’ As her classmate speaks, Gillian senses her yearning to look at Harrow. The dazzled, needy young women feed Harrow’s ego, cater to his sexual desires, and even clean his house.
Harrow’s abusive teaching is explicitly compared to ‘soul murder.’ Towards the end of the novel, Gillian and her dorm mate Penelope have a conversation about evil. Gillian takes a morally relativistic position because Harrow would have been ‘furious’ with her if she did not deride conventional, bourgeois values. Penelope suggests that Gillian’s relativism is overly facile, and Gillian assumes that her friend is being contrary out of jealousy. Penelope claims, ‘there’s such a thing as soul murder, … except you can’t see it, the way you see the other.’ She goes on: ‘there are evil people. Cruel people. People who should be punished. If there was anyone to punish them.’ Within the context of the tale, her remarks only make sense in reference to Harrow and his wife.
‘Soul murder’ is a psychiatric term defined by Leonard L. Shengold in 1979, and refers to a type of abuse whose effects closely resemble zombification. Shengold picked up the term from Daniel Paul Schreber’s nineteenth century Memoirs (1903), themselves the subject of one of Freud’s case histories (1911). Shengold uses the term to describe a specific set of ‘traumatic experiences’; namely, ‘instances of repetitive and chronic overstimulation alternating with emotional deprivation … deliberately brought about by another individual,’ normally a parent or substitute parent. He argues that alternating periods of abuse and neglect distort ‘the primal fantasies that motivate human behavior’ and have a devastating impact on the emotional and intellectual development of the victim, ultimately robbing that victim of an authentic sense of identity. According to Shengold, this kind of abuse ravages the victim’s ‘individuality, his dignity, his capacity to feel deeply (to feel joy, love, or even hate)’ and smothers ‘his capacity to think rationally and to test reality.’ He describes a male patient whose parents, in an effort to toughen him up, had deprived him of warmth and ensured that others did the same. These same parents would ‘cultivate the rivalry’ between the patient and his siblings; they would fight viciously; their fights would often ‘end in turbulent and exhibitionist sex’ near their ‘terrified children’; and they would ‘sometimes disappear for weeks.’ Many such victims become, as Shengold puts it, ‘destructive and self-destructive’ robots. Their humanity is, in short, consumed.
Andre Harrow and his wife can be aptly described as soul murderers, and the negative effects of soul murder are apparent in Gillian and her classmates. The Harrows may not be performing makeshift lobotomies like Quentin P., but they are making zombies out of students nonetheless. The professor and his wife represent substitute parents for Gillian, replacements for biological parents who are cold and negligent. When Gillian visits the Harrows’ home, she is plied with drugs and overly rich food, overwhelmed with noise (from the stereo and/or the pet parrot), and sexually exploited. During the visit that leads to the Harrows’ deaths, Gillian is sickened by the food Dorcas cooks, and she vomits. Disgusted, Dorcas slaps Gillian’s face and pushes her out of the room. The couple proceeds to have sex upstairs, and while she listens to their noises, she thinks, ‘they want me to hear, I’m their witness’ (129). Sometimes the Harrows withhold their attention or their presence altogether, leaving Gillian to feel neglected and abandoned, as is the case with a ‘misunderstanding’ about whether or not Gillian would accompany them on a holiday trip to Paris. Such neglect seems intentionally calculated to increase the pliability and vulnerability of the Harrows’ victims. When Gillian is able to ‘bask’ in the glow of attention and approval, she feels ‘like a dog that has been kicked but is now being petted, and is grateful.’ At school, Harrow compounds the emotional torment of his victims by actively cultivating the rivalry for his attentions and approval among Gillian and her classmates, effectively isolating them from one another. This mistreatment takes its toll on Gillian by disrupting her emotional and intellectual development, leaving her ‘head filled with static,’ rendering all classes but Harrow’s an undifferentiated ‘blur,’ and causing her to look, act, and feel like a ‘sleepwalker,’ a ‘doll,’ a ‘puppet,’ and, of course, a ‘zombie.’
Abuse and zombification consume Gillian and her classmates, rendering them anonymous and indistinguishable, even to themselves, as is evidenced by Gillian’s slippage between first-person singular and first-person plural in her narrative: ‘I had no choice,’ ‘we were dazed,’ ‘we felt the sting of his lash.’ Her facelessness is not, however, simply a matter of her own distorted perception. When Gillian follows Dorcas to the post office at the beginning of the story, Dorcas notices her and demands, ‘which of them are you?’, and her words echo in Gillian’s head thereafter, as if to haunt her with fears of her own insignificance. After Gillian and Penelope’s conversation about soul murder, Penelope’s parents arrive to pick her up for the holiday, and they mistake Gillian for another student and call her ‘Sybil.’ When Gillian investigates a file cabinet of pornographic pictures at the home of her professor, she cannot confidently identify a single classmate, but many of the photos remind her of her peers and of herself. She thinks to herself, ‘They’d been drugged, like me. They’d been in love, like me. They would keep these secrets forever. Like me. We are beasts and this is our consolation.’ Clearly, she has learned the lesson that Andre and Dorcas worked so diligently to teach her. When she was first invited to the Harrows’ home, she felt that she was ‘blessed’ and unique because the couple loved her. After she comes upon the pictures, she knows better. She, like the totem to which Dorcas eventually affixes Gillian’s severed braid, is only ‘minimally human,’ stripped of anything that distinguishes her as an individual.
Teaching in Beasts is enslavement and it is also, of course, consumption. Harrow calls D.H. Lawrence ‘the great prophet of the twentieth century,’ whose ‘god was the god of immediate physical sensation, a god to devastate all other gods,’ and so it is no surprise that Harrow, who relishes the teaching of ancient mythology in which appetites are gods, does not hesitate to satisfy his own cravings. Right before Harrow kisses Gillian the first time, he smiles at her, ‘baring his teeth’ and leaving her ‘shivering as if he’d drawn those teeth over” her. There is more than a little of the cannibal in this professor, and he and his wife eventually consume his students by helping to create the conditions that result in their anorexia. Throughout the novel, Gillian and her classmates lose alarming amounts of weight and appear increasingly skeletal, as though the process of being emotionally and intellectually consumed is manifesting itself physically.
Much of the literature on anorexia, including the work of Calam and Slade, suggests that it represents an attempt by young women who feel powerless to exert some kind of control over their lives and their bodies. The need to feel powerful is particularly acute for those who have experienced sexual abuse, especially at the hands of an authority figure or at times ‘of other major problems and upheavals in their lives,’ such as Gillian’s parents’ divorce. At least one of Gillian’s many doubles also fits the profile of the anorexic; her classmate Marisa is ‘painfully thin,’ perhaps even ‘starving herself to death; and she confesses in workshop to having been sexually abused first by a cousin, then by a family friend, and finally by a ‘much-beloved grade school teacher.’ Eventually, Marisa attempts suicide, confesses to setting the fires on campus, recants her confession, and is hospitalized. When Gillian confesses that she cannot ‘live without’ Harrow, he responds, ‘we don’t want you to live without us either.’ Harrow does more than simply use and abuse his students: he devours them – mind, soul, and body.
Anorexia has been further linked to ‘soul murder,’ or the reduction of the human to a zombie-like state. Louise Kaplan’s Female Perversions describes anorexia as ‘the outcome of one of those little soul murders of childhood in which, to survive, a child gives up aspects of the self she might have become and instead becomes a mirroring extension of the “all-powerful” parent.’ Female Perversions challenges the psychoanalytic tradition represented by Freud, Karl Abraham, and others that regards perversions as ‘pathologies of sexuality’ that primarily afflict men; in contrast, Kaplan defines perversions as ‘pathologies of gender role identity’ that can be found in both men and women. She argues that identity formation in both men and women is hindered by ‘infantile ideals of sexual prowess demanded of men and sexual innocence demanded of women,’ and that perversions develop when such ‘infantile ideals’ are reinforced rather than challenged by ‘soul-crippling social gender stereotypes’ that ‘assign certain narrowly defined characteristics to one sex, and equally narrow but opposite characteristics to the other sex.’ According to Kaplan, male perversions such as fetishism and masochism both reveal and disguise a man’s hatred for his own shameful feminine traits or longings. A similar strategy is at work in female perversions, which, according to Kaplan, have been neglected by psychoanalysts both because of the male-normative history of the field but also because the perverse strategies of women are not always explicitly sexual. For Kaplan, various forms of self-mutilation, including anorexia, represent not only a young woman’s bid for control but also her attempt at ‘forestalling final gender identity and denying that the illusions and hopes and dreams that made life endurable are lost forever.’ As such, they lend ‘expression to forbidden or shameful’ masculine desires. Anorexia allows the young woman to present ‘herself to the world as a sexless child in a caricature of saint-like femininity’ that hides ‘a most defiant, ambitious, driven, dominating, controlling, virile caricature of masculinity.’ Anorexia is, in short, an unconscious, compulsive refusal of female identity and sexuality as culturally prescribed.
Kaplan’s view of anorexia, the consumption of the physical and sexual self, is clearly evident in Beasts. Harrow observes that Gillian ‘must weigh eighty-nine pounds,’ and he refers to her as a ‘little girl’ immediately before making his first sexual advance. In other words, she is far from womanly, and his desire for her has a paedophilic component. Gillian remembers her mother’s disappointment at her refusal in high school to try ‘to be pretty like the other girls,’ and she wonders if she ‘might have smiled more’ and used more lipstick; clearly, she has neither embraced feminine stereotypes nor pursued adult sexuality. Nevertheless, remembering Dorcas’ adolescent totem with her braid on it causes her to muse on the ‘delusion of young-female power,’ the belief that ‘in your beautiful new body, you will be treated with love.’ Power is linked in her mind not to self-efficacy but rather to attractiveness to and love from others. In some ways, however, despite her frailty and passivity, she imagines herself throughout the novel as quite powerful and aggressive, like a ‘hunting dog picking up a scent’ while following Dorcas, for example. Given her experiences, it is not surprising that Gillian’s ambivalence towards her gender, her sexuality, and her sense of self is profound. Her anorexia is a sign of that ambivalence.
Gillian’s sexual ambivalence is part of her distorted and monstrous self-image, but her monstrosity is an important part of the narrative in its own right. Thus far, the horror of the zombie-makers Quentin and Harrow has been considered, but not the horror of the zombie itself. In Zombie, the would-be zombies are pure victims, in part because Quentin is unsuccessful at lobotomizing the young men and ends up murdering them instead. Quentin is the only monster. In Beasts, however, the zombies, while victims, are also sources of terror. Harrow robs Gillian and her classmates of the ability to think rationally, which makes them behave throughout the novel either mechanically, ‘by instinct’ or ‘as a child might.’ Though her mental faculties have been destroyed, she has not, however, lost the ‘indomitable will of all life to survive’ that she attributes to (or projects onto) the snow-covered evergreens that surround the Harrows’ isolated house. Those survival instincts find expression in her murderous act of setting fire to the Harrows’ home while the owners enjoy their drunken, post-coital slumber, and it would appear that by the end of the novel, Gillian, like Ovid’s Philomela, to whom Harrow has cruelly compared her, refuses to be a ‘passive victim’ and instead ‘takes bloody revenge on her rapist.’ Of course, Gillian’s motives for setting the fire do not seem particularly clear, even to Gillian: if she is out for revenge, then it might be revenge for the abuse and exploitation she suffered at the hands of the Harrows, but then again, it might be revenge for their exclusion of her from the primal scene or for Andre’s refusal to leave his wife for her. From the beginning of Beasts, there are many suggestions that Gillian is not simply a victim of monstrous abusers but may be something of a monster herself. Throughout the novel she regards herself, perhaps defensively, as having a degree of control that seems ludicrous, considering the power dynamics involved. In any case, she appears to have internalized the amorality that her professor tried to inculcate in her and her classmates, and she feels no remorse about their deaths. Harrow appears to have consumed Gillian’s ethical sensibilities along with her intellectual capacities, her sexual identity, and her physical body. She says that her story is ‘not a confession’ because she has ‘nothing to confess.’ She may believe that she had no choice, no other avenue of escape, but then again, she may have come to regard guilt the way that Quentin and Harrow do: as ‘superstitious and retro,’ in Quentin’s words. Either way, it is safe to say that if zombies represent enslavement, then the possibility of a slave uprising is always around the corner. The consumers are always in danger of being violently consumed.
Zombie and Beasts clearly portray formal education as the consumption or zombification of the student. Less fully developed but worth briefly noting are their further suggestions that students are consumed in another sense, which is to say, commodified. Quentin consoles himself for his failure to create a proper student-zombie by taking ‘mementos’ or ‘good-luck charms’ from his victims, often items of clothing and sometimes body parts that can be transformed into accessories. He describes these items in detail (including, in some cases, their brand names) and wears them to blend in with other students at his college. In addition, he compulsively fondles them to trigger the sexual excitement he felt in subjugating their former owners. Quentin’s dehumanization of his victims, in short, literalizes Karl Marx’s concept of ‘commodity fetishism.’ In Beasts, the students have been reduced to pornographic images for sale and resale. When Gillian rifles through the Harrows’ mysterious file cabinets and locates a cache of pornographic pictures, she inspects the files in a horrified daze, wondering ‘would [her] photo turn up in a porn magazine; had that been their intention all along…?’ She examines the magazines and guesses that the Harrows have been exploiting young women for at least a decade, and when she looks at the pictures, she feels ‘as if someone had struck [her] a numbing blow between the shoulder blades.’ She recognizes that a part of her has been sold, and she is overcome with a desire to destroy the proof of her ‘degradation.’ Like the young women around and before her, Gillian may also have been reduced to a pornographic image endlessly produced, reproduced, and circulated. Harrow has exploited both the use and the exchange value of his students. He has consumed them on every level, and he has profited from ensuring that they will continue to be consumed. For her part, Gillian has been schooled in a great many ways, and while the economic dynamics of the education she has received at Harrow’s hands have not been the focus of her story, neither have they been completely erased from it.
Critics of the Gothic tend to speak of it in therapeutic terms: both David Punter and Maggie Kilgour, for instance, call the Gothic a form of ‘cultural self-analysis,’ and Punter sees the curative powers of the Gothic in its provision of an ‘image-language in which to examine … social fears.’ Some of the most familiar components of this ‘image language’ are tropes under consideration here: curses, traps, and monsters. A curse is a reminder that we are never as free from history as we might think or wish. A trap suggests limitations on our movement, physical and psychic. Monsters manifest evils of all kinds, internal and external. These and other Gothic tropes literalize our fears, forcing us to regard them in their most extreme, grotesque forms. They are psychological caricatures, which is to say, exaggerated portraits from whose broad lines something of the ‘real’ might nevertheless be inferred. The zombie embodies our fear of enslavement to others, to our own animalistic instincts, or to our daily routines. It represents our fear of being consumed or of consuming others. When the zombie appears in the Schoolhouse Gothic, it manifests a range of cultural anxieties about such things as the role of public education in a modern, pluralistic, secular America and the degree to which the academy both preserves culture and serves a progressive agenda. It raises questions about the nature and meaning of learning and the role of power in the classroom. Most educators will say that far from consuming students, university appears not to interest them in the least, that students should be more consumed, more absorbed, more engaged in study. One explanation for the zombie-like appearance and behaviour of so many students is overstimulation from technology, but there are many others, including the impact of the consumer model of higher education, as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have recently argued in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (2011). The zombie subset of the Schoolhouse Gothic challenges us to think about education as consumption, an examination that can happen on a local and personal as well as a global level. Many educators want to see their students consumed by study, absorbed by the subject at hand, able to internalize and recreate a body of knowledge. Joyce Carol Oates challenges us to see the fear that lurks behind that ideal and serves as its dark Other: the fear that what educators really want is to feed their egos with their students. Teachers confronting zombified students should consider how they have contributed to their state, or worse, whether they secretly want to keep them that way.
Sherry R. Truffin was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and holds English degrees from Baldwin-Wallace University (BA, 1993), Cleveland State University (MA, 1995), and Loyola University Chicago (Ph.D., 2002). She has held teaching posts at colleges and universities in Georgia, Illinois, and Ohio, and she is currently an Associate Professor of English at Campbell University in North Carolina, where she teaches courses in American Literature and English Composition. Her research interests include Gothic fiction, popular culture, and literary stylistics. In addition to her first monograph, Schoolhouse Gothic, she has published essays on works by Edgar Allan Poe, James Baldwin, Chuck Palahniuk, Donna Tartt, Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, and Joyce Carol Oates. She has also written about postmodern storytelling in The X-Files and the Gothic literature of New Orleans, Louisiana.
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* from After A Death, —Tomas Transtomer
It's 3 AM. The crows on one leg or none are already starving for infant nests. A few leaves hang on still. A prayer of godwits enters the dream from the upper left quadrant. No, I tell the dream-maker,
no, make it a lamentation of swans. The times demand it. Instead, I’m given an affliction of starlings tearing the leaves that remain as they fly, and the dream is ruined. What’s real is in bed with me,
mounts me, slides in like a husband entering with the unquestioned privilege of his sexual entitlement. Drowsy, I open my thighs to him, to it, to the day. To my habit of saying “Accept it, I’ll
die tonight,” each night when I pull the quilts for sleep, so that I can practice belief. The next day is new. Always. Fair or fetid, bring with me only what I dare to remember. Opening new eyes, there is
the baby in her crib, her shape nothing I wanted. Waking is waking. What’s real is the child with her badly sculpted brain, her damaged possibility of dream. What’s real is our day in a diseased year and
the baby has come out wrong. Blame it on the chemicals. Blame it on the sting of the genus Aedes aegypti, white stripes on her legs, a marking in the form of a lyre on her upper thorax. Say that she
comes at dawn. What’s real is I was another one of the harmed, the infant, more so, but less harmed than the worse harmed than we.
Awake, it is still beautiful to hear the heart beat, I repeat. A prayer of godwits hovers at my door. I am so deeply awake.
Photo: Portrait of MARGO BERDESHEVSKY by Michael Gilbert
This poem was previously published in "Plume"
MARGO BERDESHEVSKY, born in New York city, often writes and lives in Paris. Before The Drought, her newest collection, is from Glass Lyre Press, September 2017. (In an early version, it was finalist for the National Poetry Series.) Berdeshevsky is author as well of Between Soul & Stone, and But a Passage in Wilderness, (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press.) Other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, a portfolio of her poems in the Aeolian Harp Anthology #1 (Glass Lyre Press,) the & Now Anthology of the Best of Innovative Writing, and numerous Pushcart Prize nominations. Her works appear in the American journals: Poetry International, New Letters, Kenyon Review, Plume, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, & Jacar Press—One, among many others. In Europe her works have been seen in The Poetry Review (UK) The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, & Confluences Poétiques. A multi genre novel, Vagrant, and a hybrid of poems, Square Black Key, wait at the gate. She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, or somewhere new in the world. Her Letters from Paris may be found in Poetry International, here.
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
How did you come to literature?
I began my life with words as an actress, first. I was being raised in New York City, in the theatre world, and my first ambitions was to be an actress. So Shakespeare and Shaw and Tennessee Williams were all my early whisperers. I also wrote very bad poems in solitude, but I was developing an ear for the music of finer writing...and I knew I loved the best. Eventually, I knew that I wanted to follow a call to truths as best I could. And, in the guise of characters, I learned, that such a word as truth had many voices, not always my own. I learned to listen to other voices and to find my way to speak for them as well.
When did you realize you were a writer?
When I was able to stand in public and to speak my words aloud and to feel the quiet in those listening...
I knew that feeling as an actress, when I was offering words spoken by another. But when I felt such a silence in the room in response to my own words, I dared to believe that I was a writer who had words to share that came from my own deepest wells.
Why write? What does writing give you that life does not give you?
I know that we are alive right now in dire, maybe desperate times. That the pen is mightier than the sword is something I learned to memorize and to believe. But I don’t write to stand on a soapbox. That is for politicians. I’m not a politician. But I am a poet. And I do believe that poetry is another language. What I would call “a language of the soul.” I don’t mean that in a Sunday school way. I mean that it comes from and may reach people in a different way and in a different part of their beings than quotidian language. And So I make the effort to communicate in such a language.
Were you born into a family of writers or artists?
There were many shelves of books in my growing up home, and I was taken to the theatre and to museums and concerts in New York City, and later, in Paris. My mother was a woman who “wanted” to write, but I think she lacked the confidence to do so. She lived more in her head, and she had much she might have written if she had dared to do so.
Who in your childhood–for example, parent or teacher–encouraged you to read books?
My mother read me three pages of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn each night before `I had reached kindergarten. I listened. I heard. And she played classical music on the radio. By fifth grade I had one British-born teacher who read us The Wind In The Willows aloud. I wanted her to never stop. I don’t remember what the first Shakespearean play was that I attended—but I knew I would read more and more. I loved the language. I wanted to speak those words aloud as well. And I went to the `High School of `Performing Arts in NYC (after auditioning with a monologue from Shaw’s “St Joan.”) That school, later known as “Fame” High School in the film years on...that school helped to shape my esthetics. I learned how hard one had to work to dare to be a voice in one’s time. And I learned that both the beauties and the sordid both were elements to be deeply studied and communicated without prejudice or compromise or inhibition. To be an artist of any kind, I was learning...meant being very naked in public. And eventually, I studied acting under Lee Strasberg of the Actors’ Studio, and learned more profoundly what it mean to risk vulnerability (sometimes too much so.) But again, my esthetics were being shaped, and would continue to push me, and to guide me further.
And which books do you remember most fondly?
A Child’s Garden of Verses, Milne’s When We Were very Young, Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland & Alice Through the Looking Glass, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Eliot’s Prufrock... and more...and more....
Which writers/teachers/friends supported you on your path to becoming a writer? (including writers you may have only “met” through the books they wrote) ·
I first heard an interpretation teacher at Northwestern University, Lila Heston, read Gerard Manly Hopkins out loud. I fell in love with such poetry, such experiment, such holiness. The science fiction genius, Theodore Sturgeon was a writer who whispered to me that I could also write fiction, and remain a poet. He showed me how a passage in one of his stories was written in perfect iambic pentameter. I never forgot that. As I mentioned, Strasberg was my teacher in the art of acting. His guidance toward telling the truth of one’s being— was signal to me.
I never graduated from a university, although I attended two, Northwestern and NYU. But I am in many ways an autodidact. My reading is both eclectic and voluntary, and in some ways I am still pleased about that. The freedom I have felt to explore and to invent my complex paths in literature makes me a bit different I suppose. And I am still, still, still...learning. I still have much to learn. Why not?
Are you a teacher?
I have taught in the “Poets in the Schools” program in America, when there was still an NEA grant to support that wonderful project.
What works do you recommend to your students?
Everything. Read. read read.
What do you hope your students take away from your classes? What advice do you give them? Be brave. Be a little braver than you imagined you might ever be. Stand up to be counted in these times. These times are more devastating in so many ways than we ever imagined. And yet, here we are. What can we do but to become voices in our time? I take such a challenge and I offer it.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you? For you, what makes literature distinct from all other art forms?
I am also a photographer. I very much like seeing the world through the metaphors that image offers me...both in language and in shape and in form and in light.
What are you working on now?
I am increasingly drawn to multi-genre work. Not being forced into one box or one shelf.
I have a new hybrid manuscript that is looking for a home, it merges my collaged photographic images and poems and short prose, all reflecting one another in a variety of looking glasses. the title is “Square Black Key.” And until it is between covers...it is still clay in my hands and words in my heart...so `I am still working in it.
Also, there are new poems in my notebooks, some are more baked as edible bread than others.
Do you have a recently published or forthcoming book or project you’d like to share?
My newest published book is BEFORE THE DROUGHT.
I am admittedly proud that it is in the world right now. I feel it to be a book for the cries and whispers of our time. And I hope it will be widely read.
BEFORE THE DROUGHT : from Glass Lyre Press: or Amazon.
What are your hopes/concerns for the future of literature?
We need it (literature) as we need one another...more than ever before, I believe. We need our many voices. In harmonies, and off-key! Our many and maybe conflicting wisdoms. We need to listen to one another. And we need to refuse to be dumbed down.
What are your views on the future of communication and how technology is changing the way we communicate, read, interact with the world and our imaginations?
I used to hate graffiti when I saw it defacing beautiful architecture. Then one day I saw the colors and the yearnings of its perpetrators...the yearnings to be seen and heard outside of the venues of the establishment. And I began to accept it. I feel similarly about many changes. Acceptance is one path to enlightenment. Even the acceptance of modes we first have deemed unacceptable. Many of the new technologies are inspiring, and some need to be learned. I use a computer for my image works in ways that a darkroom never allowed. I taught myself photo shop and use it as I once did a darkroom, only more. I type and retype and file in ways that my old shoe boxes of poems never allowed. I collage and steal from myself to include in another and another page. There are reasons to fight the big stores and online sellers, and the loss of the beautiful and cherished small bookshops. Self publishing is a mode that some follow. I prefer to be published by those whose other choices I know and respect as editors. But that’s me. There are as many reasons to open ourselves to something new. I hope to hell there will be another springtime...
Once upon a time, printing was new! Once upon a time, paintings of the “profane” were not allowed. Only the sacred dared show its face. Once upon a time...I was new. (Maybe `I still am. )
Considering the current state of the world, what are your hopes for our future on this planet? · What are your views on the importance of creativity and the humanities?
I am not optimistic about our chaos, our wars, our marches toward illiberalism or fascism or racism or our inhumanity to one another. I cannot be so. And yet, I write. And yet I walk in the river of a life. And yet I make my small drops into the huge seas and call them poems, and call them cries and whispers for being the best “Margo” I can be, today. If we fail, we fail together. If we save ourselves, it will be because more of us have dared to create something finer, kinder. I don’t always or even usually know if or when prayer is effective. but in my own silences, I pray. And with my poems...I whisper, or speak, or shout, as I can. I was born with such a yearning. I hope such a yearning remains with me until I die.
How can people reach you?
Twitter: @berdeshevsky
Facebook
Translated by Burak Erdoğdu / Roza Publishing
Read Turkish version
Narin Yükler's Creative Process
No water touches the nations of desert
Feet proceed with warm winds
Trails can be seen by the weights of the bags
Slowly chops the sands
I lay down my tongue to back of the coppery bowl
My hands are like roads that are between gulps
My hands collapse into Sahara
Mystery and prayer fall off from my face
Equal to house that has no stucco
Ramparts and wounds stay still at my chest
Trees that hold onto the barren lands
Epilepsy starts from the weak arms of the tree
Whichever arm that decays
Whichever side that turns to yellow
I bless her
Saints that come confessing to the tree
I kiss them with great desire
From the day that I fell down to the Sahara and epilepsy
Fooled by the borehole that comes from my clefts
I believe in a fairy tale of water
-
Su masalı
su değmiyor çöl kavimlerine
sıcak rüzgârla ilerliyor ayaklar
heybelerin ağırlığıyla beliren izler
ağır ağır yarıyor kumu
dilimi seriyorum bakır tasın sırtına
ellerim iki yutkunma arası yol
ellerim içine çökmüş sahra
yüzümden dökülüyor sır ve dua
sıvası dökülmüş eve denk
duruyor göğsümde sur ve yara
çorak toprağın sırtına tutunan ağaçların
zayıf dallarından başlıyor sara
hangi dalı çürümüşse
hangi yüzü dönmüşse sarıya
onu kutsuyorum
ve ağaçlara günah çıkarmaya gelen azizeleri
iştahla öpüyorum
sara ve sahraya düştüğümden beri
yarıklarımdan çıkan kuyuya aldanıp
bir su masalına inanıyorum
Narin Yükler was born in Viranşehir of Şanlıurfa in 1988. She graduated from the Tourism and Hospitality Management School of Gaziantep University and from the Faculty of Business Administration of Anadolu University. After graduation, she started to work as a hotel manager. She got married in 2012 and had her daughter in 2014. During that time, she took part in the activities of various non-governmental and human rights organizations, especially women’s rights organizations.
Many of her stories and poems about Middle Eastern–especially Kurdish/Ezidi–women were published in several newspapers and magazines in Iraq, Belgium, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey. She held meetings in refugee camps where she read her poems written in Kurdish and Turkish languages. She has written theatrical plays on the human and women’s rights, some of which were staged. Being a woman, a mother and a refugee in the Middle East. Her poetry books include Aynadaki Çürüme and Rê û Rêç. Her awards include KAOS GL Short Story Award – Selection Committee (2015), Hüseyin Çelebi Poetry Prize (2015), Ali İsmail Korkmaz Poetry Prize (2016), Golden Daphne Award For Young Poets – Selection Committee (2016), Arkadaş Zekai Özger Poetry Award (2017) and the Arjen ArÎ Poetry Award (2017).
-
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Can you tell us a little about the origins of this series of poems?
My poetry deals with war, women, and migration.
Why do you write?
To cling to life. I live in the Middle East and have seen many countries in the Middle East. I wrote scripts and poems during these travels. Writing is a way of defending life. And therefore I see literature as necessary. Yes, we can not change the world by typing, but we can tell what causes war and immigration. I want to tell everyone about it.
Tell us about some of your formative influences and teachers who have been important to you.
My teachers encouraged me to read. I started to study philosophy. I write poetry and I cannot write poetry without reading philosophy.
The Future – What are you currently working on?
I'm working on a Kurdish poem. I am living in the heat. I want to develop projects related to refugee flags and children. I am interested in making documentaries, films, and poetry workshops.
My Venus of Willendorff belly is flopping as I lurch forward and try to make contact with my coach’s punch mitts, brown cushions around ten inches wide; up by his shoulder height they make him look like an angry bear coming out of hibernation. John’s boxing nickname was “The Punisher” --physically he’s a cross between Bruce Willis and Tony Soprano. I am a fifty-five-year old Jewish psychotherapist and spend my days in a leather recliner, quietly tuning myself to the complex themes of other peoples’ melodies, and each day begins with someone else’s song. But not when I am boxing; then I am edgy, tough, ageless, and loud.
“C’mon baby, that punch wasn’t sexy. Put your hips into it. Jab, one-two, blow to the body, blow to the head. There ya go,” John is saying to me.
“The Punisher” is teaching me to crouch like a Ninja, slip and weave, keep my hands up, and send force up from my heavy legs into my middle and out through my arms, using my body in ways I never thought possible.
It’s a surprise to feel so exhilarated by my own body and its abilities. My body. What a drag it’s been – what a disappointment! Sometime it just seemed like a necessary over-sized backpack for my brain. My body has been, um . . . sensitive. Asthma and allergies as a teen-ager, life-long irritable bowel syndrome that started at twenty-one after a particularly pernicious GI infection involving salmonella while living in New York City (not even after exotic travel), migraines and chronic headaches forever. Not to mention the dark cloak that swathed my whole family with a swirl of odd feelings, anxieties, phobias, and panic attacks. At times we’ve been like throwbacks to Freud’s hysterical patients who couldn’t lift an arm after seeing a snake or became obsessively aware of their tongues in their mouths.
So it’s utterly new to feel my power, hear the propulsive sound of my own grunts, and feel such a delight in making this kind of physical contact. My body is bringing me joy. I’m also blinking desperately because my eyeballs are sweating. That’s how serious an initiation I’m enduring – my eyeballs are affected.
I’m tightening my core, I’m keeping my knees bent, I’m bouncing back and forth on my feet, and I can barely breathe. I never before participated in contact sports or athletics of any kind. I have not ever dominated a younger sibling, stood up to a bully, play-wrestled with a brother, or felt my own physical strength in any way. During particularly passionate fights with lovers, I have wiped a counter clear of a dish or two, and once I tore the buttons off a man’s shirt, but I’ve never hit anyone, and the thought of it, well, the thought never occurred to me. It just wasn’t an option.
Thwack! My glove makes contact. My god, it feels good. I do it again, remembering to snap my jab right back after I throw it. This is . . .it’s . . .thrilling. I’ve never made such a profoundly clarifying sound with my fist before. To say that while I was growing up my family lacked a certain . . .athleticism . . .would be an understatement. Although in the 1950s and 60s President Kennedy put the nation on a physical fitness kick, in my home there was no concept of “fit,” except as it applied to clothing, and because we didn’t do sports, our obsessive interest in food made matters worse. My sister and I loved nothing more than to laze around watching television while consuming entire bags of Wise potato chips. I emptied boxes of animal crackers into large bowls and assembled them by size, eating the panther, the bear, and the lion first, and working my way expectantly up to the gorilla and hippo. My mother, though not the most inventive of cooks (I ate my first fresh mushroom in my twenties), could whip up a mean Duncan Hines sheet cake. Late at night my father would inhale a salami sandwich on rye with Gulden’s Spicy Brown mustard over the kitchen sink. His traveling salesman tales were punctuated by detailed descriptions of the sumptuous meals at restaurants that he put on the expense account when he entertained the jobbers. “They had a spread, my daughters…” he intoned wistfully, while we listened with rapt attention to lurid tales of deli meats, chopped liver, cocktail shrimp, blintzes, and chocolate cheesecake.
Although my father had been a track star at Thomas Jefferson High, I never even saw him walk fast. My parents both seemed worn out. Newark’s Weequahic High School had an award-winning basketball team, but I never knew anyone who played on it. (Philip Roth’s Portnoy reminds us of the classic cheer of the era: Ikey, Mikey, Jake, and Sam/We’re the boys who eat no ham/We keep matzohs in our locker! Aye, Aye, aye, Weequahic High!) In the 1940s, Roth and his buddies were still fleeing from anti-Semitic violence in the streets of Newark, especially perpetrated by kids from non-Jewish schools, and still Roth said, “I could no more smash a nose with a fist than fire a pistol into someone’s heart.”
My friends and I did play hit the penny and stoopball with the pink fuzzless tennis ball called a “Spalding” on the Newark streets but it’s not the kind of activity that produces sweat. For mysterious reasons, the Spalding sporting goods corporation took the ball off the market in the late 70s, but I’ve heard it’s being reissued. I’d like to feel one in the palm of my hand again; it holds the memories of games like “A My Name is Alice” that involved standing in place, reciting a long alliterative poem while crossing one leg over and under the bounce of the ball in sync with all the letters of the alphabet – a game for a poet, a game for a girl standing still. That was my sport.
Still, a longing remained. I could not give up on the fantasy of being more like the active girls. I peered through the slats of the venetian blinds in our den, with its view of the playground next door, and watched mournfully as the popular girls played softball. I wanted to run fast, hit hard, and wear a cute uniform. These girls seemed to know something about life I didn’t.
I wanted to move comfortably through space without feeling unsteady. Later, in high school, I read Simone de Beauvoir’s journals, in which she described having a body so strong and hungry for exercise she could barely satisfy it. She took monstrous hikes, packing a tidy little bag of plums as her sensuous reward which she savored on a picturesque bench in the French countryside.
***
I certainly never knew any boxers. In the 1960s, I marched against the Vietnam War and considered myself something of a pacifist, just like the cooler-than-cool boys in high school I coveted, who professed a fierce pacifism when I quizzed them on fantasied scenarios of danger. No, babe, I don’t think I could defend you. Peace, baby, they droned while trying to master Woody Guthrie chord progressions on acoustic guitars draped with embroidered straps.
“No one’s got any balls anymore in this nation,” my coach John often says. “It’s the worst for men – they get babied, and then they just look to be mothered.”
Thug philosophy, I think, simplistic but oddly compelling.
By the end of a boxing lesson, my sweat smells like a mixture of bitter oranges, aluminum, and old pastry. I walk over to the window ledge where I keep a collection of fluids –– and encircle a bottle of vitamin water with two giant gloved hands, like a clumsy baby. Water spurts everywhere and dribbles down my chin. John laughs, and tells me not to worry; it’s a dirty sport.
Like Roth, I grew up thinking Jews were the pale scholars, heads buried in books, funny, warm, sensitive, but definitely not outdoorsy, not physical. Jules Feiffer spoke of his “great desire to grow up” because of his understanding that “adults did not have to take gym.” A Jewish triathlon, as the joke goes, consists of “gin rummy,” then contract bridge, followed by a nap.” Woody Allen has infiltrated our collective psyche as the most influential Jewish comedian of the post World-War II era, and his persona and jokes highlight his physical vulnerability and meekness.
Yet a little known fact is that there was an impressive contingent of Jewish boxers in the early twentieth century, immigrants who struggled with the dilemma that faces all oppressed groups. Am I too much of this thing that makes me who I am? Or am I not enough of it? Artist Charles Miller, whose portraits of Jewish boxers (Benny Leonard, Barney Ross, countless others) are highly prized, says he paints these “anti-heroes” to “put blood back in their bodies again.”
When I started boxing in my mid-fifties, the country was having one long, rapturous and unending love affair with youth, and I felt sour, bitter, and dry. I approached my naked body in the mirror cautiously, like a wolf sizing up its prey, eyes narrowed, not in lustful need for food, but in….terror…. and then, it could only be confronted in sections, like a cafeteria plate (peas separated from the mashed potatoes), as each day brought a new pocket of dimpled and sagging flesh. I turned the bathroom fan off when I showered, letting the steam create a mercifully diffuse and hazy reflection in the mirror. While reaching for the toothpaste, I might glimpse just the delicate curve of an underarm, the slight indentation of a waist, and retain the sensuousness of an Impressionist painting
The slide from “miss” to “ma’am” happens gradually, like watching your dog age. You don’t notice all at once the increasing droop of the jowls, the dotting of white in the fur, the hesitation at doorways, or the occasional melancholy stare, as if he is remembering a carefree jog through a field. It all proceeds in tiny increments. One day your sweet pup is fourteen, and you are mopping up accidents and patting his head with the tender feeling of rehearsing how to let go. “Ma’am” urged me further into static waters, having waded in unknowingly, to join the aunts, grandmothers, and other desexed entities.
When I boxed, my body surprised me – it assumed unfamiliar positions eagerly, as if it were agile and strong. I felt myself bigger than life. I’d walk in the woods, in a state of happy ignorance, feeling strong, powerful, quick-footed; an animal primed to pounce if need be. Spotting a lone man near the lake, I’d think, Could I take him? Where would I start? What punch would I use? I’d stand in line at the bank, push my cart at the grocery store and size people up. Not only was it somewhat absurd, I had little to back up my fantasies.
My body began to have a double life. I had the sturdy, eager, and uncomplaining body of the training, and the after-hours body, with its plump, fleshy passivity, and its mundane aches and pains.
The first time we officially spar, John gently moves my hair back behind my ears and places the helmet onto my head. I’m being crowned, but in a dark and claustrophobic way. He starts tightening the strap at the neck. My head is now outlined in black, cheeks protected, nose and mouth poking through. I steal a glance in the mirror. It’s not attractive. I look like a chubby devotee of S&M.
Soon I find myself up against John’s body, pounding him gracelessly on his middle. I want to just lean onto him and collapse. I understand now why referees often shout “No holding!” The fighters are basically embracing each other to grab a moment’s rest.
“No! Too close, get back!” John yells.
Bop! He hits me on the side of my head. Whoosh! Arms are moving past me. He’s moving from side to side like a beast of prey, sizing me up, I try to mimic his moves, and feel idiotic. I bring my left hand out in front of me and throw it higher and more in the middle. The punch mitt was always out to the side. I look at John’s eyes, his nose, and push forward. He slips expertly. I’ve hit nothing.
“Again, again! Jab, jab one-two!”
John is not only asking me to hit him, he is reaching out and hitting me. I feel the impact, it’s never very strong, but I’m definitely being buffeted by something coming at me. John. John is coming at me. I have to be careful now. The stakes are higher. I’m trying to remember everything he ever said – protect yourself at all times, keep your hands up, cover your face, keep your right leg back, don’t drop your hands, snap back the jab, keep your composure. Breathe.
“Keep jabbing! See what’s out there!”
“What do you mean? See what’s out there?” I gasp.
“See where I am. Find your range.”
Range? It’s all meaningless. I can’t get at him, whether I’m far back or close up.
Clang! Ten-second warning. My reprieve is on its way. I leap up, move towards John. “Here we go! See what’s out there!” John is batting me about.
Suddenly I’m ready, and I jerk forward a bit as if to jab with my left and then bam! I’ve thrown my right and hit John right on his nose, right in the middle of his face.
“Good! That’s it, baby, nice. You faked me out.”
Giddy with my success, I start flailing and try for a left hook on the side of his head. He ducks. I’ve almost spun myself around in the process.
“Never turn your back. Never. Or you’ll wake up in the locker room.”
I’m dazzled. I hit this man. I have made contact. It feels amazing.
Clang! The final bell. John removes my headgear. I am dripping with sweat. We embrace, and I’m crying.
After the lesson I pack up and drive down to the Milford Shopping Mall, where I often go after boxing to have a snack, browse at Borders, or occasionally go to a movie. This time I set up my laptop in front of the fireplace at Panera’s, eat some lukewarm pumpkin soup, check my email, and within several minutes, I am drifting off to sleep, thinking about how I’m often too cerebral, cognitively flooded, introspective, dreamy, ambivalent, paralyzed by nuances. When John teaches me to slip, weave, block, and feint, what am I literally doing? I’m getting my head out of the way! I’m leaving obsessions behind and entering a state of flow: all things immediate and with consequences.
A buzzer goes off signaling that an order is ready, and I awake thinking I’ve got another round to go. I hope I wasn’t snoring. I know I still look the same, like a pleasant middle-aged woman enjoying a bite to eat, but I have a victory stored deep inside me that only John and I know, and I’m going to nurture it and savor it, and it’s going to grow.
I can feel it inside, flexing its fingers and toes like a tiny baby, moving into my future.
***
So when people hear I’m boxing and say with a mixture of curiosity and concern, “Oooh, how can you do that?” I wonder, how can they ask that?
Compared to the grotesque excesses of the larger world, boxing is an elegant containment of aggression, a stage for dramas both universal and exquisitely personal, and I’ve come to love its clarity.
Most surprisingly, it got me out of my head and into my body, and there, in my body, I got smarter again.
This essay is adapted from Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind, SUNY Press, 2010 and appeared in Seneca Review, “The Lyric Body Issue,” Spring 2010.
Binnie Klein maintains a private psychotherapy practice in New Haven, CT, and is a Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. Her memoir, Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind (SUNY Press) came out in 2010. She has a weekly show at WPKN-FM (and wpkn.org), Thursdays, 10 am until Noon called A Miniature World.
None. No one is not connected to someone else in the city who was hurt that night or dead. It is
the no-degrees of separation or escape. Or times we’ve been borne to. Everyone knows someone
who knew at least one in a city of millions. Open terraces under streetlamps and a fingernail of
moon. Tables of friends. A concert by The Eagles of Death Metal and autumn and blood and no
breath and the young. The rifles and a will to end something. Paris, for lovers . . . I open my door to a man I’ve been calling all this week—to fix my door. Hamid, thin as a pencil, flaming as a showgirl.
A face from the projects. A face from the once-upon-colonies. My lock no longer works. These are days when one thinks of closing doors. He stands in my hall, eyes like tunnels and sewers that bend
under the city. Last Saturday there was a carnival bulging in those tunnels. People vowed to dance and to wear costumes and to live unless they die. I wore silk. Rented gowns, and feathers, and masks.
You had to be invited. Steps, underneath our city. I wore red. Who are you, someone whispered in
the dark. I don’t know, is anyone’s reply. . . I’m so sorry I have not answered you earlier in the week, Madame.
My sister. The baby one. She is —, was one of— in the café. She came to the birthday for her lover. Her name was Djamila. I had photographed candles and flowers left for the murdered in front of that café, the day
after. I remember that name. Djamila, I tell him. His eyes are sewers, tunnels. He cries. I cry. Destiny, he mumbles so softly I am not sure I have heard. He pulls his satchel of tools into my hall to repair
my door. There is a noise somewhere, that is too loud. We are strangers. He has come to fix my door. Holding one another, until it is over. No modifier, at all.
—for the Paris massacres, November 2015
This poem appears in Before the Drought from Glass Lyre Press, 2017
Margo Berdeshevsky, born in New York city, often writes and lives in Paris. Before The Drought, her newest collection, is from Glass Lyre Press, September 2017. (In an early version, it was finalist for the National Poetry Series.) Berdeshevsky is author as well of Between Soul & Stone, and But a Passage in Wilderness, (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press.) Other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, a portfolio of her poems in the Aeolian Harp Anthology #1 (Glass Lyre Press,) the & Now Anthology of the Best of Innovative Writing, and numerous Pushcart Prize nominations. Her works appear in the American journals: Poetry International, New Letters, Kenyon Review, Plume, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, & Jacar Press—One, among many others. In Europe her works have been seen in The Poetry Review (UK) The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, & Confluences Poétiques. A multi-genre novel, Vagrant, and a hybrid of poems, Square Black Key, wait at the gate. She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, or somewhere new in the world.
Her Letters from Paris in Poetry International.
http://www.full-stop.net/2018/01/26/interviews/devin-kelly/quintan-ana-wikswo-and-margo-berdeshevsky/
My Creative Process
Can you tell us a little about the origins of “No Modifier At All” and why you wrote it?
The inspiration was clear. I was living in Paris during the 2015 massacres, and I felt a call and a need to speak of them, as a poet and as a citizen and as a mere human on the planet in these times. The poem was written quickly, pouring from my being. The title, while seemingly abstract, speaks to an event, a memory, a fact, that cannot be modified. Also, linguistically, I gave myself an additional tsk in the writing...to do so using no modifiers. That kind of control perhaps led to a tighter and more precise expression than I might otherwise have achieved. I have read the poem in public numbers of times since it’s initial writing, and since its publication, and always I want to say I wish the time had passed when I needed to read it. But of course, that is not true. The time is now. Still.
What was your path to literature?
I began my life with words as an actress, first. I was being raised in New York City, in the theatre world, and my first ambitions was to be an actress. So Shakespeare and Shaw and Tennessee Williams were all my early whisperers. I also wrote very bad poems in solitude, but I was developing an ear for the music of finer writing...and I knew I loved the best. Eventually, I knew that I wanted to follow a call to truths as best I could. And, in the guise of characters, I learned, that such a word as truth had many voices, not always my own. I learned to listen to other voices and to find my way to speak for them as well.
When did you realize you were a writer?
When I was able to stand in public and to speak my words aloud and to feel the quiet in those listening...
I knew that feeling as an actress when I was offering words spoken by another. But when I felt such a silence in the room in response to my own words, I dared to believe that I was a writer who had words to share that came from my own deepest wells.
Were you born into a family of writers or artists?
There were many shelves of books in my growing up home, and I was taken to the theatre and to museums and concerts in New York City, and later, in Paris. My mother was a woman who “wanted” to write, but I think she lacked the confidence to do so. She lived more in her head, and she had much she might have written if she had dared to do so.
It was your mother who encouraged you to read books?
My mother read me three pages of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn each night before `I had reached kindergarten. I listened. I heard. And she played classical music on the radio. By fifth grade I had one British-born teacher who read us The Wind In The Willows aloud. I wanted her to never stop. I don’t remember what the first Shakespearean play was that I attended—but I knew I would read more and more. I loved the language. I wanted to speak those words aloud as well.
You've studied under some pretty remarkable teachers and schools.
I went to the `High School of `Performing Arts in NYC (after auditioning with a monologue from Shaw’s St Joan.) That school, later known as Fame High School in the film years on...that school helped to shape my esthetics. I learned how hard one had to work to dare to be a voice in one’s time. And I learned that both the beauties and the sordid both were elements to be deeply studied and communicated without prejudice or compromise or inhibition. To be an artist of any kind, I was learning...meant being very naked in public. And eventually, I studied acting under Lee Strasberg of the Actors’ Studio, and learned more profoundly what it mean to risk vulnerability (sometimes too much so.) But again, my esthetics were being shaped, and would continue to push me, and to guide me further.
Which books do you remember most fondly?
A Child’s Garden of Verses, Milne’s When We Were Very Young, Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland & Alice Through the Looking Glass, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Eliot’s Prufrock... and more...and more...
Which writers, teachers, friends supported you on your path to becoming a writer?
I first heard an interpretation teacher at Northwestern University, Lila Heston, read Gerard Manly Hopkins out loud. I fell in love with such poetry, such experiment, such holiness. The science fiction genius, Theodore Sturgeon was a writer who whispered to me that I could also write fiction, and remain a poet. He showed me how a passage in one of his stories was written in perfect iambic pentameter. I never forgot that. As I mentioned, Strasberg was my teacher in the art of acting. His guidance toward telling the truth of one’s being— was signal to me.
I never graduated from a university, although I attended two, Northwestern and NYU. But I am in many ways an autodidact. My reading is both eclectic and voluntary, and in some ways, I am still pleased about that. The freedom I have felt to explore and to invent my complex paths in literature makes me a bit different I suppose. And I am still, still, still...learning. I still have much to learn. Why not?
Are you a teacher?
I have taught in the “Poets in the Schools” program in America, when there was still an NEA grant to support that wonderful project.
What works do you recommend to your students?
Everything. Read. read read.
What do you hope your students take away from your classes? What advice do you give them? Be brave. Be a little braver than you imagined you might ever be. Stand up to be counted in these times. These times are more devastating in so many ways than we ever imagined. And yet, here we are. What can we do but to become voices in our time? I take such a challenge and I offer it.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you? · For you, what makes literature distinct from all other art forms?
I am also a photographer. I very much like seeing the world through the metaphors that image offers me...both in language and in shape and in form and in light.
What are you working on now?
I am increasingly drawn to multi-genre work. Not being forced into one box or one shelf.
I have a new hybrid manuscript that is looking for a home, it merges my collaged photographic images and poems and short prose, all reflecting one another in a variety of looking glasses. the title is “Square Black Key.” And until it is between covers...it is still clay in my hands and words in my heart...so `I am still working in it.
Also, there are new poems in my notebooks, some are more baked as edible bread than others.
Do you have a recently published or forthcoming book or project you’d like to share?
My newest published book is BEFORE THE DROUGHT from Glass Lyre Press, which can also be found on Amazon.
I am admittedly proud that it is in the world right now. I feel it to be a book for the cries and whispers of our time. And I hope it will be widely read.
What are your hopes/concerns for the future of literature?
We need it (literature) as we need one another...more than ever before, I believe. We need our many voices. In harmonies, and off-key! Our many and maybe conflicting wisdoms. We need to listen to one another. And we need to refuse to be dumbed down.
What are your views on the future of communication and how technology is changing the way we communicate, read, interact with the world and our imaginations?
I used to hate graffiti when I saw it defacing beautiful architecture. Then one day I saw the colors and the yearnings of its perpetrators...the yearnings to be seen and heard outside of the venues of the establishment. And I began to accept it. I feel similarly about many changes. Acceptance is one path to enlightenment. Even the acceptance of modes we first have deemed unacceptable. Many of the new technologies are inspiring, and some need to be learned. I use a computer for my image works in ways that a darkroom never allowed. I taught myself Photoshop and use it as I once did a darkroom, only more. I type and retype and file in ways that my old shoe boxes of poems never allowed. I collage and steal from myself to include in another and another page. There are reasons to fight the big stores and online sellers, and the loss of the beautiful and cherished small bookshops. Self-publishing is a mode that some follow. I prefer to be published by those whose other choices I know and respect as editors. But that’s me. There are as many reasons to open ourselves to something new. I hope to hell there will be another springtime...
Once upon a time, printing was new! Once upon a time, paintings of the “profane” were not allowed. Only the sacred dared show its face. Once upon a time...I was new. (Maybe `I still am. )
Considering the current state of the world, what are your hopes for our future on this planet? What are your views on the importance of creativity and the humanities?
I am not optimistic about our chaos, our wars, our marches toward illiberalism or fascism or racism or our inhumanity to one another. I cannot be so. And yet, I write. And yet I walk in the river of a life. And yet I make my small drops into the huge seas and call them poems, and call them cries and whispers for being the best “Margo” I can be, today. If we fail, we fail together. If we save ourselves, it will be because more of us have dared to create something finer, kinder. I don’t always or even usually know if or when prayer is effective. but in my own silences, I pray. And with my poems...I whisper, or speak, or shout, as I can. I was born with such a yearning. I hope such a yearning remains with me until I die.
If you want to learn how to be happy,
you have to know what is sadness first.
― ETGAR KERET
Missing Kissinger
Ever since Happiness heard your name, he has been running through the streets trying to find you.* He saw you on a sunny morning, striding down Mount Pleasant, slowing only to avoid the spongy tarmac where a burst pipe was sending water to the surface. You were moving fast, your head held high, taking in the view over Christchurch to the mountains beyond. The air was clear with the occasional waft of sweet lemon from the autumn-flowering shrubs. Happiness almost caught up with you, but you gave him the slip at the bottom of the hill, stepping neatly over the bricks where the path had unzipped. He was left standing at the side of the road, waiting for a gap in the traffic.
The roadworks on the bridge were causing chaos and no one was giving way, and when he finally managed to get across the road, you were almost at the bus-stop. You frowned as you walked past the vast empty space that used to be the Countdown supermarket. It was full of light, its remaining concrete pillars making a frame for the sky, but you were looking at the rubble. You looked so sad as you got on the bus to Sumner that you made Happiness sigh. He kept his distance.
But Happiness is the eternal optimist, so he followed you to Sumner that day, taking the next bus and enjoying the view out over the ocean. Listless lenticular clouds were moving slowly along the horizon. Their elongated forms were tinged with shades of green and blue, reflecting off the lagoon. When he got to the town, you had bought yourself an iced coffee and were drinking it as you walked along the seafront. But then you had to make a detour round the tall protective fencing near Cave Rock and he lost sight of you again. The next thing he knew you were taking a short cut past one of those large rusty shipping containers that line the road beside the cliffs. When he looked, all he could see back there were damp shadows and the chance of a rock fall. He didn’t feel comfortable at all. So he called it a day.
The next time he saw you, you were window-shopping in Cashel Street. The temporary shops in converted containers looked trendy and bright. They sparkled in the sunlight, offering up their shelves of colorful, if overpriced, trinkets. There were a lot of people around and Happiness had to thread his way through a gaggle of tourists who were being very slow and photographing everything. He was carrying a big bunch of flowers (yellow roses, your favorite), so couldn’t have been more conspicuous, yet you were oblivious. But the tourists were delighted with him and insisted on a group photo, smiling and pleading amicably. He obliged and by the time he’d finished you had moved off and were well on your way to the park.
Now Happiness is no quitter. He broke into a run, catching you at the entrance gate. He was quite out of puff when he handed you the flowers, but still managed a winning smile. That was when you said, after reading the note attached: ‘You must be mistaken, they can’t be for me. Who would give me flowers? It’s not my birthday or anything.’ And you wouldn’t take them. Refused point blank. You had a look in your eye that said you thought he was a nutcase, could be dangerous, and so he backed off. He gave the flowers to a little old lady who was sitting on a bench feeding sparrows. It made her day. ‘Yellow is for friendship,’ she said.
Happiness was perplexed. You were a tough nut to crack. But he wouldn’t give up; it was his job, after all. He had heard your name, knew you by heart, and he had faith that he would find you again. He remained vigilant and ready. A few days later he spotted you at the Book Exchange Fridge that stands on the concrete foundations of what was once a house. He could see you standing in the mellow autumn light, your face serene. After all this chasing, he did not want to frighten you off, so he held back for a moment. You were pulling out books from the converted fridge, leafing through them and putting them back. But before he could approach, there came a roar as a 4.9 aftershock rumbled through. He watched the pavement hump up and down in one smooth movement as the tremor passed by. ‘Amazing!’ he thought, but in that moment of distraction he lost you. When he looked up you were no longer there.
It was clear that Happiness would have to try something different. He became crafty. He would use your friends to get to you. It was an old trick that had worked before. He whispered to Suzie to put a note on Facebook – ‘Join me at the Dance-o-mat’.
The Dance-o-mat was one of Happiness’s favorite places in Christchurch. It was situated in the cleared ground of a clothes store. Someone had put down a dance floor and converted a commercial washing machine so that people could put a gold coin in the slot and play music through loud speakers. Happiness liked the crowds that turned up there; and since he had broad tastes in music he could happily, excuse the pun, spend hours there. This time he didn’t follow you; he waited for you to arrive. And you did, with a group of your friends.
You look beautiful, he thought, when you smile. In his experience, most people do.
He watched as you put your money in the slot, hooked up your iPod and started clowning about to the music. More people turned up, some of them in fancy dress and Happiness felt right at home. After a while he managed to talk to you, sharing a joke. You said you had a funny feeling that you’d met him before.
And you danced with him for ages.
*First line courtesy of the Iranian poet Hafiz c1320.
"You Look Beautiful When You Smile" was first published in
Sweet As: Contemporary Short Stories by New Zealanders, edited by Blair Polly and Wendy Moore and published by the Sweet As Short Story Project, Wellington, 2014.
Celia Coyne is a freelance editor and writer living in Christchurch. She is a graduate of the Hagley Writers’ Institute, where she focused on developing her short-story writing. Her stories have appeared in the literary journals Takahe, Penduline Press, Flash Frontier, Atlas, The Thing Itself, Flash: The International Short Short Story Magazine and several anthologies, including Sweet As: Contemporary Short Stories by New Zealanders. Celia grew up in the UK and many of her stories are set there. When she came to New Zealand, she fell in love with the sky and began taking photos of it. Pictures and stories can be found on www.mybeautifulsky.com.
“When did the left foot stop walking with the right?
–FU SCHROEDER
Green Gulf Ranch, California
Head swollen, eyes still blackened and green
from injuries sustained in a skirmish—
I turn to meditation
My body this old dog
finds a spot to rest
it is my mind that rattles
like a snake in a bamboo tube
Is it not the same with war and peace?
Within without
my country your country
I’m right you’re wrong
Hsssssssss
Many go to war two by two—
left foot right foot
left foot right foot
forgetting they are One.
Others—yogis
may cross the entire universe
without ever having left
Every day
I put one breath after the other
just as Someone Else
puts the other breath before
Breathing out breathing in–
the world becomes larger
the world becomes smaller--
continuously living continually dying
On stage online on website blogs:
message in a bottle—
see me hear me feel me touch me,
screams a disappearing world in high definition
while I in my easy chair feed these pages
with bite-size impressions.
3,000 Burmese monks walk barefoot
in protest of their government
3,000 Burmese monks walk barefoot
with Jesus in the desert
walk barefoot
with Buddha in the forest
walk barefoot
with Moses on the mountain
The earth is moving
and still I sit
The mountains are moving-
they are running beside the rivers
But I do not budge--
I hear but I do not listen
I am liquid says the snake your river flows within
I am skinsays the snake you can peel me like a glove
I am mindful says the snake you must change
tobe changed.
‘’When did the left foot stop walking with the right?’’
When did you stop becoming me?
There are many languages
but there is only one tongue
When I opened up my mouth and heard myself scream
I could feel the dry explosion in the squeeze of my throat.
I could taste the brain’s bitterness on the tip of my tongue
When I opened up my mouth and heard myself scream
a thousand consonants like stars flew in different directions.
Consonants gagged on spittle and yesterday’s dust
consonants gagged on consonants
and in no particular order
When I opened up my mouth and heard myself scream
I knew then that they would want to blindfold all my mirrors
and question them until they cracked!
Soon they are sticking bamboo shoots
under the nails of this sentence to extract its full meaning.
But I do not budge
I won’t give up the vowels
I WON”T GIVE UP THE VOWELS!!!
I a large toad growing larger on my cushion
transforming in mid-air… nightmare into dream
Eyes that stutter with all the old stories--
the history of my life
written across my bruised body in Braille
Where is Kindness?
with her thousand fingertips
to trace the shadow of our suffering
and soothe its moan?
What have they done with Quon Yin?
with her thousand arms and cameras flashing–
eyes rolling in the palms of her Hand
eyes to record and to remember. ..
what we leave out!
3,000 Burmese monks walk barefoot
in protest of their government
while I a large toad a leap of faith
go hopping on one foot across the Universe
across the only One path I know—
the path of empathy
My mother (breathing out breathing in)
rolled bandages in basements
with women who wore numbers on their arms
My father (left foot right foot)
could never step into anyone else’s shoes
When he died…they had to cut off both his feet
‘’When did the left foot stop walking with the right?’’
When did I stop…becoming you?
Antonia Alexandra Klimenko was first introduced on the BBC and to the literary world by the legendary Tambimuttu of Poetry London–-publisher of T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller and Bob Dylan, to name a few. After his death, it was his friend the late great Kathleen Raine who took an interest in her writing and encouraged her to publish. Although her manuscript was orphaned upon “Tambi”s passing, her poems and correspondence have been included in his Special Collections at Northwestern University. A former San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion, her works are widely published in journals and anthologies, among them: XXI Century World Literature (in which she represents France), CounterPunch, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology, The Rumpus, Atlanta Review; Big Bridge, Levure Litteraire, The Opiate, Iodine Poetry Journal, Strangers in Paris, Paris Lit Up, Vox Populi, Occupy Poetry (in which she is distinguished as an American Poet) and Maintenant: Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art archived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C and in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She is the Writer/Poet in Residence for SpokenWord Paris.
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Interview adapted from a conversation with Linda Ibbotson.
What brought you to Paris, city of writers, artists and musicians?
My brother. I hadn’t seen him since I was 11 years old and, finally, I was 19 and old enough to travel. I was grateful that he had chosen Paris, as Paris had always been at the top of my short list of places that I had longed to visit, and for the usual reasons— the light, the architecture, the culture, the community of artists. The notion that even if you made but a modest living, you might enjoy the abundance of beauty and spirit. I like to think, also, that it was fate.
Which is your favorite café/ Parisian haunt?
For outdoor haunts: There’s a place at the river’s edge on the Isle Saint Louis that I am very fond of. Also, the Jardin du Luxembourg. Indoor: The light tiled Moroccan patio of Salon de The de La Grande Mosquee on sunny days, the shaded room of La Palette on rainy.
What motivates you to write and your influences?
The desire to transcend. To share and/or reflect beauty. To heal, to process an experience that might have been less than wonderful and to create positive energy from it. To connect with self and with others, to share thoughts and ideals which make us most human. Writing encourages empathy as we imagine what it must be like to be in someone else’s shoes. I also enjoy the art of expression, trying to find the better messenger to convey meaning. Poetry, like music, opens a portal to the mystery of understanding without our fully comprehending. It brings me closer to Spirit.
And, of course, you never know who you might meet along the way. For instance, I was invited to a rather surreal soiree here in Paris where I couldn’t help but notice a charismatic artist with jet-black hair {and an unreasonably wide but charming moustache) wearing a satin pirate shirt topped off by a small leashed monkey sitting on his shoulder. He spoke to me towards the end of the evening. Told me he had noticed me…that I shouldn’t smile too much…that a woman must be mysterious. Our brief meeting inspired me—years later– to write ‘’One evening, stand on the sky and learn to paint your world without a wooden frame. Then, climb into the painting.’’
Writers you admire and who influence your own poetic style?
I admire Michael Rothenberg, of 100 Thousand Poets for Change as a Living Poem. He reached out to me when he heard I was ill and suggested I apply for a grant to Poets in Need, which I gratefully received. He reminds us that communion, communication and community can effect change and transformation in the world. As for writing style—Dostoyevsky, Rilke, e.e. cummings, Anne Sexton, James Wright.
What is your favorite line from one of your poems?
This is like Sophie’s Choice haha, as all of our creations are like our children. Ok, if I must…
And, still the soul’s marrow
like my own bone’s thinning
moves through and beyond
the fading bruise of my existence
Your goals and aspirations?
To get my collections of poems published. To finish my play, which I’m afraid is all play and no work right now. I had an opportunity to be published by the legendary Tambimuttu of Poetry London. I even made a recording for him under the Apple Record label as he had gone into business with The Beatles at the tail-end of the 70’s. The magazine was then called Poetry London / Apple Magazine. However, I decided I wanted to delay the publication in order to offer, perhaps, more inspired work and when Tambi died the manuscript was orphaned. I only began to submit my work to journals in the last 7 years. Now, as I approach 70, I do sincerely wish to find good homes for my poetic offspring. I suppose it might help, haha, if I sent them out into the world.
And it's something every writer carries in them in their heart.
Carries–it's a big statement, but there's a small truth
within the kernel of it–carries the history, the geography, the rules
and the songs of the place they come from. It's inescapable.
And to throw it away or to lose it is a tragedy.
And to throw it away is a crime. So, for all my complaints
about my native land, I am glad to be in thereon that bus
because it was a lovely thing to have.
There are a lot of them driving that bus.
I'm just one of the passengers.
–EDNA O’BRIEN
Finnuala Fiesta was as unpredictable as the weather. You’d finally think you finally had the measure of her when she’d surprise you with some new change of tack. The heater might go on the blink, the radio channels would change, or the windscreen wipers would spring into unexpected activity. One of her favourite tricks was to give a sudden lurch that’d drag you into the opposite lane where you could take your chances with oncoming traffic.
Her bodywork was splotched with carbuncular eruptions, some of which had burst open revealing the cancerous rust, Neil Young’s eternal insomniac, eating away at her, one crumbly orangey flake at a time.
The blisters were O’Dwyer’s fault. He’d be before your time, from the O’Dwyers drapers above on the main street, there where the Aldi is now. O’Dwyer was a loner. Still waters and all that. Hands like shovels on him. Fond of his pint. After the pub shut he’d drive the Fiesta down onto the strand and park facing the waves, a cargo of take-out cans on the passenger seat, and The Eagles, the soundtrack to his life, on repeat.
Finnuala chewed up the cassettes, copies he’d made from the vinyl at home. You’d see streels and ribbons of thin magnetic tape flashing in the breeze, caught up in the hawthorn hedges, and know that O’Dwyer and Finnuala had passed that way. If he’d lived long enough he would have moved on to the CDs, or the MP3s, but before he could get that far he ran straight into an oak tree, there by the corner of Kelly’s. I still feel a pang of guilt when I think of it.
The car was a write-off. For a long time you could still see traces of Finnuala’s red paint on the torn bark, the colour of lipstick or nail-varnish. That car was the only mistress O’Dwyer ever knew. The engine was shoved through his ribcage. You could say she broke his heart, and much of the rest of him too.
It was a closed coffin funeral. If he was looking down from above he would have been surprised by the number of people who turned up, people who wouldn’t have given him the time of day if they passed him on the street when he was alive. They came for the Mammy’s sake as much as anything else. Mind you, he’d be the same with them. He was never a man for words, beyond the lyrics of The Eagles songs, which had a peculiar habit of working their way into his speech.
For a while, there was an on-going debate down in Ryan’s as to which song O’Dwyer was listening to when he died.
“It could have been Glen Frey telling him to Take it easy.”
“More likely your man Randy whathisface encouraging him to Take it to the limit one more time.”
“Are yiz sure it wasn’t Life in the fast lane?”
But these discussions weren’t mocking O’Dwyer, if anything they were sincere and respectful. You wouldn’t hear The Eagles played around here after that. If they came on on the radio you’d change the channel or turn it off, and this must have been the only town in Ireland without Hotel California on the jukebox.
A few months before he died we were both caught up in an after-hours card game in Ryan’s. O’Dwyer slid the car keys to the centre of the table.
“Are you sure you want to be doing that?”
He nodded. The cards were revealed. My royals flushed his pair of pairs down the drain.
“Finnuala!” howled O’Dwyer, beating his head with his fists. “I’ll have her back off you this time next week if you’re man enough to wager,” he said, leaving the table forlorn and heart-broken.
He could cast aspersions on my manhood all he wanted, I pocketed the keys. But Finnuala Fiesta was no real prize, as those remaining at the table took pains to remind me.
“Sure that rust-bucket, she’d fall apart on you as soon as drive boy.”
“Seen it last week down on the strand, so I did. Up to the axles in the waves and himself asleep inside of it.”
I started to understand why O’Dwyer had given his car a name. Right from the start Finnuala showed a sight more personality than might normally be expected from a vehicle. Whether she was just naturally cantankerous, or whether it was because of the way O’Dwyer treated her, or the manner of her coming into my possession, exchanged on the whim of the cards, I can’t say. Whatever it was, she bore a grudge against me right from day one and was instrumental in the rapid withering of my tentatively budding romance with Brenda Flaherty.
“I swear, she’s neurotic,” I said to Brenda.
I’d had a long-running streak of luck, unanimously declared by the patrons of Ryan’s, as bad, particularly when it came to the ladies. In my mind winning the Fiesta from O’Dwyer marked the beginning of a change in my fortunes and I hoped things might work out well with Brenda.
“That’s just anthropomorphic projection,” she said.
“Antropowhat?”
“Seeing human characteristics in non-human things.”
“Where do you come up with words like that at all?”
“Books. Would you not read books?”
“I might if it was about something that interested me, like gardening, or a bit of DIY, sure don’t I have a library card, but you wouldn’t come across words like anthropowhatsit in them.”
Brenda had flaming red hair, though she called it auburn, and it gave fair warning of her garrulous nature, something any of her students at the community college would attest to if asked. Sharp-tongued and short-fused she was and God help the poor unfortunate who dared call her ginger or carrot-head.
She was a well-made, broad-beamed woman, with a set of hips that would give a man’s hands ample room to rove and grip if such opportunity were ever presented, which much to my chagrin wasn’t. She had a habit of probing her teeth with her tongue that reminded me of the creature in the Alien movies, writhing around inside their hosts, ready to break free and wreak havoc and devastation to all around her, but be that as it may I was happy enough to get a taste of that same flustered tongue, though truth be told it was a rare enough occurrence, requiring the best part of a bottle of Blue Nun apiece over Sunday roast above in Grogan’s Hotel. Other than that it was hands off.
“You must think I’m some sort of feckin’ eejit if you think you’ll be getting the milk for free without buying the cow,” she said, which was her way of bringing up the subject of wedding bells and rings, which wasn’t exactly what you might call forefront in my mind.
Like all school teachers back then she had a wardrobe of cardigans and A-line skirts, but the way Brenda wore them had a particular way of bringing the attention down from those womanly hips to the shapeliest set of calves this town has ever seen, all pure toned fibrous muscle, like marble statues of Greek Gods.
It was the hill walking gave her the legs, she was a demon for it. I joined her a few times, panting over a profusion of granite and heather and up into the clouds. You’d never really know if you’d made it to the top, or even if there was a top. She wouldn’t say much on those hikes, but you could sense a certain calmness from her, though being true to herself she was always smouldering away beneath it, like a fire under slake.
It all started to come apart when we arranged to go to see a film. I can’t remember what was showing, not that it matters anyhow, since, thanks to Finnuala Fiesta, we never made it to the cinema.
Brenda could have driven herself, but I wasn’t long after winning Finnuala and pictured myself a gallant prince charming come to collect his damsel in his carriage. Some carriage - more like a bloody pumpkin, and some prince as well, the sweet self-delusion of youth.
It was the type of evening you might call soft, if by soft you meant grey and drizzling enough to justify windscreen wipers screeching back and forth at low speed, and not yet dark enough to warrant the use of headlights, though it would be understandable if you did, the type of evening you could encounter at any time of year in these parts, with the taste of salt on the air and seagulls suspended on the wind blowing in towards the land, with their moans of existential angst. Plaintive, I imagined Brenda saying. My best conversations with Brenda were always the imaginary ones.
We’d talk about the way gulls are so unlike other birds. There’s a sense of menace about them, I imagined saying to her, like a gang of rowdies you might cross the street to avoid, and she’d say I know exactly what you mean, an aggressive aloofness in their sleek white-barrelled bodies, like miniature pit-bulls with beaks and wings, and I’d say always the vague threat that if you looked at them sideways they’d take out your eye with their curved yellow bills, though on a good day they might content themselves to just shit on your car.
Brenda was renting rooms from Mrs Maloney, up the top of the town in one of those old granite houses with the slate rooves. Mrs Maloney wouldn’t tolerate her tenants having male visitors, of any sort, at any time. I suspect that was precisely why Brenda chose those particular digs.
I parked out front and announced my arrival with a goose honk of the horn. The drizzle distorted the evening street through the wet windscreen, melting it into an Impressionist painting.
I remembered the umbrella on the backseat and got out to meet Brenda, swinging the car door behind me, leaving the keys still snugly in the ignition.
We walked to the car, sharing the umbrella. She was wearing some sort of perfume. A good sign, I thought. Rust, or some other form of corrosion, whether moral or physical, caused the car door handle to jam.
“Amn’t I after locking myself out of the car,” I said.
“And with the engine still running as well,” replied Brenda, in a put-down tone refined over years of use on recalcitrant adolescents. I blushed like a teenager.
“Well that’s the evening ruined,” she said, letting out a sigh. “I hope you have a spare set of keys about you somewhere.”
I didn’t, but if anyone did it would be O’Dwyer.
“Wait here until I go back upstairs for the keys to the Corolla,” Brenda said through tightly clenched teeth.
I almost answered “Yes Miss.”
I stood under the pattering umbrella watching the grey evening fade to dark, breathing in the fumes from Finnuala’s exhaust while she shuddered in a manner not unlike someone caught in the throes of laughter.
“Fuck you,” I muttered. “Anyway, I’m not the one with gull-shit on her bonnet.”
There were only two places O’Dwyer was likely to be found, three if you counted his house, which was a long shot at that time of day, and since it was still too early for him to be parked down on the beach with the gulls and The Eagles the obvious place to look was Ryan’s. Brenda drove and waited in the car while I went inside.
I offered O’Dwyer a pint for his troubles, but he refused.
“I’ll give them to you on one condition – you put them back in the pot on Friday night,” he said. “Plus you’ll have to give me a lift home now to find the keys as I’ve drink taken.”
That was never something to stop him before, and I was reluctant to take the wager, but I had little choice if I was to try and salvage the situation with Brenda. She was none too impressed at missing the film, and I guessed would be little pleased at the prospect of playing taxi for a beery-breathed O’Dwyer.
Whether it was bad luck or good I can’t properly say, but when the keys of the Fiesta were placed in the pot in Ryan’s that Friday night I won.
“Double or quits ye coward,” roared O’Dwyer, which made no sense of course. I pocketed the keys again.
“One of these nights!” he called after me as I left the table, quoting his heroes, as was his wont.
A week later I drove up the grey drizzle street to Mrs Maloney’s. Brenda had been acting cool since our last attempted date and even in our imaginary conversations she wasn’t saying much. I had a box of Milk Tray and a bunch of flowers on the seat beside me as peace offerings. I parked and honked and saw the upstairs light go off.
Carefully taking the keys out of the ignition I gathered up the chocolates and flowers and reached into the back seat for the umbrella. But my hands were too full, so I got out and put the keys on the roof while I wrestled the brolly out of the car.
I closed the car door with my foot and as I did saw the keys slide down the curve of the wet roof. Instead of falling harmlessly into the gutter the trajectory of the keys’ slow-motion decent intersected perfectly with the arc described by the closing door, which clipped them and sent them sailing through the air to land in the passenger footwell at precisely the moment the door clunked shut, locked from the inside of course.
Mrs Maloney’s front door opened and Brenda stepped out on the pavement.
“Were you going to open that umbrella?” Brenda asked witheringly. I felt like one of her classroom idiots.
“Amn’t I after locking the keys inside again,” I stammered. “It happened just this instant. Can you drive me home so as I can pick up the spares?”
“Won’t you come into my parlour said the spider to the fly,” she said, and then increasing the volume, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,” the last three words spat out in short sharp barks.
“You wouldn’t even have to come in, just wait in the car while I get the keys.”
But she had already turned and gone back inside, but not before taking the Milk Tray and chrysanthemums.
At least I had the umbrella. I finally opened it and walked home in the rain, cursing Finnuala Fiesta all the way.
Spare keys safely in my pocket I retraced my steps, heading back up the town to reclaim my recalcitrant vehicle, passing the video shop with its buzzing blue neon, past the chipper with its steamed-up windows and greasy chip smell. I paused outside Ryan’s, collapsed the umbrella and went inside.
O’Dwyer was sitting in his usual spot nursing a pint behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“Is it yerself?”
“Indeed and it is.”
“I thought you might be avoiding me.”
“Ah now, why would I do that?”
“You can’t hide those lying eyes,” he sang.
I reached into my pocket for the car keys and dangled them in front of him.
“Is it a game of cards you’re after?” O’Dwyer asked.
“I’d rather not take my chances. That car has been nothing but trouble to me. You keep them.”
I thrust the keys into his giant hand, not realizing that by reuniting him with the vengeful Finnuala I was sending him off to a meeting with an oak tree up by Kelly’s and a definitive place in a much too early grave.
Finnuala Fiesta originally appeared in issue 7 of
'The Incubator: New short fiction from Ireland' in December 2015
Born in Dublin, Marc de Faoite lives on an island off the west coast of Malaysia. His short stories, articles, and book reviews have been published both in print and online. Tropical Madness, a collection of his short stories, was longlisted for the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize.
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Can you tell us a little about the origins of "Finnuala Fiesta" and why you wrote it?
Finnuala Fiesta was inspired by a real life incident where a friend accidentally locked his keys in his car twice. I wanted to set the story in Ireland and the rest just came from wherever it is that stories come from. Since the initial idea was quite funny I thought that this would be a humorous piece, and to a certain extent it is (or at least that was my intention) but the story in itself morphed into something quite sad, where none of the three main characters are in a better place by the end of the story than where they started.
How and when did you begin to write?
My parents brought me and my sister and brother on a camping holiday to France when we were children – this was back in the late seventies. I’m not sure what their thinking was, maybe it was just a way of keeping us quiet or entertained, but they bought the three of us notebooks and every evening in the tent after dinner by the light of a hissing camping-gaz lamp we would have to write what we had experienced during the day. I kept a diary on and off after that. I was an introverted kid and I felt terribly misunderstood, so I often poured my thoughts out into a spare copybook. I’m sure I would cringe if I was to read the sort of self-indulgent stuff I was writing back then, but part of me would be curious to read them and meet that earlier version of me. I still have the camping diary from that French holiday.
Is there a built in divide between writers and readers? Is this is what the resistance to interpretation is at least in part about?
As a writer you are trying to get something out from inside your head, or wherever stories and creativity come from, sometimes I feel it’s more through me than from me, but anyway, that process is inherently imperfect. Words have limitations and this is further complicated by the fact that words resonate differently for every reader. If I write ‘cheese’ I know for a fact that this conjures up very different images and emotional resonances and memories for me than it will for the reader. When I read one of my stories I want it to be as close as I can come to the pictures that the story makes in my head. Even if I sometimes (let’s be honest, rarely) feel that I get close to those images, when I do it is still never close enough. If I can’t read my own writing and accurately reproduce the images in my head then what hope do I have of conveying the same thing to a reader, or ensuring that the reader will see the same images or understand the same things? Reading is completely subjective. What the reader can take from writing is as dependent on what they bring to it as much as the actual writing.
When did you realize you were a writer?
It took until I had a few pieces published to actually consider myself as a writer. Yes, I spent a lot of time writing, but I didn't really feel entitled to call myself a 'writer' or even think of myself in that way for quite a while.
Why write?
Because it gives a sense of direction and coherence to an otherwise chaotic inner landscape. If I wasn't busy thinking about characters and plot and suchlike I would be left alone to face my own demons. Writing seems to me to be a reasonable way to divert the mind away from those demons, while at the same time tangentially addressing them through stories and themes.
What does writing give you that life does not give you?
I was going to say 'freedom' but I'm not sure that's true. It's certainly not an absolute freedom. But writing does allow a writer to expand and explore areas of the human psyche that might not be so readily open to exploration in 'real' life. Maybe above all writing is an act of empathy, placing yourself in someone else's shoes, allowing you to hold multiple perspectives on what it means or could mean to be human.
Were you born into a family of writers or artists?
I wasn't born into a family of writers or artists, but I was born and raised in Ireland, so that's almost the same thing.
My parents always encouraged me to read. The weekly trips to the public library were the highlight of my week. Both my parents read, but my father in particular. There were always plenty of books around the house. I suppose when you're a child you don't question it when you see a parent with a book in hand, but now as an adult I see how relatively rare that is, especially here in Malaysia where I live.
In early childhood, my reading habits were fairly mundane - the usual diet of Enid Blyton. Then the Hardy Boys and my sister's Nancy Drew books. There were some what are now called graphic novels - Tintin, Asterix, that sort of thing. I can't bring to mind any book from my childhood that made a particularly important impression on me though. In my teens I read a huge amount of Science Fiction - Asimov, Niven, Arthur C.Clarke ... the usual culprits.
Who encouraged you on your path to becoming a writer?
If there is one single person who has encouraged me most in my writing it is my editor and friend Sharon Bakar. Also Malaysian publisher Amir Muhammad who has always been very supportive, publishing my stories at first and then my collection of stories Tropical Madness. Then my wife. She gives me the time and the space and the tea that I need to write. She's very understanding about all of that and accepts that often the imaginary people in my head are more real to me than many actual people.
Which books have been important to you?
In terms of writers I think reading Songlines by Bruce Chatwin was a bit of a revelation to me. I was also a big fan of Paul Theroux's travel writing when I was much younger. Looking at that now I see the themes of travel, and almost amateur anthropology are common there.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you? What makes literature distinct from all other art forms?
I love cinema. Photography. Come to think of it there aren't really any forms of artistic expression that don't interest me. Maybe certain styles of music - I not much of a fan of techno or most country & western. I find a lot of pop music insipid, maybe that's an age thing, or maybe it's because all the good stuff has been done already. Architecture fascinates me, not so much on a theoretical level, but on an immediate experiential level, how the room or building or space that we are in can have such an impact on the psyche. For a number of years in my early twenties I was a live model for art classes in an art academy in Brussels. Mostly for drawing, but sometimes for sculpture which was really hard because it often meant holding the same pose over a period of weeks. That experience gave me an insider view from the 'production' side so to speak, but I've never been particularly coordinated when it comes to drawing or painting. My handwriting is atrocious.
Perhaps literature is the most 'participative' of art forms. All art is subjective of course, there's always an element of co-creation in any art form, but literature asks so much more from the reader. Most other art forms can be appreciated passively. I'm not saying they should be, but they can be. I don't think it's possible to passively read. Reading is always an activity, an action, that demands much more from the reader than just seeing.
What are you working on now?
I don't want to talk about what I'm working on now for fear I might jinx it. I'll just say that it excites me and I'm enjoying it. Even if it never sees the light of day, which is always a possibility, it will still have been worth it for what I'm getting out of it on a creative level. I think that's a key. the work has to be a reward in itself and not just a means to an uncertain end.
What are your hopes for the future of literature?
My hopes and concerns for the future of literature are very self-centred. I set myself a goal of reading 52 books this year. I'm slightly ahead, but it has really brought home how few books a person can actually read in a lifetime. I'll be fifty next year, so realistically I'm probably past the halfway post. The number of books to read is almost infinite, so there will inevitably be books I will never get to read. That saddens me in a way. It brings home our mortality.
On a broader level though, in a way it comes back to what I was saying about pop-music earlier - perhaps all the best stuff has been done, or that there are people out there creating fantastic work, but that it's drowned because there is just so much other work crowding it out.
What are your views on the future of communication and how technology is changing the way we communicate, read, interact with the world and our imaginations?
In a way technology democratizes a lot of things. Word spreads much quicker and more easily. I think that's a definite advantage for many writers, who might once have just been confined to a very narrow geographic market. Technology has also become a filter through which everything is viewed. There are certainly downsides, but I find it very exciting. As a species we've never had access to so much so easily. In the not so distant past if we wanted to hear the Dalai Lama speak we had to get to India and trek up to Dharamsala, or wait until he visited a nearby city. Now I can just go to YouTube and spend all evening listening to him speak if I wish. That's just one example. I bought a book online a few days ago. I had heard of the book from reviews I read online. I watched the author give a reading in a bookshop on the other side of the planet and enjoying what I heard decided to buy his book. All this without lifting my bum from my chair. That we live in such a world is to me quite incredible.
On another level though of course technology can pull us out of reality. Or even if, for example, as a writer we are already working on an alternative reality technology can pull us away from that too. I'm sure without Facebook I would write more than I do. I would certainly read more. On another level, and maybe this is me just justifying my behaviour here, I live on an island in almost complete isolation. I can go a long time without talking to another human being, in a face to face three dimensional reality way, but I'm always in contact with family and friends all over the world. That simply wasn't possible in the past. Like anything, technology can be used for good or bad. It's not so much the technology itself. It's a tool, like a hammer for example. A hammer can be used to help build a table or to smash someone's skull, but the violence isn't inherent in the hammer, in the tool itself. Human behaviour will express itself through whatever media, often in unexpected ways.
What are your hopes for our future on this planet?
To look at the future I look at the past. The world has changed irreversibly since I was a child. Damage has been done in the last few decades that can probably never be undone, at least not in our lifetimes. On one hand we've never had it so good - a much smaller percentage of people die in wars, from disease, or from famine than ever in human history. That doesn't mean it's a perfect situation, but for the majority of humans materially things are better than they have ever been. I'm no so sure about mentally, spiritually. People might no longer be as hungry or as ill, but there's a lot of unhappiness and depression. I think a lot of that comes from the fact that people feel they have less agency over their lives. In a simpler society you plant your food, harvest it, fish, whatever. Your actions count and you benefit from them, some of the time at least. at least you are participating in your own fate and destiny. AI and robotics are going to pretty much clear out the workforce. That seems quite clear. Increasingly the fields of activities in which humans excel are being supplanted by technology. One of humanity's biggest challenges for the future will be to find any meaning in life. Maybe that's where literature and art come in.
Parts of this interview were adapted from
a Q&A on Mel Ulm's Rereading Lives.
Mattie got it into her head that the child was too afraid to come into the world. One night this thought was so strong she couldn’t sleep. She got out of bed, dressed quietly so as not to wake Trill and went outside. The old sycamore stood in a pool of moonlight, its branches brushed with silver. Mattie heaved her belly up with her arms and walked over the damp grass to the tree. She leaned against the trunk, feeling the texture of the bark on her skin, listening to the night sounds of birds and the scuttling of small creatures. She breathed in the earth smells of the surrounding fields. She made her child a promise.
Next day Hathor was born. Mattie and Trill buried the afterbirth under the sycamore tree. Trill’s parents, not unexpectedly, refused to attend the ceremony and took the opportunity to voice their displeasure at Mattie’s naming their only grandchild after an Egyptian goddess.
“Hathor? Lady of the sycamore?” Trill’s mother shook her head in disbelief. Nor was she soothed by Mattie’s explanation that the goddess, like the tree, embodied the qualities of sky, love, joy, beauty and music. Everything, in fact, that she wished for her child.
“What nonsense!” Trill’s mother said.”She’ll never fit in anywhere with a name like that.”
“So... you didn’t feel that Trillion Pi was a wee bit out there too?” Mattie said.
“Of course not. We’re mathematicians. What could be more natural?”
Mattie looked at Trill. He shrugged. The shrug said, let it go. Don’t waste your breath.
Hathor’s hair was flaxen, unlike her dark-haired parents, but by her third birthday it had taken on a distinctly green tinge. To refute his mother’s accusation that Mattie was dyeing their child’s hair, Trill brought someone in to look at the pipes. The plumber confirmed that the source of the problem was the copper sulphate that was leaching from the old corroded copper water pipes. When Mattie was reassured there was no danger to health she decided the pipes could stay and so could Hathor’s beautiful green hair. Trill, for once, told his parents to mind their own business.
When Hathor started primary school her name and her hair caused enough of a stir for her parents to decide that the Rudolph Steiner school in the city would be the better option and well worth the longer commute.
“Oh Martha,” said Trill’s mother, “She’ll never fit in anywhere with that hair.”
“She doesn’t have to,” said Mattie.
At her new school Hathor’s name was not considered unusual amongst all the Skylarks, Rains, Birdies, Celestials and Guineveres and nobody commented on her green hair. At home she picked wildflowers from the river banks, sang and danced in the fields and climbed the sycamore tree where she stayed for hours listening to the wind and drawing pictures of clouds and sky.
“What about friends?” the grandparents asked. “It isn’t normal for a child that age to play on her own all the time. She should be in a sports team. A debating club. She should have piano lessons. Gym. Ballet. Choir. She should join Girl Guides. She needs to stop wasting time. She needs to study maths. She needs to stop dreaming her life away. She needs to stop drawing rubbish.”
Trill suggested to Hathor that it might be best not to tell grandma that she had all the friends she needed in the larch, the poplar, the lacewood, the holly, and the sycamore, nor that she talked to them and that they told her stories and taught her songs. Hathor said why not, when it was true and Trill had no answer to that.
By the time Hathor was eighteen her hair was the colour of spring leaves. As many of her classmates at art school sported multi-hued hair, Hathor’s green locks passed unnoticed and everyone there dreamed and drew. At home she still sang and danced in the fields on her own, but she also painted trees and rivers and sky in all their different moods and seasons. Instead of the holiday jobs her grandmother told her to apply for to earn some money and to stop being idle, she spent her summer vacation painting. She told her parents it was a surprise and they couldn’t see it until she feltit truly expressed what she wanted it to.
When the painting was finished Hathorpropped the canvas up on the mantelpiece and called her parents to come in and look.
They could see the painting was of the sycamore. But it looked not so much like a tree as a young girl with hair the colour of leaves, feet elongated into roots that fastened her to the earth, fingers tapering to twigs that stretched out towards the sky.
“Is it okay?” she asked.
Her parents nodded.
“More than okay,” said Trill.
“Much more than,” said Mattie.
The Girl with Green Hair was first published
in The Airgonaut in April 2017.
Sandra Arnold lives in New Zealand. She is a novelist, essayist, short story and flash-fiction writer with a PhD in Creative Writing from CQ University, Australia. Her work has been widely published and anthologised in New Zealand and internationally and has won several awards. Her flash fiction appears or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Blue Fifth Review and was selected for the UK 2017 National Flash Fiction Day international anthology, Sleep is a beautiful colour.
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Why do you write?
My fiction often draws on environmental elements and their impact on people’s lives. Some of my short stories are set in the Arabian Gulf where I lived for a year and saw ancient buildings buried by the desert wind, and in Brazil, where I watched wind-fanned grass fires disfigure the Cerrado. In New Zealand, scorching nor’west winds rage across the Canterbury Plains in spring and summer, uprooting trees and sucking moisture out of the earth. During one such blistering wind, I saw, scored into a wooden plaque in the local butcher’s shop, the following quote from Gogol’s Dead Souls: ‘The air is torn and thundering as it turns to wind and everything on earth comes flying past.’ Soon after, I read Jan deBlieu’s book, Wind, where she describes the different names hot dry winds are given in various parts of the world and how they affect the inhabitants and the landscape. She relates advice from medical professionals about avoiding major decisions when wild winds blow. With all this in mind I wrote the short story that appears in Headland 8, "When the Wind Blows", which deals with the effect a prolonged nor’wester has on several families who live on the Canterbury Plains.
When I was 12 I watched a film on television about a herd of wild horses galloping through the surf. The film was in slow motion and I was mesmerised by the way the horses’ manes and tails caught the sunlight and sea spray, and the way light and shadow turned their eyes into dark hollows. As soon as the film finished I ran up to my room to write what I’d seen, thumbing through a dictionary to find new words to help me express my awe. I kept coming back to this story over several years, polishing and re-writing until eventually, six years later, I submitted it for a college assignment in creative writing and received a Distinction. That’s when the idea of becoming a writer seemed less nebulous.
My love of language grew from my father’s story-telling. He had been in the Merchant Navy and had travelled to exotic lands. When he exhausted his store of tales about the places he’d seen I gave him the titles and themes of stories I wanted him to make up. He also loved reciting the epic poems of Kipling and Longfellow. The books he gave me were of the adventure type that he had loved as a boy: Moby Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, King Solomon’s Mines. Not surprising then that my first career choice was archaeologist. Though the career plans changed, my interest in what lay hidden beneath the surface remained. In my late teens I read my way through the Brontes, Austin, Elliot, Hardy, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Flaubert, Hugo, Colette, and Woolf. In my twenties, I taught, travelled, married and wrote, mostly poems I had no intention of showing anyone. In my early thirties, after moving from the UK to New Zealand, I began writing short stories for broadcast and publication, drawing on the landscape and interior/exterior worlds.
My first novel, A Distraction of Opposites, published in 1992, also excavates beneath the surface. What began as an image of a big black spider lurking in the centre of a web became a metaphor for how people can become trapped in sticky situations. The novel examines the world of the subconscious in parallel with the conscious and the story is narrated by the female protagonist trapped by the ‘spider’, a mentally unstable male. I completed this novel while holding the inaugural Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary. My second novel, Tomorrow’s Empire, explores the rise of a religious fundamentalist in Turkey and the culture clash between east and west. This novel took ten years to write, off and on, as I needed to do a great deal of research and travel through Turkey. It is narrated through the voice of the Turkish male protagonist and was published in New Zealand in 2000, two years after the Iranian President Khatami declared he no longer supported the killing of Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, though the fatwa would remain in place. The previous ten years had seen book burnings in the UK and bombings and killings elsewhere. Sensitivities about Rushdie’s book still ran high. When my publisher tried to have Tomorrow’s Empire published in the UK, not surprisingly, he was unsuccessful.
Can you tell us a little about the origins of this piece and why you wrote it?
A year after Tomorrow’s Empire was published my youngest daughter, Rebecca, was diagnosed with appendix cancer at the age of 22. She died 13 months later in 2002. In the year following her death I could no longer read or write or listen to music. In 2003 my husband and I decided to change our environment and the opportunity came to live and work in Oman for a year. It was a good decision and I filled notebooks with the characters we met, the situations we found ourselves in and the beautiful lunar landscape of Oman. We returned to New Zealand via a short visit to Brazil, a country we’d lived in a few years earlier. Back in New Zealand I completed, with High Distinction, a Master’s degree in Creative Writing through CQ University in Australia. Some of the short stories which resulted from this, set in Brazil and Oman, were broadcast on Radio New Zealand and one, The Stone, was included in The Best New Zealand Fiction, vol 4. This story was inspired by finding a stone with our daughter’s initial on it as we swam in the Indian Ocean on the second anniversary of her death.
My reading at that stage consisted solely of books about grief and I found that although there was no shortage of literature on grieving young adult death from suicide or accident, young adult death from cancer was so rare that there was very little material available. I thought that writing my own book might go some way to filling that gap. Because of the amount of research necessary it made sense to tackle the subject as a doctorate. I completed my PhD in 2010. The creative non-fiction part of my thesis, which details my own experience of parental bereavement, was published in 2011 by Canterbury University Press as Sing No Sad Songs. After producing several papers from my exegesis and attending conferences delivering them I was finally able to move on from this topic. In 2013 I began writing a new novel and completed the first draft while I was the recipient of the Seresin Landfall University of Otago Press Writing Residency.
When I finished the final draft of this novel in mid-2016 I discovered the New Zealand flash fiction journal, Flash Frontier and its store of beautiful short narratives. I loved the use of language in many of these stories and the way so much could be implied in so few words. I decided to set myself the challenge of writing in very short forms. Flash fiction generates a continuous flow of ideas and I have found it to be excellent discipline for writing longer pieces too. Looking at the flash fiction and short stories I have written over the past few months I see that many of them deal with loss of various kinds, but also suggest new possibilities. The ideas for these stories come from diverse sources – newspapers articles, fragments of conversation, images, memories, but some appear perfectly formed, apparently out of nowhere. An example of this is The Gatherers in Headland 7. This appeared one day as I walked by the Selwyn River with my dog. The sky was vivid blue, the Southern Alps glittered with snow, the tracks were covered in wildflowers, and the only sounds were bees and birds and the dog splashing in the water. These things filled my mind. And The Gatherers arrived.
In your childhood, who in your family encouraged you to tell stories? Who were some of your formative influences?
My love of language grew from my father’s story-telling. He had been in the Merchant Navy and had travelled to exotic lands. When he exhausted his store of tales about the places he’d seen I gave him the titles and themes of stories I wanted him to make up. He also loved reciting the epic poems of Kipling and Longfellow. The books he gave me were of the adventure type that he had loved as a boy: Moby Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, King Solomon’s Mines. Not surprising then that my first career choice was archaeologist. Though the career plans changed, my interest in what lay hidden beneath the surface remained. In my late teens I read my way through the Brontes, Austin, Elliot, Hardy, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Flaubert, Hugo, Colette and Woolf.
You’ve also been a teacher.
In my twenties, I taught, travelled, married and wrote, mostly poems I had no intention of showing anyone. In my early thirties, after moving from the UK to New Zealand, I began writing short stories for broadcast and publication, drawing on the landscape and interior/exterior worlds.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you?
I'm interested in music and art but literature is my primary focus.
What are you working on now?
I'm currently completing a book of flash fiction titled The Girl with Green Hair and other stories.
What are your views on the future of communication and how technology is changing the way we communicate, read, interact with the world and our imaginations?
Flash Fiction is a form which has interested me in the last eighteen months. Many people believe it appeals to the internet generation because it is easily accessed and read while multi-tasking. However, I believe the best flash fiction should be read like poetry and returned to again and again for the beauty of the words and hidden allusions.
Parts of this interview were adapted from
a piece which first appeared in Headland 8, January 2017
"And when you write very short fiction you try
to document a motion, some kind of movement.
It’s not even time."
–ETGAR KERET
Evening. The grandmother waters geraniums: sunset orange, red glow. Flower heads bob as she showers them. Water trickles from the bottom of each saturated pot: big pots, small pots, decorated pots. She moves along the path. The pendulum swings, tick tock.
Geraniums: blood red, scarlet.
As a child, she stood astride the meridian at Greenwich where a circular blade sliced her in two, east west, right left. Like a magician sawing a lady in half; top bottom. North south.
‘Bipolar,’ he said. ‘Medication,’ he said.
‘Fuck you,’ she said.
And she did.
Geraniums in window boxes: bright orange, red passion.
The watering can is empty. The tap squeaks as she turns it on. The harsh sound of water hitting plastic disturbs the silence. As the can fills, the sound softens. The tap squeaks as she turns it off. Water spills. The pendulum swings, tick tock.
Her mother had stayed at home ironing sending her to Sunday school where Miss Simpson, with her doilies and china tea set, hissed and spat good and evil.
Geraniums in baskets: fire red, burnt orange.
She buried her godfather alive under stones in a dank, dark, boggy corner. Her godfather, fat doughy fingers, sniffing round her like a dog. Inside outside. Tick tock.
Geraniums: cherry red, berry.
She shakes the last drops of water from the can. Despite late birds on the feeder there is stillness. She brushes petals to release the fragrance.
‘At the still point of the turning world,’ he wrote.
She’s been there, stepped off that precipice on the edge of time and landed. With a sigh.
She leaves the empty watering can by the tap.
The earth spins around the sun, day follows night. The pendulum swings, tick tock. That’s all she knows.
Her hips sway gently, two heartbeats to the left, two to the right, arms in counterpoint.
Like a hula dancer.
First published by www.theshortstory.co.uk.
Winner of the Borderlines Flash Fiction Competition (2015).
Barbara Renel is a flash fiction writer, mother, dancer, teacher, performer, collaborator, and lover of textiles. Her publications include Spelk, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, FlashFlood Journal, theshortstory.co.uk, Structo, A3 Review. A reader at Arachne Press Story Sessions, Literary Kitchen FlashFest and her local Speakeasy. A member of the Patchwork Opera and Wigton Writers. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University.
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
You trained as a dancer. How does your dance background influence the way you approach writing?
On Dance and Flash Fiction:
Choreography is ‘… a kind of physicalized writing.’ 1
My first dance class was when I was five years old. It was a ballet class and I continued training as a classical dancer throughout my childhood and into my teens adding contemporary dance and choreography in my late teens. I have taught dance throughout my life and I still dance, albeit with a more limited range of movement! And, like many dancers whose bodies are aging, I needed a new form in which to express my creativity.
Creativity is a source. Creativity needs to find form. It could be argued that creativity is inspirational, that formal teaching/learning crushes creativity, but I would disagree; you need the tools to express creativity in your chosen form or there is a danger that the form becomes a therapy for the self rather than an art form to be appreciated by others. Both have their place, but I am interested in performance not therapy. And what I might describe as an instinctive feel for the shape, rhythm, tone of my writing may in fact be the result of years of classical ballet and contemporary technique training and the study of choreography.
‘Choreography is … a learnt skill, a taught craft, the method to structure creativity.’ 2
Dance has the choreographer, the person who creates the dance, and the dancer, whose body is trained as an instrument to perform the choreography. This could be one and the same person and it is as a dancer/choreographer that I now write.
When I was an MA Creative Writing student, my tutor suggested I use my dance background more in my writing. He had a daughter who was training as a dancer and he was fascinated by the art form. I think he wanted to read stories about dancers, their lives, the hours dedicated to their training, the sacrifices made in pursuit of a rarely achievable perfection. I was not interested in that as subject matter but it led me to consider how dance might inform my writing. And my thoughts found form in flash fiction. I can visualize a complete flash piece, see its shape, look at it from different angles. I can hold it, feel its texture, weight. I can hear its rhythms. It is a form that suits me.
As with all art forms the dance begins with an idea, a concept, inspiration, imagination, motivation. And the role of the choreographer is to shape that initial impulse into the dance. There are as many ways to create a dance as there are to write a story. Often a dance will start with improvisation, ‘dance scribbling.’ You move, you play with movement until you find expression for that original stimulus. My writing begins in a similar way. I may not be dancing, but I am seldom sitting, thoughts flow more freely as I move around. I might jot down ideas if I am out walking or, at home, I scribble words or phrases on paper left around the house ignoring any lines and the orientation of the paper, adding arrows, circles, boxes, more a visualization of my thoughts, which are often quite random.
As with all art forms the dance begins with an idea, a concept, inspiration, imagination, motivation. And the role of the choreographer is to shape that initial impulse into the dance. There are as many ways to create a dance as there are to write a story. Often a dance will start with improvisation, ‘dance scribbling.’3 You move, you play with movement until you find expression for that original stimulus. My writing begins in a similar way. I may not be dancing, but I am seldom sitting, thoughts flow more freely as I move around. I might jot down ideas if I am out walking or, at home, I scribble words or phrases on paper left around the house ignoring any lines and the orientation of the paper, adding arrows, circles, boxes, more a visualization of my thoughts, which are often quite random.
In the dance the initial improvisation may lead to a motif – a movement or movement phrase that in some way encapsulates the initial motivation of the choreographer. And in my writing a word/s or phrase/s will stand out and set the direction for the whole piece. This is often a surprising process. A motif will be developed; there are a myriad of choreographic devices – repetition, fragmentation, reversal, layering, manipulation, deconstruction, reconstruction – that might be used. Dynamics, the adverbs of movement, give texture, energy, power, intensity to the dance. There is the rhythm, the flow – the accents, the rise, the suspension, the fall, the stillness. There is the structure of the dance where smooth transitions may be added, the arc of movement observed. This is the craft of choreography. The innovative choreographer studies their craft and then breaks the rules. And while the dance is being created, the dancer trains daily throughout their careers always striving to improve their technique, searching for that illusive perfection. When you see a great dance performance you are so wrapped up in the moment you fail to analyse the choreography or notice the technique of the dancer. You just watch and admire. And the same with great writing.
I see my writing as a craft to be studied, practiced, improved. There is the initial idea, concept, inspiration, motivation; then, as a choreographer, I create the motif/s, develop the story, shape, structure, make use of dynamics, tone, rhythm. I edit endlessly searching for that illusive perfection of the dancer. My knowledge and understanding of dance is more than intellectual; dance is in my blood, it is in every bone, muscle, organ and nerve ending, my viscera and connective tissue. I would hope that this translates into my writing. I strive for my pieces to be little rounded gems, tiny three dimensional sculptures, self-contained, satisfying, complete.
Can you tell us a little about the origins of “at the still point” and why you wrote it?
The starting point for “at the still point”, there the dance is was the word prompt: borderlines.
Initial playing with ideas
- a photograph of my children standing astride the east/west meridian line at Greenwich opposites: such as left/right, north/south, up/down, good/evil
- clocks/time: the pendulum swinging and memories of a difficult time of dramatic mood swings which were monitored by watching the seconds hand on a clock!
- suspension of time: the moment before the pendulum swings the other way, the height of a jump that momentarily defies gravity, the top of a rise before the inevitable fall, the stillness of the turning tide.
The title of my piece is taken from T. S. Elliot’s Four Quartets where he is contemplating this moment:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Structuring the work and the choreographer/dancer in me
The structure for "at the still point, there the dance is" comes from the setting and gentle narrative: a grandmother watering geraniums in her garden, an image drawn from a street scene in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks where grandmothers water geraniums in the evening. It was a vivid image described in the simplest language – a real lesson in economy of words. And this also gave me the motif: geraniums.
Geraniums became the recurring motif giving rhythm and continuity to the piece, the different ‘red’ descriptions and sounds adding texture. There is also the repetitive rhythm of the grandmother filling the watering can and watering the geraniums.
It is within this overall structure that the initial ideas/images could be placed as memories/dreams/reflections of the grandmother.
Mary Wyvell, a poet and lecturer at the University of Minnesota, was on sabbatical in the UK during the sixties, studying at the British Library. We spent time together visiting museums and art galleries. Her poetry is quiet, contemplative and cuts through the complications of life:
… she sits
feelswarmth of sun on skin
Knows clouds move, people pass
That’s all
From Gammie by Mary Wyvell
This informed the tone of my piece and the final image.
I edit endlessly (the dancer seeking perfection!) spending time on paragraphing (the overall look of the piece on the page is important), length of sentences, choice of words, punctuation; what I call the dynamics of the piece – pace, tone, weight.
Writing flash fiction is for me a very slow process!
Were you born into a family of writers or artists? What were some of your formative influences?
Growing up there was always music in the house. My mother had an eclectic taste, but jazz dominated. And living in London there was the theatre - I was regularly at The Old Viv and the Aldwych (Royal Shakespeare Company), and The National. I saw ballet at Covent Garden and contemporary companies such as Rambert and the visiting companies at Sadler’s Wells.
There were musicals – my mother always insisted we saw the American cast and concerts – Ray Charles, Nina Simone. And I read and read. This list would be virtually endless so here are just some: earliest reading – folk and fairy tales, particularly Hans Christian Anderson. Jo March in Little Woman was the first character I identified with (well maybe the princesses in the earlier stories) but I was very disappointed when Jo married! Anything by Carson McCullers, D H Lawrence, R K Narayan and more recently, Alice Munro, Sarah Hall, Annie Proulx, Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibin, Margaret Atwood. I particularly love the stories of Yasunari Kawabata and enjoy the work of Kathy Fish and Meg Pokrass.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you?
I enjoy all the arts and love collaborative work. Fire Station Ghosts is a site specific sound work for The Old Fire Station Arts Centre in Carlisle where I worked with a sound artist and poet. Cloud Illusion combines my words with music and film. Solo for Two is a sound work with my words and music. Postcard Stories is my most recent collaboration with the illustrator, Paul Taylor. I work with the Patchwork Opera, a fluid group of writers, musicians, photographers and film makers who create live performance works.
What are you currently working on?
Paul and I plan to continue developing our postcard project. There are early plans to work with a filmmaker and dance artist. Patchwork Opera is working on a number of upcoming events. There will be a live performance of Solo for Two (it is a recorded piece at present).
1 Adshead, Janet (Ed.). Choreography: Principles and Practice. Guildford: NRCD, 1987.
2 Lewis, Murray. (1980) in Preston-Dunlop, Valerie. Dance Words. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995.
3 Preston-Dunlop, Valerie. Dance Words. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995.
I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
–SYLVIA PLATH
"The Colossus"
Parablue
1.
The ground stiffens under her feet
As the reek of cabbage bakes in the sun
Netted in the dog’s eyelashes, an insect,
A rodent’s leg in the dusty lane
Dried to bone, a tuft of fur.
A caterpillar, cradled in a cocoon,
Dangles like wind chimes
And sways, asleep
The dog takes the rabbit’s foot between its jaws, braces it like a stick
Clamping onto it – an offer she can’t refuse
2.
A fox and hare
Have said good night. Little birds of prey perch
In half light. A child stumbles
In the trail of a moth, blind
To the scrap of hair and bone. Dark blue,
The evening spreads out over them. Paraplui
Says her mother: dark blue between the rain
And you. Parablue says the child as she plants
Umbrellas in idyll
Grand View Paliano
Crowns of trees pierce a veil that divides
The view over terraced ground, its edges smoothed
By mist in pastel and gray. Day climbs
Neatly over the hills as little owls
March home, left, left,
Synchronized step, left, right,
Left: the silence of cicadas. Nothing
Stirs in the ghost’s room. Someone sweeps
Sand from the yard, the yard consists only
Of sand, the bread only of yeast-bubbles.
Grass breathes out moisture, it’s
Already hot out. The first horses will be driven
Through the streets in celebration. Here
The esplanade reaches the horizon, and in the other
Direction, the munitions factory gorges itself
On the steel of armaments. At the train station,
The unemployed stand in front of their coffee-
Counters, forty-five percent is the quota here.
The younger ones still showoff unruffled feathers.
They, too, would prefer to produce grenades.
Mansion
A fountain sinks into yellowed grass. No fence
Lines the property. Imagination tells me
there was once a stable. But the building’s far
Too small. And time can’t touch stone.
The house evenly divides the distance
Between two villages. A toad. No sign of ivy,
No sign of dust on the outer walls
But in the windows, the sway
Of curtains. Where the soul moves.
I want. I want this house. With its mesh of spider webs.
My mother grew up in this house, you say,
And I lift my eyes to the horizon. Your mother
And I. We couldn’t stand each other.
After
Your face is an accident:
A cheek-bone fracture,
A tooth knocked clean out,
And you yourself were released pending a cure
They’ve lied about. It’ll leave a scar,
The doctor said, hushing up
The wound’s repeated reopening.
Everyone wants to take a closer look
Until they hear what really happened:
That it was simply not an accident.
First published by Weyward Sisters
The Creative Process is collaborating with the
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative
andWeyward Sisters on global literary initiatives.
–
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Can you tell us a little about the origins of these poems and why you wrote them?
My inspiration for these poems came from Sylvia Plath's The Colossus and Other Poems. I've read a biography on her and Ted Hughes and discovered that somehow I responded to her verses with an urge to write. So I bought The Colossus, read one poem a time, thought about it and then I wrote my own. It took me about 6 months to complete my project - one poem for each of Plath's. 44 to be exact (or 50, if you count "Poem for a Birthday" as seven separate ones.)
How did you come to literature? · When did you realize you were a writer?
I did come to literature through reading. I discovered how mighty words can be, how powerful a spell a book can cast on me. Reading is such an intimate thing! And writing is power. The stories we tell about our world can do anything from widen our readers' horizons to actually shape the world we live in. So writing also means responsibility.
Were you born into a family of writers or artists?
I was not born into a family of artists. My father sells computers and is a specialist in IT networks. My mother is a nurse. There have always been books in our house, and my parents and grandparents read stories to me. But I myself was so eager to learn to read! I managed to teach myself to read with the help of a school book. After that, there was no stopping me reading.
What other art forms and disciplines interest you? What makes literature distinct from all other art forms?
Literature happens right there in your head. There is no interference, it does not have to go through your eyes, your ears, the words form in your brain, and you just can't help it - you are involved. That's what makes literature special.
What are you working on now? What are your hopes/concerns for the future of literature?
I like to explore text adventures as a future form of great literature - they do not have to be mere "games", they can be real art, entangling the reader in a web of his of her own decisions. Currently, I am writing on different projects - from a YA novel to new poetry.
Cornelia Travnicek is an Austrian poet and novelist who studied Chinese Studies and Computer Science at the University of Vienna. She works part-time as a researcher in a Centre for Virtual Reality and Visualisation. Her literary works have won numerous awards including the Anerkennungspreis des Landes Niederösterreich, for her debut novel Chucks [Converse] (DVA, 2012), and the Kranichstein Youth Literature Grant awarded by the German Literature Fund. In 2012 she received the audience award at the Tagen der deutschsprachigen Literatur [Festival of German-Language Literature] in Klagenfurt for an extract from her novel Junge Hunde [Young Dogs]. Her publications also include various texts in newspapers, magazines and journals. Her novel Chuckswas filmed in 2015 as an Austrian production.
Translator
Meg Matich is a Reykjavik-based poet and Icelandic/German translator, and a current Fulbright grantee. Her translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from PEN America, Exchanges, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, The Best Icelandic Short Stories, Aarhus, and others. In 2015, she received the PEN Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of Magnús Sigurðsson’s Cold Moons, which is forthcoming from Phoneme Media. She has received grants and fellowships from the DAAD, the Banff Centre, the Icelandic Literature Center, and Columbia University. She is currently assisting with the 2017 Reykjavik Literary Festival.
English translation
Katja Bohnet's Creative Process
Irgendwann muss jeder seinem Schöpfer gegenüber treten. Ich dachte immer, das wäre ein Witz.
Der Salzrand der unzähligen Margaritas hat sich auf meiner Zunge abgelagert. Ich schmatze, schlucke, der Eindruck bleibt. Morgens hat man immer zu wenig Spucke. Ich mache Halt in meinem Hirn. San Francisco. California, USA. Wir sind gestern angekommen. Getrampt, irgendein Trucker hat uns mitgenommen. Wir haben nicht mehr viel dabei. Unsere Rucksäcke haben sich in den vergangenen Wochen geleert. Irgendwann hatten wir kein Geld mehr, sie aufzufüllen. Meine Jeans ist steif vom Dreck. Mein Hemd fleckig. Ich rieche an dem Stoff. Alkohol, Schweiß und ich. Das bin ich, mein Hemd, mein Geruch. Und das reicht, um mich wieder ins Hier und Jetzt zu holen. Ich schlage die Augen auf: Park, Grünanlage, Baum. Sonne in staubigen Streifen wie Lichtstraßen zwischen den Blättern. Mein Rucksack ist noch da, unter meinem Kopf. Fucking unbequem. Jetzt tun mir die Schultern weh. Mein Rücken, mein Arsch, meine Waden sind feucht. Der Morgentau hat sich durch die Fäden geschlichen. Ich stehe auf, sehe mich um.
Conny. Warum er auf diesen Mädchennamen hört, verstehe ich bis heute nicht. Irgendwann gewöhnt man sich wohl an alles. Er schläft noch. Ich schubse ihn mit dem Fuss. Aber Conrad Meyer dreht sich einfach noch mal um. Ein Lichtstrahl fällt direkt in mein Auge, blendet mich. Da stehe ich in dieser scheiß Stadt, in diesem scheiß Park und habe trotzdem keine Ahnung, wo ich eigentlich bin.
„Ausweise?“
Conny und ich legen unsere Reisepässe auf den Tresen. Der Typ besteht darauf, die Passnummern selbst zu notieren. Als hätte ihn die Arbeit in einem Hostel von Natur aus skeptisch gemacht. Wir schweigen, sehen zu, wie er unter dem Vorhang seiner fettigen Haare Zahlen in das System hackt. Heute braucht keiner mehr einen Stift. Der Tresen: Holz. Hinter dem Typen an der Wand: Holz. An der Decke: Holz. Hässlicher geht es nicht. Wir übernachten nur in den billigsten Absteigen.
Er gibt uns einen Schlüssel. „Dritter Stock, Nr. 356, links den Gang runter.“ Er schaut nicht mal auf.
Wir gehen die Treppen hoch. Amerikaner stehen auf Teppichböden. Einer bunter gemustert als der andere. Ich habe tatsächlich Albträume, in denen ich von den schrillen Ornamenten blind werde. Ich schreie dann und irre orientierungslos mit ausgestreckten Händen umher. Irgendwann falle ich, werde von bunten Polyesterfäden vergewaltigt. Nach dem Teppich zu urteilen, könnten wir in einem Casino sein. In Las Vegas sieht‘s auf dem Boden auch nicht anders aus. Aber der Rest um uns herum ist San Francisco: Dreck, Armut, Arbeitslosigkeit vor einer hübschen Kulisse. Das Wetter ist toll. Man merkt hier drinnen nur nichts mehr davon. Auf dem Weg nach oben zähle ich zwei Fenster. Beide sind mit Sperrholzplatten zugenagelt. Im zweiten Stock gibt es nur noch zwei Lampen im Flur, im dritten Stock nur noch eine. Ich bin froh, dass wir nicht im Vierten wohnen. Nachdem wir uns ein Mal verlaufen haben, stehen wir vor drei-fünf-sechs. Den Schlüssel brauchen wir nicht, die Tür ist auf. Wir gehen rein. Conny stellt seinen Rucksack ab, wir sehen uns um.
Das Fester: vergittert. Kein Stuhl, kein Tisch, kein Schrank. Die Matratze: durchgelegen, abgewichst. Ich zähle sechs große Flecken. Zwei davon sind definitiv Blut. Menstruation oder anderes? Die anderen sehen aus wie Pisse, riechen auch so. An der Wand irgendein Schleim. Aus Mund oder Nase, das ist schwer zu sagen. Conny beugt sich runter, betrachtet die Matratze genau. Ich weiß, dass er nach Wanzen sucht. Hatten wir alles schon. Auf der gewellten Oberfläche bleibt es ruhig. Hat nichts zu bedeuten, aber es besänftigt uns ein wenig. Wir rollen unsere Schlafsäcke aus.
„Ich muss mal.“
Conny nickt, setzt sich auf‘s Bett, vorsichtig, als fürchte er, hinterrücks von einer Wanzen-Hundertschaft überwältigt zu werden.
Ich gehe raus auf den Gang, muss meine Augen erst wieder an das Nicht-Licht gewöhnen. Adjust. In meinem Kopf spielt ein Lied. „Ooh la la la it's the way that we rock when we're doing our thing ...“ Lauryn Hill nimmt mich an die Hand. Zieht mich zur Toilette. Wenn sie mich nicht führen würde, fände ich das beschissene Loch erst gar nicht. Wir lassen die letzte Glühbirne hinter uns, wandeln ins Dunkel, der Teppich schluckt unsere Schritte. Lauryn ist eine Katze. Ich wünschte, sie wäre real.
„Your money!“ Die Stimme ist heiser, männlich. Der Typ dazu stinkt noch mehr als ich. In seiner Hand ist ein Messer. Das Rumgefuchtel macht mich nervös. Wenn das Messer nicht wäre, sähe man rein gar nichts. Der Stahl blinkt hier und da, fängt das bisschen Licht ein, das sich hier im Flur noch aufhält. Würde ich nicht gerade bedroht, könnte ich es vielleicht sogar schön finden. Lauryn hat mich einfach losgelassen.
Ich sage, dass ich nichts habe. Das stimmt. Mein Geldbeutel liegt bei Conny auf dem Bett. Das, was ich noch an Kohle besitze, ist keinen Überfall wert. Ein komplexer Zusammenhang in dieser heiklen Situation. Der Typ sagt was von „Travellers Cheques“ und noch mal „money“. Ich merke, wie Adrenalin mich überschwemmt. Wie Angst meine Beine aufweicht. Ich stottere noch etwas, was, weiß ich nicht genau, dann kommt etwas Dunkles auf mich zu. Schwarz im Dunkelgrau. Es frisst sich in meinen Bauch, mir wird ganz warm, ich gehe auf die Knie. Jemand stöhnt. Das muss ich sein, weil die dunkle Masse weg ist, die heisere Stimme auch. Ich bin allein. Und weil ich Angst habe zu verbluten - denn das ist es wohl: Blut, das aus meiner Seite rausläuft - rapple ich mich auf, stütze mich an der Wand ab und stolpere weiter. Ich will mich in Sicherheit bringen. In mir läuft ein Notstromaggregat. Ich drücke eine Klinke runter: nichts. Ich schleppe mich weiter an der Wand entlang, presse meine Hand auf das Warme, Feuchte. Hinterlasse wahrscheinlich eine Spur aus verwischten, roten Klecksen. Wie Madonna in Take a Bow, Juliette Binoche in Drei Farben: Blau - mein Leben verkommt zum Zitat. An der nächsten Tür habe ich Glück.
Am Tisch sitzt ein Mann. Ziemlich alt, weißer Vollbart, helles Hemd. Er kommt mir bekannt vor. Das Leben ist ungerecht, denke ich. Warum hat der einen Tisch und wir nicht?
„Hallo“, sagt er. Schaut auf seinen Bildschirm. Irgendetwas flackert in seinem Gesicht.
„Äh, Entschuldigung. Können Sie mir helfen?“
Er schaut wieder auf.
Ich kenne den Mann. In meinem müden Verstand sind alle Alarmlampen an.
„Einen Moment“, murmelt er.
Hoffentlich habe ich den noch, denke ich und warte.
Dann erhebt er sich, winkt mich zu sich. Achselzuckend bemerkt er: „Die Situation in Mali macht mir Sorgen.“
Ich denke: Was?! und sage: „Ja, mir auch.“
Dann kommt er auf mich zu, nimmt meine Hand von der Wunde und verzieht das Gesicht. Weil mir schlecht ist, setze ich mich sicherheitshalber auf den Boden. Einen kurzen Filmriss später kommt er mit ein paar weißen Tüchern zurück. Dann liege ich auf seinem Bett, um meinen Bauch habe ich einen Verband, kein Leck mehr. Mir ist kalt.
Er sitzt schon wieder an seinem Bildschirm. „Dieser Ahmadinejad“, besorgt schüttelt er den Kopf. „Die Rezession.“
Und da endlich. „Sind Sie Gott?“
Leicht abwesend nickt er.
„Was machen Sie hier in diesem runtergekommenen Loch?“
Er sieht mich an, traurig, enttäuscht. „Die Rezession hat auch das Elysium erreicht.“
Seine Hoffnungslosigkeit macht mir Angst. „Lieber Gott. Bitte hilf mir!“ Mir ist plötzlich so jämmerlich zumute. Es ist mir fast peinlich.
„Du kannst mich Dave nennen. Gott ist so ... steif.“
Ich nicke müde. Dann fange ich an, zu begreifen. „Muss ich jetzt sterben?“
Gott - Dave, fuckin‘ whatever - zuckt mit den Schultern. Er scheint sich noch mit sich selbst uneinig zu sein. „Die Situation in Mali macht mir Sorgen.“ Dave hat es nicht leicht. All diese bewaffneten Konflikte.
Mir geht es gerade auch nicht gut. Aber was bedeutet schon mein Leben im Vergleich zu Mali? Ich denke an die Geschichte mit dem bösen Sohn, dann an die mit dem entlaufenen Schaf. Hätte ich in Religion mal besser aufgepasst. Denn leben, das würde ich schon gern.
Dave - es fällt mir immer noch schwer, ihn so zu nennen - breitet die Hände aus. Ich erkenne den Klassiker mit den weiten Ärmeln. Oder war das sein Sohn? Er sieht mich an, erst ernst, dann nickt er, lächelt.
Ich habe keine Ahnung, warum, aber es wird mir plötzlich warm.
Conny grinst mich an. „Na?!“
Ich habe Krankenhäuser schon immer gehasst. Aber ich stinke nicht, ich friere nicht, und das lässt mich besser über die weiße Bettdecke, die mintgrünen Wände und den Geruch nach Sagrotan denken. Es ist `ne Wanzen freie Zone.
Und Conny strahlt, als hätte ich ihm was ganz Tolles geschenkt. „Und ich dachte schon, du hast nicht mehr alle Tassen im Schrank. Kein Wunder nach all den Margaritas. Du hast immer Dave zu mir gesagt.“
„Ich dachte, du wärst Gott.“
„Denk ich auch manchmal.“
„Wusstest du, dass Gott in unserem scheiß Hostel wohnt?“
„Nee, echt?“
„Aber er hat einen Tisch. ... und einen Stuhl.“
„Verdammte Zweiklassen-Gesellschaft!“
Ich ziehe mir die Nadel aus der Armbeuge, freue mich über den Anblick der roten Tropfen und beschließe, bei Gelegenheit die alten Platten wieder rauszuholen.
"Fäden im Morgentau" deutsche Fassung in
„Das Prinzip der sparsamsten Erklärung" Nr. 10, 2/2014, Hrsg. Bross, Kreuzmair, Michalek, Pfaller, München
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"Threads in Dew & Other Stories"
translated by Rachel Hildebrandt,
published at Weyward Sisters Publishing, USA, 2/2017
Everyone has to meet their maker someday. It’s just I always thought that was only a joke.
The salt from countless margarita glasses has coated my tongue. I slurp, swallow, but the taste lingers. You never have enough saliva in the morning. I try to stop my thoughts.
San Francisco. California, USA. We got here yesterday. Hitchhiked. Some trucker picked us up. We don’t have much with us by this point. Our backpacks have grown emptier over the past few weeks. We eventually ran out of money to keep them full. My jeans are stiff with dirt, my shirt has spots. I sniff the fabric. Alcohol, sweat and me. That is the extent of me, my shirt, my smell. And that is enough to bring me back to the here and now. I open my eyes: park, grass, tree. The sun in dusty strips, like light trails slipping between the leaves. My backpack is still here, under my head. Fucking uncomfortable. Now my shoulders ache. My back, my ass, my calves are damp. The morning dew crept between the threads. I stand up and look around.
Conny. I still can’t understand why he goes by a girl’s name. You can get used to anything eventually, I guess. He’s still asleep, so I nudge him with my foot. But all Conrad Meyer does is flip over. A sunbeam hits me right in the eye, blinding me momentarily. Here I am, standing in this shitty city, in this shitty park, and I still have no idea where I really am.
“ID?”
Conny and I set our passports on the counter. The guy has insisted that he has to write down our passport numbers himself. Maybe working in a hostel has made him suspicious. We say nothing as we watch him type the numbers into the system, his greasy hair creating a curtain between him and us. Nobody needs pens anymore these days. The counter: wood. The wall behind the guy: wood. The ceiling: wood. It couldn’t get any uglier than this. We only stay in the cheapest dumps.
He hands us a key without looking up again. “Third floor, Room 356. On the left, at the end of the hall.”
We head upstairs. Americans really like carpeted floors, each one more brightly decorated than the one before. I actually have nightmares in which the garish patterns bind me. I scream and stumble around, disoriented, my hands stretched in front of me. At some point, I fall and am raped by the bright polyester threads. If you went by the carpet, it looks like we’re staying in a casino. The floors in Las Vegas don’t look any different, but the other things around us are pure San Francisco: garbage, poverty, unemployment - all against a flawless backdrop. The weather is great, though there’s no sign of that here inside. I count two windows as we head up. They’ve both been nailed shut with pieces of plywood. The second floor has two lamps along the corridor, but the third floor only has one. I’m glad we’re not staying on the fourth.
After getting lost only once, we come to a stop in front of 3-5-6. We don’t need the key, since the door is wide open. We go in. Conny drops his backpack, and we look around.
The window: barred. No chair, no table, no closet. The mattress: sagging, discolored. I count six large spots. Two of them are definitely blood. Menstrual or something else? The others look like piss, and smell like it, too. There’s some kind of slime on the wall. Hard to say whether it’s from a mouth or nose. Conny crouches down to examine the mattress more closely. I know he’s looking for bedbugs. We’ve had it all. The wavy surface isn’t moving. That doesn’t mean anything, but it reassures us a little. We unroll our sleeping bags.
“I’ve got to go.”
Conny nods and sits down on the bed, cautiously, as if afraid of a rear attack from a battalion of bedbugs.
I go out in the hall, and my eyes have to get used to the dim light again. Adjust. A song is playing in my head. “Ooh la la la it’s the way that we rock when we’re doing our thing…” Lauryn Hill takes me by the hand, pulling me toward the bathroom. If she weren’t leading the way, I’d never have found that crappy hole. We leave the last lightbulb behind, strolling into the darkness as the carpet swallows our footsteps. Lauryn is just a cat. I wish she were the real thing.
“Your money!” The voice is rough, masculine. The guy reeks even more than I do. A knife is clasped in his hand, and his fidgeting makes me nervous. If he didn’t have the knife, I wouldn’t be able to see anything. The steel gleams every now and then, as it catches a bit of the light that has worked its way in here from the hallway. If I weren’t being threatened, I might even find it rather pretty. Lauryn has abandoned me.
I explain that I don’t have anything. It’s true. My wallet is lying beside Conny on the bed. What I have in terms of cash isn’t worth a mugging anyway. A complex correlation in this dicey situation. The guy mumbles something about “travelers’ checks,” and again “money.” I notice that my adrenaline is running at full capacity, that fear is making my knees weak. I stutter something, though I’m not sure what, and then something dark comes at me. Black in dark gray. It bites its way into my stomach, and I grow very warm, as I fall to my knees. Someone groans. It has to be me, because the dark blob is gone, as is the rough voice. I’m by myself. And because I’m afraid of bleeding to death - because that’s what it is: blood, which is spilling out of my side - I pull myself up, brace myself against the wall, and stumble on. I need to get to safety. I’m now running on my backup generator. I turn a doorknob: nothing. I slide along the wall, pressing my hand against the warmth, the dampness. I’m probably leaving behind a trail of smudgy, red spots. Like Madonna in Take a Bow or Juliette Binoche in Three Colors: Blue. My life dwindles down to a quote. My luck turns at the next door.
A man is sitting at a table. Fairly old, white beard, pale shirt. He looks familiar to me. Life isn’t fair, I think. Why does he get a table and we don’t?
“Hello,” he says, before glancing back down at his computer screen. Something flickers across his face.
“Um, excuse me. Could you help me?”
He looks back up.
I know this man. All of the alarm claxons go off in my weary mind.
“One moment,” he mumbles.
I hope I have one to spare, I think as I wait.
Then he stands up and waves me over. With a shrug, he comments: “I’m worried about the situation in Mali.”
I think: What?! But I say: “Yes, me too.”
He walks over to me, pulls my hand away from the wound, and frowns. Because I feel sick, I sit down on the floor, just to be on the safe side. I blank out for a moment, but here he is returning with a couple of white towels. Next thing I know, I’m leaning back on his bed with a white bandage around my stomach. I’m not leaking anymore. I feel cold.
He is sitting back in front of the computer. “This Ahmadinejad,” he shakes his head apprehensively. “The recession.”
And then finally. “Are you God?”
He nods, a little absentmindedly.
“What are you doing here in this dive?”
He gazes at me, sad, disappointed. “The recession has also reached paradise.”
His hopelessness scares me. “Dear God. Please help me!” I suddenly feel pathetic, almost to the point of shame.
“You may call me Dave. God is so… formal.”
I nod wearily. Then I begin to understand. “Do I have to die now?”
God - Dave, fuckin’ whatever - shrugs. He seems to be struggling with himself. “The situation in Mali worries me.” Dave doesn’t have it easy. All those wars and fighting.
I’m not doing so well at this point either, but what is my life compared to Mali? I think about the story of the prodigal son, and then about the lost sheep. I should’ve paid more attention in religion class. I really would like to keep on living right now.
Dave - it’s still hard for me to call him that - spreads out his hands. I now recognize the classic image with the wide sleeves. Or was that his son? He looks at me, seriously at first, but then he nods with a smile.
I have no idea why, but I suddenly feel warm.
Conny grins at me. “Well?!”
I’ve always despised hospitals, but I’m not stinking or freezing, and this lets me take in the white coverlet, the mint green walls, and the scent of Lysol all the better. This is a bedbug-free zone.
And Conny is beaming, as if I’d just given him something real wonderful.
“I thought you had a screw loose somewhere. No wonder, considering all the margaritas. You kept calling me Dave.”
“I thought you were God.”
“I think that too sometimes.”
“Did you know that God is staying in our shitty hostel?”
“For real?”
“But he has a table. … and a chair.”
“Damned two-class system!”
I pull the needle out of the crook of my arm and savor the sight of the red droplets. As soon as I can, I’ll take the old records back out again.
-
Katja Bohnet writes. Born in Mannheim (Germany) in 1971, she pursued film studies and philosophy in college, and now lives somewhere between Frankfurt and Cologne. Travels: a lot. Jobs: a few. Kids: a couple. A former TV writer and moderator with WDR Cologne, she now spends her time making up novels and stories. Her works have appeared in various periodicals and anthologies, including entwürfe, Am Erker, erostepost, und the MDR Literaturwettbewerbs 2013. Her debut thriller novel Messertanz was published in 2015 by Knaur.
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My Creative Process
I sit down. I write. I do not plot, only make a rough plan. Focus on an idea. Mainly on two or three characters whom I try to get to know well. Develop a first person narrator, second or third. Sometimes I work with mixed perspectives. Try to ignore rules. Start with a strong sentence, an emotionally powerful situation. My approach is immediate. I work continuously, if possible, every day. A few pages. No fear. Because only in chaos is there an order which comes by itself. Trust. The story unrolls. I just follow. Long hours of reading have established my intuitive understanding of rhythm and timing. For the required length of a novel or a short story. I do not hold anything back. I do not aim for perfection. Writing is about taking risks. Down to the point, disturbing, poetic.
Can you tell us a little about the origins of “Threads in Dew” and why you wrote it?
Traveling inspires me. I have stayed in a variety of unusual, sometimes uncomfortable places around the world. Speaking different languages inspires the imagination. From a building, a situation or an atmosphere, I build the story. I like to mix literary elements, to walk along the boundaries between reality and fantasy. My characters enjoy our journey. Writing is traveling. While you travel, noir and a sense of humor walk side by side. The original title for this story was "Two-Class Society." My former agent proposed something less political, more lyrical. So I went for a strange bit from the story itself: "Fäden im Morgentau." Translated into English by Rachel Hildebrandt as "Threads in Dew."
Why did you decide to become a writer?
Accidentally. I never wanted to be a writer. Too much respect for the profession. Actress, tv presenter, photographer: yes. To be a writer was too far off, too intellectual. When my kids were small, I realized: Fuck, my life is over. I will never have a career. I studied, I worked, but I have been out of the loop for a long time. The market doesn't forgive. I have to be there to raise the kids, and part-time jobs for freelance journalists pay ridiculously low amounts or are, in fact, nonexistent. So I knew, my only option would be an office or sales job. At this point, I knew I had nothing to lose, so I wrote my first novel. I had an idea, two characters. I did not hesitate. I did not have the slightest idea how it would turn out. When I finished the first draft three weeks later, I was ashamed. I worked on it for some more weeks. Nobody knew. And then I gave it to friends. That felt embarrassing. They were critical. I rewrote. There were doubts: I messed up. Maybe I would publish it myself eventually. It was mediocre. No big deal. Nothing more than a waste of time.
Somebody talked me into sending the manuscript to a literary agency. I did and received a contract within two hours. I did not call myself a writer until I had my first contract with a big publishing house in Germany. It felt important not to misuse the title. It had to be earned through rough times. It was an endless up and down. It still is. I work in different jobs. I try not to depend on writing because it sucks the life out of me. Being a writer is more valuable to me than having the title of "artist." I am a practical person. I do not want to distance myself from other people by calling myself an "artist." Writing is still thrilling and a constant pain in the ass. There is too little time. Writing becomes an urge, necessary and repellent at the same time. Sometimes it is sheer pleasure. I have written eight novels and over forty short stories over the past five years. No other job fulfills me like being a writer. If I have nothing more to say or write, I'll just stop. Today I have finally arrived at a place, that I did not know even existed. It's like coming home. To myself.
Who were some of your formative influences? Are there other writers or teachers in your family?
Nobody in my family is a writer. We are all academics. Economists, teachers, lawyers, bankers. But not artists. I tried every other artistic thing on this planet. I am very attached to art. Of any kind. I make a very good black sheep. Everybody in my family reads. Even as a child, I read everything. Books, comics, newspapers, magazines. From every genre, every literary direction. I do not like to talk about "favorite books," because to fall in love with a book, the circumstances and timing are the most important things. I have reread a few of my favorite books and was sometimes disappointed or puzzled. For different reasons. So now I just read a book once. Despise it or love it. I have long been a fan of American and French literature. I greatly enjoyed all the creative writing classes that I took after I wrote my first few novels and short stories. I suddenly understood things I had done intuitively. I realized how the machine worked that I had operated for some time. Finally, somebody showed me an operation manual. I long thought I would never become a teacher. That job can be close to a missionary's, but perhaps that will be the next thing I do.
Literature and its Links to Other Mediums
Photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic novels, film, dance, music. Any artistic kind of expression gives me a kick. Literature allows you to play God in your own universe. You have an unlimited budget; your canvas can be tiny or huge. The world may not be enough for the things you have to say, so you tune your instrument and only play the music you like. There are no boundaries, no frontiers to literature. Go wherever you want to go. It`s the greatest possible freedom. It is about communication and liberation. Words are silly, and they fade. Yet there is something tragically important about every word that is written down. A small sign grows into a message. Like a tree. From a letter to words and sentences to a story.
What are you working on now? What are your hopes for the future of literature? What are your views on the future of communication and how technology is changing the way we communicate, read, interact with the world and our imaginations?
I work on a new thriller. Am about halfway through. Like so many times before, it seems impossible that I will ever finish it. So it is just another rollercoaster ride. I am also waiting for my next novel to be published in February 2018. Waiting. One of the most important skills for a writer. Literature will always be here. Somehow. As paperback books or e-books or data files. Or as something yet unknown. The future for the next generation seems unstable. International conflicts, climate change, water shortages, a growing gap between North and South, rich and poor. But the world is a difficult, tragic, wonderful place to live. That is why there is (noir) fiction. Hope in the middle of despair.
The Creative Process is collaborating with film schools and universities on intensive workshops and 4th-year courses combining film and literature. Multi-disciplinary artist Bronka Nowicka is directing one such program at Łódź Film School, and we are honored to showcase the imaginative works of their students and faculty.
“We have been inspired by The Creative Process to implement
a special 4th-year course dedicated to combining literature and film,
and making adaptations of notable Polish writers’ work.
Polish films were always very closely related to literature,
especially in the Polish Film School of the 50’s and 60’s.
The best Polish films were made at those times and most were based
on literature. It did change recently and here in Łódź Film School
we’ve been thinking of how to restore this relationship. That’s why we
are delighted to collaborate with your project and for
the opportunities to screen the films created by this program
at international venues associated with The Creative Process.”
–PIOTR MIKUCKI (Dean of Directing Department)
& MARCIN MALATYŃSKI (Deputy Director and Head of International Relations)
Łódź Film School
Can you tell us a little about your artistic background? Apart from film, what mediums have you worked in?
My name is Bronka Nowicka. I graduated from the Film, Theatre and TV Direction Department at the Polish State Film School in Łódź, and from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. I received my diploma at the Film School in 2004 and in 2011 I received my diploma at the Interdisciplinary Studio I, Academy of Fine Arts.
As early as during my studies at the Film School, my interests focused on the relations between people and things. In the films and film études that I directed the thing was not an actors’ stage prop but an equal character. It underwent personification, it symbolized or embodied the dead, it brought back memories. This was the case both with the film Tristis, awarded the grand prix at the International Film School Festival in Bologna and a distinction at the International Film School Festival in Munich, and the graduation film Mantra, awarded, interalia, for the best graduation film screenplay.
After graduation, I started to work at the theater. All the plays directed by me included subplots connected with the thing: a consumerist addiction to it or getting into relationships with it; relationships that substituted interpersonal ones.
In some of your work objects sometime become more than things? They come to personify a story.
After that period my work began to focus on photography and video. I created cycles of works where things served to portray their owners, as in A Self-portrait in the Thing and Word, or were used as peculiar timepieces, as in the cycle The Calendar.
I also started to use the thing as a medium for documenting events, including meetings with other people. Dried, used teabags, marked with notes about dates, times of the day and events connected with the act of drinking tea constitute a peculiar diary. Used teabags, deprived of dregs and filled with photographs of people with whom I had tea, became an aestheticizing record of the meetings. The work People I Have Drunk Tea With was being created in the course of one year.
At the beginning of my Ph.D. studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow I started a para-research project connected with various relations between people and things.
I have documented several hundred stories about human-thing relations. I have met a number of people at various ages, representing various backgrounds and points of view.
This resulted in an archive containing photographs of things and recorded conversations and monologs that give an account of the relations between the owners and their things.
What touches me, hurts me, interests me about the thing? I can assume that every single thing undergoes anthropomorphization or personification to a smaller or larger extent. It means that the world of things is a theater which reflects the world of what is human. I am interested in the human – I want my creations to be about it. However, I choose the thing as the main character of my works. Why?
Yes, this is what I find intriguing about your work. There is sadness, meaning, and symbolism underpinning objects when we look closely at them. As a painter too, this is something I think about a lot. Often you find the true focus of a portrait is not the sitter themselves, but an object or possession which defines them...
The feeling of tragedy evoked by images of things tends to be equally overwhelming, or even more so than the one that manifests itself directly through the human fate and the mortal body. The tragic nature of the thing seems to consist in the fact that it prolongs somebody’s or something’s life only several steps. A thing that outlives its owner and becomes his representative, as well as a thing that commemorates the bygone in another way, finally dies.
However, before the matter deteriorates and falls apart, it ‘remembers’, symbolizes, embodies. By talking about the spiritual through the material, about the alive through the dead, by treating the thing as a character that is present in the matter of the work of art more frequently than the human being – an equal character, I can talk about him without the pathos that results from direct representations.
Your recent work uses medical technology to examine the process of memory...
Three years ago I started to search for a method of imaging what was interesting for me – the way from matter to memory. I was looking for a medium capable of documenting things, proving – in the most reliable way – their existence, shape, kind of matter, texture, color; a medium that could reach deeper than photography or video recording. That is why I decided to subject a group of objects, which were condemned to annihilation, to an X-ray examination in a CT scanner. The scanned objects were: everyday articles, old toys, things that belonged to deceased relatives: their bags, suitcases, shoes, sacks with clothes.
In order to be able to obtain and process the images of the scanned objects on my own, I participated in training at the Department of Radiology at the Jagiellonian University Medical College. There I gained access to a CT scanner by courtesy of Professor Andrzej Urbanik, a staff radiologist and head of the department. My knowledge allows me to arrange shots consciously and to create image poetics so that it is in keeping with the themes of individual works – films, video installations.
The software that goes with the CT scanner makes it possible to obtain a 3D reconstruction of the scanned object from each master scan of organic and inorganic matter. The images testify not only to the appearance of things, but also to the authenticity of their existence proved by a test with a medical device. X-rays pass through matter. The penetrating potential of the device makes it possible to stratify every image of matter. The possibility to remove subsequent layers from the image allowed me to form associations connected with memory, for example, the deterioration of recollections and the slow process of forgetting.
The CT scanner software has numerous functions applied for diagnosing particular body parts. By using these functions to shape images of inorganic matter, I could obtain various image poetics: from ones having associations with hyperrealistic drawings to ephemeral ones, reminding the fleeting, thus also the recollection too.
The chances for imaging the way of the thing from matter to memory became greater when I learnt about the filmmaking potential of a CT scanner, which is used in medical diagnosis only sporadically and for purposes other than constructing a narrative. The CT scanner makes it possible to obtain moving images of the scanned matter: to record their fluid movement around any axis, to remove and superimpose individual layers that correspond to the layers of the scanned object. Some operations that are possible to do within the scan resemble film production operations: tracking in towards an object, using the zoom, sliding together with a moving object, horizontal, vertical and side panning, recording the objects with boom shots and steadicam shots.
By learning about the potential of a CT scanner I have discovered a new medium in the area of video art, and a poetics that is appropriate for spinning a narrative about going from the material to the recollected.
Bronka Nowicka graduated from the Film, Theatre and TV Direction Department at the Polish State Film School in Łódź, and from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where she now is a PhD student. Her fields of inspiration, exploration, and creation include human-thing relations, images in motion, language, encounters. She is looking for new media in the field of art; she uses a computer tomography scanner as a film and graphic tool.
She creates videos, tomo-videos, video installations, photographs. She took part in exhibitions at the International Centre for Graphic Arts in Kraków, the Susanne Burmester Gallery in Germany (in Putbus, on the Rügen Island), the Małopolska Garden of Art in Kraków, the Promotional Gallery at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, the Fine Arts College in Kazimierz Dolny, the Art Centre in Sosnowiec, the Ducal Castle in Szczecin, the Media Art Faculty Gallery in Warsaw, the Kunstnernes Hus during the Festival for Digital and Visual Poetry in Norway (Oslo), The Trubarjeva Hiša Literature in Slovenia (Ljubljana). She participated in the international literary festivals, including Prima Vista (Tartu, Estonia), Kosmopolis (Barcelona, Spain), Slovenian Book Days (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Festival of the European Short Story (Zagreb – Rijeka, Croatia). She took part in interdisciplinary artistic projects, interalia Corresponcences & Interventions, Open Studio of Mechanisms for an Entente, Labirynt Wolności (the Labirynth of Freedom); interdisciplinary scientific conferences, eg. “Posttechnological experiences. Art-Science-Culture” at the HAT Centre (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań). She is the author of publications on new means of narration in the field of video art (e.g. in Załącznik Kulturoznawczy, Wiadomości ASP). She is the director of theatrical plays (e.g. “Shining City” – Studio Theatre in Warsaw, “Look, The Sun Is Going Down” – the Adam Mickiewicz Theatre in Częstochowa and the Na Woli Theatre in Warsaw, “Theatre de compose ou I'homme belle” – the Jaracz Theatre in Olsztyn, “Far Away” – TVP Kultura). She is a screenwriter and director of television programs: educational and travel series. In 2015 the Biuro Literackie publishing house published her poetic book “Nakarmić kamień” (“To Feed a Stone”) that was awarded the third prize in the competition Złoty Środek Poezji (The Golden Mean of Poetry) as the best poetic debut, and the prestigious Literary Nike Award for the best book of the year. From 2017 Bronka Nowicka is one of New Voices from Europe – the project implemented by Literature Across Frontiers and European Platform for Literary Exchange, Translation and Policy Debate.
Artwork:
Eyes of the Heart
by Antonia Alexandra Klimenko
You pass through me
like windows on a train--
freeze-framed in Winter
my shattered Spring
I look for you
in all the compartments
of my heart
groping blindly
at flashes of reflection
(Why did you pull out? I ask
At which stop did you finally exit?)
knowing full well
I have swallowed you
the night before
swallowed you
as I have the sun the moon
and all the dead stars--
light years of your grief
passing through me now
I the cavity of Paris
compass without a needle--
my arteries stretching like roadmaps
across the universe of my heart
How I let you slip through me
I will never know
why
I sent you
to your own dark eclipse
your delirium of narcotic bliss
engraved on the head of a needle
What is it we hold in our hands
that slips through our fingers--
this human landscape of blood and tears
How do we hold onto heart's needle
this compass of compassion
this shining star
this point of reference--
hold onto light lost in a City of Light
hold onto that one magnet that pulls us
to a place where we belong
One day
we may lose true North
lose our way
lose this moment
lose whole continents
of ourselves
like refugees
with no where to turn
like I lost you
you who once took refuge
deep inside of me
I still hold South
between my thighs
still wait for you to move me
like the earth
like this engine pumping blood
this train pumping iron
like Night and hydrangeas
exploding into the ecstasy
of novas and constellations
tunneling the black hole of me
the deep blossoming throat of me--
you, my heart's needle-
a singing meteor
that passes through me as light
that hums in me like Spring--
the one place I cannot get to
I am the cavity of Paris
that lovers once poured into--
my heart a weeping sieve
Milky Ways oozing from
the swirling globes of my eyes and breasts--
the trickling cum of humanity
peeling Time from my lips like a mask
At night alone in my bed
I marry the sacred dark of you
I marry the souls of all your dead planets
all the sweet amnesias of heaven
that live inside my head
I curse myself and heavy-lidded Night
that slumbers through the day
I, dragging the moon
like my flesh behind me
while Dark goes on and on
like the bottomless sky
with no ending or beginning
Dark knows we are afraid of it
wants only to be loved
I swallow it
as I do my tears
I kiss it
like I drink in air
I stuff the shame of guilt
back into my horizon
praying that light will find me
I am the cavity of Paris
that lovers once poured into--
my heart a weeping sieve
Deep inside myself
inside the shadows I cannot contain-
statues and monuments to the dead--
a whole city of shimmering possibility
rises as smoke above a skyline of ancient syllables
quivering on the tip of my tongue
The pallbearer of my own dead poems
bereft of words, divine direction or
a satin box to lay my aching compass
I drift
alone in the dark
alone with you and the breath of Winter
erased by a night that forgives
Antonia Alexandra Klimenko trained as an actress at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. She was first introduced on the BBC and to the literary world by the legendary Tambimuttu of Poetry London–-publisher of T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller and Bob Dylan, to name a few. After his death, it was his friend the late great Kathleen Raine who took an interest in her writing and encouraged her to publish. Although her manuscript was orphaned upon “Tambi”s passing, her poems and correspondence have been included in his Special Collections at Northwestern University. A former San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion and devotee of Spoken Word, she has read and performed at various venues including S.F.’s renowned Purple Onion and The Intersection for the Arts. Her sold-out one-woman show Where the Blue Begins was presented in conjunction with Sonoma’s performing art series Women on the Edge. More recently she was a featured poet with Helene Cardona and John High at Poets Live, presented her work at Shakespeare & Company, participated in four présentations hosted by Three Rooms Press as well as performed at 100 Thousand Poets for Change here in Paris. Klimenko’s works are widely published in journals and anthologies–among them: XXI Century World Literature (in which she represents France) The Poet”s Quest for God, CounterPunch, The Rumpus, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology, Writing for Peace, Big Bridge, Levure Litteraire, Knot Magazine, Iodine Poetry Journal, Literary Orphans, The Opiate, The Danse Macabre Anthologies, Strangers in Paris—New Writing Inspired by the City of Light, Paris Lit Up, Vox Populi, Occupy Poetry (in which she is distinguished as an American Poet) and Maintenant: Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art archived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C and in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Interview adapted from a conversation with Linda Ibbotson.
What brought you to Paris, city of writers, artists and musicians?
My brother. I hadn’t seen him since I was 11 years old and, finally, I was 19 and old enough to travel. I was grateful that he had chosen Paris, as Paris had always been at the top of my short list of places that I had longed to visit, and for the usual reasons— the light, the architecture, the culture, the community of artists. The notion that even if you made but a modest living, you might enjoy the abundance of beauty and spirit. I like to think, also, that it was fate.
Which is your favorite café/ Parisian haunt?
For outdoor haunts: There’s a place at the river’s edge on the Isle Saint Louis that I am very fond of. Also, the Jardin du Luxembourg. Indoor: The light tiled Moroccan patio of Salon de The de La Grande Mosquee on sunny days, the shaded room of La Palette on rainy.
What motivates you to write and your influences?
The desire to transcend. To share and/or reflect beauty. To heal, to process an experience that might have been less than wonderful and to create positive energy from it. To connect with self and with others, to share thoughts and ideals which make us most human. Writing encourages empathy as we imagine what it must be like to be in someone else’s shoes. I also enjoy the art of expression, trying to find the better messenger to convey meaning. Poetry, like music, opens a portal to the mystery of understanding without our fully comprehending. It brings me closer to Spirit.
And, of course, you never know who you might meet along the way. For instance, I was invited to a rather surreal soiree here in Paris where I couldn’t help but notice a charismatic artist with jet-black hair {and an unreasonably wide but charming moustache) wearing a satin pirate shirt topped off by a small leashed monkey sitting on his shoulder. He spoke to me towards the end of the evening. Told me he had noticed me…that I shouldn’t smile too much…that a woman must be mysterious. Our brief meeting inspired me—years later– to write ‘’One evening, stand on the sky and learn to paint your world without a wooden frame. Then, climb into the painting.’’
Writers you admire and who influence your own poetic style?
I admire Michael Rothenberg, of 100 Thousand Poets for Change as a Living Poem. He reached out to me when he heard I was ill and suggested I apply for a grant to Poets in Need, which I gratefully received. He reminds us that communion, communication and community can effect change and transformation in the world. As for writing style—Dostoyevsky, Rilke, e.e. cummings, Anne Sexton, James Wright.
What is your favorite line from one of your poems?
This is like Sophie’s Choice haha, as all of our creations are like our children. Ok, if I must…
And, still the soul’s marrow
like my own bone’s thinning
moves through and beyond
the fading bruise of my existence
Your goals and aspirations?
To get my collections of poems published. To finish my play, which I’m afraid is all play and no work right now. I had an opportunity to be published by the legendary Tambimuttu of Poetry London. I even made a recording for him under the Apple Record label as he had gone into business with The Beatles at the tail-end of the 70’s. The magazine was then called Poetry London / Apple Magazine. However, I decided I wanted to delay the publication in order to offer, perhaps, more inspired work and when Tambi died the manuscript was orphaned. I only began to submit my work to journals in the last 7 years. Now, as I approach 70, I do sincerely wish to find good homes for my poetic offspring. I suppose it might help, haha, if I sent them out into the world.
“This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form
that wants to become a work through him not a figment of his soul but
something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative
power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being.”
–MARTIN BUBER, I and Thou.
The practice of clinical psychology does not have much in common with the creative process. Clinical psychology is a science. That is how it has defined itself, and in an effort to be believed, it long ago made a decision to pursue the objective, measurable behavior of human beings as its focus, leaving the mysteries of consciousness to other disciplines.
It wasn’t always this way. There was a time, during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when philosophers and psychologists were easy to spot as being from the same family. It was William James, who is considered to be “The Father of Psychology,” who originally conceptualized psychology as a science primarily concerned with the study of subjective mental experience, or consciousness. The method of inquiry being introspection. Then, in 1912, John Watson introduced behaviorism and, to put it simply, that was that.
In my daily work, I think quite often about this schism between the objective, physical, measurable aspect of an individual action and the internal, meaningful, lived experience of each person. It is said that the ability of the mind to think, reason and process information is what makes us distinctly human. But, perhaps it is also the very thing that most separates us from our true nature.
I work with patients who have dementia, and the illness directly impacts their ability to think logically, problem solve, reason, process information. The very stuff by which we define humanness. My patients have started to wander away from the objective material world that most of us inhabit everyday and into a different space altogether. It is a space in which dualism begins to break down, discursive thought begins to lose its hold, communication is less about labels, judgments, narratives, and instead, awareness turns to things that can’t be spoken because there is no language. It is the experience of one’s personal internal conscious being, unfiltered, direct, filled with meaning. It is the land of archetypes, symbols and synchronicities.
My patients have all “been somebody” in the world they are leaving behind. They have been mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers, teachers, thinkers, dreamers, artists. They have all been doers. The doing is clumsy now, where it’s possible at all, and so, they are becoming, to greater and lesser degrees, planted only in being.
Let me say that I did not always know this to be true. For the longest time, I was practicing good clinical psychology, observing, measuring, monitoring, essentially colonizing my patients. I wasn’t looking for internal lived experience, symbolic meaning or conscious being. Those things aren’t measurable, and they weren’t things that I either knew how to or thought to share with the people I worked with. It was one of my patients, an artist of some renowned in her day, who taught me the thing that I was missing.
Martha was a painter. Now, she resides in a skilled nursing facility. She is 92 years old, a sturdy woman. She uses a wheelchair to get around and does so easily. Her hair is fully grey and straight, a bowl cut shapes her rounded face. Her hands are arthritic, and she wears rectangular gold wire framed glasses, but they don’t help much now. She smiles nicely twice, once when she knows that you are actually interested and once when she talks about her paintings.
One day, after I had finished measuring Martha, I had some extra time. So, I started reminiscing with her about some of the paintings that she had hanging on the wall of her room. Because they were difficult for her to see from her chair, I took one down from the wall and brought it close for us to be able to see together. She held it for me the way she might have held open a book to read to a small child, and she invited me into the canvas.
Martha has dementia, and her ability to encode new information, or to recall recent events, or to accurately place herself in the world is poor, but she vividly and imaginatively remembers everything in her painting. It is a living present moment for her, as it would become for me, too. At first, I understood her simply to be describing the scene depicted in the painting. “This was my sister’s cabin in Maine...and this little building here was way back in the woods, and they rolled it seven miles...and just over this little hill here...”
After a few minutes, she pointed to a tree in the painting. It wasn’t a particular focal point; nothing about it would necessarily draw the eye, but it became clear to me that this tree was more than a tree to her. So, I made an effort to listen, less with my thinking mind, and more with my awareness. And she went on. “And you see this tree here...this part...its trunk...it was hit by lightning...here...so, now there is just this bow...in its trunk.”
She was pointing to the tree that she had painted all of those years ago, to a place where she had once observed how a lightning strike had removed a large chunk of bark and wood from the trunk of a tree, and how it was now stooped over, like an old woman, as a result of its wound. I realized she was telling me her story as she was telling me the story of this tree. Martha had had a stroke. She was stooped and no longer able to walk, and she experienced constant pain from her wounds. She and this tree had the same lived experience. They knew and understood each other, and now she was helping me to understand them both.
She paused for a moment and I asked her, “What happened to this tree?”
“Well, it got struck...and then it just...tied its branches into bows…”
“And carried on?” I offered.
“And carried on,” she affirmed with a nod and a smile.
There were no other words between us that morning. We sat still and waited together, contemplating, in the way that one might absorb a poem, or engage a painting, or know a flower. And then, when it was time, she lifted up her arms high above her head, tied her branches into bows and got on with her day.
This is an excerpt from "All The Doers".
–
Paige Parsons has a BA in English Literature from The University of the South (Sewanee), Sewanee, TN and a PhD Clinical Psychology, Walden University, Minneapolis, MN. She practices Clinical Geriatric Psychology in Upstate New York, working primarily with elderly patients with dementia.
The first thing I was going to say about this talk is that it's a work in progress. Lucky I caught myself. Because, well, when is writing ever finished? I don't mean to be twee. What I mean is that it's the authority immanent in notions of completeness or finality which I sought to challenge in my strange colour talk. God knows it if worked.
Let me explain. My main goal in asking What was the colour of the 1990s? was to open up ways of thinking that might prompt a derailing of the authoritativeness of historical narrative as commonly exercised (or, rather, imposed). For sure it's a silly question, but a little bit of mischief seemed the way forward when authority itself was the enemy.
It's a question I both asked and made tentative attempts to answer with the help of two main spirit guides. The first was the French surrealist Michel Leiris, who knew a thing or two about mischief. Speaking at a meeting of the Paris-based College of Sociology in 1938, Leiris insisted that self-knowledge was a matter of intuiting for oneself the colour of the sacred. With that, he left the room. Michael Taussig took this challenge up in his 2009 book What Color is the Sacred?
Spirit Guide Two was Geoff Dyer, who just seems to get it. His novel in which not all that much happens, The Colour of Memory (1989), spoke to my concerns in several ways. That lack of much happening is a big part of it: Dyer offers up vignette after vignette after vignette, such that you want to smash your head against a wall, or, at the very least, skip forward a few pages to see if maybe a new character has been introduced (don't hold your breath). But then, as Dyer notes, plots are what get people killed. Likewise history as a straight line, the passing of time as progress.
So story is done away with and instead we are left with fragments, memories of Brixton in the 1980s frequently shot through with vivid descriptions in and of colour: a dog’s frightened eyes shining red; fireworks exploding green, red and yellow; piss-coloured wallpaper; the petrol-station blue sky; pale yellow and pale blue shirts; the narrator’s newly-magnolia walls,magnolia being ‘not even not a colour’; or clouds flecked with lemon or pink, becoming bruise purple.
And we're left, too, with the writing, the beautiful writing – words freed from their usual duties in the service of narrative and going kinda wild.
Listen to the podcast of this paper which was delivered at Colours of Memory: an International Conference on the Writing of Geoff Dyer held on July 11, 2014 at Birkbeck, University of London.
Morgan Daniels teaches history at Arcadia University's London Center and Queen Mary, University of London. His current research is concerned with radio broadcasting and the sea. Forthcoming is 'Some moments of flag desecration in professional wrestling' in Broderick Chow, Eero Laine, & Claire Warden (eds.), Performance and Professional Wrestling (Routledge, 2016).
If wind asked permission
we might wait and listen
as if night stopped its blue
curtain and wheat bent without scattering
its hope of what happens in the dark,
and happens by accident.
–JOHN FREEMAN
"On Love"
Photographs by Victorine Gay
MARLENE, she looks older than the men, the daylight, how it accuses contours.
MARLENE got a new lavender coat, it hangs down to her calves, long over the jean-skirt held lop-sided at her waist like a hula-hoop with a studded belt. She’s had a double espresso from the barman who says, Don’t you want to take off your coat, Marlene? No, thanks, Marlene replies, I like it on. How do I look?
MARLENE is turning in circles, the clean hem floating up and tickling the skin behind her knees.
MARLENE took a couple of aspirin during her shift yesterday afternoon cause there was nothing else, then cut her index finger trying to get a slice out of the tight lime, and the gash wouldn’t clot because, as the man-from-the-back told her, aspirin thins out blood. The man-from-the-back closed the industrial dish-washer he was loading, brought over a hand-towel and wrapped it, gracefully, around the gash, cupping his own two hands at the stem and holding her toweled-finger like an orchid-head. She followed the edge of his hands, a beckoning, a teacup, then up at him, and he at her, and then he looked away and said I’ll find you some band-aids Marlene, but began to feel mannered against the baggy intimacy between them. His head turned away, eyes lingering on the postcards taped one next to another in a series on the wall above the stairway leading to the basement where the toilets are.
–
MARLENE tourne en cercles, impeccable, son ourlet flotte et caresse la peau de l'arrière de ses genoux.
MARLENE s'est enfilé deux cachets d'aspirine pendant sa pause hier après-midi. C'était tout ce qu'il restait. Puis, elle s'est entaillé l'index en essayant de couper la rondelle d'un citron vert trop ferme. Le saignement ne cessait pas. C'est l'homme-de-l'arrière-cuisine qui lui avait rappelé justement que l'aspirine fluidifie le sang. Il a refermé le lave-vaisselle industriel qu'il venait de charger, s'est saisi d'un essuie-main et a enveloppé généreusement la plaie, joignant ses deux mains à la tige, il tenait son doigt enturbanné comme une tête d'orchidée. Elle a effleuré du regard le bord de ses mains, un tremblement, une tasse de thé, puis d'elle à lui et de lui à elle, il a détourné les yeux en murmurant « Je vais vous trouver du sparadrap Marlene ». Gênés l'un comme l'autre de l'intimité qui s'était enroulée autour d'eux.
Excerpt from “Marlene or Number 16” translated into French by Victorine Gay
MARLENE’s been pointing the finger. She’s been blaming her younger brother. Didn’t I change your pooped-underwear when you were a little chubby Messiah, though? He hung up. Marlene whispered into her iphone, lipstick smearing on the plastic, and you are supposed to be my blood… The men are speaking Albanian over the TV in the corner of the café. This café where Marlene works, and the barman, and the man-from-the-back, who’s in the toilet just now. It’s early afternoon, the man-from-the-back rarely goes, but when he does, he urinates for a long time. The barman’s thrown out a couple jokes already and now he’s just coughing like a dandelion between sips. He reaches for the remote control beneath the counter and turns the sound up on the TV as the garbage truck thuds on the street, right in front of the couple of tables on the terrace of the café, one empty, and one with two young women, just arrived. A black man gets off the garbage truck, hazard-green trousers, neon yellow plastic vest with silver reflective strips, he rolls the green bins from the curb to the gaping metal trunk, hooks them up to the lever, which lifts, dumps, and sets them down. He rolls the bins back to the curb, where he stops to look at stream of sun falling out from the parting clouds, white hairs curling in the dark crown on his head. There’s a white man in a white truck behind him, honking. At the bar, the milk is frothing. The white man’s pounding his black-leather steering wheel, screaming, Allez!, Come on! A young mulatto with orange hair and freckles across his honeyed complexion pedals past them both on his bike, singing Francoise Hardy to himself in a high-pitched voice, Tous les garçons et les filles de mon âge… “All of the boys and the girls who’re my age stroll on by, hand-in-hand, two by two…O but me, I walk the streets alone…” Well, this street’s global, but concretely it’s in the North of Paris. The fruit and vegetable seller’s an Arab. The tobacco shop, where you get your cigarettes and lotto tickets, is run by a Chinese man. And across from him is Bombay Nights, previously Tandoori Nights, previously Rajpoot, previously Kasimir House. And this bar, named after the street, Le Saint Denis, is an Albanian hang-out, so no one can say why they serve that cheap green Portugeuse wine, but they do, fizzy vino verde 2,50€ a glass, Marlene’ll bring it over.
MARLENE’s not Albanian. She’s not a child of the eagles, Shqipëri as the Albanians call their own country, meaning Land of the Eagles. That’s why there’s the two-headed eagle silhouette on the solid red flag taped to the side of the cash register. Marlene did have a child, though. Well he was her partner’s boy, and hers, when they were together. He was panic-stricken by pigeons. They couldn’t get past the arc of Saint Denis without him peeing himself in his modest terror. The man-from-the-back comes up from the basement toilet, past the rows of taped postcards. Napoli, Marseille, Barcelona, Athens, Palermo, Rotterdam, Bruxelles, then a dense red tulip field with a Dutch woman bent over to pick one, pantiless in a mini-skirt, her sun-kissed ass-cheeks next to the cursive writing, Beautiful View From Here. The man-from-the-back goes around the staircase to the corner, where the extra orange-brown leather stools stand, on top of one, the metal fan, turned off, it’s three blades still within the wired caging, looking out as if cherishing a long-passed insult. He turns the fan on, and goes back to the back.
MARLENE’s leaning on the bar, her hip curved out, pointing across the street to the grass-green Carrefour supermarket with the homeless man slumped outside against the low-grates and the front window, shirtless, belly out, chin down, hands which have lost their sense of humor upturned at his thighs. He’s warming at the surface of consciousness, stinking of daydreams. Next door’s a small four walls with wooden booths, a phone each, 15-cents-a-minute to call Senegal, for example, Taxiphone spelled out in flashing blue and white lights. A thin man in a faded black sweater and wrinkled gray khakis walks past, holding a half eaten cob of corn, white napkin crumbled over the stem in his hand. Another man, rounder, blue short-sleeve button down, bow-legged in his stiff jeans, gray hairs on his arm, his hand missioned with carrying nothing but an standard #10 envelope. Deux, Marlene says to the barman and he gets out two wine glasses and places them on the counter in front of her. The two young women on the terrace both turn their head towards Marlene. One’s got a tall neck with a mess of her brown Norwegian hair knotted into itself, and the other, hygienic-faced, shining blonde hair behind her ears, silver hoops in her plump lobes. They are both studying at the theatre school down the street, blue door. They’re waiting for their glasses of the cheap vino verde.
MARLENE, this past weekend, was dawdling through Montmartre for no reason. She stopped in front of the man with a thinning pony-tail, a wooden-easel between them, he looked up, she said, draw me. The man drew a caricature of Marlene, her eyes puffed and sliding open, her mouth a squeaking pickle about to snap in two, her cheeks like flattened candy wrappers. She handed him the fee in euro coins, counting it out.
MARLENE’s sauntering through the bar towards the terrace with two glasses of vino verde, trying to get her lavender coat to catch a breeze and ribbon around her legs. A couple of the men wave their hand and say, Come on, Marlene, you’re blocking the TV… The man-from-the-back reties his white apron twice around his waist. His worn purple cotton T-shirt hangs at the sleeves and sticks to his shoulders, the sweat in the form of angel wings. Sorry, Marlene says and moves out of the way, but what do you think? Think of what, the man with brown leather loafers says and picks up his pint of beer. Think of my new coat, Marlene’s smiling shyly. Oh, yeah, the man says. That’s right. It looks nice, Marlene. Good color for you.
MARLENE’s still blushing when she returns from the terrace and the two women are sipping their wine behind her and she joins the men and watches the TV screen. An enormous stage is lit up with crossed beams. The camera zooms in like an eagle swooping, then abruptly cuts back to a panel of judges. A woman in a corseted canary-yellow dress, petite, reddish-orange lips, say Hello, she waves. The next judge, tight white button-up, glasses like an architect, a clef-chin and a shiny forehead someone forgot to powder, say Hello, Hello there Albania! The first act is a young man in loose white soccer shorts and a red and yellow team shirt. He spins two soccer balls on his index fingers, then takes one spinning ball to his chest, bounces it to his foot, then his heel, then up to his knee, clocking his hips to the traditional Albanian song playing in the background. The third judge is a short man with a clean buzz to his dark hair. He’s disappointed. Then the words burst through the screen: Albania’s Got Talent! and cuts to the commercial break. The man with loafers puts down his pint glass, smoothes out his thick steel-wool mustache, then goes outside to smoke. The others pick up their conversation.
MARLENE’s watching the commercials as if they were a continuation of the talent show. Her mouth’s loose and her eyes glaze and her fingers curl in, even the one she cut yesterday, with two band-aids taped around it. Are you okay Marlene, the barman asks. Marlene looks over to him. Am I okay? Marlene repeats it. She thinks about it. I’m just, Marlene takes a couple breaths, I’m just…
MARLENE! The man-from-the-back yells. Your phone’s ringing! You left it on top next to the cash register. You’re lucky no one stole it. Oh I don’t think anyone’d steal it… It’s an iphone, Marlene! I mean I trust everyone here. But there are guys that come in and out. I mean I trust people. You shouldn’t! But I want to. If you wanted to trust people, Marlene, you should’ve gotten a shitty Nokia. I’m just looking out for you. That’s nice of you, thank you. The phone’s still ringing in Marlene’s hand. Answer it, Marlene.
MARLENE, hello. It’s Marlene’s ex. Her voice is low. She doesn’t want her son to hear. He’s nine and he’s sad and she doesn’t want any more messes. When are you coming over, Marlene’s-ex asks her, to pick up the last of your stuff? Marlene’s-ex lives two streets down from the bar, between the Japanese massage place, windows covered with posters of bare-backs and orchids, and the corner-store épicerie, she’s on the third floor, where you can yell from the street, phrases like WHAT’S YOUR DOORCODE AGAIN? and I JUST NEED TO SEE YOU.
MARLENE, I’m putting it in a box and I’m taking it to the bar and I’m dropping it off. Alright, Marlene agrees, because she wants her ex to see her in her new lavender coat and maybe she’ll bring the boy even, though he’s not her biological son, after five years, he called her Mama-Marlene. Then she hangs up and realizes her ex is on her way, carrying a cardboard box of her stuff, the last one, the final trinkets of ways she couldn’t explain herself and that plant, the small cactus she never watered and yet, it lived on, without a grudge. On the TV screen the next contestant is up. A boy in suspenders and a black bow-tie. He’s missing his two front teeth. He’s singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelejah, voice splintering from him, eyes pinching and cheeks flushed as he’s reaching for the high notes. Next is a boy in a Muslim cap with dark skin and blue eyes, blowing the trumpet like Miles Davis while serving baklava.
MARLENE’s ex shows up with a cardboard box in her hands, she’s got blue jeans and a silky shirt tucked in, her flour-blond hair parted in the middle, strands of gray hidden, her lipstick applied, a violent rose.
MARLENE, her ex says, here take this. She hands her the box. Marlene takes the box and says thank you then puts it down on the curb next to the now-empty green garbage bins. You don’t want any of it? Marlene’s-ex asks her. I don’t think so, Marlene replies. She’s wondering if her ex has noticed her new lavender coat.
MARLENE waits. She waits. She turns a little left and bends her knees as if she’s about to curtsey. Marlene’s-ex is staring at her, pulling her eyebrows together. If you didn’t want any of it…, but Marlene’s-ex stops herself because she doesn’t want to get into it.
MARLENE is now doubting whether her ex will notice the coat at all and suddenly, the boy’s back in her thoughts. She really wants to see the boy. She misses that little boy. That little peanut-nose, that little wobbly-eyed boy, those high eyebrows and vigilant stare, Marlene misses that little boy more than anything, she could almost take off her new lavender coat and throw it into the green bin. Well, goodbye, Marlene’s-ex says, they kiss on the cheek, and she is walking away. The two young women left change on the table, and the empty wine glasses side-by-side.
MARLENE swallows because her mouth is getting dry. She’s done with her shift but she decides to stick around at the bar until it’s completely dark. The sun sets. The bobby-pin’s hanging down on a couple of strands from her head, she’s stroking her dark hair messily with her band-aided finger, mostly missing the hair and bumping the plaster into her chin.
MARLENE steps outside to make a call on her iphone, it’s ringing and ringing, then the call’s picked up. Marlene says, It’s me again, to her ex. Her ex breaths out, Marlene, please, she says in a quiet voice because the boy’s asleep now, You can’t do this. Marlene is just listening, wondering if the boy heard the phone ring and woke up and is listening just like her, his small body crouched against his bedroom door. We said we were going to respect each other, Marlene. Marlene’s-ex is taking her time now because she’s getting angry. You’re only 38, but I swear, Marlene, at that bar, you look – about 50, and I know, that’s an awful thing to say, to someone you love, but now, we have to love other people.
MARLENE likes poetry, and it’s almost 2am, and they’re closing up, so the man with the steel-wool mustache stands up and recites a stanza he remembers from Lasgush Poradeci: WHY I NEED TO LOVE YOU.
“Because I chose to love you.
And I chose to woo you.
And I chose to kiss you.
That's why.” Then the bar-owner shushes him and says to Marlene, you should read Ismail Kadare, Marlene, he’s our guy. He even stops wiping the counter and clears his throat, and announces, Poetry is the title of this poem. He moves the rag to the side and begins to deliver the lines carefully, translating them from Albanian in his head for Marlene: “Poetry,
How did you find your way to me?
My mother does not know Albanian well,
She writes letters like Aragon, without commas and periods,
My father roamed the seas in his youth,
But you have come,
Walking down the pavement of my quiet city of stone,
And knocked timidly at the door of my three-storey house,
At Number 16.” Not bad, the man with the steel-wool mustache says. Marlene smiles but can’t look up at the barman. She says Thank you to the floor.
MARLENE’s walking down rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis alone, with her iphone in her hand, because the barman locked up the café and they all said goodbye. It’s cool now, the wind is blowing up her jean-skirt, and ruffling her new lavender coat. The homeless man at Carrefour is awake, he says, Psst, to Marlene but she’s got her eyes semi-closed, walking towards the arc of Saint Denis, smiling to herself. The homeless man forgets Marlene and starts picking at his bellybutton. She’s already down the street, alone and humming, to herself and to her new coat, the lavender fabric dancing in the gusts of wind, her left-hand bobbing to the melody she’s humming, and her right, cradling the iphone between her band-aided finger and palm. He’s behind her, the shadow, speeding up, his shoulders in, narrow hips, quick steps. He lunges at Marlene.
MARLENE’s face-down on the cobblestone circle beneath the arc of Saint Denis. There’s pigeon-shit and cigarette ash smeared on her coat, torn-hem. The shadow’s sprinting far into the darkness, one hand moving the wind, the other clutching her iphone, which is, suddenly, ringing in his grip.
MARLENE, do you, want to, come over. I’d like to see you. He’d liked to see you too. He can’t sleep. He wants you to sing him something. After, we could, lie down, together. I miss your body. I don’t think I can, just stop, loving, you. Also, I’m ready to talk about my responsibility in what happened. And your brother called me. He says he doesn’t know how to say he’s sorry, that’s why, but he’d like to give it a try. I was thinking you could go back to school. I could take care of us for a bit. You looked so beautiful this afternoon in your new lavender coat, please. Come home.
MARLENE, near the curb where it smells like stone and urine, is pushing herself over, onto her back. She opens her eyes and begins counting the stars, fourteen, fifteen…
Yelena Moskovich was born in 1984 in Ukraine (former USSR) and emigrated to the US with her family in 1991. After graduating with a degree in playwriting from Emerson College, Boston, she moved to Paris to study at the Lecoq School of Physical Theatre, and later for a Masters degree in Art, Philosophy and Aesthetics from Universite Paris 8. Her plays have been produced in the US, Vancouver, Paris, and Stockholm. She lives in Paris. The Natashas is her first novel.
Tell us a little about yourself. How long have you been writing? Any publications?
I learned to swim before I could walk, but writing, always. I was stringing together verse before I could write, telling my mother to write it down for me (in Ukraine). I moved to America when I was 7 (Wisconsin), and because we were Jewish refugees, our sponsorship included my attendance to an Orthodox Jewish school where I had to learn Hebrew and English, alongside my Russian. Since each language has its own distinct alphabet, from different etymological families, text became as much a spatial and material playground as means for meaning. I loved the look of certain letters, each with its unique attitude and stance (and in Hebrew especially, each letter has its own spiritual charge).
Later on, I found a home for my writing in theater, as a playwright and director. I loved the way one could jump in time, transform into and out of different landscapes, and energize banality with tone and character.
After years trying things out on the stage, I had an urge for a literary homecoming, to apply all these elements within the relationship between reader and text.
Publications:
The Natashas (Serpent’s Tail, 2016), debut novel.
Les Natasha (éditions Viviane Hamy, 2017)
Could you tell us a bit more about "Marlene or Number 16" and the inspiration behind it?
There’s a café I used to go to regularly in the North of Paris, on rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, called “Le Saint Denis.” It was a couple doors down from the physical theater school I did years back, Ecole Jacques Lecoq. It became a spot I liked to go to on my own to write, sit, observe. It has a gawky grace to it, like a secret grievance or wasted wish; the perfect place to suddenly want to recite poetry to remaining customers past midnight. On the terrace, in the late afternoon, theater students got cheap wine from time to time. But inside, it's mainly a bar for old men. I tried out sitting inside, with them. And there, on a few occasion, another woman came in; she became my Marlene.
Name three short story writers you especially admire – why?
Until about 4 years back, I mostly read only plays or poetry. Then I started getting into novels / fiction. I’m drawn to writing that feels alive and dangerous, no matter its shape or size. But if I were to list 3 writers I admire who provide an incredibly expansive story in a seemingly short span of time, they would be:
1) Yoko Tawada, Japanese but writes in German, is one of my favorite writers, I love her collection Where Europe Begins, especially “Storytellers without souls.”
2) Emil Cioran, Romanian philosopher, his writing is usually a succession of proverbial-like commentary or anecdotal grudges; notably Tears and Saints.
3) Jon Fosse, Norwegian playwright (though I read him only in French). His plays are almost weightless, the short phrases manage to reveal generational trauma then curl back up into silence like a worm on a leaf.
It was not a snub. The therapy cat he brought on our second date, sitting like a bodyguard on his lap at Zito’s Pasteria. Me showing sufficient cleavage, he with his therapy cat, called Uma Thurman.
This was useful, he said, for all of us.
“We all need a bit of it,” he said.
I agreed. However, I hadn’t known (I explained) that there was such a creature. I knew about therapy dogs of course. But not cats.
“Oh yes”, he said, with his thick, boyish hair. “They’re growing in acceptance.”
The cat was white and very round. I found myself feeling a bit less than romantic, leaning forward and attempting to be even the tiniest bit showy. She owned his lap. Her back arched, but so did mine. She was probably fixed. So was I.
He said the goodness of a therapy animal ripples. I agreed. I used to have a husband. In a way, he was my therapy animal, until we stopped being good for one another. Good for the soul is good for everyone, of course.
We had ordered crab, and the cat looked angry. In spy movies, cats are diabolical animals, as cold and murderous as their owners. This was never true. “This is my second date in the last thirty-five years,” he said. I nodded. It was my fifteenth date since my divorce, a date that was obviously going nowhere. He had lost his wife. She died. He said they never really dated, he and his wife. “Nah. We just hit it off, and that was that,” he said.
He stroked Uma Thurman, therapy cat. “Uma knows,” he said.
“So listen. Let’s not look at this as a date at all,” I suggested. He looked at me as if to say something, then readjusted the way the cat was sitting on his lap. “Yes, well, there is a lot of bacon in the world. It all smells great but then you find out what it does to your heart,” he said.
It seemed unfair, how cute this man was. Red and gold hair, not quite smiling. I imagined how frisky a man like this could be without all of the scar tissue.
“May I pet Uma?” I asked. I knew that I’d never see him again, and there was always something soothing about petting an animal.
First published in Jellyfish Review.
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Meg Pokrass is the author of four collections and one award winning book of prose poetry. Her books include Damn Sure Right (Press 53, 2011) My Very End of the Universe— Five Mini-Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form (Rose Metal Press, 2014), Bird Envy (2014), Cellulose Pajamas (Blue Light Book Award winner, 2016)) and The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down (Etruscan Press, 2016). Her stories and poems have appeared and are forthcoming in over 250 literary magazines including Five Points, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Gigantic, Great Jones Street, Matchbook, Newfound, New World Writing, Bayou, Rattle, 100-Word Story, Wigleaf, Green Mountains Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Talking Writing, Every Writer’s Resource, The Rumpus, Failbetter, storySouth, decomP, Flash Magazine, and two Norton anthologies: New Microfiction (W.W. Norton, 2018) and Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015). Showcased by Adweek and Galleycat/Media Bistro as “Digital Author to Watch”, sheis considered an innovator in the use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms for writers. Meg serves as an international writing competition judge, Fiction Curator for the innovative Great Jones Street App, and Festival Curator for the new The Bath Flash Fiction Festival.
The Creative Process: Podcast Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.
