Writing the american evangelical + short fiction randoms

“We believe in the validity of male emotions more than we believe in validity of female emotions. We are a society that doubts women who report their own experiences of what a man was like or what an experience was like. That’s rape culture, too. It functions across numerous variations on how relationships work. Maybe he’s this. He’s a good guy at heart…We make excuses for men left and right, back and forth. It’s really not a courtesy we do to women…”

— Alana Massey, interview with The Millions

Amanda Miska's twitter call-out for ex-evangelicals came to mind when I was reading a great  short story by Andre Dubus, "If They Knew Yvonne," told from perspective of a young devout Catholic male, offers insight into how abstinence education dehumanizes and perverts sex, with the costs imposed primarily on female. Here is the narrator in confession, speaking to priest:

“But I shouldn’t have had a girl, because I believed my semen was the most important part of sex, so the first time I made love with her I was waiting for it, like my soul was listening for it—you see? Because I wouldn’t know how I felt about her until I knew how I felt about ejaculating with her.” 

The ejaculate is rendered holy, primal, an expression in which the female body is essentially a vessel. Narrator continues:

 “So after that we were lovers. Or she was, but I wasn’t. I was just happy because I could ejaculate without hating myself, so I was still masturbating, you see, but with her—does that make sense?"

The prohibition on masturbation resolved by presence of appropriate vessel. And the perversion of language, whereby what narrator must be doing is "making love", since any other sexual activity is Satanic, the verbal construct is fascinating here, when he says: "I made love to her without knowing her.”

And I can't help thinking about incels... how they are bred... the water they tread.

Things are always happening here, but they are always the same things: children scuttle in and out of alleyways until they finally settle, tired and confused, against a wall; boys become men, who drift along until something catches their attention; women put their hands to their mouths and call their children home. Something is always happening here, but it's never exactly what we were waiting for, so we just go on with our lives, and what occupies us right now is waiting for my brother.

Beth Nugent's short story, "Another Country" (from City of Boys)

TM: What is the best part about living with another writer?

JB: Never having to explain why you don’t want to go out.

TM: What is the worst?

GH: Whatever plans you might have, they can get eliminated at any time if one of us is in the writing fugue. You just have to accept that your plans are canceled in that instance.

[Interview with Julie Buntin and Gabe Habash]

“But I can’t help thinking there are men who still somewhere deep inside them have an unconscious fantasy that one day they’ll be helpless again. And they don’t want the person who’s going to be looking after them to be thinking, ‘Fuck you, I wish you’d die in the night.’ Nobody wants that, they don’t, but then, I was terribly taken aback by this. You know, the critics would say, this is great writing, it’s really wonderful, she’s at the peak of her powers and all that kind of shit, but there’s this awful anger and I hated it and it was ugly and how could she have been so cruel? ”

— Helen Garner, interview with The Millions

If I write from that place, of longing, then the place I am writing about becomes like an obsession. I feel intense homesickness and idealize it in the same way. The place is mine and I can imagine it as an intense version of itself. That also means that I use the setting to serve the story and forget any urge to create a faithful portrait.

[Interview with Clare Cameron]

I remember vividly being a kid in school and learning about the Holocaust, and my question back then was “What would I do? Who would I have been?” And I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t fathom how it could happen. And now here I am.

[Interview with Ethel Rohan]

Living with a sense of wonder, allows the seemingly trivial to insist on having meaning. It is not hierarchical. Children know this. They bestow great importance on a mouse on a counter, or a sticker of a unicorn prancing across a binder. As an adult, the act of judging one’s self and the world around you as insignificant is what leads us to lose our sense of wonder.

[Interview with Heather O'Neill]

"And what about your personal angel? There's one sitting right beside you now and yet somehow taking up no space at all. Since an angel has no substantial presence it can compress itself to the size of a synapse, can follow the extraordinarily swift and winding ways of a thought... Could our daily indecisions... be the contrast between what we truly want and where our concentrated knot of angel has taken us? Maybe we're compositions, evolving works of art for angels, and they're attracted to the elegant patterns they make of our fates."

Phillip Graham's short story, "Angel" (from Interior Design)

"Submitting to chance only to cheat on it": A poetry exercise from Charles Simic

“The first rule for a poet must be, cheat on your unconscious and your dreams.”

— Charles Simic, "The Little Venus of the Eskimos"

In his essay “The Little Venus of the Eskimos”, Charles Simic describes the way he comes to a poem by foraging his biblio-ecology. I found myself playing with his method this afternoon, a perfect way for book-lovers to get lost between the pages of the read and unwritten. To quote Simic:

“My entire practice…consists of submitting to chance only to cheat it… I, for example, may pull a book from my bookshelf and, opening it anywhere, take out a word, or a phrase. Then, to find another bit of language to go along with my first find, I may grab another book or peek into one of my notebooks and get something like this:"

he rips some papers
forest
whispers
telephone book
a child’s heart
the mouse has a nest
concert piano
lost innocence
my mother’s mourning dress

“In the house of correction called sense, where language and art serve their sentences, the words are making whoopee.”

— Charles Simic

After the words are written down, Simic allows them to “play off each other.” The result being something like this:

Innocence

Someone rips a telephone book in half. 
The mouse has a nest in the concert piano.

In a forest of whispers,
A child’s heart,
The mother’s mourning dress.

“I open myself to chance in order to invite the unknown.... If you worship in the Church of Art With a Message, stay away. Chance operations make trouble, promote ambiguity, spit on dogmatism of any kind. Everything from our ideas of identity to our ideas of cause are cheerfully undermined. Surrealist games are the greatest blasphemy yet conceived by the arts against the arts. In them, the disordering of the senses is given ontological status. Chance brings a funhouse mirror to reality.””

— Charles Simic, "The Little Venus of the Eskimos"

What looks like a poem might still be subjected to chance, an additional scattering and refocusing. He mentions collaborating with James Tate on some poems by taking a word or phrase and turning themselves into Paul Auster's "pinball machine of associations."

The word "match" and the word "jail" would become "matchstick jail". They'd keep playing and then stop to survey what they had. Then they'd revise, free-associate again, and discover an unexpected poem emerging. Simic describes the process as alternating between feeling like the same person as Tate, or feeling like the poet, or feeling like the critic with no clear pattern or reason for feeling any of it. I love the experience inherent in the writing of a collaborative poem like this.

“Chances continues to be one of the manifestations of cosmic mystery. The other one is mathematics. We are crucified in awe between freedom and necessity.”

— Charles Simic

For more of the marvelous and overtly anti-nationalistic, read Charles Simic's The Life of Images: Selected Prose.

Writing beyond Victorian sexual tropes: "I Enjoy Nineteenth Century Novels"

I'm excited to have a story in The Write Launch's Special Short Stories Issue this month, alongside some wonderful writers.

I love the exploration of still/unstill quiets in Adrian Plau's flash piece, "Making the Ping":

The quiet we listened to then was my sister’s quiet. It was strict and hard. It needed more and more but could not grow quiet enough. But it was brittle. It took over the house and yet a little thing could break it. A pillow could tumble on the couch or a faint wind make a window on the first floor creak a bit and it would shatter. Then she had to start from the beginning again, piling up layer after layer of heavy quiet only for it to tear again once anything moved or made a sound. You could not hear little things in her quiet.

I love how it characterizes and creates a subtle plot around a ping, a sound, a silence. 

I also love Kelly Ann Gonzales' "Dancing on Graves", evoking an un-american way of dealing with death. There is so much paucity in our commercialized mourning industry--so much self-help and so little flesh and bone. 

Because that is what Filipinos do. We cook and we dance and we cry as we cook and dance. Court jesters in our microcosm kingdoms. We didn’t have power, but we had responsibility. An ingrained sense of duty to our families and heritage. Buena was the only other Filipina I went to school with, so even if we were just family friends, she might as well have been actual family. 

“Life,” she would whisper to me, mapping a skeletal finger, nails lifeblood red, along my chin, “without other people like us is too difficult and far too lonely.”

My longer short, "I Enjoy Nineteenth Century Novels," came out of a space that kept offering a literature professor who was unhappy with her middle-years, unsatisfied with her profession, undesirable to herself somehow. I wrote the story because I wanted to know more about the character--wanted to see where she was going.

The students file through the door as I prepare to grade papers. When a pair of male legs pauses near my desk, I ignore them. After leaving tiny red fire ant-marks on the mediocre essay, I look up. 

The student is waiting. His patience startles me. Late-afternoon sunlight broadens his narrow, vulpine face. 

He says he wants to be a writer. He wants to write the world without hiding the bones. He has a degree in architecture. He hopes to expose the weakness of load-bearing beams.

The narrator doesn't have a name--doesn't inhabit herself responsibly or fully. She permits herself to be seduced into intimacy with a student. Part of what fascinates me is the way in which we rationalize breaking rules. 

He says it is in my professional interest to lay it on the table. It is in my interest as a female to refrain from dismissing the power of individual narratives.

Nineteenth century novels are frequently the entry-point for study of white literary feminism and the cult of Victorian womanhood. I also wanted to reveal how the writing of sex can be unsexy, to corner the reader in that intimate space that seeks the arousal-shame cycle. 

Although he enjoys nineteenth century novels, Victorianism moralism leads females to undermine their sexuality. He cringes. He hopes to describe a positive sexual experience from a female perspective. If it wouldn’t be too tiresome, would I mind sharing one such example from my own life– clinical if needed– so he might better understand the pieces and parts which go into such an account from a literary perspective? 

Since it is the last class before the final exam, I agree to help him. Just this once. Since the memory feels fresh.

Sometimes a character doesn't give you the ending you crave. Sometimes they let you watch them tread water. I think it's important to explore the sexual boundaries that women are tempted to violate. I think it's logically untenable to claim, simultaneously, that 1) we are sexual creatures whose desires should be acknowledged 2) we are innocent of sexual harassment or sexually-inappropriate behavior because we are women. 

You can read the whole story here.

Fear vs. anxiety, unwritable characters, and my fear of certain men

Robert Musil said the starry sky is a social phenomenon, an edifice of shared fantasy. We subject ourselves to its boundaries by creating it.

“… the act of telling a story is also a device to appropriate it.”

— Ilan Stevens, LOVE AND LANGUAGE

Confession: I am afraid of white men. Due to an event in my life, my heart races when I find myself alone on a sidewalk with a white man. I alternate between defensiveness, submission, and silence when in the presence of white men. These feelings do not exist around men of color. The grippingness of these feelings--their physicality and power--makes it very easy for me say, simply, these feelings do not exist when I am around men of color.

What's the point?

Fear is often the causal prompt for rational behavior. You should back away from a rattlesnake. But reaction to threat can also be irrational if the goal is to prove mastery rather than protect self. Our culture is replete with threat responses that focus on managing appearance rather than responding rationally to actual threat.

A good friend of mine is afraid of being alone with black men. She traces it to the experience of being raped by a black man in her apartment. The rapist, a serial offender, was eventually caught and convicted by a racially-diverse jury; my friend served as a witness. He was a stranger, not a friend, not an acquaintance. He was a black stranger who raped her violently and left physical evidence on her body. Race, ease of evidence, and repeat offense made it likelier that he would be found guilty. 

No part of this story is fair. Not fair that a black serial rapist is more likely to get convicted than a white serial rapist. Not fair that serial rapists of any color continue to unleash their hatred on female bodies. 

“The poet today must be twice-born. She must have begun as a poet, she must have understood the suffering of the world as political, and gone through politics, and on the other side of politics she must be reborn again as a poet.”

— Adrienne Rich, Notebook, 17 March 1974

My friend knows her fear is statistically insignificant and yet the salience of this fear is rooted in her physical experience of being raped--her memories of the rape, itself, and the way her mind-body chemicals processed the physical violation. 

When we walk down the street together, we alternate between fearing every man and fearing not a single one of them. 

Native American women are 2.5 to 3.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault compared to the statistics of all other races. * 79% of victims of anti-LGBTQ hate crime murders are people of color, with 82% being trans women of color in 2009. * About 9 in 10 Native/American Indian victims of rape or sexual assault were estimated to have had assailants who were of a different race. * In a study of Indian and Pakistani women, Indian and Pakistani women born in the US or who had immigrated before adolescence were more likely to experience physical violence, sexual assault, and stalking compared to those born outside of US or immigrated post-adolescence. * According to a study, Filipina women who were born in the US or immigrated before adolescence were more likely to experience physical and sexual violence (but not stalking) compared to Filipina women born outside the US or immigrated as adults. * Approximately 60% of Black girls experience sexual abuse by age 18. * According to a 2014 study, about 22% of Black women reported being raped and 41% experienced other forms of sexual violence. * While 80% of rapes are reported by white women, women of color are more likely to be assaulted than white women.

The story of a rape is often appropriated by the court and returned to the survivor in legal language. I'm not sure there is justice in a form that leaves out the neverendingness of terror on a street in a world filled with men and their guns and their bombs and their guns and their bombs...

“I’ve been compelled in some ways by describing my circumstances to learn to live with them. It’s not the same thing as accepting them.”

— James Baldwin in an interview with Paris Review

Anxiety is an unusual emotion in that it has no object. Fear has an object. Many times, our emotion management conversations replace natural fear with anxiety which should be controlled. So we miss the point and the raised pulse.

Given vague amorphous feelings—after an abortion, for example—the responses of others define our reactions and frame the space for the appropriate response of what we should feel. When we don’t know how to feel, we are more likely to seek a script. Therefore, what we do feel. Guilt. Misery. Blame. The social construction.

“I blame myself for my part in my crimes. Collusion is too little life, too little love.”

— Jeanette Winterson, ART AND LIES

Darwin thought of emotions as pre-actions, or symbols for deeds. Emotional work therefore requires us to manage bodily prep for a deed. Alienation from one’s emotions is therefore maladaptive and dangerous, fueling deep disconnect and making individual labile to manipulation.

“I’m not trying to be trendy but I’m better at addiction narratives than romance—it’s part of being a realist.”

— Character I can't quite write

Alina to character: "Who did you sell out for?" Find a cause.

The act of asserting the feeling coincides with the feeling itself. We are controlling our envy.

The evangelical idea of sadness as something one consents to feel.

I cannot tell you who to fear.

I will not tell you that the color of a man's skin makes him more or less guilty of rape.

I can swear on my blood that rape makes a man guilty of rape regardless of who he rapes--whether she is rich, poor, citizened, black, brown, white, or "unfuckable," (some defenses against rape charges are rooted in the assessment of how rape-worthy a woman might be).

Protecting rapists because they share our skin color or socioeconomic status make us complicit in the perpetuation of future rapes. At some point, we are responsible for the crimes we erase in order to salvage the heroes we think we need.

But there is no hero to save you in the alley. There is only the truth. And the woman who sells her sisters downstream for a man will find the water tastes a little like poison, a little like fear on her daughter's tongue. 

“Her voice carried the vowels like an old lady watering her favorite potted geraniums carefully, carefully, precious old thing. When what I need most was to see what she’d do when the pot broke. ”

Live in truth.

Marriage, poetry, and how that poem happened

“It is impossible for either side to withdraw now; the only question at stake is whether or not we actively take the initiative. ”

— Xerxes

There is "no middle ground" in the war between Greece and Persia. One must swallow the other. Like marriage.

From last year's notebooks....

---

I cannot text the words to P. as the plane takes off. If I say I love you, the story is finished. He will disappear into a morgue.

So I'm writing a poem inspired by Billy Collins' "Litany". Calling it "Litany with Pina Colada." Playing with Collins uses tercets, or 3-line stanzas, to the slow reader down. Stanzas "as stones in a stream" one must step on to cross. [I can't remember where this got published... or maybe I just read it at poetry readings because it was likable. Unlike so much of the rest.]

"Liberate" is such a strange, aggressive verb--not light or open-ended like free. 

My lover wants to liberate me. My killer wants to imprison me. They are the same man working different shifts. I train the eye to know the man by the uniform. When we cross the border, I will drink a very cold orange juice with ice. I will color my hair red as bolero’s rose. I will sleep through a night. I will take my baby to the doctor for pneumonia. I will let the sun rub my shoulders, fear nothing. I will find my father and uncle. I will be a white man’s hardworking wife. Under my pillow, a knife.

“ She was happy and ready: the happy wife, the ready woman in possession.”

— D. H. Lawrence, "The Blind Man"

And what's the difference between possessing--what we assume marriage grants, a safe haven-- and being possessed? Our complicity, so stark. 

The first five years of married life, the impossible intimacy; being pregnant; the "emotional enthusiast" lacking energy for her spouse. A man taking offense at being comforted for his loneliness; the thundercloud of a feller falling asleep before you. And you assume they understand what you've given up to be a wife. You assume this understanding is enough to build loyalty, but socialization recoils against the need for a wife, the crave of comfort. They hate us for loving us. It's so generic. Like cheese dip.

“We can’t talk about all that the universe contains because to do so would be to render it finite and we know in some way, that we cannot prove, that is infinite. So what the universe doesn’t contain is as significant to us as what it does.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

More than fifty years ago, the Higgs field emerged as an omnipresent expanse of energy that explains why some theoretically-massless particles have mass. The boson was predicted to appear when a particle interacting with the Higgs field excites it. Since physicists could not directly observe the field itself, they looked to bosons for evidence of the field's existence.

Nothing is finished. All of us are beta now, products not ready for official release, the upgrade on the horizon.

Phenomenologically speaking, the swan has yet to dive and its white is soundless. I am fine. Not even wet. My ears ring with crickets and uninvited bullfrog events. A disjunct between two connected places— this grimy lake and the downtown four blocks away. One being the boson to a Higgs field that proves its existence but I am too lazy to discern which.

Again, this lake where most teens in my town get pregnant bears an invisible physical relationship the downtown clinic where they creep behind bodies to secure an abortion. To visit one is to feel potency of the other by implication.

Notebooks: time, Marx, machines, love, tonsils

The struggle for time is the time struggle to feel one's self as a human being and more than just a worker. How do we parse the pain of having only two jobs and no time to read to our children? How do we keep from dehumanizing ourselves and recasting ourselves as ads? How do we stop judging single moms for the demands we make on them-- the punishment for failing to marry a man that works and resents us for it?

Marxism was rooted in the goal of freeing humans from industrial work. Stalin turned Marxism into a raison d'etat, a glorification of work, a production ethic. America is so materialist and non-subtly Stalinesque. Your job defines you.

*

Danish poet Dan Turrell read poems aloud to jazz like Rexroth and Ferlinghetti. He is buried in Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen near Hans Christian Andersen and Kierkegaard.

“The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior.

The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief, or the anger is really about. And what marks out this process of interpretation—and makes it so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship—is its charity….. How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love.”

— Alain de Bottom, The Course of Love

Incorrigible idealist believing the future absolves bleaches of days past. Strange mythoscrotum of roots, fake blonde, cawl and all, commercial skat.

Blaise Pascal had us pegged among the men who seek turmoil as diversion, the object acquired now guilty of failing to elate. Happiness runs on four legs. We don't think to nail the pursuit itself against a wall and leave it for Americans on vacation to purchase.

There is a machine in you. A twinkling tin frame with special buttons. 

As economies shifted towards industrialization, man's success was increasingly likened to his ability to perform machine-like functions. Assemble a motor. The efficiency qualifier. 

The irredeemable flesh of laborers is worth less as the value of machines rises. 

Aubade to skin. 

Threnody of tonsils.

Notebooks: Mary McCarthy, posture, memory, terror

The question posed an empty chair. The author's privilege lies in the ability to stand outside the frame. Is this about me or him?

*

Clouds weigh too much today. Planes coming. People leaving. An old copy of The Story of O. The fear of terror is constant and multi-faceted. The color of my eyes:  a cumulus. 

*

I left my phone in the seatback pocket of Southwest flight to Chicago. After waking up from a dream about the Paris attacks. Then remembering the chaos of September 11th in DC. Feeling sick. It was Friday the 13th, a pop culture scenario. Terrorists are so modern-- chasing secular superstitions on which to lean. As if God gives a flying fuck about Friday the 13th or its sequels.

“I was none of these things but I became them. The qualities of a wife, response to male gaze.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

Posture is a pose that suits the clothes. We select based on what we plan to feel, perform. Anything on Sunday might turn opera.Baroque, rococo-- a hectic harmony. The harmonium.

Mary McCarthy calls memory "a property of mind." Art is made when object of memory is converted by an act of imagination into something present. Her orphan childhood.

In her writing, characters and places grounded by sensations. It is the feeling that forms the memory. Dreams replaced thought and fantasy replaced understanding. Life imbued with mystery. Dreams as a defense mechanism for the stranded child.

Conventions of hiding: "... the true self, like the poor relative, must be taught to keep his distance."

Her mea culpa about fusing two memories-- what occurred and what was written, "...the literary truth had usurped the {actual truth].." (Brightman, 32) The impostor is carried away by her own performance, and elation replaces fear. Giving up her Catholic faith. End of hope for resolution to absent parents.

““Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say ‘shit!’ in front of a lady.””

— D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly's Lover

I've always wondered what Lawrence meant by this. "Chirpy" is almost kin to "stirrup" here. 

*

The mention of Mom at odd intersections, junctures between chocolate and winter coats. The winter coats she purchased for the girls. Red wool dress coats with black velvet collars, a vestige of elegant and the fear that the girls will grow, outgrow the memories of her nurture and care. This world we walk into, soldered. The sundriness of year-old grief.

"Why We Must Struggle" by Kay Ryan

With gratitude to Lucy Jaffe for introducing me to this poem.

Why We Must Struggle 

Kay Ryan

If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble
how loss activates
a latent double how
we can feed
as upon nectar
upon need?

(First published in Poetry, 1992)

The proper form in which to narrate a marriage

from a how-to manual

For as the interior of the house (and we also mean by "house" Marriage) is the female and what is outside the house is male, it follows that whenever I (who am the male) enter the house, which lies passive and horizontal and open unto my comings and goings, and as I wander among its furnishings (which we will call the organs), the overstuffed armchair, the pink sofa, the rich red carpets, and come upon you, surprising you and-- but what more is there to add?

Stanley Crawford, Some Instructions to My Wife (Dalkey Archive, 1985)

from a gender-bending distance

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space.

Jeanette Winterson, "The Art Of Fiction", Paris Review

from inside the belly of the whale, i.e. a requisitioned "man cave"

Sitting in the garage in a nightgown with a typewriter it might be the only time I'm calm.

Wendy Wasserstein, "The Art Of Fiction", Paris Review

from the son's youthful perspective

In his play, she's not quite capable of a real thought without the help of the romantic figure who is remembering her in the first scene... .. my mother isn't immortalized in it, she's plagiarized. She doesn't even get to own her own lines.

Richard Bausch, "Brace", Collected Stories of Richard Bausch

from a birth canal

My granny back in Tennessee was born with the web of a cowl over her head like a wedding veil, and I came into this world wearing that same veil. I see what other's don't. I am wed to the truth and a missionary of it.

Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir

from a couch where one is watching reality TV and unintentionally turning it into a metaphor for performance of marriage gestures

It's about the careful construction of two central narratives: false actualization and authentic shame... it reflects our unrequited yearning for the authentic. Americans are drowning in a cesspool of fake emotion, nearly all of it aimed at getting us to buy junk. 

Steve Almond somewhere

from ancient treatises on wars

It is impossible for either side to withdraw now; the only question at stake is whether or not we actively take the initiative. 

Xerxes on the war between Greece and Persia

from rules in a world imagined by one of your favorite lesbian novelists

Men are best left in groups by themselves where they will entirely wear themselves out in drunkeness and competition. While this is taking place a woman may carry on with her life unhindered.

Your greatest possible strength is that every man believes he knows the sum and possibility of every woman.

Jeanette Winterson, Sexting the Cherry

from inside a seashell where we invest in the power of echoes

If left unused, conversations can grow rusty over time. The opinions and feelings we’ve expressed before, when left to their own devices, can grow sluggish and curmudgeonly. They become too used to sitting alone and unconsidered, and if you ask them to move, their joints can ache, or parts of them can crumble away. Sometimes you can return to an opinion you’ve not visited in years and find it’s died and rotted away  without you even noticing. Sometimes a feeling we assume we’ll have forever can abandon us and leave a gap we don’t notice until we suddenly feel the need to call upon that feeling.

Janina Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray

The abecedarian of abandoned (yet still possible) epigraphs

Acker (Kathy): “I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.”

Beckett: "Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask."

Cortazar: "I am an axolotl for good now, and if I think like a man it's only because every axolotl thinks like a man inside his stony resemblance."

Davis (Lydia): “I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.”

Esteban (Claude): "hobble, my pure spirit, the toads
snigger in their marsh."

Faulkner: "...not the heritage of Ham, not the mark of servitude but of bondage; the knowledge that for a while part of his blood had been the blood of slaves."

Gogol: "But nothing lasts long in this world. Even joy grows less lively the next moment. And a moment later, again, it weakens further. And at last it remerges insensibly with the normal mood, even as the ripple from a pebble’s impact becomes remerged with the smooth surface of the water at large. So Kovalev relapsed into thought again. For by now he had realised that even yet the affair was not wholly ended, seeing that, though retrieved, the nose needed to be re-stuck."

Hoban (Russell): “An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.”

Ionesco: "Nothing goes beyond the why, not even the nothing, because the nothing is not the explanation; when silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence."

James: "There was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse, and how should he screw himself to that if the door he had seen closed were at present open?  He could hold to the idea that the closing had practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance offered him to descend, depart, get off the ground and never again profane it.  This conception held together, it worked; but what it meant for him depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent action, or rather his recent inaction, had engendered.  The image of the “presence” whatever it was, waiting there for him to go—"

Kingsolver: “God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.”

Lispector: “And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”

Mandelstam: "I propose to you, my family, a coat of arms: a glass of boiled water."

Nabokov: "It is fun to be present at the coming true of a dream, even if it is not one's own."

O'Brien (Edna): “There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.”

Paz (Octavio): "...I told her of my life with the wave. Nothing moves women so much as the possibility of saving a man."

Quintais (Luis): "Give what’s left of your future
to that house’s reinforcement.
Give it your attention and your affliction.
Give it the intelligence of your fear."

Rilke: "When I think back to my home, where there is nobody left now, I imagine that formerly this must have been otherwise. Formerly one knew (or perhaps one guessed it) that one had one's death within one, as a fruit its kernel. The children had a little death within them and the grown-ups a big one."

Stendhal: “But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.”

Tsvetaeva: “I have two enemies in all the world, 
Two twins, inseparably fused:
The hunger of the hungry and the fullness of the full.”

Uribe (Kirmen): "Every one of us keeps forever someone else’s hidden side,
If it’s a secret, if a mistake, if a gesture."

Valenzuela (Luisa): “Because fear called her by her name. (Her own name, not fear’s name. Fear doesn’t have a name; it’s just the steady beat underneath a smile."

Winterson (Jeanette): “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.”

X (Malcolm): “How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what is yours?”

Yuknavitch: “That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head. Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever.”

Zapruder: “......I will
never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it, which is why I am standing
here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,
doing what I’m supposed to do.”

Storycorps on World Press Freedom Day

I'm excited to be part of PEN America's #worldpressfreedom interviews. You can listen to the interview on Storycorps here.

New Orleans Poetry Festival, 2017

A four-hour drive to New Orleans in which I caught up on Ezra Klein's podcast and revved myself with excess configurations of Lady Gaga and Slackwax.

Thanks to Maureen "Wonderful" Thorson, I got to sleep in an Airbnb filled with female poets and located blocks away from the New Orleans Poetry Festival's location.

Amazing street art.

After the drive, wandering those blocks between building, getting a little lost, retracing steps, agreeing to lose a little more.

 Reprieve from the sustained visual banality of the interstate. 

Then discovering amazing publications by Tinfish Press and others at the book fair.

Can I pause for a second and plug the magnificence of Timothy Dyke's Atoms of Muses? Incredible book. 

A Tribe Called Quess rocking the mic.

....and hearing the incredible poetry performance of A Scribe Called Quess.

Being blown away.

Tweeting as much.

Buying a book. Asking him to enscribe it for Max, my teenage son.

Asking him to speak through the anger Trump has unleashed into our lives.

Being blown away again. Blown and blowing.

Running into Brooke Champagne on her home turf.

Vaguely discussing French politics.

Sign in a yard in New Orleans.

Wandering again. Eating soup from the co-op.

Pausing to hear open mike performances made possible by Dusie Press.

Coveting babies slung on hips, babies in strollers, babies making the poetry festival rounds with their mothers.

Feeling awkward.

Feeling less awkward while eating.

Feeling perpetually awkward and too self-conscious to write it. Around writers. 

Parked outside the New Orleans Center for Healing Arts.

Remembering the only other time I visited New Orleans was with my mother. Her joy all over the place. Her joy oozing from banjos and street speakers.

Drinking a Trappist beer alone near the waterfront at sunset. Vowing to be social. Failing.

Finding out that every bookstore in New Orleans closes at 5:30 pm!

Drinking another beer. Calling it even. 

Watching kids do P.E.-like things in a dirt courtyard. Wondering why.

About all of it.

Putting on deodorant.

Putting on my mother's special necklace from Taos.

Deciding what to read while sitting at a table with Maureen, Jessica, and Michelle. Being grateful. 

Being grateful again for the beautiful mammals from Negative Capability Press.

Missing the presence of Sue Brannan Walker.

Eating alligator cheesecake.

Meeting Carlos Matos, poet pugilist.

Meeting so many incredible poets whose work inspires and provokes me.

Coven Press Reading, the best, the best, the best....

Jessica Smith's enchanted Coven Press hosted a two-hour reading on Friday, and Claire Trevien (fuck typepad's lack of accent marks) was amazing enough to record it for Sabotage Review.

At which point she is grateful to the audience that remains at the end of the 2-hour reading marathon.

I read bits and pieces from a forthcoming prose poetry collection, Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus, set to be published by Finishing Line Press in September 2017, and felt generally drained by my own lukewarm performance. On the other hand, I was invigorated by readings from Heidi Lynn Staples, Vane Pacheco, Lisa Samuels, Ginger Ko, Maureen Thorson, and Michelle Detorie. 

You can read Claire's coverage of the New Orleans Poetry Festival here and here, including the eye on J. D. Scott's amazing Sacred Grove Reading Series, a staple of the Tuscaloosa literary community.