I was on vacation last week, so I’m a bit late to the take on this, but I just wanted to give a huge high-five to a couple of my favorite journals, PANK and Annalemma, for their inclusion in a recent New York Times article highlighting the literary journal as an art form. It’s so rad to see such great work get such great recognition.
I mean, have you seen this monster yet? It’s amazing. The table of contents is like a jillion pages long and full of goodness.
My favorites so far are the winners of the 1000 Words contest in the back. There’s a really, really good story by our own Tyler Gobble, and also a fantastic piece by one of my favorite writers (and one of my Shut Up/Look Pretty co-authors) Erin Fitzgerald.
If you don’t own this yet, you need to remedy that. Lit mags are expensive so I’ve had to stop subscribing to many–but the one I make sure and pick every year is PANK. Roxane and Matt and crew do such a nice job and it looks so damn good every time and the writing is just unreal. You guys. Get it.
Sometimes, no matter how much we try or how much we want to, we can’t get rid of things. They are constant, stagnant.
You confound me every day. You are not who you look like. You are not you. Look at your tiny eyes and lips.
Their value dissipated, they remain. The way we can’t get rid of memories, the smell of cigarettes. The way that we can’t stop taking what we read and applying it to what we know, what we have. When I read this piece, published at [PANK] by Rachel Bunting, after my brain slowed down and my eyes seemed able to see again, I couldn’t get it out of me. It refused to go away.
Oh how you hate to be humid.
I read it over and then I read it again. Today, I went back to it. I printed it off and read it out loud and then I pinned it on my wall. And now, as I read it once more to write about it, all I can think is that some things keep coming back. That this piece could be read a hundred times and not lose its value.
Your sharp edges. Yes, you confound me.
A while back I vouched for Ravi Mangla‘s selections from his visiting writer’s series over at Outlet, Pank, and Everyday Genius. Well here’s some awesome for you: Uncanny Valley Press just released a 23 stories from the series as an ebook. Even better, it’s free and very well designed!
Here’s a sneak peak:
1954
Vladimir Nabokov bought my daughter a chess set, with pieces carved from sandalwood by hand. Every little girl should own a chess set, he said, and my daughter nodded in feigned agreement, eager to rejoin her friends. Late afternoon, once the guests had left, my wife sent me to collect the plates and glasses from the backyard. And there was Nabokov, crouched in the garden, his pant cuffs folded to his knees, following a caterpillar across his finger.
No, not that time of the month (though maybe it is, and if so, I’m terribly sorry; my empathy for the fairer gender runs deep). The time I’m referring to is when I open my Google Reader and see new feeds from The Collagist, PANK, DOGZPLOT, and Word Riot.
The Collagist is out of the gate with excerpts from Blake Butler’s new memoir, Nothing: a Portrait of Insomnia, and Nick Antosca’s Fires. Work by Lincoln Michel, Kate Lorenz, Luke Geddes, Gregory Sherl, and Joseph Scapellato caught my breath.
DOGZPLOT delivered with a lack of animal evidence by Peter Schwartz and a stinging serpent by Nicola Belte.
And Word Riot you’ll just have to check back for later, because their feed posts before their page updates, so I’m probably a jerk for telling you how good it is now. If you’re really curious, just subscribe to their feed. You won’t be disappointed, month after month, you won’t be.
My friend Rima says I use too many commas. She’s probably right, and okay. Just last weekend, I was out to breakfast with my friend Micah, and the lack of an Oxford comma caused me to misread the menu. I talked too much about this to my server. Micah said she probably thought I was trying to hit on her. I was not. I was just trying to let the world know I give a fuck about an Oxford comma.
David Wanczyk has an awesome This Modern Writer essay up at PANK Blog about commas, those little things we think too much or not enough about. I think a lot about a comma these days.
My great poetry teacher, William Stewart, used to tell us that he fell in love with language when he realized a simple statement about the weather could be reordered in nearly innumerable ways. On Sunday there may be thunder all through the region. On Sunday, there may be, all through the region, thunder. As a stormy college student, I thought I was learning an elementary lesson. Now, though, I see the small difference in connotation that the reorganization can bring, and it can be hard to know where to put the thunder.
Last January, I came home from work to a burgled home. They’d taken my laptop, a jar of coins, our television, and some other odds and ends. Along with the violation, there’s a strange pompousness that comes to being burgled, an assumption that I owned what another wanted.
I found myself wanting to talk to the burglars, to say that ever lifting phrase, “If you just would have asked…” which is bullshit of course, a way of making me feel better about my station. When people come to my door, I’m immediately suspicious, I keep the storm door between us, I look beyond them. I rarely give a solicitor at my door a fiver, let alone a TV or my laptop.
I’d be interested in how people read this story by Jones over at PANK. Do you read it as envy? As an affair? Is an affair a sort of burglary? Is burglary out of envy or necessity or both: like how rape is so often thought of as a crime of passion, but it’s more a crime of power? Are there any psychologists in the house?
Carol decided to burglarize her neighbor’s house. She was a friend of the family, but there were things she wanted that the family had. She was tired of seeing the things, leaving them for the family. She wore a ski mask and used a flashlight. She went in late at night, when no one was home, except the husband. The wife and the kids were out of town visiting with relatives. They would not be back for days, and Carol knew it, so she could take her time getting the things she wanted. Sometimes when the family went away, they left her in charge of the dog, so she had a set of keys that the woman had made for her years ago.
The dog greeted her when she opened the door, its tail wagging. It was a big dog with a dopey disposition—the kind of animal that always seemed to be smiling at his own thoughts. Carol fed it treats from her pocket as she made her way through the house. First she went down the hall to where the children slept. In their room two walls were painted pink, for the little girl, and the other two walls were painted blue, for the little boy. Carol had a gigantic garbage bag. It was the kind of bag you use for things that break through lesser bags. She went to the beds and put all the things that kept the children warm at night into her bag. She took their pillows and their blankets. She took all of the stuffed animals that had been tucked underneath the covers. She took the nightlight, too.
Out for pizza tonight, my wife, our friend Andi, and I somehow settled on the topic of the survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes Mountains and had to resort to cannibalism to survive. I don’t know. Conversation is weird, man. I’m terrified of it sometimes.
We leave today for a camping trip. Along the Kentucky/Indiana border runs a line of whiskey distilleries known as the Bourbon Trail. We are going there. We will not have to resort to cannibalism, which is probably a good thing.
“If we get really lost in here,” Aphra says, “I might kill and eat you.”
“If we get really lost in here,” says Seth, “I’ll cut off your arm and we can roast it over a spit.”
Aphra and Seth are driving through the Angeles National Forest and the GPS lady has no idea where they are. Aphra’s car’s a mess, picnic remains crowding the backseat: a Ziploc containing three apple cores, two avocado stones, and half a tomato; another Ziploc containing two spoons and a cutting knife; a nearly empty multigrain crackers box and a half-drunk bottle of wine; tomato-streaked plates. As they watch the sky darken, they are thinking words like “bluff” and “crag,” but they aren’t sure these are the right words. They only know words like these from stories, but this is close to what they pictured.
“What about your arm?” Aphra says. She says this, but she doesn’t mean it. Aphra’s never eaten meat before, not that she can remember, and she prefers the idea of eating her own meat to eating Seth. She figures this means she might not love Seth, but she also figures she probably already knows that.
Deeper into eastern Kentucky is the Red River Gorge area. What they speak of, “bluffs” and “crags” exist there, beautiful sandstone. I don’t get to climb much anymore. I miss it. I miss the tiredness in my hands, the sting of busted skin left on the rock, the burning of muscles and tendons. I miss the language of it–’biners and gri gri’s, crimps and pockets and jugs, throws and dynos.
We’re not going deep enough into Kentucky for that. We’re not going deep enough to find ourselves without sustenance, in that animal spiral where all you know is thirst and the burning of your belly. We’re not going deep enough for any of that.
I’m posting late today. It’s been a crazy week getting ready for Vouched Presents and managing general life stuff. But, I’m determined not to miss a day of SSM, so here is today, “Porch” by David Cotrone over at PANK.
Over the phone, a woman I used to see tells me about her nightmares. What do you know about dreaming, I think.
“I couldn’t even begin to tell you,” she says. From the bathroom, the washing machine clicks off.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Try.”
“Well,” she says, “one time I was stuck lying on the floor, looking at the ceiling of our old house.”
We had decided to move in together too quickly, the counselor had said; we had committed to something without leaving room to breathe.
“There was a small crack in the plaster, and it kept growing, slow. I wanted to close my eyes but I couldn’t. I wanted to go outside but I couldn’t.”
A few months ago, I was dreaming very vivid, very strange dreams. They were strange in that they seemed very real, but something very slight was off about them. They were like a series of photos I saw at a senior thesis gallery show at Ball State a few years ago–manipulated photos. The photos for all intents and purposes were nothing spectacular. Interesting compositions. Sharp focus. But the subject matter wasn’t all too interesting.
But there was something deeply unsettling about them to me. They stayed with me a good while, and after a week of not being able to get them out of my mind, I went back to the gallery to look at them more, and that’s when I noticed the manipulations, ever, ever so slight. In one photo, the artist had simply removed the shadow from a bench and light post. In another, the artist had removed the support posts for a handicap railing, so the railing looked like it was suspended in air.
It was a striking moment for me, how a manipulation so simple could have weaved its way into me without me even noticing at first look. All I knew was something was off, but I couldn’t parse it until after a week of that unsettling sitting on my mind.
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