Posts Tagged: Smart People Saying Smart Things

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The New Testament, Citizen, and Forgiveness Forgiveness: Contemporary Poetry on the Politics of Race

In light of the recent epidemic of racially charged violence and two grand jury decisions not to indict the policemen responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, I would like to draw attention to three newly published poetry collections that deserve consideration within the current dialogue on blackness: The New Testament by Jericho Brown, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, and Forgiveness Forgiveness by Shane McCrae. These three books have garnered much attention on their individual merit, but deserve consideration in terms of the conversation we should be having about race relations in America.

A poetry book is a kind of rumination. For the average poetry collection to go from the seed of an idea to an ISBN number takes at least 2-3 years—even for relatively established poets like Rankine, Brown and McCrae. All three books were released within a month of each other and, based on their overlapping subject matter, one might suppose these varying depictions of the expendability of black lives result from the July 13, 2013 Trayvon Martin case verdict. But, assuming a typical publication schedule, these books would have been in the editing stages by the time George Zimmerman’s acquittal made headlines.

I say this because The New Testament, Citizen, and Forgiveness Forgiveness all bear testimony to the importance of poets amidst the voices that respond to today’s atrocities. The fact that these books focus our attention of varying views of blackness, of black masculinity, of disappearance, of youth—while our newsfeeds fill with the loss of one black life, after another black life, after another—is more strategic than anomalous.

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Interview with 2013 Fiction Prize Finalist: Lisa Beebe

lisabeebeWhile you’re waiting to hear the results of our 2014 Fiction Prize, or getting your essays ready for the November 15 opening date of our inaugural nonfiction contest, why not check our this interview with Lisa Beebe–the venerable finalist for our 2013 Fiction Prize–whose story, “Wildflowers,” appears in Indiana Review issue 36.1? Answered here are questions asked her about her piece, the benefits of being open to discovery, and using your phone to this end.

After your check out the interview, be sure to read “Wildflowers” online here.

Lisa Beebe lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Pacific Review, Psychopomp and Switchback. Find her online at lisabeebe.com.

 

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Interview with 2013 Fiction Prize Winner: Summer Wood

lightning field portraitSummer Wood’s astonishing story, “Boomerang,” won our 2013 Fiction Prize, judged by Claire Messud. Messud called Wood’s story “impressive” and “profoundly moving,” and praised its facility with moving “seamlessly between the narrator’s present voice. . .and his childhood experiences.” We’re particularly proud to have published this story in Indiana Review issue 36.1—and you can now read Wood’s moving piece on our site. Here Wood discusses how this piece came to her and in what form, the difficult notion of unconditional love, and the hard work of writing toward understanding.

1. Starting broadly, what was the inspiration for this piece? Do you find it has anything in common with your other work?

The first section, the two boys playing frisbee at dusk with the dog, came out of the blue—and yet I was pretty sure that it contained everything the story would mean, or be. It was just a feeling, but it panned out. The frisbee, the title, the collarbone, the whole throw-and-return action seemed vital to Jack’s experience of the world. In that way, I guess it’s like all my work; some weird thing plunks itself down in front of me and I write my way toward understanding it. Not intellectually, but through the medium of the story.

2. What was most difficult for you in writing this story?

Without question, the most difficult and painful part was having to explore Jack’s father’s role. I knew the shirt was crucial but I had to push on to understand why. And when Jack reports that his father said that they’d love their son “no matter what”—that about killed me. We talk about unconditional love but most of the time we’re talking shit. What we mean is we’ll overlook this thing about you. Not we love you, fully, as you are—something different. Which is not bad, but when you get down to it, it’s really painful. I guess a lot of the story concerns that: what we see, what we think we see, what we allow ourselves to see, what we refuse to see. And how that affects the ways we’re able to relate to one another.

3. Your character Jack is made so real. Did you have a particular technique or ambition in first developing his character?

Jack had no trouble speaking for himself. His voice came on fully formed, and since the story is so much about how he puzzles through what’s happened to his friend and to himself, I just had to listen to him amble through the process. My concern was that, well, first-person POV characters lie a lot. It’s something I like about them. But I wanted to be sure that Jack caught himself in every lie he told. So that’s part of the recursive bit of the story: this, but—no. This. And at the end, the doubling-back—the seeing himself double back—is, maybe, the truest part of him.

Also, there’s Spot. Nothing like a dog in the mix to reveal character.

4. Did you know, starting out, how the story would look in its final form, or did this piece undergo any transformation?

I had no idea how this story would go. I knew I wanted to find out what would happen to the dog, and to Jack, and to his friend Easton, but I had no preconceptions. I do know that the story caught a surge of energy when certain things came in. Plot points, sure—but also place. The bramble. And Chet. Once Chet came in, I thought, uh oh. Here we go, now. But the story pretty much fell together in three main sittings, and then a fair amount of line-level work. That’s not always the case for me. I think the structure lent itself to that, and I’m grateful.

Summer Wood is the author of novels Raising Wrecker (Bloomsbury) and Arroyo (Chronicle Books). Her non-fiction work has appeared or is forthcoming in National Geographic Traveler, Flyway, and other venues. The recipient of a WILLA Prize and the Literary Gift of Freedom from A Room of Her Own Foundation, Wood teaches writing at the University of New Mexico’s Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. www.summerwoodwrites.com

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Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

Even on its surface, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is a beautifully constructed spiderweb of a novel. It begins with the death of Arthur Leander, an aging actor, and expands outward. On the same snowy night, a deadly Georgian Flu breaks out in North America and spreads quickly, completely wiping out 99 percent of the population. Moving back and forth in time, the narrative weaves together the lives of Arthur’s ex-wife, his college friend, the paramedic who tries to revive him, and, most centrally, Kristen Raymonde, the eight-year old child actress who witnesses his death.
Fifteen years after the collapse, Kristen is performing Shakespeare plays with the Traveling Symphony, a ragtag group of musicians and actors who wander through the half-formed settlements of the new world. Painted on their caravan is the Star Trek quote, “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they encounter a violent prophet, the symphony must once again fight to maintain their fragile existence.
At once sprawling and intimate, Station Eleven is less interested in the gore of the epidemic than it is in the aftermath, the different ways humans embark on the painstaking process of rebuilding. Both before and after the epidemic, Mandel’s complex characters grapple with the same questions, searching across an impersonal world for connection and meaning and hope.
While traveling with the symphony, Kristen remembers flying on airplane as a child. “She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations liked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness. . .” For me, Station Eleven is that pinpoint of light, that faint voice coming through a dark tunnel, a prayer for the modern world.

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Laura Spence-Ash’s “The Remains”

Lately, my Christmas list consists of a series of subscriptions to lit journals, and this year I was lucky enough to get One Story—and even luckier that the first booklet that landed in my mailbox was Laura Spence-Ash’s “The Remains.” Spence-Ash tells the story of Mrs. Constantine in five distinct sections, from five points-of-view, none of them Mrs. Constantine’s. We meet the main character, in fact, by meeting her corpse, which has been decaying in her half of a Queens duplex for months. One of the remarkable and memorable components of this piece is the care and attention Spence-Ash brings to her choice of characters who fill out the—well, the remains—of Mrs. Constantine.

The cast includes a spectrum of familiarity to the woman, and in that way, a spectrum of peculiarity when we remember that Mrs. Constantine’s remains have gone unnoticed for nearly a year. The police sergeant who discovers her and the reluctant seamstress who used to do her alterations could hardly be blamed for not realizing the woman hasn’t been around in some time. But when Spence-Ash introduces Mrs. Constantine’s next door neighbor, a young mother who admits to herself that she smelled something strange earlier in the year, I began to question my own passivity and the ease with which we can explain away truths that are uncomfortable. Spence-Ash raises the stakes with Bob MacMillan, Mrs. Constantine’s old boss, who called the police when she stopped showing up to work, but has quietly resigned to her absence. In a heartbreaking final section, we meet Mrs. Constantine’s ex-husband, a man who has moved on where the dead woman could not.

“The Remains” captures brief moments and realizations that each of these characters go through, pulling together deft outlines of what the lonely death means for them all, while also constructing a subtle portrait of the deceased. Perhaps my favorite part of this story, however—which I first read in January and think about and re-read regularly—is the little note in Ms. Spence-Ash’s bio which informs us that “this is her first published story.”