Buried Letter Press April 2012 Š Buried Letter Press 2011-2012 Cover design by Matthew C. Mackey
Buried Letter Press Akron, Ohio
Proper noun: 1. the particular magazine dedicated to innovative and quality criticism of art in all of its various forms, such as literature, music, film and theater, visual art, etc. 2. a provision of encouragement to artists and patrons worldwide
~BURIED LETTER PRESS~
APRIL 2012 ISSUE Sherman Alexie is the Story by Molly Fuller The Mess by Saul Duluth Women’s Voices by SLM Young What Would You Do with $78,000? An Interview with Julia Nunes by Robert Balla Inglorious Blaze by Brian Young Place and Movement: A Look into Jeff Grieneisen’s book Good Sumacs by Matthew C. Mackey CIFF: A Cinemagical Festival by Robert Miltner
6.
Sherman Alexie is the Story by Molly Fuller Sherman Alexie, Native American writer, poet, screenwriter, but, most of all, comic stage presence, walks onto the stage with a body mic that isn’t working. “Hello,” he says. Those in the back row aren’t able to hear him. The speakers suddenly crackle to life with a loud boom. “You all jumped,” he says. “I love my power.” The audience laughs. As he begins his story, moving his arms this way and that, the mic snaps and crackles. “I feel like I’m beat boxing,” he says, leaning over, unclipping the mic from his tie. The mic is then switched out for a handheld one. “Hello, hello,” he says tapping the head of the microphone, looking at us, exaggeratedly perplexed. “Is this thing on?” The audience is laughing. The mic situation is finally resolved. “Shall we start again?” he asks. It is about body language, facial expressions, rolling with these kinds of performance setbacks; Alexie has the audience mesmerized. We are leaning toward him, anticipatory, waiting for his next antic. “I was born in Spokane, Washington in 1966,” he begins. I hear two people whispering behind me, one to the other, “Write that down,” but I am already lost in the performance. To take notes would be to miss the actual thing happening in front of me. He plays to the audience throughout his lecture. “How many of you are here because you have to be?” he asks. “Raise your hands.” A group of young students sitting on the side of the stage raise their hands. “Why are you sitting over there?” he asks. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice you? Sitting on the side?” We all laugh. “How old are you?” “Eighteen,” they answer. “You look twelve.” He shakes his head. “This is where I am at,” he says. “I can’t tell the difference between college and high school students anymore.” He talks about his writing, he tells stories, he improvises; it all starts with the story of having hydrocephaly as a child and he uses this childhood story, growing up on the Indian reservation, as a baseline to go off on tangents of his choosing, weaving this way and that, wherever the mood strikes him. He even talks about this process on the stage. Being on stage, for Alexie, is about being able to connect with his audience. He stops in the middle of a story and plays to the audience, charmingly flirting with a couple in the first row: “Are you holding her hand?” he asks. “She’s thinking about me, you know.” The audience laughs. Then,
he switches direction, and begins to hit on the man, saying he likes the man’s tie and then, he stops, backs up, and addresses the rest of the audience. He talks about the fluidity of his performance, talks about why he doesn’t read from his work, because “that would be fucking boring,” about why he likes the freedom to go where he pleases while he is on stage, to perhaps hit on a man in the front row, then, he pauses, says this is his opportunity to show he is comfortable with his sexuality (Alexie is married with two children). That this flexibility in this performance process allows him to address an issue that is important to him: marriage equality. Then he launches into a tangent about marriage equality, finally circling back in to his main story again, always bringing it back to his main story. “So,” he says, “I got four holes drilled in my brain. The doctor told my mother I was going to wake up a vegetable and she asked, “What kind of vegetable?” Instead of telling us how to tell a story, Alexie shows us the story; he is, himself, the story, onstage. Another story he tells us is about the revision process of the “canned chicken story.” He tells a terribly funny story about government food on the reservation and canned chicken, then, he goes back to it and tells us how he arrived at that particular telling of the story. We hear the final version first and we laugh because the story has been perfected, and then we learn about the process behind the story. We learn about the way the story came together. We learn that this is perhaps the fifteenth rendition of that story and we come to understand the different details that may have been removed or re-negotiated in this story. We find out that Alexie’s favorite part of the story was something that happened on stage, while he was telling the story and that he imagined, in the telling of the story on stage one night, opening the can and seeing this horrible canned chicken in his head and the words came out of his mouth on stage: “naked alien baby fetus.” Some things just happen in the moment. It is a magical instant of realization about process for the audience. He didn’t tell us: here is how you revise something; he showed us. Another important thing that Alexie does in his work and does onstage is try to dispel the myth of Indian as Shaman/mystic. He says, “I’m just a writer. I’m not a Shaman. We’re just people, just like you.” A person at the end of the lecture, in the question and answer session, seems to have missed Alexie’s point. The person asks Alexie if there are stories that his grandmother might have passed down to him from the reservation, if any, or if the stories have all been lost. It is an uncomfortable moment for me and I’m not sure what kind of answer is being sought, but Alexie uses it as a teaching moment. He says, “There is a misconception that Indians have lost their culture. Let’s play a game.” He has any of the audience members who are of European descent stand up and asks how many know a native European tongue, participate in a European ceremony on a weekly basis, have visited the European homeland, if any know who their great, great, great grandparents are. For any of these things that one might answer “no” to, the person must sit. At the end of this, only about 20 out of 200 people are left standing; Europeans have failed miserably. “You’re so disconnected from your roots,” he says, “Us Indians, we feel bad for you.” The audience laughs; point taken. For Alexie, because his stories are ever-evolving, always changing, taking on a new life in their retelling; stories cannot be lost. They are simply put together in new ways; they are not linear, but circular, triggered by memories, events, and people—he tells us about calling his mother and
how she is the one who reminded him of the canned chicken and once he was reminded of it, then it became his story to adapt and use and retell. This is the way the art of storytelling works, he tells us, it is not an A to B process, but one that is messy and involves talking to people and engaging with others and we can feel this reciprocity, in this moment, as his audience. We feel the love he has for these stories, that are at once coming from him and are about him, and we experience this affection with Alexie because, through his honest and engaged storytelling process, he makes us feel that maybe we have helped to fashion this particular story about the man standing before us who has transcended storyteller and become the story itself.
T
he Mess
by Saul Duluth
I’m a mess. I know because my parents keep telling me, and this last mistake was another in a long line of serious failures. Just when I thought I had it this time, my life was again in chaos. But, I had had the experience, I could say that. I wondered if I was making the right decision, but I knew I was. As an artist, my life is about taking risks, going head-first down into that rabbit hole over and over again. How else will I learn? I need to have experiences, make mistakes, and reflect on failures, really take chances in order to truly understand myself as a person, and especially as an artist. As artists, we are restless, we are questioning, and we do not take the surface level for granted. We see connections between things that others do not. We are critical and creative thinkers; oftentimes, we mine our past experiences for creative material. In this case, my messiness has its advantages, because I rely on myself for source material. But, as outside-of-the box thinkers, artists often do not see things as they are, but as they could be. This is a bit of a disadvantage, leading me to take risks that otherwise “sane” people would not take. But this is what being an artist, for me, is all about: We often take risks, we often are messy and restless and questioning because this is how we arrive at what matters to us. In, “The Creative Process,” James Baldwin writes, “Society must accept some things as real; but he [the artist] must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen. A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven. One cannot possibly build a school, teach a child, or drive a car without taking some things for granted. The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.” To live a messy life is to expose life for what it truly is: a thin veneer over chaos. As an artist and a creative thinker, I take chances, and sometimes I take chances that I shouldn’t take. But I’ve come to see this as part of my creative process. Sometimes these risks work out, sometimes they don’t. When they work out in my writing—I try a phrasing, a different wording, and I end up creating a story that moves people—it is a beautiful thing. However, my messiness can be frustrating. I often frustrate others. Creativity is messy and frustrating. It is loud and bizarre and it can’t be put in a box and packed away for later, but, as
artists, if we are lucky, sometimes transcendent things happen: we create art out of this messiness, out of this despair and hopelessness and longing that we often feel too deeply or inflict unwittingly onto others. Life is hard for people who refuse to quit thinking. Look at Hemingway, Plath, Van Gogh, Diane Arbus, Frida Kahlo, Mark Rothko and the list goes on and on; seeing the world in all of its terror and complexity is a messy, alienating thing. Creating art is a process and so is life. If you live your life like this creative process, it is bound to get ugly at times, but this shouldn’t be something we are afraid of as artists. To live as an artist is to be brave, it is to live knowing that you are doing what you need to do to make your art happen and if that means fucking up, crawling back home, not always knowing where that next paycheck is coming from or if the duct tape on your car is going to hold until tomorrow, remember it’s a choice that you are making and that is better than playing it safe, wondering if you can do this artistic thing, because you are doing it, you are living the creative process right now in all of its messy glory.
Women’s Voices by SLM Young
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” asks Muriel Rukeyser. Her answer: “The world would explode.”
How do we categorize a writer such as Joan Didion? Or M.F.K. Fisher? Or Anais Nin? We try to place them all into a genre, or a pigeon-hole; we say that Joan Didion is a New Journalist and M.F.K. Fisher was a food writer. Anais Nin was a diarist. Diane Ackerman is a nature writer; Virginia Woolf was an essayist; Caroline Knapp, a columnist. We strip all we can away from their writing to place it somewhere we understand, under a heading that makes sense to us. It is not enough to say they can all be categorized as writers of nonfiction, or creative nonfiction, especially since that moniker has a difficult enough time on its own trying to be defined and respected. The larger question, however, seems to be why we feel the need to categorize them at all. Will the bestowing of a genre, or a subheading within some genre, give these women respect or legitimacy in their writing? Or is this naming merely one more way women can be objects rather than subjects, one more way to deny a woman’s being and her ability to say, “I”? Do we ask what James Joyce was trying to pull writing The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? How could he expect people to believe this book to be true? The truth of the matter is we do not question Joyce’s methods for telling his story. In fact, there are many who hail him and his methods. We certainly do not call him a liar. We call him a novelist, one who uses his life as subject for his writing. Women writers, however, who use their lives as subject, are, for some reason, called liars. When I took my first nonfiction class, we began by reading the “big guns”: we started with the father of essay, Michel de Montaigne, progressed through Lamb and Hazlitt, read Phillip Lopate and Virginia Woolf and Joan Didion, but it was not until we began reading a woman named M.F.K. Fisher that I truly understood the meaning of nonfiction. I used to say that the teacher of this class taught me to write, but now I know he just opened the door. Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher taught me how to write. She was a writer her entire life and made her living from writing. Certain pigeonholers call her a food writer, but the smart critics and readers know she was more than that. In her book, The Gastronomical Me, she put it best: People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it
accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one. Fisher was a woman who wrote about life as she saw it, felt it. She wrote about pleasure and pain, food and drink, love and death. She wrote the truth as she knew it. This, truth, is the basis for nonfiction; it must be. I teach my students that truth and fact are not the same thing. Fact is undeniable. Fact is cold. Fact is, on the whole, uninteresting. Truth, on the other hand, is necessarily different for each person. It is dependent on one’s history and experiences and perspective. Truth is personal. I believe the writers of nonfiction make a contract with their readers. They say, I am telling you the truth, as I know it to be. I am not promising that my memory is infallible, but I am also not creating people or events to write a better story. If I wanted to do that, I would just write a novel. Historically, the idea of man as writer and subject, woman as listener and object, seems simple. It is the idea of expectations. Men are conquerors, rulers, and warriors, and it makes perfect sense that men write their stories down. Men do important things, things that need to be remembered. Barrett John Mandel states in “The Autobiographer’s Art” that “the appeal of great men vanishes by degrees if they do not leave something memorable behind them.” Women do housework, raise children, and take care of men. What could women possibly have to write about that anyone would want to read? Despite the fact that women, biologically, are creators, they are not valued as creators. To be valued, means to be respected, to be viewed as someone with something important to say, and it seems as if women will always be considered as other, as less than men. Much of what is at question here is not just the writer, or her purpose, but the audience, or how a piece of writing is received. Men-as-subject is easily and readily received into academia. The canon is proof of this. My academic career, which was made up of reading upon reading written by old, white men, is proof of this. Men and women, whether as a cause of biology or societal influence, perceive the world differently. Much of what is at stake for us is not just category— whether a book is autobiography or fiction—but value. Throughout history, it has always been more difficult for a woman and her thoughts and her words to be considered valuable. I believe this, in part, has to do with the difference in perspective between men and women, but also in our definition of what autobiography is: the means by which we tell our stories. According to Barrett John Mandel, “Autobiography is a retrospective account of a man’s whole life (or a significant part of a life) written as avowed truth and for a specific purpose by the man who lived the life.” I would posit that the purpose of autobiography as defined above is to record a life, to document it, and to provide evidence in the argument that one’s own life has meaning. The autobiography works to add permanence to a life through the process of writing it down, but I believe it also works to make sense of a life. The process of writing aids in creating a distance by which we can hope to view our lives from the perspective of an outsider, which may
help us and others to interpret it, to find meaning in its events, our actions and decisions, the relationships we have had, and the accomplishments and failures we have produced. By looking critically at the aspects of our lives, we may hope to understand ourselves and to have others remember us. This act of remembering is the main purpose of autobiography. The process of remembering and then interpreting those memories for a reader, however, is not an infallible one. As a result of time and perspective and experience, our memories may change. It is for this reason that there is always some inherent doubt in the telling of one’s story and in the reading of someone else’s. Most of us are not journalists reporting on our own lives. We are busy with the living. It is impossible to remember everything—every person we have ever met, every word we have ever spoken, every experience we have ever had all through our lives. And for its purpose, autobiography does not attempt or claim to attempt such a feat. Autobiography merely attempts to record the important events of a life, and perhaps this is the reason why men are considered autobiographers, and women are not, because women do not live important lives. A woman’s perspective, and a man’s perspective of a woman, is probably the most significant reason for women’s supposed inability to write autobiography. The way a woman’s mind works is different than a man’s. Perhaps this stems from the seemingly necessary act of a man to include a wide view of the world. For men, the world is seen through a wide lens, a telescopic lens. He sees the world as a political scape, whereas a woman sees the detail in the pattern on the curtain covering the world from her view. She sees the world through a microscopic lens, where all things are close up and personal to her. What a woman believes important seems inherently different from that of a man. Joan Didion describes this experience, this perspective, perfectly in her essay, “Why I Write”: My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. My belief of what nonfiction writing is varies from Mandel’s belief mostly in the idea of interpretation. Mandel believes that “the autobiographer must limit himself to the retrospection.” I believe the very thing that is interesting about nonfiction is the moving beyond mere retrospection into interpretation. This is where women can truly force their way into the picture. The basis for their perspective, which seems to be the intimate and personal, suits women better for introspection, for the finding of meaning in one’s life, rather than a simple recollection of a life. As a result, if we must define personal writing done by women as anything, then perhaps we should cease attempting to call it autobiography, but something else, perhaps memoir. Memoir, another category within autobiography, is thought of as an eye-witness account. Vivian Gornick states that the goal of memoir is “emotional and not literal truth.” As a result of their intimate perspective, this truth is exactly what women seem more suited to seek. The solution then is not to re-categorize women’s writing from fiction to autobiography, but to redefine the term autobiography to be inclusive of the way women view the world and not limited to a man’s perspective of what and who is important.
Further complicating the categorization of women as autobiographers is the belief that in society a woman’s responsibility is to keep silent, to remain an object. If a woman is bold enough to speak her truth, to make her view of the world known, then men must face the reality of who we are, what we think, and that our place is not necessarily meant to be below them. If a woman’s “job” is to keep the family together, to keep the world together, then speaking of her life—an act that might be compared to letting go—she also forfeits her duty, her silence, and her submissiveness, in other words, she claims her life as her own and not as only a part of a man’s life. A woman who no longer upholds her responsibility as complicit in the male fantasy of supremacy and domination is dangerous. A woman writing of herself and her life is, therefore, also dangerous. Joan Didion, in her essay “Why I Write,” explains what it means to be subject, to be writer: In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space. A woman who writes is acting, according to Didion, aggressively, a behavior that is the opposite of what, at least traditionally, a woman should embody. If a woman is supposed to be pure, domestic, and submissive, then writing of herself would be seen as treachery, traitorous, and sinful in the face of her societal expectations. A woman who writes her own story must be willing to face the same problem she faces in society—the desire of others to silence her—a woman writer must be strong enough to say “I” and mean it. A woman silenced is a woman victimized, and I believe making women’s writing illegitimate, by calling her a liar, we are silencing her voice. In therapy, in order to “forgive the unforgivable,” victims are instructed to name, claim, and blame: name their injury; claim their injury; and blame the injurer. This seems a perfectly reasonable approach to women’s writing. Women must give voice to their stories (name). Women must accept their voices as valuable (claim). Women must hold society responsible if it fails to listen (blame). I am a woman writer of nonfiction. I tell the truth as I know it. A writer my entire life, I have not yet leapt over the hurdle of my own silence, the fear of my own voice, and my lack of confidence in my importance in and to the world. I have been silenced as all women have been silenced. My thesis advisor helped to silence me by stating that my view of the world was too insular, and therefore, too unimportant. My college boyfriend helped to silence me the night I said no, and he didn’t listen. My mother helped to silence me by never listening enough, never believing enough. I still work to rebel against silence. It is only in words that I am known. I am remembered of Rukeyser, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Let’s find out. Let’s listen, and let us all find out.
What Would You Do with $78,000? An Interview with Julia Nunes by Robert Balla A couple weeks ago, I was talking with my friend Jason from the music blog To Eleven: One Louder about the incredible proliferation of independent music on the internet. He writes about music all the time, and I troll the web watching YouTube videos of indie bands all day instead of writing as I should be, so we both consider ourselves experts. Over a beer or two, we realized that many of our friends (and I use the word loosely) complain about what they see as a glut of mediocre musicians with a modicum of talent who clog the internet with crap as they try vainly and in vain to become celebrities. Sure, there’s a lot of this out there, but almost simultaneously, Jason and I said, “But without YouTube or Pitchfork, Julia Nunes would never have been discovered.” “Hell yeah!” we both yelled. I asked if he had his ticket yet for her February 24th show at the Beachland Tavern. He did and told me he was even interviewing Julia before the show. So was I. If you don’t know who Julia Nunes is, I’ll tell you what all the cool people already know: Julia Nunes is exactly what the internet and modern independent music need more of. In 2008, she started posting videos of herself doing ukulele covers of some of her favorite songs as a way to keep in touch with her musician friends from high school when she went away to college. Since then, she’s accumulated over 207,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel with over 50 million views, joined Bend Folds on stage at Bonnaroo, and played on The Conan O’Brien show. Last year, while gearing up to record her 4th self-funded, self-released album, she decided to give Kickstarter a try and see if she could generate some additional funding. The original Kickstarter campaign asked for $15,000. Julia was hoping for roughly a grand for each of the 16 songs slated to be on the album. Within the first 24 hours, she’d received over $19,000. And when all was said and done, the project received almost $78,000, making her album Settle Down the 3rd highest funded musical project ever on Kickstarter. She comes in behind a solo album by Nataly Dawn (formerly of Pomplamoose) and a joint effort by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls). When I asked Julia about all that money and what she did with it, she said it let her experiment more in the studio. She brought in a string quartet to back her tacks and experimented with her favorite new instrument, a Snapple bottle cap. The money also allowed her to put together a professionally produced video for the track “Stay Awake.” But the best thing about the Kickstarter money was the ability to retain complete control of her music. Julia’s been offered a few recoding contracts from labels, but as she said, she didn’t want anyone to pigeon hole her or typecast her as the quirky ukulele girl. In fact, given her musical talent,
she plays a host of instruments from guitar to piano to melodica, to kalimba, to Snapple cap and has a rich soulful voice, that’s very unlikely to happen. So after talking to Julia for a while, I moved upstairs at the Beachland to enjoy her show. Now I’ve listened to her other albums and watched her videos, but I was truly impressed by her presence live on stage. She performs with the confidence and poise of a seasoned professional while maintaining the sheer joy and sense of wonder of someone just starting out. Her show was electric. Everyone sang along, everyone swayed, and everyone laughed. For me, the highlight was listening to the power of her soulful voice as she powered through the gut wrenching “First Impressions” and bluesy “Comatose.” But then she changed tempo and timber, and she reveled in happiness without being syrupy sweet on songs like “Into the Sunshine”. On the whole, Julia is an accomplished musician, a gifted singer, and hoot to see live. The new album dropped February 28th, and she is on tour now. My friends can complain all they want about amateurs with instruments clogging up the internet, but without a democratic and free forum which enables musicians to find their audiences, we’d never have heard Julia Nunes’s music. So Settle Down, go beyond the catchy covers that made her an internet darling like “Build Me Up Buttercup” (even though they are worthy of praise on their own), and discover what a free internet can bring to light.
Inglorious Blaze by Brian Young Earlier this month, the NEA officially labeled BlazeVOX a vanity press. As a result, poets applying for its fellowships can no longer list publications with the press in their application, according to a column in Buffalo News by Colin Dabrowski on March 18th. If you are unfamiliar with last fall’s controversy, the poet and founder of BlazeVOX, Geoffrey Gatza, came under fire when Brett Orler posted his letter of acceptance for publication from the press and the subsequent email exchange that took place between him and Gatza, in which Orler was asked to make a $250 dollar donation “to help the press meet the costs of our budgeted year.” After further inquiry by Orler, it became clear that his publication was contingent upon him making a “donation” that had not been announced in the submission guidelines, and that 30 or so other authors had also been accepted on the same conditions. Most of Orler’s complaints had to do not with the press’s business model, but with the sucker-punch quality of its announcement. To place such terms in an acceptance letter is either corrupt or foolish, because it is about the most damaging thing that a press can do for its own image as dedicated to fostering and promoting the arts. Much has been made lately of the overabundance of eager MFA graduates flooding the market with manuscripts while at the same time being either too poor or too self-absorbed to buy someone else’s work. I would be surprised if anyone at any level in the literary world was unaware of this. As I discussed last month in The Problem of Documentation, MFA graduates are almost obsessively aware of the need to publish, to create a paper trail of documentation, in order to even have a chance at getting a professorship in Creative Writing or any sort of recognition as a successful artist. Given the abundance of pressures and the desperation of writers who are not yet established, this financial brinksmanship understandably pisses off many people. The diminishing quality of Gatza’s written exchanges with Orler also damage the press’s credibility. After the initial form letter, his emails contain many typos which, as Orler states “didn’t inspire confidence.” Orler admits that Gaza could have simply “been busy,” but given the circumstances, where the publisher is interrupting the accepted author’s understandable elation with demands for money, a lack of careful attention to language reinforces the impression that the publisher is more concerned with selling the scam than communicating at the level that a dedicated
writer would desire in the place where they are to be published. If Gatza, as representative of the press, seems not to care about close attention to writing, then what does that say about his criteria for choosing whom to publish or his actual interest in craft? Granted these are assumptions, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for making them given the circumstances. Several aspiring writers mention in the comments to Orler’s post that they also received the same form letter. To their credit, they responded with skepticism to the offer and decided not to publish with the press, but their “Shitty feelings” resulted from having to refuse the very thing that all their hard work—not only in the writing itself, but also in the grinding submission process— aimed for. Choosing a press to publish with is a highly emotional process. The aspiring writer wants to find a home for her work that reflects her dedication and love for what she is doing, and if the impression that she gets of the press does not rise to that level, the feelings of disappointment and frustration do not end with the refusal of publication. That’s not to say that this is necessarily an accurate impression of the work that BlazeVOX has done, just an understandable reaction to changes in the expectations created by the press’s submission guidelines and correspondences with the press. A few authors published by BlazeVOX have come to the defense of the press, and it is hard to argue, if one considers what the press has published, that the quality of their work is deficient. Gatza did not solicit a donation from every author who published with the press. It appears that the plan was to have a tiered system, with more established authors at the top, who were not asked to invest financially, and a larger pool of newer writers who were. If this was the case, then complaints about the exploitative and undemocratic nature of the MFA system like those in Anis Shivani’s essay discussed last month—wherein a select few have access to the inside of a system that is funded by but not fully available to most writers—seem to be reflected in these actions. Nothing is more dispiriting to aspiring writers than becoming so quickly disillusioned by this possibility. But the NEA’s attempt to surgically remove the press from what it deems a credible body of work also reflects an establishment attitude that is hostile to any attempts to change the system of bestowing rewards on literary insiders. Although Gatza’s repeated complaints, in the correspondence posted by Orler, about the financial difficulties of publishing poetry reveal some inaccuracies and inconsistencies, it’s clear that many presses are legitimately struggling with cuts to the arts, an indifferent market, and lack of funding. The NEA’s response could have a chilling effect on attempts by presses to create alternatives to a system that only works for those who are established and well-funded enough to thrive in this climate. If writers are invited into more of a financial and promotional collaboration with the press who publishes them, does this necessarily place them at the level of a vanity press, which cares nothing about the author or the quality of work that it publishes? If the requirements are made clear from the start, and the press is genuinely interested in promoting art and bringing important work to the public, if they care about writing and don’t want to bury themselves in debt using a publication model that doesn’t work for everyone, then why would organizations like the NEA refuse unconditionally to recognize them?
Place and Movement: A Look into Jeff Grieneisen’s book Good Sumacs by Matthew C. Mackey
“Yeah, I’m reviewing a book of poetry…a book of poetry. Look, just come over okay?” I hung up the phone after she said, “yes,” and immediately went to the kitchen. I straightened up a bit and made sure I had something to drink. A quarter of a bottle of merlot, half a bottle of Bushmill’s, three beers: two Guinness and a Miller High Life. All leftovers from a recent party. I sat down at the cluttered dining room table with one of the Guinness and waited for her. There were papers to be graded, articles that needed edited, books and unopened mail in piles on the table. I thought about cleaning it up, but figured I’d have to just get it all out again. It would be awhile until Liz made it to the apartment. Liz would take her time. Even though we were “just friends,” she would want to look her best, and I thought about what her best would look like. I liked thinking about her this way, all done up and nonchalant, her loose brown curls floating above her thick black horn-rimmed glasses, her red lips parting when she smiled. I was pinched to get a book review done for a startup online magazine. It was two days from my deadline, and I kept thinking, “Why am I not getting my work done?” The truth was I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know how to approach the work. The book of poetry, Good Sumacs by Jeff Grieneisen, is like putting all the windows up in a summer home and letting the wind clean out the air. It’s a quiet process, and before I knew it I was breathing clean. How the hell do I talk about that? Grieneisen’s book is an undertaking of change, both expository and revelatory. Good Sumacs at once exposes the nature of change as it reveals the meaning of such significance. He writes in his poem, “Transforming”: Early afternoons, I shake the tree on my way to the mailbox. Little apple bodies pound the soft ground. At dusk, three doe carefully munch apples, snuff breath into air with black, glossy noses. I try not to breathe frost onto the cold window until they fade into gray-brown trees. And, I can hardly stop myself from feeling a little more quiet, as if reading the page I also try not to breathe lest I fog up the surface. I wondered how I was changing, how I was passing from the limb to soft earth to new energy. The stout went down smooth, and I took an extra-long pull, checking my watch. I felt conflicted between what I wanted to do and what needed to be done, and I felt heavy. I thought that everyone must feel from time to time like they’re in the center of some dichotomy, forced to choose at any given moment. There is personal struggle in Good Sumacs, one that brings the speaker to pay
close attention to space, movement and responsibility, not just in craft, but in theme as well. In Good Sumacs there also exists a binary of opposites, namely Pennsylvania and Florida. The speaker seems perpetually caught between the two. In the poems, “Lesson in 78” and “Meditations At the Old Mine,” the speaker’s roots are exposed as deep, complex tendrils sunk in the Appalachian soil. The poem, “Writing Nothing About Florida,” is a poem of transplantation. Starting with “In the mountains and shale / of my beautiful Pennsylvania” the speaker laments at his inability to “write my song.” The distance is debilitating. The speaker surveys the surroundings in contrast: Here the dirt is sand and lakes teem with Anhingas that do not sing like chickadees or cardinals breaking the darkness that hides nothing. I stood up from the table and cleared off a stack of my student’s papers. I too was wishing for something other than what lay in front of me. I felt as if I was caught between two sheets of paper, somewhere in the white space between chapters or between poems. My phone buzzed and a text message from Liz read, “On my way.” I drank the rest of the beer, wondering if she was really on her way and what it meant if she was. Liz was capricious, and maybe that was what I liked about her, but it drove me crazy. I never knew how to read her. My friends were convinced that she was either really into me or I was just wasting my time. I had no idea what to do, and as she drove closer to my apartment, I thought of the opening stanza of “Memento Mori”: I want to find the man strong enough to carve the commandments of my life in scripted letters–bits of granite falling to the ground. But what if he should scrape together those shavings to form words my mouth can’t say, the words “I am happy to live, but not here?” Those bits of dull, blackish stone would know how I love to gaze at the stars my grandfather gazed into. I found myself in Good Sumacs. I traced its lines of change until they all pointed back to me, and it was a good space to occupy. As the doorbell rang, I too felt like the speaker in “Back to Dust,” that I was “speeding toward some destiny I can’t know.” Wherever that road took me, I knew that I at least could take refuge in the book’s awareness to tension and displacement. Good Sumacs is a book that extends itself beyond the page. It is camaraderie and company. I got the sense that the book and I were “Traveling Together” towards a better understanding of place. Good
Sumacs is a reconfiguring of attitude and perception, offering a new way of seeing things in my own life. I opened the door, and Liz, in all of her casual repose, walked in. She smiled, and I wasn’t concerned with the work on my table or getting a definite answer about our relationship. I was content for the moment to exist in a balance, an in-between, knowing as the poet does in “Meditations On a Drive” that I was “Traveling with the fear / and lust of passion / that can tear people into shards,” and if I was brave enough that I too would find my way back home again.
CIFF: A Cinemagical Festival by Robert Miltner
I Turning onto West Huron Road, coming in the back way off I-77 to Cleveland’s Public Square, the car rolls along the what used to be a sort of cliff overlooking the Cuyahoga River Flats that winds below, coming from the Standing Rock in Kent, through the National Park, here into the industrial valley down where they used to send the Irish immigrants to die of typhus. My people, displaced Gaels driven off their land first by the English to wander the roads like tinkers, working for half a meal to feed a whole family, then leaving County Clare when the potatoes failed, indenturing themselves for a spot in steerage. If there were documentary films then, or smart phone video recorders, my great-grandfather, James Higgins, would be seen coming to the new land, where he’d run away from his cruel uncle and slip away, a cabin boy who ended his career captain of a ship making pleasure trips from the 9th Street Pier to Buffalo and back. He’d have started on boats then moored on the Cuyahoga, which I see from up here from my car window. Then I turn down a road to park closer to the river, but not there, just in the parking garage under Tower City. II For about 30 yards or more, couples and groups of three or four range along the long hallway, some talking, most looking around. They wear spring or winter coats, a few hats. A spattering of backpacks. A few hold bottles of water, a lot hold bags of popcorn. The line forms behind a purple cardboard sign on a small staff that reads “Leaving.” The guy holding the sign has his Volunteer tag on. He looks at the line and checks the time on his smart phone. This feels like lining up at the airport after checking luggage, but there are not uniformed TSA employees looking bored and self-important. No scanners to go through, no pat downs unless partners or dates or movie-going friends have plans to do so. Everyone in line seems pleasant without the stress of the security apparatus required, unless you are a business executive, to board the plane. I make brief eye contact with a young woman sitting against the wall, texting. I tap my forehead and she looks confused, then touches her own, remembering she’s wearing a Close the SOA headband. I flash a peace sign and she laughs, nods, returns to her texting. The couple in front of me is going through their pockets, looking like people scratching ants at a picnic. “Don’t you have them?” the middle aged woman asks, her hand in her handbag. “I thought you did,” says the guy with the ponytail, unzipping pockets in his North Face jacket. I put my hand over my heart, over the inside pocket of my leather coat with the tickets I picked up from Will Call, with my stamped Free Parking parking tag. The Volunteer calls down the line, turning his sign around in slow circles, “We’re leaving, everyone” and we all laugh, for that is what we are going to see, a film called “Leaving.” Then briskly, like schoolchildren heading out to recess, we follow.
III Vaclav Havel was a Czech playwright imprisoned as a dissident during the Russian occupation of what was then Czechoslovakia before the countries divorced in 1992. A prolific playwright, he was trained at the Academy of Arts in Prague, though his family owned the largest film studio in the country. Havel was the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic, a political career running from 1989 to 2003. One of his final plays, Leaving, was the only play he filmed. The title—at least translated into English—suggests leaving office, public life, life itself, and what we leave behind, our legacy, reputation. It is a theater of the absurd-like film that is a socio-political farce—which is the kind of play that Havel had always written—that parodies the state of contemporary European post-communist governments, layered with homages to Shakespeare’s King Lear and Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard. The comedy presents Vilem Riegerova, former president, who is forced from his government-owned former villa which is soon to be occupied by the political rival who replaced him. Reigerova’s mother, lover, and daughters are all affected by the political displacements prompted by the tabloid reporters who reduce him to buffoonery in his political retirement. Havel’s satirical wit spices the plot so that the audience laughs at itself for the very ideas it identifies itself with in the play. What a closing act for one of Eastern Europe’s last great public intellectuals, and a film that will never play at the malls of America. IV In 1977, as urban movie houses were closing and movies began playing more regularly at malls, the Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights, which showed “foreign films,” that is, British or subtitled and usually French, launched the first Cleveland International Film Festival, or CIFF, by showing eight films over as many weeks. While no records seemed to have been kept—it was, after all, an idea conceived of in the moment, not with some sense of eventual artistic or historic importance—it must have been enough of a success to hold one again in 1978. The program grew and in 1991 the festival was moved to the eleven-plex theater at Tower City on Public Square in downtown Cleveland, a complex that includes hotels, shopping, restaurants, and public transportation: busses, the Rapid Transit and Shaker Rapid line. CIFF has become the largest film festival in Ohio, boasting 160 feature films and 160 short subject films from nearly 60 different countries including Haiti, Barbados, the Maldives, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Rwanda, Jordan, Iraq, Albania, Tanzania, and Cuba; but that is what makes the festival international, a cultural exchange via the screen, the sights and sounds and stories from other countries. And this exchange grows in popularity: this year saw its one millionth attendee since the festival began thirty-six years ago and its largest audience to date: 85,000 attendees over eleven day. That’s like filling the Browns Stadium plus the playing field, or the Jake twice, or the Q four times; that’s more people than live in Lorain or Youngstown; that’s the number of people in Parma, Ohio, or Lincoln, Nebraska: that’s a lot of people who love films. And it takes a lot to put on a film festival that long for that many people: partnerships with well over 200 non-profit, arts council, media groups and corporate sponsors, plus hundreds of volunteers. That’s not so difficult; Cleveland, after all, is the second largest city in the state.
V Because it is shown only twice during the festival, the lines for Detropia are shorter, move more quickly. No one rushes to see a documentary about what may be the saddest city in the country. Armed with bags of popcorn the size of a small dogs, the audience follows the story lines of an auto union official as jobs are outsourced to China, the owner of a local bar, a blogger who works at a coffee shop, and the mayor of a city that is bankrupt. How could it not be? After peaking at 1.8 million residents in 1950, an emblem of the triumph of the middle class, today the city is down to 700,000 residents living in an area the size of Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco put together, but with 90,000 vacant houses and an unofficial unemployment rate of nearly 50%. The popcorn becomes harder to swallow as the movie raises endless questions about the future of the city, the Midwest, and maybe the country as a whole, yet offers no answers. The images of decaying buildings and blocks cleared of houses haunt the screen in the way apocalypse films do, only those lurching down the streets are not zombies, just people struggling to survive in a city where even hope seems about to be foreclosed upon. This documentary has no car chases, no dancing, no bailing out George Bailey. I kept hearing in my head the old Motown song, from the days when Detroit was not only America’s car capital but its music capital as well: “Tell it like it is…” And Detropia does just that. It is a brave film, a difficult film, a necessary film. At the end, when the audience clapped, I thought that maybe that was what they were clapping for: the courage it takes to present the difficult, sobering truth. VI Because Tower City Cinema is so downtown, so Public Square, Flannery’s Irish Pub is close enough to stop in for a sandwich and a cool Guinness draft or tall shot of Jamison’s. Great Lakes Brewery would have been good too, a local business to support, but they close early, the restaurant even sooner. Flannery’s evokes the old Irish bars on Cleveland’s West Side, kind of like the one my uncle had when I was a kid. They still actually ring a bell for last call, and will set up several drafts or shots for you as long as you order under the wire and pay. I keep thinking about Detroit, just out past the Western basin of Lake Erie, how empty it is, hope dimming as I look out the windows of Flannery’s at the city lights, the bright downtown in this city in which I was born. Tens of thousands of people have come downtown to see films, support the local economy, and out-oftowners are staying at the Ritz-Carlton, Radisson, the Wyndham. Cleveland is still hanging in as tough as those Irish buckos who came up from the Flats to become policemen and firemen and politicians and ships’ captains. The bar is full, loud, raucous with laughter. On the TV the Ohio State Buckeyes are up by four points over the Kansas Jayhawks and on a good scoring drive. The future feels bright, certain. I lift my glass.
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