• VOLUME TWO • ISSUE ONE • SPRING 2015 •
- Journal of Impressive Writing The Impressment Gang Journal Association (est. May 2014 ) is a registered not for profit society dedicated to publishing literary magazines out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Our mandate is to relieve the dieting of the arts through our commitment to publishing fine new writing and engaging in reviews and criticism.
ISSN 2292-9568 (Online)
© Copyright remains with the writers. Spring 2015.
Printing by Halcraft Printers Inc. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Subscription Rates: One year (3 issues) $35 full or $15 electronic, $45 institutions Two year (6 issues) $60 full or $25 electronic, $80 institutions Full subscriptions include print and electronic issues.
Contributor’s Notes Charlotte Bondy is a writer of
short fiction living in Toronto.
Madeleine Braun moved to Brooklyn four months ago to (s)talk Mary Gaitskill and Jonathan Frazen; she’s still looking. Jonny Bolduc is a 22-year-old poet and student from the deep woods of Maine who has a soft spot for felines and good food. Pearl Chan is a writer of short
fiction and fiction editor of The Impressment Gang. Salvatore Difalco resides on
Submissions: We accept submissions all year round. View page 49 for details and send us your work online.
Editors & Design Pearl Chan Cassie Guinan
Editorial Assistants Jazmen Bishop Clay Everest
Cover Art Emma Fitzgerald
www.theimpressmentgang.ca
Toronto and is the author of Mean Season, due out this fall from Mansfield Press. Emma Fitzgerald lives and draws in the North End of Halifax, you can find out more at: www.emmafitzgerald.ca David Fleming is a writer whose enthusiasm may be misunderstood as aggression. Sara Flemington is a writer from
Toronto, where she is currently completing her MFA at the University of Guelph at Humber. Tim Fogarty is a writer based in
Halifax, NS.
Cassie Guinan, poetry editor of The Impressment Gang, likes pizza and aerobics.
Esmé Hogeveen is a Master’s candidate in the Critical Theory and Creative Research program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Matthew Hooton is the author of Deloume Road, a novel published by Knopf Canada and Jonathan Cape UK. He lives in South Australia. David Huebert’s first book of
poetry, We Are No Longer The Smart Kids In Class, will be published by Guernica Editions in fall 2015.
Dakota McFadzean is a Canadian
cartoonist who draws comics every day. dakotamcfadzean.com
Priscilla Medeiros is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. P. C. Vandall, a line is too infinite for her to reach the point she wanted to make. Ben Stephenson, author of the
novel A Matter of Life and Death Or Something (Douglas & MacIntyre), is currently working on a collection of stories.
Robert Swereda is the author of
Signature Move ( KFS press) and re: verbs (Bareback press). He’s published in Canadian and international literary journals.
The Impressment Gang • Volume Two • Issue One • Spring 2015 • Poetry 08, 09, 10
31,32,33
17
40, 41
24, 34
42
epigram(s), Twenty Three Word Poems Robert Swereda where do you get your grief ? Madeleine Braun A Real Man, Crosswords P. C. Vandall
Collider, Cryptology, The Snails Salvatore Difalco Cut Up Apologetic (excerpts) Jamie Sharpe Breakfast After a Night Spent Together Jonny Bolduc
Short Fiction 06
35
18
43
Once the Blade Gets Rusty Sara Flemington 53 Things Vowed Not to Reveal David Huebert
This Country Matthew Hooton Long as I Can See the Light Tim Fogarty
Other Writing 12
Cover Story: Gottingen St. Research by Priscilla Medeiros
36-41
Don’t Get Eaten By Anything (excerpt) Comic Art by Dakota McFadzean.
26
An Interview with Craig Davidson Interview by Pearl Chan Review Writing 11
30
14
38
23
39
Short Report: Poetry & Non-Fiction Tao Lin’s Taipei Review by Ben Stephenson
A. MacLeod’s “Wonder About Parents” Review by David Fleming Love and Lies by Martin Clancy Review by Charlotte Bondy
Mrs. Bicentennial Fire, J. Wallot-Beale Cut Up Apologetic by Jamie Sharpe Review by Esmé Hoogeveen Review by Cassie Guinan 25
Short Report: Fiction & Drama
Editor’s Note We’ve all had an anniversary this year. The Impressment Gang is having one right now. Looking back at our first issue like a baby photograph, it’s pink and glossy and we love it. I’d hang it on my fridge if I had a magnet thick enough. I am also proud that we’re bigger now, easier to balance on your lap. This issue marks a success for us; we haven’t fallen apart. But we are still a fairly wobbly baby, so that fear is in the back of our mind. This issue revolves around the idea of falling apart. Whether it be an unexpected breakup like in Sara Flemington’s “Once the Blade Gets Rusty,” or the world as we know it in Matthew Hooton’s “This Country.” And taking a look amidst the destruction, there is sometimes still a thread of what has remained together. The love and the memories that linger for the better or worse of it, an emotion explored by Madeleine Braun in “where do you get your grief?” Let these ideas of falling apart and remaining together guide you through this issue like they’re the devil and angel on your shoulder. Patron of the Arts Cecelia Liu, Simon Chan, Grace Hon, Peter Chik, Winnie Wong, Susanna Ng, Tak Liu, The Nook On Gottingen Bearers of Hope Colleen Everest, Drew Everest, Heather Jessup, Todd McCallum, Ann Marie Patterson, Colleen Primrose, John Primrose Donor List Dave Guinan, Janice Guinan, Stephanie Johns, Alexander Keddy, Ryan Everest, Donna Truesdale, Katie Hernandez, Ciarra Glass, John MacLean, Kaitlyn Guinan, Jaime Forsythe, Catherine Banks, Mollie Winter, Jacob Sandler, Lynda Talaga www.theimpressmentgang.ca
- FICTION -
- SARA FLEMINGTON -
Once the Blade Gets Rusty –Joe left. Left all his shit here too. Not that he had much, but still. What am I supposed to do with it. What am I supposed to do with all these car magazines. Fancy cars he’ll never buy. And what am I supposed to do with this razor, Joe? What do I need a rusty old triple blade for? How long were you shaving with this thing for anyway, Joe? It’s not good to keep shaving once the blade gets rusty. But I guess you wouldn’t a known that, Joe. You wouldn’t a known unless I told you. But I didn’t tell you. Hell, to be honest, Joe, I didn’t even notice till now. I guess we don’t notice that stuff till it matters. And then once we notice, it’s all we can see. Isn’t it. Isn’t all we can see, once we notice. –I’m sorry, Elmo. –I come in from the grocery shopping and it’s dinnertime and I say, “Hey.” Nothing. And I go in the kitchen but he isn’t sitting there, so I figure he went into work. But it was his day off, so I figure he covered a shift. Even though he knew I was cooking. He knew that. And he knew I wouldn’t a been out picking up those damn wieners otherwise. I told him so many times, it’s not proper protein, Joe, I can make real meatballs. But I get em for him anyway, cause that’s how he likes it. Cause that’s how his mom made it, the pasta. He knew, I tell ya. I went the long way home to do the grocery shopping, and even to stop at the video store to get that movie he wanted. With the cars. And racing, and I don’t even like Vin Diesel, Joe. And you know that. You know. –You wanna take a coffee break, Elmo? Get settled? –I get tired too, Joe. You’re not the only one whose gotta work. I work all day here at the Goodwill, lifting stuff, moving stuff, all this other people’s junk stuff, come home smelling like feet and mothballs. You’re not the only one who doesn’t wanna take the long way home just to stop at the video store, Joe, go into the video store smelling like feet and mothballs. And when was the last time you went running the errands anyway? When was the last time you stopped to pick up the stupid wieners? –Why don’t you go take a coffee break. Before you start your shift. –So two o’clock come around, three o’clock. Finally p 6
four o’clock in the morning come around so I went off to bed thinking, he must be stuck down there for some reason, busy night. Or some reason. But inside, well. I tell ya. I was feeling bad. Like I knew something was wrong. Ya know? Like when you just know. That something’s wrong. Like I was feeling psychic about him. Joe. So I’m still awake and five o’clock come around and, well. That’s when I knew it, that I was right. Something was wrong. –Alright. Gimme a hand then, Elmo? –I try calling. Still dark out. It was morning, but dark morning. It says his cell phone’s out of service. So I went down there. That afternoon when they opened up. I went down to that dirty bar. That hole in the wall. No. That hole in the ground. I went down there the next day and I asked if Joe’d been working and that dumb bartender, that cow of a blonde, Carla, she says “How the hell would I know,” and so I say, “Check the time sheet, dummy.” Except I didn’t say “Dummy.” And she says “I’m busy,” and I look around the place and there’s was no one, just some two construction guys drinking beer and eating a basket of wings. At eleven in the goddamn morning. So I said, “Listen, Carla. I gotta know if Joe was here last night. It’s important. Hell, it’s an emergency even, Carla, so can you just check the goddamn timesheet.” And all she did was she gave me this dumb look, like a camel. Like she was a camel about to spit or something. That dummy. –Gimme a hand with this table, would ya? Grab that end there, with the duck. –So there was nothing next to his name since Saturday. “Don’t look like he’s been in since Saturday,” she said. So I asked her, “Well ya know anything about his eye then? You hear anything about Joe getting in a fight here Carla? Getting punched and getting a black eye?” Then one of them grimy construction guys goes and taps his glass on the bar and so she says, “We done here? I’m busy.” That camel. Cow. –Take it easy okay? You’re gonna knock me over here. –Geez Dan, I’m sorry. –Let’s get this thing out to the dumpster.
- FICTION -
- SARA FLEMINGTON -
–I just been going on and on and on here.
or what time a night it was.
–It’s okay, Elmo, just watch what you’re doing.
–He got friends you could ask?
–I’m sorry.
–Joe?
–It’s okay.
–Yeah, Joe.
–I’m sorry.
–Well. No. Joe didn’t really have friends. He just had people he knew. Like people he wouldn’t a talked to otherwise, unless it was cause he needed to talk to them.
–I know. –It’s just, well. He took off, Dan. –I know. –It’s just -
–Well, any of his people then? That you could ask?
–Am I bad guy, Dan?
–He never let me get to know any of his people. Geez, Joe. What’s that say about our relationship. You can’t even introduce me to your people.
–On three.
–Don’t take it personal. Maybe he had good reasons.
–Like, am I unattractive?
–Good reasons.
–No Elmo. I mean, I’m not into guys, so I wouldn’t know.
–Yeah. Maybe he had good reasons.
–Lift, Elmo.
–But, from another guy’s perspective. Guy to guy. –Guy to guy, no Elmo. You’re not unattractive. –I try, ya know, to keep up. With clothes. I try to stay current. –You dress fine, Elmo. –I maybe stopped working out as much, ya know. They say that happens, in relationships. You stop working out as much. I tried to keep that in mind but it’s not like Joe was ever out hitting up any gyms. Hell, wouldn’t even go for a walk around the block with Dodge and me even. –You can’t beat yourself up about that stuff. –You stop working out as much, Dan? When you and your wife got married? –Don’t really know. Maybe. Now that couch there, okay. With the ducks. –First thing you do is you change your number, isn’t it Joe. First thing you do. –What’s with all these goddamn ducks. –I even got you that damn cell phone, Joe. Used to have to use those payphones. Those germy old payphones all covered in germs. I got you that damn cell phone, Joe. So you could call and check in, no matter what time a day it was, or where you were at,
–Well I’d like to hear them reasons, Dan. I mean, Joe. Hey Joe, I’d like to hear your good reasons. I’d like to hear your good reasons for coming home with that black eye, Joe. –Elmo. Please. Take a coffee break. Go up to the break room and get yourself a coffee. –Or how about your good reasons for never running the errands, Joe, never getting the groceries. Or how about your good reasons for leaving all your shit here, Joe. I’d like to know that one for sure. –There’s some Coffee Mate in the fridge I brought from home. You can help yourself. –I should a seen it coming Dan, I tell ya, with the jeans. I bought new jeans from Winners. For our anniversary. They were brand new Levi’s and would a been expensive off the rack. I wore them with that black shirt I hadn’t worn since Pop’s funeral. Joe said it made me look like Johnny Cash. Joke about playing “Folsom Inmates” whenever I wore it. But then he comes home with that black eye and I ask him “What happened?” and he don’t even answer, he just starts talking about me. “Why you wearing those new pants, you don’t need new pants,” on and on and on, and I go, “What’s gotten into you Joe?” And I get the peas from the freezer. But he just pushed em away. Pushed my whole arm away. Had Dodge whining and pacing around the room. I had a reservation for 7 p
Robert Swereda
epigram beauty is in the `` I `` in team.
oysters, downtown, and I was gonna surprise him, and then I was gonna bring him home, and open a bottle of red wine. I even already bought the wine. It was on the table even. But he told me he didn’t feel like celebrating anything, he just wanted to go to bed. And also that he hated my new pants. I said Joe, this isn’t just for you. This is my anniversary too, Joe. And I like celebrations, when it calls for it. But he went into the bedroom, surly. Slammed the door. Wouldn’t even let Dodge in, poor thing. Loves sleeping with him. So I just drank the wine, by myself, and watched the Stars. Dancing with the Stars. And when I eventually went to bed he just rolled away from me, over on his side. I could a cried, Dan. Honestly.
–I need a hand with the couch, Elmo.
–Elmo.
–On three, Elmo. Lift -
–I could a slapped him. Give him another black eye.
–Dan, tell me. Your wife -
–Listen. It’s the start of the month. Meaning, lots got dropped off last night. I know most of it’s probably straight to dumpster, but still. We gotta take care of at least that pile a junk by the door there before lunch.
–Shannon.
–And that Carla. Camel. Cow.
–He was jealous, I know it. Knew it was our anniversary coming up and lost it. Lost it all over Joe’s face. –The couch, Elmo. The couch with all the ducks, okay? –Geez, Dan. I’m sorry. –Okay. –I’m really sorry. –It’s okay. –I tell ya, you’re a good guy Dan.
–Yeah. Shannon. Shannon ever keep something from you? –No, Shannon’s never kept something from me.
–Focus, Elmo.
–Well, what would you do, Dan. If she was to keep something from you. Something serious.
–He probably told her not to go say anything. Cause he probably knew I’d go ask about him.
–I donno, Elmo. Shannon’s an honest woman.
–Probably. You’re probably right. –She probably knew it was someone else. Like Daryl, from the bar. I know about Daryl. Regular. I seen him, how he looks at Joe. The couple a times I been down there to pick him up. Drinking his bottles of Coors, side saddling the bar stool like it’s some kinda pony, watching Joe from behind bussing down the booths. Neanderthal.
–But, hypothetical. –Look Elmo, I don’t think I can offer you much advice here. We just gotta get this couch moved. –If Shannon were to come home with a black eye, and shove the peas away and get the dog all whining, what would you do? –Elmo. If Shannon were to come home with a black eye, I’d find the person who did it and kill the
- Short Fiction by Sara Flemington p 8
epigram the glass is always half full of another`s shards
motherfucker.
forward to him going, even.
–So, I should go find Daryl and kill the motherfucker?
–Alright. I’m gonna go organize some price stickers. For the ducks.
–No, Elmo. –Take that bottle of Coors right to his dummy head –No, Elmo. That’s not what I’m saying. –What are you saying? –I’m saying. Just have a cup of coffee. Or make yourself useful –I don’t know why I always fall for the disappearing acts, Dan. –I don’t know. –My pops was that way too, ya know. Disappearing act. They say you model your relationships, after your parents, when it comes down to it. Like when it comes down to commitment, and that kinda stuff. Saw it on Oz. Dr. Oz. –Makes sense. –Your mom an honest woman, Dan? Like your wife? –Yes, Elmo. My mother was an honest woman. Just like Shannon. –That’s good, Dan. That’s really good. You’re lucky. –Yes. I’m lucky. –And your pops. He a disappearing act? Like mine? –No Elmo. My father was not a disappearing act. –That’s good. It can be hard, ya know, on a kid, a pops like that. Come home, take off, come home, take off. Mom used to take me out for DQ every time he’d leave, make it easier for me. I started to look
–It’s not fair, ya know. How some of us get to go, and then some of us gotta stay. I mean, I’d like to just take off, like Pops. I’d like to change my number. Pack up Dodge and get a fancy new car and go some place new. What do ya think about that Pops. What do ya think about that, Joe. How about if I just take off in a fancy new car and change my number. Put on my new jeans and just take off and change my number and you got no idea in the morning where the hell I gone to, but you know for sure I left all my shit behind. –Then do it, Elmo. –Do what? –Take off. Right now. Just take off your vest and walk right out that back door there and never look back. No more Goodwill, no more Joe’s shit. I could even punch you in the face first, Elmo, if you want. If that’d get you going. –Geez Dan. You know I couldn’t do that. Who’d help you out here with all this junk. –Yeah. I donno, Elmo. –You and me, Dan, we’re the staying kind. And that’s what we really gotta do, if we’re gonna do anything. You and me, we just gotta stay put. Stay put, and maybe just get ourselves some DQ on the way home or something. That’d make it easier, I bet. Just get some DQ on the way home, or something. r
- Short Fiction by Sara Flemington 9 p
Robert Swereda
twenty three word poems oneanderthallegory twoundeditors threelegance fourugayancestor fivendictivermectin sixanathicecubes seventageoid eightmlaches ninemorousward tencaustickles eleventualmond twelvelitationyx thirteenvelopeloid fourteentasisis fifteenjointment sixteenteralline seventeenallagenocide eighteendoscopening nineteencomiumbrella twentylomahout
p 10
- CG Yes Please is soft, purposeful, and supportive – like a pillow. This pillow has a fantastic wardrobe. It wears a variety of cases that fit all the right angles.
SHORT REPORT - Poetry -
Yes Please Amy Poehler, Harper Collins, 2014.
- CG This book will tangle you. The teller of its story is the oracle of a city run down by poverty and guarded by a slightly blazed sphinx. The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl gives insight into an impossible situation that gracelessly took place and left the world short of one young girl. -CG
SHORT REPORT
The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl Sue Goyette, Gaspereau Press Limited, 2015.
- Non-Fic -
- CG
Not That Kind of Girl Lena Dunham, Random House, 2014.
The best of these poems are the necromantic, the playful and the sometimes Plath-like in both precision and rhyme (“Point Mistaken,” “Cod-Jigger and the Shark,” to name only two). I’ve been chilled to the bone.
Not That Kind of Girl is like a good looking set of boots with a tiny little hole. The hole isn’t totally secret, because every time it rains water seeps in. But you can’t find the hole exactly. So every time you evaluate the boots for disposal, you choose to keep them even though you don’t always agree with them.
Still No Word Shannon Webb-Campbell, Breakwater Poetry, 2015.
11 p
- RESEARCH -
- PRISCILLA MEDEIROS -
GOTTINGEN STREET : REJUVENATION AND THE HEALTH OF A COMMUNITY
Samantha, a given pseudonym, has been living on income assistance for ten years, an average of $800/month, and relies on organizations like Mainline Needle Exchange, the Mobile Outreach Street Health (MOSH), and the Salvation Army for transit tickets to access community services in Halifax’s North End, Nova Scotia. When Samantha does not have a bus ticket or cannot organize transportation to attend her appointments on Gottingen Street, she will walk one and a half hours from Dartmouth to Halifax’s North End. Samantha explained that she fears missing her medical appointments will effect her ability to access other services in the future.
Health and social services available on Gottingen Street, Halifax, including Direction 180, Mainline Needle Exchange, MOSH, the North End Community Health Centre, and the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre among many others, play an important role in the care of Halifax’s North End neighbourhood. Changes to Halifax’s North End over the years, such as the Theatres Lofts on Gottingen Street and the construction of new restaurants such as the Nook on Gottingen or the Agricola Street Brasserie displace affordable housing and services for lower income residents in the neighbourhood. Some of the organizations on Gottingen Street worry that the rising rental costs, in line with the rejuvenation of the area, may threaten their ability to continue serving the neighbourhood. In fulfillment of my PhD requirements, I volunteered for six months in the offices of Mainline Needle Exchange, Direction 180, and the MOSH to learn about the health needs of residents in Halifax’s North End. A total of sixteen interviews were conducted with employees from a number of organizations on Gottingen Street, including Direction 180, Mainline Needle Exchange, p 12
MOSH, the North End Community Health Centre, and residents accessing these services in the neighbourhood. The following case study is part of a larger project evaluating how policy changes are affecting service delivery in the Maritime Provinces. It is clear from the interviews that the rising rental costs in Halifax’s North End may make it difficult for community services to continue serving residents in the neighbourhood; some organizations have been serving residents’ since the 1970s. Because of rising rental costs resulting from the gentrification of this area and the deterioration of community buildings, the relocation of a number of community services on Gottingen Street to different parts of the Halifax Regional Municipality area or to the former St. Patrick’s-Alexandra School may take place in the coming years. The availability of health and social services in a single building in Halifax’s North End outweigh the larger economic benefits of constructing another condominium in its place. Keeping established community services in their current location or near to Gottingen Street, especially for low-income people living in the area, will likely prevent and manage disease or injury. The
relocation of community organizations on Gottingen Street is an ongoing discussion for many service providers. Residents feel living near health care services like the North End Community Health Centre, Direction 180, and MOSH on Gottingen Street are essential to improving their physical and mental health, and adhering to treatment. Rising housing costs have already displaced Samantha, resulting in the relocation of her family to Dartmouth. Although rental costs are generally lower in Dartmouth than Halifax, Samantha still allocates an average of 60% of their income on rent. The remainder of her income is spent on medical-related expenses, transportation, telephone services, nutritional food (subsidized with visits to the local food bank), and miscellaneous expenditures. The four other residents interviewed also in the larger study worried about the impact relocation will have on their health and ability to access services they have come to depend on in the community like child care, Manna for Health (Halifax food bank focused on people living with HIV), and The Salvation Army. A longitudinal community-based research study is needed to better
understand the affect gentrification will have on the health of the North End community in Halifax. City officials, the provincial government, and even the citizens of Halifax are withdrawing their responsibility from affordable housing provisions and the availability of community services in relation to the revitalization of the North End of Halifax. The rejuvenation of Gottingen Street not only magnifies a cultural divide, but is also displacing low-income people who rely on easy access to health and social services in this area to maintain their health. Allocating additional funds to subsidize rental costs for low-income persons in Halifax’s North End to continue accessing the care continuum in the area. Contributing to the maintenance of non-profit or community buildings such as the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre will ensure the continuing availability of services for people in the neighbourhood, especially low-income residents. r 13 p
S
L
O
W
D I SA P P O I N T I N G
E
N
D
L
E
S
S
:
a response to tao lin’s taipei by ben stephenson
It’s difficult these days to approach a text unaware. For better or worse, Tao Lin is a writer whose reputation precedes his work, and before reading Taipei I felt determined to dislike him. I imagined his writing as irresponsibly ironic and pretentious, and I knew he was an alleged rapist. (Ryan)
p 14
- REVIEW -
- BEN STEPHENSON -
But the black cloud obscuring Lin was, more accurately, the cloud of “Alt-Lit,” a mostly unfortunate literary genre he is credited with helping to create. Perhaps more of a community or “scene” than genre, Alt-Lit authors were1 hip kids who composed poems on Twitter and gave readings from their iPhones. Alt-Lit as a movement was both obsessed by its own unflinching contemporaneity and unabashed vapidity, and deluded into believing that these characteristics automatically rendered all of its works with revolutionary merit. It was boastfully anti-canonical, anti-craft, and willfully historically blind. It pretended to a level of stylistic ‘newness’ so new as to be misunderstood by outsiders (often taking the contemporary internet as both its medium and subject matter), yet neglected the fact that, except for its nouns, Alt-Lit looked like it was written in about 1950 or 1980, as if nothing had happened in literature since minimalism. Substitute “MacBook” for “bullfight” in most Alt-Lit prose and what you get is bad Hemingway; swap “MDMA” for “gin” and you’ll have something like bad Carver. With what I’d come to expect of the genre, and before I opened up Taipei, I was bewildered by Bret Easton Ellis’ back-cover blurb that “With Taipei Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation.” However, I was gratefully surprised. Though Taipei justifies its status as one of Alt-Lit’s central texts, it simultaneously transcends and redeems the movement’s style. Taipei is a hipster memoir-novel2 whose plot begs to be called a “romp.” It’s about a twenty-six-year-old author named Paul who has a breakup, hides, does drugs, meets people, does more drugs, “works on things” on his MacBook, finds a new romance with the twenty-four-year-old Erin, goes on a book tour, impulsively marries Erin in Las Vegas and brings her to visit his parents in Taipei, where the couple film themselves doing more drugs, then return to the U.S.A., nearly overdose on drugs, and watch their relationship break apart. The story is relayed through
a deceivingly flat novelistic realism: characters speak in character-revealing dialogues––revealing anxious, directionless, privileged characters––and move around parties, thinking despairing thoughts, having moment-to-moment emotional epiphanies, with aspects of their lives highlighted for the reader now and then by “enlightening” simile and metaphor. The action is framed in tasteful paragraphs and time is frequently skipped through via hard-breaks. Where a writer like David Foster Wallace’s response to our information-saturated, hyperspeed, hyper-self-aware epoch was to embody that saturation, revelling in stylistic digression and regression and yielding works like Infinite Jest––which can almost be seen as a work of hypertext––Lin’s impulse is toward slowness, objectivity, and authorial distance. Taipei moves linearly, and with a narrative perspective at once vague and specific, resting always in the banal. Quantities are frequently expressed in ranges rather than definitive numbers: “… Paul would suddenly grin, causing Michelle to grin, and they’d be able to enjoy doing things together again, for one to forty hours”(4), yet each time a new character is introduced we’re given their specific age (always < 30) right next to the name, as their primary descriptor, e.g. “Paul, 26, and Michelle, 21, walked toward Chelsea to attend a magazine-release party”(3), and “The officer … then asked Erin, 24, … to step outside the car”(89). Lin’s dominant narrative mode removes almost every trace of lyricism from his sentences to offer a staggering amount of what in another novel would be ‘filler’ lines, like “Deciding, after around fifteen minutes, to drive somewhere in two cars, they walked on the beach toward the parking lot”(105). But the prosaic narration manages to addictively conjure, in a self-conscious yet not selfpitying way, the slow, disappointing, endless feeling of what it’s like for Lin’s characters to live a human life minute by long minute in an age when their mediated relationships and information seem to shift, replicate, and vanish ten thousand times per second. A contrast grows between technology’s own consciousness––omnidirectional, immortal, allknowing––and the linear, quotidian, self-consciously sluggish and hapless subjectivity of us mortals. Thanks to Facebook, Paul, before having encountered Erin in real life, is already acutely aware of her existence––as I was with Lin––yet must inhabit his lethargic reality long enough to encounter her in the physical world. He’s confident, however, that they will “gradually communicate more and maybe begin emailing
1 In the wake of Lin’s rape allegations (and other ghastly events) Guillaume Morissette––one of Alt-Lit’s key Canadian players––pronounced the scene dead. (Morissette) I have therefore employed the past tense, though I’m sure the movement’s spirit lives on. 2 Even a cursory Google/Wikipedia search reveals that everything that happens to ‘Paul’ in the book happened to Lin, who “described it as the distillation of 25,000 pages of memory”(Martin).
15 p
and––if neither died, entered long relationships, or left the internet––eventually meet in person” (91). This is the contemporary boy-meets-girl moment. Lin’s characters trudge through a world in which their consciousness seems frustratingly obsolete when compared with the overwhelming plurality of technology’s own. Though Taipei succeeds in dramatizing the specific flavour of today’s ennui and sets itself up as a deeply moral work of fiction, it fails to gesture toward an alternative. We have to settle for what we already know, as Paul tells an interviewer: “I mean, the world
is good enough, based on evidence, because I haven’t killed myself. Like, if I killed myself…I could say the world is bad, on average”(127, ellipsis his.). And the story’s conclusion––in which Paul finally does too many drugs (Adderall plus psilocybin mushrooms) and survives a nightmarish hallucination that he has died and must now undertake the eternal and impossible task of re-convincing himself that he’s still alive, eventually feeling that he has succeeded–– is deeply affecting, yet it sounds a covertly pessimistic note. As Erin and Paul discuss earlier:
“Life sometimes offers beautiful images,” said Paul in a voice like he was in fifth grade reading a textbook aloud. “But they’re fleeting.” “Yeah,” said Paul grinning. “And you can’t do anything with them––” “Yeah,” said Paul. “––except look at them,” said Erin (146). r
Works Cited: Lin, Tao. Taipei. New York: Vintage Books, 2013. Print. Martin, Clancy. “The Agony of Ecstasy: ‘Taipei,’ a Novel by Tao Lin.” The New York Times. 28 June 2013. Web. 1 Jan. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/books/review/taipei-a-novel-by-tao lin.html?_r=0> Morissette, Guillaume. “Alt-Lit: A Eulogy.” Maisonneuve. 20 Oct. 2014. Web. 13 April 2015. <http:// maisonneuve.org/article/2014/10/30/alt-lit-eulogy/> Ryan, Erin Gloria. “Alt-Lit Icon Tao Lin Accused of Statutory Rape and Abuse [Updated].”Jezebel. 2 Oct. 2014. Web. 1 Jan. 2015. <http://jezebel.com/alt-lit-icon-tao-lin-accused-of-horrific-rape-and abuse-16416410>
- Review by Ben Stephenson p 16
Madeleine Braun
where do you get your grief?
I lost a grandfather he bled out onto the floor and quietly slipped into insanity the yellow curtains in his dying room were absurdly bright sometimes I dream of him emaciated by cancer morphing as he crawls back and forth through doorways gaining losing and everything is true everybodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s getting married their parents getting cancer and every year gets shorter and every day passes quicker and every minute is a flash unless you really want it to be like when we sat by his bed took turns holding his hand his impossibly calloused hand his insanely hollowed face his remarkably present body time stopped his mind flew away and left us shocked and tried to unravel
the curtains froze through the window so we mourned his inability to perish the intricate weave of a life passing
17 p
53 things vowed
not to reveal totally not by david huebert p 18
1.
Thing that happened between me and my father during childhood, in a train on the way to Lisbon ...
19 p
2. Name 3. Age 4. Weight 5. Gender 6. Never read Hemingway 7. Or Dickens 8. Or Joyce 9. Read Bible cover to cover 10. Favourite part was Book of Job 11. Wrote racy romance novel called Paradise Lust 12. Never found publisher 13. Never got appeal of Satan in Paradise Lost 14. Preferred Mephistopheles in Faust 15. Particularly preferred Mr. Mistoffelees in Cats 16. Posed for Playgirl in the nineties
W
17. Plan for papers after death (much like Kafka: tell literary executor to burn everything, then secretly tell him not to burn anything, that the ostensible desire to burn everything was intended to heighten postmortem mystique, that he should really publish everything, including the letter in which I told him to burn everything) 18. Height 19. Sex 20. Penis to testicle ratio
21. . . . I was eight years old and we were traveling down the coast of Portugal, overlooking the sparkling Atlantic. We were sitting, just the two of us, in an enclosed car. I was fully engrossed in a tattered, yellow-paged copy of Lord of The Flies, occasionally glancing up to take in the landscape. My father was playing solitaire, cursing tenderly every time he lost. He had decided to take me on a rail tour of Portugal and North Africa as some kind of rite of passage, even though I’d made it clear that I would prefer to go to Australia with my mother and twin sister. (My mother came back missing an arm. She’d been gnawed at by a bored, overfed Australian shark, and it had taken the beast some time to remove the entire limb. She never forgave my father for forbidding her and my sister to come along with him and me). We passed through a tunnel and I could feel my father looking at me in the darkness. When we emerged from the other side the sunlight did not return. All around us the world was shrouded in dark, and I sensed my father taking great pleasure in this, as if he’d guessed what would happen and was satisfied to see his prediction confirmed. I looked out the window and saw the sun, almost entirely hidden by the moon’s umbra, a minuscule rind of yellow curling about the bottom of it. That was when he produced the two vials p 20
22. Nationality 23. Highest degree 24. Erotic preference, feline vs. human 25. Assume that raising the possibility of feline erotic preference (above) provides a significant clue to the truth of the matter 26. Failed driving exam sixteen times before passing 27. Always look into toilet for some time after using 28. Hold vast inherited funds in various Polynesian bank accounts 29. Own island in South Pacific 30. Never been due to fear of planes 31. As a child, read Lord of the Flies over and over 32. As a twenty-something, watched Alive over and over 33. Currently watch all six seasons of Lost over and over 34. Live with no human companions 35. Live with thirty cats
39. Posed for Playgirl in the 2000s 40. Never learned how to ride a bike without training wheels but still enjoy riding a bike so sometimes ride training-wheeled CCM around private property 41. Let bushes around private property grow very thick and high so no one will see me riding training-wheeled bike 42. Use plastic bags at the grocery store and feel no guilt about it 43. Wear headlamp while trimming pubic hair in my dark, dark bathroom 44. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to hum 45. Practice certain pagan rituals 46. Wear latex gloves during urination, discard afterwards 47. Profound appreciation for Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, particularly Cats 48. Shave eyebrows and draw back with Sharpie 49. Tried to pose for Playgirl in 2011 but they said my body had really gone downhill and also the Sharpied eyebrows 50. Profession (conjurer) 51. Marital history (thrice divorced) 52. Greatest fear (loneliness)
37. Hair colour 38. Eye colour 36. At night, in the comfort of my own home, do things with cats, things that involve flashlights and almond butter and a hundred lavenderscented candles, things that require a straight razor and a sedated mouse and a squeeze bottle of chocolate syrup, things my mother taught me long ago (she used to watch and instruct, patiently sucking on the pit of an avocado)
21 p
53.
. . . one green, the other black. My father grinned a terrifying grin and asked if I’d ever wondered what he did for a living. I nodded, careful to avoid his crazed eyes. He said that his job was very important, and that someday I might have to take over the family business. Then he wagged the two vials in front of my face. “Today,” he said, “one of us will die.” Lightning flashed outside, and my father released a sharp cackle before continuing. “If you drink from the green vial I will die, here and now, and you will live forever. And if you drink from the black one you will meet your death and bless me with eternal life. Now, what do you choose?” He pushed the vials towards me as the train passed into another tunnel. In the darkness I could no longer tell the green vial from the black, and I hesitated. My father began to shout at me, screaming, “Do it! Do it! Make your choice!” In a hysteric moment I reached out, snatched both vials, and downed them at the same time. The mixture tasted like forests and oceans and earthquakes and as I swallowed the final drops the train emerged from the tunnel, the eclipse ended, and sunlight washed over the world. “Imbecile!” my father shouted. “Asinine child! The potions will cancel out. We will be left with nothing.” I reached out to hold his hand but he snatched it away, folding his arms over his chest. I told him I’d only done it because I loved him and I didn’t want to die. He hacked a barren, monosyllabic laugh. Warm tears leaked into my eyes and I averted my gaze. When I looked back he was gone, but I noticed a furry green inchworm crawling up my arm, hissing in my father’s voice. “Fool,” the worm was whispering, “weak little fool. You should know this by now: there can be no love for people like us.” r
p 22
Mrs. Bicentennial Fire, Digital Video Assemblage by Julien Wallot-Beale & The Bloomfield Arts Centre for the Arts
“In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora” -Ovid, Metamorphoses (Wikipedia)
It was with great delight that I learned of the completion of Mrs. Bicentennial Fire. In the post-Girl Talk era, many of us have despaired of the possibility of critically engaging the question of the mash-up, the splice, the double-take. The film, Mrs. Bicentennial Fire, resuscitates these much needed discussions with interpretive abandon. Mrs. Bicentennial Fire ushers us into the realm of the familiar and the uncanny, provoking laughs and tears. Whether this is your first acquaintance with the collaborations between Chris Columbus and Robin Williams, manifest in the films, Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and Bicentennial Man (1999), this mashup of these cinema giants recalls the battle between those warring brothers, Romulus and Remus, and, remember, that fiery clash gave us Rome! Watching these films in 2015 may make us uncomfortable by reminding us of the bigotry we grew up with and which arguably continues today. Indeed, why is the idea of a man staying at home to take care of his children while his
wife goes to work really so absurd that he has to dress up as an old woman to do so? Other moments may remind us of noble possibilities for subverting hegemony in our everyday lives—throw a kiwi at the head of an adversary and call it “a drive-by fruiting.” Always remember—James Bond is allergic to paprika! The strangeness of a young girl falling in love with a robot housecleaner is increasingly less unlikely in the age of cyborgs. If there is one lesson to be learned from Bicentennial Man, it is that your microwave could one day be your bedfellow. Think of this the next time you hit “quick min.” or “popcorn.” Caress one another, humans, men, women, children, and robots alike. Let Mrs. Bicentennial Fire teach you how to love again in our discordant universe. Thanks again to Chris Columbus and Robin Williams for inspiring and delighting us. With warm regards, Esmé Hogeveen Madison St. Residency Program, Portland, Oregon, USA
23 p
P. C. Vandall
A Real Man
He turns like the Lazy Susan displaying his wares, penisposing by the coffee pot, angle and trajectory, aimed point-blank at my bedroom door. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Pinocchio with a woody, erect and shedding sawdust to the clean kitchen floor. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Calvin Klein without tighty whities, a full head of hair or rugged good looks. My sister says he carries a Polaroid in his pocket and when she comes around, he flips it out, dangles it and says in a falsetto voice: Let me show you a real man! We both seal our eyelids shut like jam jars lying beneath the string-slatted Venetian blinds.
p 24
25 p
SHORT REPORT - Drama Chappie dir Neill Bloomkamp. Film, 2015
A reminder of our international context. Set in South Africa but, by all means, an international blockbuster, Chappie addresses post-colonialism as point in fact, as backdrop, without going into the nuances... because a film which shows the continued racial divide is just showing South African life. No explanation necessary. It starts big names, such as Dev Patel, Die Antwoord, and Hugh Jackman... but you’ve never seen Hugh Jackman look this bad. It would have been better if it delved deeper into the AI/ human discussion, but at the end of the day, this is Hollywood. -PC Pop Up Love Party
Huxley’s first book, Crome Yellow, is a must read for all want to be writers. It follows the flaccid adventures of Dennis, a young man very much like yourself who requires, as Mr. Scogan says, a mental . An incredibly insightful read: asking, are your words just good to the ear, or are they actually saying something? - PC Crome Yellow Aldous Huxley, Chatto & Windus, Novel, 1921.
For a novel written in 100% dialogue, there is no loss of setting or character development. The drama of interviewed kidnappings directs itself into the questions you’d want to have answered: who? what? where? why? when? how? Eggers moves fast and never gets boring. He grounds the conversation but keeps it weird, using one character that is more believable than the other. This book presents an insane take on a common feeling. - CG Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? Dave Eggers, Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Novel, 2014.
Zuppa Theatre. Lion and Bright, Play, March 19-26 2015.
A bastardization of Plato’s symposium. Highly entertaining, made for a university educated crowd with expendable income. True to the Zuppa style of physical, comedic drama. Unfortunately, it remained dully in the pop philosophy, failing to ask serious questions of its audience. When they say snack menu, they mean snack menu.
- Fiction SHORT REPORT
- PC
AN INTERVIEW WITH CRAIG DAVIDSON BY PEARL CHAN I met Craig Davidson in between snowstorms. He had come down to the East Coast from Toronto, touring Saint John, Fredericton, Halifax, and PEI. We sat down for a beer and cider at Henry House before his reading at Saint Maryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s University. He was unassuming, sitting along the back wall scribbling away. I approached him, but he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t look up, so I ran through all the twisting floors of the Henry House before I went back down to the basement and worked up the nerve to interrupt. It was him, in fact, and I have here, recorded for you, our conversation.
p 26
ON THE FIGHTER Craig says that The Fighter was his “angry young man book.” He looks back and is slightly embarrassed at his 28 year old self. “As I’m sure he was embarrassed at my 19 year old self, but it’s natural to be embarrassed.” Asked why he thinks he tackled the issues in the book in the first place, he says: “As male writers do, I wondered what it meant to be a man now. Men of my generation have no great threat: no war… but still have this need to challenge themselves.” Now, he’s moved on to other questions. In Cataract City, he’s interested in boys as kids. The first third
of the book is mostly a flashback to an early adventure of the main characters Dunc and Owe. For the rest of the book, they are adults, meandering through what they have already been shaped into. “When we’re kids, our emotions get shaped. In a way, you’ve got to be this at this age. But when we’re kids, you’re a tabula rasa: you could become anybody, do anything.” At 2 ½ , Craig’s son Nicholas is a complete tabula rasa. “I find myself wondering if he’ll be like this or that. Parts of his personality have emerged, and I’ll have a better idea in 5 years, but he’s still so young.”
ON STEROIDS “It was a weird time of life”, he confessed. He was living in Iowa at the time, doing his MFA, writing his first novel: The Fighter. He was frustrated, and felt that his character needed something, something to energize him, “Hunter S. Thompson style,” he said laughing, “ the idea that you can only understand something if you do it yourself. So I put my character on steroids. And I went on steroids.” This is how it works: steroids come in packs, 4 week cycles. If you’re a beginner, you get a beginner pack, and so on and so forth. And when you’re ready to come off them, they have a cycle for that too. “And the thing you can’t deny, is that they work. Never doubt the efficacy. I was bigger; I did amazing things in the gym. I plateaued, for instance in benchpressing at 200lbs, and on steroids, I did 250lbs. And that shift was in
a single workout. That’s the kind of stuff that can happen.” But I had to push him to get that side of the story. The side he is more ready to share are the effects which steroids could assuredly produce. “It messes your body up. I just met you, Pearl, but the … the way the male body, the gonads are there to produce testosterone, so when you put in artificial testosterone… they just sort of shrivel up. It’s like an arm you don’t use that just shrivels up. They just go to sleep. While the rest of me was getting bigger, the most signatory part of my manhood was getting smaller. And I was afraid I couldn’t have kids.” Craig stopped working out not too long after the sixteen weeks of steroids. “All that was against my personality. Some of us pretend to be macho but I just got tired of it. I’m challenged in different ways now: as a father, as a husband, as a writer.” 27 p
ON OTHER NAMES First there was Patrick Lestewka. “I was 23, and home from grad school. My mum is a snoop, god bless her, and she came across my laptop. She read one of the more… lurid passages, and she said, ‘there’s no way you’re dragging the good Davidson name through the mud.’ And the funny thing is that my mother is this very proper English woman, but my father’s side, the Davidsons, are as blue collar as they come. And they would probably be happy that one of us wrote a book.” Patrick Lestewka was Craig Davidson in his early 20s. “I was so young – I wanted to be the most badass, envelope pushing horror
writer out there.” “And the thing is, publishers want someone with a clean slate. So when it was time for Nick Cutter to come around, we have to dig a hole and bury Patrick six feet deep.” “The pseudonyms are a purely business move – to start fresh. But that’s one of the reasons I can make a living: because I also write genre, which is fun to write. And it’s interested to see where Nick Cutter books are and where Craig Davidson books are. For instance, The Deep was specifically made in trade paperback because places like Walmart only sees margins and there are no worries with a paperback book.”
ON WRITING Craig did his MFA at University of New Brunswick (UNB) before his years at Iowa, “but it was at UNB that I learned to write 500 words everyday.” Here is his reasoning: a novel is about 80000 words, and so, purely mathematically, it would take 160 days to write the first draft of a novel. “And that’s exactly what I did. I was persistent. I wrote those weekends, Christmas, birthdays… and at the end of 160 days, I had a first draft.” And he keeps up with this practice using the words ‘obsessive’ and ‘persistent’ most often to describe himself. “Now I write 1000 words
a day. Someday I’m done by noon and I can do other things I want to. And some days, my wife comes up at 11pm and I tell her I’m not coming to bed because I’m still not done. “But nothing gives me as much pure joy as writing stories. I would walk away if it ever wasn’t fun anymore.” Right now, he’s working on Precious Cargo, his first non-fiction book about his days as a bus driver for special needs kids, a book of short stories, and the 3rd and 4th Nick Cutter books. “And then I’m going into hibernation for a while.”
ON COOKING “I don’t cook much, but I do make kickass pancakes. This is my ‘staying up too late and I’ve pissed her off breakfast in bed’ recipe.” r
p 28
29 p
-
Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix 1 brown egg (because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s healthier) milk chocolate chips applesauce
Ingredients:
- follow the instructions on the box. - pour pancake into pan. - plop the apple sauce (about 1/16 can per pancake) into the middle of the cooking pancake.
Directions:
CRAIGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S KICKASS PANCAKES
- REVIEW -
- DAVID FLEMING -
MAGNIFICATION AND INOCULATION: Theme and Technique in Alexander MacLeod’s “Wonder About Parents” “Wonder About Parents” is the most aesthetically daring story in Alexander MacLeod’s 2011 collection Light Lifting. The story’s unnamed narrator frantically recounts crucial moments in his relationship with his wife, including their first date, their 26 months of pregnancy efforts, and a grueling holiday road trip with a sick newborn, who eventually requires hospitalization and surgery. The narrator remembers these events years later while the couple, now parents of three, attempts to rid their family of lice. From the opening sentences, “Lice. The third week,” the story closely examines small things in order to understand them (45). In the first of many sections summarizing the narrator’s research into lice, he claims “If you blow up an adult louse three hundred times, you can see its claws” (48). He introduces the theme of magnification with the typical sentence fragment, “Textured stills taken with a good camera and a microscope” (48). The narrator suspects that Aristotle fallaciously believed that lice spontaneously generated because “He couldn’t get close enough Couldn’t imagine their cycle.” He urges readers to inspect things closely too, saying “ Look now. Obvious when you magnify” (49). Later, discussing the diagnosis of lice-borne diseases, the narrator proclaims that there are “No small significances lost” (58). The section exemplifies the story’s obsession with magnification, a matter of technique as much as theme. The most notably magnified element in “Wonder About Parents” is the narrator’s own fragmented voice, which builds drama through the close examination of intimate detail. The narrator memorably recalls his experience of discarding his newborn’s soiled clothing in a rest-stop bathroom, describing: An entire outfit. White overalls and a longsleeved shirt. Noah’s Ark. Osh Kosh b’Gosh. It all snaps open at the crotch. Probably worth fifty dollars in the store, but it can’t be saved. Even the socks. I go through my entire supply of wipes. Grit my teeth (54). MacLeod’s sentence fragments enlarge the small significances of a baby outfit. Each does the work p 30
of an entire sentence, and the collective result in undeniable poetic energy. The reason for such close inspection, it seems, is to apprehend the danger inherent in “small significances” (58). To borrow a phrase from Don DeLillo’s Underworld, the threat of “inward and smallward”(788), like the fever that threatens the life of the narrator’s baby, is most troubling in “Wonder About Parents.” For the narrator, “inward and smallward” produces the story’s cognitive landscape and remarkable tone. He claims his innermost thoughts make him vulnerable to lice, admitting “Thought is enough. You do it to yourself ” (55). Overindulgence in the narrator’s voice could also endanger the story itself. Many recollections are a mess of the narrator’s senses. The voices of other characters are sometimes muddled by their textual equivalence to the sounds of the physical environment. For instance, the narrator remembers his wife’s drunken ex interrupting their first night together, the man yelling: I know you’re there. Two seconds of nothing, then he turns. I swear to fucking God. Hard strike. Something rattles loose in the frame. If there’s anyone else in there with you. With no quotation marks, the narrator’s voice remains present, perhaps too present. In order to avoid confusing and alienating readers, the clear, external perspective of other characters emerges at crucial moments in the plot to slow the dangerously magnified voice of the narrator. Most prominently, the narrator’s wife forces him to adjust his inward and smallward view. When the couple debates whether to cancel their long road trip with their sick infant, the narrator insists they continue as planned. The wife, however, asks him to consider her perspective first, demanding “Tell me you know it’s going to suck. Tell me you understand that” (53). Years later, amidst the household scourge of lice, a public health scare prompts the couple to consider lining up at dawn to get a vaccine for their three children. When the narrator dismisses the hysteria of the “crazy” media, his wife responds,
Salvatore Difalco Collider Was it unrequited love? All signs pointed to frustrations with relations. Here love is antithetical. Its strife includes semantic disintegration, incoherence, shame, and it fails to put structure before artifice. Our sources indicate a problem home: common among shift workers. Even if you sleep in a black box you never feel right. It meant moving into a temporary shelter, a morally ambiguous place. This world is for the birds. What we need is a collider or prison cell rioters to externalize lack of faith in the construct, redirect a fixed gaze at a world running on vapours.
“Yes. All crazy until one of them gets sick because we didn’t get them a dose of free vaccine from a free clinic. Then what…?” (59). The perspective of another character helps the narrator overcome his own limited cognition. This section begins with the single-worded paragraph “Inoculation” (59), the process whereby external material is injected into the body for its long-term health. Inoculation is an apt model for how external perspective fortifies the narrative. It saves the narrator from himself, and it also saves the story from the narrator. This happens most notably when the narrator and his wife wait all night in the ER with their daughter, begging a nurse to send them home. At just the right moment, “A doctor comes swinging through the doors,” explaining, “this child is seriously ill” (70). “We know what she needs,” he says, “You, sir, are the person who does not fully understand the situation” (70). Now the narrator
realizes the dangers of his limited perspective. Under the gaze of others, he says truthfully, “I know what I look like” (70). Here readers can judge the story free from the domination of his voice, and can sympathize with him more. “Wonder About Parents” demonstrates how incorporating external perspective negates the threat we pose to ourselves and others. As the narrator says in the final section of the story, he “will never live clearer than” he does in the hospital, exposed to the valuable perspectives of others. While the story thrives under the magnification of the narrator, its success depends on the timely injection into the narrative consciousness of externally grounded perspective. “Wonder About Parents” provides a valuable example of how multiple narrative elements deliver a keen insight. r
Works Cited: DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Print. MacLeod, Alexander. Light Lifting. Emeryville: Biblioasis, 2010. Print. 31 p
Salvatore Difalco
Cryptology
A second kind of mimesis occurs when the sun sets. A glandular surge creates black-inked memory gaps, moments of obscurity and also of a certain beauty, like the mannish woman at the head of the line gazing at herself in a compact mirror. Consider the burning lights, perfumed air and pie-eyed hubbub of nightlife. Gatekeepers in collusion with the usual visionaries bar entry, sphinx-like. Hermeneutics thus enforced, the marginalized vie for selection, their lurid, salaaming dumbshow rooted in despair.
p 32
Salvatore Difalco
The Snails
Late speculation leads to a reassessment of the resting instruments. Whether or not the music transcendsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;perpetual ambiguity. No respite from lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s opaque intentions: neither gesture nor expression, nor pathos. This has been a raw experience and trying to recapture each moment sparks a violent retinal maelstrom.
Falcons dive from the sky. Immense green fields rise. Men come with orange shovels and pails. Under the peach trees live the snails.
Life itself is an escape with complex directions: the world breaks open, and the deeper the abyss the less chance of retrieving the lost lover, or friend. We play for the stars on the garage roof, at the end of the day, and content ourselves with the quiet applause of the wind and the whistling of snails.
33 p
P. C. Vandall
Cross Words
The silence is unheard of. We sit dumbfounded (for lack of a better word) and stare at the cold white space before us. Words like breath come and go and we search for the right ones before nothing’s left. I was a word you tongued in the hollow of your mouth, a babbling brook that branched over lips and sputtered out over the disemvoweled and checkered floor. I try to figure out what’s missing. Sound is a memory buried in the crosses and rows of a graveyard, the stillness of a cornfield with its ears cropped off. We ponder the problems, hint at the other to solve and fill in the blanks. I’m tired of playing games, tired of defining what we meant. Nothing makes sense and we’re speechless as stars and sand, counting – countless things we never counted on. There are no words for what does not exist. Now, we’re frozen to chairs, lips numb, cheeks red and the only thing chattering is teeth. You look across and I look down. We know without question, we haven’t got a clue.
p 34
- FICTION -
- MATTHEW HOOTON -
This Country I love you, you say—words that the static between our bodies might ignite, each syllable dry as tinder. Love is not this fragile, I think. But oxygen burns, and there is space between us here in our living room, as we stand staring out the window at the falling white. I put my arms around you, draw you close, your thin frame folding into mine—this action like gathering your bones. So much, you exhale into my neck. The frosted-blue iron of the Johnson Street bridge in January. Sunrise grey into Easter-egg blue. A light covering of snow over the asphalt at my feet. These streets lie quiet now, and I walk alone, as I do every morning while you try to sleep. Watching me won’t change anything, you said months back, and I still pretend to believe you. Over the bridge and onto Wharf Street before an engine rumbles down Pandora, a grey pickup rolling towards me, and I can’t help but think, wrong way on a one way. Though it’s been ages since it mattered. A woman drives, red toque pulled down over her brow, dark circles ringing her eyes. She glances at me, slides past. The squeak of rubber on new powder. Acridity of exhaust. There was a time such a vehicle would have carried children in the backseat—tongues out, hot breath on glass. And I would have made a snowball to throw at them. And perhaps that hollow-eyed woman would have pulled over to scold me or her children. Even the snow means something different now, I think, as the truck passes over the bridge the way I have come and rolls out of sight. I return home to find you sitting on the couch beside the wood stove bleeding from the inside of your forearm again.
I cleaned it, you say, your eyes flitting to the Swiss Army knife on the coffee table. I have hidden the knives in our home so many times now I can’t even think where you might have found this one, and I try not to remember that it was a birthday present from you over a decade ago. The blood on the knife has oxygenated dark brown. I find a towel and clean the wounds, help you lie back on the couch, hold your arm above your heart, my hands tight over the cuts. I couldn’t get them out, you say. I nod, tell you to hush. Tell you that your hair is getting whiter, but not that your bangs are stained red from where you’ve brushed them off your forehead. Instead, I say you need a shave. Ask if you’d like that later. Your eyelids flutter. David, I say. You need to stay awake. I tell you to hold the towel to your arm, keep the pressure on, while I bring you water and a yellowing lump of sugar. We sleep in the living room beside the wood stove, the roll-up mattress on the floor, red and blue plaid sleeping bags zippered together into a down quilt. Your breathing beside me like gentle wind down a chimney. Fanning what flames, I wonder? I sleep fitfully for this question, and for fear of rolling onto your arm. And I cannot exhale this fear, cannot give it up to the creeping dark. 35 p
Don’t Get Eaten by Anything: A Collection of the Dailies By Dakota McFadzean Available May 2015 Conundrum Press, 368 Pages, $25 Full colour, Hardcover.
Downtown beneath a grey sky. The snow hard now. Occasional shapes past second and third story glass, but the streets empty. My breath like smoke as I walk down Douglas towards the totem poles outside the dark museum. And it is from behind these totems that the couple emerges, walking towards me. The man wears a backpack and uses an aluminum baseball bat as a walking stick. A woman follows, shuffling, wrapped in a blue sleeping bag, her hair cropped short, skin yellow. She keeps the man between us as we pass each other. The man stops using the baseball bat as a cane, lifts it over his shoulder, taps the top of his backpack. Not exactly subtle, I think, and I make a point of eye contact anyway, nod. No response from either of them as they trudge back the way I have come. I watch the way the woman slips and limps through the snow, trying to step in the man’s tracks. In a past life, I would have tried to guess the details of their relationship, speculated on whether or not the woman was abused, whether they were addicts, sleeping in the park. No need for that now. I know why her skin is yellow. Why she struggles to keep up with the man. Why he carries a baseball bat. I remember the lump that grew in my brother’s jaw, how it changed his voice, made it impossible to swallow. Then the one in my father’s hip, where he had always clipped his phone onto his belt. Waits for treatment grew to six months. A year. Everywhere images of swollen hands and fingers, crab-like growths spreading beneath skin. Crows roost in the bare maples and oaks surrounding the totems outside the museum. There were picnic tables here once, long since burned for
warmth or worse. The poles are a different matter though, I suppose. The crows above remain oddly quiet: subtle black shapes against the grey sky. Not symbols, I think. Or metaphors. Just birds. Just black hunches of feather against a backdrop of sky threatening snow again. I find you in the living room beside the wood stove reading Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires. I want to quote from the book, tell you that love is one of many great fires. But I don’t have the heart. Sad stuff, I say instead, nodding at the book. You smile, tell me my cheeks are red, that the colour looks good on me. I say I’m going to grow a beard like Jack Gilbert. Less white though. Less like Santa Claus, more rugged. I tell you about the guy with the baseball bat, and you agree the beard will make me look more intimidating. Tougher. Listen to this, you say, and you read me one of Gilbert’s poems about a man sitting on his porch talking to God. When you finish, we sit quietly for a time, before you open the wood stove and use the book to help another piece of wood catch. I want to tell you to stop, to keep the book, read it again, but I know you won’t. And I’m too cold to argue. A few weeks ago, you asked if I believed in God, and I didn’t know how to answer—shrugged. Your eyes closed now, your breathing shallow. I cover your feet with the white Afghan your mother knitted before she passed. I still regret not having an answer, you know. The truth is that my mind does not empty when I think about God, it fills with so many ideas I cannot sort them. Projected light on the inside of my skull. A
- Short Fiction by Matthew Hooton p 36
barrel-lens narrative of bones from clay. The frame by frame stutter of time. A film strip showing crows nesting above totems. A whirring and a click, and somewhere deep, the fear of the film catching fire. We lie side by side on the mattress, awake, for now, as the fire in the stove fades to embers. Don’t climb on my funeral pyre, you say, and I know you are smiling. A joke. A line from a movie I can’t quite recall. I dream of our bedroom walls and ceiling covered in moths, the flexing of opaque wings a ripple of shadow in the night, and the two of us lying awake, eyes wide with wonder. In the morning I rub moth dust from my eyes, watch your lids flutter open at first light. The sky sits heavily today, slate, and I walk through the deserted shipyard and along the Gorge waterway past dry-docked hulls stripped of parts, up on blocks or collapsing on their sides. These things are becoming fossils, I think, returning to the earth, elemental again at last. I reach the Johnson Street bridge and stand looking down at the green water, listen to it lap against stone and concrete. Across the harbour, downtown is quiet and still, the Empress covered in veins of dead ivy, the Legislative Assembly dark, gulls circling above. I hear the car before it turns off Wharf Street and onto the bridge. A green Ford station wagon. Slow over ice. Another woman driving, long dark hair. When she sees me watching from the edge of the road her left hand slips off the wheel to check that the doors are locked. And then I see the child in the back seat, a girl, red cheeked, eyes wide and
locked on my face. I stare back, too stunned to smile. The car window fogs with the girl’s breath, and then they are past me and off the bridge and around the sharp corner that bends back past the shipyard. The image of the child becomes a word resting on my tongue, swallowed into my own flesh and blood, a tremor of warmth in my stomach and veins. I would run after the vehicle were it not so cold, so icy, the snow sharp at the edges of each print. When I finally make it home, I find the living room cold, no fire in the stove, and I stand at the threshold staring at your form on the couch, at the angle of your head and neck tilted back over pillows, the stillness of your chest. I cannot bring myself to cross into this space yet, so I teeter on the edge, that word back on my tongue. All of those words. Red cheeks, I say finally. And louder, Fogging the window, David! A girl. Once the sun fails, I stack wood and books on our old fold-up ping-pong table in the backyard. The ground is too hard to break, so it will be fire. You are light enough for me to lift now without much strain, and this causes me to shudder. Your bones like kindling. Matchsticks in a plastic bag. I have wrapped you in your mother’s blanket, and I light the pyre without speaking. No one here to witness any words. To agree or disagree. And I have no prayers. The flame moves quickly through the dry pages of books beneath you, catches the broken pieces of wooden furniture, the blanket. Snow falls, and at first I mistake the flakes for ash, then moth wings. The flames snap at the cold. Smoke rises through snow. r
- Short Fiction by Matthew Hooton 37 p
LOVE AND LIES: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, And the Growth and Care of Erotic Love Written by Martin Clancy, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 272 Pages, 2015, $28.99. Review by Charlotte Bondy
Clancy Martin is 46. He’s been married three times, divorced twice, is a former jeweller, a recovering alcoholic and a connoisseur of deceit. Martin published a novel, How to Sell in 2009, and a novella, Travels in Central America in 2012. His third book, “Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth of Care of Erotic love” is a compelling mélange of memoir, philosophy and psychology. Narrated in an unusual tone that manages to be at once academic and brazenly personal, Martin sets out to understand the role that lying plays in our most intimate relationships. He writes, “to claim that when we love, we lie, is almost tautological. What’s more interesting perhaps is that we are so insistent on the connection between love and truthfulness.” This is the provocative premise that he spends the length of the book investigating: that absolute honesty, rather than being integral to enduring erotic love can in fact be detrimental to it. While his thesis may sound cynical, Love and Lies brims with sincerity and optimism. Martin doesn’t advocate lying to your partner, but rather, examines the intensely complicated role that deceit plays in our romantic relationships and urges us to consider how, “self-deception and deception of each other in marital love, when practiced by
thoughtful experts, can make enduring romantic love possible.” He wishes not that we would lie more, but, paradoxically, that we lie with more awareness, and thus move toward a place of deeper honesty. In expanding his argument, Martin moves with impressive fluidity from Adrienne Rich to Plato, to Freud, to Raymond Carver, to Kant, to Nietzsche, without the writing ever feeling harried or heavyhanded. This may be in part because there is so much vulnerability in the books pages; Martin’s writing seems to move beyond simple candour into a more heart-piercing, vital realm of personal storytelling. Love and Lies is by no means a perfect book. There is something about it, perhaps the redundancy in certain chapters that feels slightly messy or untrimmed. There are also moments when Martin’s extensive personal anecdotes, however engaging, begin to verge on solipsistic. Somehow, though, all of this served the tone of the book, and added to its sincerity. Overall, Love and Lies is a book of philosophy by a novelist who holds a unique, fascinating worldview about what it means to tell lies to yourself and the people you love most. It may just be the weirdest and best relationship self-help book that you’ll ever read. r
- Review by Charlotte Bondy p 38
CUT UP APOLOGETIC: “I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it.” Cut Up Apologetic, Jamie Sharpe, ECW Press, 88 pages, $18.95, Review by Cassie Guinan
I’m going to start off by explaining what I don’t mean about the association with the rhyme, “I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it.” I am not implying that this collection is simple or pretentious. What I am saying is that this collection doesn’t shy away from irony; and it holds a simultaneous feeling of being self-conscious and effortless like an already smooth face applied seamlessly with makeup. Cut Up Apologetic has many attractive layers. Sharpe does a great job of explaining his craft while being careful not to do the exhaustive act of over explaining himself. His style is minimalist and calculated, but suitably playful so that the reader can follow along without getting lost in the language. Take “Compounded” as an example (reprinted with permission of the writer, see p.38). The title is a pun. There is an epigraph. And the shape of the poem indicates a divide in the narrative. But what Sharpe does not do is tell you how to read the poem: columns or rows. Thus inviting you to do both. Another key layer to these poems is the unreliability. Would you accept a cut-up apology? Not to say it’s insincere, but hard to take at best (think of Tears For Fears “Mad World”). Sharpe creates an interesting conversation between the poet and the poem/ artist and the art. The poem “Future Art
Projects” (30) details three assignments, all of which reappear as their visual counterpart throughout the book: photographs (10-11), collage (34), illustration (44). The narrator of this collection is not claiming the title of artist. But why? This question presents itself throughout the collection. “Because it Ties in With the Throw Pillows,” provides a shady answer: “There is potential with immediacy/ in painting not readily found in poetry.” (38). This statement is arguable, especially considering the audience: poetry readers. He finishes the poem with: “I’m jealous. I want my sestina/ above your couch.” (38). Sharpe partners this unreliability with a keen self-awareness to come up with a solution, somewhat. Figure it out by reading,“Third Factory: Freedom in Art/So Much Written, So Little Read” (reprinted with permission of the writer on p.39). I also wrote my own poetic response: sharpe is right; sharp is write. I’m only being half serious with my presentation of this idea, but I really do think these poems are on point. I read Cut Up Apologetic out loud over two sittings, and I’m not finished with these poems yet. r
- Review by Cassie Guinan 39 p
Compounded
There was some element of loneliness involved — So easy to be loved — so hard to love. F. Scott Fitzgerald
collapsed against the bar collapsed against the bartender tender is the night is the nightclub’s only blonde club’s only blonde broad broadcasting looks across casting looks across counters countersinking loss inking loss with beer with beer mugs everywhere mugs everywhere
- Excerpt from Cut Up Apologetic, Jamie Sharpe, p. 13 p 40
This volume collects three years of Dakota McFadzean's “The Dailies” which he began drawing every day and posting online in 2010. Since then, the strip has been nominated for the Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize and a Shuster Award. Though it began as a diary comic, it gradually morphed into its current state: a gnashing, howling little world of cursing children, worried monsters, mutilated faces, and adorable small animals. These figures amble between absurd comedy and that dark, empty feeling of cosmic insignificance that keeps you up at night. But it will all be okay, unless something eats you first.
Third Factory: Freedom in Art/ So Much Written, So Little Read
“What art requires is material.” We say anything, publish anything. I’ve said nonsense — words failing common decency — but believe in said nonsense unconditionally. Fabricate truth from trash. The process: valuable. The product? Stretch, examine, question, blow. No value extends beyond creation. Churning out disposable party-favours won’t justify the factory, unless you focus on all the pretty balloons.
- Excerpt from Cut Up Apologetic, Jamie Sharpe, p. 77 41 p
Jonny Bolduc
Breakfast After A Night Spent Together
You reach for a frypan in the same cabinet your poltergeist father hides his stash of `secret` booze, a graveyard of bottles buried deep, back, behind the cereal boxes. I help, open the arm of the fridge. His chemo bills and appointment reminders are pinned up the cold white front beside preschool pictures of your brother; I reach inside for eggs. Soon, we are eating in an empty morning house, sharing silence, spare sparse bursts of conversation. Bright sun filters down on top the table, problems resurrected by this light.
42 p
- FICTION -
- TIM FOGARTY -
Long As I Can See The Light I remember when my father’s friend Don stayed out in the bay on Fraser’s island sometime back in the nineties. I kept hearing my father tell my mother that he was out there ‘drying out’. I had an image of him laid out on the beach like a smoked fish on a rack, which it would turn out wasn’t that far off the mark. He spent about two weeks trying to live out on Fraser’s and my dad would bring him water and food every couple of days to keep him going. He would sit and talk with him for a while to ease the loneliness, but they both knew that the loneliness was why he wanted to be there. Dad took me with him once, out in the old aluminum boat to see him. His tent was pitched in the long grass that grew on the leeward side of the island, and it looked like the ruin of a battlement long forgotten in peace time. Dad called to him as we walked up the beach. He wore an old flannel with neatly cuffed sleeves and blue jeans, and I remember his hair was combed back in deep, tidy furrows, and he was clean shaven. He wasn’t real talkative. When he did speak to me I focused on the blurry blue anchor tattooed on his forearm and nodded politely. After a bit I took my fishing rod, and stood on one of the rocks near the shore casting it into the sea without any real thought about catching anything until dad was ready to go. I remember feeling embarrassed, but I’m still not sure who for. Don fell off the wagon not too long after that. Fraser’s is pretty close to Luke’s island, and in the summer, there is a party or a group of campers almost every night of the week staying out there on Luke’s. I only heard about it years later, one of those moments when you realize there is a gap in the narrative and you have to ask someone close to you to fill it in. I asked my father about Don, and what had happened that summer. He said that Don had gone over to Luke’s and got hammered with some guys he knew and that was that. I had asked him while we were in the garage, and he stood there, neck craned over a chain-link that he was trying to bend back into shape. He kept his glasses on, and answered without looking up or turning around, his words punctuated by his body tensing to contort the uncooperative metal. I didn’t push the issue any further, and just let the radio fill in the gap in conversation until we found our way back to talking about the project at hand.
I always pictured Don swimming the distance between islands. Fraser’s and Luke’s are twinned and the sandy beaches on the back of each are only separated by a half a kilometer or so. I can imagine him staring out at the fire, over the black space between beaches and hearing the voices carrying smooth and clear over the water, like they were right there beside him when their laughter broke unbridled like the waves. The Don of my imagination figures that he doesn’t even remember the things that made him want to be sober so badly that he would put the tire blocks on his life and stay out on Fraser’s. He wades out and starts swimming toward the light of their fire, its reflection on the dark water like a carpet rolled out for only him. That doesn’t make any sense though. One of his drinking buddies probably just pulled a boat ashore and hauled him up like a big fish. Fraser’s is the rougher and the smaller of the two islands, with thick brush over most of it, which is why Luke’s tends to get all of the traffic. Luke’s has a sandy beach that stretches the length of the leeward side, and a grassy clearing like a bald spot near the center of the island with enough growth ringed-round to create a wind break. Laying in the absolute dark of the clearing with no sound but the waves, you can imagine that you are perfectly alone in the world as you drift off to sleep. It was a couple months after Michael and Angela had announced that they were expecting that we decided to plan the trip. John, Les and I thought that we should surprise Michael and plan to have a night out on the island before the kid came. It was something that we had been talking about doing for years. We hadn’t really done it properly since we were kids, and we knew if we hadn’t done it in so long we probably wouldn’t with babies in the picture. We asked Angela to pack a bag of his clothes and leave it by their back door. Around noon on a Saturday we went around to Les’ parent’s place and his father loaned us his Boston Whaler for the weekend so we could manage all of our supplies in one trip. We thanked Les’ folks and politely declined the tea and cookies, served on his mother’s china, that were offered over and over by both of them in a chorus and went down to the launch to load up. We 43 p
- FICTION -
- TIM FOGARTY -
putted over to Michael’s place and cut the engine a little before we reached his place so he wouldn’t hear. We pulled the boat up on his launch and sneaked up to the house. John couldn’t stop laughing, and when he caught himself he would break out into histrionic, wheezing guffaws to gall us. “Shut-the-fuck-up” Les kept repeating, nearly as loud. Michael’s house was an old saltbox on the waterfront. When his father retired, and his parents moved to a condo in the city, they had left him and Angela the house, along with his plumbing company. The house and the property were well looked after, and it looked like every home probably did a hundred years ago. It was the kind house that everyone that came from the bay secretly thought they would live in someday. We ran toward it on either side of the gravel path that led to the shore so that our boots wouldn’t make noise on approach. Angela had left the back door open, and we filed in quietly and made our way upstairs. We couldn’t stop the wood beneath our weight from creaking, but it didn’t seem to give us away. Les, at the top of the stairs caught eyes with Angela, standing in the kitchen making coffee, and they exchanged a smile. We ran into the kitchen and grabbed Michael, lifted him up and carried him through the front door onto the lawn where he got a hold of John’s neck and started wrestling him to the ground. He knew we were coming. Angela had told him, and he saw up creeping up like a pack of cretins. It was still good for a laugh. We were on the island by two. None of us knew anything about boats, especially Les, whose father never let him take the boat himself, only making exceptions for ‘the boys’ I suppose. But he sat there like the captain, barking orders that no one was keen to carry out for him, and following them up with elaborate, violent threats when we didn’t. When we landed, we brought everything ashore, and spread out to find drift wood for a fire. Our shoes and our jeans were wet to the shin, so we went barefoot in the sand. Michael and I went off to the windward side of the island, and left John and Les near the camp to fuck around. The wind was up a bit, but it was fresh and the sun warmed us. We walked along on the loose, smooth stones that the sea shot ashore endlessly, our ankles twisting under our weight on nearly every step. We collected armloads of dry, grey wood pulled from tangles of seaweed that clung to them like impossible seaman’s knots. Some of it deadfalls and wind broken branches, some of it
manufactured and cut into precise pieces, but all of it left adrift to season in the seawater. We decided to make a pile on that side of the island, and then transport it back to camp piecemeal when we had enough. We joked as we worked, mostly opprobrious insults aimed at John and Les, said loud enough that we hoped they would somehow hear. After dropping an enormous load of wood on the pile, Michael stopped and smiled an inscrutable smile and took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. His clothes, not particularly colourful, seemed to pop in the bright summer sun against the grey and green backdrop of the stone and brush behind him. The flame he touched to his cigarette threw no light. “Thanks for doing this” he said, pursing his lips and blowing the smoke into the wind. “It was mostly Les. He’s the one that has to answer for the boat when we set it on fire later tonight.” He coughed out a little laugh, visible in staccato smoke. His smile washed out like a rivet in the sand. “This is all fantastic, I mean it, but does it feel a little strange?” he asked, making as if he were paying close attention to where he was ashing. I shrugged and said “no, why?” It had been three years, to the day since Matheson had died. We all took it real hard because we had all been real close. At the time I couldn’t deal with it though – didn’t even go to the funeral. Nobody had said anything, but I know that those two had always been weird about my weirdness when it came to talking about him. “Three years”, he said, letting the butt drop between smooth stones. “No” he said, “better that we’re together I suppose. I don’t want to bring us down, I just thought someone should say it.” We had brought three two-fours, a tent each, a bottle of rum, two dozen hotdogs, sleeping bags, two fishing rods, a battery powered work-site radio, hotdog buns, a hatchet, condiments, toilet paper, and for some reason a box of baby wipes along with our personal backpacks. When Michael and I brought our first load of wood back around to the camp side of the island, John and Les were in the process of cutting down a tree. “What are you morons doing?” Michael called from down the beach just as the skinny pine fell, its tip splashing into an oncoming wave. “Firewood!” Les yelled back. “That’s fresh wood, it isn’t going to burn, dipshit” I said as we finished covering the distance. “It’ll burn” John said proudly.
p 44
- FICTION -
- TIM FOGARTY -
“Well you guys have your own fire with that and see where it takes you” Michael said with a laugh. “There’s a pile of good wood on the other side, why don’t you take a break and go grab some of that.” I hadn’t seen any of these three for nearly a year before. When we were a little younger, and Les, Michael and I lived together in town, we five of us would see each other nearly every day. John and Les still live together, and they are just sort of carrying on with the life we lived when we were nineteen. When I was conscious of my routine, going to work every day at the same time, coming home every day at the same time, and realize that weeks, and months had slipped away without my even noticing, I sometimes envied them. Rarely did that take the form of picking up the phone and seeing what they were up to, though. It always made more sense to get to bed early and re-commit myself to the routine which had taken me like a current. It was a month before we went out to Luke’s that Les had called me and proposed the idea. I was drinking a beer and listening to a podcast featuring some friends chatting away, when he called and when I saw his name show up I almost didn’t want to answer. It had been long enough that it felt like it would be a project in itself to get back to where we were the last time we had talked. But I answered, and he made me laugh immediately, and it wasn’t difficult to fall back into where we left off. I sat there on the new tweed couch that I was still paying off with only a reading lamp lighting the room, and I talked to him for an hour before I realized the time, walking around the empty apartment as if I were orating to the things that filled it. When we hung up, we had a sketch of the plan, and I sat back down, but I couldn’t get as interested in the podcast as I had been, so I went to bed. He hadn’t mentioned Matheson, but thinking about it now, he couldn’t possibly have forgotten. By the time camp was set, we were already well into the beer. I sat a little away from the fire for the heat, and looked back at the mainland. It was strange how close it looked, like it was right there, and all the trouble of getting here had brought us almost no distance at all. After a lifetime of looking out at these Islands, they can seem monolithic from the shore, like mountains rising out from the sea. It’s only when you come to them and look back on where you came from that you realize how small they all are. Nothing to them really. There were porcupine quills in the sand, spread about like matchsticks. Looking
back on the mainland the island seemed too small and quiet to have anything living on it. There was the proof though. There were animals all over the island, hiding somewhere, waiting until we decided to pick up our bottles and throw our trash on the fire and leave before they came back out to sniff around the sand and see if we had left anything good behind. By sundown, John’s refrain had become a, satisfied repetition of “man I’m fucked up” as he gazed smilingly at the sunset. He broke off long enough to say “Look! Look, there’s porpoises.” And there were, a school of them bobbing up in the water, not too far off shore in the sunset. “They’re beautiful” he said. “Like they’re dancing in the sunlight” he said pointing as if we were missing some important aspect of it. “That is the dumbest fucking thing I have ever heard” said Les as he pushed him over in the sand and put him in a headlock. “My beer! Don’t spill my beer, you prick!” he said, forgetting about the porpoises entirely. After dark a fog started to roll in. It felt like a heavy mist, and though it wasn’t raining, everything was damp, and the island was wrapped up in it like a blanket. It erased the mainland from view and dropped a pall of grey over the blackness of the night. We had descended into drunken complacency, and we talked about nothing in particular at length. Everyone’s speech became listless, as if nothing they said bore any relation to their meaning. When we had temporarily given up, and let the limp sizzle of the fire temporarily speak for us, we heard a sound down the beach. Before anyone could say a word, Les stood up with the hatchet in hand. “Jesus Les, what are you doing?” Michael said, standing up with him. Then we heard a clipped “HEY!” roll in from the same direction. “Hey” replied John, still seated by the fire, beer still in hand. I stepped back from the fire a bit to let my eyes adjust, and saw a figure walking toward us. “Hey!” it repeated. “You boys having a party?” it said, slurring a bit. “Yeah,” Michael said. “We’re camped out here for the night. There’s still plenty of room down on the east side of the island though, if you’re looking for a spot. Over on the other side of the swamp.” “That Mike?” the figure asked. “Yeah, who’s that?” The figure walked up into the light of the fire. “Holy shit. Scott?” Michael asked. “Put that axe away, Les. You scared the shit out 45 p
- FICTION -
- TIM FOGARTY -
of me. Walking up, I thought I was a goner.” Scott said. “Jeeeeesus Scotty, what are you doing out here tonight? Shouldn’t you be up the road, raiding your brother’s fridge? ” Les said. “I saw you guys from the shore earlier, and I thought I saw your dad’s boat, so I figured I’d take a little spin out after I had my dinner” Scott said. He was standing, unsurely on the sand in big winter boots, and wore a winter coat with the hood up against the rain. Everything was tattered except for an expensive looking button-up shirt. He sat down hard into the sand. “Cold?” John asked without getting up. “Never been too prepared” Scott said, sitting down hard into the sand. “Mind if I join you?” he said. We made room for him and everyone sat down again. “Your dad’s not out here with you, is he Les?” “No, we just took the boat out for a bit” he said, groping around in the dark for his beer, which had tipped over. “Must be a special occasion then. You sure you can handle it?” “Managing” Les said. “You wouldn’t have an extra one of those, would ya?” Scott asked, nodding his chin to Les’ beer. “Over in the cooler” he said. Scott stood up shakily and trod over to help himself. Everyone was quiet until he returned and fell back into his spot. He drank half of it in a gulp and asked about the felled tree laying out on the beach. “Firewood” John said. “Yeah, for next year” Michael said. Scott nodded and finished off the beer, tossing the bottle on the fire before getting up to grab another. By the firelight, I could see that his eyes were bloodshot, and unfocused. He made himself at home, and stayed, talking mostly to Les, and asking about his father, and his mother, and how things were going at the plant where Les worked. We began to talk again, getting back to the bullshitting banter that we had lost before he showed up. “You boys knew that Matheson boy died in the car crash a few years back, didn’t you” he asked Les. We all shut up, and the rift in the conversation closed like two water droplets merging. “Yeah. We did” Les said for us. “I ran into his father the other day at the Legion. That was a shame, he seemed like he was a nice kid. More like you lot than his parents” he said. We stopped altogether. “What a way to go” he said. “Hard way to go.”
“Yup” Les said sharply as if to end the conversation. I sat, and thought for a moment that I was going to just keep sitting there and ignore it, but I had to get up and leave. I walked, stumbling through the dark, back to the clearing where we had pitched the tents. Scott asked for the hatchet, and I could hear the hollow sound of him hacking at the felled tree. It resonated over the island, and even when I was back at camp, sitting on the log that looks out over the stony end of the shore I could still hear it. The fog was lifting a bit by then, and I could make out the hazy outline of the moon’s reflection stretching back to the mainland. After a few minutes I heard a rustling in the dark, coming up the path behind me. “That you?” Michael asked. “Right here” I said. He walked closer, bare feet feeling through the loose dirt in the dark. He held a beer to my shoulder and sat beside me, and after a moment asked “You remember how Matheson would always sing that song whenever we would pick him up? Every goddamn time he got in my car, he would sing it. Remember?” “Night they Drove ol’ Dixie Down.” “That’s the one. I never got the joke, but he just kept doing it and doing it” he said then lit another cigarette next to me, the flame the only light in the world apart from the moon. “It’s because he always used to call you a racist for hating rap” I said. He didn’t say anything. “Like you were a confederate sympathizer” I explained. “That’s also why he called your car the General Lee.” “Is that right?” He said, keeping his eye on the ocean. “Son of a bitch. Well, come on back when you’re ready. It sounds like we’ve got Scott pacified” he said. I listened, and the hacking had stopped. Michael felt his way back to the fire, and I stayed for a bit longer, sipping on my beer. The fog was gone, but it had started to rain a bit, and the sound of droplets falling in the trees around me seemed like a mocking chorus. When I did start back toward the fire, I could see it all from a distance, and stopped for a minute to consider it. It was so small against the darkness of the night spread out behind them like a stage curtain. Scott was passed out in the sand near a pile of rough-hewn logs some of which were charred black but unburnt. The three others sat in a semicircle around the fire, not laughing. I went back to the camp, struck my tent and gathered my things. I left a note, scrawled on the inside of a beer case jammed in the zipper of Michael’s tent, then walked the shore to find Scott’s
p 46
- FICTION -
- TIM FOGARTY -
boat. It was pulled up on the beach and tied to the root of a pine with rope that was rough in my hands. At first I just pushed it into the water and let it float, still tethered to the island. It felt good to float on the open ocean, but still know that I was secured to something. The boat was an old aluminum row boat, like the one my dad used to have. The sound of the water on its hull was soothing and familiar. I thought that I’d let the sound lull me to sleep. But I started thinking about Matheson again, and I couldn’t. I imagined them all sitting around the fire talking about him. I wanted to talk to someone. I took out my cell phone, and looked through my contacts. There wasn’t anyone to talk to, and I just kept seeing his name listed among the rest of them like nothing had happened. Just one among the list. I couldn’t go back. The rain cleared and the moon was bright enough that I could navigate my way back to shore, so I rowed toward Wooden’s River. I faced the island as its shadowy outline became smaller and smaller. The fire was the single point of light on the horizon, and as it shrunk into the distance it seemed like if I went far enough it would look like any other star shining dimly in the dark. When I was near shore, I took my hands off the oars and dipped them into the water where the mouth of the river empties into the sea. It was fresh and cool and I rinsed my hands and face with it before pulling Scott’s boat ashore. I climbed the embankment, pulling weeds out by the roots as I scrambled up. When I got to the shoulder of the road I started walking toward my parent’s house. I could use the spare key hidden to get in, and sleep in the guest bedroom. It must have been late. Deep into the morning. There wasn’t anyone on the road traveling in either direction for a half an hour or more. I plodded along, still drunk, thinking only about getting to bed. It was so silent that I would sometimes hear the rustling of nighttime animals in the bushes along the shoulder. On long stretches I would walk the center line, and it
would feel like freedom – like I was the only person in the world. It was a night just like that that Mattheson had died. Familiar story, drinking and hanging out - we’d done it a million times. Once too many, I guess. Standing near the center line, I thought about the way the world must have looked through his windshield, night lit silver before him by his headlights moving over the land like a lover’s glance. Aside from the sound of his car, the scene would be indistinguishable. I can imagine myself in the passenger seat as a witness. What would I have wanted to say to him? Finally, near Harborfront Drive, a car did pass, headed in the same direction. There are no streetlamps on that stretch of road, and the headlights were so bright in the darkness that I couldn’t see after it passed. I stood still on the gravel shoulder so I wouldn’t fall blindly into the ditch. When I started walking again I could see more headlights in the distance coming toward me. When they were close, the car slowed, nearly to a stop, and rolled slowly beside me for a moment. The driver’s side window was rolled down, and a woman spoke from inside. “Where ya headed honey?” She said. “Oh, just up ahead here” I said. “Come on in and I’ll take you there” she said. “Thanks” I said “But I’m nearly there”. She drove past and pulled a U-turn then pulled up beside me again. Through the passenger’s side window: “Come on, no sense in walking all that way. Let me give you a ride” she said, rolling along beside me, veering a little, side to side. I stopped for a moment, then got in and said “Thanks, I’m just up ahead.” When she stopped the car, she looked at me hollow eyed and alone. She smelled like rum. There was a lei hanging from her rear-view and little hula dancer on the dash. She offered me a cigarette. “I’m lonely” she said. r
47 p
submit your work: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, review, etc. • Previously unpublished, original work only. • We accept simultaneous submissions – but keep us informed. • For poetry we recommend sending up to 6 poems. • For fiction, non-fiction and other writing we don’t set a word limit. • We accept multiple submissions. • Expect to hear back within four months of submitting. • If selected for publication, we will send along editorial suggestions. We like working together! • While we have a focus on Canadian writing and reviews, submissions are open internationally. • We pay our contributors the sum of $25 (a number we are working hard to drastically improve). • Contributors also receive two copies of their featured issue. Send Two Separate Files (.pdf) 1 - Cover letter with name, address, email, title(s) of work, word count, and brief bio. 2 - Your work, paginated, in 12 pt readable font. Send to: submissions@theimpressmentgang.ca
- Fun & Games Sheet -
- Recipe of a food that falls apart -
OAT CAKES
Ingredients: -
2 cups uncooked oatmeal 2 cups flour 1/2 cup brown sugar 1/2 tsp salt 2 tsp baking powder 1 cup shortening or coconut oil 1/4 cup maple syrup 1/2 cup water
Directions: -
preheat oven to 350 degrees combine first five ingredients cut in shortening and maple syrup slowly add water to mixture until it holds roll out onto flat, floured surface cut into desired shape bake for 15 minutes until lightly browned
- Dots & Boxes -
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
- An alternate recipe of a similar food that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fall apart -
OATMEAL COOKIES
Ingredients: -
1/2 cup brown sugar 1/4 cup maple syrup 1/2 cup butter or coconut oil 1 egg (or equivalent) 1 tsp vanilla 1 cup flour 1/2 tsp each: salt, baking soda, powder 1 cup uncooked oatmeal chocolate chips, nuts, seeds (optional)
Directions: - preheat oven to 350 degrees - blend together first three ingredients - add in wet ingredients until smooth - combine flour, salt, baking soda, powder - stir in oats and any final ingredients - mould into one tablespoon size balls, place onto parchment lined cookie sheet, press down lightly - bake for 8-10 minutes until lightly browned
Journal of Impressive Writing • HALIFAX • NS • CANADA •
new writing by MADELEINE BRAUN JON BOLDUC SALVATORE DIFALCO SARA FLEMINGTON TIM FOGARTY MATTHEW HOOTON DAVID HUEBERT PRISCILLA MEDEIROS P. C. VANDALL ROBERT SWEREDA
reviews by CHARLOTTE BONDY PEARL CHAN DAVID FLEMING CASSIE GUINAN ESMÉ HOGEVEEN BEN STEPHENSON
an interview with CRAIG DAVIDSON
drawings by EMMA FITZGERALD DAKOTA MCFADZEAN
ISSN 2292-9568 (Online)
9 772292 955009 >