Plainsong Volume 36

© 2023, Plainsong, Vol. 36

Department of English & Theatre Arts, University of Jamestown, Jamestown, North Dakota; copyright reverts to authors, artists, and photographers on publication, and any reprinting or reproduction may be exercised only with their permission.

Plainsong, a non-profit journal funded by the University of Jamestown, published by the University Department of English & Theatre Arts, includes work of students, faculty, staff, alumni of the University of Jamestown, and creators from around the country.

Creative Nonfiction

Contents

EDITORIAL BOARD

Department of English

Sean Flory, Ph.D., Chair

Aaron Cloyd, Ph.D., Editor

Mark Brown, Ph.D.

Danielle Clapham, Ph.D.

STUDENT EDITOR & LAYOUT

Rachel Roehrich

COVER PHOTOGRAPH

“Fall on Campus”

Sydney Lewellen

COVER DESIGN

Donna Schmitz

PRINTING & BINDING

Two Rivers Printing, Jamestown, ND

Plainsong represents one of many creative endeavors at University of Jamestown. As also evident in a thriving theatre program and music department, this publication indicates the long-standing commitment to the arts at UJ. Each year, multiple productions and musical performances are staged in the Reiland Fine Arts Center, and for close to four decades now, university students, faculty, staff, and alumni have found a voice in Plainsong.

Reaching beyond its active campus life, University of Jamestown has long cultivated relationships with the community of Jamestown, the state of North Dakota, and the broader Northern Great Plains region. The school colors of orange and black are just as apparent on campus as off. Many of our students come from the region, and our alumni return to the surrounding areas to teach, work, and serve with their various degrees.

Plainsong strives to honor both traditions: the creative aspects of campus and the significant relationships beyond. To use the old phrase, Plainsong aims to be a creative magazine for both town and gown.

As such, we extended the call for submissions beyond the University this year, collaborating with independent bookstores and creative writing programs throughout the area. Work was also received from locations farther flung, from artists and authors with roots in the region, or whose work reflects concerns and currents of the Northern Great Plains.

The available prizes were likewise expanded, permitting us to recognize first-place and honorable mention submissions, while also allowing us to consider individual genres and the entirety of the submissions wholistically. This year, poetry submissions were especially strong, so the editors found it appropriate to grant an extra honorable mention prize to that category

The publication of Plainsong is possible because of the on-going support of the Department of English and Theatre Arts and University of Jamestown President, Provost, and Dean. Thank you.

This year, in particular, we are grateful for the artistic vision and expertise of Rachel Roehrich. The professional layout and beauty of this year’s publication would not be possible without her.

Finally, thank you to the authors and artists who support this magazine through their wide-ranging submissions. We look forward to reading and viewing your future creations.

In Event of Moon Disaster

"Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice."

–Unread note prepared for July 18, 1969

It makes sense that the president should have it on his desk, in a folder, under other statements, space ain't safe, wasn't safer then, and that Apollo ship really does look like a pig with a superstrong engine strapped to it, who knows what happens hanging a few hundred thousand miles over Mongolia, nobody knows, so there had to be a few smooth paragraphs typed and ready for the fireball or the quiet, for Neil and Buzz listening to the ticks and shakes in their fat suits, their ride broke down in a grey desert, knowing nobody ain't coming down this way ever ever ever, nothing to do, just watch a planet's green and blue go, above them, dark.

Oh, 49 Dollar Hotels

I’ve loved you ever since you were nineteen ninety-nine hotels, the surprises underneath your bedframes, better, I think, than the complete lack of surprise in the chain hotels with their waffle makers, labeled pillows, and safely-framed black and white photos. Your doors, technically, lock; still, I’ll put my real trust in the way the night clerk checks me in with a receipt book out of 1968, pulls a full bar of soap from behind his counter and a knife to shave me a slice for my bathroom. I will never, of course, put food in the mini fridge which smells a little like socks worn by a catfish. Here, you have no choice but to relax, don’t complain about how the bathroom tile peels like a tree shoot growing toward the sun lamp, you won’t get a discount, so when the shades don’t open, you have to figure it out yourself, like you figured not to pull too hard on the knob or the whole sink could pop out of its divot in the wall. This stop was built by someone who lived in this town, you’re handed a key a real, metal key to a space like a living room you’re invited into as have many, many before you.

The Problem With Highway 20 Now

The problem with Highway 20 now is how the brown hills roll all the way to the clouds, how snow snakes by the shoulder, filed in fields by this wind, how grain silos shine in each town, their fat shapes topped with erector-set spires, how the hay rolls are stacked, how the cedar shelterbelts gather like oases, windmills wag in their old, tin clothes, how all of this is something you remember differently years and ages ago, just a tape deck, AM radio, unreachable here in this halo by the beeps and rings and pings sounding all the way down the line.

Wind Chill

Portraits

Portrait, I

In France, Isa is German. She is German everywhere, of course, but it is in France that I meet her. She is maybe the first German I have ever met, or at least the first young one, or maybe just the first German I have spent time with.

Isa never owned or even used a microwave, her father passed away when she was a child, and she only drank whole milk. In France, we go on vacation to Provence and swim in the Mediterranean Sea together, in Cassis. Isa finds snails in the water, puts them on our bodies, tells me to pose for pictures. We don’t know the French word for mermaid, but Isa like all Germans, it seems knows four languages fluently and tells me in English. Or maybe the idea just comes across.

Portrait, II

The night we stay up until 4 am talking about all the things in the world, Mike tells us about his earliest memory, nine months old or maybe just five. It doesn’t matter really.

What matters is this: 27 years ago, he stood in his crib, shook the side, thought to himself, “this is what I do.” Mike has never thought like a child in his whole life, I’d wager.

The first time we meet, it is in a sweltering room on the first floor of the Hamilton Smith building at the University of New Hampshire. We are learning to teach 18-year-olds how to write. When they tell us to write a bad story, we pair up, write nonsense together with Nate. Mike puts a horse in the story later, I know this is for Jess, horses always for his Jess.

I think he is a little weird. This is mostly right, but so am I, and it only takes me a few weeks to figure out that doesn’t matter, for either of us. What matters is this: Mike speaks no language, writes poems, holds things in his mind I’ve never dreamed up before.

Portrait, III

Seamus told me once that his dream was to have all of his laundry clean at once. This, he explained, was one reason he elected to live alone his senior year of college, in a tiny studio behind the 24-hour Haggen on Bill

Ashley Benson – Creative Nonfiction Prize

McDonald Parkway. Otherwise, how would he sit, excited on the couch in no-skivvies-at-all, waiting for the final load to dry?

As for spaghetti, the parmesan is grated on the pasta, not the sauce if Seamus wanted cheesy sauce, he’d put cheese in the damn sauce, for Christ’s sake.

Seamus plays the euphonium, has the thickest glasses I’ve ever seen, and believes in community & local government the way most people believe in money: this can change things, he knows it. He looks exactly and I mean exactly like his mother. It’s like he doesn’t have a father at all, which to be fair he sort of doesn’t.

Other important characters in his life include several older lesbian women he refers to as his Aunties, and everyone he has ever met. There has never been an interaction that he didn’t approach with joy & love & that is why we love him, too.

Two summers ago, I watched him get married, sitting in a barn next to Patrick when our own relationship was just new. They gave us drinks during the ceremony and there were canoes & barbecue, bluegrass & peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. At night, after dancing together to “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” Seamus sat beside his new wife in a camp chair & smiling. We were all there & it was all very good & nothing wasn’t right.

Portrait, IV

Ian Honsberger’s apartment’s surfaces are covered in rocks. He tells me they are all over, in his car, and in his office. I imagine that when I get up to go to the bathroom they’ll be in there, too, lining the edges of the sink and sitting on top of the toothbrush holder. He studies geology at the University of New Hampshire in the PhD program, and drives through the most rural parts of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, to find the perfect spot for seismography devices, which he implants into the ground. They’re powered by small solar panels.

On his wall there is a map of Vermont, that is too tall to fit upright. It stretches the opposite direction, Vermont lying on its face.  It’s called the “Bedrock Geologic Map of Vermont,” and there are areas marked out in different colors, pink and green and purple and blue and lots of different yellows & browns. They’re in chunks sometimes, but more often the colors wrap around each other, in lines and rivulets that look like oil spills in water. He tells us that he became a geologist because he loved the Earth.

Portrait, V

When Charles Simic was offered the position as the poet laureate of the United States, he almost didn’t take the call. The phone rang when he walked through the door with his wife, grocery bags in each of their four hands. Because his wife told him to, he put down his groceries, answered the phone, listened for a moment, said no thank you, hung up.  He said it in his old voice, the same one he tells this story to his poetry students with: sweet and slightly accented, soft, but with no th’s, just t’s and hung up.

Later, because again his wife and also his children and close friends told him to, he changed his mind, called back, accepted the position.

Portrait, VI

Alice goes to New Orleans for a conference on deterritorialization and Deleuze. She laments the way that Americans even the academics deliberately mispronounce his name, drawing an ‘oo’ in the second syllable, rather than pushing out an ‘uh’ from the diaphragm. I hope she remains unaware of the mangling of ‘Guattari.’

On her way to the airport to take a flight to New York City, the taxi driver tells her she is too early for her flight, takes her to a restaurant, orders a meal.

It’s the only restaurant in the world that serves every meal in a potato, he tells her, and orders a potato with fried chicken in it.

When the two of them are back in the taxi, he points to the left, and says that over there’s the mall, y’all. She tells me all of this in her London accent, the one she learned in elocution lessons as a child.

Portrait, VII

Keith Gilmore and I sing the duet “Ghetto Superstar” together at a karaoke night in graduate school.

The bar is called Castaways, a tiki dive on the banks of the Piscataqua River in Dover, New Hampshire, and we sing together because the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony song that he wanted to do with Patrick and Nate

Ashley Benson – Creative Nonfiction Prize

(with whom he had dressed up as Wayne & Garth the previous year for Halloween) is not in the DJ’s book. Crossroads. When I first meet Keith, he wears sagging, baggy jeans and a baseball hat with crossword puzzle print on it. His T-shirts have comic book characters or rappers he admires on them. He is passively obsessed with lucid dreaming, and I tell him about the one lucid dream I have had at that point: a dream in college. Someone told me I couldn’t do something, something mundane, and I retorted with an expletive and the realization-actualization, “I am dreaming. I can do anything.” And so I began to flap my arms and fly. Keith is amazed, in that calm way of his.

Keith likes to freestyle rap along to beats he burns to CDs that he plays in his car, but if we are standing outside a bar, drunk at 2am and 24 years old, a basic beat laid down by someone else is enough to get him going. Later, he stops eating meat, takes up meditation, experiments with abstaining from alcohol, or weed, or both at once an ascetic trying to dream on command, in lucidity, amongst a cohort of addictive personalities. He reads the Bhagavad Gita.

Keith thrives in the hypothetical, the space between ideation and application or implementation. He majored in philosophy, if you couldn’t tell already.

In Seattle, we live with him in a duplex in the Fremont neighborhood, where we cultivate a garden together and he sleeps until 2pm whenever he can. We make Top 10 Lists to pass the time, an idea one writer or another had in grad school. Top ten desserts, top ten inventions, top ten reasons to go outside. Each decision is deliberated over, analyzed, considered.

When we meet in 2009 in the same room where I meet the love I wasn’t looking for Keith has never been outside of New England, triangulating a space between Worcester, Mass; the seacoast of New Hampshire; and his Rhode Island alma mater his entire 23 years. Later still, he lives alone in Portland, Oregon, in a studio apartment that is cold and damp in the Pacific northwest winter and has a small, fenced patio where he grows kale and feeds squirrels peanuts from his hands, far from the northeast of his birth.

Now, instead of backwards baseball caps and free style hip hop verses, he evangelizes about mushrooms and masculinity. From one corner to another.