Silent CIty Magazine, Issue 2 by Matt Goodlett

Silent Cit y

Featuring:

The Boondocks’ Carl Jones on hustling & new toys

Filmmaker Michelle Kohrs in Tanzania Writer Anna Monardo with tips for storytellers Art by Rachel Ziegler

WRITING 4 ART 4 CULTURE 4 COMMUNITY Fall 2007 4 Vol. I, No. II

Interviews with:

Bear Country Benjamin Percy Kiara Brinkman Dan Chaon Robert A. Siegel

Small Press Spotlight: MacAdam/Cage | Katie Wudel on twentysomething freakouts More “Hippie Doctor” from Benjamin Graber | Fiction by Chantal O’Keefe & Hugh Reilly

FREE 4 TAKE ONE 4 SPREAD THE WORD

Silent Cit窶楽 Founding Editors Gene Kwak Matt Goodlett Managing Editor Matt Goodlett Senior Editor Gene Kwak Art Director Katie Wudel Technical Advisor Oran Belgrave

SUBMIT!

Silent City is looking for fine writing and art, and is available in select locations across the United States. E-mail unsolicited manuscripts to submit.silentcitymag@gmail.com. Illustration by Mike Lawson, 2007.

Senior Photographer Mark Kresl Cover Artist Rachel Ziegler: Giving a Simple Gift, My Father Makes Round Things, multimedia, 2007

Silent City is published quarterly by Blue Centerlight Publications LLC, and can be reached at P.O. Box 1406, Bellevue, NE 68005. Silent City is available throughout Omaha, Lincoln and Council Bluffs for free. Yearly subscriptions are available for delivery for $20. Single issues are available for delivery for $6. Opinions expressed within Silent City are those of the writers and may not reflect the opinion of Silent City, its management, employees or advertisers. Silent City accepts unsolicited manuscripts. For advertising rates and information, contact Matt Goodlett at silentcitymag@gmail.com. To send comments or submissions, e-mail submit.silentcitymag@gmail.com. For more information please visit www.silentcitymag.com.

Table of Contents

4 Profile Carl Jones by Brian Tucker

26 Music Omaha is Bear Country by Gene Kwak

6 Document Letters from Tanzania by Michelle Kohrs

28 Small Press Spotlight MacAdam/Cage by Matt Goodlett

8 Tips Notes on Creating Characters in Fiction by Anna Monardo

29 Fiction Michael’s Fire by Hugh Reilly

10 Essay Generation WTF by Katie Wudel

31 Interview Brinkman’s Touching Debut Novel by Erin Andrews

13 Poem Music Mined from Rocks: 1 by Myron Hardy

32 Poem Music Mined from Rocks: 2 by Myron Hardy

14 Interview Of Ghost Stories and Nudist Colonies: Dan Chaon by Gene Kwak

33 Interview Robert Anthony Siegel by Erin Andrews

18 Memoir Hippie Doctor: Part Two by Benjamin Graber 20 Art Rachel Ziegler 22 Interview The Language of Men: Benjamin Percy by Gene Kwak

35 Fiction Asphyxiation by Chantal O’Keefe 36 Poem Music Mined from Rocks: 3 by Myron Hardy 37 Contributors’ Notes 38 Dream The Aspiring Artist’s Wheel of Day Job Samsara by Amie Tullius

More art by Mike Lawson (2, 19, 22), Mike Sgier (8, 17), Dorothy Gambrell (11), Jill Rizzo (13, 24), Mark Kresl (15), and Max Riffner (35).

CARL JONES talks about getting it all done and creating his own toy line. by Brian Tucker Above: Carl Jones with characters from The Boondocks. Opposite: Jones’ new toy line. Photos courtesy Carl Jones.

This month, The Boondocks returned for a second season on Cartoon Network. The animated show, based on the national comic strip created by Aaron McGruder, had the highest rated premiere in the network’s history. It was nominated for both Image and NAACP awards and last April won a Peabody Award for the episode ‘Return of the King’ in which Martin Luther King, Jr., awakes to today’s culture. Most animated shows endure a lengthy production schedule and The Boondocks is no exception. The work involved was so much that McGruder asked Carl Jones to illustrate the strip while he focused on the show. Eventually the comic strip was put on hold to focus entirely on producing the series. First developed at Fox, the deal never happened and the show found interest at Cartoon Network where fifteen episodes were produced. The Boondocks focuses on Huey and Riley Freeman who move from the south side of Chicago to live with their granddad, Robert, or ‘Pops,’ in the quiet suburbia of Woodcrest, Maryland. The show premiered in November 2005, and after much critical and commercial success and a little controversy, the show is shaking up the neighborhood again. We spoke with Carl Jones, who illustrated the comic strip and went on to serve as producer for the television series.

I awake Carl Jones at nine in the morning this summer. He sounds groggy and says he’ll call me back in about an hour. It’s nine a.m. in Los Angeles and he’s spent a late night working on the show. When he calls back, the sound of city life permeates our conversation. Jones’ voice is deep and occasionally he punctuates sentences with “man.” He’s laid back and affable, and although I won’t reveal his age, he carries on like an adult who still has a sense of wonder about him. He retains the surprise of experiencing Chuck Jones’ Road Runner cartoons or seeing Star Wars as a kid. Carl is a father and is getting to do what he loves: produce cartoons for a living. His father was in the military and Jones was born in Germany. He lived there only a year. Back in the states, his father worked several jobs. “He was a jack of all trades. Always had a hustle, some type of sales job — insurance, car alarms,” Carl recalls. Carl recognizes his father for encouraging his art, not only because his father also drew but because he’d bring a pack of paper home from work and hand to it to his young son. “I’ve been drawing as long as I could hold a pencil,” he says. “I would go through the stack of paper when he was gone. I always thought it was a goal to go though all the paper before he got home the next night. I would go through all the paper and he’d say ‘you need to turn it over and use the other side’ before I bring you any more paper home.” Now Carl draws something whenever a blank piece of paper or napkin happens to be in front of him. He tends to fill up the whole page. “I sketch a lot. I can’t help it. It’s a part of me. It’s almost habitual. I was a kid who got in trouble for drawing on walls, the hallway. That was me, crayon, whatever. I don’t know, there’s something about a blank wall, anything that was large and blank felt like a canvas to me.” In time, comics came along. Carl emulated what he saw in favorites Master of Kung Fu, Silver Surfer, and X-Men, and television shows like The Hulk and Wonder Woman. He cites Star Wars as a catalyst for opening up his imagination to more possibilities. “When I saw it the first time, it changed my life. Just seeing that scale of ingenuity and imagination, it just blew me away. I liked the idea that you do it on the big screen and have people look at it. It fueled my creative energy.”

Television also offered up animated shorts by Chuck Jones, famous for Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. “I just loved to watch the energy in the drawings and the animation itself was incredible, but the design element, the way he would approach things,” Carl says. “And Tex Avery, that stuff was really fun to me.” He attended high school in Fayetteville, North Carolina and moved to Philadelphia afterwards, where his mother was from. Eventually, Carl came to Los Angeles. “On the east coast I was doing freelance work, storyboard work. I was interested in a project with one of the The Play Pen producers at Warner Brothers, doing promotional animated shorts for the movie House of Wax.” Freelance jobs weren’t enough to take care of responsibilities. Most jobs that Carl found were factory work and didn’t pay much. “I think I get it from my father, I’ve always had a hustling talent. In Philly I had three tables of CDs, movies, toys, socks, jewelry, whatever. I would set up right in front of the Gallery Mall on 11th and Market and work down there and make my own money, work for myself. I always had that in me.” Instead of doing freelance work from North Carolina, he knew he should relocate to Los Angeles. So, he and the family moved west. Carl met The Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder walking down the street. Carl said that he always admired McGruder’s work and loved the strip. The two exchanged information. At the time, McGruder was working on The Boondocks pilot and Carl was in the process of helping develop The Play Pen with Roc-AFella films, Beanie Siegel, and State Property. The two stayed in touch and McGruder told him about meeting deadlines for the cartoon and working on the show at the same time. McGruder hired Carl to help draw the strip in the style McGruder originated. “Basically, Aaron wanted the style to be consistent. It took a little while for me to get it. Of course some of my own stuff was going to come through, but I tried my best to stick with the way he did it,” Carl says.

The Boondocks animated show was supposed to be picked up by Fox but was not. Time passed and McGruder sold the show to Cartoon Network/Adult Swim. The amount of work became overwhelming and they stopped working on the strip to concentrate on the television show.

“We’re looking at ways to bring the strip back,’ Carl says, not wanting to give too much away. Carl’s optimistic about the comic strip comeback and notes several outlets for bringing it back. Two studios in Korea were used for the first season’s animation duties. Producing an animated show is not the same as producing a normal sitcom. There are no sets that can be used regularly. Each episode of an animated show has to be created almost from the beginning, drawn and redrawn. There were problems at the start. Overseas studios handled storyboard work and when McGruder and Jones got the animation back, a lot had to be redone. So much revision was needed that the crew had to re-board a lot of the shows entirely from scratch. “In some of the stuff we do on the show, there are so many subtleties. It’s like a subculture within a culture. So if you don’t completely understand that, it’s hard to get the acting right, get the jokes right — you don’t understand the joke or the timing. We have translators for the script. That’s one layer. The next layer is getting into the type of humor we’re doing.”

Carl explains that during the first season, McGruder went to Korea and the animators asked him why the character Huey never smiles. McGruder was unable to get the idea across until he mentioned Malcolm X. Then they got it. “Little things like that, bridges we have to cross. We spend a lot of time communicating so it gets done the right way.” The Boondocks has always had an anime influence. “Aaron always had a thing for anime, to bring anime culture and urban or black humor together. It’s something that’s never been done before,” Carl says. “You know in anime, the story’s so bad you want to turn the sound down and watch the action. You never saw an anime show that told jokes. I love anime. In terms of stories, they’re hard to relate to. There are things we love about anime and things we love about comedy. Aaron wanted to bring them together.” The first season, Carl was involved more with writing, more so than the second season because the production side was much more demanding. “We have a small writing group, we sit around and think about a story and Aaron would go off and write it. Rodney Barnes writes a lot of stuff too. It was a small group of people, Aaron would write it and bring it back and we’d all punch it up.” After season one was finished everyone celebrated one day and then the next day it was back to work. “We didn’t have time to break and regroup, man,” he says. Season two was slated to begin airing in July but was pushed back until October. “We went over our schedule a little bit. Adult Swim wanted twenty shows, which is typical, and we settled for fifteen. I know why we didn’t do twenty the second season. We realized how difficult it was to get fifteen out. It’s difficult to do twenty episodes, just production-wise.” But some of the delay may have come from self imposed pressure and further attention on the style of the show. With the new season, there’s a higher scene count and extra characters, so the task requires more designers and CONTINUED ON PAGE 9

Letters from T anzania

by Michelle Kohrs

As a documentary filmmaker, I was invited to travel to Tanzania in April 2006, to film a short documentary on AIDS. The following are excerpts from my “letters” home. Between dealing with limited access to a computer, and sporadic electricity, at best, I would quickly type up my journal notes when I had the chance and send them off for friends and family to read back home. I’ve left these letters as they were originally sent, to retain the raw reflections on my experiences.

April 13, 2006 Habari from Tanzania

In the case of Rejema’s family, we learn that her husband died of I’ve quickly learned that things in Tanzania don’t always go as cerebral malaria. Though it is difficult to say, it is possible that a weakplanned. I’ve been trying to get online for six days now and am just ened immune system from AIDS allowed for the malaria to take the now succeeding for an extended period of time. Here are several days young man’s life. He had worked in mines, away from his family for of travel stories from Africa. extended periods of time. In many cases, this lifestyle leads to promis After a 24-hour journey, I arrived in Tanzania on Friday evening. cuity and the transmission of the virus. I was greeted at the airport by the producer of the film project, Bob After tea, we made our way back down the mountain, this time Kasworm, and my Dutch roommates, Julia and Ellen, both medical along a mountain stream and over old wooden plank bridges. students. The sun had set by the time my plane arrived, so the jour Sunday morning came to an early start. Ellen, Julia and I joined ney to Machame was in the dark. Instead, the smells of Tanzania asJack and Dr. Coles — two missionaries from Texas — on a visit to saulted my senses, just as they so memorably had during my first visit Maasailand. At 6:45 a.m., we climbed into a van packed full with 16 a few years earlier. Most notable were the smells of burning wood for people and supplies. I met Bernhard, a med student at the hospital, cooking fires and tropical fruit. We made the short half-hour journey and we talked about his wife and kids back in Kenya, about dowries up the mountain to Machame Hospital and I settled into the guest(he had to pay 24 cattle for his wife) and about the benefits of marhouse for the evening. rying an American. Also, we discussed polygamy, a common practice Saturday morning began with tea at Bob’s house. Afterwards, among many African tribes. Bob, the Dutch girls and I took a long hike up the mountain, camera After a couple hours of driving, we made it to Maasialand and in tow, to visit Rejema, a young widow Bob had met on a previous the village we were visiting. We stationed ourselves at the church and hike. After walking for quite some time on the dirt road, past small one of the Tanzanian med students led Sunday school with the kids houses, banana plants, people working in their fields, a man leading while the adults held worship inside. After church, we handed out a herd of cattle, another man carrying a large sack of grain on his bread, water and pencils to over 100 Maasai head, and hearing countless children yell out “Mzungu!” — a word used to describe any We talked about dowries children. Then, a health clinic was held for white person — we arrived at our destina(he had to pay 24 cattle for the children. The doctors and med students found cases of worms, some malaria, skin tion. A bibi — grandmother — greeted us his wife) and the benefits of irritations and other minor ailments, and and told us that Rejema had gone to the marhanded out free medicine. After a long, hot ket in Moshi for the day. All the same, the marrying an American. day in Maasailand, we made the journey back bibi invited us in for tea. The four of us sat in over muddy, nearly intraversible roads and on to the paved highway. the mud-floored living room of the small house, surrounded by sev That evening, I was invited by Benhard to eat dinner with the med eral children quite amazed to have four Mzungu sitting in their living students. We had rice, beef stew, beans and spinach. room. As we sat drinking tea, another bibi passed with a grandchild On Monday, I met up with Bob and he gave me a tour of the hosin her arms. With the AIDS epidemic in full force in Tanzania, it pital and we worked out tentative filming plans. Around noon we is quite common to see grandparents raising grandchildren. In most headed into Moshi, a nearby town. It became tiresome to be the center cases, it will remain unknown for several years whether the children of attention and stares all day long, but it’s inevitable traveling as an also have acquired the virus. Mzungu in Tanzania, particularly a blond, female Mzungu.

Tuesday was a public holiday, though no one could really seem to shared one bed with his three children. The kitchen was a separate tell me why (holidays are a dime a dozen here.) Bob and I filmed some shack with nothing more than a fire pit. The bathroom was a hole in establishing shots around the hospital, including me standing in the the ground with boards crossing over it to stand on, sheltered a bit by back of Bobs pick-up while he drove up the bumpy, mountain dirt some tarps. I saw very few belongings and there was no electricity or road. It was quite a sight for the locals, no doubt. plumbing. Wednesday was a very long day of filming. We filmed the HIV/ Despite only being there a very short time, the man opened up to AIDS clinic — held by the camera rather quickly. Dr. Hartwig, an incredBut, as Bob put it later on, ible American who travels he looked like he had been across the country working hit by a truck and no lonwith AIDS patients. His ger knew what to make of kind demeanor quickly his life. earns the trust and respect At the second home, of his patients. Six hours of we visited Nektar and her interviews with patients, three children. Her husstraight through. We probband died from AIDS a ably saw around thirty year ago. Nektar is fightpatients. It was mostly in ing tuberculosis, an opKiswahili, so my underportunistic infection that standing of it all, so far, is wreaks havoc on AIDS based off the little translapatients. She came into tion I was given and body the clinic some time ago language. It was a lot to with the children who take in and I am still very have yet to be tested. Dr. much processing it all. I’ll Hartwig asked why the share more stories as time children were not in school Michelle Kohrs filming in Tanzania. The children’s mother is an AIDS patient who was interviewed goes on and I, of course, and she explained they did during the documentary. These children were enthralled with the camera, according to Kohrs. have great footage. not have the money for it. I I have been here for six days now. I still have yet to see Mt. Kilimanforget exactly how much she needed, but it was just a few dollars per jaro, though if the clouds would just clear, I would have a perfect view child for the entire year. Bob connected an American donor with the from my front yard. family and now the kids are in school, allowing Nektar some peace It’s been an incredible time so far. I’ve met some amazing people and and quiet during the day. It’s a nice story that the kids are now in have great footage to show for it. school, but this is very much an exception to the norm. Very few famiMiss you all! lies have an American financially supporting them. Lastly, we visited a mother with two small children. Both she and April 20, 2006 the children are positive, but the husband has tested negative several Tanzania Home Visits times. The oldest of the two little girls, probably around five or six, was quiet with sad eyes. She coughed throughout our visit and was clearly After a grueling day of travelling, we arrived safely back to Machnot feeling well. Their home was a little nicer than the first two we ame. Though worries of drought were widespread before I arrived in visited, though with similar kitchens and bathrooms. the country, they have been quite literally washed away by one rain The next day I was filming around the hospital and I ran into the shower after another. We returned to a very muddy Machame. Bob anti-retroviral clinic where every week AIDS patients get their CD4 and I had home visits planned the next day, so we hoped we would count tested and receive free antiretroviral medication if their CD4 have a clear night so the roads would dry up. But later that evening, count is low enough. The last family we visited the day before we arthe rain started up again and continued through the next morning. rived at the clinic as I was filming. After a short time, the little girl The rain broke around noon and we took off up the mountain in caught my eye and gave me a quick smile. I walked over and sat next Bob’s four-wheel drive pick-up. Mr. Muro, an intensive care nurse, acto her on the bench. Using the limited Kiswahili I know, I told her my companied us. He does a lot of volunteer work with AIDS patients. name and asked for hers. She shyly, in a soft voice, told me, “Pendo”, His sister has the virus, so it is something he is very passionate about. which means “love” in Kiswahili. I let her look through my video camThrough his dedication, he has developed trusting relationships with era and it captured her interest for awhile. many of the patients. I left Machame this morning to spend a few days in Dar es Salaam Our first stop was to visit a young man in his early thirties. His wife and Zanzibar. I went by plane, so the trip was fast and comfortable. died of AIDS last year and he is now left to raise their three children So far, I find Dar to be a very large city, though still very much Tanzaalone. He has tested postive as well, though the children have yet to nian. I am looking forward to heading to Zanzibar tomorrow, where be tested. He gave me a tour of his house. It was no more than a oneit will hopefully be quieter with less people. room shack with dilapitaded boards for walls and a mud floor. He

I’ll be home next week... 4

Notes on CREATING CHARACTERS in FICTION

by Anna Monardo

Creating a main character for a piece of fiction is like dating.

Illustration by Michael Sgier, 2007. In Monardo’s most recent novel, Falling In Love With Natassia, one of the most prominent characters is Mary Mudd, a dancer who at 19 has a child despite the potentially devastating consequences for her budding career. Mary’s many contradictions make her a dynamic character.

You have to spend time with your character, in all kinds of situations, before it’s clear whether or not you guys have a future together. Will dating lead to love? Love to living together? Living together to marriage? Or, in terms of literature, is your character leading you toward a novel, novella, short story, or haiku? A haiku of a relationship can be lovely, even life-changing, and people have been known to go from weekend fling to wedding, but in the long run you’re usually better off taking time to get to know this character you’re dealing with before plotting a whole novel (or a lifetime) around them. Beginning writers often think that writing a good story is all about coming up with a jazzy storyline. The truth is you don’t even have to work that hard — just sit down with paper and pen (or at a keyboard) and let your character talk about himself. Let her ramble. (The nice thing about hanging out with a fictional friend is that this person lives only in your head, so you don’t have to worry about losing weight or shaving your legs.) Like a stranger at a party who catches your attention with a funny line, a sexy story, or a puzzling tattoo, your fictional character is someone you’ve decided you want to know better. When your curiosity has been aroused, you’re willing to put in your time; you want to learn everything. Maybe your character starts by telling you about where she was born. When? And what’s their deal now? What’s the one big thing they want really badly in life? And why does that Big Want keep eluding them? Once your characters start confiding in you — about their desires, about the obstacles in their life — you’ve hit gold. Here are some tips on how to mine the gold.

CARL JONES

Start by getting the name straight.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4

You know how unsettling it is when you run into someone whose name you can’t remem-

more backgrounds in the episodes. This all means more drawing, more painters and designers. “After completing a season, I want to say yes!” Carl says with obvious enthusiasm. “Once it’s done, you really feel good about all the work you put into it. The extra work actually shows.” Producing the show has a long list of duties. Carl oversees most aspects of production. From time to time, he will get in and do storyboard revisions or character designs. His job is to make sure everything is working towards McGruder’s vision, that everyone is communicating what was on the scripted page visually. This also includes the voice directing. “We have a very talented voice director, Andrea Romano. She’s been around a long time so she’s really good at what she does. Like I said, the type of comedy we’re doing is so specific and the characters we’re doing — you have to know who these characters are to really know how the line should be read and how the jokes should be played. I have to be there to make sure all those things come together. I have to make sure the style of the show looks like traditional anime. We all work together as a team.” The second season introduces new characters. Carl thinks they will help The Boondocks have

ber? With a name, though, you can address, introduce or even Google them. If you’re not sure where to go next in the conversation, explore the name itself. Why did your parents name you Babblingbrook? So now you’re getting info on your character’s family, too. I know a young woman who was named Crystal because she was conceived after a “Who Shot J.R.?” party. With that one fact, you know a bit about the social milieu of Crystal’s family. You know when she was born, and maybe even a little bit about why.

When describing a character’s looks, don’t sketch a still life. Show us how he moves, what sort of attitude he gives off when he enters a room. How does he behave with a cashier? At a bus stop, is he rude to strangers or too eager to talk? On a crowded elevator, does he offer to push buttons … or does he push people’s buttons?

Remember these equations: Story = Character + Conflict. Every well developed character has at the center of his life some confounding conflict that exists within his heart and also gets acted out in his day-to-day doings — in his house, his neighborhood, at his job.

Our self-knowledge < our blind spots. Each of us is defined by our cluelessness (or Achilles Heel) as much as we are by our strengths. For example, Raymond Carver’s masterpiece story “Cathedral” begins with a husband who is acting like a boar because his wife has invited a blind man, an old friend of hers, to their home; from the first paragraph, however, the reader can see that the husband’s real problem, the one he’s blind to, has nothing to do with this guest. Not only is this husband’s marriage at stake but so is his soul if he continues to isolate himself by pushing away everyone around him. The wife’s blind friend offers a chance for connection, and if the husband doesn’t rise to the occasion he will likely be suffocated by his own surly misery.

No conflict = no character = no story. But how do you figure out what your character’s conflict is? Follow your curiosity and your own reactions to this character. Does she scare you? Offend you? Piss you off? Great. Write about that. What is it about your character that you simply cannot put your finger on? As long as you are chasing down some unrelenting curiosity, your character is in motion and so is your story — and, by the way, so is your reader, who can’t stop turning the pages.

Avoid

McGruder was unable to get the idea across until he mentioned Malcolm X. Then they got it.

being reductive. Fictional characters, just like you and me, would be rid of their pain and problems in a second if that were possible. Honor their complexity by exploring — rather than trying to erase — their ambiguity and contractions. (Word of caution: A complex character is interesting; unclear writing is not.)

clichés. No crying clowns, please; no golden-hearted whores. concocted endings. A story that ends in a suicide, murder, marriage proposal, or a sweepstakes victory is a story that needs more character exploration.

As with your hopelessly confused best friends, your most confounding lovers, your most annoying relatives, you’re going to have moments with your character when he’ll try your patience. He might drop secrets you’ll wish he’d kept to himself. Or worse, she might get boring. At some point, inevitably, you’ll feel the two of you are in a rut and you’ll consider looking elsewhere for fun. But if your curiosity draws you back to your character, go there. Don’t play hard to get. Eventually, you’ll find yourself wanting to make a commitment; you’ll not only want to but also need to check in daily. You won’t be happy if you don’t. By then you’ll be writing scenes, stories, whole chapters. You won’t be able to remember a time when this character didn’t exist. 4

a breakout season. Returning are Regina King (Huey and Riley) and Johnny Witherspoon (Pops), as well as Mos Def, Sam Jackson and Charlie Murphy. New actors to the show include Lil’ Wayne, Cee-Lo, Busta Rhymes, Snoop Dogg, and Fred Willard. “It’s crazy, man,” Carl says with a deep chuckle. I ask him about working with Johnny Witherspoon. There’s a brief pause in the conversation. There’s traffic in the background. “What’s it like working with Johnny Witherspoon? Oh, man, he’s hilarious. Witherspoon is one of the funniest guys I know,” Carl says and then pauses again briefly. “He’s really that guy, he’s really Pops, he’s really the guy you see on TV. You CONTINUED ON PAGE 13

Generation byWTF katie wudel Oh, to be twenty-five, on the cusp of twenty-six, my

metabolism starting to go, the crow’s feet making tracks, gray hairs sprouting, and me, spread-eagle on the couch in pajamas, scarfing Cheddar Beer chips while it rains.

Life is grand, I suppose. I have two steady jobs that I dig and a nice place to live and I’m generally, what is the word? Comfortable. It storms tonight in Omaha, in the yellow way it does nowhere else. I confess: there are boogers in my nose, huge ones — something about the landscape here, the humidity or pollen, turns my nostrils into little clogged-up nightmares. I feel no bones about digging up there. So, yes, a little too comfortable. I have to tell you, I’m someone for whom comfort and happiness are mutually exclusive. I’ve always been Type A — graduated summa cum laude, won awards, befriended teachers, went to grad school early without hesitation, published, networked, re-revised my Vita, went sleepless for my work, and have generally driven my peers to eye rolls and distraction for over two decades. I had vague, big dreams: I’d move to New York and edit a magazine, or bum around in a houseboat for years with a typewriter, striking gold when my memoir came out. HBO screenwriter, tenure-track professor at FancyPants U — I’d be Truman Capote, Carrie Bradshaw, David Sedaris, good ol’ Hunter S. — it was all happening, I could feel it. And it’s all amounted to this: I’m stranded on this couch, with my boogers, nattering on about the good old days two years ago, feeling a little out-to-sea, a little misplaced. I’m surrounded by dirty laundry, dirty dishes, and an albatross of a laptop next to me for writing my stories; it ran out of batteries while I procrastinated (Veronica Mars was on). What am I doing tonight? With my life? Nothing. Wallowing. Eating chips. Ignoring that gnaw of ambition. Yawn. Like many of my friends close to my age, from middle-class backgrounds and recently graduated (with honors, most of us, in creative — otherwise known as ineffectual — fields) from college

or master’s programs, this is how I spend my time: Watching endless fuzzy reruns (I refuse to pay for cable because, like many overeducated liberals, I like to tell myself I don’t watch TV), in lieu of growing up. I suppose you’re part of a certified phenomenon when you hear John Mayer mumble the name for your ennui over the P.A. at Baker’s: All I feel’s alone. / It might be a quarter-life crisis / or just the stirring in my soul. It appears, and I’m cringing as I write this, that I’m officially having a quarter-life crisis (QLC). Roll your eyes. It’s fine. You’re not the first. And you might be having one, too. QLC — it’s a chestnut among my peers, and it’s making an impression on the world at large, appearing in trend “articles” about Generation Y everywhere from the BBC and The New York Times to Parade magazine. Wikipedia’s entry on it has been appropriately tinged with doubt, marked for potential deletion in 2004, flagged for years with the words “unverifiable claims” — yet there it stands. Since around the turn of the century, there’s been a bit of a craze for QLC in the selfhelp sector, with hundreds of books like 20-Something, 20-Everything: A Quarter-Life Woman’s Guide to Balance and Direction and What to Do When You’re 22: A Survival Guide for the Quarter-Life Crisis cropping up. The same five people have had a hand in many such titles, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in QLC’s existence. But there it is. A malaise clings to me like garbage water. I can’t shake it off. And, it seems, the damn thing has clung to several of my friends and colleagues, at least for awhile. Taylor, 26, a relationshiphopping journalist, announced over coffee last year that he’d never again date anyone under 24. “I can’t go through that whole ‘What-amI-going-to-do-with-my-life crisis’ all over again.” A copywriter, 28, and account executive, 27, at the ad agency where I work recently listened to my complaints over drinks about my upcoming 26th birthday. They nodded, commenting in near-unison, “Well, at least you’re over that quarter-life crisis!”

11 Reprinted with permission. From Cat and Girl, www.catandgirl.com, by Dorothy Gambrell.

I said, “Nope. I’m right in the middle of it. Grad school — everything’s been delayed.” Bess Vanrenen, editor of Generation What?: Dispatches from the Quarter-Life Crisis, seems to agree with me. In her book’s blog, she states: “To anyone seeking a quarter-life crisis, [I] recommend graduate school.” Although I don’t think a master’s is the cause of the crisis — neither Taylor nor my coworkers have MFAs — I do think QLC sneaks up on those with ambition, especially of the creative sort. A dear friend from grad school — Amie, 31, a waitress and director of an art gallery in Salt Lake City — has mostly recovered from her QLC. She tells me that she struggled in her late twenties. “It makes me feel really spoiled now to say this,” she says, “but I thought it was all going to be easier. I almost expected the world would actively request me to bestow my gifts upon it.” As ambitious and excited about her creative life as I am (was?), Amie says that her success in school led her to believe (falsely) that she’d be successful in life. I’m guessing

some of this has to do with motivation — in school, we work to please our instructors, who’ve created deadlines and assignments for us. We receive feedback and advice. In the “real” world, however, we need to figure it out for ourselves. Amie has another theory, too: “The rhetoric of pop psychology and alternative culture from the 80s and 90s leans very heavily on oversimplification. Do what you love and the money will follow [a little proverb Amie heard from her folks quite often growing up,] is not necessarily untrue,” she says. “It’s just that there are so many more steps.” The proverb that haunts me? You can be anything you want to be. My parents gave me violin lessons, ballet classes, books and books and books, art supplies — tubes of paint, watercolor pencils. They fostered my whims. I know Amie and I are not alone. If we didn’t receive the necessary encouragement from our family, a lot of us found it somewhere else. Lucy, 24, a talented photography major, was told by every authority figure in

her life that she’d never amount to anything, but tried college for a year, dropped out, went back to study environmental science, and as a sophomore in an elective photography class, found a compliment-dropping mentor. Voila — she’s got her BFA and a camera and hasn’t snapped a photo in months. I’m not saying encouragement is bad. Of course it’s fantastic. Without it, not many would pursue, well, anything. But all that hand-holding, those nuzzles of immediate feedback in my ear? It’s all left me without any idea of what I was actually working toward in the first place, where to go next, or how to get there. Amie told me that she once “spent six hours in a car with a stranger. I met him on the ‘Rideshare’ section of Craigslist. He was a not-extraordinarily handsome model, who I picked up after his shoot with Levi’s. I found out he’d acted in Fight Club and Three Kings, and was in the process of making a CD. He’d gone to UCLA on a tennis scholarship, started modeling, moved to Italy, and started acting. It all seemed very odd to me: first of all,

he wasn’t all that good-looking, but he was a model, and he played part of the CD. It was really not fabulous, but had been picked up by a label. After I’d told him about some of my own creative aspirations, he said, ‘You know, most of the people I know who are really successful are not the most talented. I know so many people who sit around feeling talented, waiting for some-

thing to happen. It’s the people who just work really hard that make it.’ He meant that to be inspiring — I found it terrifying.” It is terrifying! Although all of us go-getting Gen Yers have worked hard to get where we are — degrees of any sort are tough to attain, and still relatively rare — not many of us have transitioned easily into the real world. The quarter-life crisis comes for those of us who haven’t felt the need to march into war, who haven’t gotten married by now, who haven’t found a day job that — at the very least — feels like it’s enough. We’re quibblers, with some form of support, emotional or financial, that gave us time to ponder in our early twenties. QLC is a luxurious affliction. Now that we’re supposed to be grown up, it’s tough to believe we have to spend our time making money for someone else. It’s no longer about working part-time (or not at all) while bettering our minds and souls, creating beautiful things with our hands, getting good grades and accolades. We’ve got to commit first to student loans, rent, and health insurance. Lucy lives the ex-pat life in Korea right now. The daughter of a single mother (sharing household expenses with her own mother)

Do we know too much about everything except ourselves? who manages a dollar store in a small Nebraska town, Lucy’s had to pay for her private education, her medical expenses, her car, and nearly everything else since she left home five years ago. “I really want to do something better with my life,” she says. She’d like to get out of the ESL-teaching game and focus on her art, perhaps even pursue graduate school (watch out, m’dear, for the aftereffects), “but I feel stuck in mediocrity because of my finances. Everyone says to just take risks, but what happens when those risks are realized?” Because of her financial burdens, Lucy has decided to continue to live in Korea, where she feels overworked and

isolated by the language and cultural barriers. She doesn’t have the energy to create art, but her expenses are much lower. Is it money, though? Or is it that our priorities are screwed up? That, like me, we can’t help but dawdle — perhaps for the first time — then blame someone or something else for it (our coddling but overworked parents, the information age, 9/11)? It’s easy to point fingers at our society, or accuse Gen Y of being too competitive. So many of us are overqualified for the very few (and very fanciful) positions we were promised would be available. But it’s not impossible to opt out of it all — you just have to be brave. There’s my friend Mikey, who at 23 decided to hitchhike and travel the world. He hasn’t had a job in over two years. He lives in tents, on couches. He’s the happiest guy I know. I can’t speak for everyone in Generation Y, my friends, or all those who’ve stumbled because they’ve reached the end of the path that was made for them. But I wonder: has everyone been too good to us? Have we been too eager to please? Do we know too much about everything except ourselves? Damn our extra-curriculars, the promise of “endless” opportunity (oh, that glorious sea of cubicles!), our Carebear-and-self-esteem-inflicted childhoods. We stand in stark contrast to our parents. According to Neil Howe, author of 13th Gen, the boomers felt claustrophobic growing up in the fifties, rebelling with feminism and civil rights, communes and baggy, unflattering clothes. Even Generation X (lucky bastards; people called them slackers — idling and screwing up were practically required) had a neatly defined mainstream to resist. Our culture has too many TV stations, too many trends, too many political points of view, too many brands of peanut butter, and it’s too quick to co-opt any niche obsession. For Gen Y — perhaps in large part due to our parents’ good work — the search for one’s identity in adulthood can be quite long. Now that we’re supposed to be grown-ups, nobody is going to tell us exactly what we can do, and, perhaps more frustrating, what we can’t. Tattoos and flip-flops are okay at work; Gramma just might call your bisexual affair “cute.” Our generation is agoraphobic. Too much openness. So. Another confession: I don’t eat my boogers. I dab them on a tissue, as any dignified person would do. And I think of my pal Abby, who told me the other day that she’s been pick-

ing her nose, lately, too (someone caught her doing it in the parking lot at work). She’s 23 and just moved to Seattle after graduating with a bachelor’s in Brit lit and linguistics. Like me, she talks about her nose jewels, self-loathing and other such minutia on her blog. Abby says she feels like she’s “in this vortex that’s pulling me apart in two different directions — maybe four. I think that life works in quadrangles, at the very least.” She’s lived her life pleasing others — as a kid, she seemed a perfect angel, despite secretly committing small acts of vandalism. In college, she earned good grades as usual, but feeling as if she was supposed to rebel somehow, she dated the wrong guys, lived in her car, and otherwise sabotaged her personal happiness. Like other good kids I know (ahem—me), Abby’s thoughts about the trajectory of her life changed because of a book. “I read in Lucky Jim that there’s this stage in the early 20s where you get lost and you separate yourself from the things you knew when you were a kid, when you were the most yourself and could say honestly what was best for who you have always been. Then you collide with life and outside expectations. “I thought a lot about this as I drove to Seattle. At one point, I changed my route. Instead of driving on the straight and easy interstate, I suddenly veered off course. I found myself totally lost in the mountains, in the dark.” While wandering in the woods, she realized she just felt like “listening to Le Tigre and Bikini Kill” and making something good — a zine, perhaps, or writing letters to her friends. Abby decided adulthood is about doing things because you want to — not to prove yourself to anyone. She’s way ahead of me. It’s tough for me to buy that nobody’s paying much attention. For me, this is both a relief and a heartbreak. Brought up an only child with overprotective parents and high expectations, facing harassment in school, blooming in my late teens and early twenties beneath the watchful eyes of mentors, it’s hard to believe that if I flounder, it won’t bother anyone but myself. I guess it’s important to note that Lucky Jim came out in the fifties, and that when I asked my dad if he struggled when entering the real world, he said yes. Of course he said yes. We’re all human. But today, he’s a banker, loves golf, eats popcorn and watches reruns of Six Feet Under on DVR, and I think he’s pretty satisfied

with that. Does that mean I should be satisfied, like him? Is this enough? Is it

settling to enjoy myself, my jobs, my apartment, the occasional freelance gig? If I’m comfortable, does that mean there’s nowhere else for me to go but down? I spent an afternoon once in Second Chance Antiques with a drawer of anonymous old photographs. I cried. There were snapshots of vacations in Morocco, weddings, men recently come home from war. I wondered why these photographs, some of them quite beautiful, of fulfilled dreams and happy times, were left behind for just a quarter apiece. I purchased $20 worth. I used some of them in a class I taught, asking my students to write the stories of these people, to imagine what they wanted, who they were, what came next. I wonder if I, really, I was asking them to do something other, something bigger than develop their characters. Maybe I wanted to see how defining motivation really works. It might be, too, that I feel I’ve discarded my own ambitions like so many old photographs, or that I’ve forgotten them somewhere. Are my dreams too out-of-focus, too big to be captured? Maybe all dreams are. Maybe I’m asking too much from a snapshot someone sold for cheap. I know this: as a child, I wanted grilled cheese every single day, and to learn how to fly. I was a hungry, indiscriminate reader — in second grade, I slung copies of The Box-Car Children series and Arabian Nights to school; on road trips, passing peaks beneath big starry skies, I glanced up for just a second before flipping on my booklight. I delighted in oddities — men with strange hats; a cloud resembling Burt Reynolds; my friend Amy Van Velson’s extra-long fingers that waved like wheat. I wrote a book in longhand once over the course of a month without stopping — 600 pages long. I was thirteen. Dandelions and a Glass of Milk — more melodramatic than any Lifetime movie. I never showed it to anyone; it was all mine. I used to think being an adult was about embracing what repulsed you as a child: vegetables; kissing boys; coffee; the theme song to M*A*S*H. But maybe it’s about

Illustration by Jill Rizzo, 2007.

going back to who I was when I believed unaided flight was possible. The first step? Open my eyes. Get off this couch. Invest in Claritin. 4

Music Mined from Rocks

from Hurdle by Myron Hardy

Hard shelled words in the yard of a page scrapping for space—musicians break beats with beat street efforts to clock day and night— to make meaning out of sounds that ring like rounds of shots fired higher than third rails, than temperatures, at bells that butterfly crescent waves, an enclave of understanding she gave him. So he wrote. Her mouth an empty cave. She gave him a grave to bath in dirty secrets, her tongue-tied secrets hurdles to high-step, a finish line to cross, unknot or get stuck inside her cave. No light where passion’s a flame. A name came to him like a date, a bulb, a plate of sushi with sake. Her tongue loosened like ropes around the wrists set him free to walk around the park with the name of a dark lover lost to violence. The burial grounds where sound is alive, music mined from rocks, the miners break beat with beat street efforts, clock day and night with measured efficacy.

CARL JONES

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9

feel like you’re in sitcom just being around John. I love John, I love him the death.” Carl will be heard on the show this season voicing the character Thugnificent. It’s something he always wanted to do, voiceover for a character. Carl performed incidental characters in the first season. Performing a central character poses a big opportunity. “I play this character named Thugnificent who has a crew which is made up of Snoop, Busta Rhymes, and me. We move across the street from the Freeman’s and turn the neighborhood upside down and granddad is pissed off about it. That was fun, man.” After hearing his performance the first time, all Carl could think

about was doing it over. He says it felt like an out of body experience. “It was a weird feeling. I’ve seen that the show is made from ink and paint and pencils but when you see it on the screen sometimes you forget all that. It comes to life and you actually see these people as real people. It’s strange. I’m there when they record their voices. You get so consumed by the show and the story they’re telling, you look at these people as real people. Like, Riley and Huey are real people. I know if you print that it’s going to sound really crazy. But seriously, that’s the magic of animation.” Please visit www.theboondockstv.com. The Boondocks season two is airing now Mondays on Adult Swim. Story courtesy of Bootleg Magazine.

GHOST STORIES NUDIST COLONIES of

Dan Chaon is still a Nebraskan at heart and in work. by Gene Kwak

Imagine yourself

in some back alley psychic’s house about to get your fortune told through tea leaves.

A large woman in ratty afghan with long, priapic nose and kohl-rimmed eyes leads you into the inner sanctum of her office-slash-trailer home. The air is faintly nutty and reeks of incense. She asks for cash up front. You take a drink of the tea and feel a warming sensation in the valley of your stomach. She talks of past experiences and ethereal memories, ghosts of lost lives. And in the end, nothing happens. No ghosts, nothing. Yet you still feel contented. You might be lighter in wallet but the act of sharing, the stories spun, the moment spent, still leave you with a sense of satisfaction. Now lose the concrete details and hold onto the emotive gestures. The warmth of drinking tea, the unnerving feeling of awaiting ghosts, the sense of fullness. What you have is, in essence, the feeling akin to reading a Dan Chaon story. Chaon is an award-winning writer who grew up in western Nebraska and in some ways, never left. He currently resides in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two sons. His two story collections, Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, were critically lauded and won him numerous Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award and multiple inclusions in Best American Short Stories. The latter collection was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s first novel, You Remind Me of Me, was equally well-received. Although Chaon hasn’t lived in Nebraska for over 20 years, his characters and settings still embody the sense of longing and general mythos that swirl around western Nebraska, a place with closer ties to the Old West than the modernity of its largest cities, Omaha and Lincoln. Chaon writes “ghost stories in which the ghost never appears.” That doesn’t mean you’re left feeling gypped. Rather, you’re in it for the warmth, the stories, the chill along the knuckles of your spine in anticipation of spirits, and most of all, that sense of satisfaction of time well spent.

Below: Photograph by Mark Kresl, 2007.

15 Silent City: You’ve talked about how a collection of stories is compiled like a record album. If you were to do a “best of ” Dan Chaon, what three stories would you want to make the cut? Dan Chaon: The title story of Fitting Ends was a particular favorite. I like the story “Big Me”. The story “Bees,” which wasn’t in a collection but was in McSweeney’s Thrilling Tales and then was in Best American. They’re personal favorites and they represent what I feel like I’m trying to do more so than some of the other stories. I guess, after I thought about it, I’d want to mix in some slightly different stuff as well but those would be the ones that I would think of right off the top of my head. You’ve also mentioned listening to certain bands and setting a certain ambience for your writing, what are you listening to right now? The album that I’ve been listening to a lot lately is the new record by The National, they’re an Ohio band. It’s got the right mood for me while I’m working on the novel that I’m working on. How does that compare to what you’d normally listen to in your everyday life? I tend to listen to somewhat softer stuff. There’s a band called Windmill that has a very short story feel to it. They’re all songs that take place in an airport. The guy has that weird child falsetto. I tend to listen to stuff that has an ambient feel to it; it can become background music but not too much. I don’t like electronica very much because I don’t like wallpaper music. It has to have some grip to it, a little bit. In the car I like to listen to something a little bit more upbeat. The Silver Sun Pickups. Stuff that has more of a power pop feel to it.

Being a connoisseur of pop culture, what’s the one television show that keeps you from getting to your work? There are a few of them but the one that I’ve been most obsessed with the last few years has been Lost. It had its issues last season but I’m still pretty convinced by it. I’m really impressed by the narrative structure of the show and I feel like I’m learning stuff from it in an oblique way. You have two sons and a lot of your characters tend to be people in their 20s and 30s who seem to be lost. Connecting those two, what do you make of the whole “alternadad” trend of dads in their 20s and 30s who want to make sure their kids know the cool bands, rather than exist as the traditional archetype of a dad? I feel like I’ve got that element going on but at the same time I’m surprised at where it comes to its limits and I’m just this mean, sort of old a--hole. My son was in ninth grade and he was skipping school and doing whatever and it was stuff I had probably personally participated in, but I came down pretty hard on him. Grounded, can’t see his friends, that kind of stuff. I’m into sort of being friends with my kids, we go to bands together, but that has its limits. Ultimately I think kids need to get some distance from their parents, they can’t really be friends with them. At a certain point you need to be a parent rather than a buddy, that’s a sad thing, but… Since a majority of your characters are in their late 20s or early 30s and seem to be trying to find their way, do you think, turning 40 not too long ago and having had children, the natural maturation of life will change themes and perspectives in your work?

I think one of the mistaken assumptions that I had in my 20s was that things would get less blurry as I got older, that I would figure things out and then coast placidly into — I don’t know — retirement, or death, or whatever. That actually hasn’t worked out so well. I find that in many ways I have just as many questions and doubts now as I did when I was in my 20s. Some of them are the same ones, still. How are we to live the

I think it is becoming a major setting. The novel that I’m working on has stuff in Cleveland and probably the next novel will be set primarily in Cleveland. I think you have to spend enough time in a place that you can get outside of it. The problem is when you first move to a place it doesn’t exist in your imagination it only exists as a real place. Does that make sense? I think that to some extent you’re never writing about a real place you’re always writing about an imaginary one. My western Nebraska really only exists in my head; my Chicago only exists in my head. I’ve recently been writing about the Arctic Circle. There’s a town called Inuvik that’s in one of my novels. I’ve never been there so I’m inventing a lot of what it looks like. I’ve got a few pictures but I’m inventing the rest. A few of my stories are set in Los Angeles, a city I’ve visited only a couple times and not for very long. There’s a pleasure in inventing a landscape as well as re-creating one that you know well enough to re-create it.

We saw the skyline for the first time. It was one of those fireworks moments. lives we have been given? Maybe some people figure it out early on, but I’m still puzzling over it, so I guess a lot of the themes remain similar, though the contexts are changing. Some of my characters are getting better jobs, for example, and their kids are older, but being “lost” is still the condition that most of the characters continue to find themselves in. You grew up in western Nebraska and you’ve been living in Ohio for the past 20 some odd years. After your parents’ passing, since you don’t have as many connections to the area, do you foresee yourself visiting anytime soon?

I do. I was there just a couple of years ago for the Nebraska literature festival. And I’ve been in the area even as recently as May when I was in Des Moines. In December I was at K-State. Pretty close. I do feel a connection to the area and at least one more novel has a major section set in Nebraska in an invented ghost town on the edges of Lake McConaughy. Or what used to be Lake McConaughy, which as you may know is drying up. It used to be a 35- or 40-mile long lake but now it’s maybe a fourth of what it was. I’m really interested in certain aspects of the mood and setting of what I can get out of Nebraska. You’ve described your stories as “ghost stories where the ghost never appears.” Why do you think those stories work more in a setting like western Nebraska as opposed to Omaha or Lincoln or even Cleveland? Part of it has to do with the intensity of feeling you have for any place you grew up. Any place you grew up in is, to some extent, haunted because you’re always looking back at the child that you were and there is a sense that that child is kind of a ghost in your life anyway. I think the landscape is very desolate and it’s got a beauty to it and yet there’s a sense that it wasn’t really meant to be inhabited. People shouldn’t be here. There’s a hostility about the landscape that’s really appealing to me. And the fact that people settled into these little elevator towns. If you look at a map of Cheyenne county from the 1930s you’ll see all these towns on the map that don’t exist anymore. That are nothing but foundation. That’s really interesting to me because it feels like there’s a quality about western Nebraska similar to the famous colony of Roanoke where they disappeared and nobody knew what happened to them. There’s that quality. Something about the landscape can swallow people up. I’ve talked to a few writers in regards to writing about place. Some of them feel like they can describe a place better once they’ve left it. Others feel better writing about a place they still inhabit. What’s your take on it and do you see Cleveland becoming a major setting in your future stories?

So when you initially moved from western Nebraska to Chicago, what was that experience like? I was eighteen and I hadn’t visited too many cities, I mean I’d been to Denver but I’d never really been outside of a fairly small circle of places — Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota. I remember driving with my girlfriend and we came up on the interstate and saw the skyline for the first time and it was one of those fireworks moments like ‘Oh my god.’ It was like seeing the Emerald City or something. I really had that fantasy of being someone who would move to a city. A common country boy thing, especially if you’re the kind of country boy I was, that didn’t fit in with the world around me and thought ‘Oh if I go to the city I’ll find other people like me.’ Which was sort of true and not true. You’ve talked about being a wasteful writer using parts of stories and gutting them for other stories. Fifty years after you pass and they’re pulling up the dregs and printing your throwaway stuff what one piece would you not want them to print? It would probably be the first novel that I worked on. It was a huge mess in a lot of ways. It was one of those things where I was totally obsessed with Hitchcock and wanted to write a Hitchcockian novel or something that was sort of like Patricia Highsmith or something and it didn’t really work. It was really long and very slow but I used enough parts of it that I feel like I’ve gotten some use out of it. I think everybody needs to have that kind of big failure in their background. But you know if I’m dead I don’t care what people publish. When you revised Fitting Ends in the Ballantine edition you talked about Flannery O’Connor reworking one of her stories into “Geranium.” If you could do the same, what story would you choose? I think there are certain things I keep going back to. In some ways they’re the stories I mentioned in the beginning. The stuff about the brothers in “Fitting Ends” is something I keep going back to a lot. And another thing is the class stuff in “I Demand to Know Where You’re Taking Me” where there’s a bit of a culture clash and social class issues that I’m interested in writing about. I feel like I keep wanting to go back to that particular story and write about the meeting of the kind of people who might know somebody in prison and the people who would never know anybody in prison. I guess that’s dividing the world in a weird way. One of the novels I’m working on has a similar situation and I feel like it’s not necessarily going back and revising the stories

as much as it is going back and revisiting certain themes and thinking about them from a perspective of supposedly greater wisdom. You majored in film and English. If a story of yours was to make it to the big screen, would you want to work on the adaptation or would you want to leave it in the hands of others? I guess it would depend on who the other person was. One of the people that I would love to have work on one of my books is Alexander Payne — a fellow Nebraskan. I think he does great adaptations. I loved what he did with Tom Perrotta’s Election. I loved what he did with About Schmidt. I loved what he did with Sideways. I would let him do whatever. If it turned out it was somebody who I thought was an interesting filmmaker but not an interesting screenwriter I think I’d want to be more involved. But you know you don’t really have much control over that stuff. I mean I have stuff that’s optioned and there has never been a moment where people asked if I wanted to participate. They were like, ‘Here’s the money, be gone.’ What about just working on a screenplay? I have and it’s just sort of never worked out for me. I wrote screenplays in college that were just never any good. I thought about writing screenplays but what happens is I just end up using the idea for a story rather than spending the time to develop the screenplay. I probably should just do it but I’ve been so focused on my career as a fiction writer. If I can get some extra time somewhere along the way I’ll probably write screenplays as well.

of stories, i.e. creating demarcations between time periods. Are you splitting up the new novel in any way or do you feel like you’re getting more comfortable with the form? My new novel, Sleepwalk, makes use of some similar devices — fragments, shuffled chronology, multiple points of view. I find that this method works better for the way that I think — and, actually, for the way that I want to convey information about the world of the story. I find that I’m not so interested in a series of chronological scenes strung together one after the other, and I have a hard time imagining myself writing a straightforward, traditional novel. There’s something non-linear that seems to be built into the way I think. That worries me a little, but I’m not sure what can be done about it. I interviewed Ben Percy recently, and you both have the rare ability to write fiction that’s considered to be in the realm of literary fiction but also has elements of genre fiction, for lack of a better term. Why do you think such distinctions exist between what is or isn’t literary and why there seems to be a snubbing of writers who fall under the genre appellation? Is genre, as one writer said, really just an interchangeable term for hack [in that any good fiction has elements of nearly all genres]? I pretty much was raised on genre fiction — Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Lovecraft, etc. — and so it seems natural that my work would have elements of it. I didn’t really start reading “literary” stuff until college, when I discovered people like Raymond Carver and Rus-

I read you did some deejaying and bartending before going to grad school? What kind of deejaying was it? Radio? Wedding parties?

CONTINUED ON PAGE 36

It was actually club deejaying, I’m really embarrassed. When I was an undergrad I worked for the campus radio station, WNUR. The show that I did was kind of a house type show. This sounds so ridiculous. I was particularly interested in using samples and pieces from other media to mix into beats. That was fun to do. So I worked two nights a week doing that and bartending. That was a good thing to do when you’re twenty-two. Last I heard you were working on 3 separate novels, are you still working on those novels and are you making any time to work on stories? I’ve got a few stories that I’ve been working on. I mean I really need to focus on the novel if I’m going to get anything done especially because I teach so my time is kind of limited. But I do really love the short story as a form and the other thing is I’ve never had the experience of someone asking me for stories before. Now I’ve had people say, ‘Oh I’d really love to get a story from you’ and it’s hard to say no because I think, ‘Oh, maybe that’ll never happen again.’ So I’ve been trying to write stories as much as I can. You talked about grappling with the novel form at first and writing You Remind Me of Me in a way that allowed you to think of it as breaking it up like sections

IN S O M NI A

by Mike Sgier

Working at the ODC indeed was a happy beginning to my new life

as a hippie doctor but at Sky River John had promised I would be doing more than working at the free clinic like his volunteer physicians. His first project in that expanded role was getting me “out in the fields,” taking healthcare to the migrant farm laborers in Washington State. I met Mark for the first time on this assignment. He was a medical student recruited to the movement by John. Mark’s most striking characteristic was his deep voice, especially noticeable when he laughed a big, big laugh. Many male hippies, with their long hair, looked like musketeers. Mark looked like a musketeer with glasses. John arranged a series of visits to specific fields by working with labor organizers and local leaders in the Yakima Valley. Mark and I, along with some nurses and volunteers including Marsha, created a mobile clinic using three old Ford station wagons kept ready for rock festivals and street demonstrations by John’s ODC staff. We filled the vehicles with cardboard boxes stocked with a mixture of injectables, dressings, and pills. We brought our own medical equipment — stethoscope, otoophthalmoscope, blood pressure cuff — and implements for neurological exams, such as a reflex hammer and pins. The day of the mission was a pleasant one. It was an uneventful ride over the Cascade Range

surrounding Seattle into the Yakima Valley. The area was high desert, with mild weather most of the year. Many crops were grown there, the best known being the Washington apple. We left at 5 a.m. to get to the first stop in time to be organized by late morning. We arrived in Yakima by 9 a.m. Several Mexicans and Mexican-Americans met us. They were dressed in khaki slacks, open-collared colorful shirts, and cowboy boots. They were traveling in two late vintage cars, hopefully in better condition than they looked. We formed up as a caravan. One of the local’s vehicles was at the head, and another was at the rear to prevent any of us from becoming stragglers. The lead vehicle took us on several dirt roads that were more dirt than road. Then we crossed a field of soybeans without even the suggestion of a road. At the designated area in the field, we came upon a cluster of people standing near and around a card table. As word of our arrival spread, other people began emerging from the fields and closing in on the targeted area. Greetings were exchanged that we couldn’t understand, but it appeared things were going as planned. We set out some of our supplies, got out our instruments, and prepared to begin. The plan was to treat as many as we could on the spot, and diagnose the rest at least well enough to allow triage wherever necessary to complete the treatment. A major goal was to vaccinate as many children as we could against communicable diseases. I saw a few patients with minor problems, rashes and diarrhea, before I met young Manuel. Marsha brought him over to me. She performed the initial screening and helped direct the patients to either Mark, one of the nurses, or me. Manuel was an adorable, dark-skinned, dark-haired boy, about eight years old. “Hola, niño,” I said, proudly using my very limited Spanish. “Buenos días, señor doctor,” Manuel answered.

Hippie Doctor by Benjamin Graber part two in a series

A volunteer translated to the boy’s worried parents, “What problem is your boy having?” “He cannot see at night.” That’s when I noticed my young patient’s beautiful brown eyes had foamy white patchy spots on the conjunctiva. Manuel had advanced signs of Vitamin A deficiency, a preventable problem seen in poor populations. In the most extreme cases, the deficiency destroys the eyeball, eating away at it until it is gone. Fortunately, it was highly curable at the point we found it in Manuel. I made arrangements for my new young friend to be seen at a clinic in Seattle. I was about to take my next patient when a murmur went up in the crowd. I looked up to see two pickups creating a cloud of dust as they raced across the field. As they got closer, I could make out two white men in each cab, and four or five Mexicans in the rear beds. They pulled up, piled out of the trucks and pushed through the crowd to the table serving as our admitting area. “You are on private property. You’d better leave,” said one of the white men menacingly to all of us, and without identifying himself. The whites were unarmed, but several of their Mexican enforcers had baseball bats in their hands. Those who didn’t looked as if they didn’t need bats to do damage. As intended, it was an intimidating show of force. “You people are going to get hurt if you don’t get your asses outta here, and I don’t mean just the farm workers,” he said, adding for emphasis, “Comprende?” I couldn’t help noticing that none of the assembled potential patients, including the women and children, seemed particularly scared. They had lacked much expression before the arrival of the thugs, and the same lack remained. These people were used to this kind of treatment, used to being mistreated. “Larry, I think we better clear out,” Mark said. “Someone’s going to get hurt. Who the hell organized this shit?” “Yeah, this is f--ked.” I snagged one of our contact people and told him Mark and I wanted to close down.

He agreed. It was a somber group that headed back into town. We had let down the people who showed up. However, our local leaders were less downcast than were we. They understood the long struggle and knew we weren’t finished yet. As we pulled into town, we realized they were taking us to a new location. We were well into a section of the poorest housing in the city, home of most of the workers who didn’t live in the field barracks. The lead car stopped in front of a cantina. As it was a warm day, it was not surprising people were milling outside, but when we got out of the car, it certainly was a surprise to be greeted like conquering heroes. The tables in front of the cantina were filled with food; beer flowed like water, and music was blaring from loudspeakers. We were thrown a fiesta. People kept coming up, some shaking our hands, some just grinning and saying, “Gracias,” over and over again. Children played while dogs darted under the tables for salvage. When I got a chance to question one of our local contacts, he told me that word had spread into town ahead of us. The people pulled this fiesta together to thank us, and make us feel better. Well into the night the party went on. We had planned to head back to Seattle after the work in the fields was completed, but the people refused to let us leave. We were put up in their homes. To know someone cared meant the world to them. The fact that we had tried was enough. We enjoyed their gratitude, but for Mark and me it was not enough. This first experience in developing a people’s healthcare system bothered me in a way I couldn’t quite figure out. Like the Seattle Treatment Center — an alcohol and methadone clinic — the intent of this venture was right, but as the person directly involved in the implementation I once again felt like the people being served were not being served, not getting all they needed. When we returned to Seattle the next day, we told John we would not make any further field trips until the planning was better. Furthermore, I wanted to be part of the planning. These people deserved better. 4

SUBMIT! Silent City is looking for fine writing and art, and is available in select locations across the United States. E-mail unsolicited manuscripts to submit.silentcitymag@gmail.com. Illustration by Mike Lawson, 2007.

Rachel Ziegler

Left, top: Turn Out, ink on PVC sheeting, 2006. Left, bottom: 100 Year Flood, ink on PVC sheeting, 2006. This page: Giving a Simple Gift, My Father Makes Round Things, multimedia, 2004.

My work relies heavily on repetition and collection. In every finished piece, I hope to bring together materials that are enlivened by one another, whether collecting themselves into a total inundation, or merely restive and full of potential. Many times the end product involves a balancing act between delivering and receiving. Even if the desired outcome is to create a sense of abundance in offering, I find the entire presence of my work to be submissive and receptive. 4

the Language of Men

by Gene Kwak

Illustration by Mike Lawson, 2007.

Forgive my breaking a particular writing maxim, but there’s no better way to describe Benjamin Percy’s prose than this: it’s like getting smacked in the mouth by an iron fist in a velvet glove. Meaning: he crafts beautiful sentences about the most masculine of subjects. Percy’s writing has been described as “grotesque” and “dark and grand and percipient.” His prose has been lauded as “sinewy, rippling” and the stories as “big-hearted and drunk and dangerous.” These praises aren’t just coming from the likes of no-name reviewers, these commendations are from the likes of Mike Magnuson, Peter Straub, Daniel Woodrell and Dan Chaon, respectively. Not only is Percy writing stories that are acclaimed by fellow writers but he’s accruing awards on his ascent as well. He’s slated to have no less than eleven stories published in this calendar year. He’s won inclusion in the Pushcart Prize anthology as well as Best American Short Stories for his story “Refresh, Refresh.” It was also published in The Paris Review and won him the $10,000 George Plimpton Prize, an award given to the best work published in The Paris Review in a given year by an emerging writer. Add to that the story currently being optioned as a movie, the screenplay for which Percy is working on with filmmaker James Ponsoldt. So why haven’t you heard of him? Too busy reading the latest novel gossiped about in book club circles or hassling booksellers to find you the tome mentioned on Oprah or in the Times Book Review? Crack open Language of Elk and pre-order your copy of Refresh, Refresh, due on shelves this October. Better still, hunt down one of the smaller lit mags he’s publishing in this year. And read. Read about the young boys and men who live in the dusted over, small towns of rural Oregon. Read about men in love with bearded ladies and those in painstaking search of Bigfoot. Men searching for a way in this labyrinthine exigency known as life and getting swallowed up in the backwoods. When you get done, run your hand across your jaw. Feel the sensation left by cold metal wrapped in plush velvet. Savor it.

Silent City: It’s been written that your wife forced you into becoming a writer after reading your vivid love letters, yet your current “style” has been described as “brutal” and “grotesque” even. How long between writing those letters and your current stories were you comfortable writing in that vernacular? Benjamin Percy: I’ve always been a bit sentimental and I try to keep that on a leash when writing fiction. But as a person, as a husband and a father, I’ll be overtaken by Hallmark moments, I’ll admit. And I’m still writing those love letters. I just know those letters are of a different genre than the short fiction I’m producing. Certainly when I first started out, I had no understanding of the art of restraint. No understanding of what my “voice” was. I was trying to do everything at once. Trying to parrot my favorite authors. I was succeeding only in capturing melodrama on the page it seemed, but that’s a natural part of the evolution of any writer. You don’t yet have the tools necessary to compose something until a long painful apprenticeship has passed. It was several years later that I came to recognize a voice, a voice that belonged to me. I’m still polishing that voice. It changes, as the years pass, according to things that have happened to me, things that I’ve read and the natural maturation of the mind that comes with adulthood. If your wife hadn’t brought to your attention your writing ability, how great of an archaeologist would you be right now? Printing up pieces in Archaeological Digest perhaps? Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know if I would be a writer had I not met my wife. There are a lot of what ifs in life and that’s one of the major ones for me. She’s the one who very nearly demanded it. There were other signs along the way. I’d always been best in English. I was taken aside by my advisor my freshman year of college and told that

essay was one of the best he’d ever read and he thought I should switch majors. I sort of shrugged off all of it, thinking that writing was an impractical route, that English was an impractical route. Who knows how long I would’ve stayed in that mindset where rocks and lost civilizations seemed like the most important thing? Certainly, what I was interested in before has carried over into my work. There’s something about scraping a trowel through the soil and uncovering bones and chips of obsidian that closely parallels going through a book and finding the hidden pieces that jigsaw together to solve a mystery. Where would I be now? Maybe on a trawler somewhere? Or floating down some river as a white water rafting guide? Or dead drunk in a gutter, who knows? Can you describe your personal writing process? Time of day, certain room, certain time or page allotment?

I’ve always been a morning writer. I like to wake up before the sun rises. With my mind emptied, I experience a kind of communion with the keyboard where I don’t have all the clutter of the day distracting me. The bills in the mailbox, the phone calls I get about this or that, the encounter I had with a student, the pile of papers I need to grade. All that stuff can get in the way come evening. So, I prefer to write in the morning. I’ve always written in the morning, until now, because with a son who’s a little over a year old, he wakes up at 5:30 a.m. I’ve got to cater to that by changing my habits. I’ve become a night owl. I’m very tired at night, I’m very distracted at night so it takes that much more willpower to get things done — and a lot of coffee. I’ll be brewing coffee till 10:30 p.m. Staying up till 2 a.m., waking up at 6 a.m., taking naps throughout the day. Normally I write in a room of my own but that room has become split down the middle as a nursery and library. Things will continue to change as we’re moving from Milwaukee. I’m taking a job at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. We bought a house, my first house, I’m pretty excited about it. I’m especially excited about this office I’ll have there. Right now I’ve been expelled from my Milwaukee office by my son and I’m hammering away in my living room on a laptop. I used to be much more anal about my requirements: it had to be quiet, it had to be this time of day, it had to be in this place. No longer. I know that messes with a lot of people when something like a child comes into their lives so I’ve tried to be as flexible as possible. Do you have any good luck charms or superstitions that go along with your process? I always have a pile of books around me. I’ll sometimes start off my writing process by reading a little bit. It helps me get into that zone, loosens up the gears. I’ll have a stack of books around me by authors like Denis Johnson, Daniel Woodrell or Cormac McCarthy. These are books I’ve read several times before, I just like the rhythm of them. Another good luck charm is this red-porcelain Buddha, whose belly I rub. I’m not a Buddhist but for whatever reason this thing has sat on my desk for so many years. It’s been there with me as I’ve composed all these stories so I can’t help but give it a fond little pat everyday. And I always, always have something to drink. A bit of an oral fetish, I guess, when writing, but I have to bring a beer or coffee mug or glass of water to my lips every few minutes.

You’ve talked about being a “shamelessly” self-promotional writer. Why do you think so many authors are against it, leaving their careers in the hands of others? Well, I suppose they feel that the art should speak for itself. That the author is almost separate from the work. That the work belongs to the public once published. It kind of sounds like bulls--- to me. Usually most writers are socially awkward. Most writers are scared of appearing stupid and when you allow yourself to be interviewed off the cuff, when you permit yourself to stand before an audience and answer questions in a press-conference fashion, you’re going to flub up. There’s a fear. The fear of the fraud police. A fear that people will realize that you’re not as smart as you seem to be on the page. I approach it knowing that there are so many books out there. I forget the exact figure, something like 300,000 published last year. How many did you hear of? A few dozen. Anything you can do to get the word out, aside from wrestling in a thong in a vat of Jell-o, will probably be a good thing for your work. Why do you write? Sure, for yourself. But to say it’s only for yourself is hippie talk. This is a business and ultimately we want to get our words in the hands of others. I see so many strong writers out there who shy away from the public eye, whose books stumble and get put on the back shelf as a result. I’m not looking to be a superstar. I’m just looking to entertain a few folks and to keep doing what I love and to make a living off of it. Already in the short career you’ve had, you’ve won quite a few awards: Pushcart, Tamarack Award, Plimpton Prize, Best American Short Stories inclusion. Is there any prize you’d want to receive that you feel would further solidify you as a writer? I never expected to win the prizes I’ve already won. The Pushcart, the Plimpton Prize, the inclusion in BASS. Those are the best kind, because they were unanticipated. Those aren’t things you apply for, they’re things you learn about when the phone rings one night. I felt aghast, as corny as that might sound, when I first heard about them because there’s almost an “I’m not worthy” feeling. How can this possibly be happening at this young stage in my career? Accompanying that feeling is a feeling of intense gratitude. I can only hope that I’ll continue to write work that touches people even if only in some small way; that entertains people, that helps them see the world in a different way. If awards accompany that, great, I’ll happily accept them. I’m not exactly rolling in dough as a short story writer. Anything that will enable me to spend more time at the keyboard, anything that will make the work more long-lasting is deeply appreciated. I don’t take anything, so far, for granted and can only hope for more success. I know book blurbs don’t hold too much weight these days. I think people can feel there’s a certain gravitas behind a book if it’s blurbed by respectable literary writers. You’ve been blurbed by some of the best: Udall, Patchett, Doerr, Magnuson. What one writer have you been amazed by, who has publicly announced your work to be admirable? And what one writer’s name would you love to see across the back of your book?

Illustration by Jill Rizzo, 2007.

Peter Straub’s words meant the most. He’s a writer I’ve been reading since the fifth grade. He’s somebody who made me fall in love with books and made me understand [the genre of ] horror, made me into a voracious reader. Made me feel the want to be a writer. He accomplishes something that I’m toying a lot with these days; he approaches genre through a literary lens. He crafts beautiful sentences and creates believable characters and at the same time, acknowledges some of the archetypal structural devices of horror while breaking others over his knee. This is something I’m interested in myself. To be able to rendezvous, first at the Wisconsin book festival, later in New York, with him was a surreal experience. He’s someone who felt like an invisible mentor to me for many years. And all of a sudden he’s standing before me at a party and I’m sharing a beer with him and we’re talking like old friends. To be able to casually email him, to be able to get on the phone with him, to be able to talk shop and talk life, to be able to feel like I’m part of that larger community that once felt so distant, isn’t that the dream realized? As for a writer who I’d love to get the thumbs-up from, well, there are too many to name really. The ultimate among them would be Cormac McCarthy but he’s never given out a blurb. I was hanging out with Robert Olmstead last night, who just wrote a brilliant book called Coal Black Horse, and we were talking about McCarthy and he mentioned how early on in his career his publisher sent off his short story collection to McCarthy begging for a blurb. McCarthy actually sent him a letter, a two-page letter, endorsing the book, talking about how much he enjoyed it but also specifying that the publisher did not have permission to use his words. He also provided suggestions and his handwriting apparently was almost otherworldly. There was a precision to it; it looked like it came from a bygone era. Olmstead’s got that letter tucked away in a drawer forever to keep.

and do it here instead. I think that evolution may occur, but I have my next two books mapped out in my head already and they’re Oregon books. But who knows? Things could change gears down the line. I’ve read how you’re working on the screenplay for Refresh, Refresh. How has that transition been from the short story form? An update on that. We’ve finished the second draft and it has been accepted to the Sundance Institute, which is the invite-only screenwriter’s workshop held every June. Five screenwriters, who have all had previous success, are invited to work with Redford, Harold Ramis and other

You’re trying to understand best how to get them to crunch up their faces.

How is your latest collection Refresh, Refresh different from Language of Elk? There’s a natural evolution of my style. These stories are meatier. There’s a lot packed into them. Sometimes, you’ll see this in the length; other times you’ll see this in what’s going on in a single paragraph, a single sentence. The way clauses stack upon clauses; a nuance in a turn of phrase. I think they’re almost at times more like storellas than stories. Some cross-breed between a story and a novella. Also, in this collection, in many of the stories, I’m channeling the war. I’m talking about its effect on families. So the stories are bound together by that and they’re also bound together, as was Language of Elk, by the backdrop of Oregon. Speaking of Oregon, it was almost a tertiary character in Language of Elk. Obviously Refresh, Refresh takes place in Oregon. Do you think it’ll always permeate your work or since you’ve lived in Wisconsin for a while, do you think future pieces might take place in different locales? I feel like I could write about Oregon forever. I probably have enough experiences there, in my childhood, to inform my fiction for the next 40 years. I do feel Wisconsin creeping more and more into my consciousness. It offers up a number of ingredients that remind me of Oregon. There’s a vast wash of wilderness here. There’s a tension between industry and nature. Instead of mountains looming over the citizens of this place you have the Northern Lights playing across the sky. There’re ways I could easily transplant some of the things I’m scribbling about Oregon

industry vets. Five screenplays, twelve days. It’s the ultimate gateway to the Hollywood rolodex. I’m feeling very grateful for that. There’s a huge difference in the forms. You’re not able to do what you can do with fiction. You don’t have the freedom of getting into someone’s head or getting into their history. Everything has to be exterior. You must imagine yourself as a camera: what can you see, what can you hear, that will tell the audience the story that you could’ve painted with a flourish in fiction. That restraint is frustrating. Finding a way to communicate expository information is incredibly difficult for dialogue if you want to make it sound authentic. Rather than having two characters walk up the stairs to a porch and before ringing the doorbell say, “Gee, I’m feeling really uncomfortable because when I was at this house last week I got in a fight with the owner.” “Yes, I remember that,” said the other character. “This will no doubt be an awkward encounter.” How do you do it? You can watch The Matrix. It’s a constant stream of expository information but it’s semi-interesting because there’s this whoa-dude sensibility to the whole movie that you’re drawn into and want to learn about this other world. But if it’s an ordinary world, if you’ve seen Law and Order, you know how stilted expository dialogue can be. In modern publishing, everyone’s tied to the whole two book deal. One novel, one story collection. I’ve talked to a few short story writers who were working on novels and some had initial problems with the form while others took to it like water. How’s the leap been for you? Not easy. I am and always will be a short story writer. At present, as I write this novel, it feels almost like a stretched out story. I wouldn’t have written it if I felt I was doing the work some injustice by stretching it out. It seems a natural extension in this case. The story takes place in four days. We’re witnessing a crushed down moment in their lives. The essence of short fiction, the economy of short fiction is there. I’m playing to my strengths right now. Maybe over time this’ll change. Maybe I’ll grow more comfortable with the marathon pace of a novel. But I really feel like I’ve got the red-fiber muscle that enables me to sprint rather than run long distance. There’ve been a number of authors from Rick Bass to Lee K. Abbott to Alice Munro who write such muscular short stories but are unable to hammer out a novel. So maybe you’re one or the other. You’ve got a very natural resonant reading voice. For some reason before I’d heard your voice on an audio interview, from the humor CONTINUED ON PAGE 36

Omaha is an underage teen looking

for a booze fix on a Friday night –

fis

in search of an identity. Bear Country is that identity. They per-

a bookstore in West Omaha. We sat in the abutting café sec-

sonify the city in ways beyond simply living within its param-

tion and Schlesinger and I both drank frappuccinos. Sanchez

eters or having it scrawled onto their birth certificates. The six-

passed. Both Schlesinger and Sanchez live in midtown but trek

person band is made up of lead singer Susan Sanchez, Mike

out west every Sunday to make their weekly band practice at

Schlesinger and Kyle Petersen on guitar, James Maakestad on

Markley’s parent’s house. Even after three years and playing

bass, Aaron Markley on keys and auxiliary percussion and Cody

sites as varied as Ted & Wally’s, bemisUNDERGROUND, Slow-

Peterson on drums.

down and The Waiting Room, they’re still toiling away in a base-

Their folk-inspired music harkens back to an older way of

ment in West Omaha.

life. Think sepia-tones and the Old Market minus the Old. Think

The initial members: Sanchez, Schlesinger and Markley all

stockyards, railways and intersections that numbered in the

grew up together in the Millard area. Sanchez and Schlesinger

teens. Go farther back to the Mormon Trail and Lewis and Clark

attended the same middle school but only really forged a friend-

passing through.

ship after being reintroduced years later through Markley.

That being said, four out of the six members are attending

In 2004 the three got together and tried their hand at forming

universities throughout Omaha and all are barely broaching their

a group. Booking a gig wasn’t the first roadblock they came up

twenties. This youthful élan brings a freshness to their live act

against. The first roadblock was coming up with a name.

that connects to equally young listeners. Listeners weaned on

“We were playing at Caffeine Dreams and we needed to put

house parties and the ascendance of the Omaha music scene.

something down. We didn’t have a name yet and sitting in Aar-

Omaha is both the epicenter of a

on’s basement, where we practiced, we couldn’t come up with

burgeoning music and art scene that

anything,” Sanchez says. “Mike was wearing a shirt that was

garners envy from both coasts, while

from South Dakota: Bear Country. So we were like, well what

also being deeply rooted in histori-

about that.”

cal ties to the Old West. As much as

Names aside, the group started gaining a small fan base that

the city and its inhabitants want to

quickly blossomed beyond family and friends to earnest music

move forward, they can’t help but

devotees ready for something besides the atypical caterwauling

look back. Bear Country bridges the

and dour music that tend to be in vogue for most indie acts.

dichotomy, being neither one nor the

The archetype for female lead singers in said acts leans to-

other but both.

ward either the wild-child screamer or the soft-voiced brooder,

I sat down with Sanchez and Schlesinger on a Sunday afternoon at

the one whose voice is light as gossamer and who apparently grew up in libraries.

Sanchez is neither of these things. Her voice blares

A prime example of a Bear Country show:

out of the speakers with a certain gravitas. Her style

It’s a Monday night. Bear Country are opening for

works for the songs where she plays the eyelash-

Scissors for Lefty and Page France. Sanchez looks

batting, coquettish role and still has enough heft to

haggard. That is not to say unattractive, simply ex-

tackle the more serious, issue-related songs.

hausted. She informs me she had a long day at work,

“I have a soft speaking voice. No one can ever

where she works with autistic children, and now has to

hear me. Sometimes I mumble and whenever we play

get on stage with a bunch of bears. She sits at a touch

shows I’m like, ‘Can you turn up the vocals?’” Sanchez

screen game console in the corner of The Waiting

says. “I’m kind of shy with trying out new things, even

Room while the rest of the patrons simply wait. They

in front of my band, but I’m trying to step back and

drink beer and smoke cigarettes to their tepid coals.

really be more forceful and soulful, at least vocally.”

Bear Country is about to take the stage and Sanchez is

Her speaking voice is soft. It gets lost at times

droopy-eyed, looking comfortable in a hoodie the color

in the din of whirring machines and blenders in the

of blue spun sugar.

café. Schlesinger speaks very little during the inter-

“It looks like we’re playing without Susan tonight,”

view, letting Sanchez answer most of the questions.

Schlesinger says into the microphone.

He barely makes eye contact, his attention rapt on

Sanchez is greeting friends, unaware that the entire band is already on stage and awaiting their lead singer.

Sanchez, gauging her responses. I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the lead singer-lead guitarist paradigm or whether he just

She runs to the stage and takes off her sweater revealing a small black dress

dislikes interviews.

I’d imagine on Audrey Hepburn.

Not only is Sanchez trying to project herself more as a vocalist, the band

The music starts up, Schlesinger on lead guitar, Markley on percussion,

itself is gaining maturity in both subject matter and songwriting that is notice-

and Sanchez’s voice drips through the speakers — slow and sweet as molas-

able even in the short duration between their first record, Our Roots Need

ses. Schlesinger is stage left of Sanchez, Markley stage right. Maakestad,

Rain, released in 2006, and their follow-up, Lives Lost Brides and the Coolie

Petersen and Peterson fill the rest of the stage. The music they play on this

Trade, due out on Slumber Party Records later this year.

particular night is an amalgam of tracks off of Our Roots Need Rain, and new

“That album (Our Roots Need Rain) was done in two days and it was our

stuff from Lives Lost Brides and the Coolie Trade.

first time doing it. We recorded eleven songs in two days. Some of the lyrics

Through particularly raucous portions the band dances while perambulat-

I improvised right on the spot. For me, some of the songs aren’t the best and

ing around stage, legs kicking, wallowing in the ambient sound. At one point

I feel like we’ve matured a lot more,” Sanchez says.

Schlesinger runs up to Markley at the keyboard, and runs his hand along the

The songs on Our Roots Need Rain are whimsical and up-beat. Sanchez

keys, haphazardly banging out the entire range of notes. A fan turns to me,

preens about pretending to sleep while a boy kisses her to musing about the

“She’s great, they’re all great, but that guy is something.” Schlesinger is a

inability to commit to a single guy. On “Secret” she sings, “I’ll put my things

dervish on stage, the conduit through which the energy seems to flow. This

away / Just as long as you promise not to stay / ’Cuz growing apart from me

is in direct opposition to the sit-down interview where he spoke little and was

and you / We’ll be okay, we’ll be okay.” Sanchez flirts or commisserates with

mostly seen in profile.

the listener through all nine tracks of their debut album. The subject matter

The sound is largely folk-inspired rock with the six-person band layering

on the follow-up is more esoteric.

different instruments in a diapason. The instruments used are the conven-

“I was taking a biology class and we were learning about evolution and it

tional set of acoustic and electric guitars, drums, and bass but also include

interested me so there’s a new song that touches on that,” Sanchez says.

a glockenspiel, a harmonica, keyboard, organ, trumpet and even a mandolin.

“‘Coolie Trade’ was also inspired by a class. I took a class on 19th century

It’s easy to get into the act and even the most jaded looking viewer is bound

America and it was largely based on the Coolie Trade,” Schlesinger says. The

to do a little hand-clapping and foot-stomping. It’s rare that you won’t find

Coolie Trade is in reference to Latin American planters in the mid-1800s us-

people dancing at a Bear Country show.

ing coercion and fraud to induce Chinese American workers to Latin America

“Folk” is a funny appellation, an umbrella term, given to anything rock-

for what was essentially slave labor.

based and country-inspired. It’s on par with “emo” and “indie”. No one re-

The songs have come a long way from girl-meets-boy theatrics. Even then,

ally understands what they mean but people are quick to tag a band with a

when they go back to their tried and true formulas, the earthiness of San-

particular sobriquet.

chez’s vocals over the layers of instruments playing their version of up-tempo

Folk is defined in Webster’s as being “for the people.”

folk-pop is arresting.

In that way, beyond just their musical inspiration, Bear Country is folk. A

Opposite, from left: Mike Schlesinger, Cody Peterson, Susan Sanchez, Aaron Markley, Kyle Petersen, James Maakestad. Above: Schlesinger. Photos by Mark Kresl, 2007.

band for the people. The people of Omaha, especially. 4

Can you give a brief description of how the publisher got started? David Poindexter, a veteran of the commercial printing industry who has always loved books, founded MacAdam/

Small Press Spotlight:

Cage in 1999. In 2000 we acquired MacMurray & Beck,

to publish well-written mystery/crime/thrillers and are also looking for more narrative nonfiction to supplement our signature literary fiction.

How did MacAdam/Cage come to acquire The Time Traveler’s Wife?

an independent publisher based out of Denver, Colorado, and inherited their backlist including titles such as Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue and Patricia Henley’s

The Time Traveler’s Wife was initially found in the slush

Hummingbird House. From the start, the mission of

pile, but by the time we all had read and fallen in love

MacAdam/Cage has been to bring new and talented voices

with the manuscript, Audrey Niffenegger had signed on

to the marketplace.

with an agent at Regal Literary. It was a unanimous deci-

What is distinctive about a MacAdam/Cage book?

sion to publish it and we fought aggressively for it.

What two fall titles are you most excited about and why?

MacAdam/Cage isn’t currently accepting submissions, but what advice do you have for writers about getting accepted that’s not on the submission guidelines? When is the next submission period?

There is unanimous in-house excitement about our lead fall

Our reading period for un-agented material runs from

fiction title — Gina Nahai’s Caspian Rain — for its lyricism,

February 1 – June 1 every year. In addition to follow-

Although the subject matter and tone of our titles vary greatly, a MacAdam/Cage book always has interesting, compelling prose, and is deeply loved by the staff.

moving family portrait, and glimpse into pre-revolution Iranian culture. And, looking ahead to our spring 2008 list,

With Kate Nitze, Senior Editor

I’m especially excited about Jane F. Kotapish’s Salvage

therefore be more successful. So yes, we will continue

ing the submission guidelines, I would recommend that interested authors read some of our titles to familiarize themselves with our list, and that they focusing more

— a poetic debut novel with an unnamed narrator who, after witnessing a hor-

on the sample pages than on a marketing plan, allowing their writing to speak

rific accident and fleeing from New York City, faces unanswered questions about

for itself.

her fatherless childhood in 1970s suburbia, the ghost of her dead sister, and

What is your favorite past title from MacAdam/Cage?

Why did MacAdam/Cage publish more than half of its spring 2007 lineup in hardcover and paperback simultaneously, and will this trend continue?

One of my all-time favorite past titles is Nic Pizzolatto’s short story collection

This simultaneous hardcover/paperback publication is part of our new Reader’s

her eccentric mother.

Between Here and the Yellow Sea. He is currently working on a new novel, which

Choice program, which allows booksellers to order certain titles in either format,

I can’t wait to read.

depending on how they think they can best reach readers. Some independents

What are the advantages of being a smaller independent publisher?

— like a debut story collection or a literary novel in translation — we have found

On the editorial side, working for an independent publisher allows a certain freedom in terms of acquisitions — there is less pressure to produce titles based on economics alone, and more room for titles that we believe should be in the world even if they are commercially risky. Our smaller size also allows us to give each of our titles personal attention and each of our authors hands-on editorial and marketing support.

MacAdam/Cage is known primarily for representing literar y fiction. Titles like The Rabbit Factory and Die With Me seem to take the publisher into genre fiction. What was special about these titles, and will MacAdam/Cage continue to print genre fiction? Why or why not? While we continue to publish the literary fiction we have always been known for, we have also begun to add some mystery/crime and narrative nonfiction titles in an effort to diversify our list. Editorially, this mix of titles better represents the range of our tastes and interests. From a commercial standpoint, we believe a more varied list will reach a greater variety of readers, and will

have first edition clubs or do well with hardcovers, but with certain, riskier titles that the chain stores are more willing to take a chance and order more copies in paperback. The aim of the Reader’s Choice program is to find more readers for our titles and to respond to the market’s demand for more paperback originals, while still making the traditional hardcover format available for every title.

You publish a good amount of writers from outside the United States and translations of works as well. What are your thoughts on Americanizing these texts? For instance, in Mark McNay’s Fresh, “c”s are still left in place of “s”s in instances. Also, some of the phrases may be hard for readers from outside the UK to understand. In general we try to honor the original text for foreign English-language titles

from Canada, Australia, or the UK and to keep the spellings as is. Some of the Scottish vernacular in Fresh may be difficult for an American reader to understand at first, but it is essential to the narrative voice of the book, and we trust our readers to adapt and appreciate learning the author’s native language, cadence, and style. 4 –Matt Goodlett

FICTION

by hugh reilly

M I C H A E L’ S F I R E In my family , I was always the one who told the stories.

It was always, “Michael tell us the one about the pig in the hand cart,” or “Michael, give us your story on the truck driver and the penguins.” My brother Peter tried to tell stories but he was always mucking it up. Even simple stories like the one about the Gardai who sees your man sittin’ in the middle of the street and rowing to beat the band like he’s in a rowboat race. The officer stops and say’s, “What are ye doin, ye eedjit! There’s no boat there!” At which point your man says. “Oh my God!” and starts swimming madly. Of course it’s all in the gestures. Ye’ve got to get the shocked expression on your face and ye’ve got to twirl your arms like a madman. Poor Peter. He tells the story all right, but when he gets to the punch line he says, “Well, then, I’ll swim.” And then just stands there waiting for people to laugh and of course, no one does. “But Michael,” he says, “ye always get a grand laugh on that one. Amn’t I telling it right.” So I explain it to him again and he says, “ Wasn’t I just after saying that very same thing?!” I was the last born of my family. Or, as they say here in Ireland, the scrapings of the pot. Peter and Mary both tumbled out before me. They tell me I’m the image of me Da, but I can only tell from pictures. He died when I was very young. They say Da was a storyteller like me, a regular Shanachie. Some things your parents pass on with no one the wiser. It just happens like and ye can’t explain it. Da wasn’t around to show me, but somehow I picked it up. And Peter, he knew Da better than me, but he never learned to tell a story. Da was an inspector on the docks at Wexford, an important job in those days. He was a well thought of man. It was an accident that killed him, but even with that, if they’d known, they could have saved him. He was standing on the dock, working, or maybe telling a story. When a load broke loose and slammed into him. Knocked him smack to the ground.

There was blood on his lips when he got up and his ribs pained him something fierce. “They’re broke, sure,” he said. The next day he was back at work. Walking stiff with a wrapping ‘round his ribs under his shirt. It must have been awful, but that was Da. You worked if you could walk. He didn’t know it, but something had broke loose inside and he was bleeding slowly. Just a trickle at first, but faster and faster until it filled him up and he drowned in his own blood. Everyone came to the funeral. He was a well thought of man. I don’t know how Mum did it those first years. Peter and Mary helped I’m sure, but I wasn’t much use. Too young to do anything but get in the way. We lived in a little house like so many others. A simple layout. The bedrooms were upstairs with the kitchen down the hall in the first floor and the parlor just inside the door and to the right. The parlor now, that was for guests only. Ye didn’t go in there unless you were invited and wasn’t that a rare thing. There was a picture of me Da in there. Not a tall man, but a strong face with his hair combed forward. That’s a style I favor myself. It seems to suit us both.

This morning, something

happened.

I used to go and look at that picture sometimes and wonder what he was like. They told me stories about him of course, but like I told you before, Peter wasn’t much of a hand at telling stories. Me Mum, she wasn’t exactly a storyteller, but she had a quare way of using words that made you remember them. Like Paddy down the road that went to school with me. He wasn’t much for reading and writing, but he was a big fella and looked out for me. Mum, she said, Paddy wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he had a clean soul.

Things like that she’d say and you’d remember them crisp and fresh. After Da died, all the fixing and such was up to Mum. Small things always going wrong in a house. With working and caring for the lot of us, Mum didn’t always have time to do the complete job. Just slap dash and get it done. Hope it would last at least a little while. But me mother had her strengths. Wasn’t she a wonder for painting? Nothing artful like, but well enough to do the trick. If one coat would do, three coats was better. The parlor was her special target. It seemed every few months found her putting another coat of paint on the parlor walls just to spruce it up a mite. Eventually there must have been more than a dozen coats of paint on those walls. Couldn’t you look past the doorjamb and count each layer just like rings on a tree? A silly thing, I suppose, but then isn’t it just a thing like that to make such a difference later. The morning of the fire, Peter rose early, for his paper route. He always went into the parlor after his breakfast and started a wee fire in the hearth, so it’s warm when the rest of us stumble out of bed. Start the fire, make sure its going fierce, then off to deliver the papers. This morning, something happened. Maybe a gust of wind when he’s out the door. Maybe a crumpled bit of starter paper that tumbled from the hearth when the peat shifted. We never knew for sure and faith, I guess it doesn’t matter. The first we knew of it was the crash and the breaking of glass. Truthfully, that was the first me mother heard of it. It didn’t wake me at all. “Ah, listen to that row,” she said, “the cat’s gone and broken something in the parlor again!” On with the robe and down the stairs to check out the damage. The first thing she sees is the cat streaking past her up the stairs. “I’ll settle with ye The first we knew of it later,” Mum muttered, and continued on down. was the and the When she got to the parlor, the door was shut and no matter breaking of . how hard she pushed, she could not open it. Then she felt the heat through the door and a moment later smelled the first whiff of smoke. “Oh God, Oh God,” I heard her scream as she ran up the stairs. “Michael, Mary, get up quick. The house is on fire!” “Run children, run,” she yelled as we tumbled out of bed still half asleep. “Oh God, run. Hurry now!” Down the stairs we tumbled in a surge. Grabbing what we could on the way out the door.

crash

glass

Mr. Kennedy next door was already outside running to meet us. An early riser, he’d seen the smoke and called to his wife, “There’s a fire next door at the Nolan’s, call for help, I’m going over there!” They wrapped us in blankets and we waited for the fire engine to arrive. The damage was severe, but they managed to save the house. The parlor was ruined, of course, but the rest of the house was salvageable. The fire had mostly been contained to the parlor and it was those many coats of paint that had fed the flames that roared inside that room. In a strange way, it was also those layers of paint that had saved us. The intense heat had melted them so they poured around the doorjamb and formed a seal on the door. And wasn’t it then no surprise that Mum could not budge it with her shoving and pushing. The firemen told me mother that if she had been able to open that door, the flames would have burst through like waters from a dam; up the stairs and throughout the house. We never would have made it. With the door closed, the fire simply burned itself out. When they broke down the door to the parlor, we saw a very curious thing. All the walls were completely blackened except for a small rectangle where Da’s picture had hung. There the wall was still white and clean. On the floor below was the picture still in its frame. The glass was broken and the frame bent, but the picture was still intact. That crash of glass, as Da’s picture hit the floor, was the noise that had awakened Mum. It wasn’t the cat’s doing at all. “And would ye be lookin’ at this,” one of the firemen exclaimed, pointing to the braided wire that had held up the picture frame. It had not unraveled as you might expect, but had been cut cleanly, surgically, as if by a knife or a pair of scissors. “That’s a queer thing,” the fireman said, “I can’t explain that at all.” For weeks afterwards, many a strong man in the neighborhood tried to break that wire in their hands, but none could do it. It was firm and strong, just as when we bought it. My mother brushed Da’s picture lightly with her hand and then pulled me closer. She whispered in me ear, “That was your Da, Michael. That was your Da that did that wondrous thing. Sure, and I’ve no worries for you now. He’s watching out for you always.” Me mother has been gone for years now. And the old house long torn down. I’ve children of me own now — one, two, and three. But I still remember the acrid smell of the smoke and the fear in me mother’s eyes. And above it all, I remember the sharp, bright strength of a father’s love. 4

Brinkman’s by erin andrews Touching Debut Novel Kiara Brinkman was born in Omaha and although she and her parents moved to California when she was five, Omaha has remained a kind of second home for her. “Growing up, during the summers I would come back to visit for about a month or so, and I’d stay with my grandmother and because I’m an only child, it was good for me to hang out with my cousins because they were sort of more like siblings to me,” Brinkman says. The family support was evident in the large number of relatives at the reading from her debut novel Up High in the Trees. Giving insight into an autistic child’s point of view, the novel follows eight-yearold Sebby Lane as he grieves his mother’s death. With two older siblings and a father all grieving in their own ways, Sebby takes comfort in the memories of his mother, a woman who was more than his mother but a soulmate. While following Sebby’s thoughts can feel a bit confusing, it is an intriguing journey. “One of my goals was to sort of help the reader see things from [Sebby’s] perspective,” Brinkman says, “and I think he is often lost. I think to a certain degree I wanted the reader to feel some disorientation, but also there had to be enough forward momentum to carry it through. The struggle in writing it was to remain true to Sebby’s way of experiencing the world and also make the book readable.” Readers get to witness Sebby’s uncomfortable social interactions, intense heartbreak, and extraordinary insight. What at times seems to be a quirky thought or statement quickly adds depth to the story and Sebby’s character. Brinkman has such a wonderful way of interweaving serious themes with lighthearted moments. It is hard not to fall in love with Sebby. Shortly after his mother’s death, Sebby’s father decides to take some time off from work and give Sebby a break from school. They escape to the family’s summerhouse and while his dad struggles with his grief, Sebby is left to fend for himself. He meets two young children who challenge him and later befriend him. It is his experiences here, and the release of writing letters to his teacher, that seem to help Sebby remember his mother more clearly and grow. Up High in the Trees is an excellent narrative of an extraordinary child who has suffered, but it will warm your heart as you discover his story.

Silent City: How did you come up with the idea for Up High in the Trees? Kiara Brinkman: I think I had Sebby’s voice in my head for a long time and sort of just experimented with it. When I was an undergrad in writing workshops, I didn’t exactly understand the voice that well or who might be that voice. Then by accident I was teaching in San Francisco at an after-school program and one of our students had Asperger’s Syndrome. I knew about autism but I hadn’t heard specifically about Asperger’s, so in order to work with him I did some research about ways to help him through the day for my sake and for his sake. Being around that student in particular really helped me shape and develop the voice in terms of who that voice might be coming from. After that I started also doing some tutoring work with a young boy who was autistic, so he also helped. I was very careful because I didn’t want to take anything specifically from their lives — too much from any incident I had with them. So I sort of had to use it as deep background and create my own thing with Sebby. How long did the novel take to complete? I think I had a rough, finished draft after about two years. Between the time that I got the book deal with Grove and when it was published was about a year so I continued making changes. Then I sort of had a hard time letting go because so much of the language and the rhythm and pacing had to be dead-on and I read it out loud to myself a lot of times and would make really tiny changes that probably nobody else would notice, but it mattered to me. Now that you’re done with your first novel, what was the most rewarding part? I pretty much thought of myself as a short story writer, to be honest, and the longest thing that I’ve written before this was forty pages. It was scary writing a novel but I think what pulled me through this was I really grew very attached to Sebby, and I really started thinking of him as a real person. I felt very obligated to write him into a place where I thought he would be okay. I didn’t think a happy ending would’ve been appropriate for this book, but I think it’s obvious they’ve gone through so much and recovering from the loss of his mother is something he’ll be dealing with for a very long time. I thought of the ending as sort of hopeful in that the closet where they end up had always been something he shared with his mother, so that he is willing to take these other kids into it showed him opening up and being willing to share more of

himself with other people. The last couple of paragraphs he sort of understands himself as different from his mother in that she experienced the dark as this way of shutting down and closing off from the world. When [Sebby’s] sitting there, he feels himself expanding and getting bigger. I think it’s important for him to see that his path is different from [his mother’s.] It’s rare for adult fiction to be told from a child’s point of view. What made you choose Sebby’s voice for the narrator? Well, I would like to say that I chose but I really didn’t choose. Usually when I start writing, I have a very distinct voice in my head and it’s just a line or two and then I sort of play off that. The first ten pages of the book kind of came out in a rush around those two lines and then I had the voice. There were some parts where I felt heartbroken for him. We get the point of view, what he hears being said about him, but he doesn’t seem to connect. That’s one of the things I like about his character actually is that he’s not super self-aware yet, and that’s one of the reasons why I never mention autism in the book because while he seems to know to a certain extent that he’s different than other people, it’s not something that he’s dwelling on yet. He’s just who he is. Music has a significant presence in the novel, almost like a soundtrack. Did you listen to this music while you were writing? 32

Music Mined from Rocks

from Hurdle by Myron Hardy

A song will

make you aware

of what’s there

or what isn’t

a bar stool, a twenty inch woofer

A song will

fill a schooner with pale ale make a woman dissolve her marriage

That music is just sort of in me at this point. I grew up listening to that music and my dad is a huge Beatles fan. I think until I was thirteen or so, I didn’t know that there was any new music because I’d always been listening to the Oldies with my parents so that was my world of music. It’s so ingrained in me now. I still listen to that music and I love it. I didn’t really have to go back and listen to it again.

where the lyric hinges

Are you working on anything right now?

where sex sells

I’m kind of working on two projects simultaneously. I’m working on a collection of interconnected short stories — like a secondary character will come back and be the main character for another story. Then I just started another novel but I think starting a second novel after working so long on this one, it’s scary to be at the beginning point again. The short stories — having those to work on as well — they’re sort of more comforting to work on and working on them at the same time is easier for me. What do you hope readers take away from Up High in the Trees? The book is mainly about grief and loss and that’s something that everybody goes through at some point, so I hope that anyone who reads it can sort of take comfort in someone else’s story and hopefully it resonates in some way with [his] own experiences of loss. Autism is something that’s just sort of beginning to get awareness. It’s taking a long time for kids on the spectrum to get the treatment and services that they need, so I hope this will raise awareness for these kids. And also I hope people will learn how to be more comfortable and accepting of these kids in public settings where maybe their behaviors are not totally appropriate. 4

make a knot of loose verse, every end a new beginning

A song will

loop with reasons to doubt this country A song

will, if it has enough sex in it, hunker, harbor, or highlight a musician’s fingers missing their mark on the fret board

A song will

take discord as a nasty remark from a heckler, silence a gun shot, or make a man break a knuckle for punching a brick wall

A song will

crawl on its knees from the throat of a belittled bird that until a song came along

had no huff

robert anthony siegel by erin andrews

After speaking with him for an hour on the telephone, I found Robert Anthony Siegel just as captivating as the characters in his latest novel, All Will Be Revealed. With so many interesting characters to follow, you can’t wait to see how their lives intertwine. The complexity of the characters and dramatic descriptions make the novel easy to devour. Myself on one end of the line in Omaha, Nebraska, and Mr. Siegel on the other in Wilmington, North Carolina, the conversation left the sense of distance behind after the first question. With so much insight into writing and the writing process, it’s no wonder Robert Anthony Siegel has nailed it in his own work. He says of the novel writing process, “You’re giving voice to your feelings and thoughts about the world in this very peculiar way. You’re making something that explains something you can just hold up and say ‘here.’ Then people can absorb your communication and be moved in ways they can’t simply summarize either. You’ve shared something beyond words and the paradox is that it’s made of words.”

Silent City: You have such a brilliant way of conveying setting. It adds to each character and the story. How does the setting around you affect your writing? Robert Anthony Siegel: I don’t have a simple answer. Just in terms of my own life I’ve had to write wherever the opportunity presented itself. When we were living in New York — my wife is also a writer, her name is Karen Bender — we had a little apartment and we would write in the same room. She had a desk on one end and I had one on the other. In a larger sense, place as locale, that has been important to me. I was born in New York; I grew up there. All Will Be Revealed is set in New York and the novel before that, All the Money in the World, is also set in New York. That was important to both books I think even though in the most recent novel Augustus Auerbach, his character is something of a recluse and doesn’t like to go outside. But still there’s a sense of the city going on around him, and occasionally he’s forced to make a foray out and that has particular significance. New York has been important and just the idea of setting, of locale in fiction, the physical world in fiction I think is very important. I tell writing students that the story should be a movie that happens in your head, but a filmmaker has all this help. A camera, he has costume people and set designers, and actors, and a fiction writer has to do that all herself — make it truly a visual experience. I think inevitably there needs to be interplay in between what’s happening with the character emotionally and how he or she relates to the environment around them. You’ve lived predominantly on the East Coast. What was your experience like when you studied in the Midwest at the Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop and also in Japan at the University of Tokyo?

Well, I think it’s always good to get a larger sense of the world. Go to new places. Try new things. See new things. Meet new people. Iowa City was great. I loved it. It was a wonderful town. I was just back there to do a reading, and it was the first time in something like fifteen years. It was this enormously powerful nostalgic experience. The Midwest was really new to me in a lot of ways — these huge expanses of space. I had a brother in Minneapolis and a sister in Chicago while I was in Iowa City so I would drive between these three points. Fields forever, it was kind of amazing. Of course Tokyo was a whole other thing. I remember the first time I went to Japan and I got off the plane and I’d been studying Japanese for years but to be standing in the airport at that time, this was over twenty years ago, no English anywhere. Just Chinese characters. It was just, ‘What have I done?’ you know. ‘Where am I?’ The world sort of flipped on its head. It was amazing, scary. Both were great experiences and Wilmington has been a wonderful experience. What do you enjoy most about teaching in North Carolina? I really like teaching. Writing can be a very lonely activity. It’s good to get in with people and to help them out a little bit. Ultimately teaching is a form of helping, doing, giving a little to students just as my teachers over the course of my own development gave to me. It feels really good to do that. I try to be as helpful as I can or at least do no harm. And at the end of the day I can go home and feel like I did a few nice things for some people. Show them how to do this, show them how to do that, give them some encouragement or a little support because learning to write is very hard, very frustrating. It’s emotionally demanding, and I think one of the best things a teacher can offer is faith in the act of writing itself. It’s worth doing it and if you do it you will inevitably get better.

I don’t know if this has been your experience teaching beginning writers, but there seems to be a self-consciousness with beginning writers in staking the claim, ‘I am a writer.’ Did you ever feel that way or was there a specific moment where you were sure, ‘Yes, I am a writer’? It’s a very, very difficult barrier to overcome and I definitely have experienced it. I didn’t go to an MFA program right away. I sort of had this flirtation with Japanese studies. I went to graduate school for a couple years in Japan at the University of Tokyo, but I was writing fiction. I came back to the States and felt like academics just weren’t quite right for me, but I couldn’t quite jump into an MFA program either because I lacked the self-confidence. I never finished anything because finishing things is hard. Finishing stories is really tough and requires a kind of confidence to push to the end. It’s very easy to become disillusioned in the middle and say ‘Well this really is junk. Why even finish it?’ I think I did a lot of that for many years. I flirted with the idea of going to graduate school for about five years before actually doing it. So what finally gave you the push? Honestly, I think it was a sense of time passing and that I was getting older, that my good-for-nothing friends were finally getting on with their lives, not living in their parents’ basements anymore and so I felt a little left behind. I just got a little older and by the time I hit Iowa, I was really primed to learn something in my life. I was just ready to sit down and listen, so it was fortuitous timing for me. 34

What writers inspired you? Who were you interested in learning about? I think different writers at different times feed different needs. I definitely had phases in my life. When I was much younger, before college, I had a kind of 19th century Russian phase. I’m not sure how subtly I read these books but I just gobbled them up. The sense of vastness of the storytelling to me, the layered quality and the worlds contained. I loved Tolstoy, Chekhov. I like the size. I had a 19th century English phase too. I liked the triple-decker Victorian novels, the Brontës, Dickens of course, George Elliot. I moved from them to sort of later writers. Hardy is an amazing novelist. At the same time, I was very affected by the not-so-much contemporary Jewish writers because it wasn’t really contemporary. It was really the previous generation of Jewish writers. Jewish-American writers: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malmud. I recognized their world. It was partially my world and partially the world of my parents. They were talking about issues I recognized from my own life except they drew on a sort of urban Jewish American culture that I knew and understood instinctually. Of course, they were just great writers. Saul Bellow in particular was important for a while. He just writes, creates this vivid, very visual, three-dimensional world. You really feel it has mass and volume. You can step inside and turn around 360 degrees and just see everything and I think that became something of an ideal for me.

I think that the Great American Novel is something of a red herring. Obviously it is a critical trope but also a marketing ploy. I’m not sure it’s particularly meaningful in the reality of writing. Do we talk about a Great French Novel or a Great Italian Novel? The Great Japanese Novel? Of course not. As Americans we’re so culturally insecure that there has to be this one defining thing where our American-ness reaches some sort of expression and it can’t happen because as you say we’re all different. The nature of our experiences are so varied and so different not just as ethnic groups but as individuals. A novel that has tremendous meaning for me may not speak to you. Something that really speaks to you may feel kind of Aryan to me. Now I think it’s just a way of stirring the pot, getting some interest going. At the same time, American literature has produced some great books. If you want to call them the Great American Novel, I wouldn’t stop you. You could make a serious argument for all sorts of books. A modern classic that isn’t mentioned nearly enough is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. What is the one piece of advice you would pass on to your writing students? If I could only say one thing it would be this. No, it would be that. No, it would be the other thing. Based on my own experience, one’s experience as a writer starts with one’s experience as a reader. The most important thing for a writing student to do is to read. Read. Read. Read. All the time. But also write, write, write. Some back and forth between the two. You write something then read something. I think writing is very much a learning-by-doing sort of job. But beyond that, the other one single thing I would say a writer’s job is, is to really be honest. What does that mean? It means really being yourself and saying what you think and what you feel, and not what you imagine somebody might want you to say. That’s the way you achieve the individuality, which makes your work different from what other people are doing. I was fascinated by your character Augustus Auerbach in All Will Be Revealed mostly because he ranges from being completely detached to ranging every emotion in specific scenes with baby Augustus and flashbacks with his mother. How did you balance the two in this character?

I never finished anything because finishing things is hard.

With so many immigrant groups and such a vast number of people in the United States, do you think there is what could be considered the ‘Great American Novel’ or is it possible to achieve such a distinction?

The impetus for the book, the trigger so to speak was my wife and I having a child. Our son, Jonah, was born in 1999. I started the book just a few weeks before he was born. In Karen’s nine-month pregnancy I knew something big was going to happen. My life was going to change and that’s really what the book is about, right? Auerbach’s life changes, not that I’m him, but he interested me and I wanted to watch his life change. And part of what does it is Jane’s baby. Of course the baby doesn’t last; it dies early on, but it launches the change because the baby’s death brings Auerbach to Verena and reconnects him with his mother and sort of opens the gates of feelings that he’s kept closed for many, many years. It’s his reintroduction to the emotional life. And in some sense — and this is an old cliché of writing teachers but I think it’s really true — fiction is about change. We see something in the fictive world change. For All Will Be Revealed what’s changed is Auerbach’s relationship to his own emotions. 4

FICTION

Asphyxiation by chantal o’keefe

“You know, you should have thrown that trash out, and the vacuum bag.” I force myself to smile, so that he thinks I’m being light and funny. He looks at me. His dark brown curls are growing long around his face, giving him a boyish look. “I’m just saying.” I am cross-legged on the wood floor, wondering where I might be right now if I’d ignored what I found. He puts the last few remaining items in the box: three books on sports, a basketball, and some old smelly sneakers I tried to throw away the entire three years we dated. “Ben, do you know what’s on those shoes?” I’d said. “Feces, urine, a plethora of bacteria, viruses, probably blood, hair, animal parts.” Once, he even licked the top of the toe, and I refused to kiss him until he gargled with Listerine for the full 30 seconds. I watched, counting out slow Mississippis. He closes the box and lifts it properly, all legs, deep to the ground. In this squat position, his oversized blue gym shorts stretch taut across his ass; I will miss his bubble butt. I sigh too loud, because he says, “What now?” “Nothing,” I say quietly, like the echo of a foghorn. He puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezes it several times, and says, “I love you.” “Yeah.” We are breaking up, and he is moving out. I came home four weeks ago and found a 3 inch blonde hair on our crisp white pillowcase — nothing like my back-sweeping black hair. Another girl might have waited by the door for him, shown all of her cards, but I knew better.

Like Grissom, I wanted to keep the bluff up. “Hey honey, how was your day?” I put the hair in a Ziploc bag, wrote A on it in a black sharpie, and hid it in my underwear drawer. Then I sleuthed. Ben came home a few days later to find me standing in the kitchen with my evidence spread across the table. “A,” I said, holding the baggy up. B was the vacuum bag, slit down the middle and stretched open like a cadaver chest. It contained more blonde hair and a skull charm. C was a hot pink condom, which I found in the bottom of the kitchen trash bag. I was disappointed. For three years, we watched CSI Las Vegas every Thursday at 9 p.m. I have learned a lot from watching the show. I’d thought he would have picked up a few tips, too. But some of us are just smarter. Green eyes stared at me, red dot in the corner. Lips were parted, words long since evaporated. The air was cold, smoking up the breath that escaped me. His neck red and swollen, thumbprints, two, below the Adam’s apple. Shirt, blue, torn. Right arm broken, twisted. Khaki slacks covering bowlegs, ending in shiny brown leather shoes. His body in the middle of the black and white kitchen floor. The windows open, and two small blood splatters on the lower right cabinets. Then my mother screamed, arms around me, scooping me up, carrying me away, and I woke up at Grandma’s and she said, “Baby, Daddy’s dead. Do you remember what you saw?” And I said, “No.” And that’s the way it’s always been, to everyone.

On dark cold nights, when I sat at the top of the steps, my onesie covering me from toes to neck, listening to Mom, Uncle Jack, and Grandma drink bourbon with ice, and they’d say, “At least God granted us that one grace, at least the child doesn’t remember.” Then silence, swishing ice, and empty glasses set back down. How could I tell them otherwise? CSI Las Vegas was having a contest. The winner got to act as a dead body on the show, and like I told Ben, no one does a dead body better than me. I fantasized about who they’d make me into. Someone from Lady Heather’s house? A drug addict? A suburban mistress? But alas, I didn’t win. I tell Ben maybe I should think about leaving the fog and cold of San Francisco and try Las Vegas. I could audition as an extra? He is over at our place, which is now just my place, watching the season opener with me. Ben always indulges me; I like that about him. We are trying to remain friends, seeing what happens. I do not want to lose him. The Who come on and I turn the volume up. They’re going through the character introductions when I turn to Ben and say, “You know how my father died? I saw it, and I lied about forgetting.” A man enters the screen, his pistol aimed at another man, innocent of something. He shoots three times, and then flees the scene, leaving behind a hair and a footprint. All that’s needed. Ben starts to say something, but I shoosh him loudly, irritated, because he should know better than to talk during CSI. 4 Above: Illustration by Max Riffner, 2007.

Sara Holloway. That has one essay in it. After I wrote that I felt like I didn’t want to do too much to exploit my own family or people I knew. Particularly because after I wrote that essay there were a number of people who made connections between what I’d written in that essay and what I’d written about in You Remind Me of Me and I felt creepy and uncomfortable about it. And in general I don’t feel that interested in probing my own psyche in that way. I like to have a certain number of clothes on my body. There are people who feel comfortable being exposed and people who don’t

OF GHOST STORIES AND NUDIST COLONIES CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17

sell Banks and Alice Munro. I remember being embarrassed in my creative writing classes by teachers who had a lot of scorn for what they termed “genre fiction” — and I remember being kind of scared away from the stuff that I first loved — the stuff that made me want to be a writer in the first place. But at the same time, I found that the material I got the most energy from always seemed to have some element of fantasy or horror or weirdness or whatever underneath the surface of psychological realism. And as I’ve gained more confidence as a writer, I feel like I’ve been able to be more open about my genre affinities. It’s a complicated issue, since some people define the terms “literary” and “genre” very narrowly. In my opinion, the term “literary” means that the work aspires to be art — that there is some struggle for depth and beauty of expression and complexity of emotion, and this has absolutely nothing to do with subject matter. The issue is complicated by the fact that a lot of what we term “genre” fiction aspires to entertain, but doesn’t aspire to be art, and often even the most crudely written “genre” stuff can be entertaining without being very good. Some of the prejudice about “genre” is based on the perception — sometimes true — that genre fiction is conveyed in sloppily written, trite prose; some of the prejudice is founded on the idea that “genre” is the same as “formula” — that we’re talking about the kind of hack writing you get in trashy paperback series. Of course, so-called “literary” fiction can be equally convention-bound and hackneyed, and it often seems to me that the people who are most invested in protecting the purity of “literary fiction” are themselves committed to a limited, formulaic view of the possibilities of fiction. Unfortunately, it seems to me that a lot of those folks are creative writing teachers. Recently A.M. Holme’s memoir about adoption was well-received. Did you ever think about broaching the topic of your own adoption outside of the realm of fiction? I actually have one essay that talks about it a little bit. It’s in a collection that Random House did called Family Wanted: Adoption Stories, edited by

and I’m one of the latter. I guess that’s part of being from Nebraska, too. I don’t think there are any nudist colonies in Nebraska. 4

Music Mined from Rocks

from Hurdle by Myron Hardy

Another song in the key of life to play, to listen to, with spoons in rooms with wall tall windows, on chairs, using fingers and footstools, and empty pickle jars, bent hangers, drawers with metal knockers, cardboard boxes, pockets full of change, a walking cane, heel toes, steel toes, bare toes slapping linoleum, old vinyl. A compact disc in a clear jewel case. A Guitar and amplifier ready and roaring.

THE LANGUAGE OF MEN CONTINUED FROM PAGE 25

in your stories, I’d subconsciously attached a higher pitch. Nobody thinks of humor and thinks James Earl Jones or Charlton Heston. Are you comfortable with the public speaking process? Do you enjoy reading your own work or would you rather let it sit on the page? I love getting up in front of the audience. Maybe it has something to do with my theater background. In high school and college, I did quite a bit of theater until I got sick of actors. I actually considered pursuing it as a trade for

a while. I spent a summer with the American Cabaret Theatre company. But again, those with a theatrical disposition annoy me. I think what you’re doing on the page is not so different from what you’re doing on the stage. You’re a dramatist. You’re getting inside of other people’s heads and trying to understand what their motivation is. You’re trying to understand best how to get them to crunch up their faces, ball up their fists, and make your audience feel. What can you accomplish with ink and paper? Not much. You can’t slam down your fist on a table and make your audience hear that. You can’t shoot off a gun next to their ear and make their eardrum rupture. There’s just something about reading your work aloud where there’s that greater connection. There’s that more masterful ability to manipulate. To make them hear as you intended. I tend to try to engage when reading. It drives me nuts when an author gets up before everybody and reads in a monotonous voice. People can’t pay attention for five minutes. I want people to sit forward in their seats when I’m reading. It’s the mindset I take into the classroom when I’m teaching as well. I’m a high octane teacher. I use that same adjective to describe what I’m doing at a podium in front of a crowd at a bookstore. You’ve essentially been a factotum, worked every job under the sun: ranch hand, weight room instructor, gardener, actor, etc. Did you ever feel like working all those jobs was essentially research in a way? Absolutely. I think there’s something dangerous about hiding out in academia, which is a kind of la-la land separate from the real world. I think there’s something essential about getting out there and dirtying your hands. Knowing what it feels like to sweat, to be poor, to be pissed off at your employer, to be frustrated with your place in the world. To be in touch with nature, to be in touch with the asphalt and broken glass and neon that make up cities. If there’s anything I could tell students who are considering an MFA program, it would be to take a few years off and expose yourself to as much as you can. And even after getting your MFA, to not necessarily take the safe route in life. Talk to strangers on the bus, go off the beaten path and find yourself in a dangerous bar at midnight. Gut an elk on the side of a mountain in the middle of a snowstorm. Experience the stuff that stories are made of. 4

4 CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES 4 Erin Andrews is an Omaha native with a BFA from the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Writer’s Workshop. Oran Belgrave started the Black Rainbow Art Gallery with his family in 1993. It is currently located in Los Angeles. They plan to break ground on their fourth museum in Omaha in 2008. Belgrave is versed in digital media production, website design and also conventional metal sculpting. He is the founder of the media production company, Omaha On. Dorothy Gambrell has drawn Cat and Girl since, like, forever. She lives in Tucson. Matt Goodlett is the former Arts Editor of Pulp magazine. His author profiles and book reviews have appeared in the Omaha City Weekly and Pulp magazine, among others. Myron Hardy is a poet, writing instructor, and recording artist. He is a Cave Canem fellow and earned an MFA in writing from California College of the Arts. His songs are featured on Songs of Experience (and the forthcoming Masters Thesis) and his words have appeared in Beeswax, Words+Images, and Pluck!. He lives in San Francisco and is a Teaching Fellow for Writerscorp. Gene Kwak graduated from UNO with a major in Journalism and a concentration in Creative Writing. He has previously worked at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Zoo Press and was a reader for the Nebraska Review. Benjamin Graber at 62 is appearing as a playwright. Previously, he performed as a hippie doctor, sex doctor, psychiatrist, and a neurobiologist co-authoring Woman’s Orgasm. In 2002, the Kinsey Institute opened a collection of his papers. As a playwright, he co-authored the one-act play Snipped. An M.D. without a bachelor’s degree, he is pursuing a BFA at the University of Nebraska-Omaha Writer’s Workshop, while dramaturging and studying theatre at UNO and taking playwriting classes at Metro Community College. www.benjamingraber.com Michelle Kohrs is a freelance filmmaker, based in Omaha. She recently completed The Face of UKIWMI, a short documentary on AIDS in Tanzania. For more information, go to www.polepoleproductions.com. Michelle is currently collaborating with Tessa Wedberg and Lauren Van Buskirk on a feature-length documentary on Latino immigration to the rural Midwest. More information on this project can be found at www.aplombfilms.com. Mark Kresl is a native of Omaha. His still photography credits include the motion picture Imitation Life as well as several video shorts. He specializes in shooting artist portfolio material, photojournalism, portraiture, and nature photography. His photography has won competitive awards in Nebraska and Iowa. He is current president of the Omaha Camera Club, Nebraska’s oldest club for professional and amateur photographers. Mike Lawson graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with a degree in illustration and visual communication. He currently resides in Paisley, Scotland. He has illustrated iconic images of legends such as Jimmy Hendrix, Johny Cash, Jessica Larsen and Sammy Davis Jr. www.myspace.com/the _lonely_god. Anna Monardo is the author of two novels, The Courtyard of Dreams and Falling in Love with Natassia. Excerpts from Natassia first appeared in Prairie Schooner and were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Monardo is an associate professor and chair of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. For a more complete biography and a listing of awards please visit www.annamonardo.com. Chantal O’Keefe lives in San Francisco and helps care for rescue dogs. She recently received her MFA from California College of the Arts. Hugh Reilly is a native of Omaha, Nebraska. He has worked at two newspapers and has held various advertising jobs in several major cities including Omaha. He is an Associate Professor at UNO where he teaches courses in advertising, public relations, speech and creative writing. Reilly has led annual tours to Ireland and the British Isles since 1992. He has published in a wide range of regional and national magazines and published four books. Reilly is currently working on a biography of Father Edward Flanagan. Max Riffner writes and draws comics in Omaha, Nebraska. Max recently won the 2007 Isotope Award for Excellence in Mini-Comics for his book, Quick Step, which is about a mouse who can dance. He is also a member of Shocktrauma Studios, whose collective talent has done work for comic publishers such as Marvel, DC, Image, Desperado, Bongo and Markosia. Visit www.maxriffner.com. Jill Rizzo was among the founders of the Bemis Underground and works as the Associate Creative Director for Bozell. Her work currently hangs at Starbucks Headquarters in Seattle, Washington, and has been exhibited locally at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Antiquarium, Heller Art Images, 13th Street Gallery, Jackson Artworks, DarkRoom, Creighton University, and more. You can visit her website at www.jillrizzo.com. Mike Sgier was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, but considers Omaha a second home. He attended Creighton University where he received a BFA in Printmaking, and was a recipient of the Barker Art Residency Project at the Hot Shops Art Center in July 2005. He now resides in Minneapolis where he is attending the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for the MFA in Visual Studies. Visit www. msgierillustration.com. Brian Tucker is the founder and publisher of Bootleg Magazine, which originated in Wilmington, North Carolina. Bootleg features music, art, surf, skate, fiction, culture and profile stories. For more info, visit www.myspace.com/avenuemagazinepresents. Amie Tullius lives in Utah pursuing the artist dream. She has not yet reached creative nirvana. Katie Wudel’s stories and essays have been featured in McSweeney’s, Nerve, Beeswax and Futuro. She teaches creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha Writer’s Workshop and works as a writing consultant for Metropolitan Community College. She also edits for a local advertising agency and is currently at work on Fever to Fly, a memoir. Rachel Ziegler earned her BFA in Graphic Design from Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska. She has worked as a graphic design artist and project coordinator for Chemistry Advertising as well as for Concordia University’s Marxhausen Gallery. Ziegler has exhibited her work in several group shows throughout Nebraska, including the Marxhausen Art Gallery in Seward, as well as at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln. The artist currently serves as Managing Director of B|C Projects, and she handles and coordinates all aspects of the Bemis Center’s art sales and art services programs.

samsara

by Amie Tullius

the aspiring artist’s wheel of day job

two ways to get off: stop all the silliness and pick a sensible career like a normal person, or hit it big with your art so you don’t have to keep the day job. (Ok — there are alternatives: find a career that is not meaningless and do that in tandem with your art, find a benefactor, or work toward building a social democracy so that you can have health care and no fear of starvation if you choose to be a full-time artist.) You’d think that a person would have to be crazy to choose to hop into a cycle of artist samsara, but the thing is, the payoff is just so great. If you can hold on for a few spins and master it, there’s potential for the wheel to send you zinging off in a new direction: creative nirvana. 4

It’s frustrating as an artist to have your creative development slowed by

money jobs that have nothing to do with your career, but forcing yourself

into a freelance life too quickly can be like pointing six shooters at your

own feet and saying: “Dance.” The wheel of day job samsara is no joyride.

It alternates between meaninglessness, monotony, striving, rejection, and

poverty. But as the Buddha said: “Life is suffering.

Perhaps this is why our parents tried to steer us toward becoming lawyers

or teachers. Not many people can keep cycling through the drab jobs and

periods of creative poverty for very longv — most people seem to step off

about the time they start considering having children. In the end, there are