Mount Hope Issue 1 Spring 2012

Spring 2012

ISSUE 1

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Mount Hope is published bi-annually in Bristol, Rhode Island. Individual subscription rates are as follows: $20 annually or $35 for two years. Mount Hope Š 2012, All Rights Reserved. No portion of Mount Hope may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including all information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission of Mount Hope magazine or authors of individual creative works. Any resemblance of events, locations or persons, living or dead, in creative works contained herein is entirely coincidental.

Mount Hope cannot be held responsible for any of the views expressed by its contributors. www.mounthopemagazine.com Individual Issue Price: $10.00 Inside cover photo by Jason Speakman.

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EDITOR

Edward J. Delaney WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE

Adam Braver DESIGN EDITOR

Lisa Daria Kennedy Massachusetts College of Art ASSOCIATE EDITOR

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Steven Withrow LAYOUT EDITOR

Nicole Haylon GRAPHICS EDITOR

Evan Viola COPY EDITORS

Shannon Seaman Melanie Puckett EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Bradley Bermont: INTERVIEWS Leah Catania: INTERVIEWS Kevin Cloutier: OUTREACH

Wesley Isom: PRODUCTION Jessica Lagasse: SOCIAL MEDIA Marlene Martinez: WEB/MARKETING

Scott Pearson: MARKETING Taryn Roussel: MARKETING Nicholas Westbrook: PROOFS

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IN THIS ISSUE: FICTION

PAGE

Alden Eagle ..................................... The Hit Truck......................... 7 Patrice Hutton ................................ Their Teacher’s Room............... 48 Heath Fisher ................................... On Leave................................. 76 Michael Clayton .............................. Oreos....................................... 93

POETRY Christopher Hennessey ................. If Recriminations.................... 9 (4)

Yellow..................................... 11 Anaphora................................ 12 The Blessing............................. 13 Ghost Boy................................ 14 J. Patrick Lewis ................................ West Lafayette......................... 46 Kate Coombs .................................. Connections.............................. 47 Michael Cirelli.................................. Rhode Island Monthly.............. 89 Practice.................................... 90 Bare Hand Swipe.................... 91 Armchair Chef........................ 92

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NONFICTION

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Steve Almond .................................. On the Varieties of

Obsession

and Its Necessity as an Engine of Literature........................................ 15 Arlene Mandell ............................... American History........................... 39

INTERVIEWS Lynne Sharon Schwartz ......................................................................... 40 Rick Moody ............................................................................................. 73

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PHOTOGRAPHY Jason Speakman .............................. Muy Dulce..................................... 27 Denis Darzacq ................................ Hyper............................................. 78

GRAPHIC ART Matthew Henry Hall ...................... An American Cartoonist in Paris: The Last Day................................ 59

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Alden Eagle

THE HIT TRUCK When I was young I liked to help unload the packaged meat from the trunk of the car after it returned from the butcher. We worked in an assembly line, the whole family passing the smooth paper packages from hand to hand and moving them to the freezer. I made it a contest, trying to keep the packages moving as quickly as I could. Everything from the top level of the freezer had to be removed so that we could fill up the bottom, so if we did not unload fast enough, the ice cream and waffles and other stuff would melt and nothing was ever as nice once it thawed and froze again. My father, outside, manure and hay stuck to his thick-soled shoes, unloaded the car. My mother packed the freezer like a stonemason, arranging the bricks of lamb into a wall of future meals. I hurried in between, a boy moving inside and outside, grateful for the chance to feel as though he were doing important work.

The butcher shop where they cut and wrapped the meat always smelled like a butcher shop. I don’t know how else to put it. Metallic, but rich, the smell permanent no matter how often the cold surfaces were scrubbed. Every kind of animal waited in the display case, exotic and pink and machine-sliced into perfect slivers. It looked plastic behind the glass, as though maybe it were only for display. My mother told a man in a bloody apron how she wanted the lambs cut. The least savory organs weren’t packaged at all, but hearts and livers were bundled together to treat dogs. A couple legs were kept whole for big holiday dinners but the others were to be split in half. I kept myself occupied looking at the wall poster of the cuts of beef and tried to learn how all the different parts worked. This was a headless steer on the poster, not a living thing. Every remaining part of the animal was made out of discrete cuts of meat instead of flesh.

The hit truck had come the previous day. No one could mistake the hit truck for anything else but a hit truck. It was too tall, and looked precarious turning corners along the long driveway. The truck was old and custom made, with everything important in a wooden box perched where the bed of the rusty sixties pickup had been once, twenty years ago or more. Stencilled letters faded, clearest at the bottom, palest at the top: Addlestone & Co. Custom, Specialty Butchers. Grants Pass, OR. I had been in the barnyard when the hit truck came, digging thistles from around the manure pile.

Some were taller than I, and the lowest branches sent purple flowers and inch-long prickers far from the main trunk. I could only get to the roots after I used the shovel like an ax and sliced off a few outer limbs. I stopped to watch four men pile out of the cab. It seemed too full, impractical. They moved to the back and found coveralls to put on. My dad approached from the field, where he’d been working, so that he could bring the hitters to the right pen. He blew his nose into his handkerchief while the hitters got ready. One

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bolted a tall hook to the back of the truck—a place to hang carcasses while they were dressed.

I said something, some non-observation. Some nothing. “Four guys in that little truck?” Something like that.

“It’s honest work,” my dad said, and I wished I had not broken the silence.

“I know,” I said, “I know,” because I did not yet know the difference between “I know” and, “Now I have learned.” It was honest work. Noble, even, that these stoic men were willing to drive around the county all day and kill things and dress them and get blood on their hands so that we wouldn’t have to.

Embarrassed, I turned back to the thistles. I imagined a disappointed look on my father’s face but did not watch him and the hitters step quietly into the barn. I heard little, but part of me wanted to. Part of me wanted to step inside and bear witness even if I stood outside the pen, even if I stayed clean.

Later, the hitters left and I saw the red-black smears on the barn’s dirt floor, where the soil was packed so hard from years of footsteps that blood could not be absorbed. Instead it would dry slowly and mix with the straw stems and grit and manure dust, disappearing from sight but not leaving. Just spreading thin and becoming a part of everything.

My father poured rock salt from a plastic cup onto the bloody side of a sheepskin. The leather man would turn this one into a soft sheepskin rug, and the rug would last far longer than the lamb chops. My father looked up at me. “Hitter said the leather man should charge me less for this one.” That was the hitter’s excuse for a boast—an indirect way of pointing to what careful work he’d done, leaving the hide in one even piece, like the rind of an orange peeled in one long chain with no flesh connected to the pith. I nodded, and felt even more that I should have been in the barn, so that the hitter would have had one more person to boast to.

We walked back to the house. I was glad to know how things worked, to know how it was that flesh turned into meat. Not everyone knew that, exactly. You needed to see the flesh and then see the meat, if you wanted to understand. I told my dad that, but I didn’t tell him how I regretted being outside when such important things were happening in the barn. He squeezed my shoulder from up high. “No way around it,” he said.

We stepped inside and took off our dirty shoes and washed our hands in the kitchen sink. My dad rolled up his sleeves and washed his arms past his wrists like a doctor. I mimicked my father’s movements, scrubbing carefully, as though I had worked as hard as he, hoping some day I would.

This is Alden Eagle’s first published work. He lives in New Orleans, LA. MOUNT HOPE

Christopher Hennessy

IF RECRIMINATIONS 1 Do you think that if Rosey B. had noticed your song request—Toto’s “Rosanna”— that you could have made out your future in the punch bowl’s quavering ruby ripples?

Rosanna, Rosanna, I didn’t know you were looking for more than I could ever be.

2 Do you think, had the world been bigger than a country block, and you more (or less) aged than the Cass River’s mudaged carp, if the seasons hadn’t overtaken the local news and rumors and lawn care,

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3 that you would have made that promise to yourself in a place named Pigeon, Michigan, amid quiet snowfall, the smell of diesel and sweat rising like a team of horses stamping at the frosted black as you walked to the yellow bus, sucking in the cold-as-metal air?

4 Do you think that if you hadn’t hidden in plain sight on the playground, the boys on the blacktop who doffed their shirts at recess (hot brown backs in the sun) would have let you in on their dirty joke, taught your armpit how to fart, or later demanded out behind the bus garage that you ‘touch it’?

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5 Do you think B.J. would see your body tense, then vibrate (attuned to shame) as Duckie sissed, This is a really volcanic ensemble you’re wearing, it’s really marvelous—B.J. in his underwear, you—Jesus!—still in PJs, tipping your cup of Faygo Redpop onto the carpet like a sudden bleed?

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Do you think that if a summer storm thundered in from nowhere, stranding you in the little red barn where Dad keeps his musky bags of mulch, where the rain soaks a neighbor boy’s t-shirt through, every curve slicked and sticking skin to fabric, you could still find space for a breath? find and hold tight the dark seconds breaking angrily across the sky?

Christopher Hennessy

YELLOW for my sister The boy who smokes walks the aisle of the bus whacking the cotton hats off the runts’ heads.

When he sees you, he calls out Lisa, pizza, pepperoni pizza! Chinese, Chinese, where they all eat doggies.

That was the day we learned about Alaska and the Inuit.

The whale blubber, the dog sleds, the snow shoes.

The ice floes adrift with old women on them.

Your cheek is like the thumb-bruised petal of a slighted flower. Eyes black as the anise candies we get after supper.

Tonight I steal a fork, hide it in my bag.

Tomorrow, calm in class, I’ll pluck its tines.

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Christopher Hennessy

ANAPHORA Carry me away to where the hen house is row after row of sleepy eyes that bite deep into the chromosomes, our fungible blood.

Carry me back to you, like the brown egg cupped in your girl-child’s hand. Slip on the rotten corn husks spilling from the silo and your palms will close, will break me open. Carry me back to the morning cry of the sun’s immaculate agony, when I broke you open.

Carry me anyway! Past the vines jeweled with purple grapes, the spigot, the dinner bell, the bedbugs warming the attic. Carry me (12)

to bed—where a young mother’s vagina swells like a great, giving eye; where a wishbone dries on the windowsill, a chalk beginning to crust its joint; where the miotic feint of a mitosis lost — deep inside anneals me to your love, this history.

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Christopher Hennessy

THE BLESSING Neither of us knew, but I was as cruel as his April ritual of trapping toads, crawdads, snapping turtles, easy quarry, then duct taping each alive and wriggling to M-83, the highway sucked clean and black by sheets of white rain.

Neither of us knew, being criminals, why this arcane fetish, why the want of squash and the taste for gush of what’s inside, turned out.

Could it be it was too simple to refuse to turn away from his lean torso as passing cars ripped apart his helpless targets?

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What followed was a blessing, watching as he dipped his naked body into the deep, rain-filled ditch—white underwear hanging like a torn flag from the broken, hung limb of an oak.

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Christopher Hennessy

GHOST BOY for my father You say wild dogs wailed and snarled each time the Crick sisters left home to skulk about the market for salt and butter sticks, all they could afford to sauté what folks assumed they hunted for in woods where dogs wouldn’t go— slick morels and stalks of asparagus.

One squat and wrinkled, the other rickety in height, they smoked black pipes that clicked against their teeth.

No one knew why they impaled the ancient hickory standing guard out front with dozens of rusted ten-penny spikes, driven so poorly they arced like the fingernails of crones.

You whisper when you recount the oneiric night you crept along the house’s edge as a kid, peeking through the grime-caulked windows, hoping for proof they were witches, or worse.

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But always you stop the story there. What did you see?

I’m left imagining a grim-faced child pressing the ghost of his palms against the glass, a boy who sees the rumor of his future in the black glass. No old hands will hold him.

No deviance mothers him down. This house is no cage, but a life.

Christopher Hennessy’s debut collection of poems, Love-In-Idleness (Brooklyn Arts Press), appeared in 2011. He is also the author of Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets (University of Michigan Press).

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A few months ago my wife, Erin, made some homemade hummus and our daughter Josephine wanted some. When she saw the hummus she reared back in astonishment. “What is that?” she cried.

“That’s paprika,” Erin said. “It’s a spice.”

Josie, age four, immediately began shrieking: “No! No babrika!”

“Okay,” Erin said. “We’ll give you some that doesn’t have paprika.”

Which, of course – and if you are or have been the parent of a four-year-old, I’m telling you something you already know – wasn’t good enough. No, Josie wanted the paprika removed from the hummus altogether. Then she wanted all the paprika on the earth destroyed (immediately) and she wanted the capacity for further production of paprika disabled, and she wanted visible proof of same. Because we are basically stupid and overindulgent parents who want more than anything to stuff our pie holes in peace, Erin removed the entire top layer of paprika from the hummus and placed it in my mouth.

Five minutes went by.

“Where’s the babrika?” Josie wanted to know. “Where does it come from? I want to see the babrika!” And there ensued an evening devoted to the inexhaustible mysteries of paprika, which I will now, mercifully, spare you.

My point is simple: children are obsessive by nature. Their minds are constantly snagging on potent fears and desires. Part of the reason small children are such voracious readers – aside from the fact that they cannot yet drink – is because they are capable of focusing their attention with such vehemence. So, at the same time I was staring at my daughter with a familiar sense of sort of hopeless entreaty, I was also thinking (rather proudly) that she was taking an essential literary posture. Because the essential feature of obsession is sustained focus – what Saul Bellow calls the “arrest of attention in the midst of distraction” – and this, in turn, is what makes the consumption of art, literary art in particular, possible and pleasurable.

If, in fact, we are becoming an increasingly vulgar and reckless species, as the internets have been reporting lately, the reason is not because we have evolved into unfeeling screen zombies, but because we have surrendered to distraction, surrendered our capacity for sustained attention and the moral imagination that such attention bequeaths. Another way of putting it would be that we’ve lost the perfectly childish conception of reading as a form of prayer. * Obsessive prose doesn’t mean writing about the things you love. That’s the sort of self-infatuated approach that leads to “inspirational memoirs.” I don’t know about you, but when I see the phrase “inspirational memoir” – this is true of “inspirational” anything, I guess – I run howling in the other direction. (I apologize, obviously, to any of you who are writing inspirational memoirs.)

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When I use the term “obsession,” I’m talking about a feeling state that has clear negative associations: a sense of being stuck, of being unable to move on, evolve, get over it already, he’s just not that into you, and so forth. Obsession combines passion with self-destruction. It is one of the few verbs that manage to connote an internal conflict. When I call a text “obsessive,” I mean either that its manner of composition (its narrative style) is obsessive or that its plot turns on an obsession. As we’ll see, these two often travel together.

Let’s proceed from the notion that all readers enter a text with two instinctual questions: 1. Who do I care about?

2. What do they care about?

The sooner these questions are answered, the happier the reader will be. The more inflamed the protagonist’s cares are, the deeper that gratification will run. We want from our books radical subjectivity.

We want feelings that are unstoppable and crazed and shameless precisely because – as we go about the business of responsible living, being dutiful friends and lovers and employees and parents – we are depriving ourselves of these feelings almost constantly. In short, we want obsession: the utter domination of one’s thoughts and feelings by a persistent desire, hopefully to calamitous results. That’s how effing sick we are.

Now then: most of the examples I’ll cite are drawn from prose. This is not because I have anything against poets. On the contrary, I worship poets for the simple reason that they will never make any money.

They are pure and not a little sexy. And for the record, I would classify “Song of Myself ” or “Howl” as openly, even joyously, obsessive texts, and we can add Homer to that list, as the Iliad proceeds directly from Achilles’ obsessive wrath.

I’m also going to give short shrift to dramaturgy, though much of Shakespeare springs from obsessive feeling, whether it’s jealousy (Othello), ambition (MacBeth), or hormonal passions (Romeo & Juliet).

Eugene O’Neil is a virtual factory of family obsession, Willy Loman is brought low by his obsession with the heroic, even Beckett’s most famous play arises from an obsession with the arrival of Godot, without which the play becomes a minor off-Broadway production entitled “Estragon and Vladimir’s Big Fat Gay Wedding.” * But my central concern is prose and so I’ll start at or near the beginning, with Don Quixote, whose action is generated by Alonso Quixano’s obsession with books about chivalry, and his eventual conviction that it is his calling to impose chivalric order on the world around him via the knight errant Don Quixote.

Quixote is deluded, and Cervantes uses his madness to great comic effect. But he also makes it perfectly clear that Quixano’s alter ego is what keeps him alive. The moment he returns to sanity, at the end of book

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two, he dies – as does the narrative.

Cervantes is perhaps the first novelist to present obsession as a necessary engine of literary enterprise. But you can go ahead and name a classic. Chances are, there’s a lucrative obsession driving the action. Subtract Ahab’s epic grudge from Moby-Dick and you’ve got whale blubber, basically. Virtually every character in Crime and Punishment is propelled by private obsessions, and Lolita, of course, is little more than an episode of To Catch a Predator without Humbert Humbert’s exquisitely mordant (and obsessed) voice.

Monsieur Humbert is a fine example of what we might call the hypo-manic wing of obsessional literature. But it’s important to make temperamental distinctions. There are plenty of novels starring repressed heroes who are every bit as besieged by their desires. Consider Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. His narrator, the English butler Stevens, is deeply in love with his ex-colleague Miss Kenton. We come to discover, gradually, fitfully, that she once felt the same way, but that neither dared acknowledge their love or act upon it. The novel is about the obsessive nature of regret. The same can be said of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, whose naïve and hapless narrator John Dowell can’t seem to stop himself from telling us about the sordid demise of his marriage and life.

In fact, much of what drives us through a particular novel or story, as readers, is the unconscious but powerful sense that the narrator can’t stop him or herself from telling us the whole sordid mess. If the narrator can stop, why bother? Aren’t we turning to literature – to all art, frankly – in an effort to experience the extreme feeling states of which that responsible and sane life I mentioned earlier so dependably deprives us?

This quality is immediately recognizable in our favorite books: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and … all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Well, you know the rest. Here’s one you may not have heard yet, drawn from the spectacular novel The Dart League King by Keith Morris. Meet Vince Thompson: Anyway, the thing to do while waiting for Russell Harmon to reappear was a little fucking reconnaissance, take stock of the situation and formulate a plan, because how did he figure he was going to shoot Russell Harmon anyway on Thursday night at the 321, what with all the stupid assholes hanging around, let’s see, you had the open mike guy who he could hear at the front of the bar going testing, testing, fucking testing and Bill the goddamn bartender and the eight or ten yuppies he’d passed up front on his way in, all real estate agents or builders most likely like practically every other person or so in the whole goddamn town was now, if he was to taking his fucking Beretta out on the street at noon

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on any weekday and start taking potshots with his fucking eyes closed he’d hit a goddamn real estate agent within 7.5 seconds, everyone in town, every lame-brain jerk-ass he’d known for half his life getting their fucking real estate license for money, money, money, Come building your goddamn mansion on the lake! Piss the whole town to hell, who cares! so that even if he did find a way to shoot Russell Harmon’s ass and get away with it he’d have to drive fucking fifteen miles out of town just to find a decent place to dump his fat ass, whereas twenty years ago he could have practically just dragged his carcass out the back door and dumped it in the goddamn weeds next to Sand Creek and nobody would have found his fucking corpse till Christmas, and when you actually thought about it, it was him, Vince fucking Thompson, who should have been the fucking real estate agent anyway, it was him who knew every goddamn square inch of this town, but oh, they’d say, you’ve gotta get your goddamn license, like you need a fucking license to show someone around a goddamn house, here’s the fancy fucking kitchen, here’s the goddamn toilet where you piss, you rich California motherfuckers, and oh you’ve gotta cut your hair, Vince, you’ve gotta shave more regular and quit carrying a gun around and scaring the shit out of people and acting anti-social and shit, and oh by the way what about that felony conviction and oh by the way would you please piss in this jar. Assholes.

I might as well admit I’m in love with Vince Thompson. I’m in love with Vince Thompson for the simple reason that he is incapable of prevarication. This is a central dividend of the obsessive hero: one way or another, they confess to everything. Vince Thompson and his ilk are not only brimming with truths about the world around them, they are also telling the story of the world inside themselves, their grievances and disappointments and hopes. And because we would all like to be that fast and loose and brave with the truth we feel a bottomless gratitude in finally encountering a person immune from the various forms of charm marketing that afflict most of us, the evasions and the politesse, the ongoing denial of our own most abject feelings.

Vince is obviously not just some gun nut awaiting his Cops cameo. He’s a tremendously intelligent guy whose ambitions have been thwarted, largely by his own self, and he knows this and hates himself for it and can’t stop dreaming of escape and, at the same time, he knows he’ll never escape. This is the story he returns to, over and over. He is helpless to do otherwise.

This reminds me, for whatever reason, of a story about Saul Bellow. Early in his career, he was living over in Paris as an expat. He had produced two serious but depressing novels and was at work on a third. One sunny morning, heading to his studio, he noticed the water released from the municipal hydrants and tracing the curbs in iridescent currents. It was, he recalled, “just the sort of thing that makes us loonies cheerful.” He resolved, then and there, to break from his depressing third novel and allow himself as much freedom of movement as that water. The result was The Adventures of Augie March, whose delirious prose marked the liberation of Saul Bellow from the prison of respectability. Here, at last, the full range of his

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personality reached the page, the wise profane voices he had grown up listening to, the sordid human dealings, and infectious rhythms of the four languages spoken in his home. Another way of looking at it would be that he surrendered to the obsessive. Here he is at the opening of Henderson the Rain King:

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What made me take this trip to Africa? There is no quick explanation. Things got worse and worse and worse and pretty soon they were too complicated.

When I think of my condition at the age of fifty-five when I bought the ticket, all is grief. The facts begin to crowd me and soon I get a pressure in the chest. A disorderly rush begins -- my parents, my wife, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my habits, my money, my musical lessons, my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul! I have to cry, “No, no, get back, curse you, let me alone!” But how can they let me alone? They belong to me. They are mine. And they pile into me from all sides. It turns to chaos. * You will have noticed by now that one of the immense benefits of an obsessive narrator is the intimacy established with the reader. This disorderly rush of thought and feeling and detail creates tremendous vitality. But it carries several risks. The first is quite basic. Sentences like the ones Bellow and Morris traffic in are deceptively hard to write. They are intended as transcriptions of actual thought, which is a dense and associative process, not to mention contradictory. In the wrong hands, they can become hopelessly mangled. Or worse, they begin to reflect the author’s infatuations with language, rather than the character’s preoccupations. The result is a certain strain of prose I tend to think of as hysterical lyricism.

This is the sort of book in which the author seems to share the narrator’s high opinion of him or herself.

There’s no subtext. Or rather, the subtext is: aren’t I clever?

The other risk is technical in nature and impossible to avoid: an obsessive text is, by its very nature, hopelessly biased, and this bias comes at the cost of perspective. We are left without an objective, or reliable narrator, to guide us.

This, I suspect, is why so many novels about obsessives are written by secondary characters, who are both capable of sympathizing with the afflicted, and offering the impartial distance the obsessive cannot.

Nick Carraway is the quintessential example. Fitzgerald could have tried to channel Gatsby for 120 pages, but the whole point of Gatsby is that he’s a man of action, not reflection. Fitzgerald required a sensibility closer to his own. Likewise, Melville needed Ishmael to land Ahab, Conrad needed Marlow to deliver us Kurtz, Penn Warren needed Jack Burden to capture Willie Stark, and so on. The narrators of these books are hardly objective. They are all deeply invested in the fate of the men they describe, who represent and expose crucial aspects of themselves. But they offer some measure of latitude.

The beauty of an obsessive narrative stance, is that the author is able to generate incredible tension

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simply by allowing his or her hero to talk too much. When we listen to a Vince Thompson or a Stevens or a Holden or a Humbert we’re essentially hearing two stories at once: the one they think they’re telling us, and the one they’re really telling us. It’s the discrepancy between the two that keeps us turning pages.

Will Stevens admit to his love? Will Humbert recognize his sin? Let me add, unnecessarily, that we are all ultimately unreliable narrators. We are familiar with this paradigm because we are all telling those same two stories – the one about who we want to believe we are, and the one about who we know ourselves to be.

Nearly all the humiliating events in our lives (and, for that matter, the good prose) can be said to arise from the collision of these two stories. With an obsessive narrator, the author’s role is not to protect or malign the accused. The goal is simply to transcribe those outbursts that offer us the greatest insight into our hero’s psyche. This needn’t be a litany of family secrets and primal scenes. In fact, in The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker is able to wring considerable pathos from the obsessive musings of his hero over such matters as straws and shoelaces.

The same dynamics prevail with short stories. Consider the catalyst of Carver’s famous “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”: a cardiologist who refuses to be dissuaded from discussing the brutal emotional risks that love engenders. Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation” is told by a war veteran who can’t rid himself of the memory of having killed two prisoners who became his friends.

Though the voice is quiet and measured, it aims steadily at the full revelation of this episode, which the narrator has obsessed over for years. The lesson is simple. Your job, especially in the realm of short fiction, is to find those moments that your protagonists cannot forget, where everything changed. If you want to offer your reader “a slice of life” buy them a web cam.

I’m a huge fan of the story writer George Saunders, for the simple reason that he consistently nails the neurotic cogitation of his heroes, men and women who are openly obsessed with their own desires and failures. Here’s the opening of “The Barber’s Unhappiness”:

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Mornings the barber left his stylists inside and sat out front of his shop, drinking coffee and ogling every woman in sight. He ogled old women and pregnant women and women whose photographs were passing on the sides of the buses and, this morning, a woman with close-cropped black hair and tear-stained cheeks, who wouldn’t be half bad if she’d just make an effort, clean up her face a little and invest in some decent clothes, some white tights and a short skirt maybe, knee boots and a cowboy hat and a cigarillo, say, and he pictured her kneeling on a crude Mexican sofa in a little mud hut, daring him to take her, and soon they’d screwed their way into some sort of bean field while gaucho guys played soft guitars, although actually he’d better put the gaucho guys behind some trees or a rock wall so they wouldn’t get all hot and bothered from watching the screwing and swoop down and stab him and have their way with Miss Hacienda as he bled to death, and, come to think of it, forget the gauchos altogether, he’d just put some soft guitars on the stereo in the hut and MOUNT HOPE

leave the door open, although actually what was a stereo doing in a Mexican hut? Were there outlets? Plus how could he meet her? He could compliment her hair, then ask her out for coffee. He could say that, as a hair-care professional, he knew a little about hair, and boy did she ever have great hair, and by the way did she like coffee? Except they always said no. Lately no no no was all he got. Plus he had zero access to a bean field or mud hut. They could do it in his yard, but it wouldn’t be the same, because Jeepers had basically made of it a museum of poop, plus Ma would call 911 at the first hint of a sexy moan.

In the space of a single paragraph, Saunders establishes the Barber’s monstrous loneliness, his sexual frustration, his false bravado, his self-doubt, his elaborate fantasy life, the way reality keeps intruding on those fantasies, which in turn suggests an internal conflict about pleasure, and finally the source of that conflict, and the story’s antagonist, Ma. * I’ve talked a lot about fiction, but I want to touch on non-fiction as well. As an appetizer, I offer you Calvin Trillin. This is the opening line of the essay “The Frying Game” from his delightful book, Feeding a Yen: No, I do not believe it’s fair to say that for the past 15 years I’ve thought of nothing but the fried fish I once ate on Baxters Road. That statement would be inaccurate even if you expanded it to include the chicken, also fried, that I ate on Baxters Road at around the same time.

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Note how quickly – within one sentence, actually – he manages to answer those two questions: Whom do we care about? What do they care about? This one little sentence also manages to convey a good deal about his character: that he’s aware of his obsession, mildly ashamed of it, but also attractively helpless in the face of it.

Most of the opening sentences in Feeding a Yen include mention of the food in question, along with the strong implication that Trillin would sell one or more of his children to acquire a snack-sized portion.

He doesn’t clear his throat. He doesn’t preambleulate, a verb I just invented. He writes into his obsessions, not around them.

Of course, Trillin has the advantage of writing about food. I’ll move on now to more introspective terrain. Hopefully, you have all read Joan Didion’s essay, “Goodbye to All That.” Hopefully, you have all read it a dozen times. Being somewhat obsessive, I’ve read it 513 times. Here’s how she opens: It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the MOUNT HOPE

moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again…

Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?

The first thing to notice – and this is triggered even by the title – is that this essay is written in the retrospective voice. It’s clear Didion is looking back on her younger self from a distance that grants her perspective. She’s writing about her years in New York, but it’s more accurate to say that she’s writing about her obsession with New York, and her own youth.

You can safely assume that if you are consciously obsessed with something right now, you are going to have trouble writing about it well. Why? Because its full significance has not yet become clear to you, because you yourself, as you currently exist, are not yet clear to you. Really, you have no clue about yourself. I certainly don’t.

Anyway, I could say lots about Didion’s style and how delicious it is and how I basically want to be Joan Didion, though younger and happier. But I’ll limit myself to a couple of observations. The first is to note that she immediately takes us into scene. She concretizes who she was when she came to New York by telling a story. She recognizes the essential truth that readers want most of all – more than smart-sounding abstractions and clever observations – stories. Didion’s essay is basically an elegant compendium of moments from her New York years, the moments that she has been unable to forget.

I am constantly imploring my students – when I have students and when they bother to listen to me – to pay special attention to those moments you can’t forget. If an episode snags in your consciousness, chances are it bears investigation. The reason for this is quite simple: the path to the truth runs through

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shame. Any of you writing autobiographical work would be well to write this down above your own computers, though not necessarily in your own blood.

I am not suggesting here that you’re not “allowed” to write about your current obsessions. You’re allowed to write about whatsoever you please. I am suggesting that you’ll do best if you follow the example of someone like Stephen Elliot, whose book The Adderall Diaries is riveting precisely because he uses his current obsessions as a means of investigating the ancient ones that still haunt him. * Let’s move on to a very different sort of obsessive text. It’s from one of my favorite books in the world, The Emperor, by the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. His subject is the emperor Haile Selassie, who ruled Ethiopia from 1930 until 1974. The story is told by his servants and courtiers.

I was His Most Virtuous Highness’s pillow bearer for twenty-six years. I accompanied His Majesty on travels all around the world, and to tell the truth—I say it with pride—His Majesty could not go anywhere without me ... I had mastered the special protocol of this specialty, and even possessed an extremely useful, expert knowledge: the height of various thrones. This allowed me quickly to choose a pillow of just the right size, so that a shocking ill fit, allowing a gap to appear between the pillow and the Emperor’s shoes, would not occur. In my storeroom I had fifty-two pillows of various sizes, thicknesses, materials, and colors. I personally monitored their storage, constantly, so that flea—the plague of our country—would not breed there, since the consequences of any such oversight could lead to a very unpleasant scandal.

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One learns everything there is to know about the obsessive nature of absolute of power from the fragile vanity of this pillow bearer, his courtly and abject devotion to the absurd. In the realm of selfdeception, his voice rivals anything Ford Madox Ford ever devised.

The Emperor reminds us that the narrator of an obsessive text needn’t be the hero of his or her own story. In this case, Kapuscinski serves as a kind of curator. His decision to handle the material with rigorous objectivity – to quote rather than describing – brings us closer to the obsessive obedience, the dignified desperation, of the voices themselves.

I wanted to include Kapuscinski to demonstrate that it is possible, after all, to craft obsessive reportage. Much of the so-called New Journalism is energized by radical subjectivity. Hunter S. Thompson is up to the same business, after all, in Hell’s Angels, which proceeds directly from his obsession with the physical and emotional experience of riding a motorcycle, and being an outlaw. Or, in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, with the mechanics of corruption in our political theater. The same holds true, by the way, for shorter pieces, for example the famous Gay Talese piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which abandons MOUNT HOPE

the standard famous celebrity profile for the story of the reporter’s obsessive quest to get at Sinatra. David Foster Wallace brought the eye of an obsessive to most everything he reported on, from John McCain’s 2000 campaign to pornography.

I’ll close by citing one of the most insightful non-fiction books I’ve ever read, Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, which, somewhat typically, was turned into an idiotic romantic comedy by Hollywood. This danger, it seems to me, is always lurking when you write something genuinely wise.

Here’s how it opens: It’s in there all the time, looking for a way out.

I wake up around ten, make two cups of tea, take them into the bedroom, place one on each side of the bed.

We both sip thoughtfully. So soon after waking there are long, dream-filled gaps between the occasional remark – about the rain outside, about last night, about smoking in the bedroom when I have agreed not to. She asks what I’m doing this week, and I think: (1) I’m seeing Matthew on Wednesday. (2) Matthew’s still got my Champions video. (3) [Remembering that Matthew, a purely nominal Arsenal fan, has not been to Highbury for a couple of years, and so has had no opportunity to watch the more recent recruits in the flesh] I wonder what he thought of Anders Limpar.

And in three easy stages, within fifteen, twenty minutes of waking, I’m on my way. I see Limpar running at Gillespie, swaying to his right, going down: PENALTY! DIXON SCORES! 2-0!...

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There are lots of reasons I love Fever Pitch, but the main one is that it manages to make me care passionately about a soccer team that I’d never even heard of before I picked up the book. Because Hornby answers those two basic questions – who do we care about, what do they care about? – and because he does this so quickly and with so much humility and humor and unremitting British charm, I’ll basically follow him to the ends of the earth.

But Hornby is doing a lot more than waving an Arsenal banner with this book. In recounting his obsession with the club he’s telling a much larger story, of his own childhood, his loneliness, his search for a connection with his father, and the world of men at large. This is how it works with obsessions. They develop to satisfy spiritual needs, not just to fill our minds and hearts with junk. There is no such thing as a meaningless obsession, in other words, because obsession itself is the deepest form of human meaning. To repeat: “It’s all in there waiting to get out.”

Later, he adds this observation: None of this is thought, in the proper sense of the word. There is no analysis, or self-awareness, or mental rigour going on at all, because obsessives are denied any kind of perspective on their own passion. This, in a sense, is

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what defines an obsessive (and serves to explain why so few of them recognize themselves as such….)

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I appreciate especially that Hornby suggests the limits of obsessive thought, and the implied dangers of writing about your obsessions. So please bear this in mind before you rush to your keyboard to write your inspirational memoir God Just Friended Me: How My Hidden Obsession with Facebook Brought Me to the Brink of Suicide and Brought Me Back. To write about your own obsession will require that you step back from the one subject against which you most ardently press yourself.

Having said all this, I need to emphasize that a big part of writing – the most exciting part, actually – resides in the mystery of the act, the unexpected directions your artistic unconscious will take you. This is why writing directly about your obsessions often invites solipsism. When we speak about a book being solipsistic – this is particularly true of memoir – what we’re suggesting is our sense that the author is settling for self-regard over self-examination, is navel-gazing rather than peering into dark regions of the heart.

To be clear: your own obsessions should lead you in directions you weren’t expecting, and reveal things about you don’t want revealed. It’s not about simply telling us how much you love David Hasselhoff, or making detailed lists. Anyone can do that – on Facebook, for instance.

I truly believe that anyone who tells honest stories about those things which matter to them most deeply – whether by means of fiction or non-fiction – who does so in a genuine effort to reveal world inside and around them, will find an audience. At the very least they will feel unburdened of the glorious secret of who they really are.

Steve Almond is a published author of various collections of short stories, nonfiction, and essays, including My Life in Heavy Metal, The Evil B.B. Chow, and Candyfreak. Almond is also the co-author of the novel Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott). Steve lives in the Boston area with his wife and two children.

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MOUNT HOPE

Arlene Mandell

AMERICAN HISTORY The air, scented with lilac, is blowing through an inch of open window. Betsy Ross is sewing stars and stripes. Mr. Halperin is scanning the room with his keen blue eyes. I hold his gaze, knowing if I glance away, he’ll call on me.

The breeze tickles the hair at the nape of my neck like a lover’s lips. I like that idea, though I haven’t had a going-all-the-way lover yet. Not that boyfriend “B” wouldn’t be delighted to volunteer. What I don’t know now and won’t know for another 49 years, is that the tall, shy boy in the last row, let’s call him “L,” is in love with me and has been since we were both 14.

He’ll confess to my best friend after we’re both married for the second time and are in our sixties – our sixties! He’ll say he used to watch me walk down the hall, my hips swaying and my ponytail swinging from side to side. But today, feeling restless, wanting something. . . .

The bell rings. There’ll be a quiz tomorrow. George Washington had wooden teeth. All Betsy Ross did was sew. I scoop up my books and drift out the door.

“L” is waiting for me in the hall. He asks if I want to study with him.

“No,” I say with what I hope is a sweet smile. I walk away, oblivious to the love shining behind his smudged, horn-rimmed glasses.

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Arlene L. Mandell, a retired English professor, has published more than 500 poems, essays and short stories. She still keeps in touch with “L.” MOUNT HOPE

LEAH CATANIA: I KNOW YOU’D MENTIONED TALKING ABOUT WRITING BETWEEN DIFFERENT FORMS— LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ: You know, a lot of writers think nowadays, “I’m a writer of novels, or a writer

of stories or poetry,” and they don’t want to venture into anything else. It’s like a specialization— you know, as among doctors or lawyers—but I’ve always thought if you were a writer, you could write anything.

All the 19th century writers that I was brought up on were men, or women, of letters and they just wrote.

They would write in various forms. Sometimes they were best in one or another. I think my strong point is fiction, but I enjoy writing in all genres. Sometimes I get an idea that’s not really a story. I think, “Well, how would this idea take shape?” And sometimes it doesn’t want to be a story; it wants to be an essay, my mind wandering on one topic or another. Or sometimes it’s very, very small and it comes in the form of an image and then it wants to be a poem. So I just kind of follow my instinct on that. More often what I write turns out to be fiction. I started writing very young and I didn’t know about genres or what they were and I just wrote everything. I’m still that way. I don’t like to think in terms of strict genres. Even now that the memoir has become so popular, and some memoirs are a little-bit made up –not mine, but some are – the line between fiction and nonfiction is growing blurry.

LC: YOU MENTION SOMETHING IN THE INTRODUCTION— IT’S ACTUALLY QUOTED ON THE BACK OF THE BOOK—THAT I THOUGHT WAS REALLY INTERESTING. “A WRITER WRITES ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING, JUST AS A COMPOSER COMPOSES ANYTHING, NOT ONLY SONATAS OR ONLY NOCTURNES, OR ONLY SYMPHONIES.”

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LSS: Yes, that’s exactly right. Very good, I’m glad you’ve caught that. You don’t have to specialize in one

(well, maybe some people specialize in one), because the form is determined by the idea or the motif. It takes shape; it finds its own form. If you’re composing, sometimes it turns out that it’s a symphony. It’s not a little nocturne. And if you’re writing a symphony, you’re writing for an entire orchestra. That might be comparable to writing a novel, where you have many voices and many events, whereas a sonata may be more like a short story. These are pretty rough analogies, but I think it’s the same. Or the same with visual artists.

You have visual artists, Matisse for example, who does paintings and drawings and sculptures and prints. I feel writing is really the same way.

LC: YOU HAD A COUPLE OF WHAT LOOKED LIKE VERY TYPICAL POEMS WITH THE SHORT LINES AND VERY REGULAR STANZAS, AND THEN YOU HAD A COUPLE THAT WERE ALMOST AS IF THEY COULD HAVE BEEN SHORT STORIES THAT I REALLY LIKED. ONE OF THEM WAS “IN SOLITARY.” IT ALMOST READ LIKE A SHORT STORY. LSS: Yes, it’s a long poem with long lines. Some people say my poems are kind of prose-y, like, “Why aren’t

they prose?” But I think they’re poems. I write them that way and I love to play with the idea. With “In MOUNT HOPE

Solitary,” I had a long thing to say and there were a lot of ramifications, whereas there are some very, very short poems. There’s one poem called “Doctor Untangle.” That was just an idea, it didn’t really warrant more than those few short lines. I have a new book of poems called See You in the Dark and that line is also from one of the poems. Some of them are formal, they even rhyme and have a particular rhyme scheme, and some are very free.

LC: I REALLY IDENTIFIED WITH A LOT OF THE THINGS YOU SAID IN RUINED BY READING. I GUESS IT WAS NICE TO HEAR THAT AN ESTABLISHED WRITER DOESN’T NECESSARILY REMEMBER HALF THE THINGS THAT SHE’S READ. LSS: I read all the time. Every night, whenever I get done with whatever I have to do, I just sit down and

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read for a couple of hours. It’s like an addiction. It almost doesn’t matter what I’m reading, I just have to sit there and read. Of course, partly what I’m reading matters, but it’s just the act, the act of sitting there with a book and just being quiet and letting it kind of seep into me. I used to be bothered by the fact that I didn’t remember a lot of what I read, but it happens. I have to accept it; I have no choice. I don’t want to take notes. I don’t want to spoil the process. It’s an act you really do for the moment. You’re in the moment and for those moments while I’m reading I’m totally absorbed and I’m totally with the text and I know I understand. I know it; I remember it, from moment to moment. And then I finish the book and a couple of days later… It’s not that I forget it totally, but what I come away with is more the feel of the book, the style or sometimes a particular character. I don’t even always remember the plot, which was very absorbing.

While you’re reading, you’re kept going by plot. But later it’s more the sense of the book. I mentioned in Ruined by Reading, I think it was a little funny story, how in Billy Budd, the Melville novella, there’s this conflict between the rule of law and personal understanding and mercy. A young man has killed somebody and he’s supposed to be hung, but he really didn’t know what he was doing. He was provoked and it wasn’t intentional. He’s basically such a good person and there’s a conflict between the moral issue - he should certainly not be convicted - and the rule of law, obeying the strict rules. I understand all that very, very well.

But in the end, I actually forgot he committed a murder. My daughter had to remind me. It’s not at all a small deed, but it was the basic theme of the book, the sense of the book, that remains with me.

LC: DO

YOU FIND WHEN YOU GO BACK AND RE-READ BOOKS THAT YOU THINK YOU REMEMBER HOW THEY WENT

BECAUSE OF THE FEEL YOU GOT FROM THEM, AND THEN IT TURNS OUT THAT THE PLOT DIDN’T ACTUALLY GO THAT WAY?

LSS: I think some things stay with me, buried, I wouldn’t say unconsciously, but somehow it’s all there and

if somebody reminds me, “Remember when her sister did this or that?” It’s “Oh yes, yes I remember that.”

But I think it all seeps into me somehow. I think it shapes you as a person, even if you don’t remember MOUNT HOPE

the details. With each thing you read, you grow. You see another point of view and you see another way of looking at life. I became a writer through reading. I read when I was young and I loved reading as a kid. I wanted to write when I realized that actual people wrote these stories. I said, “Oh, I can do that too,” and I was inspired to do my own. But even people who don’t write—there are lots of readers who don’t write—it forms them. It makes you who you are; it makes you bigger and more knowledgeable about the world.

LC: I AGREE WITH THAT COMPLETELY. SOMETIMES I SAY SOMETHING AND SOMEONE WILL ASK, “HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT?” AND I WILL JUST KNOW IT FROM SOMEWHERE, BUT NOT BE ABLE TO REMEMBER WHERE. THE ONLY ANSWER I CAN COME UP WITH IS “I READ IT SOMEWHERE.” LSS: Exactly. I read mostly fiction. I read some non-fiction, but I’ve realized that so much of what I

know about the world I get from fiction, whereas other people know a lot of facts from reading history or sociology. For example, last year I had the flu and I was home for a couple of weeks, and I re-read War and Peace. That’s what I know about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. I know it from there. I know a lot of British history from reading Shakespeare’s plays, although they may not be totally true to fact, but I trust Shakespeare. Lots of what I know comes from fiction. If you read novels about other countries, distant places that we don’t know very well, you can begin to understand the culture as well as, or maybe better than, you would if you had read, say, a history book.

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LC: WHAT WAS YOUR REASONING BEHIND WRITING THE MEMOIR? LSS: When I wrote it, it was 1995, I had just finished a novel. I was really feeling empty, as if I had nothing

more to write. It was twenty-five years ago and I’m still writing, but I didn’t know what to write next and I felt I didn’t know anything. I was written-out. And I thought, “Well, what do I know?” And I said, “One thing I know is reading.” So I just started writing about that. First it was published as an essay, called “True Confessions of a Reader.” I wrote this long essay and published it in a magazine, Salmagundi, and then I heard from an editor at Beacon Press, who happened to come across it. She liked it and she said, “What would you think about trying to turn this into a book?” So I thought, “Hmm, that’s an interesting idea.”

I put down everything I could think of that had to do with my personal reading history and reading in general. I just kept writing and writing and before I knew it, I had a book. It was really that editor who led me to it. It might have just remained an essay if she hadn’t urged me.

LC: I KNOW THAT YOU NEVER ACTUALLY STUDIED WRITING— LSS: I never went to a writing program. When I was in college, I took one or two writing courses. But

no, I never went to a writing program because when I was starting, there were hardly any. Now, they’re all MOUNT HOPE

over the place, but there was the Iowa Workshop—I didn’t even know about these things. I had little kids, I worked, I did various editorial and other jobs. I worked on Fair Housing during the Civil Rights movement.

It never occurred to me to go to a writing program. I just thought I had read and read and read, and now I’m going to write.

LC: DO YOU FIND THAT WHEN YOU GO BACK AND READ, YOU END UP THINKING ABOUT THE MECHANICS BEHIND THE WRITER’S THOUGHT PROCESS SOMETIMES? LSS: Yes. Sometimes I still read like a kid, just “Oh, this is fun,” or “this is interesting.” But very often,

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especially when I read contemporary writers, and younger writers, I like to see what they are doing. How are they doing this? But I don’t think of it in terms of hi-tech. I teach at Bennington, an MFA writing program.

I know my students throw around fancy language and terms to describe the writing process and I generally do it in a much more simple way. How is this being done? Why is this so effective? I just read a book by a young writer, Zachary Mason, who re-told stories of the Odyssey, Odysseus’ return from the war in Troy.

It’s called The Lost Books of the Odyssey. I often think I could try that, or I could try that, or that’s a good technique. I certainly do that. I don’t always end up trying it. I translated from Italian a wonderful writer called Natalia Ginzburg. She died about ten or so years ago. I just loved her work. It was very, very simple.

It was very profound, but it was written with very simple language. I later read that she was a translator of Proust, the French writer. Proust is known for his long, involved, complicated sentences that could go on forever, pages. She said that’s what she wanted, to write like and when she sat down, everything came out thin, spare as a bone, very short sentences, very simple language. So even if you think you want to do one thing, you are who you are as a writer. Even if I want to be innovative or do something that I see somewhere else, sometimes when I sit down, it’s just me all over again. I think you can’t change your sensibility or your use of language, but you can certainly learn and be aware that you’re one of many different sensibilities and many different ways of approaching a subject.

LC: I

REALLY LIKED IN THE

FAMILY WAY. I WAS INTIMIDATED WHEN I FIRST OPENED IT TO THE MAP YOU HAVE OF THE FAMILY LINES. I COULDN’T FIGURE IT OUT FOR THE LIFE OF ME, BUT AFTER THE FIRST CHAPTER, I WENT BACK AND LOOKED AT IT AND EVERYTHING MOSTLY MADE SENSE. I’LL BE HONEST WITH YOU, I WAS EXPECTING TO BE LOST THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE BOOK BECAUSE OF ALL THE DIFFERENT CONNECTIONS AND THEN THE WAYS IT KEPT SWITCHING TIME PERIODS, BUT

I WASN’T AT ALL.

LSS: That book was so much fun to write. I really did the family tree at the end. It was kind of a joke,

because there were these huge Russian novels that had family trees. But I did think maybe readers would have trouble figuring out who was related to whom. I don’t think it’s a difficult book at all. I really meant it MOUNT HOPE

as a comedy, kind of a satire. There are a lot of laughs, but with all that what I had in mind was a picture of the modern family. This book was written in the late Nineties, and it was just at the time when there had been so much divorce. I remember in the Seventies, everybody I knew got divorced. I didn’t, I’m still married, but everybody was divorcing. There would be stepparents and children, his, hers and theirs. Now we have gay couples marrying. I didn’t have that in the book - I mean I had gay couples in the book, but they weren’t marrying; it was illegal. But I was so interested in the new shape of family that I really wanted to make a total mix-up, not mix-up to confuse the reader, but total families intertwining, I just thought that would be fun and it would really give an exaggerated picture of the way the traditional nuclear family has transformed into what it is today.

LC: I THINK YOU DID THAT. IT WAS FUNNY. LSS: I really did enjoy it. As far as the complications, I actually had charts. I don’t usually have to do this for

a novel, but I made charts of who was doing what, especially in the building. There are a lot of things going on in the building, elevators breaking, the windows being washed. I live in a co-op, and I’ve always lived in New York apartment buildings, so I’m very aware of life in an apartment building and the daily routine of keeping the building going. So I had charts of what would be going on in the building and who would be affected by it. The main man, Roy, he keeps marrying people, he had babies with different women, so I did have to have charts to keep track of it all.

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LC: DO YOU STILL HAVE THOSE? LSS: Somewhere, I don’t know where. But I did it so the reader wouldn’t have to do it. I wanted it to be

very clear. Just as you said, I didn’t want the reader to be sitting there, scratching her head. So I made it clear for myself so I could make it clear for the reader.

MOUNT HOPE

J. Patrick Lewis

WEST LAFAYETTE Jack’s father owned a company that signed up one summer to wash every window on the campus of Purdue University.

An August evening, after twelve of us had been at it long past hope and horse sense, Jack and I squeegee into a dive called the Hanky Panky, the Cocky Locky, some idiot handle that passed with colors the half-wit test in West Lafayette. I tell Jack there is no way we can get a beer, not at nineteen, a full deck plus the jokers shy of experience. Saddling up on chewed-leather stools, we give the bartender our best hooded James Deans, which he has probably never seen before probably. What’ll it be, gents, he asks. Rolling Rock, says Jack.

Same here, I say, the slow twin. Sure, he says, if I can just take a lookie-loo at a driver’s nuisance.

So it had to come to this, as I knew it would, and I mumble to Jack, Let’s beat it. But oh no, Jackie’s so cool he whips out his baby ID, and what am I gonna do, I hand mine over like I’m turning state’s evidence. Mr. Bacardi takes his time. Checks us out, the licenses, us, the licenses, us, like a border guard in hostile territory, trained to induce knee-knocking fear in a triathlete. Well, ain’t you boys a sight, he says.

Happy birthday.

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J. Patrick Lewis’s first book of poems, Gulls Hold Up the Sky, was published in 2010 by Laughing Fire Press.

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Kate Coombs

CONNECTIONS My hairdresser and I talk about the weather.

We have nothing in common until we begin critiquing the Twilight movie.

Then how our voices rise and fall!

A woman on a plane to Chicago tells me the difference between the roll of the waves in Lake Michigan and the movement of waves in the Pacific.

I was born in yet another state, but my mother’s father was a sheep rancher in Wyoming, and my birthfather’s father was a sheep rancher in Montana.

When I move to Bountiful, Utah, my best friend moves to Cleveland.

She tells me how surreal it feels in a new place, like living a story.

I shiver inside, knowing it, too— how the trees are all wrong.

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And so we touch and surprise, like God reaching out from his leisurely cloud to shock Adam’s finger.

How alike we all are! How alike the grass in Korea, in Nigeria, in California. And how utterly strange it all is. We rise and we fall, like voices, like waves, like a story, like sheep grazing on hills, eating the ordinary alien green-gold grass.

Kate Coombs, who most often writes for children, has a collection of ocean poems called Water Sings Blue coming out in March 2012.

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Patrice Hutton

THEIR TEACHER’S ROOM

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The bedroom had belonged to Charlie Appleton when he was waiting to grow up, and then once again when he was waiting to be sentenced. Maya stood at the doorway, watching his mother plug in a lamp. The woman, small and elderly, barely seemed present in the darkened corner. The old lady had been kind to open the room, but it had been at her son’s—Maya’s former teacher—request. As Mrs. Appleton switched on a lamp, Maya tried to picture the woman’s younger self slipping into the room to wish her son Goodnight. Maya glanced to Ben, who stood at her side. Maya wondered if the woman had worked to reinvent the room. Years later, and maybe just months ago, Maya suspected, Mrs. Appleton had added the vanity opposite the bed. A place she could lean forward to massage cream onto her face, half-remembering those Goodnights. The woman knelt at the trunk, folded a stack of worn linens, and handed them to Ben. Mrs. Appleton walked around the perimeter of the bed, smoothing the quilt with her hand. The quilt was taut, untouched, either faded or dusty. “The women at my mother’s retirement home made this for Charlie when he was hit by a car one summer,” she said. “He survived and never wrote them a thank you note.”

This would have been the chance to ask about her son, their teacher, Mr. Appleton, Maya later told Ben. He’d moved out years ago. Taught school in Wichita and opened his classroom at lunch for students who wanted to talk more about Paradise Lost. He had moved out and moved on, but then came home again the spring before the trial. Mr. Appleton had sat across from his mother at the breakfast table, watching her hand tremble as she scooped sugar into his coffee. He kept an eye on this every morning, distracting himself from the fact that these were the first leisurely weekday mornings he’d had in twenty-two years, yet worrying what would follow the trembling. What if she needed his care? His attorney predicted he’d be away nine years. Five, the judge came back. That was all Ben had told Maya as they drove up I-135 to Hays. Maya wanted to ask how Ben knew this all but instead stared ahead at the highway.

A lamp lit just one corner of the room, near the windows and opposite the double bed. The house smelled of cantaloupe, which Maya had neither seen nor eaten at the dinner Mrs. Appleton had just served them. She’d fed them lasagna and said nothing of her son.

Mrs. Appleton fluffed the pillows against the headboard. “My son said you two met through his class,” she said.

Maya nodded. “And lunches in his classroom,” she said.

“Lunches?” Mrs. Appleton said. She shook her head. “I made the bed fresh for you. More blankets are in the trunk if it gets chilly. Pillows too.”

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“Thank you, Mrs. Appleton,” Ben said.

“I can’t say this was my idea,” she said.

A week ago, Ben had called Maya and asked her to dinner since they were both back in town. They met at a restaurant that sat deep into the country night. It took a dirt road to get there and once they arrived, it was dark. A shame, Maya told Ben, because for once, here they were out in the country, and they can’t even see it. The place was a barn with a porch and you ate dinner inside, tilting your chair against the plank wall and scolding yourself for inventing the smell of manure.

They stood outside the restaurant, Ben beneath the porch light. Maya clutched her purse by both handles. She saw something newly proper about Ben, but she didn’t want to say it, and couldn’t if she tried, so she leaned into the railing and let the cicadas talk for them both. He’d said, “Let’s get a table outside so our eyes can adjust and we can look into the prairie.” So they waited.

The two sat at a table on the patio behind the barn. Overhead, a ceiling fan whirred off-kilter, one blade weighted by a mud glob, maybe a wasp nest. Ben unbuttoned his cuff and rolled the sleeve. He was taller—always taller than the last time Maya saw him.

“Foolish to wear this,” Ben said, unbuttoning the other cuff. “When it’s 90 degrees after the sun goes down.”

“I’d missed Kansas,” Maya said. “Quiet nights. God, I’ve been soaking them up.”

“Thought nothing of them until I left,” he said. “Did it go like that for you?”

They shared a loaf of bread, pulling it apart and handing each other pieces. A door swung open and a waiter carried out a tray of food. “Dinner’s served,” he said, unloading dishes onto their table.

Ben situated his silverware and caught Maya’s glance. He tapped his fingers across his silverware and said, “Mr. Appleton asked me to teach his Sunday school class.”

“He taught Sunday school?” Maya asked. “What kind of church lets somebody guilty of statutory rape pick a replacement?”

“His mother was the church secretary for years,” Ben said. “He asked, and she arranged it all. At least this Sunday. The normal substitute is out of town, and his replacement starts in September. I’m going up to Hays Saturday and teaching in the morning.”

“But you stopped believing in God,” Maya said.

“He needs somebody to teach,” Ben said. “Five-year-olds. A lesson about Adam naming the animals.”

Maya pulled a hair tie from her wrist and gathered her hair into a ponytail. “I used to help with Sunday school at my church,” she said. “Four-year-olds. A lot of felt boards and glue sticks. I know all the

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songs. ‘This Little Light of Mine.’”

“Would you help?” Ben asked.

“On Sunday?” she asked.

Ben nodded. “Mr. Appleton would be pleased,” he said.

“Of course he would,” Maya said. “He loved to pair us off. He lived to meddle in students’ lives.

Remember how he invented ‘discussion partners’ the week we went to homecoming? Sat us together and gave us the topic on Much Ado About Nothing.”

“Give him credit,” Ben said. “Maybe it helped us stay friends.”

“Landed him in jail this time,” Maya said.

Ben stretched against the back of his chair and started to shake his head.

Maya interrupted. “Thanks for calling me,” she said. “I worried that it’d been too long.”

After dinner, they followed a sky of smoke back into the city. There was black sky but only between the distant cloud of smoke and the hedgerow out her window and the hedgerow out his. Ben drove and it was cool enough to have the windows down. The gravel road turned paved, but they were still out in the country, even with a private airport out Ben’s window.

“I wonder what’s burning down?” Maya said.

“Maybe I should put up the windows,” Ben said. A receipt flapped on the dashboard—where Ben had stashed it, absent-mindedly—and Maya watched Ben glance at her and then look back to the road. The smoke funneled upward, twisting to the right, and looked like it came from a chimney. As if a block of houses pooled their smoke, organized its dissemination into the night sky.

Two days later, Ben picked Maya up for the drive to Hays. Maya feared that a three hour silence lurked along the stretch of highway that Mr. Appleton had driven every Sunday morning, from Wichita to Hays, to teach his Sunday school class. She knew that Ben wouldn’t talk about their teacher, even as they approached his former home. The trip was about a dutiful favor, and that was all. It was Ben’s faded Catholicism, she suspected, that allowed him to think no less of Mr. Appleton, to forgive completely. But his upbringing—the honest household, the hardworking parents and the quiet, bob-haired twin sisters— caused him to not involve himself. There were things you knew about people and then things you didn’t.

Mr. Appleton was a teacher; he assessed your work. There were some things you’d never get to know about him.

The summer before their senior year of college stretched forward for at least another month; this was an August that brought both of them home to Wichita. After Maya agreed to come along, Ben suggested that they sit down for coffee on the way out of town. “To keep me awake, so I can navigate these

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prairies.”

Maya wanted to know everything. She knew she exhausted Ben in that way: inquiring, prodding, and asking. He wasn’t against her asking; she just did more of it than he knew he was allowed. Maya wondered if Ben might fear silence too, even after the dinner at the table in the prairie. One month, four years back in high school, she’d turned October into a purgatory for the good, Catholic boy: him asking her to homecoming, her saying yes, them dancing, changing her mind, telling him no, explaining that they weren’t going to be a pair. She felt awful, but he supplied her with tissues for the rest of the month—they both had colds that wouldn’t go away. Mr. Appleton got Ben through those weeks, Maya suspected. Every lunch time when she passed his classroom, she saw Ben in a chair beside the teacher’s desk. She’d look and then hurry around the corner.

Somewhere in the following four years Ben marveled that she’d managed to speak to him the whole time, and she laughed, claiming that the real danger had been the reverse. They grew up, at first keeping up through letters, feeling that their friendship had survived enough to warrant the effort. Then saw each other only at the typical intervals—yet knew so little about what transpired in-between. Once they’d discussed that this might be what growing up meant. The anonymity of in-between. With time, Maya thought of Ben often. So often, sometimes, she wondered if she’d made a mistake those years ago in finding him too polite, too kind, too good.

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“Is there anything else you’ll need?” Mrs. Appleton said, standing at the doorway. “The candles, Ben, come, we’ll get them.”

Ben trailed after Mrs. Appleton. Maya turned to study the bedroom, and her reflection caught in the full-length mirror. She had dressed in shorts and a floral button-down, and she let her light-brown hair loose so that it fell past her collarbone. She had another set of clothes in a tote bag: a gray jumper and black heels. Maya sunk into a rocking chair beside the lamp. Back and forth, the chair knocked into the lamp, causing shadows to rise up the wall and then shrink away. The room felt less crowded; it was a room that somebody was supposed to be in alone, getting ready, thinking about being elsewhere. Mr. Appleton, as a boy, reading, and thinking about the rest of the world.

“Mrs. Appleton said that lamp worries her—it’s old,” Ben said, coming into the room. “She wants us to turn it off and use candles after dark.”

“Does she think we’re married?” Maya asked.

Ben shrugged. “I suppose,” he said. “That or she doesn’t care.” Ben placed the candles on the dresser and surveyed the room. “The room is nice,” he said. “Mr. Appleton was glad you decided to come.

I think he wanted a Protestant to oversee this lesson.”

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“It’s funny,” she said. “I didn’t realize that whole time that he taught church.”

“He taught something six days a week,” Ben said. He picked up the candles again, one in each hand, and eyed the dresser and then the windowsill. Maya saw his eyes wander to the bed, but he drew them away, quickly.

“I wish we weren’t staying in his room,” Maya said. “God, I still can’t believe it happened.”

“But you’ve heard the story,” Ben said. “The girl wasn’t blameless.”

“It makes me rethink all those lunches we spent in his classroom,” she said.

“They were harmless,” he said.

“But it could have been any of us,” Maya said as Ben neared the windows. “When you’re seventeen and someone calls you beautiful. You’re young and how do you know any better?”

Ben pulled a window shut, secured the latch, and then sealed a second window. “He warned me to keep the windows shut. They have a bat house out back, and they go to feed at dusk. Might slip through the windows.”

“What?”

“Mr. Appleton built his mother the bat house before he left,” Ben said. “Wanted to make sure they kept out of her attic. It gave him something to finish before he left.”

Maya joined Ben at the window. A hedgerow charted the outer boundary of the yard, and before it stood the wooden tower on stilts. Maya would have believed the structure to be a small tree house, except the lumber was too freshly cut for the yard of a forty-four-year-old son.

“He told me to look out at dusk,” Ben said. “I mean, not just to close the windows, but to watch.”

“Crepuscular,” she said. “He gave it to us as a vocab word.”

“Maybe I should pass it on to the children in the morning,” Ben said. “‘Bat,’ said Adam, ‘To fly at dusk. Part of the dusk. The black specks of the dusk.’”

“In contrast to the elephant and the camel,” she said. “The creative splendor. Megafauna.”

“Some child will draw an elephant,” he said. “Surely. Large eared; insides pink. God himself creating Dumbo.”

“Actually, don’t mention camels to the children,” she said. “They’ll no longer believe in a merciful god.”

“It’s a subtle way to give them an option.”

“God, Ben,” Maya laughed.

The door rattled, and Mrs. Appleton pushed it open before Maya realized that it was her knock.

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room. She’d brushed out her hair, grayed but whitening at the part. It fell across her face as she leaned in.

“But please, one more thing. As you stay here, say a prayer for my son. Goodnight now.” She disappeared, an apparition of the woman who’d seen them into the house and prepared the room.

The door lingered an inch from the frame, and Maya pushed it shut. She saw Ben watching. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s habit.” She nodded toward the door. “Mrs. Appleton is so frail. The summer couldn’t have been easy on her.”

“Let’s pray now,” Ben said.

“What?”

“We should say a prayer for Mr. Appleton.”

“Why?” “His mother asked us to.”

“What difference does it make?”

“We’re staying in her house.”

“Ben, you’ll do anything for this man,” she said. “I’m surprised you didn’t put up bail.”

“Maya.”

“It’s one thing to teach Sunday school,” she said. “That’s a favor. But to fake a prayer.”

“You’re a guest in this house,” Ben said. “How can you say that?”

Maya fell silent, startled by Ben’s ability to be forbidding. They hadn’t quarreled before. Beneath her aggressive curiosity, she was polite, and in this way they matched.

“I just want to say the words for him,” Ben said.

Maya sat at the vanity and traced the front edge with her index finger, drew it around the side, and let it curve around bottles of perfume and powder at the back. “She added things to make the room look like somebody else’s.” Maya kept her eyes from the mirror, her finger outlining the vanity again. Then she swiveled the chair to face Ben. “You know, I almost wrote you in April, but it was going to sound so self-indulgent. I was agonizing so much. Studying Feuerbach, and doubting. But thinking about you, how you live, made it okay.”

“What?”

“You were the Catholic boy but always knew you weren’t one,” she said. “And you did life so wonderfully.”

“That’s generous,” he said, nodding to her. “It’s disrespectful to this life to spend too much time dwelling on the next,” he said. “You forget about being here, about existing in this world.” Ben pulled his legs to the bed and sat cross-legged at the edge.

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toward the house. The gaps between the Osage-orange trees held a hazy air, punctuated by spindly trunks that knotted and jutted and bowed; the patches of grass between the shadows held more light than did the sky. Light poured through the bedroom window, splashing off the vanity and setting the walls aglow. Maya rose and lingered at a bookshelf. She reached for a book on the top shelf and pulled it down with both hands.

“This must be Mr. Appleton’s yearbook,” Maya said. “Hays High School – Class of 1981.”

Ben joined Maya at the bookshelf. He took the book from her and tucked it sideways on a lower shelf. “We shouldn’t go through his things,” he said. His hands fell to his hips, and he smoothed the hem of his t-shirt. He leaned toward the bookshelf, hands in his pockets, and let his eyes run across the books. Maya watched as Ben took a book from the shelf and ran his finger across its top edge. He opened the book to a dog-eared page and read a passage. “Mr. Appleton read this over the summer,” he said.

“How do you know?” Maya asked.

“He told me,” Ben said. “Suggested I borrow it.”

“When?”

“June.”

“You spoke that whole time?” Maya asked.

Ben nodded.

“You two are still close.”

“Maya, whatever happened with Mr. Appleton has nothing to do with me, or you, or any of us,” Ben said.

Maya reached for Ben’s hand and squeezed it. “He must have appreciated your friendship,” she said. She pulled the yearbook from the shelf. “He wouldn’t mind,” she said. “You know it, Ben.” She opened the book and crouched to the floor. Maya thumbed backward through the pages, and Ben knelt beside her when she stopped at the beginning of the alphabet.

Charlie Appleton, the eighteen-year-old, hid behind a turtleneck and glasses that swallowed his eyes. Ben lifted the book from Maya’s lap and flipped to the index.

“He was on the chess team and literary magazine,” Ben said.

Maya reached to turn back to the class photo. “His eyes are the same,” Maya said. “But twenty years helped him considerably.” Maya shut the book and stood to stare out the window. “I’m curious about this town,” she said. “We should see it tonight if there’s time. It’s strange to think that this was Mr. Appleton’s view as a child. He can’t have much of a window now.” Timid sunlight glowed at the base of the hedgerow, but above, the sky had darkened. She’d lost track of time. They’d left Wichita at four? Ben stayed silent. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not saying anything right tonight.” She slid to the floor again and sat with

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her back to the wall.

“You’re fine,” he said. “You are.”

“Let’s work on your lesson now,” she said. “You could play charades. Have the kids pretend to be Adam choosing a name for each animal.”

They sat on the floor, side by side, joking about this or that way to teach the kindergartners that a man named Adam had decided what all the things they knew were called. Rain pelted the window. Distant thunder—a far rumble, out across the row of farms that lined the road between Hays and the next town.

The lamp flickered, casting an instant of darkness.

“A circus,” Maya said. “Let’s definitely wait for a circus to come through town. We can just point and feed them popcorn.”

“Do you think the town has a zoo?” he asked.

“Collect offering and take the kids on a safari,” she said.

“Animal crackers.”

“I used to memorize a Bible verse for a Jolly Rancher every Sunday,” she said. “Wait, what about the plants? Where’d they get their names? Sequoia and Queen Anne’s Lace.”

“Maybe the latter coincided with the King James Bible,” he said.

Maya toppled into Ben’s shoulder, laughing.

“What do I say when they ask about the dinosaurs?” Ben asked. “And evolution?”

“They’re five-year-olds, not our school-board members,” she said. “How’d Mr. Appleton say to teach it?” Maya asked.

“Like he taught Dante,” he said. “A close reading. He said the felt board characters will help the lesson soak in.”

“Shouldn’t we look the passage up?” Maya said. “See what it says?”

The rain had hastened, thickened, and Ben nodded. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and unfolded a piece of paper. “I’ve got it here.”

“My God,” Maya said, reading the verse. “You don’t have to teach this Eve part, do you? I’m not telling children that their mother’s mother’s mother’s whatever came from a rib.”

The lamp flickered again, off and on, and went out. The green dusk replaced the lamplight. It seeped through the window, lighting the patch of floor the two shared.

“We never turned off the lamp,” Maya said.

“We’ll stick to the animals,” Ben said.

“So Mr. Appleton just wants you to teach the story and it doesn’t matter that you don’t believe it?”

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“We never really got into that,” he said.

“He thinks you believe?”

Ben shrugged.

“But he wouldn’t just assume that,” Maya said.

“It never came up,” Ben said. “He knew my family went to St. Thomas. I think he assumed.”

“My God Ben, you were obsessed with this man,” she said. “Letting him believe you believed.”

“Maya, c’mon.”

“It doesn’t seem honest.”

“Does it matter?”

“I didn’t expect it from you.”

Ben laughed. “Then you expect too much from me,” he said. He patted Maya’s hand and let their fingers fall together for a moment.

Maya stretched her legs across the floor. “I was jealous of your friendship,” she said. “Honestly. He liked everything you wrote or said and let you skip class to hang out in his room.”

“We’ll have to see the town in the morning,” Ben said. “This storm.”

“Sunday school is at nine?” she asked.

“Arrive at eight to prepare the crafts and snacks.”

Ben rose. “Where do you want to sleep?” he asked. “Take whichever side.”

“I can’t sleep there,” Maya said. “There are blankets in the trunk; I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“Take the bed,” Ben said. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You’ll startle Mrs. Appleton out there.”

“She doesn’t want us in her house anyway.”

Ben went to sit on the end of the bed, fixing his gaze on his hands. They trembled, but he grasped the bed hard enough to steady them. His hands always trembled, and Maya knew it’d been this way since he was a baby.

“Why’d you come, Maya?” Ben asked.

“You asked me,” she said.

“You decided to come,” Ben said. “You called me back and asked.”

“Why’d you want me to?” Maya asked. “Did you bring me along to make yourself feel OK about this?”

Maya watched Ben from the floor. The curtain brushed her neck, and she shivered. The room had darkened quickly. She wanted to ask Ben where he’d set the candles.

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“I wanted to see what it was like to be him,” Ben said. “To stand in front of those kids and teach them a story. Why do you think I’m an English major? I can’t even say all he did for me.” Ben gulped, and Maya joined him on the bed. She sat cross-legged and watched as his chest rose and filled his shirt.

“And now he’s gone,” Ben said. “Didn’t he know there would be other kids who needed him?”

Maya took her sleeve and dabbed at Ben’s cheek. Ben took her hand and squeezed it again. “Just what you came here for, right?” he asked, managing a smile. “It was selfish,” he said. “I knew you thought everything I did was good. If you came it meant that this was OK, too.”

“I’m not here because of Mr. Appleton,” Maya said. “I was selfish.”

Ben looked to Maya.

“You could have said, Let’s sit in the mall for six hours,” she said. “I’d have sat there.”

“But you liked Mr. Appleton as much as I did,” Ben said.

“I wanted to see you.” Maya watched Ben, waiting.

Ben put his hand on Maya’s shoulder. “Let’s sleep,” he said. “We’ll teach the lesson and then get back to Wichita.” He stood. “I’ll change in the bathroom,” he said. “Then it’s yours.”

Ben returned in pajamas, a foosball t-shirt and striped pants. Maya had already changed. She was seated at the vanity, weaving her hair into a braid. She watched Ben fold his shirt and jeans and tuck them into his backpack, wondering what it meant that he had wanted her approval. She stood and then climbed into bed, near the window, and sat up against the headboard, knees pulled to her chest. “Storms are louder in the country,” she said. “Louder in Kansas than anywhere out East. Maybe anywhere. Just listen to the rain. There it goes down the gutter. Gurgling. Then it seeps into the soil. You can distinguish parts of the rainstorm.”

“You’re exotifying it,” Ben said. “But well.”

“Look,” Maya said, examining the quilt she’d pulled over her knees. “Isn’t this Ezekiel and his bones?”

Ben gripped a candle, hand shaking, ready to sacrifice his other palm to dripping wax. He illuminated the squares one by one, and let Maya tell the story. He’d fill in if she hesitated. Together, there were four patches of the quilt they couldn’t match to a Bible story. Maya could tell, from the orange swath of rainbow over the ark, that back then—when Mr. Appleton slept under it—it’d been a quilt of bright colors. A pristine, white gown for Gabriel. A red apple. A deep blue for the belly of the whale that swallowed Jonah.

“The stories were so literary for him,” Ben said. “That’s why he grew up to read Milton. Now I feel even less qualified to teach. Shouldn’t I know all these images from some Sunday morning?” Ben blew out the candle. Maya stretched beneath the dampened moonlight, placing her glasses on the opposite nightstand. Ben lay still, hands clasped at his breastbone.

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“You’re only responsible for this one,” Maya said, reaching her hand down and patting a square of quilt. “He wouldn’t have asked you without a great deal of faith. Stop worrying.”

“Night, Maya,” Ben said.

“Goodnight.”

Mr. Appleton’s bedroom, in Hays, three hours away from Wichita, was dark and still. Rain slowed on the window. Ben curled to his side.

“When I was little, my cousin and I used to pretend that every rainstorm was another flood,” Maya said. “Not the great flood but a big one that would carry us across the world. We’d cower on my bed, pretending it was an ark or raft, waiting to be swept away.”

“Maybe Mr. Appleton will need the flood lesson taught soon,” Ben said.

“But a question for tomorrow’s Sunday school teacher,” she yawned. “Why did God create the world? Did he make the moon too?”

“To turn away from himself ?” he said. “That’s what some say.”

Maya stared at the ceiling, in the dark, able to see nothing. She turned to look at Ben. His hair rested on the pillow, lit by the moonlight. This is what he looks like in the night, she decided. The Ben of the night, in the dark; what you see every night when you take off your glasses. The Ben who’d driven her to Hays and brought her to this room.

“Why did he need to turn away from himself ?”

“Boredom?” Ben said. “Same reason he made the camels?”

Neither would remember how—none but the room itself—but he turned, and she slid into the crook of his arm. She yawned and hid her eyes in his side. She could tell Ben lay awake, watching the sky darken, the storm retreating. High summer; the would-be hour of the cicadas if the storm hadn’t washed them down the tree trunks, into the grass. Outside of town was the prairie. And a room away, an old woman, long asleep.

“I hope Mr. Appleton sleeps well tonight,” Ben whispered.

Patrice Hutton is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University, where she received the 2008 Three Arts Club of Homeland award from the Writing Seminars department for excellence in creative writing. She resides in Baltimore, where she runs Writers in Baltimore Schools and teaches at Maryland Institute College of Art. MOUNT HOPE

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MATTHEW HENRY HALL:

THE REAL-LIFE AMERICAN CARTOONIST Matt Hall is a published author and illustrator whose work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Missouri Review, Reader’s Digest, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2006, Matt’s first published children’s book, Pheobe and Chub, was a finalist for a Western Writers of America Storyteller Award. In his second career as a singer, Matt has opened shows for Los Lobos and Richie Havens. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

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Rick Moody came of age among a group of young male writers who would go on to achieve rockstar status in the field of literature. Alongside peers such as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Jeffrey Eugenides, Moody, with acclaimed books such as The Ice Storm and Demonology, was a critical part of a writing tree that would shape literature. A stylistic virtuoso, Moody’s prose reflects the rhythm and beats of the lives of his characters, be it the suburban realism of Garden State or the futuristic satire of The Four Fingers of Death.

One reviewer noted “Moody’s characters are like word-chords… brutal experience set to the available music of language.”

(instead of the pabulum that they give kids to read). Everyone in my family sang to one degree or another, so there was much music in the household. The radio in the car (the A.M. radio, in those days) was a locus of dispute. I can remember regularly refusing to get out of the car because I wanted to hear the end of a song. Of course, everyone read a lot in my family, as well. Both my parents are voracious readers.

Moody is very much a musician – not a hobbyist, but one whose art crosses borders, finding expression beyond the page.

RM: I suppose I don’t need to describe what

He is a composer, a soloist, and a member of The Wingdale Community singers, which he’s described as creating “slightly modernist folk music.” In this interview, the subject is Moody’s music, and its connections to his writing.

BRADLEY BERMONT: Were your interests in music and literature at odds during your early years? Which came first?

These two interests came at about the same time. I was taking voice and piano lessons when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and that was also the period that I really started reading fiction for adults RICK MOODY:

BB: In 2009, you said in an interview that you feel “the way to describe the world is to get longer not shorter.” As forms of storytelling, where do you see literature going? Do you have a similar view for music?

will happen in the future of literature so much as I need to describe what I personally want from literature. The world, these days, seems to prize brevity, and also to appreciate very conservative ideas of story structure. But I am not a fan of brevity or of conservative ideas of story structure. I like long, demanding, multifarious books, books that hop around in terms of time, locale, character. I like things that require significant outlays of attention. I like imagination. I am, I suppose, somewhat reactionary in this, if by reactionary you mean against the status quo. The novel has gotten where it has gotten by being a polyglot form.

It is never just one thing. And every negation is, later, the site of an affirmation. So being reactionary, or stubborn, or iconoclastic, or temperamental, or howsoever you want to call it, is just being devoted to the form, to all

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the possibilities of the form. What I despise most is formula, because wherever there is a formula there is artifice.

BB: How is a reading performance different than a musical piece?

RM: Playing music live has made me a better

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reader, just as acting in college made me a better reader. I think it’s a mistake to get up there and read words on the page. You’re supposed to create an environment in which people are interested in the book, right? So a memorable reading will create some interest.

I would say that I am a better reader than I am a musician right now, because I am always confident, or mostly confident, in reading situations. But I am getting better at music, and I enjoy the challenge of it. And I think this in turn helps me in literary performance.

BB: Do you find any aspects of musical composition that leaks into your writing process or vice versa?

RM: I asked this very question of a musician

friend who is also a writer, recently, and he was a little peeved. He said one is like swimming and one is like climbing a mountain. I never did get it worked out which was which.

BB: People often say that Boys has a musicality to it. Did you see that as a piece of music?

More like a prose poem, probably. (By which I do not mean that I think I am a poet, but that as a piece of fiction “Boys” borrows from some formal tropes of poetry, anaphora, RM:

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e.g.) But I was sort of thinking of jazz in those days, as an inspiration. Like those long Coltrane pieces, “India,” or “Impressions,” where he sort of can’t figure out how to stop.

I think Miles Davis is reputed to have said to Coltrane: just take the horn out of your mouth.

BB: Is there any correlation between what you’re listening to and what you’re writing?

Not really, although sometimes if something really moves me, you can tell in what I was writing that day.

RM:

BB: Many of the tracks on Spirit Duplicator have a very antique, folky feel to them. Which band members provide the array of influences present?

The band, as a unit distinct from its individual members, has certain inclinations, and old folk music is very much among these inclinations, as is country and western, gospel, early singer-songwriter music. We all like this kind of material. We are, however, trying to move away from being pigeonholed as a folk band, and I think our future efforts will be a little more contemporary in some ways.

RM:

BB: Will you be releasing anymore solo albums? Albums with The Wingdale Community Singers?

The Wingdales are at work on album number three as we speak. It’s pretty far along.

I am assembling songs for a potential solo album, and a spoken word album. Wesley RM:

Stace and I made an album as Authros, which is composed entirely of covers and sounds a bit like Simon and Garfunkel. And the community choir project in which I participate, We Are Your Friends, has made an album length cover of Kraftwerk’s Computer World, without instrumental backing of any kind. I have also composed a fair amount of computer music recently, including some soundtracks for video, and so on. There has been a lot of music in my life recently.

BB: Musically, how does the creative process differ in writing music within a group dynamic as opposed to solo pieces?

The whole point for me, as a musician, to the extent that I am one, is to work with other people. It’s all about that process. I have plenty of time to be the sole arbiter of my fate as a writer. It’s a great blessing to put this aside and to work with others. And, in particular, to let go of the need to control the fate of The Wingdale Community Singers, and just be part of the project. I have had my moments of wanting to be able to determine where the band is going, but lately I have just sort of given myself over to it, to allowing it to use me however it wishes. This is good. I am sometimes bored of myself and my interests.

And bored of language, and fiction. Music, and especially the collaborative part of music, gives me a way out.

RM:

spawned this? Are there any plans to continue in this style?

RM: The only way Four Fingers seems different

to me is in its length. And even that doesn’t seem so different, because The Diviners, the novel that preceded it, was 600 manuscript pages, as well. I was already getting longer, five years earlier. In terms of its language, Four Fingers sounds like Rick Moody to me. And its overall tone, which is morbidly comic, is not far from the unrepentant satire of The Diviners. If you consider Right Livelihoods, my book of novellas, as a relation to these two, it makes clear that for eight or nine years, I wrote varieties of comic fiction. This I did because when I wrote a very serious memoir before that, I got my ass handed to me. So I wrote comic fiction for a while. I think I may now be finished with that, to some extent, and am embarked on something closer to the model of Purple America, my novel from 1997, which is to say a book that is dense, lyrical, domestic, and somewhat sad. We’ll see. I’ve only written a couple hundred pages so far.

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BB: The Four Fingers of Death was a departure from your more recognized works in its length, its language, and its overall tone. What MOUNT HOPE

Heath Fisher

ON LEAVE

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The first time my father came home on leave I was fourteen. He bear-hugged me in the airport terminal and put his arm around my neck as we walked to the parking lot. Mom drove while he described the enjoyable parts of his job–catching the sunrise on patrol, soccer games with village children, the way soldiers celebrate American holidays in the desert, with fireworks and silly games like catch-the-scorpion or canteen-chugging. I watched in the rear-view mirror as he scanned the grass medians and highway shoulders while he talked. Every time we came to a crowded stoplight he tensed up.

We played catch in the backyard while Mom made dinner. He was impressed with my curveball, but said I needed to “throw heat,” and have a slider or a change-up if I wanted to play past high school. He duct-taped a big square strike zone on the fence and told me that when I could hit it every time, I should get more tape and make a smaller square.

When we came in, Mom made him a drink and we ate at the dinner table as a family for the first time in a year. We watched The Late Show and I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, the living room was dark. As I passed their bedroom on the way to bed I could hear mom laughing.

When the weekend was over we took him back to the airport. “I bet that square will be smaller when I get back,” he said, shouldering his green duffel. He looked back twice before disappearing through security.

By the time he came home again, I could hit a square the size of a dish towel from sixty feet. I was so nervous it took four throws to prove it. When I finally nailed it, he patted me on the back without saying anything, then disappeared into the garage. I kept throwing, hitting the next three. He returned with the roll of duct-tape. “Make it smaller,” he said, tossing it to me.

We ordered pizza and ate on the couch during the news. There was a special segment on about the war–how some soldiers were being made to stay in the army even after their tour was finished. Dad’s eyes seemed glazed over, and I thought he’d stopped paying attention until Mom started to change the channel and he wouldn’t let her.

That night, I heard them arguing when I got up for a drink of water. The next morning Dad took me out for breakfast, explaining Mom didn’t feel good. When I asked him if he was going to have to stay over there, he said he didn’t know, but that I shouldn’t worry about it with baseball season coming up.

We were supposed to play catch when we got back, but he went inside first, saying he’d be out after

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he talked to Mom. I threw the ball at the fence for an hour. When I went inside, their bedroom door was closed. I knocked and he came to the door but only cracked it. I could see Mom sitting on the edge of the bed.

At the airport, he told me he’d try to get back in time for playoffs. I told him I’d go home and practice right away. Mom started crying, but she turned away so we couldn’t see. He hugged us both, and after kissing Mom, asked us to leave first because he hated being the one always walking away. When I looked back, he motioned like he was pitching to me. I crouched down and pretended to catch the ball way outside of the strike zone and just shook my head. He laughed so loud that several people in the terminal turned and looked. He gave a little wave, and when I looked back the next time he was gone.

My pitcher’s mound was a pile of sandbags and a rubber mat I had to stomp flat. I practiced all the time–in the rain, in the heat, and when it snowed, so that I had to hunt for the ball after each throw. Every evening after practice I’d come home and throw more. Sometimes Mom would pull up a chair nearby and read a book. There were many nights she had to drag me inside to keep from eating alone.

I threw until my sunburns became tans and my blisters turned to calluses. More than once, I had to wrap an icepack around my shoulder and hold my elbow in a bucket of ice water. When I splintered the boards I put up new ones and kept throwing. I got to where I could hit a square the size of a cassette tape seven throws out of ten.

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We finally made playoffs my senior year. Mom was there for every pitch that season, wearing my jersey in the stands. She put together a highlight tape for the scout who came down from Detroit to watch me in the second round. He told her I might have a real shot someday. She fielded phone calls and kept my college recruitment letters on the kitchen table.

On senior night, she stood with me near home plate, squeezing my arm tightly when they announced our names. The day I signed my letter of intent, she jumped up and down in the living room clapping her hands and crying, saying how proud of me she was–how proud he’d have been.

The duct-tape strike zone came down after I moved to college. Whenever I return home on break, I go out and stand on the weather-beaten mat and lumpy sandbags. Even with the tape gone, there remains a series of faded overlapping squares.

This is Heath Fisher’s first published work. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

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HYPER

IS A SERIES OF PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRENCH ARTIST DENIS DARZACQ THAT EXPLORE THE PLACE OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN SOCIETY THAT IS INCREASINGLY DRIVEN

BY CONSUMERISM. SET AMONGST THE HYPER-COLOURES, BRIGHTLY-LIT SPACE OF THE SUPERMARKET, THE PHOTOGRAPHS PRESENT FLOATING BODIES AMONGST MASS-PRODUCED CONSUMER GOODS. THE ASTONISHING PHOTOGRAPHS INVOLVE NO DIGITAL MANIPULATION, JUST CLOSE COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND YOUNG DANCERS OR SPORTS PEOPLE AS THEY JUMP FOR THE CAMERA. THE UNREAL, EXAGGERATED POSES THAT ARE CAPTURED IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE DRAWN FROM PARKOUR AND STREET CULTURE.

EXHIBITED EXTENSIVELY THROUGHOUT FRANCE AND INTERNATIONALLY, DARZACQ WON A WORLD PRESS PHOTO AWARD IN 2007 FOR HIS SERIES LA CHUTE. HE LIVES AND WORKS IN PARIS.

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Michael Cirelli

RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY did a story on the “Best Breakfast Spots” in the state, covering hash browns in black ink, the height of a tall stack with simile, the fluff of an omelet woefully compared to a cloud. For our restaurant, along with touting the #1 corned beef hash on the planet, French toast that bests the French’s, the article had the most words about mom. This journalist was good, managed to get Spoonem’s secret recipes straight from ma’s smile. Here they are: she has your usual on the grill as you walk through the door, visits regulars in the hospital, cries at their wakes, buys Christmas gifts for their children and even brings two eggs over medium to Celeste at the nursing home. She knows birthdays, family histories and news-gossip-weather.

She’s the Griot of Cranston, the Bard of Broad Street! Our bacon tastes better because of her. Our Autocrat coffee is hot with mom’s gibberjab! In the article, each restaurant got a photo: T’s blueberry muffins, the Beacon Diner’s silver dollar pancakes, and Spoonem’s waitress holding three plates and smiling.

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Michael Cirelli

PRACTICE

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Hockey prodigy Sid “The Kid” Crosby used to practice his shot into his mom’s dryer, to get out of doing the laundry I presume. I used to swing a bat, balance a soccer ball on my head, line up 12 pucks in a row and try to knock over empty tomato paste cans in my driveway.

My parents wanted me to practice responsibility, to wax on and off dirty dishes with a green sponge, to fill pots with potatoes and water, then boil, cool, and slice into home fry-sized chunks with a razor sharp paring knife. Dry silverware, bus tables, force-smile at all the customers who paid for my knee pads, batting gloves, Catholic school. I plotted to stay out of the kitchen by trying out for every

sport possible, and the better I was, the less I scrubbed.

I played YMCA soccer, Little League baseball, Church League basketball and hockey as far away as Moorhead, Minnesota.

But when there was no game, no morning ice time, I was back to making perfect, to digging the crud off the bottom of a frying pan, to fitting coffee mugs onto my fingers like rings. Back at the rink, 6AM, my teammates wondered why I was so chipper. I was avoiding perfection, I was choosing to go to an all-boys Catholic school to carve up the ice twice a day — and if we lost on Saturday night — coach would make us do suicide sprints all Sunday morning, which meant I got out of washing dishes.

Michael Cirelli

BARE HAND SWIPE When I was five, under the lip of that long counter at John’s Lunch I made my secret coloring fort, and Nana spoiled me with a lunchbox full of Crayons to keep me busy while she poured coffees for longshoremen, and I would draw chain mailed knights with butcher knives on their boots and towering castles without maidens and she still hangs those drawings on her walls to this day, and sometimes papa — years before his doctor made him stop working, and not working killed him — would call me to the kitchen

that was like a dungeon and Uncle Jimmy was back there, right before heroin and hepatitis hit, and the oven had a breath of flame like a giant square cauldron, and the metal table had a steaming hunk of dripping roast, and papa would take me to the sink, to the grumbling Hobart, would show me how to do it: Like this he yelled, and he’d pull a sticky crumby plate from the bus tub and swipe the dregs straight into the garbage can with his bare hand before loading it into the dishwasher.

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Michael Cirelli

ARMCHAIR CHEF I know how to pronounce Jacques Pépin.

I’ve heard Masaharu Morimoto’s English better with time like wine. Thursday nights is Top Chef, Tuesdays Chopped, on Sundays, instead of football, I watch two chefs run plays in Kitchen Stadium. I’ve seen enough to know what I’m doin’ here, chef from the armchair, and I can sing every note of the Pinot greeeej. More than that: Dad works in the kitchen. So did my grandpa, who died deboning The grind. More bones in there than years. My mother learned from the best: When Nana opens her hand, your mug refills with coffee.

When Mom clicks her heels, the table is set. Inside her head, she divides Amber’s tuition by 33 wooden chairs. No time to sit down.

The customer is always right.

From my couch, I order another course.

From the backseat, I build a double broiler for the beurre blanc.

When I tell Mom that if I save enough money to buy a house, I will open a restaurant instead— she won’t talk to me because her back is broken.

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Michael Cirelli is the Executive Director of Urban Word NYC, and also the author of three books of poetry, Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Vacations on the Black Star Line, and Everyone Loves The Situation.

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Michael Clayton

OREOS Cindy watches the top counterweight on the scale as Barbara slides it toward the right. The numbers climb beneath the pointer at the center of the lead weight. Before she expects it to, the scale’s balance beam tips. Cindy inhales sharply and covers her mouth. Barbara taps the smaller of the two weights back to the left until the metal frame across the top of the scale floats, easing left then right, but floating.

“Is that right?” Cindy asks.

“Yep. Look at it. 396 pounds.”

Doubtful, Cindy looks down at her feet to make sure they’re on the scale. They’re swollen and red with her puffy little toes creeping over the edges of the platform, but there they are. There it is. 396 pounds. Barbara leans into Cindy’s shoulder and reaches across her back in an approximation of a hug.

Before she steps off, Cindy uses her phone to take a picture of the scale’s beam, the larger bottom weight centered on 350, the arrow on the smaller top weight pointing to 46.

Cindy cries while other women in the clinic gather and congratulate her. Barbara cries too and gives Cindy a pin marking her first fifty pounds lost. Then she takes a picture of Cindy for her book. For now, it will be the “after” picture, but eventually it will become one in a series of “progress” pictures. Cindy is afraid she blinked so she asks for a second picture. She pushes her hair back over her ears, stands straight and smiles. She’s glad she wore her yellow dress.

Walking across the parking lot to her minivan, Cindy barely notices the usual pain in her left knee.

Lately, she parks at the far end of the parking lot to force herself into that small, extra bit of exercise. She sways from left to right, swinging one big thigh around the other to make each heavy step. Her Crocs scrub the pavement, so she puts in the effort to make sure she lifts her feet completely. She doesn’t want to cheat.

At the minivan, Cindy places a foot inside, she takes hold of the steering wheel, and with a heave and a grunt, she pulls herself into the seat. She uses momentum to swing her right arm over her left shoulder to grab the seat belt and uses the belt extender she bought to click it in place.

As she drives away from the clinic, Cindy is already thinking about the present she’s going to buy herself. She has a chart at home that grants one dietary lapse every twenty-five pounds. It isn’t a part of the program. In fact, Barbara would be mortified if she knew about it, but Cindy decided to do it anyway.

She was afraid that if she didn’t let herself celebrate occasionally, she’d lose control one day and end up on

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a binge. At twenty-five pounds, she had allowed herself one large Snickers bar. And now, after losing fifty pounds, she could have one pack of Oreo cookies. She promised herself she would make the pack last for a full week.

When she arrives at the store, she parks at the farthest end of the parking lot again. It’s a hot day and Cindy uses the washcloth she keeps in her purse to wipe the sweat from her temples and chin. By the time she makes it through the doors, her knee is hurting enough to notice. She doesn’t like to use the electric carts to move around the store, but today she’s celebrating. She puts one foot in position, takes the handlebar, and pulls herself up onto the seat. She has to do it in one quick motion or, as she’s learned, she could pull the cart over on top of her. The front of her yellow dress is pressing against the handlebars.

Cindy smiles at the elderly greeter and drives around the store, patting her right foot to a tune she’s making up. She could actually use some detergent and a few other groceries, but that’s not what she has on her mind. She wants her present first. Oreos. Not Double Stuff but Oreos. Not the cheap fake brand that she used to call “Pooreos.” Oreos. And milk. She’d settle for skim milk, but you can’t have Oreos without milk.

She’s patting the handlebars by the time she turns into the chips and snacks aisle. She passes the Doritos and the knock off two-dollar corn chips beside them. Cindy loves corn chips and Frito-Lay jalapeno cheese dip. Or bean dip. Bean dip with a little Trappey’s Louisana Hot Sauce. But she’s not here for those.

The Oreos are on the top shelf. She parks as close as she can to the shelves and reaches for them.

She leans a bit further because she’s sure she can snag them without tipping over. They’re going to be so good, she thinks. She loves to eat the first few completely whole. Two bites per cookie. Two drinks of milk. Then she’ll twist a few apart, raking the cream with her top teeth and stacking the chocolate halves into a crunchy sweet sandwich. Stretching that extra smidgen, she takes the ruffled edge of the plastic between her fingers and pulls. The cookies flip over the lip of the shelf and fall towards her. She slaps both flabby arms together and catches the Oreos in an awkward hug. Then she hears a click.

She turns to her right, and two teenage boys are at the end of the aisle. One of them is pointing his cell phone at her, taking a picture. She freezes in place, staring at the boys, pack of Oreos still held firmly against her chest, just under her chin. The boy without the phone blows out a spitting laugh and pushes the other backwards out of the aisle. The one with the phone says “holy shit.”

Cindy sits in the aisle by herself staring, first at the spot where the boys were standing and then at her fat arms holding a pack of cookies tight against her squishy, yellow clad body.

This is Michael Clayton’s first published work. He lives in Tallapoosa, Georgia.

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