Panhandler Issue 2 by Panhandler Magazine

Panhandler 2008

University of West Florida

Panhandler poetry ~ fiction ~ nonfiction ~ drama ~ criticism

Panhandler (ISSN 0738-8705) is an annual literary journal published by the University of West Floridaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Department of English and Foreign Languages. The editorial policy of Panhandler is to present in each issue many of the aesthetic forms that the majority of contemporary magazines do not have the space or the desire to publish. With the goal of bringing many of these underrepresented genres to a wider audience, Panhandler publishes substantial folios of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama and criticism. Poetry folios contain 10-20 pages of poetry. Fiction folios range from 2 short stories by individual authors to novel excerpts and novellas. Drama folios consist of either a one-act play or a single act from a larger work. Panhandler welcomes all forms of nonfiction--memoir, literary nonfiction and traditional journalism--as well as substantial and insightful criticism. Subscription rates are $5/1 year, $9/2 years $13/3 years.â&#x20AC;&#x192; For full subscription and submission information please visit Panhandler on the web at the following address: www.uwf.edu/panhandler. Mailing address: Panhandler Department of English and Foreign Languages University of West Florida 11000 University Parkway Pensacola, FL 32514 www.uwf.edu/panhandler jfink@uwf.edu

Panhandler poetry ~ fiction ~ nonfiction ~ drama ~ criticism Editor: Jonathan Fink Managing Editors: Virginia McPhail Doug Moon

Panhandler Folios

1. Allan Peterson Poetry and Art /1-10 2. Eric Trethewey Fiction /11-18 3. Natasha Trethewey Interview /19-25 4. Bradley Armstrong Poetry /26-33 5. Lynna Williams Nonfiction /34-40 6. Jeff Parker Interview /41-46

Allan Peterson

Allan Peterson’s poems have appeared widely in print and online journals such as Agni, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Green Mountains Review, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Perihelion, Adirondack Review, Swink, and many others. His books include All the Lavish in Common ( Juniper Prize 2005), Anonymous Or (Defined Providence Prize 2001) and four chapbooks. He has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The State of Florida, been nominated eight times for Pushcart prizes and once for Best of the Web. Recent recognitions include Arts & Letters Poetry Prize, The Muriel Craft Bailey Award and The GSU Poetry Prize. His visual art is represented in a number of public and private collections. In 2005, he retired as chair of the Art Department and director of The Switzer Center for Visual Arts at Pensacola Junior College in Florida.

poetry and art

llan Peterson writes, “Visual art and poetry have been parallel occupations since I was an undergraduate art student at Rhode Island School of Design. Although I have taken no courses and attended no workshops, I pursued poetry on my own because it seemed the intuitive complement to what I was doing in painting and drawing. It could be direct, bone-hard, keen-edged, incantatory, and able to get to the heart of a matter in striking ways. And since both were ways of exploring and expressing things about what it is like to be alive in these bodies, it has always seemed natural and necessary to do them together. They are as close as I can get to the mysteries that lie below both words and pictures. The link between the two is also the similarity of process. A word, a mark, suggests something that suggests something else. The process is compelling, unpredictable, intuitive, and revelatory. The fascination with that inexhaustible process has never let up. Within poetry as a response to the whole of living, I am also indebted to non-poetic sources like the sciences, history, the flora and fauna of my yard, geography, weather, Jung, De Quincy, D’Arcy Thompson, Birds of America, Grey’s Anatomy, the presocratic philosophers, various unabridged dictionaries, and a myriad of other ancient and current influences too numerous to list. These poems come from an as yet unpublished manuscript titled The Natural World, the first line of which: There is no other, is a flat summation of the reason why I try to pay as much attention as possible. “The portfolio of acrylic and mixed media drawings that accompany these poems are a sample of work from the last decade. The originals are in color. ‘The Curious Chair’ appears on the cover of the most recent book, All the Lavish in Common.”

But Just Because Many think life is like people singing in a language they failed in high school, breaking spontaneously into dance while outside a few of the downed leaves pick up and run in a parody of animals. Afternoon will be full of these transformations. Some of wind. Some light. Some because strings of the doily spider connect to everything. A thumb and forefinger touching is OK. An opportunity wren-sized whose cozy architecture is everything waiting on the other side. Allan Peterson

Panhandler

The orgiastic insect-laden hum of hearts. July. The time when a sudden flush has shrew-leaves and otter-children spinning in a eddy on the deck, and you feel you might actually honk this time if you love something, honk when inadequate, if horny, if you regret something you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t take back or talk about. But just because some ivory gulls are passing for nurses with giveaway feet and the wall mirror is a kind of upright bed and all of the laundry behind us is visible and refuses to fold down, changes nothing, or just because it lets go its images to remind us to be neat, to stay combed, in short to be an organ like liver, or the skin containing the sheet music held up to be read. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no wonder one could be confused whether the quavers were music or fear.

Guilt The commandments are tenscore ten and all negatives. New ones are created daily in the plant dish. In the crumpled wreck of the calendar (I wadded May yesterday) Who to blame. . The survivors interviewed felt they were saved for a purpose. Evidently it was to stand in front of the grieving families whose loved ones never left the wreckage and say how special they must be in the sight of God . Sometimes C is K Sometimes X is SH Sometimes you have the right to remain silent to have anything you say held against you to have the clumsy fingers of a chimp be pointed out as yours that your hair grows as if you were swimming to remind you the nary song of no housing no job no continuing attention Allan Peterson

Panhandler

. These are not symmetrical equations but ruins of feelings one stone tumbled from another. A line of fedayeen with mirrors sending a little quivering light into a pyramidâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dark grave corners .

The Infinite Daily Mrs. Guthrie refused to take her suffering cat to the vet She said if God wanted it to live it would and if it died horribly as it did later somewhere in Century her faith was simply not strong enough. This is only a test. If this had been a real emergency we would have been directed to discover her son the year before was convicted of fire bombing a clinic for the same God in hopes an imagined congregation would exalt such extreme acts and condone fearful frightful prideful arrogance as acceptable in the elaborate true/false believer test they can simplify life to We come so close to the infinite daily it lingers not as a test but reminder the real ideals are lovers that take time with their kisses and passions No infinite master of the universe even in the demand-filled hagiographies of the blind gospels is so insecure as to picture the torture of small animals to test the obedience of a single alcoholic in a driveway in Florida

What the Usual Has Become For the misery of the body there are houses, the same for delight, most happening at home. The ghosts of both are holding our attention, and not with gloomy intonations of the common ruin, the end of calamities and back spasms, Allan Peterson

Panhandler

but so subtle it seems nothing is missing but a few frogs from our yard to California. By the time we notice, they are half dead of what the usual has become. It is a sad thing to see a cow falter with palsy, sheep from scours, cousin Earl stymied by his name and aunt Belle feeding him. Now after amphibians comes word our seahorses are declining worldwide. They mention it tenderly —our seahorses— delicate and fragile as if knowing the males brood offspring the ocean would be a shrine, seahorse a savior and we would rush to restore the toxic waters. For the mystery of the body there is relentless arrogance and poor understanding No wonder nothing comes to us but what’s afraid to be eaten if it refuses. If we were to graph trends, the declining corkscrew of belief like the Devil’s dick would diminish to wood smoke, the favorite telephone of bloodthirsty deities that can’t tell a lamb from a forest fire.

All of Our Nightmares History is layers of relatives, future the same. We are standing in the bright light in the Hall of Bones next to the dark one of Minerals and Insects, sons of our mother’s sister, our cousins, father’s brother of native copper covering one wall, daughter of water seeped between strata, eggs in eons if that’s a plural. We are still wearing rings on the finger with no vein to the heart, though married to them all. We are sure that all of our nightmares are variations on a theme, riders astride dark horses, fingers and toes coming and going light as Air Mail paper. After lessening the weight of correspondence, the load of silt in the river is lightened. Soon we’ll see through it to the middle of the river and its restless fish. In the middle of the fish is an evident river whose bones are future to the rest. Allan Peterson

Panhandler

The long dead not yet missing, nor the two-ply moon. We do not awake from this. We repeat it over and over. The river writes its name, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s such a bad speller. The process of composure decomposes too. The asking is the exit, a long story in one line with meanders.

Cradles of Civilization The future does not speak our language Water rises and falls in the twin sinks like the breathing tides Babies are everywhere in bulrushes Wherever we say it is now it is elsewhere we cannot surmise This is purposeless which is not to say useless Where you came from was not an elsewhere but here from available parts You will dissolve where you fall And when the answer comes back from the inner world on Hua Shan or Delphi or Sister Madame Zodiac in the trailer on highway 4 Reader and Advisor it is cryptic and difficult Yang dragon and Yin phoenix the spontaneous chatter of all the plastic hangers in my closet who have shed their bodies to talk among themselves We should be ready to find out everything we know is wrong sunrise a phosphene something daily pressing the sky clocks accelerating enough to one day spin off their arms We read in the skull bone the history of needs each example a long story a room crowded with tapestries hunting scenes kings a cardinal behind me whose face became sharpened by experience but not its own To remember who gave us history follow the money the greedy the astigmatic the scared shitless glittering dead from whom all knowledge has been multiplied then lost

Allan Peterson

Panhandler

“The Curious Chair” acrylic on paper, 36” x 30”

“Featherweight” acrylic on paper, 36”x30”

“Not as a Rule” acrylic on paper, 28”x32”

“Feet to the Fire” mixed media: pencil, acrylic, rubbing, collage, 26”x40”

“Tea for Two” Mixed media: acrylic, watercolor, rubbing, collage, 40”x26”

Eric Trethewey

Eric Trethewey has published six books of poems, most recently Songs and Lamentations and Heart’s Hornbook. His poems, stories, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines in Canada, Britain, and the U.S., among them The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Canadian Literature, Commonweal, Encounter, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, New Letters, The New Republic, North American Review, Parnassus, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, Stand, and The Yale Review. He lives in Catawba, Virginia and teaches at Hollins University.

At Harry’s

fiction

hadn’t been in Charleston long when I started hanging out at one of the watering holes downtown. It was a good establishment. A lot of people who were friendly, not too judgmental, hung out there. They were easy to talk to—for the most part. The place had a long L shaped bar with a brass bumper or rail, whatever, all the way along. And the bartenders were real friendly too. That’s how I met Todd. He looked to be somewhere in his 50s, maybe twenty years older than me. He was a burly guy who looked like he might have been a football player once upon a time. I thought he looked a bit like my dad, good looking, but as I got to know him I saw that he always had pronounced dark pouches under his eyes. When he spoke he usually began by saying, “Well, I don’t know now,” and then he’d launch into whatever it was he intended to say. He’d say it slowly and deliberately, as though it was something he had been considering a long time. And after he’d said it, as profound or superficial as it might be, he would frequently tell a joke. He had quite a repertoire. The first time I had a conversation with him was one Tuesday evening when things were pretty slow. There were a couple of biker-look-

ing dudes with black leather jackets and long hair shooting pool, and a middle-aged man and woman were sitting glumly at the bar. The room was so quiet you could hear the balls clicking. Noticing that my glass was about empty, he came down the bar to where I was sitting. “You want another?” he asked. I held out my arm toward him. “Twist my arm.” He grabbed it and gave it a gentle twist. “Okay, Okay, I give in,” I said. He poured me another drink, a generous one. “You’re pretty new around here,” he said. His tone was part assertion and part question. “Yeah,” I replied, “some friends told me this was a cool town, and I decided to check it out.” “Oh, I don’t know now,” he said. “It depends on what you’re looking for.” He looked at me as if he had asked a question and was waiting for my answer. Just then one of the pool shooters came over and sat down beside me at the bar. He was not bad looking, though a little rough around the edges. “What’s goin’ on?” he asked. “Not a thing,” I said. “You got it all.”

Eric Trethewey

Panhandler

“I wish,” he said, and ordered a Corona. “You want another drink?” he asked, flashing a big smile at me. “No thanks, this one here’s brand new.” He sat there for ten minutes or so, swigging his beer, making a few abortive attempts at conversation, but not managing to say much of anything. I wondered what he was up to. Then he got up, said, “See you around,” and left with his buddy. “Watch out for that pair,” Todd said, “nothing but trouble.”

odd usually worked the evening shift, 4 pm until midnight. I was drinking quite a bit at the time, way too much if truth be told, and I used to drop in four or five nights a week for a few. Sometimes, when I’d been feeling extra down for a day or so, I’d end by staying until closing time. When the crowd started thinning out, Todd and I would shoot the breeze between the times he was waiting on customers. That’s how we became friends. It got so that whenever I decided to drop by Harry’s, I’d be looking forward to a talk with him. We even started telling each other our troubles. Or some of them. He had a nasty divorce somewhere

behind him, and he was still hurting from it. I had never been married, but I had just broken up with someone after a longtime thing, and I was mostly lonely and drifting. So I was seriously engaged in drinking away all the hurt and loss that drinking had caused me in the first place. You know how that goes. From time to time I’d ask myself, Why not just put a gun to your dumb head and get the shit over with? One time I went so far as to load the pistol I kept around for protection and put the barrel in my mouth. Then I thought better of it. The next day I threw the pistol off the old Cooper River Bridge. Just so it wouldn’t be available if I decided on a repeat performance. I worked at convincing myself that what I was going through was just a temporary setback, nothing much to worry about. So I decided to let go of things, take a break from the usual, drift for a bit. And then I would screw up my will to the sticking point and get back into the real thing.

had known Todd for a couple of weeks when I dropped into Harry’s one evening. I was feeling pretty bleak. I think it was around 10 pm on a Tuesday night, and the bar was almost empty except for two guys shooting pool. They were the same pair—leather jackets, long hair—I had seen in here before. They checked me out pretty carefully when I came in. You might even say it was over the line toward rude. It occurred to me to ask them if they had a problem. Without inquiring what I wanted, Todd served me a beer and a shot of bourbon, my usual to start with. “What’s new?” he asked. “Nothing new but new ways of saying what is old.” It was some-

thing one of my professors used to say. Since there were so few patrons in the bar we began to talk about this and that. I told him about the weird thing that had happened to me early that morning. I had convinced myself that it might be a good idea to try to begin each day with a clear head—no matter what might come down during the day. Whenever I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep—which was most days—I would drive down to the beach and go for a long walk. I couldn’t run because a few years before I had injured my right leg badly in a car wreck. You couldn’t tell, if I was standing still, but I walked with a limp. To be politically incorrect, which I mostly tend to be, I’m a cripple.

It was an eerie moment. Early morning, the sun just above the horizon, the only sound the steady whisper of withdrawing water, and no one else on the beach but me and this dead man. I didn’t feel at all normal. Everything seemed to come into clearer focus than it had been in a very long time. Maybe I had never felt quite like this before. For a few moments I was in some timeless, placeless zone. My car was only a couple of hundred yards away so I hurried over and called 911 on my cell phone. By the time I got back to the body, a few cops were already there. A moment later an ambulance wailed up. The cops asked me a couple of questions, but that was all. Apparently I didn’t look like a suspect. The way Todd was listening to all this, I knew I had him hooked on n this particular morning, the my story. To tell the truth, I was still sun was just coming up over hooked myself. the horizon when my eye caught sight of something about thirty y closing time, I was feeling a yards out in the water, rising and lot better than when I came in. falling with the waves. It looked sort Almost mellow, in fact. of like one of those black plastic gar- “What are you doing after we bage bags—but I wasn’t sure. I stood close for the night?” Todd asked. there for several minutes trying to I looked around, and it occurred get a clearer look, but whatever it to me that the near-empty room was it just kept bobbing without ris- looked like I imagined that clean, ing any farther above the surface. well-lighted one in Hemingway’s I walked another mile or so along story. I read that back before I the beach before turning around. dropped out of college the first or When I got back to the place where second time, and it had stayed with I had seen the garbage bag, the tide me. had gone out. An all but naked guy “I don’t know,” I said. “Guess I’ll in a black T-shirt lay face down on go back to the apartment, have a the sand. I knew immediately that nightcap and turn in.” the guy was dead, though I walked “I got an idea,” he said. “I know a over to get a closer look just in case. little hole-in-the-wall place, a kind He was no longer young—middle of sneaky Pete that stays open unfifties I’d guess—but he was slim til everyone there goes home. Why and probably in decent shape. One don’t we stop by and have a few? I of those guys who take care of think I could ‘utilize’ a good stiff themselves. I couldn’t imagine what drink about now.” had happened to him. “You’re on,” I said. It sounded like

Eric Trethewey

Panhandler

a plan. Todd told me he’d been walking to work, not more than ten blocks, since his car was in the shop with a burnt-out clutch. They had installed a new one and the car was ready, but he didn’t have the cash right now to pay for it. “That’s okay,” I said, “we can go in my car.” A good thing, it turned out, because the place he had in mind seemed to be two, maybe three miles from Harry’s. Zeke’s place turned out to be a scuzzy joint—thick with cigarette smoke, filthy paint peeling from the walls—but there was no loud music and the liquor came in the same bottles as it did anywhere else. “Here’s to a sweeping improvement in the state of our miserable lives,” he said as he raised his glass in a toast. I could see a slight trembling in his hand. I was drinking the usual, bourbon, and he was slurping scotch. Anyway, that’s how we embarked that morning on our first serious bout with the booze together. Serious enough that I was still not right two days later. While we were drinking Todd told me parts of the story of how he had ended up in Charleston. He had lived in Mississippi for a bunch of years, married a drop-dead gorgeous ex-cheerleader and had a couple of kids, a girl and a boy, who were now in college. He took out his wallet and showed me their photographs. I had to strain to see in the semi-gloom, but finally I made out the smiling faces of two teen-agers, both of them blonde. He looked at them in what I took to be a melancholy way. He’d had a good job at the time. Told me he had a talent for selling, consequence of which he eventually became a high-powered sales rep making 200 grand a year.

But there was a worm in the apple. He’d been drinking too much for years, ever since he’d been an undergraduate at Tulane. By the time he turned forty the drinking had gotten pretty bad. Real bad in fact. Definitely out of hand. His wife threatened to leave him if he didn’t slow down. They talked about it and both decided he would check himself into a clinic, try to dry out. It was tough going, he said, but he got himself straight and went back to work. Things were okay for several months, until one night on the road, feeling tired and a trifle blue, he went out to dinner with three dudes from the same company. The guys were all bon vivants. Hard drinkers. He held out for a couple of rounds but then told himself, a couple drinks won’t hurt. I’ll have a few tonight and that will be it. Yeah, right. We’ve all heard that one before. Sure enough, the slippery slope turned into a free fall. His wife was really pissed off then. She told him to get out, she didn’t want him around their kids. He was embarrassing her, she said, a public disgrace the way he talked whenever they went to a party. So he moved out, settled back into the booze again, so much so that he had trouble keeping up at work. His sales fell off. He got desperate. His boss took him aside and asked him if there was a problem. Not really, Todd told him. It was just a dry spell, things would pick up soon. “Money talks and bullshit walks,” Todd said to me, summing up the situation. A few days later, after giving it a lot of thought, he went back to his boss and told him he was having some health problems, could he take some time off. The boss said okay. So Todd went back to the clinic

Eric Trethewey

Panhandler

and dried out again. When he got out he threw himself into his old job, and before long he was hot again. Three months later he called his wife, told her where he had been. “I feel good, Susan,” he said. “I’ve been sober now for over four months. I want to come back. I love you more than anything. I’m miserable without you and the kids. This time I’ve learned my lesson.” I think she must have believed him. He had made all of his child support payments and even gave her extra money—a lot of it. He kept only enough scratch to pay his rent and buy food for himself. Well, Susan let him come back. Why not? They had two beautiful kids and had been married for twenty years. Things were great, almost like a second honeymoon. For a while everything was as good as it gets. It lasted for almost two years this time. Their lives were happy. He was back earning big bucks again, and she had been elected mayor of the small Mississippi town they lived in. Then, when he was completely convinced he had the booze licked, that he had become a new man, he had a drink one night at a party. It was okay. He enjoyed it and didn’t feel he needed another. After that he started having a drink here and there, always in control. Well, you know the rest. He lost Susan for good this time. And then he lost his job. In short, that’s how he’d ended up in Charleston, tending bar—of all things—and living in a tiny apartment. At the end of his story he said, “End of story. End of the road.” “There’s always hope,” I said. “No, I don’t think so.” He sounded pretty definite. “There’s only one way to deal with things now. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.” “Come on, Todd, this is just a bad

patch. It’s bound to get better. You need to hang in there.” Deep down I doubted that things were likely to get better for Todd. I knew they would for me. “So what’s your unadorned hard luck story?” he asked. “Ah, not much to speak of,” I told him. “I got tired of Lynchburg and decided to come down here to the coast for a while. Some friends told me that Charleston was a great town.” What I didn’t bore him with was the way my own drinking had caused me some problems—like losing my driver’s license. I had a decent car, an old Corvette that I had treated myself to when I finally got a Master’s degree in English after having graduated college at the tender age of 30. But here I was driving around with no license and no insurance. “You got an ex?” he asked. I shook my head. I also shook my head when he asked if I had a boyfriend. “That surprises me, Rosie,” he said, “You’re a babe. What’s the world coming to?” “I know plenty guys,” I told him, “but they’re all losers.” “I don’t know, now,” he said. “Better laid than never.” After I dropped him off I weaved home and fell into bed without undressing.

On the third page of the paper I found the story. I wanted to know how a dead, almost naked man had ended up on a beach where people walk and run every day. No one seemed to know for sure. There was no evidence of foul play. It seemed certain that he had drowned. But how did he end up in the water in the first place? A small unidentified rowboat had washed up on another part of the beach, so there was some speculation that the guy had committed suicide. It was too soon to tell, particularly since the body had not yet been identified. By the time I got home, showered and dressed, and poured myself a hair of the dog, it was time to get over to the joint where I had been waiting tables. It wasn’t much of an

dered without looking at the menu. Each time I passed by his table, he tried to chat me up. His name was Stu, Stu McBride, he told me. He had lived and worked in Charleston most of his life. He was an electrician. To tell the truth, I began to think he might be a pretty interesting guy—good looking, good natured, polite, and witty. And he actually seemed to be interested in what I had to say. Todd must have been mistaken in his negative judgment, I thought. When I gave him the check, he said, “You’re a really attractive woman. Could I call you some time?” Against my better judgment, I gave him my telephone number. part from feeling tired, I had a good shift that day. I made above a hundred bucks in tips. It was all but inevitable when I finished that I would drop by Harry’s. “Hey, partner,” Todd said, “what it is?” He had picked up this greeting from his days in New Orleans. “Comme ci, comme ca” I said. “A hair of the dog might make things even better.” He probably suspected this wasn’t the first dog’s hair I had had today. “Well, I don’t know now,” he drawled, “if this keeps up much longer maybe both of us will need some hair-ball medicine.” I hung around until midnight when Todd closed up. We went back to Zeke’s where we had gone the night before and had a reprise. This time he seemed a bit different, solicitous even. “Now I sure don’t want to preach to you, Rosie. God knows, I’ve had enough assholes preach to me about

“After I dropped him off I weaved home and fell into bed without undressing.”

woke up around noon with a killer headache. Took a couple of Tylenol and tried to go back to sleep without any success. So I forced myself to take a walk on the beach and actually felt better afterwards. On the return to my apartment I bought a copy of The Post and Courier and stopped at a deli for coffee and a Danish.

establishment, and somewhat pretentious, but the tips were half decent. When I entered the restaurant, Jake’s Bar and Grill, I noticed right away the guy with the leather jacket and long hair who had sat beside me at Harry’s the night I had first met Todd. He was sitting at the bar here as well. He caught my eye, smiled, and waved. Just out of politeness I waved back. At some point, he must have asked the hostess to seat him at one of my tables because not forty-five minutes into my shift, that’s where he was. “How you doing?” he asked when I put water and a menu on his table. “About as good as a buzzard in fresh guts.” He chuckled at that. Then he or-

Eric Trethewey

Panhandler

my drinking.” He looked at me carefully, as if to discern how I was taking this. “You’re a great drinking buddy, one of the best, and I sure wouldn’t want to give up the pleasure entirely,” he added. “But Rosie, you’re going at this at one hell of a pace. And I sort of feel I might be helping you along.” “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” I said, “I’m fine.” “Okay, Okay,” he shrugged and immediately launched into one of his yarns. “This guy goes into a bar, and when the bartender asks him what he’ll have, the guy says a tonic water on the rocks. What? The bartender says. You’ve been coming in here for at least ten years, now, and you never leave until you’ve sucked down half a dozen double scotches. What’s up? The guy says that the last time he was in he felt real woozy when he left, and when he got home, he blew chunks. The bartender commiserates with him and says it’s no big thing—happens to all of us now and again. But you don’t understand, the guy tells him. Chunks is my dog.” Todd laughed louder than I did, but I have to admit it was funny, particularly given the occasion and our predilection for booze.

tu McBride called the next afternoon. Pleasantries passed, he asked “How would you like to go out to dinner?” “What the hell, I thought, why not? “Maybe,” I said. “When are you thinking of?” “When’s your next night off?” “Thursday.” “How about then?” “Okay,” I said, still feeling some misgivings. The last thing I needed was to get involved with another asshole. “Whereabouts do you live? I’ll pick you up around 6:30.”

‘‘Better yet, I’ll meet you at Harry’s.” I didn’t feel comfortable having him know where I live. Not for the time being at least.

got to Harry’s a bit early. Deliberately, so I could have a drink and maybe chat with Todd for a bit. “Do you remember that dude— long hair, leather jacket—who sat down beside me and offered to buy me a drink the first time you and I spoke? I thought at the time he was trying to hit on me.” “I do,” he said. “Bad news boy. Go out with him, you might as well be a cherry tree making friends with a tent caterpillar.” “Well, I’m not real sure of that yet. Anyway, he came by the restaurant and then called a day or so later to ask me out to dinner. He’s supposed to pick me up here around 6:30.” Todd grimaced. “I wish you good luck,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Take care of yourself.” Eventually, Stu arrived and sat down beside me at the bar. “Stu, this is my good friend Todd. Todd, Stu.” I gestured toward each of them. “Hi,” Todd said good naturedly, though I knew his thoughts were less than friendly. Stu grunted something. I couldn’t make out exactly what it was. When we were leaving the bar, Todd said, “Have a good time.” Once outside, Stu said, “Who the hell is that old geezer? He’s always coming on to you.” It was almost a snarl. Whoa! I thought. This guy is ready to own me already. Not good. “He’s not coming on to me,” I said, “We’re just good friends and that’s important to me.” The words came out in a voice as cold and decisive as I could muster. In spite of that rocky beginning,

Eric Trethewey

Panhandler

we had a great dinner at a place called Magnolia’s. Stuffed flounder to die for. And the conversation was good. Though he was a college drop-out, Stu was well-informed and witty and generally good with words. After eating, we stopped by Zeke’s—which turned out to be a mistake. I was surprised he hadn’t known about the place. Anyway, three hours later—three hours of boisterous laughter and drink later—we were both shit-faced. To make a long story short, we ended up at his place fucking our brains out. He lived in a trailer park just outside the city. It was sort of upscale for a trailer park—but it was still a trailer park. At least he was a good lover. As drunk as I was, I could tell that. He kissed like he meant it and was adventurous when we got it on. And to top it all off he didn’t neglect to tell me I was gorgeous. Beautiful. Big and beautiful. Given the fact that even with my bum leg I’m 6’1”—taller than he is—I knew for sure half of it was true. The next morning, we toked up on some kind bud Stu just happened to have lying around, and though both of us had hangovers from hell, we had sex again. It was even better than the night before.

ventually, it got to be that Todd and I would have attitude adjustment sessions at Zeke’s or some other joint one or two times a week. I began to see how haggard he looked. Soon enough we became really close friends. Dependent on each other in a way. There wasn’t any sex, not a hint of it. Well, perhaps a hint, though our relationship was really just a close friendship. We were bosom buddies. One night, we spent drinking in his apartment and

crashed there. The next day, I realized I had left my bra in his bathroom. When I asked him if he had seen it, he swore he hadn’t. Later, I suppose feeling guilty about the lie, he told me he had it but said he wanted to keep it. “Why on earth?” I asked. “It smells good,” he said. “Just like you. It makes me feel I’m not alone.” I let him keep it. Some time later he confided in me that he had never had sex with anyone but his wife. And that was all he had to say on the subject. It was one of the few times in my life I was good friends with a man who didn’t try to get me into bed. One night, at Zeke’s, he asked about Stu, if I had been seeing him. He hadn’t mentioned him since the night I introduced them at Harry’s. The truth is, I had been seeing Stu, but I had been careful to stay away from Harry’s when we were out together. I was being the good woman trying to mediate between the men in her life. Now, however, Stu and I were history. As painful and embarrassing as it was to do it, I told Todd the whole story. After all, he had warned me. I had been seeing the guy for several weeks, I told him. One evening we had plans to go out to dinner. After work, I was supposed to come by and pick him up around six. But I got off from work an hour early and went directly over to his place. The door was open when I got there, so I just walked into the trailer and gave him a yoohoo. As it happens, the bedroom door was open, and I could see them on the bed. The bastard had been fucking his “friend” and neighbor’s wife—a damn crack whore—when I arrived to interrupt his little session. She saw me first. When he fol-

lowed her gaze, he started and stood up. “Aw, Rosie,” he said coming toward me. “It ain’t what you think.” “Fuck you Dickhead,” I said, and then I was out of there. From this and some other stories I had told him, Todd could understand why I was gun shy about romantic entanglements. I probably didn’t have to tell him, though I did, that most guys were okay with my uneven step, but when we ended up naked together and they saw my withered leg, they had a tendency to lose interest pretty soon. And here it was again, same old, same old.

rinking wasn’t the only thing Todd and I did together, but it pretty much served as the refrain. Some times were worse than others. We got really shit-faced one night and, as wasted as he was, he had to drive me home in my ‘vette. The only thing I remember was him driving way too fast down back streets and going through red lights. I think he spent the night at my place, but when I came to life the next morning he was gone. Since I felt like hell, I had a few drinks until I started feeling a bit better. Along about dusk, I don’t know exactly how I did it, I knocked over a lamp, and the light bulb broke. Feeling my way to the overheard light switch in the dark, in my bare feet, I stepped on broken glass and slashed my feet. When I finally turned the light on, I could see I was bleeding. Profusely. Fortunately for me, it was Todd’s night off. I telephoned him. He said, “Sit down. Don’t move. I’ll be right over.” He was there, it seemed, in less than five minutes…and he was relatively sober. He washed my cuts, put antibiotic cream on them, and bandaged my feet. Then he cleaned up

Eric Trethewey

Panhandler

the mess. Since I couldn’t walk, we sat around, talked, and sent out for some gourmet Italian food. It would have been a restful, quiet evening if we had quit early. But we didn’t. We embarked on a three-day blow and slept in the same bed for the next two nights without taking our clothes off. When we got up in the morning we’d have a beer or three just to get going before we started in on the hard stuff. The evening of the third day I got so wasted I don’t think I was capable of making any sense. While Todd was taking a nap I telephoned some of my close friends back in Virginia and elsewhere. You know that routine. Reaching out. Except for Jack, my mentor and former English professor who now lives in New Orleans, they all hung up on me. As drunk as I was, I could hear the concern in his voice. After that particular performance Todd tried to talk me into chilling for a while. Which I did. We started having some good quiet times together. Would sit home and read, and listen to his fabulous Motown collection. Sometimes, when we could afford it, we would go out to interesting restaurants to eat, and we got in the habit of renting movies. Several times we watched his favorite film, Duel in the Sun with Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. We even drove to the beach one weekend. I started reading books again, and believe it or not, I tried to write some new poems.

ne slow night I was at Harry’s, sitting at the bar talking to Todd between drink orders, when Stu walked in. I hadn’t seen him since the day I found him screwing the neighbor’s wife. He had on his leather jacket and was obviously

half drunk. He glared at me and he glared at Todd. Then he and the buddy he was with racked the balls and selected some cues. Todd and I exchanged raisedeyebrow glances and resumed our conversation. Fifteen or so minutes after Stu had come in, he sidled up beside me where I was standing at the bar, still holding his cue as if between shots. “How you been?” he asked, forcing a smile. “What business is it of yours?” “You don’t need to get all wrapped around the axle, Babe. We don’t need to be enemies.” “We don’t need to be anything. Don’t bother me. Just go back to your game.” “Aw, come on Rosie,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. It nauseated me just hearing my name coming from his lying mouth. I shrugged him off. “Keep your paws to yourself, asshole.” That did it. There were only a few people in the bar, but they were all talking loud and laughing and having a good time. When I all but shouted, “asshole,” however, the place went silent. All eyes were on us. “Bitch! You don’t get away with calling me asshole,” he snarled and slapped my face. Hard. I stumbled and then regained my balance. My skin was burning. I was mad enough to tear into him, was about to, when Todd came hurrying around the end of the bar toward us. I knew he would do what he had to do to protect me, but he was too old and too out of shape to deal with Stu. “I’m going to kick your faggot ass,

old man,” Stu yelled. I knew something really bad was going to happen. Stu had reversed the ends of the cue he was holding so the handle became the business end of a club. Todd didn’t back off. He tried to shield himself with his forearms while grabbing at the cue. Stu clubbed him repeatedly until I tackled him from behind. A couple of women were screaming, and the only other young guy in the bar was circling around Stu, waiting for a chance to grab the pool stick. Stu’s buddy had booked. I have no idea what would have happened if the cops hadn’t come busting in. Obviously, someone in the bar had called 911.

our or five months after Todd and I met, we decided to rent a house together. Our apartments were small and tacky. Together we could afford a comfortable old house, maybe something with a patio and a back yard where we could barbecue if the spirit moved us. Maybe it would even make us feel better about things. I had eased back some on my drinking and the world seemed to be a clearer place. But Todd was definitely deteriorating, and I thought living together might have a positive influence on him. By that time, he was drinking two liters of scotch or vodka a day. His hands had swelled and he’d begun to go through periods of near catatonic depression and reclusiveness. It took me a month of looking, but I found a great old two-story house on a quiet, leafy street. Three bedrooms, living room with fireplace, dining room, two baths, and a large kitchen. The whole nine yards. A thousand bucks a month. I rented it on the spot and put a halfmonth’s deposit down until I made the rest in the next few days. Todd would pay me back. That evening, all excited, I dropped by Harry’s to tell Todd about it. But he wasn’t there. The fill-in bartender told me he had called in sick. Said he had a bad cold. I remembered that he’d complained about coming down with something the night before when we were having an abbreviated session at Zeke’s. “I’ve got a bad cold,” he said when I called him. His voice was hoarse and he sounded all clogged up. When I told him about the house he seemed pleased, excited even. We agreed we’d move in just as soon as

“Surprisingly, apart from a small gash on his forehead, and his forearms that hurt like hell, Todd was okay.” Stu, with me trying to restrain him, was still trying to whale on Todd when the cops cuffed him, asked a few questions of the bar patrons, and hauled his sorry ass out to the squad car. Surprisingly, apart from a small gash on his forehead, and his forearms that hurt like hell, Todd was okay. I used a tube of Neosporin and small box of bandages they kept behind the bar to dress his cut. I hung around until his shift was over. Then we went to Zeke’s. As soon as we had drinks in our hands, Todd said, “This guy with a frog on his head goes into a bar. ‘Where in God’s name did you get that?’ the bartender asks. To which the frog replies, ‘It started as a pimple on my ass’.” We both needed a laugh.

Eric Trethewey

Panhandler

he got to feeling a little better. The next day I came down with the same crud and was laid up for a couple of days before I could go back to work. The first day back, soon as I knocked off, I dropped by Harry’s. Todd was still out sick. So I had a drink or two. This guy I had seen hanging around from time to time comes over and sits beside me on a bar stool. He offers to buy me a drink, but I point out that I already have a full one. The usual routine. Not taking the hint, the guy starts trying to hit on me. Right, I think. The last thing I need to do at this moment is get involved with another loser. So I finish my drink, excuse myself and go home.

ater that evening, when I had a buzz on, I called Todd at home. There was no answer, so I thought he was feeling better and had maybe gone over to Zeke’s. Feeling worn out, I decided to turn in. Before going to work the next afternoon, I called him again. Still no answer. I started to get seriously worried by then. While I was at work I called a couple more times with the same results. I wondered if he might have caught a Greyhound up to Virginia where his kids were in school. He had mentioned he needed to do that soon so as not to lose touch. After work I went by Harry’s expecting to see him for sure since it was his usual shift. But the substitute was still there. Todd, I wondered, what is going on? I called one more time, and when there was no answer, I decided to drive over to his place to check on him. Perhaps someone in the same apartment building had seen him around.

omething was definitely not right when I pulled up in the parking lot. Several police cars, lights flashing, were parked near the entrance. An ambulance was there as well. Whoa! I looked for the least conspicuous place in the lot and parked. Going up the stairs to the second floor where Todd lived, I heard the murmur of voices above me. In the second floor corridor several of people were standing around outside Todd’s door. It was open. And then it hit me, the smell, rank, almost overpowering. “What’s going on?” I asked one of the bystanders. “Guy who lives here is dead,” she said. “We could smell something bad for the last couple of days. Someone finally figured out it was coming from here. So we called 911.” She seemed somewhat self-important in telling me this, as if it gave her a privileged insight into things. It was all I could do to keep from crying. I wanted to slap the shit out of her. “That guy over there knows one of the cops. He says they think he killed himself. There was an open pill container near the body and a note apologizing to some woman named ‘Rosie’.” “Stand back,” a cop said, and then a couple of rescue squad guys came out of the apartment carrying a stretcher. A plastic sheet completely covered the body lying on it. I felt sick then, and in order not to vomit in the hallway, I hurried down the stairs in front of the guys carrying the stretcher and managed to make it behind the hedge that skirted the complex before I lost it. The two guys must have seen what I was doing. They probably felt sorry for me. They put the stretcher in the

Eric Trethewey

Panhandler

ambulance; by then I was crying full throttle. When the ambulance pulled out, I walked back to my car, barely able to see for the tears running from my eyes. There was no point in holding anything back. So I just opened the floodgates and cried like a baby. Then I sat there in the car until the tears dried on my face. When I pulled out of the lot I had no idea where I was going at first. So I drove around aimlessly for a while until deciding it might be a good time for a walk on the beach. I parked in my usual place, put my Nikes on, and set out. Oh, Todd! I couldn’t hold back the tears. I wasn’t sobbing out loud, but tears were flooding out of my eyes. Why couldn’t you hold on? You would have been happy living in our house. I thought about the guy’s body that I had found just about where I was walking right now. I thought about myself, about where I was going. Fuck it I said out loud, and I walked back to my car. I pointed it toward Harry’s. I needed a drink.

Natasha Trethewey

Poet Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize (selected by Rita Dove), a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2003 and 2000, and in journals such as Agni, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among others. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at Auburn University, the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill, and Duke University where she was the 2005-2006 Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies. Her most recent collection is Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2006), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Jonathan Fink

Jonathan Fink received his BA from Trinity University and his MFA from Syracuse University where he was a Graduate University Fellow. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Southwest Review, among other publications. From 2003-2006 he was the Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the St. Botolph Club Foundation and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He also received the 2006 Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review. At UWF, Jonathan Fink teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in creative writing, directs the Writers in the Gallery Reading Series and edits Panhandler.

Jonathan Fink: Welcome. This is Jon Fink. I am here representing Panhandler and the University of West Florida. We are thrilled today to have Natasha Trethewey to talk with. I guess we should start with telling you congratulations on the Pulitzer Prize.

interview

ings because the audience there was bit about if you see that as a conjust a terrific and warm audience. nection in some ways to the artistic I felt really good, so thank you for process? that too. NT: I hadn’t heard that either and JF: I was thinking of ways to start it is just a lovely way of putting it. [the interview] and I was reading I think about another quote – Phil Michael Ondaatje’s new novel Di- Levine who said, “I write what I’ve versidero and in the start of it he has been given to write” and I feel like Natasha Trethewey: Thank you very a Nietzsche quote I had never heard some of the things I’ve been given to much. before. One of the characters says write in terms of their truth are very the quote, which is, “We have art so difficult things and it is only the art JF: You read at UWF last spring and that we will not be destroyed by the that in some ways frees me from the we all take probably undue pride in truth,” which I thought was a re- difficulty of those truths that I have the fact that you won right after you ally interesting quote that I thought to live with and carry with me. But visited us. resonated in the work that you do, there is another writer who has said this idea of the nature of art. I was something wonderful that I think NT: That was one of the best read- wondering if you could talk a little applies to this as well and that is Natasha Trethewey

Panhandler

Shelly who said that poems are “records of the best and happiest times and the best and happiest minds,” and so for me what that means is that even when I am writing about very traumatic or difficult truths, the act of writing them, of making the art itself, is the best and happiest time and so I definitely think that art is the thing that makes truth bearable as well as sort of carries it to us in the most elegant ways. JF: What were some of the first works that you remember reading when you were younger that served as that sort of buffer to the world or entrance to the world? NT: I think the most significant book that I read early on—this is just what I remember from fourth or fifth grade—was The Diary of Anne Frank, and that shook me deeply because I felt that there was this little girl who was my age or so (or maybe she was a little bit older) but her voice coming across time and space articulated something that I felt I had begun to understand as a child growing up in the deep south between Mississippi and Georgia. Her experience spoke to me and I think it was reading that that I first felt what it means to have empathy for someone else who is different yet very much the same. JF: I have always felt that as teachers of creative writing that what we are fundamentally teaching is empathy: how to conceive the world and understand the world not only from someone else’s point of view but even your own point of view. NT: I absolutely think so. I had an interaction with someone who will go unnamed who said that he found the idea offensive that I thought

that either the goal or result of art you work with the pleasures of those should be empathy. He found that layers? idea offensive. NT: I love documentary evidence. I JF: How come? What was his argu- love the things that we might find ment? in a strong box, in the bottom of a closet, like letters for example. So NT: I think he felt that art was if we find letters written from this somehow purer than that and above one person to another person for basic things like human empathy. an intended audience but then we And I thought, “Well then, why am open it and read it ourselves. We’re I even talking to you?” [laughing] I overhearing and participating in a felt sympathy. way by overhearing that conversation and so I enjoy thinking about JF: Tolstoy used to say that you the formal elements of making an want to “infect the reader with emo- epistle like that because you have tion” and I think that really comes that intended audience to whom the across with the fullness of experi- persona writes that conversation and ence that’s conveyed in your work, [the conversation] has to have the and that’s experience not just in the genuineness of the utterance to it. circumstance of what’s taking place, It has to really seem like something but the experience of the tone, the this person would say to that person. language, the rhythms, the form, the But at the same time it has to also be structure. I think that all of that is the kind of thing as utterance that is an embodiment of empathy. meant for a reader to encounter, that it includes so much more than that. NT: I am deeply interested in the I think the trick is coming up with experience of other human beings, how to give the information that the no matter how small or seemingly outsider, the reader, needs, while at trivial it is. the same time not creating a false document between persona and inJF: I was thinking about this a lit- tended reader. tle bit when I was reading all the books together and appreciating JF: I know this is a hard question seeing the different types of forms to answer, but how practically do and structures develop and resonate you do that? How do you anticipate in the different books. One of the what it is a reader will need to feel things I was interested in was the drawn into the poem? letter form—the epistle form—because it creates such an interesting NT: Well, I think the imagery, the scaffolding for the poem because in things we always use in a poem. In one sense a letter itself already has writing letters you could certainly an intended and specific audience to write shorthand and say, “Well you it and [a letter] is very different than remember what happened there,” like a monologue where someone but instead you can say, “I recall the is speaking generally to the air. In color of the leaves that day,” and the the poems the persona has a specific person to whom you might be writaudience and then laid on top of ing a letter, even though they know that you as writer have a secondary the thing you’re taking about, they audience that’s the reader. How do have the image created for them too.

Natasha Trethewey

Panhandler

I think that people wrote letters like that – that the letters were vivid and full of imagery, and so the letter poem is doing that not only for the intended recipient of the letter but for the reader of the poem as well. JF: What I have always appreciated about the imagery in your books is when the images contain a sort of tension in opposites, and that’s something I see resonating in both the individuals poems and collectively. Specifically, I think of the poem “Flounder” in the first book where you have the image of a flounder flipping back and forth and it’s clear that the image itself contains the tension of opposites. And then something like “Genus Narcissus” in your most recent book – I love the development of the daffodils, which is a singular image, but has very different interpretations for the persona and her mother. What is the pleasure of that tension in opposites?

on the other has other characteristics that are interesting about it. A flounder has what, a single eye that goes straight through its head or its eyes are on one side of its head? JF: Yes, it has one on each side I think. NT: I could certainly have used that image instead, but that’s not the one that was necessary for that opposition that you’re talking about. I get excited (I assume like most folks) reading the OED. When I was working on “Genus Narcissus” the poem began for me just in a recollection of picking daffodils. Who knows where you go from there and how we get there and I don’t know if

them for my mother, but also there was another resonance they had that spoke to the very nature of her life, her short life. JF: It’s a beautiful poem. I know many times when we are teaching, a lot of what we are trying to do is demystify the writing process, right? NT: Yes. JF: Because you read something that seems so perfectly controlled and polished and finished and then students will read that and say, “Well clearly the writer knew this to begin with.”

NT: Right. Well you can tell your students I did not. I believe it echoed in the poem because there’s a moment for me where the poem I can necessarily demystify the jour- just changes and it’s that moment ney of how I get from one place to where I say, “childish vanity.” Just the other. But I did know that day the two-word sentence there. Before something was missing for me from I got there, I was like, “Where is this the poem and I went and I looked in going?” I looked in the dictionary the OED because I felt like if I did and I thought, “Here is where this some research (which is always the has been about all along.” place that I turn to), that if I knew something else, maybe it would help JF: What are some of the other avthe poem go in an [unanticipated] enues for research that you use or direction. And I looked it up and see? that’s when I found that daffodils were genus narcissus—that they NT: Well, beyond the dictionary—I were a narcissus flower, which I had think the dictionary is the best one, not known. I did not know either I love staying in there and reading that, even as I was aware when daffo- all the definitions and the usages of dils appear in the landscape, I didn’t the word because it opens so many know that part of their lifespan was doors for figurative language that to bloom early and to die young and I may not have ever opened—also, so when I read that in the dictionary, I always do historical research. I I thought, “Well, here’s why perhaps always figure that there is always I was drawn to the symbol of daf- something more to know, even fodils.” Not only did I literally pick about things I think I know a lot

“I think poets are people who are like this; for whatever reason you feel psychological exile because you’re always an outsider...”

NT: Sometimes you find that the image is always—I suppose it was Pound who said, “The image is always the apt symbol.” JF: Yes, “The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” NT: And I find that so true because I can’t imagine inventing something better than the actual flounder, for example, to represent my own tension as a mixed-race person—a person of a black parent and a white parent which my great-aunt Sugar was trying to help me understand and in her subtle ways which she talked about things. A flounder that is black on one side and white

Natasha Trethewey

Panhandler

about, and so, again, the dictionary is the easiest place to go to that first, but [I also go to] other histories [like] primary documents including paintings and photographs. I think of those things as places to go to do research because you are trying to do this thing in your head, but then you think, “Well, let me go and look at this again.” Research can be looking at the primary document of the photograph. JF: What was the story (I remember you telling me about this) where you first came to understand your subject matter? You were looking at the paintings at Virginia maybe? Someone was with you and said, “This is your subject matter”? NT: Oh, right. This was when I was still at Massachusetts, and it was photographs. My teacher was Margaret Gibson. I was at UMass working on my MFA thesis. A lot of poems from my MFA thesis are, of course, poems that made it in to Domestic Work, particularly the title sequence of Domestic Work. She and I went to a gallery on campus that had an exhibition of photos up that were depicting the great migration of African Americans in the early twentieth century from the cotton fields of the deep south to places like Chicago. So they were on one side of the room. On the side of the room there were these photographs of blacks in New England around the turn of the century that were taken by a photographer who traveled around a lot and his name is Clifton Johnson. Clifton Johnson did a lot of travel narratives and to places like “The South” and he would go and write the narrative and take a lot of photographs. So these were his photographs up on the wall as well and she looked at me and she said,

“Look at this. Look really closely at this because these are the people you’re talking about,” and until that moment I hadn’t thought that, as I was writing my grandmother’s story, that I was writing a larger narrative of a people, that her story (that seemed so personal and so family) was also a story that spoke to the larger condition of people in the Jim Crow south.

relationship to language is also a great sense of exile. As Robert Hass says, “A word is elegy to the thing it signifies.” So there is already that distance and that remove. But we have to live in it in order to try to make sense of what we have, and so there is always that disconnect.

JF: I think that a poem that illustrates that well—one of the poems that I absolutely love in you most JF: You mention in your most recent recent book—is “Myth,” how the book the theme of psychological ex- language itself sort of circles and ile—the E.O. Wilson quote. What’s turns back, and the representation of the language itself becomes a way the quote exactly? of conveying meaning right? Could NT: “Homo Sapiens is the only spe- you talk a little about that form and structure and how it repeats? cies to suffer psychological exile.” JF: How do you interpret that, both NT: I didn’t know this when I was literally as a quotation and aestheti- working on the poem, but there is a form called a palindrome. Of course cally in your own work? I know what a palindrome is, “Ah, NT: Quite literally that I could live Satan sees Natasha,” “A man, a plan, in the deep south—so I am not a canal, panama.” [laughing] physically removed from my home, my south, the place that made me— JF: “Able was I ere I saw Elba” and yet I am not fully a part of it either, and the fact that my parents’ NT: It never occurred to me that marriage was illegal when I was a poem could read line by line one born in Mississippi, that the very way and then to reverse it all and go fabric of government and custom the other way. When I was working and law in my home state wanted to on “Myth” I just was trying to credo things to prevent me from exist- ate the feeling of going into sleep ing. I can’t image how you would get and into a space where we often a greater sense of exile from the very dream alive those people we’ve lost beginning of your life as soon as you and that there is often that moment know that. I think poets are people of waking up where for a couple of who are like this; for whatever rea- seconds the person is still alive, or son you feel psychological exile be- at least you think, and then you recause you’re always an outsider to adjust and realize they’re not. And something, no matter how “inside” to me that really seemed just like you are. As a southerner, as a native Orpheus descending into the unMississippian, I feel like I am always derworld to try to bring Eurydice on the outside trying very hard to back and when he turns and looks at stake my claim in a state, in a re- her she vanishes again just like that gion, in a country that renders me moment of opening your eyes after sort of less than a full participant. waking—that fleeting, instant disBut language is like that too. Our appearance of this person who has

Natasha Trethewey

Panhandler

been there with you in a dream. So I had gotten to the end of the first section of the poem and thought, “Is this where it ends?” and I don’t know what (again this is the thing about demystifying) lead me to look at the poem backwards. I wasn’t going there when I started it, but I got to what I thought was the end, but it was not the end, it was a hinge instead and I did not know what the other side of the hinge was, that it was actually a mirror image. There are also some tricks that people do, like how you read your language to check it for some internal integrity of sound, and I think I was doing that. Perhaps I was remembering the late Shahid Ali. While he was at UMass he used to make students read their poems backwards just as a way to sort of find the weak spots. I think that is a way of finding a hinge too, because if you read it backwards maybe what you thought was the crux of the poem isn’t really it and it appears somewhere else. So I think I must have do that and seen with my eyes really big that the poem can indeed enact exactly what I was tying to convey. So not simply that the words would suggest it, but that the movement could enact that movement of descending and then returning. It almost seems like a happy accident. Sometimes the best things are. JF: Carver used to says that a writer is someone who is willing to sit and stare at something longer than anyone else. What you are saying specifically, which I think really resonates, is how that inversion was fitting to that specific poem and that content, that it wasn’t an arbitrary decision, but it was one that grew organically out of the process and subject matter itself. That universal awareness of forgetting you have

lost someone and then remembering them—what is so heartbreaking about that is that you have that dual sensation of for an instant they are alive again, but then you have to reexperience, even if in a smaller way, their loss secondarily, so that sense of loss is continual rather than singular.

There is the “Native Guard” poem. There is a four-part poem called, “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi.” I think the elegiac poems for my mother can be read as a sequence, and yet Native Guard, the whole book, is also a sequence, although people will read it in whatever order possible, which is also fine because it is a sequence NT: That’s right. It happens over which is not exactly linear. [laughand over again. ing] You can start and go around and around. I think I answer quesJF: Would you read it for us? tions like that too. I start out with an answer and then I go over here NT: I’d be happy to. [reads poem and then I circle back to it. – see insert at the end of the interview] JF: In “Southern History” it ends with the persona feeling complicit. JF: Thank you. I am also interested The persona says [referring to the in sequences and series of poems, teacher’s presentation of the past], and structurally what that allows “it was a lie my teacher guarded. Siyou to do both narratively and im- lent, so did I.” The persona feels imagistically. What do you feel are the plicated in perpetuating the lies of generative elements of a sequence? history through her silence (and I’ll let you answer the question instead NT: I like the way that a sequence of answering it [laughing]) But how can build upon certain images that do you see that resonating throughof course become motifs throughout out your books or as an artistic dia sequence of poems and build a kind rective? of tension. I love how a sequence allows me ([although] I think I am NT: I think it is my artistic directive. someone who tends more towards I was contemplating this recently a linear narrative) to do sequences because I just came back from dothat circle back on themselves. I ing the Page-Barbour Lectures at am really interested in how I can the University of Virginia, and I tell a story that is obviously a liner was lecturing on (I was “meditating” story that has a beginning, middle I should say) the Mississippi gulf and end, and yet by circling back coast. The title was, “Beyond Kathrough the sequence it doesn’t have trina: A Meditation on the Mississimply that straight line through it. sippi Gulf Coast, Present, Past and I mentioned those images and how Future.” And after Native Guard they become motifs and how they came out and I started giving readare repeated or echoed throughout ings, and even more so after the a sequence. I find that I like very prize, and I talked to people, I often much very subtle repetition and the got the question, “Are you going to way that certain sounds as well as write about the gulf coast now, afcertain images echo throughout a ter all of this that has happen? Afsequence. I think Native Guard is ter the storm and the rebuilding?” made up of individual sequences. and I kept thinking, at first, “Well,

Natasha Trethewey

Panhandler

No. Native Guard was my elegy to the gulf coast.” I thought that I was done and then Ted Genoways asked me if I would do this and I took it on foolishly, I think. I’m happy now because I’ve come to think that I would have abandoned my own directive had I not, and that my silence right now as the native daughter I have tried so hard to position myself as, the silence of that native daughter at this moment, would have been that kind of complicit silence that relegates some history to the margins. And so—I am going around in a circle again—but I absolutely see my role as a poet in some way is to try to recollect the collective and historical memory of a people through the very individual people because I have always been deeply concerned with erasure: those things that are left out of the larger story. To me, the only way we can tell a fuller version of history is to try to reclaim and to get as many of those erased stories back into the larger narrative. JF: What has been your recent impression about how things are going on the gulf coast after the hurricane?

ten, that the man-made tragedy and pleasure. travesty of New Orleans—while it gets, rightfully so, the attention that NT: Thank you, Jon it gets—in some ways is playing a role in subjugating the story of the natural disaster that happened to the citizens on the Mississippi gulf coast. So that is a story that needs to be told and remembered and we need to erect the kind of markers of collective memory in the nation that let us keep that story too. JF: What are you working on now? Can you talk about it? NT: Oh, well I had begun working on a new book of poems before I found out about the prize which has made me very busy the last few months. JF: We feel so sorry for you. [laughing] There, there. There, there. NT: All I will say is that toward the end of working on Native Guard I was hanging out in front of my OED just reading some definitions and I looked again at the word “native” because I just kept thinking—I continue to think—about what it means to be native to a place and I was really surprised to find that the first definition, the primary definition of the word, was not at all what I expected. I was imagining something like the way that a plant is native to a region, or I might say, “I am a native of Mississippi.” But the definition that came up was, “Someone born into the condition of servitude, a thrall.” And, of course, “thrall” means “slave.” So I was thinking about what is it to be enthralled to anything, to language, to memory, to nostalgia?

NT: There is all the rebuilding stuff, all the problems that are germane to the idea of what will be rebuilt and for whom and how. But in my own way I am also thinking for the future in how the actual rebuilding, the construction of the buildings and economy that we need, is connected to the kinds of monuments and memory making that are being built right now too. The memory of the coast is being rebuilt brick by brick but also word by word in terms of the recollections. The people I talked to on the coast JF: Well we will look forward to are worried that they will be forgot- it. Thank you Natasha it was a real Natasha Trethewey

Panhandler

Myth I was asleep while you were dying. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow I make between my slumber and my waking, the Erebus I keep you in, still trying not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow, but in dreams you live. So I try taking you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning, my eyes open, I find you do not follow. Again and again, this constant forsaking. * Again and again, this constant forsaking: my eyes open, I find you do not follow. You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning. But in dreams you live. So I try taking, not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow. The Erebus I keep you in -- still, trying -I make between my slumber and my waking. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hallow. I was asleep while you were dying.

—from Native Guard

Natasha Trethewey

Panhandler

Bradley Armstrong

Bradley Armstrong lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and daughter. He received his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a Creative Writing Fellow. He was born the year that Kiss released their first album and the Ramones formed. He earns his bread with a hammer and a paintbrush. He has a band called 13ghosts, after that great book of ghost stories by Kathryn Windham Tucker. He is also one of the founders of Low Fidelity Press (www.lofipress.com). He cowers in fear of any corporation that employs more than 20 people; he hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t patronized McDonalds in ten years, for instance, but for some reason he still wholeheartedly uses and endorses the Phillip Morris line of products in alarming quantities.

poetry

the curdled dreaming of crows In another possible world I am lying dazed and drunk on Erie Boulevard, my ear letting the secrets of my blood into the snow. The engine of your overturned car ticks. The traffic light ticks. The great ravens clack and rustle on the power lines. There is a raining of stars, a centrifugal whir as the wheels of your overturned Buick fling away ice, mud, what other earthly derivations they have held in their treads. There is the crack of trees bearing up under the terrific weight of winter. There is the irregular hitch of your breathing. I contemplate sleep, the blameless warmth of the snow, the idiot conformations of water to a body in any of its states. There is a hitching in the other car. What need be said about what happened? There were fantastic gouts of whiskey, a woman whose name I no longer remember kissing vodka and sour apples into the cleft of my chin. There were songs Bradley Armstrong

Panhandler

(there are always songs). There was a fight about this poet or that. There was posturing, a grand beating of breast. There was fast driving in an American car, a rhythmic pounding on a steering wheel, a kicked-in radio. There was a hitching in the other car. In another possible world I held your lightening head in my hands held my face over the steaming wound of your head and breathed you in held the wet solder taste of your head in my lungs until there was no taste of you in this possible world as the wind sang of its own wretched undercurrent as the gasoline spoke burn and shiver into my legs as the wail of your child not yet six months old broke apart the night like the curdled dreaming of a crow— * What need be said about the choices we make? They are made almost before we make them. They are memories of events that never happened. Once I drove my car through the red light at the intersection of Kings Avenue and Erie Boulevard. I never slowed nor thought of slowing. The snow tore free of the asphalt as I passed. I looked neither left nor right as I went through the intersection. As I climbed the hill on the other side of the street I hit my pint of whiskey and lit a cigarette. Behind me the ghost of a car crash withered in the air collapsed in on itself and was gone. Here— years later—

in another of the possible worlds

I hold my screaming daughter six minutes old in my arms and laugh as Bradley Armstrong

Panhandler

she turns her wild and trembling eyes on mine

the low hours There was the sky, with its deathwatch and constant ticking. There were the fingers of vine scraping softly up the yellow walls and out the hole in the roof, reaching for something that wasn’t where they could get to it anymore. There was the milk and cataract of our eyes, the water-skin of our temples, the thinness of vein, of blood, of heart. There were the shattered posies I’d picked coming to dust on the floor, scattered carelessly, beautifully, like thrown bones reading of themselves— there were these things, and you lying on the bed in the middle of the dining room, looking out the window we’d thrown the table from when it became something we didn’t need anymore. My dear, I said, the croak-sound of my voice leaving my throat reluctantly, rattling up through the geology and mud of my throat. My dear, I said, as though you were a secret I had been keeping these fifty-three years, are you thirsty? There was you, lying thirsty all this time on the bed in the dining room; there was the sound of ravens screaming their dawn rage in that lowest of low hours. There was the memory of our children who had left us, so long ago, for others. There was the memory of ourselves as children, which existed between us and nowhere else— Bradley Armstrong

Panhandler

there were others. Most had been lost, would never be remembered again. We kept them with us as long as we could, I whispered into your dry riverbed ear, and poured you a glass of water that you would not drink and set it last in the row of full water glasses that you had not drunk. My hands trembled as I beheld the quiet, staring skins of your un-drunk water. My hands trembled as I beheld the stillness of them.

immovable objects I remember being breathless, my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s arms holding me too tightly as the train passed, as though he feared I would be sucked away from him in the weird vacuum that happens when you stand next to something that long moving that fast. I stood on the Manhattan Bridge and felt that giving over of myself into the sickening sway of concrete and steelâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;how can bridges move like that? Immovable objects bending and crackling in the wind like rotted eavework. It seemed to me some physical law were being flaunted and I felt myself wanting to jump, as though I could fly through the air for as long as I wished, as though I could decide when and where I landed, as the memory of my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blameless arms wrapped me like cable, as the bridge shivered, as I stood shivering with it, my daughter clenched into my chest like breath.

Bradley Armstrong

Panhandler

let the fauna of corpses pillow your head in sleep He carries her until his muscles burn like whiskey-gut and the legs of shot horses, until his arms and back are unaware of the weight of her, as the trunks of trees must be unaware of the heights their bodies reach, until he no longer remembers with his mind what he is looking for— it becomes as a place only the animal body can know how to find. When, after days and nights, he comes to it, it is like coming into a church of green light, the high sibling-trees buttressed into a kind of sanctuary. He listens to those things that would speak to him, the squirrels scratching verses into the walls of their vestibule, the mushroom’s afterbirth powdering the air with hymns of spore, the water communing under the ground, sermonizing the veins of the earth, pumping up through the secret martyrhearts of all oak trees and into the great basin of cloud and sunlight that is banked over the world— He lays his woman down in a cradle of moss and shed willow fingers, waits with her for the river song of frogs, the birth-scream of the cicada, the coyote’s lunatic whine, waits for the moon to cover them over in night, Bradley Armstrong

Panhandler

and finally, as she sleeps under the dark, the insects begin to take her apart. He listens all night to the starlight glinting off their hard-shelled backs, the clacking kisses of mandible into socket, the giving of flesh into bone—the melody of her assumption weeps in his ears. At dawn, a necklace of thorax and glisten runs between her breasts like black pearl water. He pounds a rock on a rock, trenches the dirt with his boot heel, transcribes words into his arms with a jackknife, and finally goes still— the garland of green bottle flies in her hair, the shards of emerald Hister beetle hunching into her dark, loamy ground-skirts, the red-headed Devil’s Coach-horse laying her blameless children in his wife’s belly— all become sacred to him and he is struck by stillness as though he has suddenly gone blind. For the rest of his life he remembers that first night with her more than any of the forty nights that followed. It comes to eclipse the other parts of their life together until, on his own deathbed, he remembers taking her as his wife on that night, before God and all Bradley Armstrong

Panhandler

the insects of the earth with a carrion beetle for a ring. He remembers consummating their final marriage in a pelt of coffin flies. On his own deathbed he has forgotten all the rest of it— the way her body swelled and burst, the fingers of wasp reaching out of the places where her eyes had once opened, the Tineid moths softly brushing her hair away, he has forgotten the thick trunk of stovewood with which, lost in five days of whiskey, he’d bashed in her head as she mopped his whiskey vomit from the floor. He has forgotten that he held the bruised chunk of wood cradled unknowingly in his lap, as a man will cradle a shotgun, until her body at last collapsed into the ground, and now, on his deathbed these long years later, as his flesh begins its own quiet keening, he is like the larva three seconds old, innocent of everything except being born.

cataplasia Where the waters merge into one brine into plasma salt into blood platelet fused to drifting platelet where the waters come into one she breaks apart stone by rattling stone in my arms and there

like a finger of bone

Bradley Armstrong

Panhandler

comes the first pale shoot comes the second comes the crackling spray of current ozone carbonite cooling fissure of magma tongues of blue electricity licking against her uterine walls comes the cherrypit of heart aortic wormholes valve lips suckling at the mouths of new vein comes an expression of her head her torso her limbs her hands her feet her capillaries tasting each other whispering to each other Come Call your brothers and sisters Call your cousins Tell them tell them all comes an expression of her self inside herself so minutely perfectly rendered it is like her own body inside her body one inside the other and inside that another and so on and on until the bottom of the world where all souls sleep in warm cocoons of mud and copper comes the great and final rise and collapse of the single atom at the very core of the universe from which all things expand on which all is hinged that angelic pinhole whence we Come we sang with our bodies twined in fucking Come we screamed with our bodies as we wrung orgasm from writhing orgasm come we whispered with our bodies as something lay dying between us as something else between us was formed

Bradley Armstrong

Panhandler

Lynna Williams

Lynna Williams is an associate professor of English/Creative Writing at Emory University. A former politidal reporter in Texas and Minnesota, she was working as a political speechwriter (and unpaid stand-up comic) in Minnesota when she began writing fiction. Her first short story, “Last Shift at the Mine,” dealt with unemployment on the Minnesota Iron Range, and won a Loft-McKnight Award and a Loft Mentor Series Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Lear’s, The Oxford American, Crab Orchard Review, and other literary magazines. Her short story, “Sole Custody,” was nominated by the Atlantic for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and she was one of four writers featured in an Atlantic cover story on “New American Voices” in contemporary fiction. Five of her stories have been included in the “100 Other Distinguished Stories” list in the annual anthology, Best American Short Stories. Her collection, Things Not Seen and Other Stories, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has won the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters. Her essays have won prizes from the Chattahoochee Review and the Bellingham Review, and have been anthologized in Sleeping with One Eye Open: A Survival Guide for Creative Women (UGA Press), From Mothers to Daughters: I’ve Always Meant to Tell You (Simon and Schuster), and other collections. Her book reviews appear in the Chicago Tribune. She is at work on a story collection, and an essay collection that grew out of a year teaching English to a group of Kurdish women in a small Georgia town.

nonfiction

The Harvest at the End of the World

he house where I lived with my parents and older brother in the fall of 1961 was on a corner lot on Fitzgerald Street, which meant we had only one set of next door neighbors. Their names were Frank and Vera Schmidt, and when my mother thought only my father was listening, she liked to say that Vera could win a gold medal in the ScaredyCat Olympics. “Think about it,” my father always said back to her, which I knew had something to do with Mrs. Schmidt being German, coming to America with Frank after the war was over. My mother still rolled her eyes now and then, but mostly she was kind when Mr. Schmidt was on the road selling shoes and Vera called our house late at night to report a “dark” man near the fence line, or ran for the safety of our porch if a stray dog came down the street. On our way to school one morning, as my mother slowly backed down the driveway, Vera came out

of her house and ran toward us, her arms full of home-canned jars of green beans. “What on earth?” my mother said, and stopped the car. She had handed the jars out like Halloween candy to everyone on Fitzgerald Street, and liked to hear how good the beans were. Vera stuck her face in the driver’s side widow. “This seal, Dorothy?” she said, lifting one of the jars toward my mother. “You would say that was safe or you would say that was not safe?” My mother turned off the ignition, got out, and took the jars from Vera, one by one. “Safe,” she said. “Safe. Safe. Safe. Safe.” My brother, who spent his life being called out at home plate, was having a fit in the back seat. My mother jerked her head at him, without ever turning around, and he folded himself into the upholstery. Vera nodded after each word. She was pretty, the way girls who went into the forbidding woods in fairy

Lynna Williams

Panhandler

tales were pretty. When my mother had checked every jar, Vera said maybe it would be safer not to eat any of the beans. My mother said she would be happy to take back any delicious home-canned food Vera didn’t want, wished her a happy morning, and got behind the wheel again. She didn’t say anything about the scene in the driveway until dinner that night, when she caught me poking my green beans with a fork, then taking deep breaths, my face centered above the plate. “No, ma’am,” she said. “We eat our food in this house; we don’t investigate it.” I watched her expression change from anger to reasonableness, which was never a good sign. “You ate green beans from the same batch last night. Were you poisoned last night? Are you a ghost right now? Are you a ghost in a Brownie uniform?” My father, a policeman going to Seminary part time to be a Bap-

tist minister, cleared his throat. My mother waved her hand at him, and he got busy applying a neat layer of green beans to the bite of salad on his fork. I said I hadn’t been poisoned last night, or any night, but I wasn’t sure that meant I never would be. My parents exchanged the look that meant I might be smarter than my brother, and for that I would have eaten rat poison with a spoon straight from the box. I finished my green beans, helped with the dishes, and retired down the hallway to read Nancy Drew. After a while I heard my parents’ voices in their bedroom, not the words, but the tone and cadence. The sharp, hurried words were my mother’s, and I knew she was talking about me: Vera, Jr., a 10-year-old girl who refused to give up her lamb nightlight, who couldn’t be coaxed out of the kiddie pool to learn how to swim, who threw up in the car on the way to the doctor, never mind the fuss if a needle appeared. My father’s voice was slower, softer, and I imagined him counseling patience with me, charity with our neighbors. My mother must have told him she’d give both the old college try– they had jokes like that between them–because for a long time afterward, she let Vera say anything she wanted to say, without telling her that master criminals rarely wore bow ties and lugged discount vacuum cleaners door-to-door. She also let me give up on swimming “for now” and take tap instead, and never said that if I found myself in an ocean one day, a shuffle ball change was not the ability to float. Things changed the morning Vera met us in our carport as my mother, brother and I stepped out of the kitchen door. She was wearing her bumpy Chenille robe, carrying

a newspaper. “War,” she said. “War with Russia. The bomb will drop, it says right here the bomb will drop, and that will be the end.” My mother jerked me into the car by the elbow, so hard my own hand came up and hit me in the chest. She yelled at my brother to get in, and put the car in reverse. As we turned out of the driveway, I lifted my head. Vera was still at our house, not her own, holding the Fort Worth Star-Telegram close to her face like a shield. I hurt in two places, but I kept it to myself for a change. I had seen my mother’s eyes, in the instant before she got into the car. If she was afraid, there wasn’t anything to say. That night, at dinner, my father– obviously by request-- made a little speech to my brother and me about Christians not needing to be fearful because, for us, life on this earth would become life in Heaven. Into the silence, I said, “When? When does life in Heaven start?” and both my mother and brother snorted tiny, identical snorts, like cartoon pigs, and lowered their eyes. My father, whose war had been in the Pacific, put both hands on the table. “Not for a lifetime,” he said finally. “Just don’t worry, all right? That’s all I meant, that there’s nothing for you to worry about.” Vera didn’t come back to our house, not at Christmas when Frank brought over discount coupons for house slippers and talked to my father on the porch for a long time, not on New Year’s when my parents invited all of Fitzgerald Street to a potluck in honor of 1962. My mother didn’t cross the driveway to the Schmidt’s house either, but if the power went out, or it was stormy, she sent my father or brother see if Vera needed anything. Vera always sent them back with something for us, until one night, in a downpour,

Lynna Williams

Panhandler

Marty ran into our kitchen with four plastic rain hats in a paper bag. My mother spread them out on the table and stared at them, shaking the way she did in church when she didn’t want to laugh. After a minute, my father led her into their bedroom. I said, “Weird,” trying to get my brother to explain what was happening. But he just finished clearing the table, went into his room, and played the Righteous Brothers. He played them too loud, but my parents still didn’t come out again until morning. School was almost out for the year when my mother picked me up at S.S. Dillow one afternoon, and swung around to William James Junior High School for my brother. We were still half a street away from our house when we had to stop. A long flatbed truck was blocking our driveway, blocking three driveways, in fact. A crew of men was on the back of the truck, surrounding two halves of a giant steel box. When I looked past them, I saw Mr. Schmidt in the front yard and behind him, on the porch, his wife. Over a roar of sound, my brother named the yellow machinery filling the Schmidt’s driveway. My mother said a word so terrible I knew the world was ending, all right. We were cooked. That night, when my father came home, he spent some time in our yard, talking over the picket fence to the workmen. “Bomb shelter,” I heard him say when he came into the kitchen. “No kidding,” my mother said. “I thought it was Carnegie Hall.” he bomb shelter was buried deep in the backyard next door, a gentle rise and a patchwork of new sod marking its place. If I pushed the kitchen step-stool to the sink, and climbed up it to face

the window, it looked as though the Schmidt’s had decided to grow themselves a tiny hillside on a quiet street in Fort Worth. I decided the hill was verdant, a word I’d learned for the fourth grade spelling bee, but had never used in a real sentence. If I was on the stool when my mother came into the kitchen, she reminded me, mildly, that I could join the Army anytime and see the world. But she didn’t tell me to quit staring at the bomb shelter because she refused to use bomb shelter in a real sentence. All that summer when the other mothers called to pump her for information about the Schmidt’s, she changed the subject or hung up the phone. Some of the women tried again, showing up at our door with flowers or homemade cookies. My mother said them how glad she was to see them and then, when tea and cookies had been handed around, she asked for their support in reforming the PTA bylaws. Nobody stayed long. As long as I was up on the stool, the hill in the backyard was the least of what there was to see. Some people stood on the sidewalk opposite the Schmidt’s house, pointing and talking, without ever crossing the street. But other people marched right up to their front door: mothers pushing baby carriages, and neighbors bringing out-of-town company, and once, four ladies who had been playing bridge up the street. Vera greeted them dressed in what I thought of as church clothes, her blonde hair swept off her face with a heavy silver clip. She looked older that way, less like a girl afraid to go into the woods alone. When her visitors asked to see the bomb shelter,

Vera came out of the house, smiling, and led them around to the backyard. The shelter’s door was to the left side of the hill, and even if there was a man there to help, Vera leaned over and pulled it up herself, directing people onto the first steps of the ladder, one at a time. I saw their legs disappear, and then their arms, but I tried to jump down off the stool before their heads could follow them. It scared me: watching, waiting, holding my breath, timing my jump for the instant before the heads disappeared. But I did it as many times as I could get away with, and then one night I went to bed and woke up screaming. When my parents ran into my room, I was sitting up, my brown

was wailing, and my mother alternated between asking me to hush, please, and asking my father what kind of parent gave a bear with Ed’s past to a six-year-old, never mind a six-year-old who was a-f-r-a-i-d of every single thing under the s-u-n. My father, who hated being spelled at, suddenly braked for a light and flipped the bear over the backseat, right into my lap. Nobody said a word the rest of the way home. I was still crying, but there wasn’t much breath behind it, and my head kept slipping down onto my father’s shoulder. My mother turned around, and without a word began to work Ed from my arms. I tried to hold on, but she made a wet popping sound with her mouth when he came loose, and I was so startled I laughed. No force could hold my mother in a room when the Three Stooges were on TV; no joke that involved noises a human body made was funny to her. My father and I were both staring at her when she stood Ed up on the bed and helped him take three steps toward me, wave, and take three steps back to her. She used her right hand to make his head turn toward me, and then my father, making little sniffing noises through her nose, for Ed, because his nose was a button. “Ed’s a peach,” she said, and I waited for the rest of it, a snappy little parable about little girls and the bears who were braver than they were. What came instead was my mother’s hand, sliding Ed onto my pillow, where he could get fresh air all night long. “Close your eyes, honey,” she said to me. “Take deep breaths and close your eyes.” I did both, and my parents walked into the hallway. They

“But she didn’t tell me to quit staring at the bomb shelter because she refused to use bomb shelter in a real sentence.” bear, Ed, in a stranglehold under my chin. My father pulled me into his lap, and used a washcloth my mother brought from the bathroom to cool my face. “Tell us,” he said, and, crying, I explained that Ed couldn’t breathe in the dark. It took me a long time to get even that much out, because as hard as she was trying to look sympathetic–so hard her eyes were almost crossed–it was a fact that my mother was not Ed’s friend. I was six when Greg Pomerantz, a boy at our church, died of leukemia. Weeks after the funeral, his mother brought his racing-car toy box to Sunday School, and divided up what was inside. Ed rode home with us in the car, but in the front seat between my parents, who were arguing over whether to give him back to me, or swing by the donation box at the Salvation Army. I

Lynna Williams

Panhandler

were almost to their room when the fight started. I forgot about keeping Ed’s airwaves open and used him to cover the ear that wasn’t on my pillow. But I heard my mother say bomb shelter anyway. Clear as day.

he house was quiet when I woke up the next morning, which meant my father and brother were gone to work and to Scout Camp. I had tried sleep-away camp, too, but both times my parents had to drive to Oklahoma to get me after only two days. The last time my father, who believed sarcasm was unchristian, had suggested straight-faced that I streamline the process by having hysterics when my madras duffle came out of the closet, before anybody got into the car. My mother was in the kitchen when I went looking for her, and she made cinnamon toast and watched me eat it. When I was done, she said to come on, we were going for a walk. Outside, I turned toward school, and the park next to it, but my mother shook her head. We were at the Schmidt’s front door before I believed that was where we were going. I opened my mouth, and my mother rang the doorbell. Vera answered, already smiling; when she saw us, she dropped her head, so that the smile was just for me. My mother said we were sorry to bother her, but if she had a minute, we would like to see the bomb shelter. She said it so matter-of-factly that both Vera and I nodded, before I understood we were going into a hole in the ground, every part of us: legs, arms, heads. I started to cry, which made Vera stop smiling and come outside. My mother said she knew we were imposing, but she thought looking inside the bomb shelter would help me.

“You think now she is afraid of the shelter?” Vera said. “Not of what is outside the shelter?” There was something in Vera’s voice I couldn’t place, but I thought she was glad we were there, glad that my mother was like everyone else now. Next to me my mother’s shoulders lifted, and she said again we were sorry to be a bother. Vera waited. After a minute, she told us she would be glad to take us to the backyard another day, but this morning she needed to get some grocery shopping done. “We’ll come again then,” my mother said, and poked me in the back. I told Vera thank you, and we moved down the steps. We were on the sidewalk when two women and a little boy walked past us to knock on Vera’s door; she looked right at us as she came outside and took her visitors around to the backyard. My mother said it was such a beautiful day we should take a real walk. We were stopped at the Coleman’s yard, admiring their gardenias, when I told her we didn’t need to go back to Vera’s. “Mrs. Schmidt,” my mother said automatically. She told me she thought I’d stop worrying if I went inside the bomb shelter and saw it was nothing there to be afraid of. No way was I telling my mother I was afraid of the steps to the bomb shelter. “We read about bomb shelters in school. We saw a picture of one. It was just a little room, with a generator for light, and some cots, and some shelves with food and water.” My mother looked at me as though I were level-headed, which startled us both. “That’s exactly right,” she said. “It doesn’t sound that scary, does it?” I shook my head. I thought she

Lynna Williams

Panhandler

probably wanted to quit while she was ahead, but when we sat down in the bucket swings at the park, she asked if I wanted to talk some more about the bomb shelter--not what it was like inside, but why the Schmidt’s wanted it in their backyard. It came to me that she was asking me, for the millionth time, to tell her what I was really afraid of. I pushed backward in the swing, and dragged my tennis shoes in the dirt coming the other way. We had had this same talk about electrical sockets, and spiders, and the junior girls’ cabin at camp, about singing in the choir, and big dogs, and field trips, and the dark. But this time I really thought about the answer to my mother’s question: dreaming of heads disappearing down the bomb shelter steps was baby stuff, but Vera in her blue robe, Vera announcing the end of the world, that was something else. It made me feel grown-up to be afraid of something that huge. It was like being at the Grand Canyon two summers before, when I had refused to get out of the car because I was afraid of all the bugs flying around. When my father had enough of talking with me about the glories of God’s creations through my rolled-up window, he pulled me out of the car and spun me around to face the canyon. I didn’t say a word about bugs for the rest of the trip. Now I watched my mother in her swing, and wondered how she was going to tell me the end of the world was nothing to be scared about. I thought about her walking Ed down my quilt, and making cinnamon toast, and taking me next door to see the bomb shelter. I wanted to give her something. “I might want to take swimming again,” I said. “Do you think there’ll be a class that starts this late?”

My mother said she would find out, and I told her I needed a costume for the tap recital. I thought I’d wait to say that it had to be a costume of a building because the recital was a salute to American cities and I was the only girl tall enough to be a skyscraper. She slid out of her swing and stepped behind mine. “Think about flying,” she said, and gave me a push. Houston was the biggest city I had ever been in, and I had never flown on a plane. I was probably going to be afraid when it finally happened– but I closed my eyes and let her take me as high as I could go.

had been in fifth grade for six weeks when my father called home from the cop shop at dinnertime to say the President was on TV. My mother told him she loved him, and left the food uncovered on the table. She let my brother and I take our plates and sit on the floor too close to the television, without once telling us to move or we’d be blind by high school. I scooted back by the couch anyway, but I could have kept right on going out the front door. No one was paying any attention. I watched my mother and brother, and they watched the President, who we hadn’t voted for, and didn’t trust, but not because he was Catholic. When he had finished speaking, my brother asked a few questions to prove he was the oldest child, and my mother asked me if I understood what was happening. “Cuba,” I said, thinking that was a solid one-word answer. My mother explained it to me anyway: the Russians had put missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy wanted the missiles removed, and what the United States was going to do with our ships in the waters around Cuba was called a blockade. My brother went to get a World Atlas, as if Ex-

tra Credit was actually possible in the home, and my mother told me we could have ice cream sundaes when she’d finished cleaning the kitchen. When I didn’t offer to help, she asked why I wasn’t outside getting some fresh air. Because it was night, I thought, but I followed her into the kitchen and stepped out the back door. I hadn’t been afraid of the dark, really afraid, for a while, but I didn’t spend a lot of time in the backyard after sunset either. The air was cooler than I’d expected, and I hugged myself walking toward our swing set. There were kitchen lights on up and down the street, and I wished I could see inside, could know if everyone else was afraid, or getting ready to have ice cream like us. I was headed back inside to report there was nothing to do in the dark when I saw the Schmidt’s back door open. Vera came out, and then her husband appeared in the doorway. He was calling to her, telling her to come back inside, but she didn’t turn around. I could see Mr. Schmidt clearly by the kitchen light, but now that she was in the middle of the yard, Vera was only a shape and a shadow. She was going into the bomb shelter, and I didn’t wait for the door to open. I ran. Inside the house my mother and brother were still in front of the TV. The President was talking about Cuba, missiles in Cuba, and America’s responsibility to the rest of the world. “Go to bed, honey,” my mother said when she finally saw me, but when I slid down in front of her chair, she didn’t tell me again. She was leaning forward, one leg tucked under her skirt, as if she hadn’t told me a million times how ladies sit, as if she and John F. Kennedy were alone in the room. It took my brother dropping his his-

Lynna Williams

Panhandler

tory book to break the spell. “Go to bed, both of you,” she said, and my brother gave me a look that said, Not now. In my room, he asked me if I understood what was happening. I shook my head yes, because I knew if I didn’t, he’d explain it to me. When he said good night, I took my Brownie uniform out of the closet to wear to school, and got on top of the covers with my clothes still on, trying to think what I would want to be wearing when the world ended. I wouldn’t be allowed to wear heels for another two year, so that was out. If the world ended that week, my choices would be school clothes from 8:30 a.m-3 p.m., shorts and a t-shirt if I was home playing after school, or flannel pajamas if I had already been sent to bed. If the world ended on Sunday, I would go out in a red a-line dress and a fitted jacket with fat, black trim. The trim was called soutache, which I hoped to use in a sentence someday. After the President was on TV, two more families, one down the street and another three blocks over, ordered bomb shelters. I saw Mr. Schmidt in his car once or twice, but not Vera. I didn’t let myself think of her down in the ground. My father was still working nights, but he called home more often. The TV stayed on all the time, and on the phone my mother called Walter Cronkite by his first name. My mother was afraid, I knew because she never asked if I was. At school, girls who started to cry were allowed to go to the nurse’s office. I was not one of them, even though Mr. Shipp kept walking down my row during Social Studies to spot check my face for moisture. At Wednesday night prayer meeting, a bunch of kids went down the aisle to re-dedicate their lives to Jesus. I

didn’t go there either. I didn’t tell anyone, but it seemed too much like going next door to Vera’s, being nice to her because she had figured out a way to save herself. We had bomb drills every day after lunch, ducking under our seats on command from the teacher. I was always one of the last ones down because I was watching everyone else try to disappear under their desks. I didn’t believe a bomb wouldn’t find us there. A couple of days later, my mother was late picking me up. I was walking up and down the street in front of the school when she honked and pulled over. My brother wasn’t in the car, and she told me he had gone home with a friend, and my father had to work late again. The world wasn’t going to end if the four of us weren’t together, and I relaxed against the seat. I was harvesting a last bit of fingernail, when my mother slapped her hand against the steering wheel. “Ladies Night Out,” she said. “Do you know what that is?” “We’re going somewhere?” She nodded. “Downtown, and we can eat at the Picadilly and maybe shop a little.” We didn’t eat out very often, and it was never just the two of us. My father kept the car radio tuned to an all-news station, and my mother fiddled with the dial before she turned it on. The song playing was about young love, sweet love, and she laughed at the horrified expression on my face. All the way downtown she told me the story about going to church with my father all her life, but not falling in love until he came home from the war. For the first time I wanted to know about

the war, not the love that came after it, but I didn’t know how to ask. In the line at the Picadilly Cafeteria, I pointed at anything that looked good–baked chicken and dressing and two kinds of salad we didn’t eat at home--and my mother didn’t say a word about what it cost. After we ate, we walked across the street to Leonard’s Department Store. I tried on big picture hats in front of a mirror, and my mother bought me a package of Paisley barrettes I couldn’t wear unless my hair grew out. I didn’t tell her that I had figured out that the only good thing about the end of the world would be that I would never have to get a Pixie haircut again. The store was open late, and it was starting to

her mother to come over. Above us a bell sounded that made me jump, and an announcement that the store would be closing in 15 minutes. I started toward the escalator, but my mother caught me. Everything was too bright, and she looked smaller than I wanted her to be. “We have a minute,” she said, and shook her head at how that sounded. She went over to a fake living room, filled with furniture she said was called Danish Modern. She walked around each piece, a sofa and a coffee table, two end tables and a book case, before she raised her hand at the salesman behind the counter. When he didn’t come, she went over to him, fishing in her purse for her checkbook on the way. D r i v ing home, my mother told me we had needed new living room furniture forever, and there was no time like the present. I thought she might be crying, but I didn’t want to think about what it meant if she was. I told her the furniture was pretty, and everything I could remember about the principle exports of Denmark. She told me to go to my room while we were still in the driveway, and in a few minutes I heard her on the phone with my father. “Tommy,” she said, “Oh, Tommy.”

“My mother reached around and took my hand, and we didn’t stop until we were in the furniture department across the store.” get crowded; I watched other kids as they went by, wondering if their parents were afraid to go home. We took the escalator to the top floor, and my mother waited for me to jump on and off four tijmes, without telling me to hurry. There was a wall of televison sets opposite the escalator, and a crowd was gathering in front. My mother put her hand in my back and steered me past people, but not fast enough to miss the news. Russian ships were closing in on Cuba. An elderly woman who looked like my first grade teacher walked by us in tears. My mother reached around and took my hand, and we didn’t stop until we were in the furniture department across the store. A man behind the counter was talking too loud on the phone, telling someone named Judy not to worry, to put the kids to bed and ask

Lynna Williams

Panhandler

he world didn’t end, and Vera came out of the bomb shelter. After Christmas, my mother took a job at Monning’s Department Store without saying that she was helping to support our new living room furniture. We were dressed for church one Sunday, eating breakfast together and watching the rain pelt down

outside for the third straight day, when Vera called. My mother said hello as if the two of them talked all the time; she told Vera she was sure everything was all right, and hung up. My father looked a question at her, and she shook her head. “Frank’s away,” she said, and told my brother to go get our raincoats and umbrellas. After church, I was in my room taking off my good clothes when I heard my father yell “Jesus!” from the kitchen. My father did not take the Lord’s name in vain. I ran in the hallway in my slip, and collided with my brother, who stuck out a hand to keep me from falling. My mother came out of her bedroom, and the three of us ran down the hallway. My father was at the kitchen window. “Look,” he said to my mother. “Will you look at that?” She edged past him, her hand cupped over her eyes. “What is it?” my brother said. “What’s happening?” “The rain,” my mother said. “The top of the bomb shelter’s is out of the ground.” My father was already lifting his raincoat off the back of a chair when he said we should see about helping Vera, but he was waiting for my mother. “You go,” she said. “She’ll feel better if it’s just you. You didn’t tell her it was nothing to worry about.” My father told her she couldn’t have known this would happen, and anyway, we couldn’t have stopped the rain. From the window, my brother said, “Where will it go? Will it come into our yard?” My parents were talking to each other. They didn’t stop even when I opened the carport door and stepped outside. Outside the cover of the carport was a curtain of rain, everything shimmery and grey. I

walked to the concrete’s edge, and stood looking at Frank and Vera’s backyard. The hillside was gone. In its place a corner of the steel box was tilted to one side, mud and broken sod everywhere around it. “Honey, go inside now,” my father said behind me. I went slowly, thinking all the time that I had seen something miraculous, but without a miracle, something like the end of the world.

Lynna Williams

Panhandler

Jeff Parker

Jeff Parker is the author of the novel Ovenman (Tin House Books) and The Back of the Line (DECODE), a collection of stories and images in collaboration with artist William Powhida. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Hobart, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Walrus, and other pubs. He teaches at the University of Toronto and is the program director of Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Doug Moon

Doug Moon is a graduate student at the University of West Florida where he edits Panhandler and teaches English composition. His thesis, a cycle of short stories, is forever forthcoming. Doug Moon: Your novel Ovenman has the mantra of the pizza restaurant “make food, not war” which cues you into a vivid amalgam of all these different backdrops: the food service industry, the Gulf War, the skateboarding scene, and the music scene. Which one of these came first while writing? Jeff Parker: The landscape of the pizza restaurant came first. That’s what I was trying to do. I was trying to find a story in that milieu and then worked on it for a little bit. My process is one of – just start writing, having pretty much no idea what I’m writing about except for maybe a setting or a character or a sound or a voice and seeing what develops around it. DM: So did the protagonist When Thinfinger develop naturally from that setting? JP: Well, kind of. For me, I didn’t know that was his name even when I started. I don’t remember exactly what I had. I probably just had one of those lines like “I am a motherfucking skateboarder.” And I just started working with that, trying to write little scenes in the restau-

interview

rant and figure out the sound of the character, how a character talks. Just do that by vicious editing and revising of your own stuff, and you start to get an idea. With the name – I changed the name probably twenty times until I just found one that I liked that seemed to make sense with what was beginning to develop in the story. So my process, I think, is a real organic one in that respect. In the end, it can lead to problems, that kind of process, because, for instance, there are writers who are very structural and they start with outlines of their whole pieces, and the consequence of that is a novel ends up feeling really ordered. It does all the right things in all the right places whereas in my book the plot doesn’t really get going until page 90 when he wakes up and finds the money in the pizza box. So that’s sort of one of the flaws that comes out of that kind of process. You just sort of build and build and wait for things to happen, and they do in their own time. If that doesn’t sound too new age-y. DM: [laughing] Was it a conscious decision to set the novel during the Gulf War, or did that arise from writing about the pizza restaurant Jeff Parker

Panhandler

environment? JP: Well, I started writing it a long time ago. A version of it was my graduate thesis. It was a lot closer, first of all. It was much more natural for it to be that time. It seems now in 2007 to be a much more deliberate move than it was at the time. Because of the timing of it all, it definitely impacts the story like if the timing weren’t thus a slogan for the restaurant like “make food, not war” wouldn’t really work there. Or it would only work as a sort of funny line or quirky line whereas hopefully it begins to build some thematic unity. DM: Published now, do you feel that the circumstances of the novel might be easily transposed from the background of the Gulf War to Gulf War II? JP: Well, as I got deeper into this thing I started to—because I would be technically a little younger than this character is—I started thinking back to when I was in high school when the first Gulf War was on and sort of thinking about what that did to my psyche and what that did to other people who I knew. There are

basically two areas that came up. The first was that lots of people I knew—it was a really trendy kind of thing or very common thing throughout the 80s but even more so in the late 80s and the early 90s that people would just go into the army reserves or go into the army so that they could pay to go to college. Didn’t even cross your mind that you would go fight in a war. You didn’t even begin to think about it when you were 17 or 18 years old. So the first prominent thing that came to mind was, OK, so people are having to redefine this idea. All of a sudden what was a move to get some college tuition isn’t just that. It has some more grand consequences. And the second thing was that you have to figure out how you feel about that. Which for me, I was a degenerate redneck growing up in the woods in Tallahassee, Florida, and I didn’t even know, to be quite honest, like what a Jewish person was. I had a vague idea, but I had all kinds of retardations. Let alone had I ever really thought at the age of 16 or 17 what my moral compass would tell me to do in a situation like the first Iraq war or the second Iraq war, you know? So all of a sudden you have some pretty—I guess whenever any war comes along you have people trying to figure out where they stand on issues that they never before thought about. All of a sudden your consciousness is trying to sort out an issue that’s much larger than, say, your particular popularity at the time in whatever high school you happen to be in. So I forget even why I went on that long tangent but basically what I was getting at is these are the kinds of issues I was trying to transpose onto these characters. These are the kinds of things they’re trying to figure out. When’s very much trying to organize some

kind of ethos by trial and error, and yet another thing that he’s trying to he’s failing and he’s figuring some sort out, and he’s very uncomfortthings out for himself. able with that one. He’s much more uncomfortable with that one than DM: About that ethos—at times with, say, the war because it’s much the novel seems to triumph the po- more tactile or much more in the sition of ovenman and other times, moment. critique it, and When is trying to figure that out himself. To what ex- DM: Do you think it’d be fair to pin tent do you feel Ovenman is a cri- the wandering aimlessness of When tique of the food service industry? at times to the scene that he’s develOf a restaurant job? oping from? The local life in Central Florida, the skateboarding culture, JP: You mean literally the position or even the restaurant job? of operating the oven? Or you just mean that as emblematic of— JP: You mean to find some cause and effect there? That’s an interDM: Well, to start, how do you feel esting question. I don’t think so. about the position of ovenman? Doesn’t seem that way to me. Not necessarily. JP: So I worked in a lot of restaurants, and you meet a lot of people DM: I’ve noticed a lot of intertexthere with very different work eth- tuality in your work: the post-it ics. But the point is that people who notes in Ovenman and the illustrawork in restaurants have work eth- tions in the graphic novel The Back ics, you know? So people who might of the Line offer a play between these look like slackers on the outside texts, the images and post-its, and aren’t necessarily slackers in that what’s going on in the narrative. Is way you might traditionally think this something that you are particuof them. And I don’t think that the larly invested in or something that character When is. He maybe sets naturally occurs from the narrative his goals low. But there’s nothing re- circumstances? ally wrong with that. [laughing] JP: I think it just kind of organically DM: Right, and he certainly has happens. Again going back to that an ethic, and when he becomes the whole thing I was talking about, manager of the restaurant, that’s the organic process, I forget exactly when that ethic is endangered. That when the post-its came in, but I reprovides the most moral quandaries member I really liked them when for him. they came in. I think I was trying to sort out his membership in the JP: Right, and that’s also in a way band or his place in the band, and mirroring this—he’s suddenly in- I was going to try him out as being vested with power. Not only power the singer of the band. I just put a in the general sense in that he’s el- post-it note in his pocket and had evated in this stratus of workers in him write down some lyric. And the world, but all of a sudden he can then I started thinking about it fire one of his friends, hire one of and the post-it note made a lot of his friends, or hire a totally hot girl sense to me because what is a more with a bellybutton piercing. So that’s clear signifier of cubicle culture, evJeff Parker

Panhandler

erything he would be completely against, than a post-it note? So then I was just working backwards and trying to make those post-its which seemed to me to embody this conflict that this character had. How to make them intrinsic to him. Then eventually I came to the move that when he passes out he writes himself post-its. So all that stuff I think kind of happens organically: just trying things out, seeing what works, and what seems to make sense on some level. When something works, allowing the story to change or working backwards to justify it.

lot because while it’s sitting in the drawer, it’s either still calling you back to it or it’s not. If it’s not, then you just don’t go back. But it kept calling me back, and when I finally pulled it out a couple of years ago, about two-and-a-half years ago now, to work on it again, I felt like I had a much clearer perspective. So I rewrote most of it, and I think it comes out much more supportable.

uation if I wanted to continue to be a writer. One of my friends who had worked on a lot of short stories for a few years, even if a couple of them didn’t work, he had a stack, so he was sending them out, getting them published. So I basically went back to work in some restaurants, did some jobs in computers, did some adjunct teaching, whatever I could and just tried to get better. And then after grad school you have a support DM: Having gone through the network. People who you can turn workshop process in school, do you to and say, hey, what do you think feel that a lot of that criticism you about this? That’s when it becomes still recall while writing now, years maybe even more valuable. After after? the fact.

DM: You said Ovenman developed from your thesis. Was any construc- JP: Some of it. It’s strange what DM: I actually Googled you and tive criticism particularly helpful in sticks and what doesn’t. The prob- found you did some work in hyperdeveloping the text as well. Are novel that you there any obstatook with you? cles having that sort of work JP: Oh yeah,tons. published? Are One of the best reads I ever got on it lem for me is that I went in really there stories limited to or excluded was from one of my professors who young. The work I was doing wasn’t from that genre as opposed to othsaid, you know, throughout the first deserving of the high level of criti- ers? half, my interest level was up here, cism it was getting. Had I been furand in the second half, my interest ther along—and I don’t necessarily JP: Well, I’ve kind of left that world level was down here. It’s just the mean just in age. I was young in age, because I was very disappointed most general comment, but it ended but I was also really young in think- with a lot of the work that was being up being the most helpful. So I ba- ing about my writing. Some people done. I do think there is some intersically just threw away the second were there who were my age were esting work being done, but I don’t half and rewrote it. Because you’re much older in thinking about their know if that brief moment which a writer as well, right? You’re writ- writing. And I think they got more is referred to as hypertext fiction ing some stuff. So you kind of have out of it. I got a lot out of work- which to me seems to be the time a sense when things aren’t working, ing with certain people. But I could period between like 1996 and 2002 but sometimes you can’t always just have gotten a lot more out of it if I or something—I don’t know if those quit there. Sometimes you have to had—I’m putting this back on me is will ever work. None of them ever really push something that’s not what I’m doing. I should have gone seemed to be like really working to working. With this particular piece, to Peru for three years and sold weed me. It’s an interesting concept, right, that’s where I was on it in 1999. I on a beach [laughing] and then gone because all of a sudden here is esknew I needed to do more work on to grad school and I probably would sentially this new medium on which it, but I just didn’t know where to go have gotten a lot more out of it. In- one could work on a narrative or with it at the time. I knew I need- stead, you know, I went in, I wrote a lyrical, literary form. So you had lots ed to rewrite that second half. So I novel, because that’s what everyone of experimentation going on and just threw it in a drawer and started said you had to do, and I got out and experimentation is good, but I think writing short stories for about three the novel didn’t work. It was this, a there’s a point where you realize or four years. But you find out a version of this. So I was in a bad sit- that the work that’s being done in

“... he said, you know, I write about love, what’s more experimental than that?”

Jeff Parker

Panhandler

these experiments somehow—these experiments aren’t bearing fruit. So what I think is really interesting and what I think will be the outgrowth of the kinds of thinking that a lot of people did with regard to hypertext fiction will be in some form of videogame. I mean already now you’re hearing all the time even in the popular press how videogame screenwriters are becoming more and more—you know it used to be ten years ago the script for a videogame would be like “NEW GAME” and “GAME OVER,” but now they have videogames that have significant scripts and there’s now a guild of videogame writers and whatnot. There are people like these guys who do this videogame called Façade, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that. But it’s this group out of Portland, Oregon. It’s a really interesting piece. If you’ve ever read this Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” it’s kind of like that story if it were done as a videogame.

kinds of things. DM: Beyond the nonlinear narrative, is there any experimental work going on right now that you find interesting, that you think has the potential to bear fruit? JP: Do you mean in the electronic medium or literature in general? DM: Literature in general.

JP: That’s what was so interesting about hypertext is it just seems like there’s—I mean, what else can you do in print fiction? I don’t know. There have been periods of intense experimentation throughout the 20th century. Like the Oulipo in France have done all kinds of interesting experiments, everything from writing whole novels without the letter E to using computer processes to parse out literary texts. I don’t know. I mean, hypertext was interesting because it provided a real opportunity to go into some new frontiers. But I don’t know, maybe I DM: Is Façade where you sort of en- sound kind of pessimistic. Maybe I ter the apartment of two people— don’t read a lot of experimental fiction anymore. I used to read a lot of JP: Yeah, that’s it. It’s very primitive experimental fiction. [laughing] but the developers—a guy named Andrew Stern does a lot of the pro- DM: Fair enough. Is there anything gramming. He basically invented that you’re working on right now this kind of application that’s sup- that you’d want to share— posed to generate dialogue. It has lots of limitations in Façade, but it JP: Wait a second though. Let me also does lots of interesting things not leave that. I answered that questoo. There are numerous different tion really poorly. One of my teachoutcomes depending on how you ers was a great guy named Arthur behave at their house. They can de- Flowers. He taught this workshop cide to end their marriage or decide at Syracuse called Experimental to come back together. The context Fiction. And he’s a literary bluesof it is when you walk in they are man. His prose, he works it over and in the middle of marital strife. So I over again. It takes him ten years to think that’s really interesting, and write a novel. But when it’s done, I’m following closely where that’s his prose literally sings. It just sings going. I’d like to work on those to you. He has a book called Another Jeff Parker

Panhandler

Good Loving Blues. And I remember when we were in the Experimental Fiction class, he said one time—and he wasn’t talking about formally or what he does with language, he said, you know, I write about love, what’s more experimental than that? [laughing] What was so interesting to me about that statement is he is writing in an experimental form. But he doesn’t even really acknowledge that. It’s more that there’s some other core that he’s interested in. What ends up being experimental about it in the sense of literary experimentation is incidental to the thing that really interests him about writing. It’s nothing new, but the age-old criticism of experimental writing is that its heart drops out. Puzzles aren’t known for being very emotional things. That’s what a lot of experimental fiction especially amounts to. It’s not that I’m against those kinds of things, but Ben Marcus said it really well in the introduction to the new Anchor anthology. He said, I think what contemporary fiction needs to do is it needs to synthesize the innovative and the heartfelt impulse. I think he’s calling for some kind of middle ground of traditional and craft and also innovation. However a particular writer is innovative. DM: Is there anything you’re working on right now? JP: Well, I just finished up a short story collection, a regular one, without an artist involved. So I’m going to be sending that one around. And I’m trying to put together a novel, a new one. I’ve been making notes for a few years, but there’s not so much of it existing right now, unfortunately. DM: I would love to end the inter-

view on the word “unfortunately.” So we should do it there. JP: Cool. Let’s do it. Feel free to insert the word “unfortunately” anywhere else. DM: That’s all I have. I really appreciate it. JP: Thanks for taking the time to read the book, unfortunately.

Jeff Parker

Panhandler

or a moment, waking up after this caliber of drinking is like birth. There ís all this nothing. Then my eyes pop open. The Florida sun hangs there in the open window, blinding me. My hand finds a yellow Post-it stuck to my elbow on which I seem to have written, You dont no much. But I do know something: I’ve lost the Haro with the kinky triangular frame. I can’t really even say know. More like got a feeling. Like, I’ve got a feeling my bike, my long-range vehicle of choice, is gone. Like, I’ve got a feeling I’ve been fired from Ken’s Barbie-Q, where I’ve spent five mornings a week for the past year as Butcher/ Pit Cook, quartering chicken, yanking out pork bones, spraying green stuff off racks of ribs with bleach water before splitting them. I’ve got a feeling me and Blaise went out to celebrate my premiere firement. I’ve got a feeling we celebrated. I sit up and find myself polka-dotted with yellow Post-its, some of them blank and some of them scribbled on, nearly illegible markings that are trying to tell me something, but it’s hard to know what. I take one from the top of my foot that seems to be a doodle of a U-lock with the words vehicular misplaisement underneath. My spelling, already bad, goes downhill fast on nights like last. A crumpled note is tangled up in my chest hair, longer than a standard Post-it, and on closer inspection I see that it is a yellow notice to appear and not a Post-it at all. Two boxes are checked: “Disorderly Conduct” and “Open Container.” Below this, in the comments section: Subject was witnessed kicking around city property (pylons) in the east wing of City Lot P with a half-full can of Natural Light. Subject then urinated on said pylons, the newer hard plastic ones. Subject informed me that the line inside the bar was too long and “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t hate orange.” I encouraged Subject to head home. These are my fourth and fifth misdemeanors and will no doubt mean trouble. Last time I went before a judge—that time to take care of over two K in parking tickets, a figure he dropped to five hundred, a figure I’ve yet to pay—he said to me, “Son, this represents a serious caricature flaw.” His Southern made certain words come out more syllabled. “Yes, sir,” I agreed, considering myself lucky. When your arms are covered in faded blobs of green tattoo and you have been unsuccessful in locating your single long-sleeved shirt and you discover crust in your eye at the very moment the judge demands—his chin pulsing—to know just what type of citizen it is you preport to be, you expect much worse things than tries to your caricature. —from Ovenman

Jeff Parker

Panhandler

Natasha Trethewey - Eric Trethewey - Allan Peterson

Jeff Parker - Lynna Williams - Bradley Armstrong