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FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART
O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y
JEFF W. BENS
THE SEA CREST SEAN FINUCANE TONER
NIGHT DIVING GRACE MARCUS
GROVE OF THE PATRIARCHS author profile
PAUL LISICKY
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O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y
CONTENTS FEATURES 3 8 10 16 17 18 20
The Sea Crest (fiction). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeff W. Bens Night Diving (non-fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sean Finucane Toner Grove of the Patriarchs (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grace Marcus Paul Lisicky (author profile). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jessica Jeffers The White Deer (memoir excerpt). . . . . . . . . . . Paul Lisicky Good Beginnings (column) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aimee Labrie Quickpicks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marc Schuster
3 Rittenhouse Square by Nancy Barch. Nancy is a Philadelphia-born, mixed media artist and Vice President of the American Watercolor Society, New York. Nancy is most noted for her images of Philadelphia. Her work is in many commercial and private collections. 8
Flight of the Spirit by Donald Stephens. Donald has been in the Delaware Valley and Burlington County NJ area since he graduated from the Art and Design High School in Manhattan. He went on to study at Burlington County College and the Tyler School of the Arts. Learn more at www.facebook.com/deesteezepro or www.artwanted.com/deesteezepro
POETRY 5 6 11 12 13 14 15
Tying Flies for a Friend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Grant Clauser philada blues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Paul Siegell Slicing it Open . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Dilruba Ahmed Early Rising on a Fall Morning . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Grant Clauser Esopus Spitzenberg, 1927 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Gwen Wille Atlantic City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Jean YeoJin Sung Waiting for October 8th . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Wilson Roberts
PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG Publisher/Fiction Editor Carla Spataro Publisher/Managing Editor Christine Weiser
Brandon Hartman Jessica Jeffers Amy Kates Nicole Pasquarello Alyssa Songsiridej
Essay Editor Julia MacDonnell Chang
Contest Coordinator Jamie Elfrank
Associate Fiction Editor Marc Schuster
Editorial Assistants Jamie Elfrank Diana Restifo
Poetry Editor Courtney Bambrick Director of Development Sharon Sood Production Manager Derek Carnegie Web Design Loic Duros Board of Directors Kerri Schuster Mitchell Sommers Christine Furtek Michael Ritter 2
Interns Angela DeMott Adam Gianforcaro Samantha Green
Editorial Board Jackie Cassidy, fiction Christine Cavalier, poetry Liz Dolan, poetry Sandy Farnan, non-fiction Melissa Foster, fiction Marylou Fusco, fiction Adam Gianforcaro, poetry Pat Green, poetry Joanne Green, fiction Samantha Green, fiction Steven Harbold, fiction Brandon Hartman, poetry Marleen Hustead, fiction Jessica Jeffers, fiction Matt Jordan, non-fiction Amy Kates, fiction Cecily Kellogg, poetry Aimee LaBrie, fiction Nathan Long, fiction
10 Warm Autumn Sun by Madeleine Kelly. Madeleine’s work can be found in private collections throughout the U.S., including in a collection at the University of Pennsylvania New Bolton Center. Her work has also exhibited widely throughout the region. Find more about the artist at www.madeleinekelly.com 14 Spring-Early Summer by Pauline Houston McCall. Pauline is the director and founder of women artist collective, “Women Holler.” She is also an art instructor at the Perkins Center for the Arts, a muralist, activist, vocalist, and children's book author.
Cover Art: Portrait Study in Orange by Jessica Barber. Jessica E. Barber is a mixed media printmaker originally from South Central Pennsylvania. Her intuitive approach to the creative process includes the use of monotype and lithograph printmaking, pastels, and painting. A graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, she is currently a resident of Marcus Hook, PA and is represented by Twenty-Two Gallery in Center City. More information can be found at www.phillyart77. carbonmade.com.
Andrea Lynch, fiction Walt Maguire, fiction George McDermott, poetry Julie Odell, fiction John Shea, poetry & non-fiction Greg Silber, fiction Mitchell Sommers, fiction Janice Wilson Stridick, fiction Valeria Tsygankova, poetry Michelle Wittle, fiction
Philadelphia Stories is a non-profit literary magazine that publishes the finest literary fiction, poetry and art from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and distributes free of charge to a wide demographic throughout the region. Our mission is to develop a community of writers, artists and readers through the magazine, and through education programs such as writer’s workshops, reading series and other affordable professional development programs for emerging writers and artists. Philadelphia Stories is a 501c3 and is managed completely by a staff of volunteers. To support Philadelphia Stories and the local arts, please visit www.philadelphiastories.org to become a member today!
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Rittenhouse Square by Nancy Barch © 2010 ’d moved to Atlantic City to take care of my father. My sister Daphne had called from Tampa Bay to say that his number was up. “What are we going to do?” she asked me, like we talked all the time, like we was a thing. “How bad?” “He wouldn’t say.” I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Jillian had left me. I was living in a basement apartment in Bensonhurst whose only window looked out to a dry cleaner’s vent. She’d run off with the guy, Nick, who’d fix our car; they sparred together at the zendo. Jillian was a brown belt. She’d go to the zendo morn-
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ing and night, and suddenly our car was never in better shape. I was most likely gambling, as I gambled every day. I always had a bet on. That was my fix, my way of getting through this life that is supposed to bring happiness before the inevitable fold. I’d been in Gamblers Anonymous for six months before my sister’s phone call. We didn’t talk much, which is to say we didn’t talk at all. Daphne had run off when she was just seventeen with an Iranian guy who sold jewelry. The guy, Danny—Danny! I remember my father saying, What kind of a name for an Arab is that? Danny?!—was more than twice her
age, and he took her to Tampa Bay where they’ve been happy ever since. They go on cruises and have Danny’s mother over for dinners, and the last time I had seen Daphne—maybe four years earlier when I was in the middle of my master’s thesis on Joyce, Yeats, and Synge, and an Anaheim Raceway horsebetting binge—she had told me they were thinking of children. I don’t know what happened with her plans. I didn’t follow up. There was my teaching assistant money from the English department going to football and basketball and the track, there was a short, six-month bout with drinking, and then Jillian’s pregnancy, our marriage, and the
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miscarriage. And then the move back East where we lived with Jillian’s mother—herself addicted to mah jong and juicing— and the trips to Atlantic City to visit my old man (who’d been born there, of all places, and who’d moved back to be near the casinos). And the jobs I could not keep—men’s suits, ice delivery, shoes— and then the final blow, where I found myself washing dishes in the back of a Brighton Beach Ukrainian discotheque. The owner’s brother had busted one of my shins and had said he’d bust the other if I didn’t make him back the money I’d borrowed to put on a sure thing. For better, for worse, my father did not survive long after I moved in. He was taken care of by the guy, Mr. Stottlemyre, who lived across the hall. The whole building, The Sea Crest, was out of another era. No one in the building was under 70, except the blacks who,
Mr. Stottlemyre said, were in there either on behalf of the state government or the Atlantic City Improvement Council. “You can’t blame the shvartzes,” Mr. Stottlemyre said, running a mop around my father’s baseboards. “Where else are they going to go?” Stottlemyre was 81. He’d lived in Toronto and then moved to Providence and eventually he’d ended up at the Sea Crest, floor seven, just across from my father and the room that had the lady with all the cats. Stottlemyre was in costume jewelry. That’s how he put it, I’m in costume jewelry, such that I checked to see if he was wearing it. He told me how Providence was the costume jewelry capital of the world, and when he said it his eyes bulged wide and the veins stood out from his neck with conviction. He’d flail his arms to make a point, and then sit in a chair and say nothing. He smoked constantly,
whatever he could borrow. He’d escaped the Nazis with his brother, who’d died packing fish in Toronto. And he was a member of the Atlantic City Polar Bear Club. Somehow, he’d gotten my old man to join. Every Sunday, at eight in the morning, they plunged in and swam. My mother died when I was twelve, so my father had long been a widower. He never remarried. He worked in the train yards for the MTA, the big yard outside of Bensonhurst. I remember him always fixing things and always working. I went to St. Stephen’s in Bay Ridge and my sister to St. Mary’s, and when I’d get home she’d be out with a boyfriend and my father would be out at the yard, though I soon understood that he wasn’t working at the yard as much as drinking. Drinking killed him. He had cancer of the bladder, and because he didn’t get it looked at until too late—and he’d have
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS It’s hard to believe an entire year has passed since we announced our fifth anniversary! As we enter year six of publication, we can reflect on another good year. Why? One word: members. Thanks to member support, we were able to take part in the following events since the last issue: Free Library Book Festival: We distributed thousands of free magazines to readers both local and national, to both current fans and new ones. Launch of PROMPTED: This fourth title from PS Books is an anthology from the students of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio and features both established and emerging writers from the area. Workshops for writers: We continued to offer affordable workshops for writers, including fiction workshops from Aimee LaBrie and Elizabeth Mosier. Free spring reading: We hosted a free reading at The Belgian Café showcasing our spring authors, including our 2010 Second Annual Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction winner, Katherine Hill. Free reading series at Rosemont Writers Retreat: We offered free readings and “meet the author” events each noon during our third annual Rosemont Writers Retreat.
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But the best member reward is in your hands: a four-color, free print magazine that showcases our region’s writing and artistic talent. Thanks to our members for continuing to keep Philadelphia Stories free to all readers, and also continuing to support reading and writing through our workshops and other programs. We hope to see you at one of our upcoming events! All the best, Carla & Christine
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j e f f to have been pissing blood for a month—the cancer got into the surrounding muscle and lymph nodes, and that was it. He carried a scrap of shrapnel in his shoulder his entire life—sometimes it would set off the metal detectors at airports when he flew to Florida to see Daphne and Danny at Christmastime— so I guess pissing blood did not seem too much of a big deal. The one time he came to see Jillian and me in Pomona he was drunk the whole trip. But we did get him into the Pacific—he always loved to swim—and he put Jillian’s niece up on his shoulders—you could see the thick scar from where the metal went in—to
show her the seabirds in the sky. He drank to the inglorious end. He’d get cheap drinks at the casinos, especially the older ones, which were being taken over, so nobody cared. If you ever want to knock off a casino, get them when they’re being sold, when the employees feel betrayed. Stottlemyre, on the other hand, used the casinos as an upscale walking track. He got my father to come along: a small group of oldsters power-walking from one air-conditioned lobby to the next. In the casino lounges, my father would start with beer and end with gin, and Mr. Stottlemyre would extinguish
Tying Flies for a Friend Grant Clauser The time isn’t anything of course, or the hair plucked from a rabbit’s cheek, feathers pulled from turkey wing, mallard neck. Each thread pull, each twist, tight against the steel hook the barb surgically sharp like a threat, the promise of a deep jaw set. I haven’t seen you for years. I hear your legs are gone, the fight, gone too. And yet I’m here at my desk, tying flies and thinking of the moon on the Bushkill, pale evening duns lifting off the water like ghosts while rainbow trout slipping in and out of moonlight, gorge on velvet insects. The water, cool against my hand as I release the trout, one swish of the tail and it’s part of the night again. You laughing under the willows, a pair of bats flying just above your head. I twist a little bit of that night into each set hackle, into the wings cut from flight, into life. Grant Clauser is a medical magazine editor near Philadelphia and freelance technology writer. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Hatfield, PA. Poems have appeared in various places including The Literary Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Wisconsin Review, The Maryland Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and others plus a TV show about bass fishing. Read his blog at www.poetcore.com.
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the cigars and turn off the living room lamps and pull a blanket across my father, who always had the windows opened in a building whose super used the heat sparingly. For years after my mother died, I’d come down in the mornings for school and find my father asleep on the sofa. He slept only sporadically in the bed he’d shared with her. They were dancers; they’d met at one of those vast VFW dances, when my mother was just eighteen. She worked at Bell Atlantic until her death, and her death was a lingerer. She was in pain for nearly two years. That’s why my father didn’t call my sister until near his own end, I think. That, and the drinking. He didn’t want to remember. At the end of my mother’s life, he’d go straight from the yard to the hospital, and she would have one roommate after another, in various stages of agony, and he’d sit in the visiting chair, and he’d wait for my mother to wake, running for the nurses if she wanted even the simplest thing. Thinking of it now, the panic in his body must have been crippling without a drink Daphne and I were there when she died. She died with an intern yelling— really yelling—into her ear to see if she’d come back to life. I hid behind the silver wrap-around curtain, and my father found me and picked me up. His face was wet, and he told me I was a beautiful boy. On the day my father headed to the big Caesar’s Palace in the sky, I was at a GA meeting. We’d got him so he could die at home, such as it was, at The Sea Crest. A male nurse came in once a day. Mr. Stottlemyre was there all the time. I wondered about Stottlemyre’s family. Stottlemyre had kids all over the place, as he put it, but in the five months I’d eventually live at the Sea Crest, I never saw them visit even once. Stottlemyre cooked and took my father’s sheets to the laundry and one time when I came
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home they were smoking cigars and he was covering my father’s hand with his own. They talked about the War. My father had never talked about the War before, with me or my sister, as far as I know, and I don’t think much with my mother. I heard my father tell Mr. Stottlemyre that until he’d fought beside one, he’d never liked Jews, had heard they were stand-offish and yellow. Stottlemyre shrugged, said he’d heard all Irish were drunks. And he told me a story, one night when neither of us could sleep, when the Giants game was over and the TV reception was frazzled by a shore-line lightning storm, how in 1945, in northern Italy, with the War for all intents over, a German soldier no older than fifteen had shot at him. My father said he couldn’t believe it. He let the German kid get away, staring right into the kid’s face so the kid would know his benign intentions, and then the kid fired a second shot at my father—my father, an old man ser-
geant at twenty-one, who’d nearly bled to death from shrapnel in the neck, whose eardrum was punctured by mortar. The German kid leapt onto the back of a hay wagon, pointed his rifle right at my old man, and my father fired and killed him with a single shot to the head, the boy’s head bursting, he didn’t have to say it, with the lightning outside the window, with the glass untouched on his knee, all over the dry hay. At the GA meeting, I talked a little about Jillian. About the late miscarriage, in the sixth month, how we’d feel Shea practicing kicks in the womb. Flying Monkey, Jillian would laugh. Horse Scraping the Hoof. I’d place my ear to Jillian’s belly to hear our daughter. I’d sing to Shea. Born to Run and Dirty Old Town. Jillian would read her stories. Maybe she came to know the fighting; maybe she came to know how in her name I was betting her upbringing away. My sponsor, Bob A., a former card
philada blues Paul Siegell pink nickel-Ziplocs branded “NEW LIFE” litter the outskirts of a highrise condo construction site dumpster that’s been 6
tagged “DREAMS GO HERE” Paul Siegell is an editor at Painted Bride Quarterly and the author of three books of poetry: wild life rifle fire (Otoliths Books, 2010), jambandbootleg (A-Head Publishing, 2009) and Poemergency Room (Otoliths Books, 2008). More about Paul may be found at paulsiegell.blogspot.com.
shark who’d had his teeth literally kicked in when he tried to hustle the larger games—we all had our little indignities—told me that Jillian hadn’t left me, but that I chose to let her go. Although I’m not the type, I nearly decked him. When I came back from the meeting, Mr. Stottlemyre was reading a Bible and had covered my father’s whole body with a blanket. He didn’t look up when I came in. He sort of bobbed there, leaning over my father, praying, two water glasses half-full with seltzer, a cigar still smoking in the ashtray. The broken television set, the framed photograph from his wedding, the dusty sea bass mounted on the wall. I excused myself fast and headed for the bathroom. I splashed my face with water. There were cigar ashes on the tap. My father would sit on the toilet and tap his cigar ash into the sink. I remember this as a kid, my mother complaining, It’s like living with Groucho. My father with, It’s the only place I can sit in peace! She was a duster, she always had the feathers flying. The house could be on fire, my father would say, and you’d run back inside to straighten! Once, winking at me, she’d vacuumed his chest hair when he’d fallen asleep eating crackers on the living room sofa. He jumped so high and laughed so hard that our cat leapt out the window onto Twelfth Street. When I looked up from the ashes on the sink, I stared into the complete whiteness that I had experienced the time I was wrapped in the hospital curtain while the intern yelled into my dead mother’s ear. Out the opened window, an ambulance sirened. And then I realized that Stottlemyre had covered the medicine cabinet mirror with a towel that my father had swiped from the Holiday Inn. In the mirror, where my face should have been, was a casino in terry cloth relief. I turned to the window. I hoisted it higher. The cold snapped in. Past the low roofs of Pacific Avenue banks of light swirled with the storm clouds; snowflakes flashed red, green, and gold.
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Beyond the lights, white caps crested the ocean. I looked down to the Avenue. The rows of air conditioners, the square windows each the same, dropping toward the street, where the ambulance’s lights whirled in front of a pawn shop, Gold Bought Here. In the living room, Mr. Stottlemyre’s eyes were shut, the Bible open in his lap, the window shade pulled tightly behind him. “Did you call someone?” I asked. For a moment he seemed as far away as my old man. “Call your sister,” he suddenly said, and without opening his eyes he made a karate-chopping motion with his hand. I pulled on my coat—a heavy coat that in fact had once been my father’s— to get out of there, and I walked up Kentucky Avenue fast. I walked past St. Joe’s, where my father had been confirmed in 1937, snow falling across
headstones as in every Irish novel, past Dino’s Grinders, his favorite, Real Gravy Served Here. I crossed Atlantic and Pacific and up along Baltic and cut through the shitty little park the casinos built—seagulls clustered on the waterless fountain, a homeless kid slipping a bag over his head—and out onto the frigid boardwalk, and I wish I could say that I dove straight into the dark water like one of Stottlemyre’s bold cronies. Instead, I sat on an icy bench—all the benches in Atlantic City have their backs to the sea—and watched two bronze horses guard two minarets. A couple of dealers came out, leaned on the concrete railing at the top of the flashing escalators, the Taj Mahal bright behind them, the gold plate, the lapislike archway, inside the clashing of chips, the whorls of slots and roulette, the clean snap of blackjack and the tumble of fresh dice. When my father was home from the
Army for a few weeks and thinking about, I imagine, what to do, he drove down to Alabama to visit a guy he’d served with. He spent the night sleeping on a roadside in South Carolina, only to be awakened before sun-up by a cop about his age, rapping on the windshield. You can’t sleep here, son. He says it was the son that did it. My father stepped out of his car and decked the cop who merely looked up, lying on the ground on his back, and let my father drive away. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay. The dealers lit cigarettes. When I called Daphne, Danny answered. He was in their back garden, in Tampa, spraying their lemon trees with soap. Jeff Bens is author of the novel Albert, Himself and many short stories.
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NIGHT DIVING o wheels, no license, no ability to drive – I’m a little hesitant, a little ashamed. I pause for a two-beat before I dial Ursula to arrange our weekend together. She’s a teacher and single mother in Pottstown; I’m a latethirtyish man living at my Granny’s Drexel Hill Tudor-style house. During this pause, I’m sitting at my adapted computer, my finger poised over my phone’s Velcro-marked five button. I feel like I’m my formerly sighted, adolescent self, standing at a mall payphone, arranging a pick-up. The adult me pushes through, and dials. But I don’t get Ursula. It’s her daughter. “Hi, is your mom home?” “Stop making that funny voice,” Ursula’s daughter says, right away without a “howdy-do.” “Is your mom home?” I repeat in my higher-pitched “everything is okay kid” voice. “Stop that,” the girl shouts. “Daddy, stop talking like that!” Then slam. Dial tone. My chair creaks under me as my heart becomes all inaudible bass beat. I fidget with the phone cord, then work at disentanglement. I fill the dark silence with a movie image. Today it’s Big, and Tom Hanks is hoofing “Heart and Soul” on the oversized walking piano. How many takes were there? Did he break a sweat?
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It’s the weekend and Ursula gathers me from the Reading bus station. We drop off my bags at her place, then take a walk through her neighborhood. As we stroll, my ears tell me what my eyes would. Traffic is infrequent, sound is sponged up by lawns and bushes, the stationary eloquence of a robin several
Flight of the Spirit by Donald Stephens © 2010 stories above me hints at tree heights. We head uphill, past the pools, and to the pond, circle it at leisure with my hand resting on her right shoulder for guidance. I hold my white cane upright, dandy-style, in my free palm. Ursula pulls me aside when we meet an oncoming couple who haven’t done the white cane and black glasses math. “We’re coming to a footbridge,” she says. “No rails.” I scrutinize her tone for weariness or resignation. I still can’t figure if I’m man
or encumbrance to her. Her divorce is not final and I fear I am a cliche in tennis shoes — the Transitional Man. A brush of her long hair against my arm tells me she’s turned her head away. I Photoshop her locks Day-Glo apricot to contrast her picket-fence spirit. Only, I’m thinking about the steady quiet of her neighborhood, its pond, its pools, the nearby market. I could easily tap-taptap along the pickets, as well. There’s the faintest of paddling noises from the water. I’m sure there are duck
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feet, upended, as a Mallard goes under for a morsel. “Still going swimming tomorrow?” Ursula asks.
While she’s in the kitchen drawing up a shopping list, I’m out of the way, in the bedroom, attending to medical concerns. Diabetic, I test my blood sugar, the meter counting down aloud and voicing a number I’m satisfied with. It’s time for my afternoon meds, so I take the four antirejection transplant pills, the pair of blood pressure pills, the anti-nausea pill. Ursula calls out, “Can you think of anything besides soda and chicken you want?” “Strawberry Pop Tarts. The glazed kind, please.” They are my current form of emergency sugar. But still, I blush. Before she leaves, Ursula refreshes my memory about the stairway threshold and projecting TV shelf. She grabs her keys, says, “I have to stop at my husbands with my daughter’s schoolbag.” The door closes behind her. It’s not long before the stillness conjures the creepy twin girls from The Shining.
We wait for the senior citizen hour at the lap pool because the main pool is a mined bay of bobbing children in nosecoat and water wings ready to sink my ship. “Marco!” “Polo!” Ursula gives me a quick description of the layout, and then I’m swimming, first time in the dark. Splash, splash, then a little bit of a crawl, and then I’m going freestyle. I bump into walls and tangle myself in lane dividers. But this isn’t good enough. Hand out, I trace my way to the ladder. Once I’m up, Ursula walks me around to the deep end and sets up her towel. I perch on the coping, work up nerve, then jump. I try to go coast-tocoast underwater, and put my hand up to
meet wall. I fall short the first dozen tries. This game still isn’t good enough, though. I encounter my first flotation worm and get ideas. The Styrofoam worms are a little shorter than my white cane, but when I’m up and poolside I find I can hold them ski-pole style and make it to the diving board. Once up, I edge cautiously past the handrails. Tap with the left pool toy. Tap with the right, then another tap ahead to discern my placement on the board. I don’t want to pitch forward unprepared. I find the end and ready myself. Ursula, poolside, and a senior couple treading in the water, wait in sparkly daylight. This is not nighttime, shades drawn, lights out. My body is exposed, on display with my shrunken eyes, my transplant scars, my insulin injection bruises. I am a Google map of doctor visits and hospitalizations, hinting at many more unpaved miles ahead. Is Ursula up
for that trip? I am eager to dive. But my mind conjures a dry excavation in front of me. Then, the crypt full of snakes from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Next, a chamber filled with a thousand armed Chinese terra cotta soldiers. “Are you watching?” I ask. “Go ahead,” Ursula says, and the words hang in the air. I picture her floating as well, Chagall-like, five feet over cement pool deck. “Just go.” Finally, I toss the worms into the pool. I trust there will be water, soft and buoyant, to catch me as I leap. Sean Toner's essays have appeared at webdelsol.com, perigee-art.com, and in Opium Magazine (where he's twice been a finalist in their 500-word memoir contest). His CNF also appears in the Book of Worst Meals from Serving House Books. Sean is a former vice president of the Philadelphia Writers Conference and was chair of its Free Forums at Drexel University. He earned his MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2006 and lives in Bryn Mawr, PA, with the writer Robin Parks. Sean has been sightless since 1995 and is a public speaker about disability. www.seantoner.com
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am the first child my mother never wanted. That I have two brothers and a sister is a testament to her docility, not her change of heart. My earliest memory is of her perfume, an exotic, spicy scent, and of her dark hair swinging
have been five or six years old and whining for her attention) she told me, “I’m not your mother.” And, for a moment, I believed her. It’s when I noticed for the first time my mother’s dreamy blindness and deafness, inhabiting what world I didn’t know. All I knew was that she was
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down around her pale and pretty face when she rescued the hem of her dress from my grasp. I was always reaching out for her. This is not selective memory. In photos she is ever lovely, and I am ever longing—one chubby arm outstretched—to touch her. One day (I must
unhappy when summoned back to mine. For all his faults, my father was the one who took care of us when we were sick, staying with us until we fell asleep. “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques. Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?” he’d chant over and over, but I’d resist, waiting once more for the
“Sonnez les matines. Sonnez les matines,” loving the sweet cadence of his voice, his hand on my forehead. Since he walked out on her, it falls to me to be my mother’s caretaker, not that she needs one yet. But if it comes down to that, it will be me. My brothers live on the east coast and my sister Sharon, who lives in Vancouver—Washington, not Canada—and close enough to drive down in a few hours, hasn’t spoken to our mother in years. “You’re a sap, Suzanne,” she tells me. “You can’t change the past.” I’ve taken today off from my job at the Puget Sound Views to drive my mother to a cardiologist in Seattle for a consult about a condition that causes her heart to slow and lurch disconcertingly. She and I live on opposite sides of the Narrows Bridge; I’m in Tacoma and she’s in Gig Harbor. I leave early enough to first drive down to Point Defiance Park to walk the waterfront, a salve for the resentment I will inevitably feel when she fails to evidence any interest in those parts of my world that do not intersect with hers. A mile-long crescent of walkway snakes from the parking lot at the boat launch to the beach along Commencement Bay in the penumbra of the Cascades. Mount Rainier wears a corona of clouds, so I can’t see its distinctive ram’s head shape, even though the weather is unusually fine for December. That’s where I planned to be today for my ritual respite after the jumpy rush of making another deadline—up in Mount Rainier National Park on a small island in the middle of the Ohanapecosh River, at the Grove of the Patriarchs, filling my lungs with oxygen from the ancient trees. That stand of Douglas fir, western hemlock, and red cedar has been growing undisturbed for nearly 1,000 years, the river protecting the Grove from fire, the gods protecting it from all else. I am fas-
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cinated by the elegant symbiosis of the nurse logs, which perpetuate that lush forest. The fallen trees decay by degrees into a carpet of mosses. Then lichens, mushrooms and fern transform them into nurseries for cedar and conifer seedlings. There are nurse logs here at Point Defiance as well, along Five Mile Drive, but I’ve run out of morning. There’s no bridge traffic at this hour so I can easily hazard glimpses down at the choppy swells and the blue-gray ropes of rip tides in the Narrows. On the other side of the bridge, I take the second exit and drive around the harbor where the marinas are filled with masts soldiering in the breeze, before looping
onto the access road to my mother’s house. I turn left at the crooked Madrona tree, drive down the unpaved lane and park on the gravel. Her house, rented since my parents’ divorce three years ago, is shoebox plain with dated appliances and drab carpeting, but situated on a sandy spit of beachfront amid grander homes. Inside it smells pleasantly of bracken from the stones and shells and driftwood she has placed on every windowsill, in every shallow bowl, her only contribution to this furnished house. Her decorative stamp is outdoors, in the whimsical sculptures, the tiles embedded in the pathways, a hot tub enclosed by a filmy forest of pampas grass.
Slicing It Open Dilruba Ahmed I want a fruit that cleaves as cleanly as butter, and if its barbed skin grates my lips with an animal scratch, no matter. Give me one with salmoncolored flesh even if its nectars mask its burrs and snares. Is there no succor in the bite that lodges inside, in the sound of a device that could cut me, slowly whirring to life? Dilruba Ahmed’s debut book of poems, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2010 Bakeless Prize for poetry. Ahmed’s writing has appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. Web site: www.dilrubaahmed.com.
My mother beams her hello from the open doorway. Nothing personal, it’s the same smile she offers everyone. She used to be beautiful, with a hint of animal wildness peeking out in the otherwise buttoned-up old photos, her belt tied askew at her cinched waist, a bit of tooth bared between the dark lips, her hip cocked and knees aslant, as provocative as she dared, it seemed to me. Even now at nearly seventy, she is prettier than I, with her thick hair— streaked and cropped spiky-short—and espresso eyes. She wears an ivory silk blouse with a narrow black skirt and a light wool jacket the color of plums. Two-inch heels and tinted stockings show off her elegant ankles and calves. I am raggedy with lack of sleep and rumpled for lack of clean laundry. Both my daughters were home over Thanksgiving break—Elise from Boston, where she lives with her father during the school year, and Kit from Ann Arbor, where she lives with her lover, also named Kit, also a woman. When the girls are home, except for work, I put the rest of my life on hold. Not out of obligation or sacrifice but because I enjoy their company; Elise’s mordant wit and discerning intellect; Kit’s dead-on mimicry, her hilarious political rants. I’d like them even if they weren’t my daughters. We cook together and scout thrift stores, ride the ferries and walk the waterfront. Sail in good weather. They catch up with their friends and each other when they’re home. But they’ve stopped visiting their grandparents. My father berates my former husband to Elise, who adores him, and crudely mocks Kit’s relationship. “You just haven’t met the right guy, honey,” he told her. “Believe me, he’d change your tune.” My mother, on the other hand, pretends that neither the girls’ father nor Kit’s lover exist. “I had a bad night,” my mother tells me, offering her cheek to be kissed. “You look wonderful.” I say this as if
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it were an accusation. “Oh, well . . .” she waves her hand, dismissive. “I felt it though.” She rests her fingertips in a cage over her heart. “What? What did you feel?” I always have to shape her language to understand her. She’s maddeningly vague. “My heart,” she says. “Felt it what, Mom? Stop? Slow? Hesitate?” “Just different, you know. Like it’s been.” My mother has unwittingly chosen my profession. I untangle syntax, un-mix metaphors, interrogate reporters until I know the story as well as they, so their articles will read with clarity and grace. I sigh. It doesn’t matter what she says, anyway. We will have empirical evidence
soon. The exam, EKG, the labs. My mother waits until I pull onto I-5 and am dodging traffic before she tells me she has been seeing my father. The way she says it, I know it isn’t for coffee. “He’s married,” I say, although that’s not what worries me. “Maybe it’s better this way.” “Why? So he can beat her up and date you?” “Don’t be melodramatic, Suzanne.” Her tone is mild. “Your father never struck me.” When I feel compassionate, I remind myself that she was constricted in every possible way: by poverty and gender, education and class. What she had in abundance was imagination. It was how, I understood later, she could pretend my
Early Rising on a Fall Morning Grant Clauser
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Frost is still a wonder this October morning, an excuse for suspicion—to think about age, seasons replacing seasons in small stages the way a book progresses a page at a time until you’re in the middle of it, letting the words into your body like inhaling a deep winter breath before you realize how cold the world has become. I wish it were that simple. Watching things change and move on— her small body, small puffs of breath on my arm. My shoulders unwilling to unbind. A corner of the yard greens and softens as the sun rises. Birds not yet ready to migrate scour the warmed patch for insects. I’ll chop wood today for winter, thinking of warmer things my hands clenched tight across the ax. Grant Clauser is a medical magazine editor near Philadelphia and freelance technology writer. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Hatfield, PA. Poems have appeared in various places including The Literary Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Wisconsin Review, The Maryland Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and others plus a TV show about bass fishing. Read his blog at www.poetcore.com.
father was exhausted or worried when he was overbearing or cruel. How she could reframe his badgering as concern, his insults as instructive. The dreamy quality that kept her at a remove from me, from us, was how she survived. The pity was she couldn’t imagine herself free. The cardiologist is bald except for a low-lying fringe of wooly grey hair, and is extremely tall. Tall, and good-looking in a coarse, sensual way. His fingers are thick, his mouth wide. He swivels in his chair and rests one ankle on the opposite knee, his thigh a long and solid plank, his shoe like a small boat. “I haven’t seen you before, Mrs. . . .” he glances down at her chart, “ . . . Garner, have I?” “It’s Ms.,” my mother says. “And yes, I had a consult in August.” He puts down the chart and studies her. “I think I would have remembered you.” He manages to make this sound provocative. He stands and extends his hand, “Come, let me listen before we do the EKG.” He helps her onto the examination table, tells her to unbutton her blouse. She is, I see, wearing a lacy camisole. He slips the stethoscope under its frothy trim. Her breast disappears under his cupped hand. “Fifty beats per minute,” the doctor says. “Any dizziness? Nausea?” “Sometimes.” “Which?” he asks her. “How often?” Good luck, I think, trying to understand my mother. He takes her hand and tries again. “How about now? Do you feel lightheaded now?” It infuriates me that this man is flirting with my mother—and not in a patronizing way. Some remnant of her glory days clings to her, some superannuated estrogen patch or pheromone. My boyfriends, my husband, all of them were taken with her. I don’t know how
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my father stood it. No, that’s a lie. My father is the sort of man who likes his women beautiful. Beautiful and frail. He does, of course, resent them for it later. “Christ, Adele, must I do every little goddamned thing for you?” he would say after my mother handed him a light bulb or a recalcitrant pickle jar. “Of course you must, Mitchell,” she’d say, and laugh as she rubbed up against
him, the sensuous gesture revolting to my teenage self. Was it that or the way in which my father was captivated? He always got the best parts of her. And when my father was away, at work or on a business trip, it was as though she went away as well. From the time I was twelve, I became the woman of the house in his absence, signing permission slips, helping with homework, defrosting the ground beef for dinner. My mother
Esopus Spitzenberg, 1927 Gwen Wille By mid-October, there are so few from the old yard left, those leaf-bright orbs, here yellow and russet, wind-stroked but wormfree: apples. Even the word is firm on your tongue, tart, oversweet and old. You’re hungry. They go like this: one, for when you fell out of the tree, every fruit loosen’d from your grasp by the time you bent over a broken wrist. You were eight. No, younger. This fruit is cool to the core; so good. And oh, two: the day you saw the depth of your father’s ache. He wouldn’t last a year. Three for all the exams you passed without having heeded the lecture, and four for the baby’s breath shed from your double breast like all this world’s long, tired days, every bough bent as a burrow. The fifth is for the road. Weigh it in your palm, shroud it with warm fingers; save it for a while. Think on green-white flesh pocketed by seeds: dark arsenic hearts naturally formed, and knowing.
Gwen Wille lives and works in West Chester, PA. She studied writing at the University of New Mexico. Her work has appeared in Crow Toes Quarterly, Writers' Bloc, previously in Philadelphia Stories, and others.
wore aprons fussily, like a wardrobe in a play. Pots got burned and dinners ruined amid chapters of a book. I am fulminating about all this when my mother blinks three times then slumps to the floor. The doctor kneels beside her, bends his ear to her mouth. When he places his hands between her breasts, it takes me a second to realize it’s CPR. “Get my nurse,” he tells me. “Now. Move!” I intercept the nurse in the hallway. “My mother collapsed . . . he wants you ...” The placid-faced Filipina races past me into a room, then pops right back out, like in a cartoon, dragging a red metal cart behind her. She summons another nurse who rushes into the same room and wheels out a gurney. It’s only minutes before the doctor is running alongside the gurney, two nurses in attendance, the Filipina straddled across my mother’s chest, her hands like pistons revving up my mother’s heart. I run behind until they disappear into the service elevator at the end of the corridor. I’m punching the elevator buttons when the receptionist tells me they’ve taken my mother to the Cardiac Care Unit. “Fifth floor,” she tells me. “Bear right.” I call Sharon from the family waiting room. “I’ll come down,” she says. I know she means for me, not our mother. The kindness undoes me. “Okay,” I manage through the knot in my throat. “Good,” I whisper. “Suze?” I can’t speak. “Suzanne. You’ve done your best.” “Her, too,” I say, and hang up before Sharon can tell me that’s bullshit. While I wait, I close my eyes and conjure the hushed embrace of the Grove of the Patriarchs, immerse myself in its green glory until I am as tranquil and still as the trees themselves, and so I can’t believe it when the handsome doc-
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Spring-Early Summer by Pauline Houston McCall © 2010
Atlantic City Jean YeoJin Sung
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Blues emerge from the Jersey shore’s salty spray, spitting white froth on boardwalks lit up from Atlantic City. I close my eyes to neon glow and gamblers’ stumbles. When you died, I could hear reverberations of the weeping tears that Shah Jehan spilled at the absence of his lover, howling out from a counterfeit Taj Mahal. Lying under tattered covers as a child, I never knew how the miles of weathered wood here would hold reminders of all we could lose to the restless waters – recurring spilt sorrow that dampens the cracked planks we once trampled over. Jean YeoJin Sung was born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in Cherry Hill, NJ. She received her MFA in Creative Writing student from Rutgers University – Newark. She received her BA from NYU's Gallatin School where she was awarded the Herbert J. Rubin Award for Poetry and her MPA from NYU's Wagner School of Public Service. She has previously published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Contrary Magazine, The 322 Review, and Salome. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The room has a ghoulish green glow, all fluorescence and scrubs and easily washed plastic chairs. Everything else is white, the crib-like hospital beds, the linens, the bathroom fixtures exposed to passers-by. I edge past the patient in the bed closest to the door, my heart knocking in my chest, to look for her but the second bed is empty. I double-check the slip of paper in my hand. Room 3605-A. The first bed. I spin around. I didn’t recognize her because this time she has gone so far away that she’s never coming back. I know this even before the doctor arrives and tells me it wasn’t her heart, after all, but a burst aneurism that caused the stroke, which has spared her heart but ravaged her brain. My breaths seem to enter my chest through a long narrow tube, one cold milliliter at a time. I back out of the room grateful for the obligation I have to call the others. I call my brothers first. They take it in stride. To them our mother has been as impartial and reliable as a nurse log, giving off nutrients but little else once they took off on their own. “I’m sorry, Suze,” they tell me, acknowledging that the loss is mine alone. I call Sharon but she’s not home so I don’t leave a message. I call my father last, reluctant to subject my mother to either his scrutiny or his lack of regard. Until I can make contact with Sharon, I walk the streets, wandering over to Pioneer Square, then into the lobby of the Alexis Hotel where I buy a pack of cigarettes in the gift shop. It’s been a decade since I’ve smoked but I decide I’ve been prudent for too long, that I should have been bolder and said my piece when I still had the chance. Three cigarettes later, I throw away the pack and dial Sharon again. She cries when I tell her. Great gulping sobs, which astonish me. I’d expect-
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ed her to comfort me, but it’s the other way around. When I hang up, I realize that she must have harbored the same secret hope all the years she’d been ridiculing mine. The hospital room is dark now, except for the frenetic flickering of the TV. The remote is pinned to the sheet near my mother’s head, the stagy voices and static-y soundtrack leaking onto her pillow. I can’t tell if she’s listening but she’s not watching the screen, her eyes are closed. Wait. If she turned on the TV, then perhaps she’s trying to work her way back to speech, back to comprehension. The nurse’s voice startles me. “We turn it on for them. Sometimes it helps,” he says as he fastens the blood pressure cuff onto my mother’s arm. “Is it helping now?” I ask, a tendril of hope taking root in my chest. He shrugs. “Hard to tell.” As soon as he leaves, I stand close to the bed. “Mom,” I say. “Mom. It’s me.” She looks up at the sound of my voice. Her gaze slides down my face to my hand, which she seizes in a fierce grip. “Mom,” I try again, and this time she doesn’t even look up but just tightens her hold on me until my hand aches and her nails inscribe their hieroglyphics in my flesh. One by one, I pry her fingers loose and cradle them between my palms until they slacken. “It’s okay, Mom, I’m right here.” I tuck her in and brush the damp hair away from her still lovely face. I station the green plastic chair where she can see me and settle into its cool, unyielding embrace, prepared to stay until she falls asleep. She reaches for me through the bedrails. I take her hand and begin, “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques. Dormezvous? Dormez-vous?” Grace Marcus has been published in The Bucks County Writer Magazine, TheWritersEye, and Women on Writing. Her novel, Visible Signs, was a semi-finalist in the 2007 William Faulkner Writing Competition. She lives in Bucks County, where she is working on a second novel and a collection of short stories.
Waiting for October 8th Wilson Roberts From my window in the forest I look out at a canopy so thick I need candles in the day in order to read or write. There is one hole in the dark leaves through which I see beyond my world; today a red tail hawk flew by, a mouse struggling in its talons; the day before, a murder of crows, shiny black and loud, filled my hole, and three days earlier a jetliner. I found it in my book of airplane silhouettes, an Airbus 300A. In seats eighteen A and B a couple hold hands, speaking in soft low tones, heading for St. Petersburg where his mother is dying; twenty six C, an old man nods and dreams. All this I see from my book. Once a year, on October 8th, the sun shines through my hole, a bright beam fills the room and hitting the prism I carefully placed, breaks into shards of jangling light. Within a month autumn leaves will have fallen, the open sky crossed by gray limbs and their terrible ragged branches. Soon they will have a shell of ice and snow as hawks and planes fly by, and crows sit watching, silent in the early winter dusk. There will be days when sunlight hits these trees, loosening their frozen cover which, thawing, will drip to the ground, tears in the cold dead of the year. Wilson Roberts was born and raised in Newtown, Bucks County. His novels, The Cold Dark Heart of the World (2008), The Serpent and the Hummingbird (2009), and Incident on Tuckerman Court (2010) are published under the Fantastic Books imprint of Wilder Publications. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in a number of small journals. A certified mediator, he works primarily in small claims court and with a pilot program mediating between state agencies, the courts, and families whose children have been placed into foster care. His short fiction, "Against the Dying," appears in the current issue of the Massachusetts Review.
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PAUL LISICKY
By Jessica Jeffers
wish to transform that moment into something felt, active, remembered.
As the keynote speaker for Push to Publish, you will be sharing advice and wisdom with aspiring writers. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? I spent years writing what I thought I should write, what I imagined to be publishable. Things changed once I was given permission to write what (and how) I needed to write. I think that’s when my real writing began.
What made you want to write a memoir? How did you approach this project differently than your fiction? I didn’t want to do another version of the novel I’d just written, and the shift in voice and stance helped me to access aspects of my character I’d never put on the page before. I don’t mean to be disingenuous, but it didn’t feel so much like a decision. I just happened to be writing an essay for fun one day, a piece about my childhood next door neighbor, who happened to be both an avatar of style and a bit of a nutbasket, and the voice that came out sounded looser than anything I’d done before. Paul Lisicky is the keynote speaker for the fourth annual Push to Publish event at Rosemont College on October 16, 2010. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Lisicky’s works have been published in many journals, including Ploughshares and StoryQuarterly, and he currently teaches at New York University. Lisicky is the author of a novel, Lawnboy, and a memoir, Famous Builder. He has also written two forthcoming books, the novel The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012), a collection of short stories and essays.
How much do your novels reflect your real life? I’d say they’re emotionally autobiographical but they’re not literally autobiographical. The feelings are certainly real, but not the facts.
You are releasing a collection called Unbuilt Projects. Given the similarity in titles, is there any connection to Famous Builder? What binds the Your website says only that The Burning House is pieces together into a unit? “a novel about the complexities of longing and The thread of building and community planning certainly binds all my books. And I deliberately wanted Unbuilt Projects to talk desire.” What else can you tell us about the story? back to Famous Builder. Famous Builder is my attempt to locate The story is about a man whose life unravels once his sister-inlaw moves in. She evokes for him all the qualities that once drew him to his wife, and he’s a wreck about it, because he doesn’t want to tear up his settled life, doesn’t want to hurt his wife. On another level, the story is about the relationship 16 between home and community life; the community where the story takes place is undergoing redevelopment, houses torn down right and left, houses turned into commodities. How does all that affect the life at home?
From where do you draw inspiration? The moment in front of me, the moment ahead of me, the
my family in time, to think about how a certain historical moment informed how we thought about identity, memory, social aspiration, art. Unbuilt Projects, on the other hand, deconstructs the family narrative. My mother developed senile dementia in the last years of her life, and once she lost the major signposts of her memory, the whole family story seemed to go down with it. We didn’t know that her allegiance to story was in fact holding us together, and once her mind went, who were we? Read more about Paul Lisicky and his work at www.paullisicky.com.
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AN EXCERPT FROM THE MEMOIR
THE WHITE DEER i
can’t exactly say why I went to church on Saturday for the five o’clock mass, but that’s just what I did. I don’t know why that feels like I’m confessing to some dirty impulse— maybe it’s just that I’m still drawn to the liturgy—the music, the patterns of it—in spite of my exasperation with the Church. I hadn’t gone to church by myself since my teens, and as I walked into the sanctuary, I thought, okay, I’m home. When I’m with someone else—for Christmas Midnight Mass, or a funeral—I usually feel some tug of loss, a loss I can’t quite explain. But not this time. Maybe it helps that the church is a progressive church—many gay and lesbian parishioners, people of all ages and nationalities. Think of it as a Unitarian Church—but with communion. I’m usually not so big on homilies. I usually think of that as the time when the celebrant makes meaningless noises in order to fill up some space; time to look at the songbook, but this was different. He was talking about hospitality—what does it mean to welcome the people we love? I was thinking on that, my arms outstretched on the back of the pew, when a line of his jumped out at me: “The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom.” Every molecule in me was turned to him. He said it once more, as if he wanted it to sink in. “The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom.” What on earth could such a thing mean? Later that night a friend told me about a white dog showing up at another friend’s house. The other friend looked at the dog’s tags—the address was three miles away, all the way on the other side of town. There were fireworks in town, extravagant fireworks, and it was likely the dog had run across woods, marshes, highways to get to
the friend’s house. The friend looked out the door and saw what she thought was a white deer. But it wasn’t any white deer. It was a dog, a white fluffy dog, who walked right into her living room and dining room, muddy paws and all. The dog looked around a bit, submitted to the friend’s petting, then slumped, turned on his side and fell asleep. The friend called the numbers on the dog’s tags. No one answered at the numbers. The friend left a message, and when she didn’t hear back after a while, she started to get suspicious. Maybe the dog was hers, the mystery beast coming up the street in the dark, out of the briars, the woods. The next day the phone rang. A terse, gruff boy on the line, and the story comes darker, clearer. The dog’s human, his protector, his mother, drowned in the pool the night before. Did the dog see it happen? Did the dog jump in the water after her, try to rescue her? Was it a suicide, a heart attack, a slip off the side while she was heading back into the house with armful of dry clothes? The friend didn’t feel she had the right to such questions, but she did ask
the boy—the woman’s daughter’s boyfriend—if he’d be willing to let the dog stay with her for a while. “He seems so comfortable here,” she said. And the boy agreed to that, if reluctantly. And who could blame the friend if she started to make plans, if she thought about driving to the store for dog food. Life with the white dog, the white deer—and wasn’t she already relieved that she had a reason to keep herself from going so many places? A root in her midst. Finally, after so much running around. I suppose I don’t need to say that the family wanted the dog back the next day. I suppose I don’t need to say that the friend was inconsolable, as the dog jumped in the back of the family’s car, so grateful to be back with his familiars. Of course his mother wouldn’t be there at the house when he jumped out of the car, but he didn’t know that yet. And all the losses of the friend rose up before her like ghosts turning to flesh, needing to be dealt with.
“The White Deer” is from a memoirin-progress tentatively titled, I’D SURE LIKE TO SEE YOU.
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GOOD BEGINNINGS Aimee LaBrie
Every two months, I sit down with a stack of short fiction submissions to read for Philadelphia Stories. I am asked to go over each story carefully, to evaluate them according to a grid of basic storytelling techniques and then to give general feedback about the story. I know that behind every piece I read is a writer anxious to have his or her work published, so I try to keep an open mind, from the first page to the last. But, if I’m honest, my overall opinion is largely influenced by how the story begins. If I’m hooked in the first paragraph, I am more likely to give the writer the benefit of the doubt on page three, when he stumbles on an awkward bit of dialogue. If, however, the story opens with a mew, with an alarm clock going off, for instance, my guard is up— I’m girding myself for a “day in the life” story, one where nothing much happens up until the very end, when the central character realizes that it was all a dream! Think of the beginning of your story as similar to how you tell a story in real life, like how you might give a toast at your friend’s second wedding. First, you start by getting everyone’s attention—you crush a champagne glass under your heel or pull up your skirt or give a holler on the karaoke mike. There’s a lot going on at weddings, just as there’s a lot happening in your reader’s life, so you have to make your opening startling.
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Once you’ve gotten their attention, you must also recognize that you have a limited amount of time, just enough to tell maybe one or two key events in the fated meeting of the bride and the groom, so you must focus immediately. You can’t give every single detail of their courtship and you certainly don’t need to start with
their disastrous first date. Instead, do as Kurt Vonnegut suggests and start as close to the end of the story as possible.
“After my little brother died, we moved from the house on the lagoon to a twobedroom apartment near I-95.”
In short fiction, you have an economy of space and you must use it wisely. This means that your opening should establish the who, what, where, and when of the story. We should know pretty much immediately who the central character is, what the conflict involves, where the story is set, and when it’s taking place. If your reader is floating in space, unanchored in any particular details of the now of the story, she is going to tune out and go make herself a cheese sandwich.
— “The Farms,” by Eleanor Henderson
And here is where my wedding toast analogy breaks down, because a good beginning also has to start with trouble, whereas a nuptial speech should probably not mention any previous illicit affairs or indiscretions. We should know from the very first sentence of a story that something is amiss, perhaps even gravely wrong. But don’t just take my word for it. Let’s take a look at first lines of a few of the short fiction published in The Best American Short Stories 2009. The twenty stories in this collection are culled from thousands published in literary journals across the country. Somehow, they stood out from the rest, and I believe it’s in large part because the first line delivers: “‘Never take you back, son, hard as it break my heart,’ Aunt Cleoma had told Rubiaux. ‘This is the last you come home like this—we don’t break this demon now.’” — “Rubiaux Rising,” by Steve de Jarnatt
“The girl, unlike most people photographed for fashion magazines, was not beautiful.” — “A Man Like Him,” by Yiyun Li
“Because Paula Blake is planning something secret, she feels she must account for her every move and action, overcompensating in her daily chores and agreeing to whatever her husband and children demand.” — “Magic Words,” by Jill McCorkle Addiction, death, the unexpected, a secret—each opening sentence promise us something interesting. They start with conflict and an implied question we want answered—will the addict kick his habit? How did the little boy die? Who is the girl in the photo? What is the woman hiding (and will she get caught)? So the next time you’re getting ready to send your story in to a literary magazine, look very carefully at the opening. Because though I promise I read every word as an editor, I am influenced by the beginning. I also can’t speak to the rest of the publishing world—those who see a wobbly start to a story and move on to the next manuscript without a second glance.
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ResouRces foR WRiteRs and aRtists
Philadelphia
Great Books
Interested in joining a Great Books discussion group? There are over 50 groups meeting regularly in PA/NJ/DE using the Shared Inquiry Method for discussing significant works of literature or non-fiction.
Contact us to find a Great Books discussion group in your area: phila1@greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org For further information about Great Books events on the East Coast, see
www.greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org
Great Books Weekend at the Inn at Pocono Manor
All readers welcome to attend! The Raptures and Ravages of Love A * Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway * Phedre by Jean Racine Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert *
November 5-7, 2010 For further details: www.greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org/GBDPPoconoFallInstitute.html
books you might have missed! by marc schuster
FALL QUICK PICKS stateside while their loved ones are deployed in foreign lands. The novel follows the ups and (mainly) downs of a young woman named Mia whose significant other, Jake, is serving
How to Survive a Natural Disaster by Margaret Hawkins Fans of Margaret Hawkins’ first novel, A Year of Cats and Dogs, will find that she’s exploring some familiar ground in her sophomore effort, How to Survive a Natural Disaster, but they’ll also see that she’s progressed immensely in terms of both technique and emotional depth. As with A Year of Cats and Dogs, Hawkins exhibits a soft spot for animals throughout her latest novel. Indeed, a three-legged dog named Mr. Cosmo narrates portions of the book a la such contemporary petcentered works as Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain. How to Survive a Natural Disaster, however, sees Hawkins expanding her character palate to include a mismatched and largely dysfunctional family whose ups and downs become especially pronounced when the mother decides to adopt a Peruvian child in a misguided attempt at infusing more love into her life. The result is a heartwrenching tale not so much of the things we do for love, but the things we do when love runs dry. 20
Homer Front by Kristen J. Tstetsi In Home Front, Kristen J. Tsetsi presents a searing examination of war and its effects on those who remain
overseas in the Iraq War. Every day is a struggle for Mia: Though the evening news can’t give her anything more than a few sound bites, she can’t take her eyes off the television whenever the subject of the war arises. As if that weren’t enough, her would-be mother-in-law hounds Mia from a distance, always with the implication that nobody, especially Mia, is good enough for her “Jakey.” Meanwhile, Mia’s job as a cab driver has led to a complicated relationship with a traumatized Vietnam veteran, and her fascination with a painting in a local coffee shop offers the only potential solace in her otherwise overwhelming and emotionally fraught life.
ETA: Estimated Time of Arrest by Delphine Pontvieux Delphine Pontvieux’s ETA: Estimated Time of Arrest is a sharp, fast-moving, intelligent novel that is equal parts thriller and romance. When Faustine Laroche falls for Rafael Vargas, she has no way of knowing about the past that he’s running from. Years earlier, he participated in a march against the Spanish government that went horri-
bly wrong. Now, living in exile under an assumed name, Vargas is a wanted criminal — and the terrorist organization that helped him escape from Spanish authorities is calling in the favor. As good as (if not better than) any thriller on the mainstream market, ETA is, appropriately, full of twists and turns, but it never loses sight of the human element that makes works of fiction so compelling. It is that rare gem of a suspense novel that serves not only as a page-turner, but also as a hopeful reminder that for all of our flaws and crimes, we are all viable candidates for redemption.
Snaketown by Kathleen Wakefield The short chapters of Kathleen Wakefield’s Snaketown read like a series of microscope slides. Ostensibly the story of a family’s search for a missing child, the novella also serves as a naturalist study of life in off-the-grid rural America. Snaketown begins with the disappearance of Caytas Buck, the
youngest child of the Sibel clan, an allegedly inbred family scraping by on government handouts and odd jobs in their own little closed-in corner of the universe. “They seem confined within boundaries,” Wakefield writes of the Sibels in the precise diction of a sociologist or anthropologist, “as if on an island where only certain things grow, other things three-toed instead of five, winged instead of gilled, the Sibels moving within a range of their own isolation, their own limitations, the roads narrowing, the slant of the sun, their valley, their bend of the river, hogbacks, Mingus Mountain.” Even the disappearance of Caytas does little to bring the family out of their isolation as a mix of destitution, alcoholism, religion, and (curiously) pride keeps them from interacting with the outside world. Indeed, one thing that makes Snaketown so enchanting is Wakefield’s uncanny ability to move seamlessly from the perspective of the Sibels to that of outsiders, thus giving her readers a complex, layered vision of the family and its tragic relationship with the world at large.
Thomas Reyfiel’s Time Among the Dead. Evoking the Victorian sensibilities of works like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as well as the yearning for a better age inherent in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Rayfiel’s latest novel bears nostalgic witness to the passing of the age of aristocracy and the social mores that went along with it. What’s more, as the values and traditions of one era give way to the newfangled ways of the next, the uneasy relationship between the past and the ever-changing present comes into sharp and sometimes painful focus, only to reveal that even the past, or at least our recollection of it, is as fluid as any chain of events unfolding in the present. A truly enchanting novel, Time Among the Dead offers readers a glimpse into a bygone era and suggests that what really sets humanity apart as a species is our peculiar talent for
divining meaning in the present from the ceaseless tension between the past and the future. To read more book reviews from small & indie publishers, visit smallpressreviews.wordpress.com
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Time Among the Dead by Thomas Rayfiel In the opening lines of Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy writes, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This truism, however, belies a fact that anyone who’s spent any amount of time with an apparently “happy” family knows: each happy family is unhappy in its own way as well. Such is the case in
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