1 http://iangordoncraig.blogspot.co.uk
Woven Tale Publishing Š copyright 2013 ISSN: 2333-2387
The Woven Tale Press
Vol.III #2
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Sandra Tyler Author of Blue Glass, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and After Lydia, both published by Harcourt Brace; awarded BA from Amherst College and MFA in Writing from Columbia University; professor of creative writing on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including at Columbia University, (NY), Wesleyan University (CT), and Manhattanvill College, (NY); served as assistant editor at Ploughshares and The Paris Review literary magazines, and production freelancer for Glamour, Self, and Vogue magazines; freelance editor; Stony Brook University’s national annual fiction contest judge; a 2013 BlogHer.com Voices of the Year. http://www.awriterweavesatale.com
ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Michael Dickel, Ph.D. A poet, fiction writer, essayist, photographer and digital artist, Dr. Dickel holds degrees in psychology, creative writing, and English literature. He has taught college, university writing and literature courses for nearly 25 years; served as the director of the Student Writing Center at the University of Minnesota and the Macalester Academic Excellence Center at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN). He co-edited Voices Israel Volume 36 (2010). His work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, art books, and online for over 20 years, including in:THIS Literary Magazine, Eclectic Flash, Cartier Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Sketchbook, Emerging Visions Visionary Art eZine, and Poetry Midwest. His latest book of poems is Midwest / Mid-East: March 2012 Poetry Tour. http://michaeldickel.info
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: FICTION: Kelly Garriott Waite Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Science Monitor, Thunderbird Stories Project, Volume One, Valley Living, The Center for a New American Dream and in the on-line magazine, Tales From a Small Planet. Her fiction has been published in The Rose and Thorn Journal (Memory, Misplaced), in Front Row Lit (The Fullness of the Moon) and in Idea Gems Magazine (No Map and No Directions). Her works in progress have been included in the Third Sunday Blog Carnival: The Contours of a Man’s Heart and Wheezy Hart. She is the author of Downriver and The Loneliness Stories, both available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. http://kellygarriottwaite.com
FLASH FICTION: T.K. Young: US-based writer; author of the flash fiction collection When We’re Afraid, and currently finalizing the upcoming “pre-dystopian” science fiction novel Chawlgirl Rising for publication. He posts original work, writing tips, news and contests at www. flashfictionblog.com. THE ARTS: Seth Apter Mixed-media artist, instructor, author and designer. His artwork has been widely exhibited, and represented in numerous books, independent zines, and national magazines. He is the voice behind The Pulse, a series of international, collaborative projects, the basis of his two books The Pulse of Mixed Media: Secrets and Passions of 100 Artists Revealed and The Mixed-Media Artist: Art Tips, Tricks, Secrets and Dreams From Over 40 Amazing Artists, both published by North Light Books. He is the artist behind two workshop DVDs: Easy Mixed Media Surface Techniques and Easy Mixed Media Techniques for the Art Journal. http://www.sethapter.com PHOTOGRAPHY: Susan Tuttle Award winning iPhoneographer and DSLR photographer. She is the author of three instruction-based books (published in the US and abroad by F+W Media, North Light Books) on digital art with Photoshop, mobile photography and DSLR photography, and mixed-media art. Her fourth book, Art of Everyday Photography: Move Toward Manual and Make Creative Photos (about DSLR photography and mobile photography) was recently released by North Light Books and has been a best-seller in its category on Amazon. She is currently the Technical Advisor for Somerset Digital Studio Magazine. http://susantuttlephotography.com
ASSISTANT EDITORS: Dyane Forde Author of forthcoming Rise of the Papilion Trilogy: The Purple Morrow (Book 1) http://droppedpebbles.wordpress.com Lisa A. Kramer, Ph.D Freelance writer, editor, theatre director, and arts educator. She has published non-fiction articles in theater journals, as well articles aimed at young people for Listen Magazine. Her fiction is included in Theme-Thology: Invasion published by HDWPBooks. com. She is the director of a writers’ workshop From Stage to Page: Using Creative Dramatics to Inspire Writing. http://www.lisaakramer.com
Our staff is an eclectic mix of editors with keen eyes for the striking. So beware–they may be culling your own site for those gems deserving to be unearthed and spotlit in The Woven Tale Press.
Editor’s Note: The Woven Tale Press is a monthly culling of the creative web, exhibiting the artful and innovative. Enjoy here an eclectic mix of the literary, visual arts, photography, humorous, and offbeat. The Woven Tale Press mission is to grow Web traffic to noteworthy writers and artists–contributors are credited with interactive Urls. Click on an Url to learn more about a contributor. If there is a “Featured!” button, it will link you back to a special feature on The Woven Tale Press site. To submit go to: http://thewoventalepress.net
http://susantuttlephotography.comcom
IP
hone
P
h o t o g r a p h y
Brittle White Slivers of Ice 1
“
Chair in Snow
T he iPhone, always on my person, makes for wonderful spontaneous photography. Editing photos on an iPhone is a seamless, convenient process. There are tons of user-friendly apps to choose from. I can take the shot and edit anywhere, anytime, all with a device that fits in the palm of my hand. 2 – Susan Tuttle
”
Ellie Descendait
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The Last Picture Show
http://susantuttlephotography.comco
4
DSLR P “
h ho o tt o og gr ra ap ph hy y
With my iPhone, I am often using myself as a model; the clay of my photo-manipulation so to speak...
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Untitled
Untitled
But with my DSLR, I can shoot a variety of photo styles.The interchangeable lenses allow for a variety of effects and supreme clarity of images. – Susan Tuttle
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Untit
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tled
http://susantuttlephotography.com
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http://brickwahl.com
Every day when I go to work, I am literally—now there’s a pun —the only one carrying a book. Over the past year, out of hundreds and hundreds of my fellow employees, I’ve seen less than ten with a book in their hands. But there is one book-reader I remember. A gorgeous thing, with raven hair, olive complexion, black eyes, in a billowing white chiffon dress that spilled over the arm rests of the chair she sat in, a big stuffed chair in the lobby of the floor I worked on.
A
Lady
in a
Chiffon Dress
Reading
Thucydides
She was one of the loveliest women I had ever seen, and she was deep into a hardback volume of Thucydides. Seriously. she was not a spectre, not an epileptic’s vision. She was a genuinely pretty lady reading one of my favorite books ever. Oh, to be twenty or thirty years younger at that moment. Oh to be young and brave enough to sit along side her, to muster the nerve to bring up Pericles or Cleon, or the Revolt of Mytilene. The Plague of Athens and the Siege of Syracuse. The meaning of it all. But no. You reading the History of the Peloponnesian War? I asked, lamely. She looked up, surprised. Such big black eyes, a tinge of worry. Yes, she said, I am. That’s one of my favorite books, I said. Oh, she said. She didn’t believe me. Thought I was trying to pick her up. Never trust men old enough to be your father who’ve read Thucydides, her mother had warned, 9
they’re the worst kind. I wasn’t trying to pick her up, not at all. I was just surprised—astonished, really—to find a beautiful young girl lost in ancient history. I’d first read that book at about her age myself. The Penguin edition, paperback. I still have it. I was twenty, it was the autumn of 1977, and I had immersed myself; I remember coming to a scene late in the book where the Athenians, set out patrols to reconnoiter the beach. It all had been so modern, the way they thought, and I had realized, suddenly, that they had been so much like us. These men weren’t myths, legends, or simple. They hadn’t been ridiculous Italian muscle men, or philosophers with perfect Oxford accents. They had been Greeks doing things the way we would do them now, as described by a contemporary historian who had been one of them. Though twenty-five centuries old, they came to life, those Athenians fresh on that beach. Later, they had all been killed, or drowned, or died of pestilence. The survivors were sold into slavery. I remember feeling sorry for them, for each of them. I had been living on the Santa Barbara coastal plain then, a perfect Mediterranean climate on a perfectly Mediterranean lay of land. The sea had shone the same blue under the same sun, and vineyards were stitched along hills between groves of carefully tended fruit trees. It had taken very little imagination to picture the Athenians and Spartans around me, distant columns, fleets of triremes sailing off. I’d sit outside on my balcony and read of ancient campaigns in the same sort of light that had fallen on those men back then. It was magical. I wanted to tell this girl that. Tell her about how that book had changed my life, let me see people then as people now, or the other way around. I wanted to, but she was far too beautiful and far too young, that lady in the chiffon dress reading Thucydides. I had an elevator to catch. Enjoy the book, I said, and kept walking. I will, she said, looking relieved I wasn’t stopping. She settled back into the chair, crossed her beautiful legs, and slipped back into her book. The elevator doors shut before me, and she was gone.
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http://www.smallblueyonder.com
“
When I started my blog, the idea was to keep it wash, scanning, saving as JPG, done.The comic has each strip more legible, I began putting the text o ed adding more layers, adding tones, editing the lin hours on each comic instead of minutes. Eventually each comic, I may as well do them in color. For no I was using an old Rapidograph pen but have switch
11
t fast and loose: pen and ink, black-and-white s tightened up over time. In an effort to make on a separate layer in Photoshop.Then I startne work in each strip. I found myself spending I realized, If I’m spending this much time on ow, I’m still doing the line work on Bristol Board. hed to Faber-Castell PITT artist pens. – Crispin Woods
”
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http://www.taraskurtu.com
The Amoeba Game I stood at the stove holding a wooden spoon in my right hand, listening to butter sputtering against the splattered circle of an egg. Perhaps it was the flapping of the egg’s wavy edges against the steel pan, or the amorphousness of its innards outside the carriage of its brown shell— I remembered an odd game I played in Brownies. The amoeba game. In the front yard of the scout cabin, one girl at a time would become an amoeba and lead the rest. We didn’t know what amoebas were, only that they weren’t human or animal, and moved like a thousand blind legs treading through molasses. So it was that our heads and arms became legs and feet, undulating wayward into dusk. Swaying our shoulders left to right, we’d giggle through mouths we weren’t supposed to have, pretending we had no eyes and didn’t know where we came from or where we were going. (Originally published in Poet Lore)
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Visiting Amber at Lowell Correctional A windowless room. Mom and I remove shoes, socks, spread our arms wide between the cinderblock wall and locked door. The guard takes a swallow of V8 before patting us down. Inside, I ask Amber if this is a maximum security facility. She tells me they’ve got her in here with murderers like The Gardener—worked at a daycare, killed a few kids there, buried them alive. They gave her yard duty until she began to name the trees she planted: Josie, Maggie, Stephanie. Slicing deep into her thighs, she mortared her wounds with shit and got gangrene. In a wheelchair now. Don’t wanna think about her no more, Amber says. Seeing her every day is bad enough. An inmate takes Polaroids, two dollars each, acrylic wall paintings in the background. One of an angel, feathers fanned out against a pastel sky. Stand here, Amber says. I want you to have wings. She’s to my right, our mother to my left. We smile big. When I dream about my sister she’s a child, in our Florida backyard, wide-eyed and silent. She fills buckets with garden snakes, catches strawberry-necked lizards poised with the want of a mate. With one hand she holds a wriggling lizard, with the other she hinges its jaws open then closed onto the lobe of her ear. (Originally published in The Southeast Review) 16
http://adraijer.wix.com/eternity
A C R Y L I C S
Elements
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Change #2
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Reflection
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Change #4
http://adraijer.wix.com/eternity
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Migration
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Change #1
http://adraijer.wix.com/eternity
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http://kristypoems.blogspot.com
Uncontrolled Jungle The Wind Has Lost His Mind The wind has lost his mind He is desperately howling as if he knows my feelings The wind has lost his mind His thoughts are frozen as if he knows you died The wind has lost his mind He is breaking glass and trees as if he is mad at death I have lost my mind I hear your voice I see your smile as if you are alive
Jump into the jungle of uncontrolled words You are not a birthday cake in a shape of Mickey Mouse Smash the mold on the wall let the art be what it was before the humans invented locks Enjoy this fresh beat turn off the set heat choose the color of the breeze don’t let others intervene get wild and set the scene
False colors All your holy goodness The vases with artificial flowers You fooled many others with your false colors but not me
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http://curtthewriter.com
R
hapsody
in Blue
Several weeks ago I was boarding a United flight in Tampa, to begin a three-week trip to Europe. My wife and I could board early because we used an affiliated credit card to book the trip. We moved down the aisle toward the seats we’d chosen in the back. This location increased our likelihood of having the middle seats open on this less-than-completely full airplane.
Approaching our row, we heard someone talking loudly. “You can’t put all those bags in the overhead bin! You have one – two – three people. You can put three bags in the overhead bin. All the rest will have to go under the seat in front of you.” We were her next target. “Two people; two bags. Your personal bags will have to go under the seat in front of you.” All of a sudden I remembered Mrs. Cassidy, my fifth-grade teacher who on field trips scolded us almost as much as this flight attendant. With no room to move my feet under the seat in front, I brooded over the sorry state of air travel for those unwilling to pay the four-figure cost of business class on this two-hour flight. I was also thinking about the blog post I’d write, Tweets I’d send, and my ratings if given a survey. I told my wife we should consider a Delta-affiliated credit card. Heading up the aisle after a mid-flight trip to the lavatory, a term most commonly used in grade schools and commercial aircraft, I somehow found myself between the beverage and trash pickup carts, my seat being several rows behind the trash cart. Walking up to the flight attendant taking passengers’ used cups and napkins, I apologized for getting myself into this situation, but said that I wanted to get to my seat, which was “back there.” She turned to look where I was pointing, then looked behind me to see the other cart. Looking directly at me she broke into a big smile and said, “Looks like you’re stuck.” You know those times when you come up with a really good response after an event has passed? This was not one of those times. “I guess you might say I’m stuck in the middle with you,” I replied. She laughed out loud to this Stealers Wheel reference and backed up the cart so I could get to my seat. As we were leaving the plane an hour later, she was up front thanking the departing passengers. Seeing me, she smiled as she complained, “I can’t get that song out of my brain.” “Serves you right,” I laughed heading to catch our next flight. One flight attendant had an attitude; the other had attitude. One in no way reflects the brand’s “Friendly” campaign; the other is an ambassador for it. One almost cost the company this customer’s future spending. The other assured my continued loyalty … and revenue stream. I sometimes worry that the ways we analyze and measure behavior, both customer and employee behaviors, only ensures that employees are hitting each note, not playing “Rhapsody in Blue.” 24
http://iangordoncraig.blogspot.co.uk
“
This is about my childhood spent on Thoresby Estate, Nottinghamshire. As with many of my pictures there is a time lapse built into the composition, so we can see different times of day or year or lifetime brought together in one image.
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Dukery Boy Oil on Canvas
– David Hockney
“
As children, my sister and I lived at The Woodyard, Thoresby Estate. This painting is based on a memory of us watching the owls at night in the surrounding forest. In the foreground you can see items from my Sooty and Muffin the Mule Club membership. The owls in the trees were contributed by my nephews and nieces when they were younger.
Watching the Barn Owls Oil on Canvas
”
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“
Portrait of the Artist Oil on Canvas
‘Portrait of the Artist’ depicts me as a grammar school boy. The famous James Joyce novel was really the only thing of lasting value I took with me from my grammar school days.
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”
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Pink Panther Oil on Canvas
Lister gate, Nottingham, was the regular site of one particular street artist who always included the Pink Panther in all her pavement drawings. The painting depicts two small girls discovering the Panther on the street, the eldest of the two watching her younger sister’s expression. In the background the less magical world of adulthood passes by.
”
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“
The Jam C is a small, po lar coffee ba Nottingham f turing live mu One such mu cian is Notti singer-songw Rosie Abbott this painting picts Rosie i dark interior venue, watch other band. I pieces of var Nottingham b promos to c and paste in foreground.
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Jam Café, Nottingham
Acrylic Painting on Paper Wth Collage Elements 29
Café opuar in feausic. usiingham writer t, and dein the of the hing anI used rious based cut up the
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“
’Under Lady Bay Bridge Nottingham’ was an experimental collaboration with an art student friend of mine. The theme was to be identity, and the painting is about different aspects of one’s character. The distorted background helps convey the contrast between the two sides of this character.
”
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http://michaeldickel.info
Programming C
The troglodyte tree emerged from its cave exactly when three lights lit the evening ling of course, in her first month, and a growth to maturity away from motherhood— branches, anticipating need layered behind an urge, urgently rooting its words to sunset faded, but they failed to notice the rhymed shout of the waddling crow or t over rocks to escape the leaden footfalls, but caught the corners of eyes just eno the counter-rhythm of hikers’ hearts as the circadian cycle wheeled around the corner into mythic headlamps. The schism parts a sea of rock that waved out from the mud under great heat and pressure, a rift that shifts semantic considerations into syntactic synapses sparkling with possibility. The owl mother raises her brood in the arms of the old woman while the dark ink-stains test the psychological nature of night in Rorschach irregularity. The hikers dream strange narratives disrupted by correspondence to rather than with, while the flight of lava spans only a second of memory, seconded by the sergeant-at-arms who grew tired of standing at attention. The rhetor no longer senses anything and begins to tongue language into a frenzy of aurora borealis framed by a moonless expanse above a dwindling plain, matted with a white foam of stars. Thus, a scroll, parchment from a cracked amphora, unrolls a story about raptor rapture, tree delight, and generations of sublime song—a cultural blueprint that makes us (again).
Flash S u r r e a l i s m 31
ultural DNA
g sky on the New Moon that fell before the birth-month of mother owl. Just a hatch—but she arrived in the world as an archetype of herself. The tree prepared nesting the future. A dance of hikers climbed out of the wadi, cars lost in gloom when the the emergent present of a deciduous hermit. Shadows slid like blackhole-mercury ough to pull at small fears caught in past anxiety. Branches snapped in bushes to
Image by Michael Dickel
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https://jeandrawingaday.wordpress.com
Red and Yellow, Yellow and Red 33
C O L L A G R A P H S
“I
was attracted to the collagraph printmaking process by its
home-friendly nature–my printing plates are made from mount board, found textured papers, and
The
PVA glue.
combinations of textures allow
me to make prints from my imagination and from observations of the local landscape, and buildings.
It’s
easy
to experiment with the process, as
the materials are free or relatively cheap, so
I
can be bolder than
I
used
to be when using zinc plate in etching.
Over the years, I have managed to buy my own press, and so I can transform
my kitchen into a print workshop for
the day, to print my collagraphs using colored inks, chine colle or sometimes in black ink for handcolouring later.”
– Jean Edwards
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https://jeandrawingaday.wordpress.com
Textures of the Land Colored Collagraph
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W Two-
Green Bird Colored Collagraph
Winter Tree, Winter Sky -Plate Colored Collagraph
Blue Bird Colored Collagraph
Misty Morning Two-plate Colored Collagraph
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ISSN: 2333-2387