Mark Pointer - undefined magazine Book 7

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undefined : Book Seven : July-August 2010

features:

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Preach Jacobs on Sanford Greene Creative Writing Competition: Poetry Creative Writing Competition: Flash Fiction Creative Writing Competition: Short Story Hub City Writers Project Matt Matthews First Novel Winner 2010 Brian Ray First Novel Winner 2009 Book Review: Out Loud Featured Poets: Kristine Hartvigsen and Ed Madden Book Review: Call it What You Want

contributors

Cynthia Boiter … Associate Editor Jeffrey Day … Associate Editor Mark Pointer … Associate Editor

Ed Madden … Poetry Editor Preach Jacobs … Writer Stephen Long … Photographer

Subscribe now at: www.undefinedmagazine.com These pages are the labor of many talented hands, from writing, design and editing, to sales and marketing. We encourage you to contact us with any feedback or story ideas at our website. Please support the artists, your community leaders and advertisers. For advertising information please contact us at: 803.386.9031 or ads@undefinedmagazine.com undefined magazine is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any manner, in whole or in part, without the publisher's written permission.

Write us at: undefined Magazine 709 Woodrow Street : 321 : Columbia, SC 29205 803.386.9031 ©2010 All Rights Reserved undefined : book seven

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Photo: Joshua Beard

Cynthia Boiter, Associate Editor

A message from the editors.

Hello again and welcome to the first undefined magazine Summer Reader – an edition devoted to the literary arts. The winning entries in our short story, poetry and flash fiction contests by writers from around the state are the heart of the Reader and in this issue you’ll find the top three picks in each category.

We also couldn’t have done this issue without the efforts of Ed Madden, who selected the poetry winners, and Janna MacMahan and Tom Poland, who picked the short story winners. Like the winners, they worked for free. Thanks guys.

(Cindi selected the flash fiction winners. Associate Editor Jeffrey Day narrowed down the short story entries before passing them on to Tom and Janna.)

We were pretty staggered by the number of entries: 42 short stories, 28 flash fiction pieces and about 400 poems from 84 poets. What impressed us even more was the high quality of the entries.

As of this issue we welcome Ed aboard as Poetry Editor of undefined. Ed is an associate professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina and in June won the 2010 Prose Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission.

Even though we aren’t in a position to hand out hefty awards (OK, we’re not giving any at all, but we didn’t charge folks to enter either) we are honored to be able to provide an outlet for these fine writers and their words.

Now we welcome you to the Summer Reader. You’ll find some beautiful, funny, and sometimes disturbing stories and poems in these pages. Give a round of applause to the writers.

Credit for the Summer Reader goes to Associate Editor Cynthia Boiter. It’s natural for Cindi to want to create a literary issue because she’s a good writer with the prizes to prove it. She is a six-time winner of the South Carolina Fiction Project, a threetime winner of the Piccolo Fiction Open, and a two-time inductee into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. Her articles and creative non-fiction have appeared in Southern Living, Woman's Day, Family Circle, and a slew of parenting and regional magazines. A recipient of the Porter Fleming and Irene B. Tauber awards for fiction and essays respectively, Cindi was also the first place winner of the W.W. Norton prize for Flash Fiction a few years back.

Let us know what you think – about this issue, past issues, or what you'd like to see in future issues. Address your correspondence to editor@beundefined.com.

We’ll be back in September looking at the upcoming South Carolina arts season and the artists who make it happen.

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artist

Preach Jacobs on

Sanford Greene Sanford Greene is one of Columbia, South Carolina’s busiest and best kept secrets. A 37year-old Charleston native and illustrator, Greene’s work can be found on the covers and in the pages of such internationally recognized comic books as Batman, Star Wars, and The Amazing Spider-Man. Now, with the release of the third installment of “Deadlines,” a sketchbook highlighting Greene’s work for Marvel, DC Comics, and Warner Brothers, alongside original Greene characters, the artist is also readying to release a comic book with a hip-hop character of his own creation.

B

We met on a Friday afternoon at Greene’s home in Northeast Columbia while his wife, Lesli, was out of town, leaving Greene with his two sons, Malcolm, 8, and Mason, 2.

After the boys were tucked into bed, we watched an NBA playoff game and a Don Cheadle movie, all the while eating popcorn and trail mix. Finally, Greene was ready to talk about his life and work. It was knocking on 4 a.m. – Greene’s favorite time for getting things done.

He speaks humbly about his accomplishments.

“I don’t think my greatest achievement has happened yet,” he says. “I’m really proud of working on Spider-Man, since it’s my most recognizable project, but there’s more that I want to do.”

ut, what you also need to know is that I am the man’s biggest fan.

I first met Sanford Greene almost ten years ago. Because my musical endeavors in the world of hip-hop were similar to Greene’s interests in the art world, we became comrades at first, but ultimately, mentor and protégé. I knew there was a lot I could learn from Greene. He was living proof that success can happen while holding on to one’s roots. To consider my work for this article to be an interview just doesn’t feel right.

Getting together with Greene isn’t so much like an interview as it is a ritual gathering of like-minded people that I just happened to record.

story: preach jacobs

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In the forward of Greene’s latest book, “Deadlines 3,” Eisner Award-winning comic book artist Darwyn Cooke isn’t short on praise for Greene. “Sanford is an Art Director’s dream,” he says. “His clear unique designs, filled with distinctive shapes and sometimes daring stylistic turns, make his work fun to look at. The other ingredient to Sanford’s success is discipline – the discipline to get work done, and done well.“ That discipline may be what is leading Greene into the most successful year of his career – finishing a graphic novel collaboration with the Wu-Tang Clan member, Method Man, while at the same time working on the Marvel Comics project, “Deadpool.”

Greene attributes his wide range of projects to his many

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sources of inspiration. “Artistically, my influences include Norman Rockwell, animator Don Bluth, Michael Golden, and others,” he says. “I’m also into different cultures. African culture, urban culture – the ability to bring these together with the influence of classic illustrators is the reason I think my work appeals to people.”

Greene’s talent for combining the two seemingly divergent worlds of hip-hop culture and comics, and finding ways to make it his own, requires a delicate balance.

His “Method Man” graphic novel was a hit at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, one of the world’s biggest comic book fan conventions. The book sold record numbers and gave Greene go-to status for anyone in the hip-hop world looking to dive

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moments when the difference between the right decision and the wrong decision is something that can only be found by gut-checking.”

I ask about a defining moment in his career.

“You know, when I started out with my first big placement, I had a moment when I had to learn who I was. I was a hungry artist and I felt that I was being abused and not fulfilling my potential,” Greene says. “The day I told the guy in charge of the project that I was going my own way, he gave me a backhanded patronizing comment. He said something like ‘OK, good luck trying to find a job with Marvel or DC.’ “ “But, you know what? I work for both of them now.”

into comics. The connection is second nature to Greene.

“Hip-hop is such a character-driven industry and I create characters and design stories with huge narratives,” he says. “It’s all about telling your story and that’s what the music is to me.”

The night has worn long and Greene’s modest twostory home is silent. The kids are sleeping and the vibe in the house is one of a family that is loved and cared for. I ask Greene what the secret is to succeeding in an industry as cutthroat as Hollywood and unforgiving as the music industry.

“You have to know the rules before you can break them,” he says. “You have to understand the handiwork and fundamentals of this type of work. Identity is so important and there are

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SHORT STORY

POETRY

It was a real pleasure to read the entries for this year’s undefined poetry contest, and it was really hard, in the end, to decide on the best ones, with so many imaginative, beautiful, and distinctive voices. The entries came to me without names, but once the editors notified me who the writers were, I was delighted to see some familiar South Carolina names.

– Ed Madden The first place winner is Susan Meyers, who lives in the rural Lowcountry, for “No more than the bird with piercing voice,” one of a group of poems, each developed from a line taken from Sappho. The language of all of them was rich and musical, the syntax interesting, the wording sometimes quirky, but this one seemed the most beautiful of the batch, lovely and enigmatic in its catalogue of comparisons, all leading into that powerful ending.

“Rooting for the Redskins on Monday Night” by Gilbert Allen of Travelers Rest was one of my favorites as I read and reread through the entries — clever and punning, but also such a poignant comment on emigration, heritage, and ethnic identity.

and some other somewhat surrealist poems, this one seemed to offer the best of both, simultaneously strange and poignant and centered on an emotional and familial truth. A South Carolina native, she lives in California.

Teresa Haskew of Greenville, and Serena Chopra of Denver, Colo., received honorable mention. Haskew’s “Husked” was a tightly worded and explosive little poem of sexual awakening.

Chopra’s “Heart” was one of the quirkiest poems of the bunch, insistently elliptical in language, yet implicitly focused on the heart as the body’s muscle, a fist of muscle full of holes. Like the other winners, her poem was a delight to read aloud.

Julia Koets’s “For Julia in Little Armenia” was the third place poem. I was hooked from that opening metaphor of a rabbit that porpoised through snow. While there were a lot of family poems Ed Madden is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Signals, which won the 2007 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, and his work was included in Best New Poets 2007.

Anna Redwine "April Insects"

No more than the bird with piercing voice does the butterfly call upon yellow, does the door open itself to insects and the window screen draw the spider; does the letter to someone owing money take a swift, efficient path before sundown, risking the scars (or worse ) of travel; does the shoe desire its mate, the driveway its shallow bed of dust, the jelly bean jar its cache of perfect eggs; does the bugle (early and late) pick the best notes of this particular season to bring home the soldier, that one sweet face.

(The title is from a line by Sappho fragment 30.)

Susan Laughter Meyers is the author of Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), which won the inaugural South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. It went on to receive the SIBA Book Award for Poetry and the Brockman-Campbell Book Award.

Her poetry has also been awarded prizes by South Carolina Review, Yemassee, and Crucible. A long-time writing instructor with a master of fine arts degree from Queens University of Charlotte, she lives with her husband in rural Givhans, S.C.

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Rooting for the Redskins on Monday Night May God us keep From single vision & Newton’s sleep! for Magdalena Zaborowska, a recent arrival

Unlike you we’re just here—a perfect example of Blake’s nightmare, scarfing Fig Newtons before nodding off in the La-Z-Boy so to see the Cowboys get killed, we’ll check the smoke signals in the morning paper.

We’re Americans, pure and unhyphenated, though we suspect our Great-Great Grandpa Genes came from somewhere, sometime.

What we have as our better half is this nothing inside us never to be known.

How different it must be to hear that other vacuuming the house of your heart, even if you can’t marry him or her or divorce.

How unlike this cartoon desert island, with only the palmetto of a single aerial for company, surrounded by endless waves of infinite channels, which beckon equally, from all directions.

Gilbert Allen also won second place in the undefined short story contest. He is a professor of English at Furman University, has published several books of poetry and won many awards. See his full biography on page 30. undefined : book seven

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For Julia in Little Armenia When a rabbit porpoises through snow, a thousand things are true at once: you’re not close to your father for the things you share: the always being right, the wine, basil that dries brown on your windowsill. When I say your name out loud: an inheritance from my grandmother, who saved tap water in glass bottles; who kept a jar of broken glass on the counter.

But it was soft: glass buried in the ground for years.

We may have too many things in common: an unlikeliness to hug at first, a quiet in our eyes, a tendency to miss and love too early. When I say your name out loud, a mirror rests on my tongue and turns into a bird when it leaves my lips. This bird is a strangeness, hearing my own face in saying Julia. It carries this in its tiny beak, where a thousand things can be true at once.

Julia Koets holds a master of fine arts degree in poetry from the University of South Carolina and lives in Claremont, Calif., where she is an AmeriCorps Promise Fellow with the Academy for Literacy Through the Arts in affiliation with Cal Poly Pomona. She has been published in journals such as Cutthroat and Euphony. She grew up in Summerville.

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FL ASH FICTION

Call it what you like – short-short fiction, microfiction, postcard fiction, or prosetry – we call it flash fiction, and we call the more than two dozen entries into our inaugural flash fiction competition – wonderful.

It isn’t easy crafting such a compact piece of literature – grabbing the reader, developing a story arc, moving it forward, and bringing it home, all in 500 words or less.

SHORT STORY

It wasn’t easy choosing our winners either. But our three winners stood out for two reasons – originality and an almost lusty abandonment of the constraints of conventional writing wisdom.

– Cynthia Boiter, undefined Associate Editor In “Brenda kissed me on the forehead and walked off into the El Paso sunrise ,” Paul Bowers uses a common referencing mechanism to uncommonly construct his tale of an illicit encounter. This type of innovative cutting-edge artistry earned Bowers our first place award.

A poet and prose writer, Phebe Davidson gives the reader an inside perspective to a world-rattling moment in time in her entry, “Seven Pieces,” winner of our second place award.

And in “Gyp,” our third place winner, John Purvis defies more than gravity to lift us beyond the earth-bound places where most of us spend our days and nights, unlike the characters in his story.

Reading all three entries was a joy.

POETRY

Jeffrey Day "No Entry”

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1

Brenda kissed me on the forehead and walked 5

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off into the El Paso sunrise .

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I meet Brenda every time I cross the state of Texas. She finds

I sat by two young guys from El Paso yesterday at an Awful

me at the payphone when I call her, and Lord, she’s just like the Interstate in these parts: not much to look at, but untamed when we’re alone together. The first time, she didn’t ask before she yanked the cord and sounded an air horn blast into the 1 a.m. silence. Now, as far out as Odessa, I can tug that wire and hear her wailing along like she did that night. And then I shift into the hammer lane and ball the jack clear through to her.

Waffle in Socorro. Said they were headed to the White Sands Missile Range. Said their teacher told them once about how we did the first A-bomb tests there, said they needed to see the crater themselves. I swore I’d have kids one day and take them out to see it. But at the moment, I was off to meet Brenda.

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Bugging my eyes at my wristwatch, I knew the boss man would have questions when I got to Tucson. I popped open the ashtray and took out the wedding band. She was headed back in the direction of Socorro on foot and had assured me there’d be someone to pick her up. Slamming the door, I crammed the key in and jammed the air start. I dialed the CB volume to 12 o’clock, fiddled the squelch, and immediately I heard one of these desert-dwelling crackpots, no doubt messing with a radio in his garage. I gathered from his monotone that he was reading something aloud. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he said, and that was all I could take before I switched channels. I glanced in the rearview to see if Brenda was making progress, but I couldn’t even make out her silhouette in the coming dawn. I continued to stare at the reflection, and it burned. Lord, it burned my eyes.

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Brenda’s not too big on the lovey-dovey, but when she kisses you she does it on purpose. She leaves Big Red skid marks on your lips, and her K-Mart perfume clings to upholstery for days.

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I don’t reckon anybody had laid it on me there since I had the chicken pox. When she did it, I was half awake and thought I was back in Memphis already. But by the time I was up, she was outside the cab with her back to me hooking on her black overalls. Her bare shoulder winked in my direction, but I knew she’d not be turning around.

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But I’d see her again. We’ve got this way of smoothing over the bumps in each other’s roads, and it’s the same story every time, same as when I was 22 and alone.

Paul Bowers is an award-winning journalist who has written for the Charleston Post and Courier, the New York Times and the Huffington Post. A native of Summerville, S.C., he is a journalism student at the University of South Carolina. In July he is marrying his high school sweetheart.

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Seven Pieces Death walks into Chester A. Arthur High School. Who knows why? Say it’s Wednesday. It’s a slow day and maybe he’s bored.

Say he feels a sense of professional obligation. He goes in through the door by the gym.

There’s another kid coming down the library hall with a Braves cap backwards on his head. He’s wearing a torn, red sweatshirt that says “Bite me!” He has his father’s Glock in his book bag. The cafeteria staff doesn’t know it yet, but halfway through ‘C’ lunch the steam table will be a mess of blood mixed with flesh and little slivers of bone. It will look almost like barbecue hash. The two slowest food ladies will be dead.

So will one teacher and the school nurse.

The red head, a junior in a short skirt, looks up at him. She’s two weeks pregnant and doesn’t know it yet. She doesn’t wonder if her old man will kill her. She’s leaning against the wall by the locker room door. She’s tired of waiting for her boyfriend.

Say there’s a kid standing in front of the urinal when Death steps into the boys room to take a leak. Say the kid looks over and wonders who this new guy is. He looks pretty much beat to hell and his dick is no bigger than the kid’s. The kid thinks he’s nothing special. Death shrugs.

A ninth grader is eyeing her from the other side of the corridor. He is a full head shorter than she is. He will die at thirtyseven with a degree in patent law and a ruptured appendix but right now he is a catalog of pimples and unarticulated lusts.

There’s a quick cracking noise, louder than anything the kid has ever heard, and the urinal lies broken into seven pieces that rocking on the floor. Say Death tucks himself in and zips up. Say he slicks back his hair, walks out the door.

One floor up a girl walks into the library, a senior. Her navel is pierced. So are her upper lip and both of her eyebrows. Her left ear sports eight studs, alternating gold and silver. Her lipstick is black and she is an honor student. She wants to study social work. A kid in her art class has burned out on dragons and switched to cars. He wants to design tattoos. He’ll die of AIDS before his work catches on. His head is shaved and she loves the shape of his skull, the delicate set of his ears. She has slept with him but only once.

Phebe Davidson is a poet/reviewer/editor who publishes in print and electronic venues. Her collections include The Surface of Things (David Robert Books, 2009), and the chapbook Seven Mile (MSR, 2009). She is a staff writer for the Asheville Poetry Review, and a contributing editor at Tar River Poetry. She lives in Westminster , S.C.

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featu

Gyp The dog had shepherd in him and, with his hindquarters canted toward the earth, this is probably why he ever learned to fly. Forever falling earthward likely inclined his mind to flight.

the dirt shoveled out in raspy breaths, the moonlight turned over, again and again, by the spade. He had found the body later, conventionally, as would be expected of a dog. For a time, he refused to fly.

Or perhaps it was his master’s vocation which applied the downward tension allowing him to kite up into an evening sky, pulled and pushed aloft. His master was a carpenter whose work took the living wood spilling slowly up into the sky and set it sturdy into earthbound purpose. Or maybe it was the gravity of patient expectation, watching as his master labored with massive hands, the pulse visible in them, strong and steady, suddenly uncoiling, humming, slicing through the flesh as the woman he loved burned for another, and caught upon the musty breeze, floated, floated, screaming up a fiery kite into the night sky, shuddering against the wind and string, the tail finally bursting into flames. The cinders fell a light rain through open, rough-hewn, dreaming rafters.

They executed the woman, and she was suspended in the sky, pushed and pulled, dead in her flight. The dog’s master had eventually married a female pastor long loved by his younger brother. The younger brother took up residence with his brother and sister-in-law, the wife he wanted. He never married.

Now this is the strange part. On Saturday nights after his master and his master’s brother had retired to their beds, the dog would join the lady pastor in front of the fire as she put the finishing touches on her sermon for the next day. Then they would walk outside and lean forward into the wind, however slight. The lightest breeze would lift them, and they would play out on an invisible tether, hover above the house built by the two men who slept below, beneath the rafters now holding up a heavy sky, too tired to dream. Smoke from the chimney spread a path of cinder softly falling like the lightest rain, a fragrance, a shadow seeping into the woods behind them. Then, their tether slipped, they would glide into the forest. Later they would walk out together, the dog pressed into the woman’s leg, her fingertips trailing down into his fur, walking into the dawn, his eyes aglow, her eyes patient expectation.

But any of this could only account for metaphorical flight. And this dog flew in fact. His hindquarters angled toward the earth, his chest exposed, a strong wind had wished to lift him. Tired of patient expectation, he had let it.

The woman killed the baby. The dog had seen it, far below, her breath a different passion now in this night,

John Purvis lives on Preacher Purvis Road in Chesterfield County. His research for his writing career carried him around the world many times posing as a pioneer in the computer industry.

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SHORT STORY

undefined's short story submissions tended to avoid the plots and subject matter that often appear in fiction contests. I didn't find the typical mill town and coming-of-age stories. Instead, I was treated to fresh, contemporary characters working out their issues in art museums, ad agencies and apartments. It was great to read a more edgy collection of work.

– Janna McMahan.

POETRY

McMahan is an award-winning short fiction writer and the author of the novels The Ocean Inside and Calling Home and the novella, Decorations. Visit JannaMcMahan.com.

Reading undefined’s short story submissions proved revealing, a journey into the world of intriguing characters and the failings that make humans so fragile. Judging a competition means not all can win, and though few things prove more difficult than writing, I know these writers will keep creating insightful stories.

– Tom Poland.

Poland is a freelance writer, author of 500-plus magazine features, and the author of the novel Forbidden Island and the South Carolina pictorial journey, Reflections of South Carolina. Visit tompoland.net

Jonathan Goley "I Am You"

Collateral Damage

by Leslie Haynsworth

W

hen Jenny quit smoking, she knew if she ever had even one cigarette again, she’d be right back to a pack a day in no time. So now when she needs one she gets Tim to smoke for her instead. They go out to the little patio behind their office building and Tim lights up and she stands right beside him, their shoulders almost touching, and he smokes and she breathes in the smoke-salted air with deep, greedy breaths, and every now and then he turns toward her and exhales, hard and fast, right into her face, and she breathes in even deeper. By the time he’s finished smoking, she’s okay again. Not as okay as she’d be if she’d just smoked a cigarette of her own, but okay enough to get on with things.

He’s smoking for her now, this morning, because of the meeting she just had with the creative director, who told her she’s going to have to totally redo the copy on the Nestor and Seigleman brochure before the client presentation at 8:30 tomorrow morning. “This copy is dull as dishwater,” the creative director said. “You’ve got to jazz it up, sweetie. Come on, think outside the box.” Jenny and Tim both think that as alleged exemplars of creativity, creative directors should try to at least be sort of original in the ways that they insult your work. “He’s such a fucking moron,” says Tim supportively as he blows smoke into Jenny’s eyes. “You don’t ‘think outside the box’ when you’re writing copy for a freaking law firm, come on.” He takes another drag, then pulls his arms in tight against his chest. It’s colder out here than he’d realized and he can tell from the raw ache in the back of his throat that he’s coming down with something. He probably shouldn’t be smoking.

Jenny skitters around beside him, chasing smoke, waving her arms at it to corral it toward her. It’s windy and a lot of the smoke is blowing away before she can get to it. She’s not getting enough of it; Tim’s almost done with the cigarette and that clutch of need in her chest remains almost entirely unsoothed. She wants to tell Tim he needs to smoke another cigarette, but when she looks at him, all huddled into himself and now his nose starting to run, she sees that she can’t. “You know, it’s exactly because he is such a moron that he has the job,” she says, referring to the creative director. “It’s why he gets along so well with the other managing partners.”

“Yeah.” Tim nods. “You’re probably right,” he says. Jenny, he knows—actually, they all know—is having a secret affair with one of the managing partners. So whatever she thinks she knows to be true about the managing partners is more

likely to actually be true than anything hypothesized by the rest of them. He’d love to ask her about it, about what it’s like to have all that furtive, groping one-on-one time with Frank, the VP for New Business Development, whether it bothers her that Frank has kind of a paunch but practically a concave ass, whether they talk about work and the people at work and if so whether the things Jenny says to Frank are the same as the things she says to him, whether, when they’re in the heat of passion, Frank ever whispers insider knowledge about the agency’s future in her ear. These are all things that he’s dying to know, but he can’t ask. He’s not supposed to know, about Jenny and Frank, and she doesn’t know he knows, so he has to keep pretending that he doesn’t.

“We should go inside,” Jenny says. “Craig wants the new copy by 2:00, probably so he can make me write it all over again after that.” She reaches in the pocket of her coat.

“Here,” she says, and holds out a tissue for Tim’s nose. As he takes the tissue, she reaches for the now-almost-all-smoked-up cigarette. There’s a moment when their fingers touch and, as always when this happens, Tim feels his whole body wanting to curl toward her, wanting the touch of those fingers everywhere. He closes his eyes and presses the tissue to his nose.

When the cigarette is wholly in her possession, Jenny holds it tight and stares at it for a couple of seconds, then stubs it out against the wall and drops it in the trash can. She often does this after Tim has smoked for her. He used to think it was out of consideration for him, that she was taking on the dirty work of disposing of the butt out of gratitude for his having done the dirty work of actually smoking it. But one day in a meeting, just after they’d come back inside, he caught her repeatedly raising her hand to her face and sniffing at her fingers. The smell of the smoke embedded in her skin is just another little thing that keeps her going.

It’s not until 4:30, an hour before they’re supposed to go home, that Craig tells Jenny she’s going to have to redo the Nestor and Seigleman copy yet again before she can knock off for the day. “Can I just tell you, honey,” Craig says, “how much this new copy sucks?” He waves a sheaf of apparently-suckycopy-filled papers in her face, practically hitting her in the nose with it. “What exactly,” he asks, “do you think is your problem with this particular assignment, hmm?” What he wants, Tim can tell from the way he’s leaning in on her, is to loom over her and be all physically intimidating. But while

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Craig’s not short, Jenny’s fairly tall, and her fashionable platform wedge sandals make her a good couple inches taller than he is. So he has to settle for creating the possibility that the way he’s waving the copy in her face might give her a paper cut or two.

That Craig would assault Jenny with both her copy and his poorly-worded critique of it like this is nothing new. What is egregious, though, as Tim sees it, about this particular creative director-copywriter encounter is that instead of taking place in Craig’s office, it’s happening right in the middle of the art department, where Craig intercepted Jenny just as she was walking through to her own office with a new cup of coffee.

Craig, Tim decides, has crossed the line with this one. He can no longer even pretend that he’s just trying to do his job here; he’s plainly out not just to ruin Jenny’s day but to inflict maximum humiliation. And in its very egregiousness, its nasty unprofessionalism, Craig’s behavior all makes sense now.

Craig, Tim suddenly understands, is so predictably horrible to Jenny not, as Jenny and Tim have been thinking, because he’s just a plain old misogynist ass but because he likes her, because he wishes he was the one who got to screw her. Tim knows what that’s like. In his mind he too has done this to Jenny too, put her in her place, made her suffer, made her shut up and take it, over and over and over.

The affair between Jenny and Frank that’s supposed to be a secret but is instead an object of endless discussion among all the members of the creative department except for Jenny seems to have started last summer when Frank and Jenny went to Hilton Head for a couple of days to pitch the Sunset River Resort campaign. Being out of their normal context must, all the art directors agree, have thrown them both off kilter, because you could never have imagined it otherwise: Jenny with her Goth-look eyeliner and her college-radio-DJ past and Frank the ruddy ex-frat boy who has a picture on his desk of himself shaking hands with George H. W. Bush. But however accidental its beginnings may have been, the relationship took. You can see it in the way Frank bites his lip and blushes whenever she walks into the room, the way she gets all jittery and can’t meet his eyes in staff meetings. Besides, Sue Entwhistle saw them going at it in the small conference room one night just last week when they must have thought everyone else had already gone home.

Why it’s a secret is obviously a) that there are rules against this kind of thing and Frank and Jenny could both get fired; b) Jenny would be embarrassed as shit if she knew that everyone else knew she was sleeping with a College-Republican-type putz; and c) Frank has got to know how Craig and Tim and all the rest of them feel about Jenny and he apparently doesn’t want to rub it in.

“Fucking, fucking asshole,” says Jenny ten minutes later on the patio out back. “Ohmigod, I mean, can you believe him?”

Jenny’s critique of Craig, notes Tim, who’s been listening to it for a solid seven minutes, isn’t worded much better than Craig’s critiques of her work are. Maybe that’s just how it is with writers: they think so much about what they’re putting on the page that they don’t have much energy to put into what they say. So maybe it’s not really Craig’s fault that his verbal feedback is seldom very helpful.

Tim takes a drag off his cigarette and exhales quickly in Jenny’s direction. It’s the second one in a row she’s made him smoke and his lungs, now phlegmy and tight from whatever he’s coming down with, are burning. Jenny leans in close, until their mouths are practically touching, and breathes, hard and deep. “Mmmm,” she says, “that’s better. I’m really starting to feel better.” She closes her eyes, tilts her head, and drops it onto Tim’s shoulder. Her head, warm and heavy, presses into his neck. He breathes in slowly, carefully, not wanting his breathing to disturb her. But the intake of air unsettles something at the back of his throat and he has to fight off an overwhelming urge to cough. He’s smoking too much. As Craig’s campaign against Jenny has accelerated, so too has Jenny’s need for Tim to smoke. For years he’d been a casual smoker, two packs a week, take it or leave it. Now he’s becoming alarmingly habituated, increasingly often wanting or even needing a cigarette even when Jenny’s not around to demand that he smoke one. He’s the collateral damage in Craig’s war against Jenny, which is both fucked up and not fair but at the same time feels to some extent just like the natural and inevitable order of things.

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“Oh, Tim,” says Jenny, letting her head loll against his shoulder. Her voice is low and slow. “I should get going,” she says.

“The Nestor copy awaits.” She sounds sleepy, spacey, as if the secondhand smoke she’s been breathing in for the last ten minutes has soothed her into passive acceptance of her fate.

Earlier, when they first came out here, she was crying. It was several minutes before she could even find the wherewithal to start cussing Craig out. It makes Tim feel good about himself that he has the capacity, just through the simple act of smoking, to help someone else feel so much better so fast.

But his own lungs are screaming now; he can’t hold it off any longer; he’s got to cough. So he does, and just as he does, Jenny rolls her head, and her hair tumbles down behind his shoulder, which shoulder, as he coughs, jerks back reflexively, pressing itself into the firm brick surface of the wall behind them, so that just as Jenny’s head rolls forward, all her hair is pinned back, and—“Ow!” she says. “Ow, Tim, let go!”

“Sorry!” he says, “shit, Jenny, I’m sorry.” And he leans forward and her hair falls free, and she shakes, it, pulls it to her and smoothes it, and then winds up and punches him on the arm. “That hurt!” she says.

His arm hurts too. Since she quit smoking, Jenny’s been going to the gym more often. She’s become stronger than she realizes. “Hey,” he says, “no hitting!” He grabs her by the wrist, and she fights him, tries to wrench free of his grasp, so he has to hold her even tighter, so tight he can feel the bones of her wrist compressing beneath his fingers. She grits her teeth against the pain and kicks him in the shin. It hurts. It feels pretty good. “Let go!” she says, clawing with her free hand at the fingers clamped around her wrist. But he can tell

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she doesn’t really mean it. She stomps on his foot. He shoves her up hard against the wall. She looks at him, and her eyes go all narrow, and she smiles. He knows from that smile just what she wants, so he leans in and gives it to her, leans in and kisses her, opening his own mouth wide and vulnerable, kisses her hard, and she bites his lip, bites his tongue, bites his chin, and he pinches her on the ear and tears at her shirt and bites her on the shoulder, and she elbows him in the ribcage, and he tries to kiss her again, only by now they’re both laughing, laughing, laughing so hard they can’t make their mouths fit together, and finally she puts her mouth up against his ear, nips his earlobe gently, and whispers, “smoke me another one?” And so he does.

And “oh, that’s better,” she whispers later, three days later, on the rug on the floor of his loft. “That’s just so much better,” she says. Today Craig tore up her script for the Freedom cough drops ad in front of all the other copywriters, and then he complained to Frank about how terrible all her work’s been lately and Frank said, okay, that he and Craig and Jenny would have to have a talk about that. But tonight Jenny kneed Tim in the groin and he slapped her in the face and she gave him an Indian burn on his forearm and he stabbed her in the leg with one of his drafting pencils and she bit him on the stomach until he bled, and, yes, she’s right, after all of that everything is indeed much, much better. He kisses her again, more gently this time, and then he puts a band-aid on her leg over the place where his pencil lead is embedded, and she rubs some Neosporin on his stomach where she bit him, and he smiles at her tenderly and says, “It’s all going to be okay, baby,” and she smiles back, not tenderly at all, and says, “Yeah, I know,” and pulls him down hard on top of her, and he both knows and doesn’t know what’s going to happen next.

Leslie Haynsworth is a Master of Fine Arts student in creative writing at the University of South Carolina and lives in Columbia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, The Common Review, Roanoke Review, Gulf Stream, Marie Claire, The Denver Post, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere.

She grew up in Columbia and is still here, married to a boy she met in first grade. She is web editor for the University of South Carolina and spends much of her spare time being a soccer/football/basketball/baseball mom for her two sons, Adam and Owen. She likes secondhand smoke as much as the next person, but she hasn’t bitten or stabbed anyone in quite a while.

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undefined : book seven

Weather

by Gilbert Allen

I

’d tucked my parakeet in for the night and started emptying the dishwasher when I heard my husband shouting over the TV in the other room.

“HFC! HFC!” I winced and didn’t even bother to put down my linen towel on my way to his recliner. “I wish you wouldn’t use that term, Noel Willis.” I smiled, to take the visible edge off my annoyance. “It’s blasphemous.”

“C’mon, Hilda.” He muted the TV sound. “It’s just three letters.”

“Yes,” I said. “Like KKK.” “More like KFC.” He sipped the green tea I’d brought him fifteen minutes ago, at the top of the 11:00 news. “We do saviors right.”

I rolled my eyes, but before he could see them the station had come back from commercial break. “How dare they,” he said, pointing to the 50-inch screen.

I saw a spindly old woman, smiling like she was about to lose her dentures, gesticulating toward a digital representation of the upper atmosphere. “Hallowed be Thy name,” I whispered. The mute button was still on, so I couldn’t hear whether a break in the drought was in our Extended Outlook.

“Whatever happened to our Weather Tootsie?”

used to be—framing her brilliant smile. The first time we’d seen her on WFOP, Noel said she must’ve spent all her offcamera hours with a peroxide rinse in her mouth. “Mammals don’t have teeth that white,” he’d declared. “It’s not natural.”

Noel’s taught high-school biology ever since he graduated from college, so he should know. But then, the rest of the Weather Tootsie probably wasn’t entirely natural either.

“Her blouses were two sizes too small,” I admitted, folding the newspaper so I could finish my English muffin.

“She looked like a snake ready to shed her skin,” Noel agreed. “But her replacement.” He grimaced. “What’ll we call her?”

I heard Dovie singing from her cage in the corner of the formal dining room. I listened to the first eight notes of Amazing Grace before I said, “The woman looks like a big stork.”

“She’s too old to be carrying babies,” Noel said. “Even in her beak. I bet she’s even older than—” He stopped himself. I didn’t have to say anything.

“Than I am,” he finally said. Noel took back the newspaper and held it horizontally this time, over his scrambled Egg Beaters. “Guess what? Her name’s Christina Crane.” Our gazes locked, and we both said the same three words aloud.

“The Weather Crane.”

Things like that happen when you’ve been married to somebody for thirty-six years.

The next morning, since Noel wasn’t teaching summer school, we were having a late, luxurious breakfast in the sunroom. With the screens wide open, the air almost smelled sleepy. We were both still in our pajamas.

“Atlanta,” he said. His voice came from behind the newspaper he was holding up like a soiled bedsheet. “Says here she went to Atlanta.” He passed the Local News section across the table, barely clearing the butter dish, but at least now I could see his face. “Seems like our Weather Tootsie upgraded.”

I continued reading the story aloud. “Greenville is a nice place to begin your career,” I intoned. “Not a nice place to end it.”

We both laughed. We’ve been living in upstate South Carolina ever since we came to Clemson as freshmen, forty years ago.

“I’ll miss her workplace-inappropriate attire,” Noel said, wiping an imaginary tear from his eye with a real paper napkin.

Our Weather Tootsie had been a young Hispanic woman with impossibly long, glossy hair—even darker than mine

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As June stretched into July, the drought got worse.

Moderate became Severe, and Severe became Extreme.

Georgia even tried to redraw its border so it could pump water directly from the Tennessee River to Atlanta. In upstate South Carolina, lawns began looking sparse and colorless as the Weather Crane’s hair. Anderson County told people they couldn’t wash their cars anymore, and in Greenville we couldn’t remember when an outdoor burning ban hadn’t been in effect.

After the Weather Tootsie’s departure, we’d boycotted the eleven o’clock news, but as the drought deepened, we began watching again. All the lakes dropped to their lowest levels in recorded history. Every other night on the TV, you saw footage of Lake Hartwell with cracked mud at the end of already-extended docks, the only visible water puddling in the distance, like a mirage. Lake Keowee wasn’t much better off I wanted some tips about how we could help, what we could

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contribute, even though we’d been living in a Belladonna condo for the past three years and no longer owned a yard.

“Hey,” Noel said. “I’m contributing. I’m only flushing for Number Two.” Tonight, Christina Crane was wearing a pale pantsuit, so you couldn’t quite tell where her blunt hair ended and her collar began. She hunched over, then started raising her unsteady hand. “Marginally cooler air is up to our north—” Now she began lowering her arm. “While even warmer air is down to our south.” She stared straight into the camera.

“Couldn’t we all use a good Artic blast about now?”

“Arctic,” Noel snickered. “Least she could do is learn the lingo.”

“The Tootsie didn’t know the lingo, either,” I reminded him. “She called snow frozen percipitation.”

When Noel raises his eyebrows, they move just like caterpillars. “I never noticed.”

“You were too busy ogling her workplace-inappropriate attire.”

“Why not? She looked like a pole dancer, for God’s sake.”

I felt the blood coming up in my face. For a year and a half, I took Senior Pole Dancing lessons from Mona Beegle as part of my weight-control program. But I never told Noel.

“She could melt the wax in my dissecting pan,” he continued. “Any day of the—HFC!” I refocused on the screen. The Weather Crane was kneeling in front of her telestrator, praying. Praying for rain that would bless the just and the unjust. I’d never seen that on TV before, except on Sunday mornings, and then I’m usually in church.

“Dear God.” Noel folded his hands, melodramatically.

“Grant us, in Your infinite wisdom, the second coming of Tootsie.”

“The woman’s just trying to help,” I said.

“Bleep,” Noel said. “Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“My Super Doppler Fundar,” Noel explained. “Idiocy must be in our Extended Outlook.”

“Matthew 5:45 is idiotic?” I hadn’t been this mad since Noel had insulted my minister while I was in the recovery room of the hospital, twenty years ago. The poor man was only trying to help me pray, but he made the mistake of grabbing my husband’s hand as well as my own.

“What are you humming?” he demanded now.

“The Thirsty Are Called to Their Lord,” I muttered. And I was.

with rain.”

After Noel went back to teaching in late August, I started helping out with the Mosquito Ministry. Our—my—new pastor, Reverend Rogers, is an outdoorsman eager to increase the size of his flock. And decrease its average age. So he goes to the Swamp Rabbit Trail whenever the Xtreme Horizons Club has a scheduled excursion, and he sets up a table with bottled water and insect wipes. He doesn’t preach, but he attaches our church bulletin to each bottle with a rubber band.

One morning, after the last hikers had left and we were packing things up to bring back to our Family Life Center, Reverend Rogers said, “I hear Noel’s retiring soon.”

I was surprised he even knew my husband’s name. Noel never goes to church, and Reverend Rogers has only been here since Methodist Relocation Day in June. “Actually, he is retired. Technically. He’s on the TERI plan, so he gets to draw his salary and his pension at the same time.”

The Reverend lowered the box of water bottles into his trunk. “Sounds like a sweet deal.”

“It’s a five year program,” I said. “When he stops teaching, he’ll’ve been at it for forty years.” I laughed. “He calls it his forty years in the wilderness.”

“Maybe I’ll be seeing him,” Reverend Rogers said. “When he has more free time.”

A picture of my asking Noel to go Sunday service popped into my head, and I wanted to get it out of there just as fast as I could. “Reverend, do you believe in the power of prayer?”

“If I don’t, I’m in the wrong business.”

“Have you been praying about the drought?”

He raised his eyebrows, just like Noel. “Have you been watching Christina Crane?” My face must have answered his question. “It’s a tricky thing, Hilda. Weather isn’t just a personal matter. When it rains, it rains on Little League baseball, roofers who don’t get paid, highways that get too slick for an 18-wheeler to—” But I persisted. “Can God make it rain?”

“Yes,” my minister finally said. “But He’s been known to get a little carried away.”

We’d gotten a few stray showers, but come September we were still officially at the dead center of Extreme Drought on the weather map—a red bull’s-eye surrounded by orange and yellow that radiated into north Georgia, Tennessee, and both Carolinas. I’d started watching the late TV news in my sewing room, with Dovie, to get away from Noel. Something about Christina Crane made him angry.

“Pray for rain. Pray for rain. From cumuloose clouds,” he’d mocked. “You know that’s what she calls them? Cumulooose clouds.”

“You’re just jealous,” I’d said.

“Of what?”

“Well, she’s on the TV.” After he’d snickered, I said, “And she probably makes more money than you do.”

“That’s right,” Noel said. “But I’m not jealous. I’m bitter.”

Each night, after Noel began snoring, I began to pray. I’d get out of bed and shuffle into the bathroom, just to make sure he didn’t wake up. Sometimes he did. Noel is a light sleeper.

If he stirred, I’d just flush the toilet, then slip back under the covers, clasp my hands, and stare at the dark ceiling. But if his raspy breathing hadn’t changed, I’d kneel next to my side of the bed—the moonlit side, by the east window—and whisper the gospel according to The Weather Crane: “Dear Lord in Heaven, send rain on the just and on the unjust. Bless us all

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“What’s the difference?”

“If I were jealous, I’d want her salary and her job.” His voice climbed an octave. “Praying for rain.”

“It can’t hurt,” I said.

“Prayers can’t change the weather, Hilda.” Then his eyebrows started crawling up his forehead. “Are you praying for rain?”

“Well, it can’t hurt,” I said.

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” he said, and he left the room.

there.” He was grinning. “It got on YouTube and she was gone the next day.”

At times like these, I’m glad I’m computer illiterate.

“Maybe Greenville is a good place to end your career.”

“You know, the rain missed Atlanta,” Noel said. “They’re still trying to steal that river from Tennessee.”

“Maybe they need Christina Crane. She certainly solved our problem.”

“Don’t push it,” Noel said. “Pride cometh before a fall.

Even in September.”

And I had to agree. Noel is a good man. He didn’t have to bring Dovie home on that day. He could’ve let her die, in that June sun. A lot of socalled Christians wouldn’t have stopped their cars.

“Finally things are back to normal around here,” Noel said, right before he pecked my cheek on his way to school. “About time.”

Now I watch him through the window as he pulls out of our condo’s little driveway. Noel will make a great old man some day in the not-too-distant future, when he’s forgotten about Frog Dodgeball, vandalized microscopes, and parents who call him an instrument of Satan. He’ll be fun, and funny, and gentle, and maybe I’ll even talk him into doing Meals on Wheels with me. He can drive, and I can deal with the people. We have a good Extended Outlook, even if he does call Reverend Rogers “Lord of the Flies.” But there’s something else. Something he can’t mock out of me even if I wanted him to, and Lord knows I don’t. I will grow old with it, too, just as I will grow old with him, and God will figure out a way to bless us both.

When the drought finally broke, with a big tropical depression coming up from the Gulf of Mexico, Dovie died. Noel had brought her home and surprised me, nineteen years ago.

He said he’d bought her at Kmart, but I knew better. Our departing minister, Ebenezer Paulsen, had left her behind in a cage, outside the parsonage, for Noel to find on Relocation Day. By Christmas I’d taught Dovie to sing the first eight notes of Amazing Grace and Faith of Our Fathers and Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow —well, whistle them, not the actual words, which would’ve sounded like a joke coming from a parakeet—and sometimes I’d sing along with her.

“Low atmospheric pressure,” Noel said. “It correlates with myocardial infarctions.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

He stood up to hug me, like I knew he would, and I cried into the front of his shirt. “I know you loved that damn bird,” he whispered, stroking my hair, letting it linger beneath his fingertips. “I’m sorry, Hilda.”

After the rains had moved east, I buried Dovie in an old Christmas cookie tin, my favorite—the one with the holly branches and the bright red berries, the one that seemed to be waiting for a nest. I waited until the Livengoods’ lights had gone out before I found a spot under a real holly bush, outside our bedroom window, because technically we didn’t own the land outside our condominium. I parted the pine bark mulch and dug a small hole in the softened red clay with the little spade I use for my house plants. When I came back inside, Christina Crane was announcing that she was leaving WFOP. Noel clapped his hands, three times. “It is finished.”

I almost dropped my trowel when Christina Crane said the Weather Tootsie would be taking her place next week. Of course, she didn’t call her the Weather Tootsie.

Gilbert Allen lives in upstate South Carolina and is a professor of English at Furman University. He received his Master of Fine Arts and Doctorate degrees from Cornell University, where he was a Ford Foundation Fellow. He is a poet as well as a short story writer and his sequence of poems "The Assistant" received the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Prize from The Southern Review.

He has several collections of poems published - In Everything (Lotus, 1982) and Second Chances (Orchises, 1991), Commandments at Eleven (Orchises, 1994) and Driving to Distraction (Orchises, 2003) and has edited two anthologies of South Carolina poems.

Allen’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Cortland Review, The Georgia Review, Image, Shenandoah and The Southern Review.

A native of Long Island, N.Y., he has lived in upstate South Carolina for most of his life. Those who want to know more about his family history should read his poem "The World of Tomorrow" in the Spring 2008 issue of The Southern Review and his essay "How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Swamp in South Carolina" in Living Blue in the Red State.

“Statistically inevitable,” Noel pronounced at the breakfast table the next morning. “The drought was an aberration. It had to rain eventually. Prayers or no prayers.”

“In Japan, the crane is a symbol of good fortune.”

Noel didn’t seem to have heard me. “I know why the Tootsie’s coming back!”

“Really,” I said.

“I Googled her. Seems she’s been out of work for the past month. Remember that day it hit 105? She was talking to the sports guy and didn’t know she still had a live mike in front of her. Told him it might be too hot for them to—fornicate out

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"Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it."

-Truman Capote

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undefined : book seven

Grey Goose

by Leslie Dennis

S

tella downs her shot in one sharp swallow and slams the glass onto the table, never losing sight of Lucas as he crosses the room. His blue polo shirt clings to his body, revealing the slight paunch that has grown in place of his once lean abdomen. He stumbles as he tries to find his way to her, tripping over the coffee table.

“Having some trouble?” She smiles, for a second, only slightly amused.

“Damn thing just jumped out at me.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not used to this new apartment either.

There’s so much space that all the furniture seems out of place.”

The past four years she lived off her overage checks from scholarships and loans, which barely covered her small offcampus apartment in the worst neighborhood downtown.

The carpet was stained, the ceiling leaked whenever it rained, and the walls were so thin she could hear her neighbors having sex every Thursday night.

But since she graduated and got a job as a publicist for a local magazine a few months ago, she moved into a new apartment with wood floors and a view of a park. At first she was excited about living in a newer, nicer apartment, buying furniture, and picking out paint for the plain white walls. But now, just a month after moving in, she misses her old place that she had slowly, unconsciously gotten used to and made her own.

“I see you kept the old bar table.” He pulls a stool out from under it and sits across from her, hunched over with his elbows and forearms resting on the table.

“Yeah I just couldn’t part with it. Too many memories. I was thinking about painting it or maybe putting a glass top on it but…”

“No, no. Keep it like this. It looks like it’s lived,” he says.

She rubs her hand over the tabletop. She found it at a yard sale her first weekend at college. When she saw it, she knew it was exactly what she wanted – about four and half feet tall with four bar stools and a round top – perfect for drinking and playing cards.

After a few minutes, his silence begins to unnerve her.

Everyone left around midnight – relatively early – and it is just the two of them now. When he first came in, she was shocked that he remembered her birthday and that he bothered showing up to the party. Even though she has seen him since that last night at Deuce’s, she feels awkward being alone with him again.

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She blindly reaches for the vodka bottle and carefully pours herself another, making sure not to spill. The Grey Goose, her favorite, slides into her Margaritaville shot glass with ease like a bullet slipping into its chamber, preparing to be fired. She tips the bottle towards him as a silent offering to which he shakes his head in refusal. He’s still working on the Jack and Coke she made him an hour ago. She wanted him to feel the bite of the whiskey so she poured more Jack than Coke and swirled the glass around instead of combining the drink completely, the two liquids never really becoming one.

“So how many does that make now? Four? Five?”

“Six.” The shot goes down smooth and settles her.

“Hey I remember that shot glass.” He picks up the glass when she finishes and rolls it in his hand.

“What?”

“Oh come on. Tequila night, sophomore year. You totally stole that from Deuce’s place didn’t you?”

She pauses. Deuce. Lucas says his name without missing a beat, like he throws it around in everyday conversation – a “how are you” or a “good morning.”

“You caught me.”

He laughs. “Oh my God we were so messed up that night…”

“And every other night at Deuce’s…”

“Yeah, but you were really bad that night.”

Three years ago after the first football game of the season, Stella ran into Lucas at one of Deuce’s parties. They had gone to high school together but were never really close and hadn’t seen each other since graduation. It took seven tequila shots and Deuce, another graduate of their high school and a college drop-out who still threw parties to feel like he belonged, to bring Stella and Lucas together.

“It was the tequila,” she says in a whisper.

“It was the tequila.” His voice is clearer, firmer.

“Why do you think I drink only vodka now?”

“You tried to climb out of the car at every stoplight on the way to my place. And it was raining. By the time we got back to the apartment you were soaked, but you didn’t seem to care.”

The memory comes back to her slowly like a scene out of a drunken fog – the warm sweet rain, her body soaking in each drop almost instantly, the smell of just cut grass and the day’s heat, her clothes sticking to her breasts, stomach, curves. She had her face turned up to the sky, looking for God but finding

32

only the gray clouds against dark blue, and her arms stretched out as she spun, turning her body in time with nature’s rhythm. When she stopped, she saw him, Lucas, underneath the covering of the building, looking at her as if he was watching the sun rise over the ocean – intent and amazed and in love with its beauty but unable to truly touch it. And she just stared back, not really smiling but laughing, mouth open, tasting the rain and the air, giving herself over to the moment completely.

“When I finally got you in, I took off your clothes and wrapped you in a blanket, but you refused to stay in bed. You kept crawling onto the floor with me, rubbing your nose against the back of my neck in a really sexy sort of way, whispering ‘no rain…no rain...’.”

She blushes at the boldness she once had, the sexual abandon that she forgot, until now, was possible and came so naturally to her.

“I thought you meant you wanted it to stop storming but you just wanted to hear that damn song.”

“I love that song.” She rubs the lime on the side of the shot glass, pulling her eyes away from his.

“I hated it before that night.”

She pauses to think about what he just said, reading hidden meanings in his short declaration. Scenes from their two-year relationship, starting with that night in the rain, weave together in her mind: the nights they played Rummy for hours on the bar table, the Halloween they dressed up as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, the Sundays they stayed in bed all day listening to the bad 80s music from their childhood, and the mornings she would wake to a Pop Tart and a note on his side of the bed because he had earlier classes than her. But she can’t do anything with those words now, so instead of going back, she refills her glass.

“You love your vodka.”

“Nothing else like it. It doesn’t warm you like whiskey and it doesn’t have the aftertaste of tequila. Vodka slides down, stinging at first but then cooling the insides – a sharp pain that leaves you cold.”

As she takes the shot, pushing the alcohol down to control the pain, a sudden flash of memory floods her and she feels their calloused fingers burning into her long goose neck again, crushing every scream as it tried to escape, keeping her bound beneath the perpetual beat of the ceiling fan. Unwillingly, she puts the glass back on the table. She exhales, tunneling a small icy breath from her lungs.

“I’ve never understood how you could pack shots away like that. There’s something admirable about it.”

“I suppose.”

And in that moment, a feeling of sobriety that only drinking can create takes hold of her and she once again sees the boy she loved beneath the covers their last night together almost a year ago. The smell of the cigarettes and the vanilla of her hair, the taste of the tequila in Lucas’s kiss and the dirt under his fingernails, and the feel of his body on top of her own; all fold together and seep into her. That night she felt the hardness slip from her steel eyes and burst into vibrant

rays of satisfaction, her legs prickle from the October wind after a football game, and his hand quietly fall into hers as if it belonged.

There is something in her wanting to preserve the moment, wanting to crawl back into his arms and sleep in his heat. She remembers how it was to love him and to be with him, and she feels the air shatter within her, leaving her breathless. She wants to be back in that place with him again, but she can’t – forgetting the pleasure is better than remembering the pain.

Lucas looks down at his watch. It’s 3 a.m., and she doesn’t show any sign of all the alcohol she has had – her eyes remain still and linger in his.

“Doing better than you used to.” When he looks at her, his eyes go directly to the faint pink scar beneath her thin right eyebrow.

There are chips of the broken beer bottle buried beneath the skin, an extinct animal clawing its way from its burial ground back into existence. Even a year later Stella still remembers how the blood oozed through her pale skin, penetrated her lashes, and colored her eye a candy-apple red.

“Practice makes perfect.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Lucas reach for the bottle before she can begin again.

“What are you doing?”

“Stopping you.”

“You never have before.”

She is drunk, now she knows for sure. She would never have the courage to say that sober, or at least not the way she wants to say it. The memories and the shots catch up to her and hit her all at once with a slow dizzy realization of what they have been avoiding all night.

“That’s not fair.”

“What the hell is fair, Luc? There is no fair or right, only what happens and what doesn’t and either way we’re fucked.”

There is a pause. She feels the pieces of words jumbled in her head and she can’t put the puzzle together in a congruent picture – she never will.

“I loved you, Luc. I loved you and that’s not fair.”

“I loved you too. I really loved you.”

There is no emotion in his face, only a complete blank slate waiting for something to appear. But it never materializes.

Instead, he sits across from her, just looking at her.

But she won’t let him off that easy – she has to say all the things left unsaid and undone.

“We made love in that same bed only an hour before –” “Before it happened, everything between us, everything we had, was perfect, Stella –” “And then they came in…” Her voice trails off and her mind won’t focus. Her head is spinning to the rhythm of that dusty ceiling fan in Deuce’s room again and it won’t slow down. Now the same slippery worm of fear slides down her throat and into her stomach as it did nearly a year ago.

“And after it, you were distant – closed off…”

“They tore all we had apart, Luc.” “And I didn’t know how to love you like that.”

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His final words stop both of them and echo through the silence.

“Shit Stella, I was drunk.” He rubs his thumb with his forefinger, a nervous habit he has when he speaks in public or is in trouble.

She knows he’s replaying the details of Deuce’s last party: how she and Lucas crawled into Deuce’s bed while everyone else was in the next room, how she fumbled with the zipper of his jeans with nervous fingers, how they listened to the whirl of the ceiling fan when they finished. But then the night shifted: Lucas got up to go to the bathroom but didn’t make it to the door, Deuce and Bo came in and took turns on her, they struck her with a half-empty beer bottle from the nightstand and choked her to keep her quiet, and Lucas watched from the corner halfway between drunkenness and sleep.

And she is glad. She wants him to feel it, she wants him to become the past and touch the pain that is in it. There are no words for her to explain it, no way to accurately tell how it has affected her. But he was there; he is the only one who shares this totally inexplicable experience with her.

In her memories of that night, she was never fully present.

She felt nothing as Deuce and Bo pushed into her body, only the faint force of muscle crashing against bone. When they came in, her soul became numb and she wasn’t able to live with the reality of it. So instead she removed herself from the shell of her skin and floated in the corner beside Lucas like a ghost and watched them invade her dead body and rip her former self apart.

“I never knew how to bring it up or what you needed.”

“All I needed, all I wanted, was for you to say something, anything. I mean you watched them fucking rape me.”

Even as she says the word, she winces. Rape. Never before has that word penetrated her like it does now, but hearing it drop from her own lips, neither in anger nor sadness, it seems so insignificant that it hurts.

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“I mean, what could I do, me drunk with guys twice my size standing over me?”

“I don’t know Lucas.”

So she picks up the bottle again, imagining while she pours how she will take the shot – no hands, her mouth gripping around the square shot glass, throwing her head back with her eyes closed, savoring the sting as it slips down her throat, a razor cutting its way to her core.

But suddenly, before she can drink, she reenters her body and feels everything for the first time all over again: she is forced down with beads of salty sweat stuck to her clammy body, her breasts smashed beneath the weight of their chests, her legs pried by knees into limp exposure.

“Stella there has never been a day…”

“Just shut up.” There is an assurance in her voice, a sound from deep inside she hasn’t heard in a long time. And that is all she needs – not Lucas or his excuses or her faded memories of him.

She puts the bottle down and pushes the glass aside with the back of her hand.

She never takes the shot.

Leslie Dennis lives in Columbia where she is Scholastic Press Manager for the state and southeastern high school journalism programs at the University of South Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications. She graduated in August 2007 from the University of South Carolina with a Bachelor of Arts in English with a creative writing concentration. She is working toward her Master’s Degree in Teaching English also at USC. She is originally from Elgin, S.C. Her favorite poet is Pablo Neruda and she owns a transgender cat, Mr. Mona.

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OPENING SUMMER 2010 1332 Main Street, Suite 62 Columbia, South Carolina 29201 T. 803.665.0151 | F T F. 253.660.1285 Available online at: highcottonoutfitters.com

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feature

Hub City Writers Project and the rise of the Southern creative class It seemed a small enterprise at first.

Publishing just one book a year.

It seemed little more than a gesture, really, to the larger goal of preserving the gnawing sense of place that the three writers – two journalists and a poet – sensed about Spartanburg, South Carolina, the city in which they lived. The smells, the sounds, the familiar greetings and postures and predilections of the people who walked the sidewalks and drank the coffee and shopped in the stores of their city.

One book a year to store away some essence of a city’s culture – a few bars of music, a recipe for cobbler, a path to a creek through the woods – comparable to putting peaches by in a quart Mason jar.

But, born small, grown healthy and large, the Hub City Writers Project, through the efforts of Betsy Teter, John Lane, and Gary Henderson, has done that and more. In its endeavors to preserve the unique sense of place of their Southern textile town before they feared it lose its distinctive identity to encroaching strip malls and run-of-the-mill sub divisions, Hub City Writers Project created not only a new culture of writers and readers with an appreciation of where they came

story: cynthia boiter photography: stephen long

from, but a nationally recognized and honored independent book publishing company, and a new model for residents of other special places to preserve the color of the towns they hold d ear.

And the story does start small.

In 1995, the three young writers challenged themselves and their community to rise up and create a publishing company with the modest goal of one book a year.

“We asked a group of Spartanburg county residents to commit one hundred dollars to purchasing the first limited edition book,” recounts Betsy Teter, recalling the company’s early office in a condemned building and selling books out of the

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back of her car. “From that first book came another book, and another, and eventually, it became important to people to have a copy of the newest Hub City book on their coffee tables.”

Modeled after the Depression era’s Federal Writers Project, Hub City took its name from the city’s moniker as a nineteenth century railroading center, titling its first collection of essays, Hub City Anthology: Spartanburg Writers and Artists.

Subsequent books would address topics ranging from nature conservation to Christmas stories, with healthy helpings of place-based poetry and fiction.

The group commemorated early publications with unique celebrations at sites often specific to the publications’ contents – canoeing along a river or dancing in an abandoned railroad station – and the entire city was invited, guaranteeing for everyone a sense of ownership in the endeavor. “We felt like every book we released was cause for celebration,” explains Teter, who eventually married partner John Lane and serves today as Executive Director of Hub City Writers Project.

Acquiring non-profit status from the beginning also helped assure supporters that their donations were being put to good use, validating the integrity of the enterprise. “I don’t think we would have made it two years had we not gone non-profit,” Teter says. “Our people needed to know their contributions were going directly to the Writers Project and I think, in many ways, that’s why we were successful.”

Fifteen years and 42 books later, Hub City Writers Project has published more than 300 writers and sold in excess of 70,000 volumes, but the group’s greatest accomplishment is the revitalizing energy it has generated in the city and its local arts culture. Once a typically dusty downtown on its way to

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obsolescence, Spartanburg’s streets now host art galleries, cafes, and boutiques. Its calendar is filled with art walks and pub crawls, concerts and festivals, many boasting the name ‘Hub City” – an interesting development given that prior to the emergence of the writers project, few people were aware of either the sobriquet or its history.

The success of the writers project prompted Spartanburg city officials in 2004 to consult with the organization on how best to persuade members of the creative class, the young and the talented, to stay in the city rather than moving on to find greener, more stimulating and youth-friendly pastures. Given a generous budget to work with, Teter enlisted the help of, among others, fellow Spartanburg native, Alix Refshauge.

“Phase one was to build a website and collect information about young people in town who were doing interesting things, and to promote events happening in the city – music, film, arts, etcetera,” Refshauge explains, crediting Spartanburg residents Kerry Ferguson and Steve Adams for their work on the site. “HUB-BUB banners started showing up at events around town and HUB-BUB.com was stenciled on the city’s sidewalks. There was a website launch at the Montgomery Building and tons of young people showed up.

The site went live and people started to connect.”

Locating and renovating a downtown building to serve as a gathering place for the newly connected artists and supporters was phase two of the group’s plan. They decided on the old Nash Rambler automobile dealership building near the heart of the city, and renovation efforts got underway. Before long, a new program and place was born, appropriately called HUBBUB.

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“Hubbub literally means the sorts of sounds and noises that people make when they’re milling around, enjoying themselves,” Teter says, adding that the clamor created by the patrons and artists attending performances in the HUB-BUB building makes it aptly named. Since HUB-BUB’s Showroom Gallery and Performance Hall opened in 2006, the brickwalled space, dating back to the roaring twenties, has hosted films, art exhibits, concerts, planning sessions, parties, and a series of random and generic artistic happenings. As many as 150 events were held during the first year with subsequent years capping at around 100. The three floors of new space also proved beneficial for Hub City Writers Project which relocated its offices to the newly-renovated building in 2006.

In 2007, the group, which had grown in scope and volume to include photographer and designer Stephen Long as HUBBUB Showroom director, took their mission even further. Acting on the combined goals of revitalizing downtown Spartanburg, attracting young artists, and promoting arts grounded in an appreciation for sense of place, the third floor of the HUB-BUB building was converted into lodging and studio space for the first class of HUB-BUB’s artists-in-residence program. Having just completed a master’s degree in public administration in

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arts management, Refshauge was hired to fill the position of Artist-in-Residence and Development Director.

“It’s been a dream job to work so closely with the artists-in-residence and to be so involved with the community,” Refshauge says after three years on the job. “Now we have four enormous and beautiful apartments and studios on the third floor for the artists – three visual artists and one writer, (who works with HCWP), the gallery and performance space on the second, and restaurant space on the first floor.”

Once HUB-BUB got underway, a new organization called HubCulture was created to act as an umbrella organization for both HUB-BUB and the Hub City Writers Project. HUB-BUB and HCWP share the HubCulture governing board and the HubCulture 501c3 (non-profit) status. HUB-BUB and HCWP each have their own advisory boards and HUB-BUB has additional committees to address needs such as the artists-in-residence program. “The advisory boards and committees are made up of volunteers whose job is to provide ideas, energy, their time, and expertise,” Refshauge explains. “The Hub Culture board is responsible for governance and fundraising.”

With a motto of “live free and create,” HUBBUB recently welcomed its fifth class of artists into their “sweet” apartments and studio spaces, Teter says, where they will live for 11 months focusing on their art and assisting with HubCulture business, sometimes setting up shows or answering phones, sometimes selling concessions at HubCulture events, for a total of 20 hours per week. With almost 200 applicants for just four positions, competition is fierce.

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Writers Project and Hub City Press in 2600 square feet of the available space, and leases the remaining space to a local coffee roaster and a bakery.

The Hub City Bookshop carries Hub City Press titles in addition to children’s literature, popular fiction, regional authors, some high quality used volumes, and more.

Proceeds from sales go back into the business of funding creative writing education experiences, scholarships, and publishing regional authors who write place-based literature. According to Teter, the new space allows for even more opportunities for creative types to gather – future plans include workshops, a readings series, book club meetings, and conferences. In addition to paid staff – Erin Haire is the bookshop manager – local residents are encouraged with incentives to volunteer in the shop.

“This bookshop will belong not just to the Hub City Writers Project, but to the city of Spartanburg,” Teter says proudly. ‘I want everyone involved to have a sense of ownership.”

From the original small enterprise of publishing one lone volume a year, the Hub City Writers Project has grown into a prodigious operation with enveloping arms that reach out to inspire and direct readers, writers, and an entire city of artists and patrons. Sounding a metaphorical wake-up signal to the residents of the provincial Southern city of Spartanburg, one small gesture reminded a community of what a valuable place they live in and how important preservation of that place – and that sense of place – is.

Chosen artists, who must be between the ages of 20 and 35years-old, exhibit their work in the HUB-BUB Showroom Gallery when they first take up residency, when their residencies are complete, and at various locations in the city throughout the length of their stays. “Artists-in-Residence act as ambassadors for our program and for the city,” Teter says, with 2010 artists hailing from such diverse locations as Kansas, Utah, Kentucky, and Illinois.

With the addition of people and programs to the HubCulture space, quarters got close in the old Nash Rambler building fairly quickly. That is when Teter had what she calls “another big idea.”

“With the growth of online book purchasing and massive book stores who don’t deal with independent presses, Hub City Writers Project was losing its path to their customers. We didn’t have a way of reaching our market,” she says. “We had this brainstorm. We were running out of room at HUB-BUB, and Spartanburg needed an independent bookstore.

So we decided to ask the city to become our partners in bringing a new independent bookstore to town. A fundraising campaign brought us $300,000, and the city kicked in money as well.”

Early in 2010, the Hub City Writers Project took on their newest and arguably most ambitious project yet – renovating a 1927 Masonic Temple on West Main Street downtown and converting it into an independent bookstore. The non-profit bookstore opened June 30 and also houses offices of the Hub City

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For more information on the Hub City Writers Project, Hub City Press, HUB-BUB, or HubCulture go to www.hubcity.org.

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profile

First novel winner a man of the word

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motion; and, most importantly, remember who the book belongs to – the author should change nothing he doesn’t want to. His efforts have helped him trim the book from 82,000 words to 73,000 – and he is still working.

“I’m trusting Betsy Teter (executive director of the Hub City Writers Project) to help make it leaner – to give it more economy and clarity, too,” he says.

Writing has always been a comMatt Matthews ponent of Matthews’ days. He entered college with the plan of being a journalist but midway through became interested in producing electronic religious media. “I didn’t like the way people like Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart were taking advantage of folks who were watching them at home, and I wanted to do something more responsible,” he says. “So I entered the seminary as a way of complementing my training.” The seminary, however, served only to stoke a smoldering passion for religious life that had been set in his youth, and the young seminarian decided that he most wanted to serve and write for a congregation in a way that was meaningful to him on a regular basis.

“In some ways, I feel like I’ve been a professional writer for my entire ministry,” he says, though he only began experimenting with short fiction 15 years ago.

Writing short stories hasn’t panned out well for Matthews.

“Short fiction is a black hole I slip into for three or four days,” he says, ironically comparing his short stories to an “unrelenting mistress who always wants more.” Matthews is more of a onenight-stand kind of man, preferring the simplicity of writing a song which can be accomplished all in one evening. He has selfrecorded four CDs of home grown music that is surprisingly not gospel.

Similarly, though Mercy Creek is a story about the son of a Presbyterian pastor and it takes place in a church, the book itself is not religious either. “It’s a coming of age story about a 16-year-

ntering Matt Matthews’ office feels more like going into the enclave of a nutty professor than a Bible Belt minister.

In addition to the art books and CDs and boxes of assorted manuscripts that line the walls, there are odd contraptions arranged about the floor; a variety of antique bedpans line up in a company front before his desk; a tuneless Yamaha guitar rests in the corner. Yet there is no mistaking that Matt Matthews is a minister. From his Dockers to his blinding white smile to his perfectly coiffed hair, Matthews wears the cloth of the modern cleric well. His manner is genteel, if somewhat reserved, and it isn’t until the final third of our conversation – after he has dropped his glasses repeatedly and pointedly called my name a dozen times – that he begins to relax; that the real Matthews emerges. He may be a man of God, but he is as much a man of the lower case word, as well.

Matt Matthews is a writer, and if he ever doubted the fact – though why should he, having written 55 sermons a year for the past 21 years – his recent win of the 2010 South Carolina First Novel Prize validates the fact. The First Novel Prize is awarded biennially by the South Carolina Arts Commission and its literary partners, The South Carolina State Library, The Humanities Council South Carolina, and the Hub City Writers Project, who will publish the book in 2011.

“I’ve preached a novel’s worth of stories one sermon at a time,” the 45-year-old pastor of Saint Giles Presbyterian Church in Greenville says. “But they didn’t work out as a novel.”

His most recent try, Mercy Creek, a coming of age story that caught the attention of contest adjudicator Bret Lott, did.

“I began working on the novel in 2001 while I was pursuing an MFA program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia,” he says. “The novel hatched there. Then in 2002, I finished the first draft while I was on sabbatical. Chapter five was added last summer, and there was a huge re-write that I did on a trip out West.”

It’s been a process, and the work isn’t over.

Since learning of his recent success in May, Matthews has heeded the advice given him by Lott, author of twelve books and former editor of The Southern Review: make sure every word moves the story forward; take the story’s ending out of slow

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story: cynthia boiter

retrace his father’s path and write about it. Though he does not identify himself as a pacifist – the minister signs his correspondences and leaves his visitors with a meaningful “peace” – he is anything but quick to jump on the prototypical patriotic bandwagon that currently encircles the desks and pulpits of most Bible Belt pastors.

“My father weighed 85 pounds” at the end of the war, he writes in an unpublished essay entitled, Nexus, which describes the experience of viewing the film Saving Private Ryan alongside his father. Matthews readily admits that he is “hounded” by the affects of war on the men and women who serve.

“I have questions,” he says soberly.

Questioning. Faithful. Thoughtful. Responsible. Matt Matthews may have as much to offer the reading world as he does the world that prays. But don’t expect platitudes or easy answers from a writer who works for the truth himself. There’s more than one kind of ministry to this man of the word.

old boy with a dead mother and how he and his father try to figure out what life is like without her,” Matthews explains. “It’s a summer story – vandalism, the Ku Klux Klan, and a well-kept town secret are all stirred together in the narrative. It’s not a bodice-ripper or a page-turner – it’s a quiet story and, in some ways, a true story,” he says grinning. “Mercy Creek is true without being encumbered by the facts.”

Winning the First Novel Prize has changed the role that writing plays in Matthews’ life now. “I have a lot of experience writing unpublished work,” he says. “Winning this prize encourages in me a greater sense of responsibility to my writing. I want to treat the time that I write more faithfully and re-think how I use it.”

His next project has been a long time coming and goes to the roots of the writer himself – Matthews’ late father. A member of the greatest generation, Bill Matthews served in the fiercest part of the Battle of the Bulge and was captured in the Ardennes in Belgium and taken as a prisoner of war in December 1944.

Thoughtful about the wages and gains of war, Matthews wants to

Excerpt from Mercy Creek by Matt Matthews, coming May 2011 from Hub City Press Mr. Pincus shifted his attention to Isaac’s dad. “You’ve been keeping up with these break-ins, David?”

Isaac’s dad glanced at his son and said that he had, and that, no, they hadn’t caught the culprits.

“What do you make of them, Isaac?” The question caught Isaac off guard. He thought immediately of the reward and wondered what Orioles season tickets cost.

“I’m not sure, Mr. Pincus,” he said finally. “But they’re offering a reward.

Five thousand dollars, last I heard.”

Isaac glanced over to his dad who turned his gaze to the tiles on the floor. “I aim to collect that reward,” Isaac said, hoping to get under his dad’s skin. “Going to try, anyway.”

“Sounds dangerous to me,” Mr. Pincus said. “What do you think of your young detective, David?”

His dad answered without looking up. “He says he’s going to buy me cable TV with the money. It’ll be nice to have ESPN. I can’t complain.” Rev. Lawson looked up to Isaac. “Of course, if he gets killed sticking his nose in where it doesn’t belong, that’ll be a problem since his life

insurance isn’t quite paid up.

Funerals aren’t cheap, and I’d hate to be left holding the bag.”

Isaac rolled his eyes.

Rev. Lawson smiled at Mr. Pincus.

“You’ve raised three children, Steve.

Maybe some day you could tell me how you did it.”

“Oh Lord, we’ve had our moments.” Mr. Pincus laughed. He looked at Isaac. “I think it’s kids running some prank, personally. You got any clues, Sherlock?”

Isaac looked at his father. “A few,” Isaac lied. “I’ve been asking around.

Somebody at the hardware store says it’s kind of like arson without the actual fire. You know, the flames painted on the walls.”

“Interesting observation,” Mr. Pincus said. “We never had any proven arson within the city limits, not when I was in the department.

And the only deaths we had in residential fires were back when I was a kid like you. When I was a kid, I’ll tell you, I was filled with visions of becoming a fireman.”

Isaac had no vision about what he wanted to be.

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“Yes, sir,” Mr. Pincus said. “It was Eddie Patrick’s wife and baby. What a sad thing.” He looked over to Isaac’s dad. “Have you heard about that, David?”

Isaac’s dad nodded. “Many times.”

“Those old houses burnt easier than dried hay.”

“Eddie Patrick?” Isaac asked, taken aback. “You mean the hardware Eddie? Crazy Eddie?”

“Eddie still working?”

Isaac nodded.

“I thought he retired this winter,” Mr. Pincus said, “but what do I know?

He’s not slowed down a bit, that old guy. He’s well over seventy, I would guess. Hardware Eddie, that’s the one.”

“I didn’t know he was married and had a child,” Isaac said.

“There’s probably a whole lot you don’t know about Eddie, son.” Mr. Pincus crossed his legs and put his hands behind his head. He had short black hair that was slicked back and a sagging tattoo of an anchor on his forearm. “You never really know any man, son. Especially a man like Eddie Patrick.”

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profile

A very good year and one bad accident Brian Ray

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roles of author and student. Pale Door has nearly sold out its 1,300 hardbacks. And he didn’t flunk out.

It wasn’t easy; in fact, it was dangerous.

“I was on the road every weekend going to book stores and festivals,” he says. “I had evening classes, so I’d drive to Myrtle Beach or somewhere, get there at 2 in the morning and get up at 7.”

He racked up the miles on his Toyota Echo – until on his way to a reading he hit a slick spot on Interstate 381 near Greenville, spun out and totaled the car. (He suffered minor cuts and bruises.)

The book received positive reviews from Booklist, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Southern Literary Review and Atlanta Magazine.

“Ray's characters may be unhinged,” said the Journal Constitution, “but his writing is far from it. And though it was a gamble to set a contemporary story in such a haunted, Poedrenched world, the result is a quirky first novel that's not afraid to be itself a modern, yet unabashedly romantic look at what happens when art and madness collide.”

Those at the Hub City Writers Project were elated.

“For an unknown author from a kind of unknown press to sell

n the spring of 2008, Brian Ray received notice that he’d been accepted into the doctoral program in English at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. A few weeks later, he got word that his novel Behind the Pale Door would be published in the summer of 2009.

The book focuses on a young woman who has taken a summer job in the steel mill her father manages – a mill frequently visited by an artist who uses the huge buildings as a canvas. The publishing deal was his reward for Pale Door being selected as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina First Novel Award from the Hub City Writers Project and the South Carolina Arts Commission.

If he wanted the book to succeed, Ray knew he’d have to hit the road to give readings, sign books and attend book festivals a lot to do while tackling a doctoral program. Ray considered postponing school, but there was a problem.

“My graduate record exam scores were about to expire,” Ray says with a laugh. He dreaded re-taking the four-hour multiplechoice exam – which amounts to four hours of torture for a writer. So he figured he’d attempt to be both a full-time student and a full-time author.

Ray has just completed a very successful first year in the dual

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story: jeffrey day

1,000 books in a year is extraordinary,” says Betsy Teter, executive director of Hub City. “We couldn’t have done any better on round one of the First Novel.”

The reviews helped, but the main reason it sold was Ray. “He worked his tail off,” Teter says. “Brian is very serious about marketing his own work. He’s a delightful person and a hardworking author.”

As the one-year anniversary of the book’s publication neared, Ray got more good news. Ray went to New York in late May to pick up a fat gold medal on a blue ribbon from the Independent Publishers association. That was his award – an “IPPY” - for taking first place for a novel from the Southeast.

“It’s nice but kind of cheesy,” says Ray while having a cup of coffee at Immaculate Consumption during a recent visit to Columbia. (He had the medal with him.). “I felt like I’d been to the Olympics.”

A native of suburban Atlanta, the Ray family moved to the Columbia suburb of Irmo around the time he was starting high school. After graduating from Dutch Fork High School he worked one summer at the steel mill where his father is a metallurgical engineer. That’s where he found the setting for Pale Door. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 2006 and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing in 2007 at the University of South Carolina. While there, Ray was editor of the graduate literary journal, and won the James Dickey Award for both poetry and short story.

Having the First Novel winner slide quickly into the academic world and out of South Carolina didn’t bode well for the success of the book, but Ray made a commitment to be a full-time author from South Carolina as well as a full-time doctoral student in North Carolina.

He’s certainly an anomaly among his fellow students. To enter a PhD program with a published novel under one’s belt is unusual and his classmates give him a good-natured hard time about it – what’s a published author novelist doing taking up valuable space and future teaching positions?

“They think it’s cool and are interested,” he says. “There’s some healthy jealously.”

Most just want to pick his brain about the nitty-gritty details of the writing life touring, making contacts, getting invited to festivals, driving techniques – all the things that most master of fine arts programs don’t teach.

During the coming academic year, Ray will be deep into research for his dissertation – he’s leaning toward something in the field of teaching English across cultures.

And he has been writing. He has completed a novel inspired by an unsolved murder in Sumter 20 years ago.

“It’s got a beginning middle and end, but it is problematic,” he says. He’s also at the computer developing a series of short stories based on the characters in Behind the Pale Door.

Interest in Pale Door hasn’t stopped either. This fall he heads to the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, where he’ll be on a panel. He’s getting there in his new Toyota Yaris and by that time may be carrying the paperback edition of Pale Door in the trunk.

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“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

-E.L. Doctorow

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review

An Out Loud voice for diversity

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red velvet cake while at the same time recounting an anecdote told by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who, he says, is as “sweet and folksy as he can be, even when he's telling you that you're like a cake made with (a cup of) salt.”

As much as the typical Southern dweller may not ask about things like sexual orientation, the authors in this collection do.

From Chellew-Hodge's inquiry, “Do you like Cris Williamson?” to Smallwood's “where are the rainbows for little black boys whose compasses don't point north?” the questions they ask offer sometimes poignant revelations about humanity simply in the asking.

And these authors tell, as well. In “For John, at Christmas,” Becci Robbins tells of seeing for the last time, her friend John, who was dying of AIDS. “He was incoherent, drenched in sweat, curled into a question mark.” In “My Uncle Greg is Gay,” an essay written when he was 14-years-old, Tommy Gordon tells of confronting a protesting preacher with the words, “Jesus never taught me to hate.” And Tommy's grandmother, the local hero and advocate, Harriet Hancock, for whom the collection is dedicated, tells of a hot June day in 1990 when she took the trembling hand of her son, Greg, into her own, and stepped off in parade at the whistle's call, celebrating the first ever Gay and Lesbian Pride march in Columbia, South Carolina.

The air was thick with humidity that day in 1990, as it probably was on October 9, 2005, when “Rainbow Radio” went on the air, and as it likely is today. But because of these events, and because a book like Out Loud is now in print, the air is a little clearer, a little sweeter, and a little more just.

(Hub City Press, 160 pages, $14.95 )

here is something in the air in rigidly traditional, old boy, God fearing, deep South cities like Columbia, South Carolina, that says, “We don't talk about things like homosexuality around here.” We don't ask. We don't tell. But on October 9, 2005, the climate changed for the better when “Rainbow Radio – the Real Gay Agenda” took to the airwaves.

Five years later, Hub City Press in Spartanburg has published a collection of Rainbow Radio readings called Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio, edited by Ed Madden and Candace ChellewHodge.

Divided into three logical sections, Listening, Learning, and Resisting, Out Loud offers more than 40 essays and poems from a diverse group that ranges from the well-known local human rights activist, politician, educator, and entertainer, to the soldier, average student, mother, and member of the ministry.

As with any story collection, the writing is sometimes inconsistent. Readers should keep in mind that the stories were, for the most part, written for the listening, rather than the reading, audience. The reading audience may sometimes miss the luxury of inflection; the rising, falling, and pausing of the human voice.

But all of the writing is meaningful, if it isn't consistently stellar.

In fact, there is exquisite writing to be found in this collection. In the poem, “Rainbows” by Stacey Smallwood, for example, the poet writes of wrists that are “bound with thick black rope fastened by the buckle of the Bible belt.” Melissa Moore, in her essay, “Strong Southern Women,” writes of her white male, economically privileged father being “Blind in the way that one cannot see one's own eyes; one can only see through them.” Ed Madden cleverly takes the reader through the construction of a

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poetry

PiĂąero the living of it seared like a drop of Chinese water popping on a white-hot skillet and the steam felt even the pain of that nicotine fingers snuff out gilded thoughts, caramelized visions and the well-meaning muse whose mistress waits at the dock in steel-blue stiletto indignation he sees the brass ring through long strings of hair steel bars and memories of madre the cloak of back streets and lengthening alleyways proud, fallen scribe even in death he is dismissive

Kristine Hartvigsen is a poet, writer, editor, and the moderator for undefined magazine’s poetry reading series.

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Independence Day 1.

3.

Missed it again this year, the guns-n-God pageant at First Baptist, armed guards

Whitman walked hospital wards on the Fourth, 1863, with cherry syrup he poured

invading the aisles. They’ll play it later on one channel or another—they always do. At ten,

into ice water, dispensing sweet drinks to the boys with news of the war, Meade’s

Juan and two amigos whose names we didn’t get were banging up sheetrock in the basement—

victory, Lee’s retreat—good and strong, he wrote, but innocent—the bells ringing sundown

air conditioning claiming another room. The Fourth’s not a holiday for them, Juan says. Next door

peals, the usual fusillades of crackers and guns.

a guy is singing, Girl what you drinkin?

Go on let it sink in. Here for the weekend.

4.

We heard firecrackers midday, but now, the suburbs quiet at sundown, just the bravuras of birds,

By afternoon the men are slapping up mud downstairs, slathering joints, hiding the studs where we’d thought to write our names.

and next door I hear America singing, Blame it on the ah-ah-ah-alcohol. The mudmen are paid

2.

and gone, the drywall done. Red buds of montbretia in the bed near the road

The humidity has lifted a bit, the breeze still wicked hot, even zinnias beginning to wilt

pack stems like firecrackers green wicks, clusters seething and lit, the cleome’s pink

as the sun smacks them down hard, the way it does. Our neighbor Ginger stopped by to say

waits in the heat, a dirty bomb of seed.

hi, eye our new mailbox of rock, mortared by a guy halfway home in the house next door.

Ed Madden is the poetry editor for undefined magazine.

Along the front walk, something’s riddled the sunflowers, leaves bitten to lace, petals clipped—bug-bit eclipse—and a green rash of aphids like little blisters, swarms of ants tending them, drawn to the sugary shit they secrete, honeydew, sticky and sweet. They’ll bite off the wings to keep them put. We want what we want.

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undefined : book seven

review

Clemson professor’s short story collection is like awesome Keith Lee Morris’ short story collection Call It What You Want is frankly quite a shocker: who knew there was such a brilliant writer teaching at Clemson University?

Morris tells engaging and accessible stories, but he does them with a technique that is just dazzling. Quite a bit of the action in these 13 stories takes place in character’s heads.

The opening story, “Testimony,” is set in a courtroom where the main character is on the stand at a murder trial.

The defendant is a friend, as was the victim. And while the actual testimony provides some of the plot, the real plot takes place within the protagonist.

But even when Morris leads the reader into these internal monologues, he still has them speak to us (and to themselves) in a conversational style. Most of the folks in the book are working class, or out of work, and a bit on the fringe of society. Taking us inside them, he shows that under often-rough exteriors they are sensitive and thoughtful, but he writes them in a manner consistent with their exteriors.

Morris is quite a stylist as well.

The second sentence of “Ayudame” is 130 words long and if it doesn’t flow it sure moves at a tight clip. The first sentence of the story “My Roommate Kevin Is Awesome” is “Totally.”

In “Visitation” the narrator provides a list of rules of his house - most about not stealing his stuff. He comes home and

undefined : book seven

finds someone stealing his stuff and proceeds to beat him up.

Then he explains to the bleeding man that he just came from church where his mother died while holding his hand. They watch “Happy Days” and discuss why Potsie and Joanie have such a big part in this episode. Then we move into his head as he tries to grasp his mother’s death.

These stories are funny as well as being down and dirty and grim and rather violent too. At times they fly off into fantasy.

In “Tired Heart” a man has agreed to pick up boxes on a cross country trip for a big cash payoff – but has to do so in some strange ways with a timetable that miraculously and menacingly changes so as to be impossible to meet. “Desert Island Romance” puts two strangers on an unnamed island, who still get bogged down in jobs and relationships.

The most successful of these is “My Roommate Kevin is Awesome.” What’s awesome about Kevin that he is so bored with college life that he “like tore a fucking hole in the fabric of the universe.” This allows him to conjure up a Jacuzzi instead of a skuzzy dorm-room shower and makes the late Ray Charles drop by for an impromptu concert.

Like Kevin, this collection is awesome.

(Tin House Books, 262 pages, $14.95)

50

story: jeffrey day

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