1|
the lab review volume 1: issue 2 Faculty Advisor
Patricia Ann McNair
Chief Editor
Melaina de la Cruz
Associate Editors
Malissa Stark, William Horner, Giovanni Perry
Layout
Melaina de la Cruz
Cover Design
Lindsey Borgna
Department of Creative Writing Faculty
Randy Albers, Jenny Boully, CM Burroughs, Garnett Kilberg-Cohen, Don De Grazia, Lisa Fishman, Re’Lynn Hansen, Ann Hemenway, Gary Johnson, Aviya Kushner, David Lazar, David McLean, Eric May, Patricia Ann McNair, Joe Meno, Nami Mun, Audrey Niffenegger, Samual Park, Alexis Pride, Matthew Shenoda, Shawn Shiflett, Tony Trigilio, David Trinidad, Sam Weller. The Lab Review, a journal of student writing, is published online by the Publishing Lab through the Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago, on a monthly basis. Fiction, creative nonfiction, stories in graphic form, poetry, visual art, and photography, were submitted by students for consideration. Visit us online at thelabreview.com for past issues, market research, and industry interviews and videos. For information on studying creative writing: http://www.colum.edu/Academics/CreativeWriting/ Copyright © 2015 Creative Writing Department
Editor’s Note:
The sophomore issue of The Lab Review will plunge you into nostalgic territory, from rented bedrooms reminding you of lost love, to illegal tobacco purchases while playing hooky. It will cause you to consider nature, and the ways that tiny aspects of the world around us can affect our lives. It will also have you wading your feet into the discomfort of accepting death, in more unexpected ways than one. The Lab Review was fortunate enough to get its start last month by rising from the success of the long-loved Story Week Reader, following a ‘best of’ issue to commemorate the latter’s tenth publication. April brought forth the exciting new challenge of giving The Lab Review its own life, separate from the glorified Reader, with a new generation of voices to breathe into its pages. Not only will you find a steady mixture of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry this month, but we have also wandered beyond our normal boundaries by including several photographs that capture one writer’s journey through La Ville Lumière. Let’s begin this marvelous literary adventure together. -Melaina de la Cruz
contents fiction pack of camels |Melissa Huedem
.
.
.
8
two doors | Meli Alvarez Juarez
.
.
.
16
creative nonfiction teal attics & red headed girls | Patrick Thornton 5 the equipment of extinction | Scott Wilson
.
19
influenced by a life of meaning : an interview with re’lynn hansen . . . . . . . 20 photojournalism a writer abroad: paris journal | Lindsey Borgna 12 poetry without wild thought | Brandon Lee Vear
.
11
hospice, age 19 | Taylor St. Onge
.
26
author bios end note
. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 28
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 29
teal attics & red headed girls | Patrick Thornton
What would you say if I said I still dream about you? How would you feel if I told you that seeing your picture makes me think of memories we never had together? What if I showed you the scar on my heel, and how seeing it always reminds me of failure? The line between affection and obsession runs thin. I close my eyes and it’s six years ago. N. tells us in stage movement that we need to get more in touch with our bodies. She makes all of us get down on the floor and spread ourselves out over one another. She calls it a bliss puddle. I always feel awkward with my body, and I am rigid in that mass of limbs on the black floor. But then I find a hand that holds mine and suddenly things feel less complicated. The bones of your hand are fine and I want to stroke your skin with my thumb. I try to look at you but all I can see is your red hair. Always the red hair blinding everything else. I wanted to say something after class but I decided not to. It seemed too soon to start seeing someone after B., and I didn’t know what to say to you anyhow. We were both young, both actors, and I hadn’t learned my lines, so I moved into that liminal space where I’m the friend who wants to be more than just. We lived in a part of Indiana called “Tornado Alley” where there was a constant anxiety that our lives could come undone if the winds moved a certain way. Memories of you and me are few, I only mention you three times in my undergrad journals, but the memories I do possess have an unsettling clarity to them. I can remember the classes we took together, the plays we were in. I remember Dr. S. telling me not to look at you during a scene because I was a servant and you were a princess. In scenography, the class pulled an all nighter and you tried to spray M. with paint but it hit me instead. “It wasn’t supposed to be you,” you said apologetically— that always seemed to be the problem. Of course I never forget the spring dance, how things were strained at the end. I’ve tried to come up with an explanation as to why things went wrong that night. I try to blame my shoes
because it’s an easy solution. On the walk from my car to your dorm I’d developed a blister. It had started out as a rubbing, then a chaffing, then a tearing of flesh. I limped into the lobby of your dorm and saw you there. You were in that black lace dress, your red hair falling over your shoulders in loose curls, your kind eyes glittering. I still picture your skin, almost translucent with blue veins running across your chest like a map, trailing down between your breasts. By the time we got to the dance I could barely walk. I got a Band-Aid, but the shoe kept rubbing. I had a pair of boots in my trunk that I finally put on in defeat. They were black like my suit, but worn, with specks of paint on them from set design. The boots were clunky. I was clunky. In stage movement we learned how to become more in touch with our bodies, but I felt like a stranger in mine that night. I went outside and smoked a Parliament with C. and we talked about being depressed, and when we got back you were talking to M. That’s when I knew I’d missed my chance. We didn’t dance together once that night. I don’t even think I walked you home. I want to believe that I did, but the more I think about it I don’t believe I walked you home. No wonder you hate me now. No, you never said you hated me, I know that. What I mean is: no wonder I hate myself. When I came to visit everyone after graduation I thought I could finally tell you how I felt. I’d forgotten you were studying abroad that semester. When you graduated I thought for sure you would move back to Chicago to pursue your acting career. I thought we could be in shows together and that I could fix things. You moved to California to get your MFA. After that I had a dream of you standing naked in a shower, beckoning for me. I was standing at the end of a long corridor and no matter how fast I ran I never got closer to you. Later I dreamt that we were on a beach and you were smiling at me, but we never said anything. Then suddenly I was in the beach house, watching you through the window, but unable to get to you or call your name. In reality and in fiction you are always close, yet far away. And I wonder if you still dream about me, or if you left the memories that included me back in Indiana, where the path of a tornado swept them away. My senior year I rented a house with two friends, and claimed the attic bedroom, painted teal, like the owner knew it was my favorite color. My desk fit under the front dormer, my bed tucked in the back, but something about the room always seemed empty. I imagined again and again waking up in that 6|
bedroom and seeing you lying to my left, red hair spilling onto milk-white pillows that matched your skin. Waking up with you is as real as any memory I have from that room where I rarely had a visitor. I look for houses with hidden bedrooms, but I realize that’s been the problem all along: I hid from the world and it eventually stopped looking. I always wake up alone. What if I told you that it’s always the wrong time, and never the right place? How would you feel if I said that I’m afraid I’m in love with the memory of you? What if you said that it’s better to imagine than to know?
|7
pack of camels | Melissa Huedem
Fifth grade was a drag, so Michael Napelli skipped the bus and walked to the nearest Gas and Slurp with change jingling in his denim pockets. He had enough ammunition to play seven rounds of Wild Gunman. It was the only arcade game he was good at. Eight a.m. on a Monday was the only time when there weren’t twelve other boys crawling over each other, hogging the joystick. When Michael pushed open the glass door he expected to see Bronco standing behind the counter with a churro between his thick pink lips and dark wire-rimmed glasses resting on the bridge of his crooked nose. Bronco didn’t care if Michael played Wild Gunman till the school bell rang, just as long as “TwentyQuestion-Mikey” didn’t ask what was in the backroom. Michael already had a hand raised to his forehead in a salute position. “Reporting for duty, sir!” he announced before realizing that the man behind the counter wasn’t Bronco. This man had a pink birthmark the shape Florida in between his eyes. “Shouldn’t you be in school, Kid?” This man’s voice was raspy and low. He eyed Michael up and down. Michael did the same to the man. He had on a white button-down puckered along the folds of his hairy chest. A chain dangled off his neck. Looked like a cross to Michael. Michael looked around. “Where’s Bronco?” The man scoffed and placed both hands on the counter. He turned his head from left to right. “Who’s Bronco?” “Who are you?” Michael pointed a finger at the man as if he were shooting a gun. “I’m Elvis.” He tapped on his nametag. Michael put his finger down. “Like Elvis Presley? You don’t even have hair on your head.” The man didn’t smile. “Buy something or get out.” “Bronco don’t make me buy anything.” Michael spewed. The man scratched the inside of his ear with an index finger, spinning it around and around. “Bronco ain’t here. Now are you gonna buy something or scram?” Michael walked closer and cocked his head to the side. “Gimme a pack of Camels.” 8|
The man laughed, revealing a gold cap on his front tooth. He plucked a pack off the shelf and slammed it down on the counter. Michael stepped back. Elvis slid the cigarettes toward Michael. “Here. Take it.” Michael lifted a finger, but was hesitant to snatch the pack. “Just take the goddamn box, Kid, and leave the same way you entered.” Just as Michael’s chubby fingers latched onto the box, the back door behind the counter swung open. Standing in the doorway was Sgt. Boatman, Michael’s D.A.R.E. officer. He was standing outside the door, just enough so Michael could see his jeans and a tight long-sleeve polo the shade of mustard. Whatever was in the room was hidden behind his six-foot-five frame. Hanging from his lips was a cigarette. “Elv— His head turned from the man to Michael. The wrinkles on his face stiffened. “Sgt. Boatman?” Michael’s mouth hung open. “Napelli. Does your father know you’re not in school? You know I’m gonna be seeing him at poker night tomorrow. Don’t think he’d want to hear you were skipping class…again.” Michael scrunched his face. Sgt. Boatman looked down at the pack of cigarettes laying on the counter. He snickered. “Tobacco is wacko! ’member what I told you kids?” He pointed his cigarette at Michael. “These are for my dad,” Michael blurted out. “Sure.” Sgt. Boatman nodded. All three stared at each other, waiting for someone to make a move. “What are you doing here, Sgt.?” “I could be asking you the same thing, Michael.” Michael nodded and turned on his heel to leave when he heard someone yell: “Boatman, you finished weighing that bag?” The milky voice belonged to Bronco. He stepped out from behind Sgt. Boatman, holding a can of Tab Soda. The door widened and inside was a forest of green. From the crack of the doorway, Michael saw potted leafy plants lining every shelf and taking up floor space. He shifted to the right to get a better view. Michael cocked his head and peered further inside. “Hey Bronco! I was wondering where you were.” “Michael, gonna play some Gunman?” Bronco’s eyes were red and he looked sleepy. “That was the plan,” Michael smirked. Sgt. Boatman and Elvis stared hard at Michael’s pale face. Michael stood on his tiptoes, trying to look past the Planters Peanut display. “Are you growing a rainforest in there?” Bronco stumbled on words before finally letting out, |9
Bronco stumbled on words before finally letting out, “Something like that.” “What is it?” Michael began walking past the counter, but the man with the birthmark held a hairy arm out to stop him. “Hey, Kid! You can’t step behind the line.” The man pointed to the black tape on the tiled floor. “I think Napelli needs to head to school, right, Men?” Sgt. Boatman’s thick brown eyebrows lifted into a high arch. He put the cigarette back into his mouth. Bronco nodded slowly. “School? Oh, oh yeah. I guess you should do school. Uh, I mean go to school.” His glazed eyes stared off into the racks of Ho-Ho’s and Doritos. He giggled and even let out a snort. “But Bronco, you told me that school is uncool. What’s the point?” Sgt. Boatman patted Bronco on the back. “Bronco here was only kidding with you. School is cool. See, it’s only us adults around here. All the cool kids are in school.” Michael stuffed his hands in his pockets, rubbing knuckles on pennies, running empty on questions. “Mikey,” Sgt. Boatman tossed the cigarettes at Michael. “It’s on me.” Michael caught the cigarettes and stared at the camel on the package. Instantly he thought of his dad, who never let him touch his pack of cigs. “Don’t smoke. It’s bad for you,” he’d say as he would pluck a stark white cigarette from its pack and place it between his lips. Now as Michael held the pack of Camels, he liked the way it fit in his palm. “Remember, drugs are whack so watch your back!” Boatman’s laugh was low and contagious. The other two men chuckled along with him. Michael began walking toward sthe exit. The bell above the door dinged. He turned around one last time, taking a good look at Bronco, Elvis, and Sgt. Boatman. “One more question, men,” Michael called out. The guys stopped laughing. “This kid and his questions,” Elvis said as he rolled his eyes. Sgt. Boatman leaned back. “Shoot, Napelli.” “Any of you got a light?”
10 |
without wild thought | Brandon Lee Vear
it is the visible arts, so it is with literature, the obvious, vulgarest form is in the case of reading— it begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, shopping list of the mind, phenomenon occurs after influence of the imagination, emancipate night, alarm the city by leaping out with black masks & unloaded revolvers, the mistake is essentially creative, seeks new form of life’s instinct, occupied as fact, trying to reproduce fiction, we see repeated, extended, analysed pessimism “I’m lonely” “That’s good!” —puppet melancholy
| 11
a writer abroad: paris journal | Lindsey Borgna January 2015: Of course Paris changed me. But I also know that home changes me, and that Chicago will continue to change me when I return. Life is always shifting, molding, bending, and breaking, no matter my location. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve been stepped on more than I’ve been carried, but I only have to look back at my adventures in Paris to know that’s not true. I am stretched thin but stronger still, fighting my restraints but fully appreciating where my feet are planted. I haven’t shaken my demons. I’ve poked and prodded them, and, if anything, I think I woke them back up. But I am writing again and that is one of my better weapons. The longer that I’m home, the more digging that I do, the more I understand what really took place in those two weeks. Paris didn’t give any of us a clean slate; instead it erased the smudged edges of the vague outlines of ourselves to make them clear and solid lines again. We let our lives take shape while we laid ourselves bare, and that was where the real growth began.
12 |
“Sacré Cœur”
| 13
“We are all Charlie”
14 |
“Reverent kisses”
| 15
two doors | Meli Alvarez Juarez
Her car had stopped in front of a road made of gravel. She stepped out and felt it crunch under her ballet slippers. There was music coming from the mansion on top of the hill. She closed her eyes and listened to it, it was so clear. It felt like the rhythm of her heart. The music was classical ballet, Swan Lake by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. She remembered her Quinceañera; a long white skirt, beautiful white corset at the Good Shepherd hall, scuffed white shoes, and sweet marigolds. She recalled Ricardo whispering to her that day as they walked down the aisle, “This is how you will be on our wedding day, cariño.” She remembered late arrivals, fluttering butterflies in the pit of the stomach, bad snow days, small frustrations like crowded elevators, guava seeds caught in between teeth, photographs that were never taken. She continued to recollect moments as she listened to the beat of the music. Soon she found herself moving towards it. She began to walk and make her way to the mansion at the top of the hill. The music guided her like the songs of Sirens luring a sailor at sea. She wasn’t sure what to expect at the entrance of the building, which looked like a gothic castle hidden amongst deep, enchanted woods. She walked towards it, climbing the steep stone steps that appeared to never end. The music grew louder and as she reached closer to the mansion gate, she felt a sense of dread. It all reminded her of old fairytales that never had happy endings, of journeys that led to nothingness. She reached the mansion’s black doors and just stood still for a moment, hoping the chill air would calm the firing nerves that electrocuted her insides. The air smelled crisp and clean like washed line-dried laundry, yet felt cold and malicious. She took a deep breath and pressed her right hand to the door and gripped the handle with her left, feeling as if something was sucking the life from within her. She twisted the handle and pushed it open. The music had stopped as the black doors opened wide. It was empty. There was a black and white marble checkered floor, a beautiful crystal chandelier above on the ceiling, Victorian paintings around nicely finished wooden walls and at the far end a big, white staircase that twisted into two separate paths to opposite hallways on the second floor. This place, she’d been here 16 |
before, in a dream. The sound of footsteps from a distance began to emerge from the silence, the doors closed behind her as she let herself in. From her right side appeared a man dressed in a black tux. “Que bueno, I’m glad I’m not late this time.” He extended his hand to her and she hesitantly took it. Her father looked different to her, younger. His grey hair was full and nicely brushed, the wrinkles and skin that once showed signs of fatigue, old age, and death were not as visible as they once were, days before his passing. She didn’t question his presence before her; it felt as if she expected it in an odd way. She wanted to say so much but didn’t. “Where am I?” was all she could say. He smiled at her and walked her toward the stairs. She remembered the first time she danced with him, the first time he saw her dance ballet. He always made her feel safe, like a treasure that no one could find. Just then the music started again and the whole room shimmered and got brighter. “Dance for me again, one last time, mija.” He stepped aside to watch her. He recalled the last time he had seen her dance when she was eight, how happy she twirled in the meadows of their jardin where their flowers grew. She had always been a dancer. She gave her father a warm smile, took a deep breath, and danced in her ballet shoes. She danced gracefully and did every twist and sway swiftly. Just like a bailarina from a musical box that consumed every child with comfort in hearing the music and watching the bailarina dance. There was a sudden coldness in her stomach, then a sharp pain in her chest and a pounding in her head. She tried hard to keep her balance while flashes of the car drive to the mansion struck her like sharp knives. The car coming from her practice rehearsal, swerving on the road, the scream, the impact came all at once, rushing into her brain like a flood of water. With a face of horror she looked down at her ivory ballet dress and saw the red stain of blood grow and drip down to her white tights. She stopped and saw the burn marks on her chest, felt the throbbing from the cut on her forehead. She ran to her father for comfort. He embraced her and told her everything was alright. “What happened to me, papá?” She began to cry in his arms. “The same that happened to me.” With his hand he took hold of her face and raised it to meet his eyes. “Life and fate is what happened, mi querida niña.” She no longer felt the pain and saw that she was normal once more. “Ven, we must make a choice now.” He led her to the foot of the stairway and went up the | 17
stairs. “Now look at your choices.” She looked ahead and saw there was two distinct hallways that lead to two doors opposite each other. “Which door will you go into?” “Where do they each lead?” “One is the door of life. You go into that door and everything is as you left it. It is life as it is. You spend it with those you leave behind but at a price. The other is of afterlife, of eternal life. You go into that one and everything you know is gone but never forgotten. Though you live forever, free of pain and suffering, with me.” “What is the price you pay for the door of life?” She looked at both white doors that looked exactly alike. “I can’t tell you.” Her father began to walk down the steps. “Where are you going?” “I just came to guide you but I can’t decide for you.” He got close to her and kissed her forehead. “Everyone must die, you can’t undo death. Remember that.” He turned around, went down the steps and disappeared back from whence he came. She didn’t understand that. To her, the choice wasn’t hard. She wasn’t ready to leave behind Ricardo or her little girl. She walked up the final steps and opened the door. He was right; everything was as she had left it. She drove back home and there was Ricardo with their daughter. But something wasn’t right. She saw her husband and daughter dressed in black, sitting at the kitchen table. She spoke to them but no answer. The silence was killing her once more. It was a black and white motion picture. She saw her husband carry the girl to her bedroom. She insisted on not staying alone and Ricardo agreed, letting the child stay with him that night. She watched her family fall to bed, looked at her picture hung over the nightstand. She bent down next to her daughter and thought she finally understood the price she had to pay for staying. She kissed her daughter, a kiss that felt like nothing but a cold wind on her cheek. She felt the tears inside but didn’t have them, for ghosts can’t shed tears. She whispered into her daughter’s ear, “Don’t worry mi bailarina, I’m here to stay.” She did stay, watching over them, never leaving them until their death came for them and they left without her.
18 |
the equipment of extinction | Scott Wilson
We’re at an almond grove with a farmer standing next to his Lincoln truck, and a guy on a tractor, in the Central Valley of California. I don’t know what to call the tractor guy. He’s the one who actually does the farming, but he’s not the farmer. They call me a scientist because that’s what the job application said. Bees are circling us in the morning sun. The tractor guy hooks up a metal barrel with a fan on the back and drives off through the trees. He flips a switch connected to some pumps and the liquid contents of the barrel are sprayed through the fan, turning it into mist. The liquid, I’m told by my fellow scientists, is a chemical that kills bugs if they eat it. But don’t worry! It’s not supposed to kill humans. We scientists have been informed by an e-mail from the research firm to wear respirators and full-body Tyvek chem suits anyway. The tractor guy has a flannel shirt and, seeing us, decides to put on a paper mask from his back pocket. The farmer watches, smiling, elbow resting on his truck. We pick white, nickel-sized almond blossoms using tweezers so that we don’t get chemicals on our hands. Later we’re going to sit in a barn and suck pollen off the flowers with little vacuums and use tiny glass pipettes to slurp up nectar. The nectar tastes sweeter than Diet Coke. Some other scientists back at the lab will see how much chemical is in the samples we took. Taking a break to “replenish the ammonia levels in the soil” a curious worker bee tries to take a peek at my applicator and gets a swat. This here ain’t for you, little lady. Looking a few feet over to the bee’s mobile home, a stack of pallets that follow the almond bloom up and down California, I wonder if they’re as busy as they bill for. I lean over the top of their colony, watching for hostility, mistrust, annoyance, resentment. No, they don’t mind. After a minute of me breathing on them, my face blocking their sun, I smile and understand the farmer.
| 19
influenced by a life of meaning: an interview with Re’Lynn Hansen | William Horner
Re’Lynn Hansen is an experimental prose form and nonfiction essayist and novelist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Rhino, Prism, and New Madrid. She is the recipient of the New South Prose Prize, and the Prism International Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her novel, Take Me to the Underground, was nominated for a Lambda Literary award. Hansen also helped run South Loop Review and now is setting up the new, Columbia College sponsored nonfiction literary magazine, Punctuate. Her new book, a collection of prose form poetry and short lyric essays, To Some Woman I Have Known (April 2015, White Pine Press), takes us through Hansen’s life and the women within her memory and language. Associate editor and intern, William Horner, had the opportunity to sit with Re’Lynn in her office to discuss her book and the introduction of a new literary magazine. ... William Horner: South Loop Review just came out with its final issue, and you’re teaching Senior Forum this semester, and Beginning Nonfiction Workshop and the new Literary Magazine Production class for Punctuate, the replacement for SLR, for next semester. And not only that, you’ve been promoting your new book, To Some Women I Have Known. Where did you draw your inspiration for the book? Re’Lynn Hansen: I think I’ve been writing it hard for a couple of years. I had a diagnosis with cancer and I felt really compelled to write about the things I wanted to write about—how we live each day, equitably and beautifully. And then all of my writing became more important. All of it. The writing that’s produced in this book, in particular, is a
20 |
memoir from the 70s. I dropped out of college to join friends in Guatemala. It’s about their influence; it’s also about women in my family. WH: You take us everywhere, basically, in place and in time. The way I saw it, it’s more of how you go through all these photo albums, snapshots and home movies, and what these literary pictures cause is stories and memories that, perfectly or imperfectly, affect you. RH: Some of them are single snapshots, you’re right about that. The first poem, “Ghost Horse,” comes from the image of this white horse my friend and I were going to get, and we were going to get it because we needed something wild in our life. The image I have is of the horse, this appaloosa, going crazy, shooting the fence, just leaping it. And both of us were so silent afterwards, we knew we were not going to get that horse. [Laughter]. That is a snapshot, and others are more a compilation. The longer essays I like too, they’re a kind of compilation [of those] snapshots. WH: In the piece “25 Sightings of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker,” which was also published as a chapbook for Firewheel Publications, you go very research-heavy. A lot of writers struggle with this wealth of information, like they’re giving too much for the reader to digest. What did you feel was most important and why did you find those things significant? RH: I’ve always been interested in the environment, and extinction is one of the symptoms of our environmental illness Birds, [for example], are the most delicate species. I was always interested in the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, and one reason it took my interest was because people kept reporting sightings of this bird. Peterson’s Bird Guide[s] had listed the bird as “extinct.” However, there have been so many sightings that bird guides have changed the listing. They now list it as “believed to be extinct.” So, therefore, it’s believed not to be extinct by a certain amount of individuals who just want to see that bird. And running parallel to the story of the bird, I knew I wanted to see these snapshots of my ancestors again, grandmothers who used to be alive in my life. I had that same kind of sentiment with them that I had with that bird, that nostalgia. I wanted to show… I guess the crossover of feeling mournful for our environment and species, with the same kind of mourning we have for family.
| 21
WH: Yes, and family plays a huge role in these pieces, especially with “A Famous Case of Syphilis.” You compare your aunt to Mary Todd Lincoln, along with other famous cases. RH: When we go through struggle we become heroes, we become epic, because of that struggle. I think the struggle with illness, and syphilis in particular, goes outside the boundaries of heroic. WH: Yeah, it’s more of a test. How far are we willing to go? “What is my real limit?” The people you bring up in this piece (who had syphilis), Schubert specifically, are interesting because it’s one of the places where, not explicitly, you bring up sexuality, offering a reinforcement to the stigma of the disease. RH: Yes, the disease had a lot of stigma. It was caused by casual sexual relationships. And this was the case with Schubert and Flaubert and Mary Todd Lincoln. And the question is not how do we interpret the disease in society, it’s how do you live and breathe this as family members, as friends? They’re still part of your lives. WH: What piece did you write first? What was the one that set everything off? RH: One of the first pieces was “From Where I Stand On the Steps of the Romanesque Church.” At that point, I wanted to write about a family in its ascendancy. I wanted to write of that matrimonial moment, the family looks beautiful, not even just the bride and groom. The entire family seems verdant. WH: Lively, and just awake. RH: Exactly, and because of a wedding. And I think I knew, as I was standing on the steps, watching the cars drive into the parking lot across the street and watching everybody emerge from them, I knew that this family was in its golden age. WH: A majority of your experiences and your influences are compiled into either a prose form or poetic form. It’s a rollercoaster, especially in form. How did you decide to go through so many changes? To go with a number here or a bullet there, or to start every other stanza with “It could have” or “I shouldn’t?” RH: I know that I like more elliptical and more poetic writing. On the other hand, I like narrative. So, prose poems, or if you 22 |
want to call them short lyric essays—it’s just a more natural fit for me. The Image emerges and suggests metaphor and narrative. I tend to edit the page heavily. I cross-out nonessentials, words like “was,” “that,” “the,” “looked into,” “it seemed that.” WH: Seems like you wanted to make it more individual. RH: I want to cut right to an image. I also use repetition. I think it creates symmetry in the essay. As you mentioned the phrase, “It could be,” that appears in that essay, “Lake Cumberland”. WH: Yes, right. RH: I wanted the reader to hit that sound and feel comfortable and anchored in the essay. So it’s a poetic device, that repetition, that makes an essay move a bit more. And you hope the audience appreciates it and that it doesn’t become a contrivance. That’s why I consider narrative the primary through-line in my writing. I use image devices and repetition to enhance the narrative. WH: Staying on “Lake Cumberland,” there’s this specific quote; “She used to water ski in the late blue hours, long arms sluicing the sky, coming off the old wood ramp, she’d carve air on the jump, and landed with barely a splash.” It’s so strange how unfamiliar that sounded to me. I had to read it over and over, because you always lose me at “blue hours, long arms.” How sentences are structured, and not only that but how things are remembered is confounding. Though it’s very concise and specific, and it shows throughout. Do you try and be nitpicky about sentence structure and how it sounds in a given lyric? RH: That quote that you just read. . . I was trying for the image, the image. I saw her, twisting and turning, “carving the air. ” I want the reader with me, seeing from my eyes. WH: For those times, it feels like we always have to question ourselves. Like, “Well does it really look like that?” It’s that universality of imaging, how not everybody sees the same thing. The structure, in every aspect makes everybody think of everything a little differently. It’s not just, “There’s the water, here’s a rock.”
| 23
RH: Exactly. WH: There’s depth to it, and even in your concrete descriptions. RH: Yeah, and maybe we don’t live in a descriptive age. [Laughter] Maybe we live in a let-me-tell-you-what-happened-tome-today age. Or, the oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-it age. WH: Definitely. RH: To some degree, meditating on the image, “rock” or “water.” Just trying to get into the space of it is slower than the pace of society. Much slower. WH: In the piece, “There’s a Shoe on Your Plate,” you have a line referring to your grandmother, saying, “She has passed, and these moments should dissipate and not be frozen.” Why try and freeze the moment and not let that person, their being, move on? RH: There were two reasons I was writing about that moment, but to get to the question of why try to freeze frame a moment, and why not let it dissipate. It gets to this foundational belief I have that all lives are energy, and thought is energy, and that energy, when someone moves on, goes somewhere. And I don’t know where people or mind-space goes physically, but psychically, it threads within us. It’s some extrapolation of energy. WH: Let’s talk about the new (and last issue) of South Loop Review and Punctuate. Tell us what it was like the last few months at South Loop Review and how it went putting this together. RH: You know, South Loop Review was so phenomenal. The writing in there was… it was smart and heartfelt, and lyric. And it received many awards, SLR. Pieces in there were just in Best American Essay, and our students have won the Bennington Plain China “Best of Undergraduate Writing.” award. It was a phenomenal publication. However, I think, because we reconstituted ourselves as a department I think we wanted a fresh start with our new students and new faculty. Honestly, I think Punctuate will repeat a lot of the success and the tone of SLR. Punctuate will have more online presence, and one thing I had loved about SLR was the interviews. Nonfiction is an evolving art form right now. I think there should be a publication where practitioners have an opportunity to discuss it. It’s exciting to have craft essays and interviews, and that will be
24 |
interviews, and that will be part of Punctuate’s mission. It will publish more of that kind of writing. As well as narrative essays, it might go more narrative than SLR. RH: Exactly. WH: Yeah, it was very hybrid and experimental. I remember being a student judge for some of those submissions for the 2014 Student Contest. And man, there were some weird pieces in there. Not specifically weird, but refreshing and new. Weird in a new way. RH: Sometimes, one might say “weird” because it’s unfamiliar. I think that even now, with the proliferation with the segmented form, graphic memoir. 20 years ago, it would have been considered too outlandish to publish them. But South Loop Review was one of the first publications publishing that kind of groundbreaking memoir work. Prose poems or nonfiction, lyric essays, craft essay, photo narratives. I know there will be space for that in Punctuate, but what I think SLR did well was break ground, break new ground all the time. Punctuate will break new ground as well as reference a more narrative essay. ... You can find To Some Women I Have Known on Amazon or in a Barnes and Noble bookseller. For more information about and work by Re’Lynn Hansen, go to her website at relynnhansen. com. For more info on South Loop Review, feel free to visit their website at cms.colum.edu/southloopreview. The first issue of Punctuate will begin production in the Fall of 2015.
| 25
hospice, age 19 | Taylor St. Onge
If “dying is an art,” you do not do it well. I do not have words, do not have thoughts; there is nothing inside of me anymore. I am vacant, hollow, and if this is what time travel feels like I do not want any part of it. Racing past the stars, past the planets, past Andromeda’s spiraling, galactic force, I am light-years ahead and then light-years behind—I am two years too late. You cannot know, you will not know, how Auriga is waiting in the sky to whisk you away,
away,
away.
The bubbling of your oxygen sounds like the water fountains you used to pass as a child, but there are no pennies at the bottom of this. And I wonder, with your eyes closed, if you feel like you are swimming: barely treading water, fighting to keep your head above, choking on salt and brine as you try to kick your feet, try to swim to Lake Michigan’s shoreline. I want Poseidon to spit you out of the sea like a cork, want Neptune to come alive through the mosaics of your bathroom and lead you away from the great, black, wave of stars that is breaking and crashing and barely brushing your bare feet. Some fish were meant to drown. You are not one of them. Pisces is meant to swim
forever.
(If there are oceans in outer space, do you think that they can wash away sins as well as the Jordan?) This time machine has dropped me back into my nightmare again, but it is not only mine, it’s yours. I am trying to read the constellations, trying to map the planets, trying to figure out the moon cycles, but I fear that this is a language I had learned once and tried to forget. The nurse in blue, the doctor in white, 26 |
have merged into a new dialect that does not mirror what I know the way the Gemini twins mimic one another in the cosmos. (I think I have lost my ability to speak with angels and this terrifies me.) You are halfway to Heaven’s stairs, part way to Saturn’s rings; you are caught floating in a living purgatory, and I want to know if: God is whispering the secrets of the world into your ear yet? Is Jesus showing you how to be holy? Are you tearing the bread for communion and feeding it to the birds? Are you taking shots from His heavenly blood, getting drunk off the possibility of closing your eyes, leaning back, and watching Perseus fight your battles for you? Do you want to be a constellation, too? I am eighty miles away from you, but it feels more like eighty light-years— the stars in the sky are all dead and in the past; you are trying to imitate this but we know that you have to wait and build up brightness first. I am watching you through someone else’s eyes and choking myself with my own hands as I try to show you what you mean to me. My knuckles are cracked and bleeding from pounding them against the wall you constructed around yourself, but you don’t have control over that wall anymore, do you? You are too young to ride Pegasus in the night sky, too young to build your own wings, too young to fall and drown like Icarus. You know how to swim. You are learning how to fly. There is no reason for you to shake God’s hand yet. Put the halo down— you are not ready.
| 27
author biographies Lindsey Borgna is a twenty-one year old portrait and lifestyle photographer, as well as a creative nonfiction writer. She is Chicago based, but a St. Louis native. She loves tea, books, and far-off places. Melissa Huedem is a writer and storyteller. She is currently earning her BFA in Fiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been published in Word Riot, Chicago After Dark, and The Columbia Chronicle. When Melissa is not writing, she is figuring out a way to get back to 1985 by way of DeLorean. You can find her work and musings at melissahuedemwriting.virb. com and on Twitter at @mehuestories. Meli Alvarez Juarez is a Mexican/American creative writer from Chicago. She is a recent graduate of Columbia College Chicago with a Bachelor’s in Fiction Writing. She plans to continue her studies and receive her MFA. She hopes her stories will inspire and bring a more diverse audience among readers. Taylor St. Onge is a current freshman, incoming sophomore, at Columbia College Chicago. She is majoring in Poetry with a double minor in Creative Nonfiction and Arts in Healthcare. When she graduates, she has high hopes to attend graduate school and become an Expressive Arts Therapist. When she is not reading, working, or writing, Taylor enjoys crocheting and playing with dogs. Patrick Thornton is a third-year MFA candidate in Columbia College Chicago’s Creative Nonfiction program. He is a Graduate Student Instructor and Assistant Editor for Hotel Amerika. His work has appeared in Ghost Proposal, and is forthcoming in Redivider. Brandon Lee Vear the adopted son of Pablo Picasso but the bastard lovechild of Salvador Dali and Sofia Loren. Scott Wilson is a first-year MFA candidate in the Creative Nonfiction program at Columbia. When not in school, he reads for Hotel Amerika, fixes bicycles at a shop, writes music reviews
28 |
for quipmag.com, writes technical articles for thechainlink.org, teaches at Columbia as a Graduate Student Instructor, and explores the secret lives of honey bees with his scientist father.
end note The cover images were provided by Lindsey Borgna, whose work is also featured in the center of this issue. The front cover image is entitled, “Crêpe de sucre à la Tour Eiffel”, and the back cover image is entitled, “Montmarte”.
| 29