COIN - 2021 by The Cabin, a center for readers & writers

The Letter & The Lilac THE CABIN COIN 2021

The Letter & The Lilac COIN 2021

Introduction by Joel Wayne Artwork by Ameerah Bader

This is a Log Cabin Book, an imprint of THE CABIN 801 South Capitol Boulevard, Boise, Idaho 83702 (208) 331-8000 www.thecabinidaho.org (c) 2022 The Cabin All rights reserved. Printed and bound in the USA in an edition of 110 copies.

CONTENTS Introduction // 7 Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai // 9 Lauren Wilkinson // 11 Crystal Boson // 13 Malia Collins // 17 CMarie Fuhrman // 21 Patricia Marcantonio // 25 Amanda Ranth // 27 Debra Magpie Earling // 29 Contributors // 31 Donors // 35

INTRODUCTION What are you trying to show me? That’s the question at the heart of this year’s COIN. Penned in a single day by a group of eight talented women, the 2021 edition of our progressive writing fundraiser is a tale of letters, apparitions, and the lingering scent of our strongest memories, here lilac and oleander. As with the best stories, the answer is found equally in the middle as the last paragraph of the last chapter. To the authors who helped write the story: thank you. To those who helped support the writing through their donations: thank you. And to those who are reading the story for the irst time: enjoy.

JOEL WAYNE August 2021

CHAPTER ONE Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai “I need to warn you,” my mother told me on the phone, “that my brother’s family just found a box of items he’d kept hidden from them all his life.” She sounded breathless, as if she had just run up a set of stairs. I rubbed sleep from my eyes and looked at the clock. 6:05 am. My mother never called me this early unless there was an emergency. “When did you know, Mom?” I asked. “And what did they ind inside the box? My uncle had died two weeks before. My parents and I had attended the funeral.

CHAPTER TWO Lauren Wilkinson I missed him a lot. I’d always had more in common with my uncle than I did with most of the other members of my family. “Your aunt just called me. She’s pretty furious, actually. And as far as what’s in the box, well, it has bunch of things in it. His real birth certiicate, for one. Your uncle got involved in organized crime when he was still young. It started out with low level stuf.” “Like what?” “I think theft, mostly, but I’m not sure. He probably explained it all in the letter to Cheryl, if you want to know. But the important thing is he got deeper and deeper into it and eventually they asked him to… kill someone.” I nearly laughed from the shock of it. “Uncle Victor? The sweet old man who’d spend hours teaching me about all the diferent lowers in his garden? You’re saying he was a professional hit man?” “My brother was a good person. I know he didn’t want to do those bad things, but I don’t think he had much choice…. Anyway, he escaped soon after that and came here. He had to immigrate under a fake name because of his criminal record.” I’d always known that my mother and her parents had immigrated to the US when she was still a teenager, and that my uncle—who was almost ifteen years her senior—had joined them a few years later. But the way my mother was illing in the blanks about what my uncle had been up to in the old country had stunned me into silence. “There’s a letter in the box that’s addressed to you,” she said quietly. “What’s it say?” “I don’t know.” “Auntie Cheryl can open it if she wants to.” “She doesn’t want to. She’s been through enough. She wants you to go over there and read it for yourself.” 11

CHAPTER THREE Crystal Boson Phone. Wallet. Keys. In pain and panic, my best practice for doing what needs to be done is always routine and pattern. Phone. Wallet. Keys. I grabbed what needed to be gotten and locked the door, checking each lock four times to complete the pattern loop. Phone. Wallet. Keys. On the drive, I kept thinking about the lowers; the gently curved Oleanders with their gumline pink petals, the grape clusters of Foxgloves. I remembered our game of walking exactly in the middle of the path, a point for every Lily of the Valley I avoided touching. Pretending the lowers were dangerous, hiding monsters and sharp rocks and snakes. I spent the drive almost dreaming of the lowers, expecting their perfume to be crushed into me. I thought when I opened the door it would pour over the seat and lood into the street. It didn’t. Instead I was met with the early morning emptiness of Aunt Cheryl’s neighborhood, her worn smooth door mat, and her rage-dry eyes. “Come take this box.” She stepped back to let me in the door and quickly closed it behind me. I stood there, waiting for our ritual of squeezed cheeks and a quick smoothing of my hair. She always ran her ingers through only the long side. She didn’t move to me, so I stepped into her. Raised my hands to her cheeks and gave a few quick squeezes, my ingers gently pushing into her skin. “Auntie Cheryl?” “Please. I need you to take this box.” At the foot of the stairs was a grey metal box with a combination lock. The numbers on the open lock, 392, were worn and faded. The rest of the box seemed to be in surprisingly good condition. The corners shiny and smooth from age and use, and only the smallest trace of rust starting to 13

collect in the hinges. Old and cared for. “How do you know the code?” I turned around to see Auntie Cheryl standing behind me; she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. “It was unlocked when I found it. So a secret box, but a half kept one. But either way, I need you to take it out of my house.” I couldn’t remember ever seeing her so angry, or scared. She looked at the box like it was poison. I opened the lid to see a thick envelope. I expected something older honestly; a note he wrote to me when I was a child and tucked away. Or maybe a stack of notecards with my favorite lowers from his garden. Instead, it was this. A long white envelope, heavy and unsealed, with my name written in my uncle’s steady hand. “Don’t read it in the house.” I could feel Aunt Cheryl’s irm hand guiding me towards the door and through it. Again, I thought of the lowers and the careful way Uncle Victor would hold some of the petals in his gloved hands. I stood on the porch for a few minutes, trying to decide where to go. Where do you go to read a letter from the dead? Anywhere but here, on the porch of a closed house. I got into my car.

CHAPTER FOUR Malia Collins I set the box on the seat next to me and pulled the seatbelt around it. Where would he want me to read this, I thought. Uncle Victor – silver hair, sad eyes. I still couldn’t believe he was gone. Even the air around his house was illed with the scent of him – lilac, he loved lilacs, oleander. Thick and sweet, his smell pooled in the folds of his neck. Give me a sign, I said to the air. Outside of the car the wind picked up, the smell of rain not far behind. Our walks always lead to the river. I turned the key and drove back towards town. I wondered if I’d drive down this street again. When the people we love aren’t there anymore, doesn’t the place itself change? Trees, sidewalk, grass, river. I counted three steps in each spot, holding the silver box close as I slid down the muddy incline to the water. The cottonwoods were in full bloom and fat clumps of luf and seed blew past me. I sat down on a split log, opened the box, and took out the envelope. Dear M, he started. He loved initials – who needs names, he said – sometimes a single letter is enough. Seeing his handwriting on the page like that broke my heart. Come back already, I thought. I started over.

Dear, M. I’m writing this because I need you to do something for me. Do you remember on one of our walks I asked you what your favorite words were? You said without pause, sequestered and succumbed. I love the way those words sound. You were maybe seven. That’s when I knew you could keep a secret. I need you to keep this secret.

When we irst moved into our house, there was a swimming pool in the backyard. That’s when all the kids were into skateboarding and they used to come over in the middle of the night and yell – Drain it! Drain it! So we did. There was a spot on the bottom, almost a perfect circle, that was a diferent color than the rest of the blue. And when we knocked on that spot, it was hollow. We didn’t think about it much. Too many other things to tend to. Then one night about a month after we moved in, we heard knocking back. The sound got louder and louder – like hundreds of ists trying to break through. And we could see the bottom of the pool crack open until the entire pool itself was gone and when I leaned over the ledge to look down I heard the voice before I saw it. It’s that voice, he said. That’s what you need to ind.

CHAPTER FIVE CMarie Fuhrman And that is where the letter ended, save for the “V” that he left as a signature, a letter that looked as if it were a sparrow lying from the page. That voice. I folded the letter, gently stroking each small crease and put it back in the envelope. I placed the envelope back in the box, and closed it, not caring about what else he’d placed inside. That voice. Hadn’t that been what I had spent years looking for? I set the box beside me and turned my eyes toward the river. It was spring, the water was high, rushing, pulling at the alder that lined the bank, making the newly leafed branches dance like ingers toward an open sky. I thought about the river, the snow it had been in McCall just the day before. And McCall itself and then I thought of Lick Creek, the stream of hammered silver that lowed from the Salmon River Mountains. It was here that Uncle Victor taught me to sing. It was here where he read that irst poem I wrote, then the short stories that followed. Here, that after getting my MFA in poetry at the University of Idaho, I returned and burned every single word I had ever written. Gave what I had to the Akashic record. As if the ether even cared. That was ive years ago and I hadn’t written a word since. I looked again to the river, to the water lowing to Boise and beyond. I thought about the Salmon that used to spawn up the Payette. The grizzly that once were waiting for them. Both gone from the valley where Uncle Victor had his cabin. And behind me the traic, the sound of Harleys and Winnebagos coming and going. The rubber on asphalt. Those who passed through taking photos from the car windows. Not missing the howl of wolves or the beat of a salmon’s tail 21

making a redd on the river bottom. God damn you, Victor. He always knew how to get to me. I picked up the box and watched the silver lash like a trout in the water, and I threw it into the Payette. Whatever was in there would drown with the ish and the memories and the secret that Uncle Victor had made me keep all these years. Swimming pool my ass, I thought. I knew damn well what he was talking about. The knock. The knock back. The cabin at Browns Pond. And the poem that started everything. The poem that Uncle Victor said could change everything. And it did, for a while. They said it was my voice that mattered, my ierce voice in the poem. And the poem and subsequent poems were like the salmon once in Long Valley. Abundant, strong. Important to the landscape. My poems, my words. My voice. I thought they could make a diference and it was goddamned Uncle Victor who said they would. I scrambled up the slope to my car, digging my ingers into the wet earth, leaving their prints on the door handle. Phone. Wallet. Keys. I started the engine and cut of a truck with Washington plates as I swerved onto Highway 55. A horn wailed, which made me push the gas pedal harder. North. Back to the cabin. Back to, as Uncle Victor called it, the scene of the crime. Back to the place where my words were burned into the earth along Lick Creek. Where the griz and the wolves once shit. And salmon spawned out. Where, beneath the water of Browns Pond, hid the ugly truth. And my voice. My once strong and fearless voice, hid with it.

CHAPTER SIX Patricia Marcantonio The white stripes of the asphalt came at me like spears, and I swore I could feel their points graze by my cheeks. I did have a good imagination. Uncle Victor told me that. He told me a lot of things but whenever I was alone I began to wonder what I had made up in that good imagination or what really took place. I patted the gray metal. My own Pandora’s box, which had unleashed what I might ind at the cabin. I turned on music to stop thinking, but the tunes sounded muled as if I had a wool blanket stufed in my ears. It was miles to the cabin, but my head was already there. That voice. What was I going to do when I got there? Walk into the meadow near the cabin and stroll through the mat of bell lowers and bee balms, the wild lupine and sunlowers. Flowers so thick even the color would stick to my legs. Beauty I could never hope to capture in any of my writing. Okay, in the meadow. I’d open my arms wide and twirl like goddamn Julie Andrews bursting into the song and hope I’d get an answer. Any answer. One answer. Whose voice was that under the pool? I might be taking this too literally. Leave it to my Uncle V to write me in terms of ambiguity when I needed clarity. He wasn’t going to make this any easier for me. Had he been a killer in another country or was that his imagination? If he had murdered, then he might have wanted to save a life. That was the question, but the other one shooting at me like those white spears on the road, was when had I lost my own voice? Sequestered and succumbed. My favorite words I told my uncle. I shivered and it wasn’t from the air conditioning. I could be standing in the midst of the open Idaho wilderness and still felt as if I were in a box. Not unlike the gray one on the seat next to me. A prisoner who surrendered. I’d been like that since I could remember. No, since the fall at the cabin. When I lost my voice. 25

CHAPTER SEVEN Amanda Ranth As I turned of Highway 55 and began my ascent towards the cabin, I rolled down the windows. The smell of pine and sunlight hit my brain like a hundred daggers. Finally, the grief of losing Uncle V registered and I allowed the tears to gently surge down my cheeks. The current of emotion rushed simultaneously with the lood of unanswered questions. Why had he kept this secret from me? From all of us? For so long, he buried his past. Why tell us now? When there could be no reconciliation. When there could be no closure for his sins. I wiped the tears and tried to focus on the road so I wouldn’t miss the turn of. The dirt road was the last length of space between me and what I hoped would be answers. It was a washboard from the thaw and spring rains and I had to slow down. The last leg was always the longest. That voice. The riddle of a letter played over and over in my head. Spliced with all the conversations we had over the years. In his garden. About my writing. I was trying to piece together the message. What was it he wanted me to hear? That voice. I tried so many times to conjure words the way I once did. It was more than writer’s block. It was a boulder in my brain that rolled of a clif. Blocking the road. It fell the same day I fell. Slipping on the mossy rocks around Browns Pond. I didn’t remember how long I was there. Uncle V found me in a tributary of blood. He joked that I would live in the pond forever. My blood mixed with water. My cells sinking into mud at its murky bottom. All at once, I could smell him. Lilac and oleander illed the car. It was as if he was sitting beside me. His presence was robust. Not a ghost. Ghosts would be light. This was heavy. Substantial. A sitting memory on a bumpy road. The trees parted into a wide valley as the dirt road snaked around to end at Browns Pond. There it was. The cabin. And I had arrived with my ghost. 27

CHAPTER EIGHT Debra Magpie Earling I stopped in the middle of the road and dust rose up and past me with the smell of long-ago Idaho. Mint. Sage. Milk of Owyhee River. Victor wouldn’t have led me this far without answers. At the very bottom of the weathered box was a brownedged piece of paper. Onion paper. The kind of paper Victor had used to write home. I’d mistaken it for lining. But I remembered something he’d told me when I was a child. Every object holds a story and every story holds hidden clues. Things are never what they seem. I peeled back the paper and it cracked beneath my prying. I lifted it to the sunlight and saw three bold words. Marion Two Bulls. I saw more but the words were inked in candlewax, withered, illusive. I pulled my lighter from the glove box, and candled the paper, careful not to light it. And there, beneath her name, these words appeared. You will lose your faith in your own writing because you are a person of substance, and writing to express yourself alone is not in your nature, but this woman Marion went missing the summer you left home for university. No one spoke about her. Her voice has been silenced like so many Native women and people. She lived not far from the cabin and we’d hear her voice, and other voices, on cold winter nights. The poetry of those longago voices called to the voice within you. Those voices were nature driven, splintered in wood, and broken against our window panes, broken on our colony of houses surrounding their sacred land, blocking their ancient songs and stories. In spite of her loss across the years, and in spite of what we know and what we have lost, and all we have loved, let yourself always see the world in a spirit of inquiry, and let your writing bring you home, not to wallow, nor to feel piteous, instead, let all the things we have lost along the way, and your voice serve the voices of many. WRITE. 29

CONTRIBUTORS DR. NGUYEN PHAN QUE MAI is an award-winning author of eleven books in Vietnamese and English. Her writing in Vietnamese has received the Poetry of the Year 2010 Award from the Hanoi Writers Association, the Capital’s Literature & Arts Award, and First Prize in the Poetry Competition celebrating 1,000 Years of Hanoi. Her debut novel and irst book in English, The Mountains Sing, is an International Bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Selection, Winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, Winner of the Blogger’s Book Prize 2021, and Winner of the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for “a work of exceptional quality” and for “contribution to peace and reconciliation”. Quế Mai is an editor of DVAN’s publishing series with Kaya Press and Texas Tech University Press. She has a PhD in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. She has just been named by Forbes Vietnam as one of 20 inspiring Vietnamese women of 2021. LAUREN WILKINSON’S debut novel, American Spy, was a Washington Post bestseller, an NAACP Image Award nominee, an Anthony award nominee, and an Edgar Award nominee. It was short-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was a Barnes & Noble Book of the Month, a PBS book club pick, and was included on Barack Obama’s 2019 Recommended Reading List. Lauren earned an MFA in iction and literary translation from Columbia University, and has taught writing at Columbia and the Fashion Institute of Technology. She splits her time between New York and Los Angeles where she works as a writer for television. CRYSTAL BOSON writes short, dense poems that lay bare the complicated geographies of the United States and the lives of the Black, queer, and marginalized bodies that dwell within its boundaries. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow and was 31

awarded the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in 2014. She has work published in Blueshift Journal, Pank, and Parcel, among other locations. Most recently her work, The Bitter Map, was selected as the winner of the 2017 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest by Saeed Jones. She currently writes about and resides in the midwest. MALIA COLLINS is a writer, editor, and teacher. Born and raised in Kailua on the Island of O’ahu, she served as editor of The Hawai’i Review and The Idaho Review, and was named Idaho’s Writer in Residence in 2019. Her work has appeared in a number of magazines, featured in a series of books about Hawai’i, and she is the author of a children’s book, Pele and Poli’ahu: A Tale of Fire and Ice. Collins currently lives in Idaho with her husband, Josh, and two children, Max and Mehana. CMARIE FUHRMAN is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020) and co-editor of A LIterary, Artistic, and Natural History Guide to Cascadia (2022), and Native Voices (Tupelo 2019). She has published poetry and noniction in multiple journals including Emergence Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Whiteish Review, Broadsided Press, Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, as well as several anthologies. CMarie is a regular columnist for the Inlander, the translations editor for Broadsided Press, noniction editor for High Desert Journal, director of the Elk River Writers Workshop, and faculty at Western Colorado University’s MFA Program. She resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho. PATRICIA MARCANTONIO is author of the Victorian mystery series, Felicity Carrol and the Perilous Pursuit and Felicity Carrol and the Murderous Menace (Crooked Lane Books); Verdict in the Desert, published by Arte Público Press, the largest US publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by US Hispanic authors and ailiated with the University of Houston; and Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos (FSG) which earned an Anne 32

Izard Storyteller’s Choice Award and was named an Americas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature Commended Title and one of the Wilde Awards Best Collections to Share. Her screenplays placed irst in the Willamette Writers Kay Snow contest, as well as in the top percentage of the Cynosure, Phoenix Film Festival, Stage 32 Blood List, MORE Women in Film and Screenwriting Expo 5 competitions. She earned an Alexa Rose Foundation grant to produce and direct her original play. As a journalist for radio, television and newspaper, she earned several state and regional awards and was named a Newspaper Association of America New Media Fellow. AMANDA RANTH is an activist, poet, performer, and visual artist whose background is in street theater and storytelling. She enjoys blurring the lines between poetry and music, performer and audience. Ranth is the author of several chapbooks including Seeds and Sleepless Nights and Skinless Woman. Her work has been showcased at Queer Gather of Nations in Albuquerque, New Mexico; One Flaming Arrow: Intertribal Art, Music and Film Festival in Portland, Oregon; and locally at MING Studios, Storyfort, and at the Boise Art Museum’s Tall Tales exhibit. An Idaho native, she currently resides in Nampa where she wanders the edges of wilderness with the Cooper’s hawks and swallow tails. DEBRA MAGPIE EARLING is a Native American novelist, and short story writer. She is the author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, which was on display at the Missoula Museum of Art in late 2011. Her work has also appeared in Ploughshares and the Northeast Indian Quarterly. Of the Bitterroot Salish (tribe), she is a graduate of the University of Washington, and holds both an MA in English and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Cornell University. Earling is currently a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Montana at Missoula. 33

AMEERAH BADER – illustrator of the cover and chapter headings – is a Palestinian-Tlingit poet and artist located in Boise, Idaho. They have been writing poems for ten years and drawing for nine. They have been published a handful of times and nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice. Humor, identity, and tiny moments are at the forefront of Ameerah’s work. They use creativity to learn how to navigate spaces, places, and the sweetness of life. They work within the processes; they appreciate the unseen. Most recently they have been creating stop-motion animations with relief prints, as well as learning software development to bring interactivity into their artwork. In 2019 they graduated with two BFAs in printmaking and illustration from Boise State University. Their favorite pastimes are long walks, talks, and drawing all day. JOEL WAYNE is The Cabin’s Public Programs Manager, helming Readings & Conversations, Ghosts & Projectors, and other Cabin productions. With a background in content marketing and producing podcasts like You Know The Place and Reader’s Corner for NPR, Joel is a writer, irst and foremost, whose work can be seen in The Independent, The Moth, Salon, and elsewhere. While Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t played a pivotal role in his younger years, if he could have dinner with any author, it’d have to be James Baldwin. Incorporated in 1996, THE CABIN is an anchor of literary arts in our state, serving as the only nonproit organization in Idaho devoted entirely to arts and educational activities that celebrate reading and writing. The Cabin serves children and adults with a variety of programs, including: writers-in-school residencies; summer writing camps; adult writing workshops; book discussions; writing contests; published anthologies; readings by local writers; and our annual Readings & Conversations series, which brings world-renowned authors to our city. 34

THANK YOU TO OUR DONORS Suzanne Allen Gertrude Arnold Stephen Asher Lori Banducci Linda Beebe Karen Benning Kacy Berliner Dianne Bevis Laura Bond Hollis Brookover Kym Browning Joan Christensen Nicholas Cofod Malia Collins Kerry Cooke Laurie Corrick Katherine Devlin Betsy Dunklin Kathryn Durrant Deborah Eisinger Anne Elmore Marne Elmore Kathryn Elzinga Jan English Steve Frinsko Laurel Fritz Mary Gehrke Craig Goulden Valerie Greear Elizabeth Greene Sarah Griin

Jenna Hagley Heather Hamilton Kay Hardy Joan Harrie Sue Hebert Debbie Johnson Amy Johnson Linda Kahn Scott Ki Tom Killingsworth John & Carol Cronin Kriz Erica Larson Emily Lavelle Rebecca Leber-Gottberg Kathleen Loftus Joanna Madden Allison Maier Julie Manning Jim Matheson Sue McMillan Rhiana Menen Molly Mettler Ashley Miller Kelly Miller Marcelle Morris Dan Morrow Sharon Moses Eileen Mundorf Nissa Nagel Jane Newby Mary Ann Newcomer

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The Cabin is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners. Now in its ﬁfth consecutive season, COIN is The Cabin’s fundraiser through Idaho Gives Day on the ﬁrst Thursday of May every year. Local, regional, and national authors pen sentences as donors “purchase” them, generating a collaborative story that allows The Cabin to participate in Idaho’s largest state-wide fundraising event.

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