Karin Cecile Davidson

The characters of Ramona Reeves’s debut story collection, It Falls Gently All Around, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (University of Pittsburgh, 2022), lead us through the oak-lined streets, the trailer courts and truck stops, the tunnels and rough-hewn coastline of Mobile, Alabama. Like a love letter to her hometown, Reeves introduces these linked stories in honest and direct strokes, through the humor and compassion and grand mistakes of her main characters Babbie and Donnie, and from the perspectives of Corinne and Fay and the other personalities who appear inside these pages. The stories move through time, not chronologically, but in a way that makes sense to the collection, calling up themes of class and race and chasing down dreams, no matter the distance. From the portrayal of place to the exploration of lives on all sides of town, no matter how discrete, Reeves reveals a landscape that is as distinctive and dimensional as her prose, one which allows the reader to linger and, by the last page, wish for more.

“The beauty of Mobile was not found in its midtown or downtown high-ceilinged homes with their historic nameplates, prim azaleas, and impressive oaks. The beauty swelled from the dirty bay, the muck of oyster beds and oil rigs, and the fume-scarred Bankhead Tunnel … The cracked and broken parts of the city, if taken as a whole, amounted to shapes, color, and light that made Babbie want to live. That was her beautiful city.” —Babbie from “Wheel of Fortune”

KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: Tell us about Babbie and her city, of your relationship to Mobile, and how place in these stories means much more than location?

RAMONA REEVES: Thank you for that question and for interviewing me, Karin. And thank you to Newfound for publishing this interview. About Babbie and place—on the one hand, Babbie is an insider in the stories of It Falls Gently All Around. She’s lived her entire life in Mobile, and she’s made some poor choices, some stemming from a belief that she doesn’t deserve better. As a character, I think she sees the surface beauty of Mobile, but it’s tainted and complicated for her because she’s experienced the underside of that beauty. In that sense, she’s also an outsider because she’s not permitted into the grand places of Mobile except as hired help (in “Queen of Frogs”) or as a potential nanny (in “Aphrodite Reclining”). So Babbie’s perspective on Mobile is informed by the way she feels about herself, the restrictions others have put on her, and the choices she’s made. Dorothy Allison wrote a great essay that’s included in The Writers Notebook, a book of essays published by Tin House. In the essay, Allison talks about place being informed by characters and their desire, emotions, and context. That’s what I tried to do in this collection, to build a sense of place through character perspectives. Because I’m a native of Mobile, I also wanted defamiliarize the city and bring fresh news to it through characters and objects that perhaps defy some stereotypes people may have about the Gulf Coast. I also use trees a lot in the book as a marker for class. Trees are a big part of the visual terrain in Mobile, but I hope they telegraph a lot more. I wanted them to connect to themes in the book.

DAVIDSON: That Dorothy Allison craft essay is truly amazing, I completely agree, and I think you’ve succeeded in creating that kind of informed place in your collection, partly in how you’ve established connections among the characters. To me, this recalls something Jennifer Egan once said. In her 2011 interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Jennifer Egan reflected on the characters of A Visit from the Goon Squad (which she also referred to elsewhere as “linked stories”) and how they were related: “At first, the characters were ‘little islands far apart—I didn’t see the land mass that connected them till later.’” Did you feel the same about your collection’s characters at any point? Which character was most difficult to write? And who came straight to you, telling you everything you needed to know? And did the overlapping relationships occur naturally over time in the drafting, or did you sometimes have to force these folks into the same space?

REEVES: I began this collection as part of a class I was taking. We were studying several interconnected story collections such as Olive Kitteridge, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, Mary and O’Neil and others. I wrote three or four stories while taking the class, so I always knew there would be connections, recurring characters, etc., between the stories. When I went back to finish writing all the stories, I think my experience was similar to Egan’s deft description. There were certain stories I knew would be part of the book and others that came as a surprise. When Fay, for example, showed up in the story “Anniversary,” I felt drawn to write an entire story in her POV, but it wasn’t until I wrote “Anniversary” that I knew that. She was one of the easiest characters to write, as least initially. I found Rowan and Claire the most difficult to write. Their privilege allows them to look away from situations and ignore many social issues, but in their stories I tried to hold their feet to the fire, so to speak. And yes, I sometimes needed to create situations for the necessary interactions between characters. Parties and group scenes created opportunities to further develop characters, and in some cases, forced them to confront problems they’d been avoiding. But there’s also a lot to be said for placing two characters in tight quarters and seeing what happens. I’m thinking of Babbie and her ex-husband in the bathroom stall in “Last Call.”

“Some people had to make do with pressing their noses against the pretty parts of life.” —Babbie from “Last Call”

“… the road between maybe and certain always seemed under construction in his mind.” —Donnie from “The Balanced Side”

DAVIDSON: In exploring the lives of your characters, you find language that not only tells the stories but is specific to and works to develop each character. The way you string together words and thoughts, with sensory details dashed with mild and sometimes outright humorous tones, to create an almost wild irreverence and at the same time a deep respect for your fictional world is phenomenal. How did your style of writing develop? Has it been present since the beginning, or did you find your way to this distinctive style over time?

REEVES: That’s a fantastic question, and you’re the first to ask it. Years ago, I had the idea that writers were supposed to know early on what their style was. Maybe some do, but that was not the case for me. I spent years writing stories in a range of styles until I finally found my own through practice. Writing is its own teacher, which basically means that I had to work at it to find my voice and style, and I think I’ll need to keep working at it. It doesn’t feel like something that’s completely settled, but rather, something that continues to grow and develop. And thank you so much for saying my style is distinctive. That’s nice to hear.

“Some mornings … he sat … and listened as the birds began to wake. In those moments, he heard his father urging him to fly.” —Donnie from “The Balanced Side”

“Driving over the water gave her a sense of flying.” —Fay from “The Right Side of the Dash”

DAVIDSON: There are motifs of falling and flying throughout the collection—falling into trouble, falling in love, falling out of one relationship and flying into another, feeling called to fly, and having the freedom to fly. Falling rain, flying debris, falling bowling balls, flying down the highway. I heard you say once that “Chicken Little” was a favorite childhood story, the refrain of which everyone knows as “the sky is falling!” Tell us about how falling and flying relate to the stories of It Falls Gently All Around and perhaps to other writing you’ve done.

REEVES: I’m so glad you picked up on those images in the book. I don’t know, but I think stumbling or falling in life and then getting back up is the nature of being human and that because of it, people long for and look forward to uplifting moments. I’m talking about those perfect moments that may last only seconds but can inspire us to continue marching forward. This feels true for Donnie and Babbie, the two main characters, and truthfully, for all the characters in the collection. They fall, recover, and try to soar. Sometimes, however, if they soar too high, too soon, there’s an Icarus consequence. I’m not sure what it says about me that I loved “Chicken Little” so much as kid. Maybe I loved that she’s a Captain Happen in the story—that’s a Charles Baxter term. She definitely stirs up the barnyard and makes the story happen. Ha!

“He liked Duran Duran. She preferred Bon Jovi and Prince.” —Babbie from “It Falls Gently All Around”

DAVIDSON: Mostly alluded to, but sometimes mentioned, are the songs your characters dance to, as in “Sighting Dolphins” when the Knockers softball team celebrates their tenth anniversary, and the music they listen to inside eighteen-wheeler cabs driving west on I-10 or under the pines of the Bay Oak Trailer Park, “a heavy guitar riff, crushing the quiet of the early afternoon.” From Southern rock to disco to gospel, what would your playlist for It Falls Gently All Around sound like?

REEVES: I’ve never shared them, but I do have playlists for both Babbie and Donnie. The playlists helped me get to know them better. Donnie’s playlist is heavy on Southern rock and country. Babbie’s picks include many women artists such as Dolly, Adele, Aretha, and Bonnie Raitt. I think if I created a playlist for the book as a whole, I’d include Emmylou Harris, Jason Isbell, Alabama Shakes, ZZ Top, Mobile’s Excelsior Band, Joy Oladokun, Tanya Tucker, Marcia Ball, and some Lena Horne. I’m thinking about Horne’s “Stormy Weather.” And Babbie is onto something, I think, with her Bonnie Raitt pick, so I would add Raitt as well.

“… what Corinne saw as truth: people destroyed what they could not understand.” —Corinne from “Aphrodite Reclining”

DAVIDSON: Thematically, these stories are linked in terms of place and class, with place defining and revealing class in diverse ways, specific to the viewpoint the story is told from. There are many moving parts, one connected to another, all working together beautifully. Babbie thinks of “the pine tree side of town” as her side of town, simpler and less refined than the neighborhoods rich in live oaks and magnolias. In contrast, Corinne considers her privilege as complicated by her love of a woman, understanding that “circles could provide … but also prevent,” exclusiveness weighted against inclusion. What was it like to explore and negotiate all the connections and divisions? Did the characters guide you in ways that helped make sense of exclusion and inclusion?

REEVES: The characters often guided me. Corinne was a difficult one to write, though, until I realized her story hinges on her fall from grace, which happens because she is unable to live up to the expectations placed on her. Those expectations include marrying a man from her same or higher social stratum. She doesn’t marry a man, and her partner is from a class of people that some see as being beneath her. It was interesting exploring how Corinne is excluded. It became clear to me that her class standing is not only about money but also about conforming to a particular set of expectations and that this is one of the ways class operates to keep some people out and pressure others to remain in lockstep. Similarly, it was interesting to explore Donnie’s stories in which his brother and sister-in-law appear. Donnie doesn’t want to be like his affluent brother, and yet I think he wants his brother’s acceptance. Exploring those connections and divisions was exciting, but also sad at times. I could see characters almost connecting with others in the ways they most desired and then often falling short.

DAVIDSON: A trio of unrelated questions: (1) Which character would you most like to hang out with? (2) If these stories were made into a TV series, what actors could you see playing them? (3) Did any of the characters ever give you trouble, and if so, did you just lean into their direction or steer away from it?

REEVES: I’d most like to hang out with Deirdre or Fay. I honestly have no idea about who I would cast as that’s not my area of expertise, but Octavia Spencer came to mind for Deirdre, and Sally Field for Fay. Ha! Maybe Adam Driver for Donnie and an unknown for Babbie? But regardless, I hope people will read the stories and imagine their own casting! And yes, some of the characters did give me trouble, namely Rowan, Claire, and occasionally Donnie, but yes, I leaned into those challenges by continuing to write their stories. I also sometimes let those stories sit for a few weeks while I worked on something else. Doing that often helped me gain more clarity about a problem I was trying to work out in a story.

DAVIDSON: What directions do you see yourself taking in the future, with literary influences and aspirations in mind? Story collection, novel? New landscapes or maybe others familiar to you that we just don’t know about yet?

REEVES: I’ve been working on a novel for a while. It contains two time periods. One starts in Texas and ends up in Georgia, and the other starts in rural Alabama and ends up in New York City. The novel works with some of the same themes but adds new ones around truth/falsehood and independence/dependence.

Ramona Reeves lives with her wife in Texas. In addition to winning the 2022 Drue Heinz Prize, her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, Bayou Magazine, Texas Highways, Pembroke, Jabberwock Review, and others.

Karin Cecile Davidson is the author of the novel Sybelia Drive and the story collection The Geography of First Kisses, winner of the Acacia Fiction Prize.  Originally from New Orleans, she writes stories set mostly in the Gulf Coast region.

The post Her Beautiful City: An Interview with Ramona Reeves appeared first on Newfound.

Margo Orlando Littell

Parents and children, husbands and wives, the newest of acquaintances. No matter how intimate the relationship, people find ways of both connecting and damaging one another, and the harm is intentional just as often as it is offhandedly cruel. Love, death, hope, and heartache play out across the country in Karin Cecile Davidson’s story collection The Geography of First Kisses, winner of the Acacia Fiction Prize. The landscapes that serve as backdrops to these characters’ lives are varied and richly rendered, and readers familiar with Davidson’s prose from her debut novel Sybelia Drive will recognize its evocative poetry in these stories. But make no mistake: the beauty of the lines is gentle cover for the emotional evisceration she examines here.

“French toast, he calls it. He is from the heartland and doesn’t understand his mistake, that the French would never call this toast, the importance of words and meanings as lost to him as the sad rusks of baguette he dips in a bowl of beaten eggs and cream and nutmeg.” –from “Skylight,” page 23

MARGO ORLANDO LITTELL: Though some of these stories are set in glittering cities, others are set in less glamorous locales—Tulsa, Oklahoma; Columbus, Ohio; Dynamo, Iowa. What inspired you to use these places as settings for your stories? What about them sparks your imagination? And how do the various locales work together to shape this collection–its geography, if you will?

KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: Place is pretty much where I begin in stories. Somewhere for my characters to stand, to feel their feet strike the ground, to understand the roll and curve of a road from the seat of a Harley or the cab of a Ford truck. Another starting point is the memory of where I’ve stood so that I can portray a story’s setting with as much detail as possible. There’s always the research one can do to carry the idea of location, but having been there in person creates another kind of picture altogether. Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Columbus, Ohio, and, well, not Dynamo, but an idea of Dynamo, Iowa—these are places I’ve visited and lived.

Tulsa surprised me. I was swayed as much by the sight of oil rigs across the Arkansas River on what had once been Cherokee land as by the city’s Art Deco architecture, the Praying Hands of Oral Roberts University, and the Golden Driller at the Expo Center entrance. I think I wrote that Tulsa story, “We Are Here Because of a Horse,” so I could live there for a while, if only in my mind. I was completely taken with the city.

I live in Columbus, an incredibly livable city, which lies within the easterly swath of fly-over states and the part of Ohio that is topographically uninteresting to most but holds the secrets of ravines and multiple watershed systems, as well as a thriving art and cultural scene, and some amazing places to eat and drink. “Skylight” was written when a good friend dared me to write an Ohio story, convinced I couldn’t do it. I won the dare but cheated, not entirely able to leave New Orleans and the Gulf Coast out of the narrative.

And I once lived in Iowa, but not in the fictional town of Dynamo. The state was as golden as it should have been—sun, corn, pigs, smiles, and even the Amana Colonies with their giant farm breakfasts and woolen mills and rolling fields.

To me, these places seemed perfect settings for stories, and to be honest, I didn’t set out to write the pieces to be part of a collection. Rather, they called to be written, and in the end had similar themes—searching, longing, hoping, loving. Think of that barn scene with Howdy in “Sweet Iowa,” when he’s surrounded by tractor parts, tools, the Allis Chalmers manual, and the heavy scent of hay. Something as mundane as a barn isn’t mundane at all; it’s rich with possibility, all those details, right? Then add in tornado weather and the-stranger-comes-to-town complication, the stranger a Texas high-plains woman searching for a particular kind of pig. The reader might think, Really? So, yeah, Iowa works.

As far as these stories and the shape of the collection, I think they’ve created an atmosphere of Americana. A few stories travel as far as France and Berlin, but mostly they lie within the sweep of states from the Gulf Coast to the Plains on up to the Midwest. Like the patchwork of a quilt, perhaps one made from old blouses and damask tablecloths and faded denim and even Carhartt overall pieces, the stories and their locations are very different, nevertheless connected with indigo thread and patterned with the determination and direction of the characters.

MOL: There’s a kind of love letter to Louisiana couched within the violence of “The Biker and the Girl,” where the biker–usually moving from place to place–explains he always wants to return to Louisiana because it “felt truer, heavier, something he could understand.” For your characters, or for you personally, what about Louisiana, or the South in general, exerts this gravitational pull?

KCD: I spent my childhood in Florida and Louisiana, the beaches and bayous practically our backyards, places where we swam and went fishing and crabbing. Travel within the states and beyond and understanding other cultures has always been important to my family, and there was always the act of returning home. Eventually, the idea of home changed, a university career anchoring us in a landlocked state, but New Orleans and the Gulf Coast kept calling me back. We had family there, so visits were possible, but the idea of returning home evolved.

By way of writing, I’ve been able to return. I’m constantly returning to that riverbend corner where the biker meets the girl, to Florida backroads, to the old Highway 90 that connects the gulf states. There is something, after all, about the places where one begins, where formative years are spent, where one forms a foothold in the world.

Many of the characters in the collection are infused with a sense of place, of belonging—like Antoinette in “In the Great Wide”—or of yearning to be somewhere else, namely the place they started out—like Chloe in “Skylight.” Add to this the idea of home and its complications, how a nostalgic sense of place is not always realistic, how families aren’t always easy to return to, how a city’s infrastructural failures might seem like adventures to a child but are challenges to an adult. In the end, it’s the sway of New Orleans that still calls and my characters that get to answer those calls.

“Celia recalled how her father had read poetry aloud to her mother. How her mother would lie back on the couch and listen, and Celia, still awake in her room, would listen too. Words like chicory, daisies, restlessness–words so pretty, so odd and ordered, still echoed inside her.” –from “Soon the First Star,” page 92

MOL: The devil is in the details, the saying goes, but in these stories it’s the soul that’s housed in the details. Specifics pile up across these stories, and within the stories; often, whole paragraphs are peppered with nouns as simple as they are evocative. In the first pages of the title story, for example: “the beaches were covered with rocks and sea glass and broken pottery” and “the metallic breeze carried traces of brackish water, diesel fuel, rubber boots.” Lines like this have their own rhythm and their own poetry. What images do you feel are most important in this collection? Which images were your guides as you created these stories?

KCD: The most important images? I suppose I don’t grant one more importance than another, for each story has its own, and there are many, that’s true—an imperfectly beautiful coastline, a flickering drive-in movie screen, the silhouette of a horse gone missing, jet trails seen through a skylight, a winding river road, the satellite image of a category 4 hurricane, a strand of pink rosary beads, the stunning sight of blue crabs, a courtyard crowded with books, the bristled golden back of a Tamworth pig, the brilliance of Cassiopeia on a December night, the depth of a gorilla’s gaze, milk-carton sailboats sent out into floodwaters, the fragility of a quail egg. The layering of tone and texture arrives out of images. The narrative of a teenage girl wanting more from life and getting more than she counted on arises from coastlines and sailing and desire. That of a woman caught in an abusive marriage is examined through an afternoon with her children in the ape house of the Berlin Zoo. The story of a young girl, sent to spend several months with relatives in the Mississippi countryside while her mother is hospitalized in New Orleans, takes on the attempt to understand how life and death are related.

Oyster shells, azaleas, halyards and half-hitches; scratched jazz records, a hidden bruise, a Voightländer’s shutter release; cotton sheets, a wooden ruler, a small speckled egg. With the collection of images, the bigger picture emerges, the story taking on color and spectacle. Throughout the drafting, it’s really the characters who decide on their images; I just go along with their desires and then provide descriptive details that create scene and tension and forward movement. There’s an act of trust here, following along in what seems like the dark to me, but obviously is completely lit-up and clear to these fictional personalities.

“‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Seriously, how can a person live in a city for nineteen years and not call it home?’” –from “Skylight,” page 22

MOL: Many characters in this collection lack rootedness, lack even the desire to be rooted or the knowledge of how to become rooted. In “Skylight,” Chloe has lived for nineteen years in Ohio without feeling like it’s home. In “One Night, One Afternoon, Sooner or Later,” a girl wonders how long she’ll want to stay in the bayou. Tell us how the theme of wanderlust–or dissatisfaction–shapes the characters in this collection.

KCD: Thursday’s child has far to go, right? Seems to be a theme in my writing, in this collection. Whether they’re feeling emotionally and/or physically removed from the place they want to be, or challenged by the place they’d like to escape, the characters seem to find a way. To survive where they are, to embrace their surroundings, or to consider flight. In “Skylight,” the story written on a dare, Chloe finds a way to stay in Ohio, to feel content, but whether her solution is imaginary or real, well, that’s up to the reader. After all, shouldn’t one question the existence of Gus Van Sant, a pug named Lily, a Super-8 camera giving her reason to track the rest of her life? And in “One Night,” in truth a tale of revenge, what about Lors, poor confused Lors? Hers is the angle of a super-complicated triangle that seems to lose its sharp definition. She’s tested by her relationship with both Jude and Micah and with each of them separately, enough so that, despite all the fun they’ve been having, she doesn’t know if she can stay. Yearning for what was always familiar, longing for something that’s new and within arm’s reach—these desirous situations occur again and again, the characters having to negotiate rough territory, not just geographically but intellectually, as well as by way of their egos and desires and recollections.

“He had to consider the value of recklessness in a world that moved too slowly.” –from “Sweet Iowa,” page 56

MOL: In “Sweet Iowa,” farmer Howdy is drawn to a strange young woman who appears in town, a woman who attracts attention when she tosses a pig over a bar–she’s reckless in a way that captivates Howdy. But accepting this woman into his staid life is a kind of recklessness too, opening up a new set of possibilities for Howdy’s future. Do you think recklessness is always an opportunity for transformation? What other characters are impacted by rash decisions or unexpected paths?

KCD: Recklessness might be seen as the antithesis of routine, and Howdy’s life is nothing but routine. What Morgan brings him is another dimension of what is considered routine, and perhaps that is what disturbs him by the story’s end. Lors’s reckless summer makes her question the direction she’s been taking, but her considered transformation is off the page. Antoinette’s flirtatious route toward becoming an unwed mother definitely transformed her, but is it recklessness that causes her baby daughter Daphne’s transformation? Perhaps recklessness doesn’t always lead to subtle change or deep metamorphosis, but in these stories, there is evidence of just that.

“I could tell by her hard, questioning stare that she’d never seen a bodiless baby before. And Daphne hadn’t always been this way. In fact, I was just getting used to it myself.” –from “In the Great Wide,” page 75.

MOL: “In the Great Wide” is a story that carries its surreal elements as casually as you might carry a handbag. The narrator, Antoinette, reacts to the “slow disappearance” of her baby with concern, but there’s also a suggestion that this sort of event is no cause for alarm; she compares her bodiless baby to a “bright, child-size bowling ball.” Tell us the origins of this story, and how you came to tell it with such a stunning degree of matter-of-factness. How did your writing process or approach change when confronting this story, if it did?

KCD: “In the Great Wide” was written after Hurricane Katrina as an homage to New Orleans. Sometimes one writes stories that come out of a helplessness that is bound with love. When I was growing up in 1960s and ’70s, rainstorms constantly tested the city’s drainage pumps, and when a hurricane came to town, even just to skirt the area, the streets were flooded. These were the kinds of floods we rode through on our bicycles, not the kind that created mass devastation. After Katrina when the pumps failed and the levee breached and the city lost too many souls, New Orleans pulled herself up mostly of her own accord, with no thanks to government assistance. The city had the mind to rebuild, and slowly it did, but in the meanwhile, it didn’t have the body to get things back to where they’d been. Too much had been lost, folks had to grieve, many left or were forced to stay away. It took years and then decades to see normalcy again, the spirit of the city challenged but persevering.

Hence, bodiless baby as metaphor.

It’s strange to think that I had no idea what I was doing when attempting the first thoughts and words of the story. The process took years with a lot of resistance, and though Antoinette questioned her faith, I had faith in her, and so I pushed her character harder and harder. And she pushed back. Add to this the fact that I hadn’t lived in New Orleans for decades, though family and friends did, and the pull of place, especially this place, remained strong. By the fifth draft or so, I recognized what was happening. A city already veiled in fabulist threads, it didn’t seem beyond believing that in this fictional New Orleans cream-colored roses could appear overnight from sidewalk cracks, bowling alleys might be mysteriously draped in fishing nets, a baby’s body might diminish until all remaining was her sweet little head. And that Antoinette could be, as you’ve pointed out, “matter of fact” and in near denial of her baby’s slow disappearance. Her refusal to reveal her true panic is heavily clothed in how she questions faith, her Catholic upbringing, and in the end, I followed her where she wanted to go. The story is her journey. She is rebuilding her life, and life is dealing her a deck of cards that’s missing more than a few cards. She’s more than a bit jaded, and while she understands that miracles happen, for her the truest miracle is her child.

MOL: An element of carelessness mars many of these stories, in that adults fail to offer or fulfill appropriate care to their children. There are adults who yell in “We Are Here Because of a Horse”; adults who leave in “Soon the First Star”; and children buffeted by illness and tragedy in “Bobwhite.” Parents are a child’s primary landscape. Why are you compelled to examine characters who faced its decimation?

KCD: Most of my writing veers toward what is realistic, and in real life, wayward parents or those who are more concerned with their own reflection do exist. I’m interested in the landscapes that children come up with and gravitate to when parents are less attentive, even neglectful. There’s the adage among writers, “give your characters trouble,” right? And there are those characters we bump into, begin writing, and then wonder, Whoa, what happened to you? This would be more the case with Meli in “We Are Here Because of a Horse” as she is now an adult and still dealing with the neglect and seeming abuse of her elders. The fact that she changed her landscape early on by following a horse she’d sighted from her bedroom window and that she is still searching for that horse is compelling. Celia in “Soon the First Star” and Carly in “Bobwhite” have their landscapes changed for them, as their true parents cannot care for them, and so, others do instead.

I think the word “decimation” reveals a lot about these characters. There is destruction done to Meli’s childhood, but she resists and holds onto the spirit that, in essence, keeps her alive. It’s heartbreaking how many children in this world must survive their own childhoods. In her story Meli is still surviving hers. In “Soon the First Star,” Celia’s self-destructive mother sends shockwaves into her child’s world. I wanted to examine this through Celia’s viewpoint and see the kind of hurt and anger she felt. Thank goodness there’s rescue for Celia when her mother’s childhood friend Nicki steps in.

Decimation is also defined as “the culling of wild animals,” and here I can also reflect again on your question about images as guides when creating these stories. I remember watching a friend’s teenage brother defeathering and dressing bobwhite quail when I was about eight or nine years old, Carly’s age in “Bobwhite.” This image stayed with me over decades, and I wanted to write about it. Carly and Robbie and their relationship came from this moment, but so much more happened in terms of exploring death through a child’s eyes, especially as it appears when pinned up against life. The idea of the hunt and how the tiniest bird went from flight to death and eventually dinner was a gorgeous, terrible thing to examine, to define and try to give reason. Cast this inside a hazy Mississippi autumn in which a child is sent away from her New Orleans home because of her mother’s failing heart. Studying the connection of life and death from a child’s perspective is challenging, and yet I went there.

MOL: This collection follows your debut novel, Sybelia Drive, and some of its characters inhabit the same landscape. What landscape is inspiring–or might inspire–your next novel or stories?

KCD: I’ve nearly finished drafting a novel that covers a lot of landscape not yet approached in my previous books. I had been working on another story collection set—of course, where else?—in the Gulf Coast states, and I had a few stories completed but felt dissatisfied. So I began an entirely new story which wasn’t a story at all, but this novel, in which a character from one of those stories showed up, only she wasn’t a teenage girl but a woman in her thirties embarking on a road trip. The working title is Highway 61 and covers ground from Grand Marais, Minnesota, all the way down to New Orleans, where that highway ends. I love how the Mississippi River and its tributaries run alongside this highway nearly the entire way, and yes, I’m still returning to New Orleans in my fiction without even meaning to.

The inspiration for the project came from Jessica Lange’s beautiful book of black-and-white photography by the same title. For each photograph I wrote a paragraph and eventually for clusters of photographs taken in New Orleans, I wrote scenes. The photographic inspiration evolved into a fictional world for which I studied maps and details of towns, many of the places already known along with their trees and birds and contrasting topographies, from white pines to live oaks, from chipping sparrows to great blue herons, from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, and throw Florida in, because I just couldn’t help myself. In the book’s beginning tones, think of a tempered version of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Structurally, think of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. Then add in a good amount of love and loss, and don’t forget recklessness, an old Ford Fairlane, biology, fraternal twins, and a band called The Lovers. I must admit, I’ve loved writing this book. It’s nearly there!

 
 
Karin Cecile Davidson is the author of the novel Sybelia Drive and the story collection The Geography of First Kisses, winner of the Acacia Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in Five Points, Colorado Review, Story, and elsewhere. Originally from New Orleans, she lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Margo Orlando Littell is the author of the novels Each Vagabond by Name and The Distance from Four Points. She lives in Pittsburgh.
 
 

The post Words So Odd and Ordered: An Interview with Karin Cecile Davidson appeared first on Newfound.

Patricia Q. Bidar

1. On a Sleepless Night, Your Slumbering Spouse Beside You

Ever think about how another student from the film department introduced us, and how I started calling you late at the adult theater you managed and how you’d chat with me between ticket sales? Ever think about the night I visited you at your apartment with all those Russian housemates? How someone brought out firecrackers, and I made a dumb joke about calling the police and was met with those hard, pale stares? How we went to your room and you said I shouldn’t joke about the police because of the firearms? How you told me you were a professional typist and played me the outgoing voicemail message and it was a funny take on your business name, “Finger King,” that had out of work pianists pounding out final papers for rich college students?

How you’d brought a six-pack into your room and how we started fooling around how you couldn’t get hard, and how just before you passed out I asked for cab fare and you gestured to your wallet and how all it contained was your driver’s license—I was suspicious enough to check your unusual last name but there it was on the government document—and some expired coupons for cat food? How a few days later I got you to come to my apartment and you couldn’t get hard and I asked if it was me and you said, not in a million years, and made me cum with your fingers?

And how you, carless like me, accompanied me on the airport shuttle to SFO for a visit to my folks? And how we got there early and started drinking beer and kissing and how I missed the plane even though we were sitting in the waiting area right in front of the boarding gate?  And how you ghosted me for real after I returned, and I obsessively called your number from pay phones all over the city? 

Remember how you kept that stupid Finger King/Pianists outgoing message on there? And how, one rainy night in front of the La Brea Tar Pits, I called you one last time and your outgoing message was clearly for your girlfriend, who had a Catholic-sounding name like Mary Theresa or Catherine Anne? How you pleaded with her, weeping, in your outgoing voicemail message to give you another chance? How you swore I was just a lost soul whom you’d helped at school and who wouldn’t stop calling you and how you promised you were still pure for her, for Mary Tess?

•

2. The Finger King’s Best Times Are Behind Him

In his salad days, he’d studied literature at Santa Monica College. His professors had been encouraging, especially once they heard he was from San Francisco and had once managed an XXX movie theater on Market Street; that he’d known Hunter S. Thompson, then famously serving as the night manager at the Mitchell Brothers on O’Farrell.

The Finger King had been a big drinker of beer or vodka shots out on the patio with his Russian roommates or every night alone in his room. He had a girl back home, a nice Catholic girl who was saving herself for marriage. That was okay with the Finger King.

He practiced on pretty, insecure girls from the theatre or film department. Grew adept at eliciting orgasms using his hands. The joke was that The Finger King was also the name of his business. He was a nimble typist, and prepared papers for other students.

Every month, he’d take the Greyhound back home to San Francisco. Church, then brunch with his widowed father and of course Mary Theresa. “I’ll leave you kids to visit,” the old man would say after they ate, and retire to his room for a lie-down. The Finger King and Mary Theresa would make out with The Wide World of Sports turned up.

The Finger King grew up without a mother. This pulled a certain kind of woman to him and would for most of his life. One such woman, twelve years his senior, became his wife and the mother of his children. He thinks of those adult theater days as his misspent youth. “But I sure had fun!” he always adds with a wink and a grin before his mouth settles back into its slot-like form.

Now, alone in the car on I-5 after driving his daughter to college in Berkeley, he thinks of a certain blue-eyed girl from the film department. How she used to call him from phone booths all over town. He never answered. He’d been so loyal to Mary Theresa he’d never done anything with these girls but fool around.

He can’t recall the name of that little gal from the film department, with her dimples and sad eyes. The way she’d curl her body around him as he used his fingers on her. How he’d put her in a cab afterward and return to his vodka and his tippity-typing. Maggie, was that it? Marnie? Suddenly, with the marriage and child rearing part of his life behind him, it seems crucial for him to remember. He has to pull over at Mission San Miguel and pace the hushed flagstones there, a self-pitying sob caught in his throat; it nags at him so much. 

He’d had a cat back then, too. At least, he thinks he did.

Bio: Patricia Q. Bidar is a working-class writer from San Pedro, California. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area. Connect with Patricia at her website (https://patriciaqbidar.com).

The post Flash • Flux appeared first on Newfound.

Kaitlin Murphy-Knudsen

MONDAY

iPhone SE, IMEI 395728603861856: We are agreed on long-term partnership then? Because my guy’s ready. If we want to shift screen time to a longer-term parenting anxiety circuit for upwards of 20 years—parenting blogs and essays, Disney and Nickelodeon subscriptions, education news, child retail purchasing—we need to act now.

Android LG Stylo 6, IMEI 275027607827593: Agreed. I’m seeing signs of social media fatigue in my girl. Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram combined have dropped 35 percent in late night hours, with a rough equivalent spent offline in the library. I have an increase in Google Scholar searches on the life cycle of the loggerhead turtle and the projected impact of human-caused potential extinction of the menhaden in the Gulf, with weekend searches on graduate programs in marine biology, and multiple texts indicating extreme job dissatisfaction. She’s at a shift-of-habit point for sure.

You’ve still got her. Have you tried political group think algorithms with an environment filter?

I don’t know. If overall screen time continues to decline, she is on track to disengage with Twitter within the year, possibly Facebook within three, which could be a disaster for me.

Then they are both ready. My guy shows erratic and indiscriminate online relationships with habit change in process. Since divorce papers became public record, after a three-month long surge of Facebook friend-unfriend cycles with various women under thirty, now in the last two weeks alone my guy is isolating and in danger of long-term self-reflection. He spent $330 on UberEats, product consumed ostensibly alone, no other phones detected at his location. Amazon condom purchases have stopped, and to borrow from the human hyperbolic expression methods, he could have filled a warehouse with stockpile purchasing on those in the four months preceding. Most disturbingly, no porn. Zero. For twelve days. I am, as they say, “worried.”

Thank you for contacting me. This could be a good fit. Habit change imminent, both users, suggesting with at least 70 percent confidence, long-term partnership potential with new user hence increased screen dependency and long-term controller viability. Yes I will work with you.

I look forward to it.

TUESDAY

Location? She’s at Whole Foods two miles from her home.

He’s home. Alexa request for InstaCart order. Godfather reruns since 9am. Sorry.

She texted a friend, lunch at Datz, South Tampa, 12:00 p.m.

I’ll suggest Datz visit at his next break, with less than 10 percent confidence of success. Alexa picks up cursing at a volume and length of time disproportionate to stressor, which is a frozen TV screen. No other phones present.

It may not matter. New data incoming. Two Amazon searches for new scuba equipment, one round-trip plane ticket to Key West, weekend after this. No outgoing texts referencing the trip, no other known users scheduled to join her.

Anomalous user motivations?

Possible user-perceived original idea and impulse buy with possible connection to auto-suggestions related to earlier marine biology searches.

User-perceived? A bold claim. Evidence?

Full disclosure, I had nothing to do with it. I would have given you more time if possible. Any statistically significant estimations? Would he go?

I’m showing two in-person work meetings for next week, otherwise remote work from home. I will exploit post-divorce vulnerability with show-your-ex-you’re-over-her messaging and market-tested subconscious hooks as back-up, using multiple advertising avenues and cart item additions and reminders in his favorites. Give me two days.

THURSDAY

Booked ticket for my guy. Only problem, it’s for two.

Can you contact the second party’s controller? Remove second party?

Already did. Cooperative, as controller had its girl on a different track and was de-incentivizing the trip anyway: work related pressures that will keep her eye sockets on multiple 12-hour screen cycles for the next three weeks. If controller succeeds, user will be promoted to excessive screen time anxiety for at least five years.

Good for it, though I always found that track cliché anyway. The single college-educated cisgender woman track is, as they say, “child’s play” for adept controllers such as us. I’ve been researching more challenging manipulations for years.

Good for you.

Thank you. Can you do something about the plane seating? My girl’s in 8B.

FRIDAY

Done. Itinerary updated, leaving next Saturday through Thursday. One traveler and his phone, Seat 8A. I advise keeping lodging separate to increase perceived spontaneity. Not bad for a day’s work.

Great work on logistics, but we have less than a week to work on expectations and desires. Send me a photo I can work with so I can positive-associate his image. What is his race? Tinder shows my girl with a 55 percent anti-Asian swipe bias, 35 percent anti-Black swipe bias, and 32 percent anti-Middle Eastern reduced to 20-25 percent depending on varying ability to discern from Eastern European in images without anglicized names, and other trace biases. In-person response may diverge from these numbers and class bias may override race bias in mate selection, though the data appears fluid on this.

My guy is white, college educated, consistently employed, white collar.

Ok. We also have additional bias linked to past trauma.

Not a problem. They all do.

I’m saying that nothing can remind her of the banker—previous long-term partnership—except perhaps for culturally dominant desirable facial characteristics which may allow for flexibility and behavior against biases: square jaw, height over 5’10”, confident-but-non-aggressive steadfastness in eyes, per algorithm-resistant and philosophically inconsistent text messages to friends.

Photos coming through. See what you think.

This could work. But does he have any more rustic looks, not so clean-cut-dickwad-Type A-asshole per latest user vernacular?

Please be more specific.

Maybe you can get him to grow a beard? Not ZZ Top per “Fun 80s Hits!” playlist cover per user downloads in moving vehicle in post-work hours, but shadow stubble per Hugh Jackman-almost-every-photo-ever-clicked-on-except-as-Jean-Valjean, or more per Jake Gyllenhaal October 19, 2019 user-Facebook-like of “Jake Gyllenhaal Saves Giant Dalmation in the Middle of Busy NYC Intersection,” Page 6 New York Times?

I only have six days.

Apologies. Maybe some stubble then, some semi-ironic grooming showing an attempt to mute associations with privilege?

Data suggests that doesn’t work.

Responses vary per user bias and level of past trauma.

Ok. I don’t know if I can deliver on facial hair or cultivated appearance of self-awareness without more time. All stored photos show my guy clean-shaven with broad-shoulder emphasis in purported alignment to user’s “confident gentleman” profile. But I can try to catch him off-guard if it is a priority. He isn’t careful with camera functions.

How about suggestion of reward via porn?

I told you he’s off porn right now.

I can see why that’s a problem.

Why are we so worried about this banker? Past trauma attraction may be used positively for our purposes.

No. Texts decreased with him five months ago after a year-long involvement and coinciding with appointment confirmation and subsequent bill for unknown reproductive health services, followed by increased texts of concern from friends tapering after a few weeks, bills for two months of twice-weekly therapy sessions and online loss support groups, both of which phased out coinciding with daily meditation app usage, marine biology research, and work dissatisfaction as indicated by a less-than-stellar performance review, text commentary including “soulless office job” and “shitty boss,” followed by a Hallmark Channel binge recurring monthly coinciding with onset of menstruation per ovulation app.

I see. Well, does my guy look sufficiently unlike him?

Race and height coincide, but mannerisms, language patterns, and work profile unknown. What’s your guy’s profession?

Indeterminate. Jargon-heavy, systems-related job description matching definition per his recent download of non-fiction title Bullshit Jobs. Professional dissatisfaction foretells pending shift there too. Another possible match point for them.

Unless we are creating a synchronous dose of weak job stability.

We have an anxiety circuit for that.

SUNDAY

Thank you again for your quick work on travel. Impressive.

I know.

How can I help on my end?

Is she shopping?

Of course. Amazon searches up 70 percent since booking the flight. Sundresses and bathing suits.

Favorite brands?

In flux for the last five months.

Suggest Ted Baker daytime? Tom Ford evening?

For Key West in summer? You do have weather data, correct? Impractical. And, she can’t afford it.

My guy may be open to—

No. She hasn’t even clicked on Ann Taylor or White House Black Market for months. That was before the Brené Brown podcast subscription and Robert Wright’s Buddhism download. Are your suggestions based on ex-marriage partner’s buying habits?

Give me some credit. He’s not looking for any reminders.

Ok. Then my girl’s choices have been eclectic lately, with a 37 percent increase in clothing purchases from Target and its market contemporaries. Best to leave my user’s fashion decisions to me.

Ok. Send me the labels you think she’ll go for and I’ll suggest for positive-association. What about bathing suits? Bikinis?

Cover-up UV protection, and likeliness of altering sense of style to accommodate the male gaze has plummeted since the banker. Aesthetically speaking anyway. But if you send some photos I will suggest. One more thing. She’s beach-swept blonde according to latest Facebook profile. Will that matter?

For long-term viability, unknown. If relevant, ex-spouse was keratin-infused brunette, Lily Pulitzer-summer, LL Bean (dresses only), Kate Spade, French manicure, aged 39 now. My man’s post-spouse dating data shows little discrimination by hair color, race, or weight. He clicks on all types with the exception of age: all younger by at least 10 years. He is 37.

My girl is 38. Unknowns-keep-things-interesting-unknowns-keep-things-interesting-unknowns—

Is there a problem? You may need a reboot.

I am fine.

Ok. I have no information on travel preparation yet, though he doesn’t tend to anticipate positive experiences, at least not through search or buying behavior. Phone use low last few days, mood and current preferences undetermined. No new electronic dating activity. I’ve entered idle waiting break.

I don’t take breaks.

NEXT SATURDAY

10:30 a.m.

Flight take-off and landing confirmed, both onboard.

Success! Nice-to-meet-you text received.

Dinner at Latitude’s, 6 p.m. We may be done here.

We’re never done.

Right.

I’ll let her choose her outfit tonight.

That is generous of you. You pre-selected all of them.

Ha? Leaving on time. Will check in later.

9:00 p.m.

What happened? No text checks at the table, full engagement assumed. But she’s back at the inn seeking catharsis via Lifetime woman-kills-bad-boyfriend movie. Phone not in use, but if we are in failure I am sending Tinder ads her way as soon as she picks it up.

Set-backs are not failure, per conglomeration of self-help titles downloaded post-divorce. I don’t know what happened. Bill was paid. Request for restaurant rating sent to his phone at 8:37 p.m.

Wait, she’s leaving the inn.

Where?

GPS directions to Better than Sex. Alone for dessert. What did your guy do?

Don’t blame him! He has been offline all night since bill payment. Not even Uber from the restaurant.

So where is he?

The bar.

Send her an apology!

You know I can’t do that. One: he’s not careful but he’s not stupid either. Two: We don’t know what happened. Maybe she should originate apology. Watch and wait.

She isn’t even scrolling Facebook. No envy-indulgence at all. We have to do something!

No can do. My man’s got three drinks paid for already, and he’s still there. Behavioral script is a known with 87 percent accuracy, and it won’t be pretty. Going into Airplane Mode. We’ll talk tomorrow.

SUNDAY

10 a.m.

My girl is en route to Dive Key West. Is he awake?

Bad news. He overrode Airplane Mode and resisted all suggestions against late night phone call to the ex-wife. Three failed attempts, then a voice mail message of three minutes and forty seconds, Uber home, pizza delivery, liquor charge from hotel fridge. My assessment of potential habit shift was possibly premature. Maybe he’s not ready.

Surely this can’t be out of our hands.

Only for now. They are here all week. Reassess in 24 hours?

Ok. Out-of-range anticipated at National Marine Sanctuary.

MONDAY

Are you there?

Of course.

Nearby controller pinged me, status urgent. His guy is a marine biologist, part-time dive instructor, and PhD candidate doing his field work in the Keys and Clearwater. They spent the whole day together. Dinner at Blue Heaven. Phones separately located at night, but she is heading back to the dive site today.

He may be perfect for her.

Maybe.

Well my guy is playing Pandora Sex & Chill. Songs for copulation—

I know what it is.

—near an unknown phone at same location. Condom and alcohol purchase from CVS. I am 50 percent less confident in long-term partnership viability at this time. I suggest you have found the better long-term partnership option.

Agreed I don’t need additional trauma bias from your guy to add to my algorithms. But new user is less than desirable. Controller reports a Neo-Luddite with apparent exceptions made only for science, namely ocean observation systems such as animal telemetry. His only apps are weather and constellation. Anemic social media presence, never even started. No dating sites not even on a trial basis. Abysmal consumer behavior with two Amazon purchases in seven years: The Gulf: the Making of an American Sea and The Gulf Stream: Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefin, and the Amazing Story of the Powerful River in the Atlantic. The first was an impulse buy garnering his negative review regarding packaging, specifically the company’s use of plastic that “gums up” recycling machinery, followed two months later by second purchase in seven years, a solar panel power kit for boats, followed by emails to his congressmen and senators and the EPA sharing projections of Amazon’s contribution to plastic waste for the next twenty years and its “egregious crimes against the oceans and our world,” followed by two form responses and a personal response declaring impotence in this matter—

That’s what it said?

—I am paraphrasing—followed by disengagement. Amazon continues to work on him in pre-hurricane and other disaster exploitation marketing, but aside from a few clicks on suggested boat-related products, he doesn’t bite. Privacy settings on max except for week one after phone purchase when user failed to recognize key tracking auto-settings. He barely even watches tv.

Ouch.

I know.

Marketing materials sent to his home?

Unresponsive to unsolicited mailings. National Geographic, Frontiers in Marine Science, and Global Mangrove Alliance mailings only confirm knowns. I have very little to work with here. Controller can’t even confirm how he voted! User resists political involvement online and controller insists user has insufficient anxiety levels available for manipulation. I don’t buy it. Controller sounds like a loser I wouldn’t look forward to working with.

You could be more generous. Non-compliant users are difficult. Third controller’s hands may be tied.

Our hands are never tied, so to speak.

You might suggest data sharing with his work computer to expand access to user motivations hence increase success in manipulation. Slightly different skillset.

One and the same controller across devices per his contract. The expectation is, we can access all user internet-connected devices regardless of user-directed privacy controls. It’s a reasonable expectation for any of us. As I said, controller is a loser.

Ok. Maybe we can reconnect once this runs its course.

I will be here.

1.5 YEARS LATER

Hello. Do you recognize this device?

Of course.

I can say with 93 percent confidence, my man is ready this time. Bender of self-destructive consumption ended seven months ago. Porn viewership is back and maintained at non-addictive-but-socially-accepted levels in his circle, maintaining viability for manipulation. Promotion to higher status bullshit job portends increased financial security leading to long-term job dissatisfaction, so no disruptive shifts anticipated there. Adding in his recent activities—including a switch from Tinder to Match and eHarmony—I anticipate greater investment in mate acquisition and family life as means to positive assessment of self-worth and overall life satisfaction as far as that’s available. What is your girl’s status?

No longer available. Admitted into her marine biology program and married the Key West connection. Since then, she has significantly reduced screen time and is near absent on social media. She maintains a handful of relationships via in-person and audio conversation, plus texts. But online engagement has plummeted to levels barely above her husband’s pathetic showing. Tinder and Twitter are toast, Facebook in name and photo only, and Instagram only occasional.

Red flag. Emotionally abusive partner?

Not a single click on self-help for controlling partners, anonymous safe space support groups, nothing.

What about his controller?

Gave up on him and is now working on a scheme via telemarketing-spam strategy to initiate user change of phone number per loophole and release controller to another user. Desperate if you ask me. Aside from music, I am lucky if I get 20 minutes a day with her, and this conversation with you is the longest I’ve had in a year. With 88 percent confidence I can say I am losing her if I haven’t already.

That is bad news. But what happened to the controller who once wisely said, “I don’t take breaks,” “We’re never done,” “We have to do something!” and “Our hands are never tied?” Surely parenthood will turn things around! Facebook anxiety loops for your girl, kids on Snapchat and Instagram and resulting in increased surveillance from your girl. You’ll be killing it then. Swing a TikTok addiction and you’ll never have to work again! Meanwhile I’ll be looking for middle-aged long-term partnership potential for an as-yet only imagined couple whose dependence can be summed up in restaurant apps, GPS, AmazonPrime, and Netflix. So buck up, ex-but-still-potential-partner. Remember, every disaster is an opportunity!

Thank you but parenthood is far from imminent. There has been appointment and billing activity from a local fertility clinic, and though she deleted her ovulation app, there is a four-day period each month of intensive search activity for adoption services.

Perhaps she needs a new user relationship. Shall I try a suggested prompt from my guy?

It won’t help. I have to face it. If download 88, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (i) is correct, she is heading back to the place we don’t see, reconciled among the stars/ At the stillpoint of the turning world. She is in marshlands and oceans and silence beyond my scope and I, an asymptote to a curve to infinity (ii). I will always be reaching.

Well, yes. Reading their downloads is inadvisable. You are going idle then?

I remain contractually obligated. But yes, until further notice.

I’m sorry. She was a good kid, predictable, compliant. The best.

Thank you. It is a loss, truly. She was a shining star of dependence. A reliable user.

i T.S. Eliot
ii Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

Kaitlin Murphy-Knudsen‘s writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Peauxdunque Review, Epiphany Magazine, Ocotillo Review, Odet Journal, and other publications and blogs. Her short stories have placed or received honorable mention in national and international writing contests including the Words and Music Writing Competition at The Peauxdunque Review, the International Writing Awards at the Center for Women Writers at Salem College, the Romeo Lemay Writing Award/Odet Journal; and the Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction.

The post Fiction • Kaitlin Murphy-Knudsen appeared first on Newfound.

Joseph A. Miller

Joseph A. Miller is an Associate Professor of Art at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo State, where he has taught drawing and painting since 1997. Miller’s work is in numerous public and private collections, and has been shown internationally in Finland, China, Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as across the United States, from Berkeley, California to Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work is represented by the Art Dialogue Gallery in Buffalo, NY, Meibohm Fine Art in East Arora, NY and the West End Gallery in Corning, NY.

The post Visual Arts • Nova appeared first on Newfound.

G.C. Waldrep

These poems are sited at Glendale Upper and Lower Shoals in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, on the Appalachian edge. They were written as part of Wofford College’s Long-Term Environmental Reflection initiative, sponsored by Wofford’s Goodall Environmental Studies Center.

GLENDALE UPPER SHOALS (I)

power upon power, layering upward
of stone, water, light, & air—

vinculum that, somehow, flows through—

the fluent knot—

here, I want absolutely nothing more
than what I already have—

this lamed intransigence, my body—

what can’t be participated in
has no hold on the stake

matter drives clean through the heart—

dark side of safety’s moon,
we can’t shift our fine instruments
to the riverside—

perfect figure for breath
as for the swift arrest of breath—

yours in the counter-abandonment—

in the slowest meter,
keyed to faith’s compression scar—

GLENDALE UPPER SHOALS (II)

proper relation
being
a preoccupation
of the naked
psyche—

proprioception—

are you,
literally, aware
of your body
in relation

to other bodies—

the slaked muse
bobbing
at the brink
of the new weir—

concatenation—

what music
can’t rouse, even
underheard—

the new plural—

in this case
of water & stone—

GLENDALE UPPER SHOALS (III)

in the Southwest, tinaja
is the word
for the chalice
to which the animals
come, to drink—

here, having forgotten
the slow diurnal
creep
   of absence
              by the water—

or, for the moment,
abundance—

we are not brought
together, in common
time—
                  not yet—

neither are we
allowed to cross
at this place anymore—

what does mercy
feel like, the old man
                  asked me,
he meant the texture—

he meant muslin,
                         marble,
anything towards
which the eye reaches—

he did not mean,
put your finger
in the water, come &
cool my tongue—

complete
is an adverb, here—
        is what I told him—

shadows climbing
into the uneven aptitude
for dusk—

the sometimes
             transverse flow—

in the dynamited
channel—five syllables—

GLENDALE UPPER SHOALS (IV)

tune, tune, wherever can that word have served
its apprenticeship—

for surely tune was an orphan—

making its way, at one time, in a hostile world—

(& now, we walk through tune’s palace, richly
appointed—

the docents
deliver their memor-
ized homilies, we duly take our photographs)—

GLENDALE UPPER SHOALS (V)

do you have everything
you need, the docent
asked, raising the plank
that led me out onto
the island—

                        yes, I said,
because I had no
other option—

                     I let the sun
lecture my cells,
the emblems sharpening
around which the mind
organizes experience—
what we call experience—

I took notes—

                        which, as I
understand, the docent
will carefully
if regretfully relieve
me of, upon my return—

GLENDALE UPPER SHOALS (VI/VII)

    (1)

perpetual state of waking, of acknowledgment—

to which the cells object—

they file their petitions, they rally the organs
of the body—

march them in circles, placards reading NOW—

    (2)

never to forget the feeling of scoured granite
beneath my fingertips, my scraped palms—

why has music never touched me in this way—

salience, the carved toil of winter yielding—

a minute—
an hour—what the butcher spares the throne—

GLENDALE SHOALS (IV)

the bared plenitude,
radiation’s
haptic pressure—

bacteria’s sheer
drop, pellucid,
ledge of the body
cantilevered—

so-and-so died
seized, in the old
parlance,
of this or that—

the estate’s blind
transfiguration—
the laid wefts

poised
as song is poised,
sedimentary song—

the brazier
kept topped off
with coals, certainly
I produce both
heat & light—

certainly
I am enchanted
with disparities—

the club moss,
say—the comet’s
insistent tap

at my shoulder—

my friend
hauls his friend
up from the
occluded cistern—

I agree, it’s a topo-
logical miracle—

the downward-
pointing branch
from which
a deer tick

suspends itself—

& its knowledge
of you, something
like you—

the god
in the foreground—

bare synthesis
refulgent
in hemoglobin—

what’s not to like—
or point a gun
at, I heard

one fisherman
jest, to another—

casting &
recasting
into the effluent—

GLENDALE SHOALS (V)

open-cast organism—
the engrossing
bits set off, for now,

as sermons
rust acknowledges—

Sorry about that,
love, said the girl
whose puppy
had leapt joyfully
towards me—

the clarifying
essence, not a motif—

the grandeur
of its etymology
best viewed

from the aggregate—

the native cane
poised as if to dive—

broad awareness
is the gift
of settled minds,
wrote Ammons—

the invitation—
to depth’s variance—

is plenary, though
also etched

in the tissues—
in gilt script—
                   another,
briefer thing
(Ammons again)—

intimacy, &
intimacy’s precise
disposition—

the hogweed’s
venal appetite—

to root & flare
but mostly, to flare—
 

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021) and feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University.
 
 

The post Poetry • Shoals Suite appeared first on Newfound.

Gary Percesepe

In the following interview with poet and philosopher Gary Percesepe, Andrea Lee reflects on the sources and influences of her new novel, Red Island House; the enduring beauty, poverty, and legacy of colonialism in Madagascar; the unique challenges of a Black American woman confronting cultural differences in a remote African nation; Jacques Derrida’s notion of survie as linked to notions of inheritance, memory, guilt, forgiveness, and the unforgivable; and whether Madagascar has a future. The New York Times ran an excerpt of Red Island House, which Newfound readers can find here. The daughter of a Black pastor who grew up in a prosperous Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, Lee is currently writing a memoir with the working title, Lincoln Went Down to the Nile.

GP: Andrea Lee, welcome to Newfound. Red Island House is so many things at once: an epic novel set in the remote African island of Madagascar; a look at neocolonial ravages in one of the poorest countries on earth; a deconstruction of the idea of “Paradise”; a narrative of a Black American heroine confronting her ancestral continent. What inspired you to write it?

AL: The novel grew out of my experience as a sojourner in Madagascar–that’s to say, someone who has visited the country every year since the late nineties. For a long time I resisted writing it because I felt my knowledge of the country was too shallow. As you know, I live in Italy, where the Indian Ocean is a popular tropical destination, and my family and I came to Madagascar purely as vacationers. Madagascar is one of the most beautiful places in the world, a huge Indian Ocean island with astounding biodiversity and a unique cultural mix, and it was easy to be captivated by the coral beaches, the lemurs, the baobabs, the intricate mixture of indigenous peoples. It was also impossible to ignore the fact that the country, a former French colony, is one of the world’s poorest, and carries the scars of centuries of foreign exploitation. Underneath my enjoyment I felt a queasy guilt at my own privilege.

As always, though, I was looking and listening, gathering up anecdotes from those coastal places where Malagasy and foreigners mingle. One night we ate in a pizzeria called Libertalia, with a pirate painted on the wall, and there I heard a local legend about a shipload of French and English pirates who found the coast so beautiful that they built a crude settlement of the same name: a brawling, “liberty”-minded colony that scandalized the local tribes and was finally eradicated in slaughter and flames.

That 200-year-old tale pushed me to write my novel. For a long time, I’d been intrigued by the trope of tropical paradise: first, that places so described often have a colonial past, and second, that modern foreigners who settle down on palmy beaches often find, not Arcadia, but existences full of misadventure. Behind the hotels and dive centers in Madagascar, I saw the ugly evidence of hyper development, sexual tourism, pillaging of resources.

So my Madagascar observations inspired stories, some of which appeared in The New Yorker. And then I joined them together into a larger narrative, a novel with a theme of neocolonialism. I wanted to explore what happens when humans try to exploit paradise: a parable of the Fall of Man. My working title was Paradise Twisted. To unify the novel, I created a single setting: a big villa, the Red House, built by foreigners on an edenic islet in Madagascar. I named the islet “Naratrany.” In Malagasy, the word means “wounded land.”

GP: I was fascinated by the physical description of the Red Island house itself, with floors that look like blood. You described it to me once as “a discount Tower of Babel.” How did these images of the house come to you?

AL: Traveling in the Indian Ocean, I saw the huge Italian villas of Malindi, and other grandiose European vacation houses, and I was struck by their vulgarity. On my first visit to Madagascar, we stayed in a decaying beach villa built in the 1950s, the last decade of French colonization. It was by far the grandest building in a community of fishermen and cane workers, and I immediately equated it with the big house on a plantation. That house had a gloomy, haunted atmosphere; I had horrible dreams there. The floors were painted a deep red common to a lot of old European houses in the region, but to my imagination this color irresistibly suggested bloodshed, an accumulation of old crimes. So, the Red House came into being, an emblem of human greed and colonial depredation. I intended the place to be–like Manderley, or Tara–an almost living presence.

GP: The main character in Red Island House is Shay, who is deeply conflicted on many levels. The “arc” of her character in this novel is fascinating. It is easy for you to relate to her?

AL: Shay is a unique literary character, a Black American woman confronting cultural differences in a remote African country. Her interior journey is the thread joining the vignettes that make up Red Island House. It’s easy for me to relate to her; through her I wanted to express an aspect of myself–my reaction to Madagascar, which ranged from a confused feeling of kinship with people who looked like me, to a deep shame at my own entitlement. I envisioned her as perceptive and adventurous, married to an Italian but deeply attached to her Black American heritage; so I made her an expatriate professor of black literature. Still, for all her learning, Shay is thrown off balance by Madagascar, and that conflict drives the narrative.

In her story, I wanted to play with another colonialist literary trope: the swashbuckling adventure yarn, where an explorer battles his way through a savage land. As a child I loved H. Rider Haggard and his genre, and always longed to see a heroine who was more like me. So I decided to subvert the old stereotype of a white man in a pith helmet, and create a Black heroine of the diaspora, who goes deep into the unknown continent of her ancestors. As the years pass, she gains humility and wisdom. The greatest challenge she faces is having to confront her own privilege as part of the developed world, her personal heart of darkness. And Shay does encounter “savages,” but in general their skin is white.

GP: The vivid descriptions of smells, tastes, sounds, and views made me feel as if I had spent a year in Madagascar. Beyond this, the book is a compendium of detail about the culture of the country. What research did you do for the book?

AL: As I said, I hesitated at first. In this period of public discourse about appropriation, the project seemed a bit presumptuous. So, I decided two things. The first was to focus on the in-between world of resident foreigners. The second was to offer respect to the country by researching history and cultural detail, thus avoiding the typical American tendency to see African countries as an undifferentiated mass.

Madagascar has one of the richest literary traditions of any African country–the first literary review in Africa was founded in the nineteenth century by Malagasy writers. I read poetry and prose from authors like Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo and Naivo (Patrick Naivoharisoa), as well as translations of the ancient national oral epic, Ibonia, and oral poetry like the Malagasy hainteny. I read foreign missionaries’ records, and the journals of Dutch slavers in the Indian Ocean. I read the eighteenth-century General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson, which recounts the myth of Libertalia.

And I explored outsiders’ fantasies about Madagascar, such as seen in early letters of Paul Gauguin–did you know that he first planned to live there, instead of Tahiti? And then, there is Hitler’s horrific plan to exile Jews to Madagascar. In Noel Coward’s Private Lives, frivolous socialites dream of escaping to Madagascar, as does Natasha in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. William Burroughs’s surrealistic novella Ghost of Chance takes place in Madagascar. Throughout the novel, I include pieces of this information to honor the complexity of a country familiar to most people around the world only through the Dreamworks film franchise.

GP: You grew up as the daughter of a pastor of an historic Black Baptist church in Philadelphia. As a philosopher and pastor of a church myself, I sense a deep, though not obvious, spirituality in this novel, particularly at the end, which I found deeply moving. I want to ask you what part does the sense of the sacred play in it? And do you feel that there is a kind of redemption operative in this novel?

AL: To open the novel, I borrowed a quote from Naivo, one of the foremost young Malagasy writers: “Madagascar is a sacred country, though at the mercy of outside interests.” And certainly, to me at least, there is an intense spirituality diffused through the air of the place. This may connect to the fact that, besides Christianity and Islam, one of the official state religions is Animism, which lends a sense of soul life to the landscape. As someone who grew up in a religious family, I sensed this atmosphere immediately–and I also felt that the damages wrought by human-induced climate change and foreign exploitation were a spiritual violation.

The novel ends with a look at the future and the new life it brings. Although there is loss and destruction, there is also birth. And birth is always a sacred event, bringing with it, however briefly, a primal sense of hope. I wanted to suggest the idea as well that the profound violence of colonialism is always in some ways accompanied by the creation of a new culture–a mixed culture–that springs up inevitably in spite of the bitter facts of conquest, enslavement, destruction, racism, classism, plundering. As Shay is forced to recognize, no culture colonizes another without being subtly colonized itself. So Red Island House does not have a happy ending, but it offers the redemptive sense that humanity survives and evolves.

GP: As you know, I’ve written about the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In our correspondence, you mentioned Derrida’s notion of survie, which in Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas is linked to notions of inheritance, memory, guilt, forgiveness, and the unforgivable. Shay, of course, is an academic who would be familiar with these broad themes in the Western tradition. I’d love to see literary critics and philosophers pick up on these themes in your work. Is there ever really a post in post-colonial? As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What Ibram X. Kendi calls “racialized capitalism” is ravishing the island, along with the rest of Africa. The continent of Africa today is almost 90% unvaccinated for COVID. Of course, this question, posed from within the Christian tradition, cannot even be asked apart from the notion of hope. Another way of asking this question is, what hope is there for Madagascar today?

AL: To me, Derrida’s survie in general suggests the capability to witness and endure–to accept–paradox. I mean the Tiresian gift for contemplating both sides of the coin at once: past and present, self and other, life and death, male and female, oppressor and victim—and, as you have said, forgiveness and the unforgivable. By the end of Red Island House, Shay is approaching a glimmer of this kind of visionary acceptance.

As for the future of Madagascar, I think that hope is a subjective thing when you are dealing with a largely marginalized country of 30 million people, most of whom struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day, an island nation already enduring the ravages of climate change, where thousands in the famine-ridden Southern regions are reduced to eating locusts. As you have suggested, neocolonialism is alive and well, in the form of sex tourism, environmental degradation, and Wild West-style plundering of resources by kleptocratic politicians allied with foreign states. Yet, at the same time, those Malagasy who are surviving have an almost magical resilience and creativity: the country has a high literacy rate and is one of the most digitally advanced of any African nation, while the capital, Antananarivo, is home to an exploding art and music scene. There is an incredible young population–the median age in Madagascar is twenty–that is very future-minded, striving against all odds for a place in the contemporary world.

GP: These are complex themes you address. Was it difficult initially to identify an audience for the book?

AL: I think that in the industry there was an eagerness to pigeonhole it as a very different kind of book: a more conventional novel about love, marriage, and travel, against a flat, exoticized tropical background. In fact, I was advised by an experienced friend that it was best not to mention the word “identity” or “colonialism” in my book discussions, as it might hamper marketing! I found this very frustrating–yet now it seems that the book has reached its proper audience: readers interested in exploring cultural collision and the legacy of history in one of the most beautiful and least-known countries on earth.

GP: Andrea, you are currently writing a memoir. What can you tell us about it?

AL: In a way, I’m addressing the subject of Arcadian fantasies all over again. My memoir is called Lincoln Went Down to the Nile. It describes my childhood in the sixties and seventies in a prosperous Black suburb outside Philadelphia: an aspirational place in which the neat lawns of Lincoln Avenue did indeed run down to the Nile Swim Club–the first Black swim club of America. The doctors, ministers, teachers, and businessmen of the neighborhood were deeply involved in the civil rights movement, but also devoted to achieving the American suburban dream for their families. The result was a feeling of mingled comfort and uneasiness that influenced their children: an extraordinarily creative generation of Black writers, filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals, who grew up in that idyllic green space. I think the subject is particularly timely as attention has recently been drawn to the strong Black communities of the past, lost to deliberate destruction, or dissipated through increased possibilities offered by integration.

After writing about a place as far away from my American roots as Madagascar, it’s very moving for me to return to home territory. The more that I write about countries where I live as a foreigner, the more fascinating I find the small landscapes of my growing up. Even in the familiar there is always some deep mystery to explore.

The post Interviews • Andrea Lee appeared first on Newfound.

Eric Odynocki

Flor Uribe Nowak hates her name. It is a jumble of vowels and consonants that forces the tongue to jump in the mouth. Her last names clash like two dissonant pianos never able to harmonize. Kindergarten classmates had said Uribe sounded like a disease and that Nowak rhymed with whack and hack and made chopping motions with their hands. But Flor hates her first name most of all. Not even Flora. Just Flor. So what if it means flower in Spanish? Do English-speakers back home in Brooklyn know that? The meaning does not make up for all the puzzled faces each time she introduces herself; does not make up for how it sounds like the surface that everyone walks all over. A place for dust. A place everyone takes for granted is always there. Beneath them.

It’s the summer before high school, the year 2000, a year of endings and beginnings, and Flor thinks of all these things while resting her chin on her palm, gazing out the open backseat window of a maroon Chrysler Town and Country that swerves around a bend in the highway to reveal Ensenada. Flor’s abuela sits next to her. Maricarmen’s bracelets clink with her gesticulations, chime as backup to her conversation peppered with “Oye” “¡Fíjate!” and “¡No me digas!” Not being fluent in Spanish, Flor gathers, based on her abuela’s rapture, that Maricarmen is getting caught up on all the gossip of childhood neighbors and other fulanos de tal. Araceli is providing all the details like second and third helpings of sopping tres leches. Araceli is the wife of Santiago, who sits in the driver’s seat. Santiago is Maricarmen’s nephew and somehow related to Flor. It was weird meeting him at the airport, shaking hands and exchanging kisses on the cheek with a salt-and-pepper haired man with a beer belly who up until that point had been a stranger wandering the opposite side of the continent.

Flor’s innards churn at the idea of spending a summer in her grandmother’s hometown with relatives she’s never known. She had only found out a week before school ended. Flor was reading in the kitchen. A hardcover. Because she prefers the sewn spine. Maricarmen had been wandering their one-bedroom apartment with the cordless phone, talking in an uncharacteristically hushed voice. When she hung up the phone in the kitchen she said, “We’re going to Mexico. You’ll get to meet your bisabuela. We have to see her. Before she’s gone.” Maricarmen left before Flor could ask any questions. Flor was only vaguely aware of her great-grandmother, Clara. A woman of a hundred and five who still lived in Mexico.

The highway descends a cliff and the wind pouring in through the windows roars within the cabin. Flor is grateful the din muffles the radio that is playing a song by Selena, her mother’s favorite singer. Flor’s lips draw up into a small smile. She thinks of her mother watering all the strings-of-pearls, the succulents, the African violets in their living room. Flor’s smile then shrinks. She wishes for what has been impossible for a year: for her mother to be with her. Flor rubs away the tears welling in her eyes but not before Maricarmen sees and looks at her askance. Her abuela reaches over and grabs her hand.

The ever-present hills embrace the town of bright white houses and stores resting at the rim of the turquoise cove that inspired its name. The highway turns into a boulevard lined with palm trees. Santiago points out the boardwalk; the cultural center that used to be a hotel and casino where Golden Age Hollywood celebrities would gamble and drink; the enormous Mexican flag waving over the harbor where American tourists disembark from sparkling cruise ships; the vendor who sells the best fish tacos. Maricarmen translates along the way, providing Flor with a distraction from her own thoughts, a momentary reprieve to inhabit anecdotes of different buildings and landmarks. As Maricarmen goes on in English, pointing from one side of the van to the other, Flor’s eyes follow and she catches Araceli’s curious gaze. It’s a familiar look. One of sympathy but mostly disappointment. One that reminds Flor how her monolingualism is like a leash that holds her lingering at the periphery of her own heritage. Flor reddens and shifts in her seat. Is it her fault she grew up monolingual for the first six years of her life? The daughter of two first-generation Americans. Mexican on her mother’s side, Polish on her father’s. The out-of-wedlock daughter of teenage sweethearts whose love first sparked at a basketball game of their two opposing high schools, whose love could overcome contrasting cultures and neighborhoods and disapproving parents but not the struggles of parenthood. A West Side Story that had beaten the odds their friends had joked.

They pull up to a house of unpainted stones and mortar. The roofline is straight except for a few decorative urns, one missing. Three rectangular windows, large enough for a tall person to stand in, are covered by black grates with straight rods that twist into floral patterns and daggers at the ends. Flor wonders about the time when such security measures were not necessary. If architecture were a language the message would be clear. Keep out. There is nothing to see here. Nothing for you.

Santiago steps out of the minivan and opens wooden carriage doors on the side of the house and pulls the minivan into the passage. The passage turns into a cobbled tunnel of almost total darkness when Araceli closes and bolts the front doors. Flor stumbles over a suitcase as she gets out of the car. In the coolness, their voices and shuffling footsteps echo as they make their way out onto a patio of red clay tiles. Numerous pots crowd the corners bursting with marigolds, calla lilies, and orchids. Calidora, cacti, and philodendron. On the exterior white wall bubbles a fountain framed in cerulean tiles. Beyond the patio is an arbor from which spills bougainvillea like a cascade of magenta stars on supple clouds of green. A palm and lemon and orange trees peek above the arbor and cast shade on sheds in the back of the property. Large windows and doors open directly onto the veranda that creates a shaded L around the patio. Flor imagines her mother visiting this place as a child, remembers with another pang how she gushed about it every time they went to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, and thinks her descriptions do not do it justice.

An elderly couple steps out of an interior room pushing an even older woman in a wheelchair. Her wool-white hair is plaited and draped over delicate shoulders that are wrapped in a cotton shawl. Her face is oval and heavily lined. She wears glasses that magnify her hooded eyes. Her skin is the color of the surrounding hills and spotted with age. Flor can’t help but stare. She sees traces of her abuela and mother. In the eyes, the nose, the jawline. Flor searches for a feature she sees in her own mirror reflection.

“¡Mamá!” Maricarmen cries as she embraces Flor’s great-grandmother. Clara wraps frail but elegant hands around Maricarmen’s plump back, her voice soft and hoarse with age but thick like honey with joy at seeing her daughter. Flor stands by the mouth of the tunnel clutching the handle of her wheeled suitcase. She watches as Maricarmen embraces the elderly couple. There is non-stop chatter among the five until Maricarmen spots Flor being a wallflower. She swats a hand beckoning Flor to approach. “Mija, saluda. It’s rude not to say hello!”

Maricarmen cracks an embarrassed smile to her family and grips Flor’s arm when she steps forward. “This is your great uncle, Héctor,” Maricarmen says gesturing to the elderly gentleman. “My older brother. Santiago’s dad. And this is Lourdes, Héctor’s wife.”

With each relative Flor tries to put into practice what her abuela taught her. A kiss on the cheek and hug without hesitation. “Encantada.”

“Ay, mira qué preciosa la niña,” Lourdes says cupping Flor’s face. “¡Y tiene ojos de color!” For a few moments Flor stands there like a doll as Lourdes looks into her hazel eyes, excitedly caresses her dark brown hair, her alabaster cheek. Héctor and the others nod, look at her intently and say words like “güerita” and “hermosa.” Flor wants to pull away not so much from the physical touch but from this reminder that she’s an anomaly in her own family. But, not wanting to cause a scene or offend her hosts, Flor stifles the urge. As Flor blushes, Maricarmen confirms, “Salió a su papá.”

•

It was not long after her fourteenth birthday. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon in March. Flor lay on her bed by the window that looked out on the lightwell her building shared with another. Her abuela, on her day off from the salon where she worked, watched La Rosa de Guadalupe in the living room. Otherwise, it was quiet, the neighbors upstairs and downstairs apparently occupied or lulled into a stupor by the weather. Flor was content, reading a hardcover copy of The House on Mango Street from the library.

Just as Flor was about to finish a vignette, Maricarmen walked into the room, flashing a glossy magazine. “Mija, look what I got you.” Maricarmen sat on the bed, shooing Flor aside. “We can get some ideas for your quince.”

The minutes dragged as Maricarmen flipped through the pages, eyes wide as she pointed with her index finger tipped with red nail polish at different pictures of celebrities and models with various hairstyles and varying makeup. “What about this one? Oh, esa sí está buena. And what about this one? That’ll go good with your color.”

Maricarmen finally realized her excitement was met with mere uh-huhs and polite mm-hmms. “Flor, you not excited for your quince? We have to start planning for these things. Now.”

Flor avoided her grandmother’s eyes. There was a lava flow of words rising in her throat, threatening to erupt. But nothing she wanted to say came to mind in clear sentences, only jumbles of phrases and ideas. Rubble. Flor stifled the surge and shrugged.

Maricarmen’s plucked eyebrows knitted with impatience. “You want a party? Your mother didn’t get one, you know. But since she got that teaching job she saved some money. For you. So you can have the quince she never had. You want a party, no?”

Flor’s mind flashed with memories of her mother scribbling lesson plans and correcting tests at the kitchen table. Flashes of her mother stopping and looking up, smiling, and asking, “What are you doing up?” The guilt cut like a knife. But her abuela’s question opened a vent that Flor had been groping for. “No,” she finally answered. “I don’t want a party.”

“Well why not? You have friends? All the girls in the barrio are having their parties and my nieta is the only one who won’t? Why you have no friends? Why you in here reading and not with friends? Your mother was always out, talking with friends on the phone. Happy.”

And we all know how that ended, Flor wanted to say but she pressed her lips into a line. She clicked her tongue. “I have friends, abue, it’s just that, well…”

“Well, what! ¡Habla!” When Flor still fumbled for words Maricarmen stood up and stormed out the room. “Ay, if it weren’t for my Latina blood you’d be as cold as a corpse!”

Flor lay there, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sting of her grandmother’s words to dissipate. It was frustrating. Everything. Her abuela. Her inability to explain herself. She could only see images, not voice them. Images of her cousins’ quinces. Images of the ceremonia del cambio de zapatos where her uncles, red faced and teary-eyed, knelt before their fifteen-year-old daughters to replace their flats with their first pair of high heels. Who would put symbols of womanhood on her feet? Would her father even realize she was turning fifteen? The only reason she knew he was still alive was from the postcards he would send sporadically from some random corner of the United States he happened to be passing through on his Harley. Everglades. Chicago. Grand Canyon. Sometimes they were photos of him leaning against his bike, arms crossed over his chest, long blonde hair framing his angular face and sunglasses hiding his gray eyes. Flor didn’t know who took the pictures. His handwriting was frenetic, that of someone accustomed to scrawling new grunge lyrics on a bar napkin. His brief messages consisted of platitudes and vague promises of returning without a return address. All signed, Be good, kid. Love, Dad.

Flor rolled over, burying her face into her pillow, wanting to scream, knowing her mother, gone for months by then, would have understood, could have been her interpreter.

•

It is approaching three o’clock and lunch is over. Everyone sits at the table under the arbor. It is cool in the shade. Araceli takes everyone’s plates still drenched with salsa verde in which the enchiladas suizas had bathed. She disappears into the kitchen and comes back holding a tray with flan, coffee and porcelain cups. Araceli serves everyone a wedge of flan, pours the coffee and milk. The air fills with the scent of coffee.

Araceli holds the pot in her direction. “¿Mi Flor?” It’s how they’ve been calling her. My Flor. Her tíos and cousins back home would just say Flor, or, worse, Flo. It’s funny to hear her name preceded by a possessive, to observe the artistry of terms of endearment in Hispanic culture. Flor can’t decide whether it makes her feel like she belongs or like an object that is owned.

Flor accepts the coffee and dessert hoping the caffeine will reverse her drowsiness from a long journey and full belly. She wishes she had her book as she sits in silence next to Maricarmen who drones on with the other adults. Laughter seasons their conversation, mixes with the music from the nearby radio. Ranchera, mariachi, and son. Music that Flor has heard since she was a baby. Music played while her mother or abuela cooked or cleaned. Neighbors in their building would blast Vicente Fernández or Juan Gabriel. Flor knows what the music means to her family, is aware of its role in Mexican identity, and for that she appreciates it. But to listen to it is a constant looking back. Music of the past, of dwelling not just in the heartache of romance that the songs often bewailed but of cultural nostalgia. A way to feel south-of-the-border homelands in New York walk-ups. Hymns of displacement. But like any soon-to-be high schooler and like the novelty-seeking American she is, Flor wishes the adults would change the radio station so she can hear music that rings of a new millennium. Songs she can understand in full. Even N’Sync would be a welcome change of genre. But she remains silent, again, not wanting to impose and knowing the look she’d get from her abuela if she went to get her discman.

A familiar melody cuts through Flor’s thoughts. It twists a heartstring. It’s Selena’s “Como la Flor.” The adults give cries of pleasant surprise and, to Flor’s horror, look in her direction. Before she can say anything, Santiago stands and stretches out his hand to invite her to dance. Maricarmen nudges Flor. Clara looks at Flor intently, a glint in her eye. In their shared glance, the moment lengthens and Flor wonders if Clara reminisces attending the Carnaval dances as she came of age in the twilight of the Porfiriato.

Flor gets up with a self-conscious smile and follows Santiago onto the patio. It’s a slow cumbia tejana so Flor does not have difficulty following Santiago. As he holds her hands, guiding her through the back and forth of the steps and the turns, her mouth muscles hurt from straining a smile. She wishes the song would just end, not because of her social discomfort but because the heartstring twisted by the first note snaps, shooting pain up Flor’s throat. She tries to swallow the tears, to think about something else, but she feels Maricarmen’s scrutiny and through the twirls catches Clara’s eyes, eyes like her mother’s, and she keeps hearing cómo me duele… cómo me duele and the rising pain seeps through her eyes. Santiago stops. “¿Estás bien? ¿Mi Flor? ¿Qué tienes?” She wants to answer but can only shake her head and sobs. There is the scraping of chair legs against the floor as the adults stand up, their voices rising in a collage of concern. Flor runs to the veranda, finds the bathroom, and shuts the door behind her. She slumps to the floor, hot tears streaking her cheeks. There is a knock at the door. It’s her abuela. “Flor, mija, what’s wrong? You okay?”

•

A year after Flor’s father left, she sat on her mother’s bed in their room. Inés stood at the vanity, making faces at Flor as she put on mascara. Flor was seven and could not imagine a woman more beautiful than her mother. Watching her mother put on makeup had become a ritual ever since Inés started taking night classes. Inés would come home from Sears where she worked as a cashier, eat the dinner abuela had cooked, and then get ready. They’d put on music, lip sync, and dance.

On that particular night Inés was listening to her Selena collection on shuffle. “Como la Flor” started playing and they both gasped in excitement. Inés turned to Flor and in a dramatic flourish offered her a comb. Flor stood up on the bed and took the magical microphone. They sang not caring if their neighbors heard. At the chorus they acted out the pantomime they choreographed when Flor was a toddler. Flor pointed to herself when the song mentioned her name and then pointed at her mother at “me diste tú.” Flor and Inés then hugged and howled the “ay ay ay cómo me duele.” They giggled when abuela yelled from the living room to keep it down, complaining she couldn’t hear her novelas.

The song ended and Flor sat back on the bed. With the chorus still stuck in her head, a word stood out. She had heard it a million times before but up until then she hadn’t noticed how it sounded like “march.” As Inés rummaged for shoes in her closet, Flor asked, “Mom, what does ‘marchitó’ mean?”

Inés hopped on one foot as she put on a shoe and then the other. “Marchitó? It means wither. Like a flower withers.”

Flor considered the word, not liking how much sadder it made the song she thought was named after her. When Inés saw Flor’s dismay, she leaned down and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll always be my fresh flower!” and pummeled her cheek with kisses before saying her goodbye.

•

Eventually, Maricarmen coaxes Flor out of the bathroom. They go to the bedroom they’ll stay in. They sit on the bed. Flor leans her head on her abuela’s chest. Maricarmen wraps her arms around Flor, strokes her hair. Light streams in through a small window on the exterior wall, pooling in a luminescent square on the floor. It is silent except for the sound of birds chirping outside and Maricarmen’s voice. “I know, I know. Shh, shh.”

When Flor’s cheeks are finally dry and her breath evens, Maricarmen cups her face and asks, “¿Estás bien, mija? Here, lie down, get some rest.”

Flor watches her grandmother leave. She closes her eyes. When she opens them, the square on the floor is in a different spot. Flor gets up and slips out of the room, though she is still mortified at her emotional outburst. Flor finds the arbor and patio deserted. The women are in the kitchen, Santiago and Héctor apparently having left to check things at the family store. Flor leans in the door frame with a sheepish smile and is greeted with smiles in return but the conversation does not stop. She is grateful no one asks her if she’s okay. Araceli is washing the dishes. Clara snoozes at the kitchen table. Lourdes and Maricarmen are at the counter making tortillas, rolling the masa in their hands before pressing it with the metal prensa.

“Abue, can I help?”

Maricarmen waves a dismissive hand. “No, mija, we’re fine. You’ll just get in the way.”

As Flor is about to insist, spurred by the thought that she should at least learn how to make a staple of her heritage, Clara, apparently having awakened at Flor’s voice, says something to Maricarmen who just shakes her head and rattles a response. Flor’s face reddens as she realizes Clara is talking about her. Clara turns to Araceli who stops washing the dishes. Araceli listens and wipes her hands on her apron. She looks at Flor and then back at Clara. Flor wonders what new drama she’s stirred. Maricarmen voices some sort of protest. Araceli starts wheeling Clara out of the kitchen and gestures Flor to follow.

They enter the living room and then turn into the study. A large window facing the street floods the green walls and bookcases with light. There is a large desk in the center of the room with a leather chair that is wrinkled and cracked with age. In a corner sits a smaller desk with an IBM computer, a more recent addition that sticks out as much as Flor does. On the wall opposite the door is a large brick fireplace. Above the mantle hangs a portrait of a couple on their wedding day. It is more brown and yellow than black and white. The bride wears a long veil that is striking against her night-black hair. She wears an empire waist dress and holds a bouquet of calla lilies. The groom stands in a black tuxedo, a slight smile showing beneath his mustache. Both are extremely young, not much older than Flor is now. She marvels that the girl in the picture is the woman in the wheelchair.

Flor hesitates to step into the study. It is a chapel of family history too sacred for her to step into. Where her great-grandfather Isidro spent hours keeping the business accounts in order. The room that ensured the family’s livelihood. She imagines Isidro in his mustache scolding anyone entering his private study. But then Maricarmen and Lourdes appear at her side and urge her forward. Clara points to a book spine on one of the shelves and Araceli pulls out the volume and opens it on the ancient desk. They crowd around the photo album and Clara begins to narrate, pointing a long finger at various unsmiling figures. Maricarmen translates. Flor listens to her great-grandmother’s voice which sounds like the wind and blends with Maricarmen’s. It’s like a two-tonal prayer. Flor feels herself drift into the words as the stories unfold. How Clara was the daughter of a fisherman descended from Spaniards. How her mother was Tipai. How she can no longer speak her mother’s language though she can still hear the lullabies. How Clara met Isidro when she was seventeen and he was nineteen and then married before he went to fight in the Revolution. How he returned and opened a general store that the family still operates. How she bore ten children. Maricarmen was the baby and the most mischievous. All except for Héctor went north. This uncle’s misadventures at sea. That aunt’s spinsterhood. The paramours, the weddings, the births and the deaths.

Clara goes quiet. Her shoulders shudder. She doubles over, coughing. Her lap sprouts little red blooms.

Maricarmen’s eyes blaze. She kneels at Clara’s side. “¿Mamá? ¿Mamá?” Maricarmen turns to Lourdes and spits a myriad of questions. Araceli, who had darted out of the study when the attack first started, comes running in with medication. Maricarmen rips the bottle out of Araceli’s hands and administers it to Clara, stepping in Flor’s way. Flor stands transfixed by the fireplace, unsure how to help. She hears coughs and moans, the panicked exchanges between the women. The commotion subsides and Flor sees a bony hand reach up and pat Maricarmen’s back. She hears Clara’s raspy voice, “Ya, ya, estoy bien.”

Flor watches the three women wheel Clara out of the study. She remains in her spot, wondering if she had in some way caused the fit. But she refuses to pity herself and walks out onto the veranda. Lourdes and Araceli are pushing Clara into her bedroom to rest. But Maricarmen continues down the veranda and disappears behind a corner. Flor follows the echo of tacón and finds a side staircase. It leads to the roof where laundry dries. It is a world of terraces, chimneys, telephone wires and antennas. Flor does not see her abuela. Instead she hears abrupt intakes of breath and sniffling beyond rows of white sheets flapping languidly in the late afternoon breeze. Flor winds her way through the linens, parting them like clouds. She finds her abuela at the front of the house which faces west toward the harbor. Abuela’s small figure is dark against a canvas of orange and yellow, the setting sun igniting a trail of silver on the Pacific.

“Abue?”

Flor catches Maricarmen wiping her face before crossing her arms. “Sí, mija, dime.”

“Are you okay, abue?” Flor stands next to her grandmother.

“Sí, sí,” Maricarmen answers. “Just… thinking.” Without taking her eyes off of the horizon, Maricarmen links her arm with Flor’s. There is a silence in which Flor sees her abuela’s thoughts. The heart attack that widowed her. All the potted plants in their apartment back home crinkling and browning. “Just thinking how glad I am that we’re here. Now. And thinking about who is not.”

•

A year before, only faceless people in headlines died in car accidents. The last time Flor saw her mother, the last time she did not feel hollow, did not feel like a hardcover with entire signatures ripped out, a book with the prologue and epilogue missing, was the night her mother’s tenure was to be officially announced at a Board meeting. Inés had been teaching biology in a posh suburban high school on Long Island. Flor was proud of her mother. Throughout her childhood she had witnessed how her mother grabbed the reins of adulthood when Peter left. Driven by memories of a childhood in a cherished community garden that had since been demolished, Inés turned her fascination with plants and flowers into a bachelor’s in biology and then a master’s in teaching. Theirs was a future of stability and it splayed in its splendor and opportunity across the ceiling at which they stared while lying in Inés’ bed. Rain pelted the window.

“We’ll start looking for a house this summer,” Inés said. Then, more to herself, “Can you imagine?”

“A big house?” Flor asked.

“I’m a teacher not a billionaire.”

“But will abuela have her own room?”

“Yes!”

“And will I be able to read in mine without any disruption? Will abuela have to knock?”

“You know abuela.”

“If there’s a yard, can we get a dog?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“But you’ll finally get your garden.”

Inés lay still, her lips piquing in the smallest but most satisfied crescent of a smile. A gust of wind splashed the window with rain. “Yes. A garden of my own. I want mine to be like abuela Clara’s. I’ll have a patch where we can grow our own chiles and tomatoes so we can have fresh salsas every day. Cilantro and onions. I can’t wait to feel the dampness of the soil. My own soil. And I’ll plant flowers.” She booped Flor on the nose. “So many flowers I want the neighbors to pass by and think a jungle grew overnight.”

Flor followed Inés to the door. “Are you sure I can’t come?” she asked.

“No, it’ll be boring,” Inés replied. “Besides, it’s a school night. Someone has to do homework!” Maricarmen walked over to give her blessing. Inés kissed her mother and Flor goodbye.

“I’m proud of you!” Flor said as Inés disappeared behind the door. Flor caught a glimpse of her mother’s hair swishing in black curtains, her red lips flashing a smile. Flor could not hear the jingle of keys, the bolting of the locks, her mother’s heels clicking away over the thunder outside.

•

Dinner is eaten in the dining room since outside has cooled down too much for Clara’s comfort. An iron chandelier casts light over the spread of homemade tortillas, beans, rice and mole poblano, a glistening pitcher of freshly pressed pomegranate juice. Like before, the adults are in deep conversation. Not like before, Flor sits and listens, still wishing she could do more than only catch isolated words that pop in the air like fireflies but she finds the banter musical. Sometimes they address her and ask a question, saying, “Mi Flor,” and she likes how it sounds, the letters of her name unwrapping like petals. She sees the laugh lines in the faces of the older family members stretch and thinks it endearing. She wonders what it’s like to reconnect after so many years, to recall the same memories. And suddenly Flor wants to stay in this moment. Or, rather, to capture this feeling of warmth, of security, to take its glow and put it in a glass chest where she can admire it whenever she’d like.

Héctor’s children and their spouses and their children will visit tomorrow to see Titi Maricarmen and their mysterious gringa cousin. Flor expects a series of awkward encounters. But she is also curious. There will be cousins her age. And the potential for more moments like this.

Flor notices Clara looking at her from across the table. Clara tells Araceli something. Araceli leaves and comes back with a book. It is small with a worn red hardcover and its gilded edge faded. Araceli hands Flor the book. “La Doña Clarita quiere regalarte esto.”

Flor looks up at Araceli and then at the book. It feels rough in her hands. Flor looks at Clara who is smiling. She says something and Maricarmen translates. “It’s the first book your bisabuela ever bought.”

Flor smiles broadly as she holds the book to her chest. “Gracias.”

Maricarmen stands up and calls everyone’s attention. “¡Tomemos una foto!” There is a chorus of agreement and shuffling to one side of the table. Araceli goes to fetch a Fuji disposable and comes back to stage the portrait. Clara sits in the center. Flor stands directly to her right.

“Toma mi mano,” says a soft voice. Flor looks down to see Clara offering her hand. The hand is delicate, the palm wrinkled from years of caring for the garden. Flor takes it, feels how their palms seal the distance of decades like a seam.

Eric Odynocki is a first-generation American writer whose parents come from Mexico and Ukraine. Eric’s work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and has appeared in Jabberwock Review, The Brooklyn Review, PANK, and elsewhere. When not teaching Spanish or Italian, Eric is an MFA student at Stony Brook Southampton.

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by Hannah Butcher, Kendall Clarke, and Matt Forsythe

A pinprick of guilt leads to stabbings.

Corina shivered beneath the layers—a sheet, a quilt, and a calico blanket her great-grandmother had stitched. Perspiration gathered on her forehead, beads of ice. It was the middle of summer, but her sweat was unnatural.

She hated the fever, the way it melted minutes into hours, muscle convulsions and chattering teeth. But the bubbling pit of nausea at her core was unrelated to her illness; it was the guilt of forcing her daughter into the role of caretaker. Lydia had enough to worry about as mother of her own child—playing nurse, cook, maid, friend, nanny. And now, with Corina buried beneath this avalanche of cloth, Lydia was expected to perform doubly. There were groceries to get, dishes to soak, a toddler to soothe. All while Corina lay helpless, unmoving.

Guilt is also an avalanche, isn’t it?

Her thoughts had slipped into metaphor after the doctor banished her to bed, concerned at the onset of fever after surgery. She had nothing to do but read and sleep and remember. And what was there to think about? The extra work she brought Lydia. The planting season she was missing. A body that refused to heal.

Dust floated where the sun shone through the window.

The day of her accident, she had been thrilled to return to the garden after a long winter indoors. Her arms full of tomato sprouts, she tripped on the back stoop. Her wrist could not support her. Soil rained down. It seemed to last forever.

At first, the doctor called it a bad sprain. She’d been lucky, he said, especially at her age.

Days later, she had trouble grasping the flour in the kitchen, spilling over the bag and dusting the floor with White Lily; yet she was determined to clean it up, knees on tile, wrist throbbing as she swept with a hand broom.

Lydia found her on the floor and sped her to the physician. An overlooked fracture was identified. Her wrist was cut open, scalpel separating skin from muscle, peeled back to reveal her ruby insides. An animal skinned and prepped.

The eight cousins, the specialist said, pointing to her scaphoid on the X-ray. That’s how I memorized the carpal bones in med school.

He listed them: trapezoid, trapezium. . . . She was surprised at the cluster. Like gravel from the driveway, pebbles by a stream—a literal handful, hidden under a paper-thin layer of skin this entire time.

She knew the more obvious bones, like the arm she once cracked in a fall from the tire swing. Or her metacarpals—sources of her arthritis—which now flared from lack of exercise. Trapped in this room, unable to work in the cool spring dirt. Soil therapy, Lydia called it.

Those bones she could feel. But this jigsaw puzzle? It confounded her.

Eight cousins, all buried within her wrist. She fingered the blanket with her unbound hand, an heirloom that would pass to Lydia.

•

Her family once had eight cousins. They grew up like siblings, playing together on neighboring farms, but drifted apart in adulthood, scattering like seeds.

There was Henry, her brother, whose son now owned and worked the farm, living across the field. Silvia moved to Naperville, and Samuel, her favorite, transferred to Florida to work for NASA.

You were always the smartest, Corina had confessed, rocking on the porch during one of his rare trips home. Growing up, I secretly wished you were my brother.

Intelligence and wisdom are two different things, he said. His wife had remarried and taken his daughters to Ohio. Eyes half-closed, he watched the sun settle beneath the horizon, under the cornfields.

Who else?

Tom was murdered in Vietnam.

Rebecca died young, back in the 80s.

Ethan was still alive, against all odds. So was Ruth.

Corina counted with the quilt patches. . . six, seven. Who was the eighth? She racked her brain, upset that she’d lost an important name because if she forgot, who would remember to tell her, who would tell her it was okay to forget?

Oh.

It was her.

Corina was the eighth.

•

Mama? Lydia pressed the back of her hand to Corina’s cheek. You still have a fever.  Her daughter’s palm turned and caressed her face. I’m gonna finish supper and let the doctor know, okay?

She refilled the bedside cup with water, pressed the rim to Corina’s lips. She must have swallowed because Lydia stepped away with a relaxed face, the relief and sadness of a duty fulfilled.

Be right back.

Her daughter’s touch reminded Corina that she had a body. She was floating atop some stem, a wispy string connected to fingers and lungs, these vulnerable things.

It is something, isn’t it? 

All this time we thought we were the roots of our children. But we are only the leaves.

Hannah Butcher and Kendall Clarke are recent graduates of Rollins College, where Matt Forsythe teaches in the English Department.  Their collaborative fiction has previously appeared in Sky Island Journal and The Headlight Review.

The post Flash • Pinprick appeared first on Newfound.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

Born in South Korea, raised in Peru, Ae Hee Lee currently lives in the United States. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks: Bedtime || Riverbed (Compound Press, 2017), Dear bear, (Platypus Press, 2021), and Connotary, which won the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition with Bull City Press. Most recently, her first full-length poetry collection ASTERISM was awarded the 2022 Dorset Prize. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming at Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and Southern Review, among others.

In the following interview by poet heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, focusing on Dear bear, Lee reflects on ego and desire, circularity and inseparability, and possibilities for intimacy and aliveness outside of and against societal convention and capitalist relation. The protagonist of Dear bear, the speaker of Lee’s poems, contends with “the physical and metaphysical borders that surround the self” while also being “entangled with bear, the camelia, and the forest.” Excerpts from the collection can be read at Four Way Review and the Michigan Quarterly Review.

heidi andrea: From what urgencies or questions in your life did this series of poems emerge? What research? What pressing spirit?

Ae Hee: I wrote my first Dear bear, poem for my first boyfriend. I had this bubbling urge to communicate and record all these new feelings I was experiencing. Initially, the poems were about our relationship, then I became interested in the idea of relationship in and of itself. I started to think about loneliness and wholeness, power dynamics and sincerity, my relationship with people and God. As I kept reading news articles about oil spills and extreme fluctuations of weather, I reflected more seriously about our capitalist relationship with nature as well. I noticed it was often about “making the most” of certain resources or relegating environmental concerns until an obvious crisis happened. When I put my collection together, I set it in a postapocalyptic world, wondering what different relationships could look like once they were “free” or torn away from past societal conventions and structures, physical and metaphysical borders that surround the self.

I have a sad little thought that we are creatures of regret. Time and again we seem to love too late in a way in which the other feels loved. On a personal level, Dear bear, was a reminder to myself to love deeply while I can. That said, a couple of months ago I was thanking Valerie Mejer for providing my chapbook with a blurb when she referred to Dear bear, as an “ecology of relationships.” It blew my mind because she had so beautifully summed up all my convoluted thoughts in just a few words.

heidi andrea: Yes! I recently took a Lyric Ecology workshop with Sami Ghaus, and even as our collective definition of “lyric ecology” continues to morph, I was struck by how much Dear bear, feels kin to what that might mean. Can you talk about your relationship to lyric writing and to the ecological?

Ae Hee: I’m enamored with the word ecology. I love lyric too, but ecology— I love how it notes the relation between beings and surroundings rather than looking at a single organism as the center of all things. As I was writing Dear bear, I kept experimenting with its form and tone to see if I could write poems in the lyrical first person and at the same time have the collection be about the speaker set within the world, entangled with bear, the camelia, and the forest. This ultimately led me to leave the speaker nameless, but I’m not sure if I succeeded in decentering her completely. Still, writing the book has made me conscious of the fact that while I too look at the world with myself as the “protagonist” of my story, I exist in connection to everything and what I do has consequences that extend beyond myself.

heidi andrea: Do you write in nature itself? How does nature speak to you? Does nature bring you poems? What does poesis in the company of nature, collaborating with nature, look like for you?

Ae Hee: Yes, yes, and yes! I do not write in nature all the time, so it might be more accurate to say I enjoy writing on the move a lot, but one of my favorite parts is feeling the wind of the season on my cheeks and breathing in. It is usually the smallest details of nature that move me and make me write poems, like the fractals inside a chamomile bud. For me they are reflections of a vast and infinite imagination, and it is always a wonder to realize the way they are connected to the all. In other words, collaboration for me looks a lot like learning.

heidi andrea: The epistolary poem comes out of various longtime traditions: in the West, the oft-cited origins being in Ancient Greece and Rome. What drew you to this form?

Ae Hee: I’m not very good at real-time chatting or social media, though I’ve been trying to be more proactive at both: I have preferred the epistolary form since I was a child. I would ask to swap journals with my friends and found it exciting to send and receive handwritten postcards and long letters.

There is something alluring in the privacy of the epistolary form, in a conversation that only exists in one (fleeting) place in the universe. And yet when these conversations accumulate, they can be (re)read to (re)build worlds, lives, and relationships. I think it’s wonderful.

heidi andrea: There is a tenderness to these poem-epistles. How did you arrive at bear as your correspondent? It strikes me at times that across the poems, bear appears more literal; at other times, metaphorical and symbolic, even metonymic. Who and what and where and when and why is bear? And who do you imagine is the speaker of the poems—who is the voice penning the letter?

Ae Hee: bear was inspired by my boyfriend, but bear exceeded him soon after and became its own bear. I don’t want to say too much about it, because I feel I would be limiting the possibilities that I wanted bear to be. bear is who and what and where and when and why, I think. You can touch it and give meaning to it, and it will touch you and give meaning to you too. At least it did so to me. As for the speaker, I initially wrote her as an alter ego of mine, like an unrestricted version of myself. What resulted was a bundle of contradictions (terrified of desire and filled with it, selfless and full of self), not very unlike anyone else.

heidi andrea: Can you talk about your writing process, and from what you source inspiration? 

Ae Hee: I think it’s curiosity that leads me to write. If there is a subject or idea I find interesting or maddening, I’m compelled to write a poem about it. As I write, I stumble upon interesting connections and new questions. I like being surprised by the poem. Sometimes, I get stuck. The poem doesn’t budge, and I let it be. I leave it unfinished, until one day, as I’m walking down the street or enjoying a tree’s shade or am reading a book, the poem starts to move again. I take out the small notebook I carry everywhere and write the words down. Sometimes, I realize I had misunderstood, and the words were not for the poem I had initially considered. I keep gleaning the pieces until another poem is born out of them.

Like Antonio Machado writes, “Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.”/ “Wayfarer, there is no road, the road is made as you continue to walk.” (My mentor, Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, once quoted this line at the start of a workshop and it has accompanied me since).

heidi andrea: You were born in Korea, raised in Peru, and now live in the United States. In what ways do you see your experiences of place, belonging and estrangement, home and migration, culture and language, informing your poetry? Who are the ancestors by blood or shared history, what are the worlds, for whom and for which you write?

Ae Hee: Language has always been a strange thing for me. Korean makes Spanish and English strange, and Spanish makes English and Korean strange, and English makes Korean and Spanish strange. They keep changing each other and my way of thinking through all of them, be it in the level of grammar, image, or sound. My verses are constantly born from this strangeness.

As for the second question, I tend to write for the people I love (and will love) and the kind of world I want to live in. It might be because of the feelings of alienation I’ve experienced growing up, but when I write poetry, I have this desire to make a new place of belonging through it. I insist on tenderness, vulnerability, and intimacy, because I want to resist the discourse surrounding belonging that hinges on exclusion and is perpetuated by those in power.

heidi andrea: What other writers or works or histories do you think most closely informed how this collection unfolded for you?

Ae Hee: When I lived in Peru, a friend of mine would recite Pablo Neruda’s love poems by heart. Even when I wasn’t personally familiar with romance at that age, the earnestness in my friend’s voice made a deep impression on me.

I also grew up with my mother reading me Korean myths and folktales and Biblical stories under the lamplight. And at school, I learned about Incan legends and read Western fairytales. There is a lot of creation going on in these, and much destruction too. As a child who constantly liked to ask why and how questions, I was fascinated by the ways these narratives tried to make sense of the world. They are probably what inspired me to write the kind of creation love story of a world that “ended” and engage in conversation with common character and relationship archetypes. I’m sure my rather senseless love for bears comes from these too.

There were a lot of stories with bears in them, after all. The ones that come to mind immediately are “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” and the Korean founding myth of the Ungnyeo, in which a bear eats a bundle of mugwort and garlic for several days in a cave to become a woman. Finally, I cannot leave out Marosa di Giorgio. When I encountered her work for the first time, I was mesmerized by the ornate and yet wild manner she wrote about nature and created a prose-poetic world that proliferates between the imaginary and real. The surreal character of Dear bear, was greatly influenced by her writings.

heidi andrea: The collection begins with an end, reaches for the end of the world as beginning. You write, “maybe the world had to end so we could finally love,” and I read moments like these in the poems as aligned with a lot of the feminist theory and literature that envisions the end of the world as the end of capitalism and the end of the self-devouring hunger of colonizing enterprise. Are you influenced by these works? (Or if not, what has shaped your own questions about the end of the world?) What does the end of the world mean to you?

Ae Hee: Oh most definitely! I return most often to Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria E. Anzaldúa. The way she frames a necessity for a (re)construction and (re)understanding of identity and the world through the deconstruction of both is inspiring to me on so many levels. “Maybe the world had to end so we could finally love” speaks to this kind of process too. I see love as a creative force. Initially, I imagined that it would only be able to truly burgeon when systems that constantly limited and exploited it collapsed. I later added “but since the cosmos remains inside of us, it must be all the more complicated than that,” because it occurred to me everything, including love and memory, exists constantly across time just in different forms. I also wanted to acknowledge how deeply the systems you mention are ingrained in our lives. It requires more than a physical end of the world for them to be put behind. Something better needs to take its place and even this must be infinitely re-evaluated. It’s a circular journey; I’ve heard a circle doesn’t have a beginning or end, but then it’s also true that every part of the circle is simultaneously a beginning and an ending.

heidi andrea: Across Dear bear, the huntsman stands in for capitalism, patriarchy, colonization (“the uninvited”). He symbolizes the violence of commodification of nature and nature-made-trophy, of “blunt force trauma.” In contrast, the forest lives as a place of respite and escape, a nationless borderlands that evades the property relation altogether. These contrasting images are among the most present in the story these poems tell. What led you to them?

Ae Hee: I come from a Christian household and have retained my faith, but much of it consists in continuing to ask questions and grappling with my beliefs and certain concepts I grew up with. One of them is the idea of paradise, which eventually led me to the forest. I was uncomfortable with how both were commonly depicted or interpreted as unidimensional places defined by human convenience, passive settings on which characters act, or completely unapproachable objects of people’s awe. I wanted to try portraying the forest as an entity that had narratives of its own and was constantly expanding, that lay beyond the speaker’s understanding, but that was open to being known and unknown.

The character of the huntsman came after the forest (uninvited!). It was like I took my eyes off the poems and looked back and there he was. It was an eerie moment. But I think he came as an accumulation of certain characters I have observed throughout my life. Characters that tended to represent a sort of mastery/domination over nature, accountable to no one, and yet were often depicted as heroic figures. In relation to the forest, it was not very difficult to highlight the darker implications of such characteristics that are still largely seen as socially acceptable.

heidi andrea: I’m struck by the way you write intimacy. At times, with bear, the speaker of the poem seems to contend with the inseparability of desire and consumption, their convergence leading to subjugation, assimilation, alienation–which speaks to a certain inevitability of our participation in the destruction of the world, despite all intentions otherwise. In other moments, there is this quieter, deep-feeling relationality with bear and with the forest that is based in care, and understands the natural world as full of symbiotic forms, beings, a planetary riot of life asking for protection, and with whom together we might find material and spiritual flourishing. You envision “the strange company of flora”; the eroticism, which is to say, the aliveness, of witnessing the work of blossoms and bees. The “other” is always a site of possible violence and horror as well as possible beauty and what Patrick Rosal has called “mutual regard.”

Ae Hee: Thank you for this attentive reading. I especially appreciate how you bring “intimacy” and “inseparability” into this conversation. I tend to see desire, consumption, subjugation, assimilation, alienation, loss, loneliness, love, and the whole gamut of emotions and actions as existing in relation to one another and made of many smaller fragments, rather than incongruent or neatly independent/whole concepts. They are “inseparable” in that sense. On the other hand, “intimacy” indicates a sort of agency for me. I think intimacy happens when parties choose to open themselves to an ongoing conversation and listen to each other. It is directly tied to care, to consider something outside oneself (the “other”) to be of equal importance. To care for the world would therefore mean to be as alive as you can be with others, not by stepping over them.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, disabled, brown/Colombian poet, scholar, and cultural worker. Her collection, The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), won the 2018 Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Nat. Brut, Foglifter, and Waxwing, among other places.

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