Language is where I was born, the home I lost, the apartment where I live now, the room I returned to when I translate, the city I visited when I studied German, the neighbor’s house I see from my window but have never visited. – Kaveh Bassiri

This year’s winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry prize is Kaveh Bassiri, for the chapbook “99 Names of Exile,” to be published by Newfound in Summer 2019. It was a pleasure to talk to Bassiri about the sound of language, issues of translation, culture, and more:

Laura Eppinger: The opening dedication of this chapbook is lines from “La Cantatrice Chauve” by Eugène Ionesco:
“He’s not English. He’s only been naturalized.
And naturalized citizens have the right to have houses,
but not the right to have them put out if they’re burning.”
This absurdist play is all about slips of the tongue, mistaken identity, miscommunications, and the limits of language in expressing ourselves. Are these themes you explore in your work?

Kaveh Bassiri: Yes, all those issues—such as “miscommunication” and “the limits of language”—are found in the chapbook. I am interested in the power and limitation of words. We try to harness the vitality of language, as it slips away and writes us. I am interested in how we find ourselves in language, how language defines us and determines our opportunities.

When you live in different languages, when you cross languages and cultures, these issues become even more obvious. Language is where I was born, the home I lost, the apartment where I live now, the room I returned to when I translate, the city I visited when I studied German, the neighbor’s house I see from my window but have never visited.

Ionesco wrote “The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice Chauve)” while trying to learn English. As I understand it, he used an English primer for French speakers, L’anglais sans peine (“English without pain or toil”) put out by the French company Assimil (as in “assimilation”). He first considered L’anglais sans peine as the title for the piece. English primers inform my work—the role learning English plays in becoming an American, with all its implications.

The quote from “The Bald Soprano” is both funny and dark. The play isn’t about assimilation or immigrants, but as a French playwright writing English characters, those themes found their way into the work. In our current climate, the quote seems especially apt for what many immigrants are experiencing.

Eppinger: The poems are evocative and no doubt sound beautiful when read aloud. Still, the shape of each poem on the page is striking—“Mihrab,” “Peeling the Seed (Part 2)” and the title poem come to mind right away. When drafting a poem, do you have a vision of how it will look on paper? Or is the sound of the words more important at first?

Bassiri: The form of the poem is very important to me. It is like the meter. You can’t avoid it, so why not consider it seriously? I am always searching for the proper container. Like many poets, I cast the poem in different forms to see what happens. For example, the prose poems in the chapbook were once lines of verse. “Majnun” was once a sonnet in fourteen lines.

For me, traditional forms like sonnets and more experimental forms like concrete poems have a lot in common. They are both containers that limit and shape the words. The container can be visual or aural. For example, with “Peeling the Seed” I wanted to have the visual sense of two different peelings, as if you are peeling the orange first (part 1), and then the seed (with the erasure in part 2). At one point, the original shape of the poem resembled an orange.

Sound also provides a container. I love soundscapes like anaphora. The poem “How to Build a Bomb,” for example, used the anaphora “Say …” In the end, I took most of them out. But the original directive formed the container that made the poem possible.

Eppinger:  I have this hunch that the alignment of the text in “Mihrab” is meant to evoke a prone posture of prayer. Am I right about that? Are the words of this poem praying?

Bassiri: Actually, with “Mihrab,” I was thinking more literally of the niche in the mosque wall that indicates the direction of Mecca. The wall is the page, and the direction is East. Persian is also written from right to left.

But, yes, it is supposed to evoke a prayer, with every two syllables being like the prayer beads of a Muslim tasbih—itself a form of zikr, a repetition of short utterances. Words are the mihrab.

Eppinger: That titular poem, “99 Names of Exile,” strikes me every time I read it. Racial epithets and concepts like “Dirty” and “Forsaken” are listed as three columns of text, ostensibly defining “Exile.” Both “Villain” and “Victim” appear on the list, one of many contradictions. Also listed: “Unspeakable, Unthinkable, Untouchable.” Back to the Ionesco—can exile be named?

Bassiri: It is impossible to limit the scope of what exile means or who a person in exile is. Exile encompasses many things.

We can do the same thing with the word “immigrant.” What do these words conjure in our mind? How have they been manipulated to limit or define immigrants and their experiences? I am hoping the use of alliterations like “dis” and “un” reinforces the absence, the undoing of the names, the exile that happens inside the words by pinning a label like “un.”

The inspiration for the poem comes from the 99 names of God in Islam. The names work as labels and attributes, encompassing a much broader range of words than one may imagine. We have “most merciful” and “most kind,” “the first” and “the last,” as well as “the avenger” and “the destroyer.” God is, of course, beyond any specific attribute. The best we can do is to produce a field of words for our idea of god.

Eppinger: I’ve read and reread “Invention of I” several times, drawn to both its power and its playfulness. The poem is broken into two sections, seemingly comparing one language to another.
Part 1 is set up like:
“In Farsi, if you take bread from a verb, you make history.

In English, for a perfect past, it isn’t enough to exist, you must have things.”

Part 2 takes this form:

“In English, we capture with an army of nouns.

In Persian, we guard them with the veil of adjectives.”

Clearly there is a lot more going on here than the feel of a language—culture, history, religion, geopolitical power and more are wrapped up into speaking a language in a specific time and place. Is it difficult to capture all these other forces that bubble up when learning or speaking different languages?

Bassiri: I do hope the poem conjures different possibilities in the minds of the readers. I don’t expect them to come up with the exact references, though usually I have specific things in mind.

A number of sentences start with a play on grammar. For instance, the Part 2 example you mentioned has to do with the use of adjectives in Persian and the emphasis on nouns in English. I remember one of my issues when I first started to write papers in English was the overuse of adjectives, as if I didn’t trust the nouns. I am always amazed by how many nouns there are in the English language. But the reference goes beyond just nouns and adjectives. In Iran there are many veils in our customs, not just the women’s hijab. For example, Iranians also use a complex web of civility, called taarof, that produces another layer in conversations.

One more thing I should mention is that the poem begins with “in Farsi” because it evokes the time I grew up in Iran and was learning English. The Iranian language is called “Farsi” in Iran.

The second part is a reflection of my life in America, where English is my main language and the Iranian language is called Persian. The debate over whether we should call my native tongue Persian or Farsi has been going on for a while. Many of my friends insist that we should use “Persian” because that is the name in English, the way we use German and not Deutsch.

But I’m not making any specific point about this politicized topic. My use is more a reflection of my personal experience of this change and the role the languages played in my life.

Eppinger: The speaker in your poem “Alarm” describes living in California while many of his family members are in Tehran, including a sister who has gone missing. It contains the line, “We contain no message, are no messenger.” What a devastating sentiment—to be exiled from the ability to decipher language, or from sense of purpose. Are grief and exile necessarily the same thing, or are they different?

Bassiri: Being an immigrant means different things to different people. Immigrants cope with the experience of exile in their own ways. For Iranian-Americans, the experience is determined by such socio-political events as the Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War (one of modern history’s longest conventional wars), September 11, the sanctions against Iran, the Muslim ban. My own experience has been shaped by all of these events, whether I’m talking about my sister going to jail as a political prisoner when I was young or about my wife not being able to join me because of the travel ban now.

Eppinger: I am wondering if you could talk about the influences you drew from while creating the poems of this chapbook.

Bassiri: For a long time, I didn’t want to write anything about my heritage as an Iranian or about being an Iranian-American. Maybe because I didn’t want to be reminded of or to engage with the negative media coverage. I also didn’t want to be an immigrant poet or to be labeled as one. I wanted to write like the great American poets I admired, such as Stevens, Eliot, Bishop, Plath, Ashbery, etc. I remember (to my embarrassment now) during a workshop with Merwin, he was trying to encourage me to study and learn from the great classical Persian poets like Hafez, Rumi, and Ferdowsi. I told him that I wanted to write like him and that I left Persian culture behind a long time ago and had no interest to go back.

It was during my MFA at Sarah Lawrence College that I decided to write about my experience as an Iranian-American, though I was uncomfortable. I am still uncomfortable. I don’t want to write what is expected. I don’t want to repeat the same clichés, be a spokesman for Iran or Iranians, or try to gain empathy or publication because of political circumstances. However, I also don’t want to deny my heritage or to avoid writing about something that matters to me. I need to write responsibly.

To write these poems, I experimented and found inspiration in many immigrant writers: Charles Simic, Li-Young Lee, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Agha Shahid Ali, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Etel Adnan. Gloria Anzaldúa is also a hero. African-American poets are among my greatest models—how so many expand the language while addressing important issues of identity and the socio-political condition in America. They are a great foundation for American poetry. I read widely and am influenced by many different styles, but reading poets of color gave me the courage to write the poems in this chapbook.

I have to say that, in the past few years, we have a lot of amazing young poets who are doing great work. I think they are redefining the shape of American poetry. I am in awe of all the talent. It is a very exciting time.

Eppinger: I agree! Finally, what are you working on now and how can we see more of your work?

Bassiri: First, I want to thank you for the interview and the thoughtful questions, Laura.

After working on the chapbook, I started to put together a manuscript built on the same themes. I am also working on another chapbook. My most recent poems are based on my visits to Iran in the past few years. I am not sure where they are taking me. For this year, I am focusing more on translation, however, including translating the poetry of a contemporary Iranian woman writer, Roya Zarrin, for which I got a 2019 fellowship from the NEA.

Laura Eppinger is the Managing Editor at Newfound Journal.

Cover photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

The post Naming Exile: an interview with Kaveh Bassiri appeared first on Newfound.

The speaker diffuses bits of herself and her very visceral memories to a friend, lover or regular haunt, but it also clear she has absorbed parts of these people and places into herself as well. Indeed, the collection opens with a poem FROM a Goodwill, which is a perspective I’d never imagined correspondence from before.

A decades-long friendship is celebrated in “Letter to Kelly from the Memory of Har Mar Mall,” recalling scenes like:

Do ​you remember going public braless? I can’t
but I can’t undo the truth of flesh-and-blood photographs.
Rip them and the smallest shreds contain atoms of the youth.

Intimate recollections like this suggest that the speaker’s life has fused with the people in it on the atomic level.

“Diffusely Yours” is a work about locations and personal memories, but also the speaker’s own body. Again from “Letter to Kelly from the Memory of Har Mar Mall,”

Spider
veins remind me of heaven and they’re reality now
that I’m 30, joke age turned real.

These poems witness a changing and aging body, and yet the intellectual or emotional connections made along the way remain constant.

The memories shared throughout this chapbook could come across as inside jokes that most readers are on the outside of. But the language is so sharp that the specifics illuminated actually point to broader, even universal, truths.

I think my favorite in this collection is “Letter to a Wife from an Almost-Wife,” in the voice of a guest at the wedding of an ex. The speaker is sloppy but still elated.

We will always need mothers
because we can’t sew zippers ourselves, will
always love thrifting for the romantic salvage
& rescue vibes. I’m writing on your two-thirds
anniversary because every month needs fresh
champagne.

“Romantic salvage” is an intriguing turn of phrase and, I would argue, the nucleus of the project that is Diffusely Yours.

Kate Garklavs lives and works in Portland, OR. Her work has appeared in Juked, apt, Leveler, Tammy, and The Airgonaut, among other places. She’s the prose editor for the Submission reading series. She tweets @ueberkatester.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post “Diffusely Yours” by Kate Garklavs Suggests We Are All Connected on an Atomic Level appeared first on Newfound.

I live in Asbury Park, New Jersey. I don’t know what it means. I just got here.

I moved to a shore town to be closer to work during the final crescendo of summer. On an evening walk last month I overheard a child complain to his mother that it was still too hot, even after sundown. She joked, “We’ll have to start vacationing in Alaska.”

I cannot imagine being a person who uses “vacation” as a verb, let alone doing that verb.

The summer I turned 17 I ran away from home to catch a punk festival in this town. I nearly got ripped off by a phony scalper before the show, who tried to get me to fork over $70 for a yellow bumper sticker. It was a special kind of ticket he said, a new promotion. I didn’t buy it. I know I looked young, but I didn’t want to look gullible. After the concert let out I waited at the train station among people getting progressively more stoned as they lay on the ground.

I was grounded for the rest of that summer.

Labor Day means so many things.

It’s much more complicated here. Beach tourism infuses cash into this area between Memorial Day and Labor Day, but that cash is brought in by tourists. There’s a mean acronym for northern folks who come here to clog the roads with their cars and the beaches with their bodies, umbrellas, voices, tanning oil and brassy accents: BENNY. It means people from Bayonne-Elizabeth-Newark-New York.

You can read BENNY GO HOME! on bumper stickers, t-shirts and fridge magnets. I’m already sick of hearing my neighbors complain about them. (Them? Me? Did I stop being a BENNY when I moved in August 1?)

Labor Day is supposed to be a holiday for laborers, after all. But since it’s the last hurrah for holiday-makers, it’s a big weekend for local employees to make money. Many restaurants or other food service joints tell job-seekers they are not allowed to take or request this weekend off. There’s no time for irony when all your cash-cows are about to leave till next summer.

Lately I’ve been intrigued by an odd bit of local history: the shipwreck of the Morro Castle in 1934. This luxury cruise liner was returning its revelers and honeymooners to New York after a stop in Cuba—before embargoes and travel restrictions. It was returning from an Orientalist fantasy of tropical paradise.

Cruise director Robert Smith had all the of promises of the cruise line’s brochure memorized, and he would welcome each new crop of passengers aboard by reciting these lines. Amazing revelation, tropical luxuriance, a world of flowers, unique hospitality – all phrases from the cruise ship’s promotional material.

The ship’s staff felt a lot of the same pains that contemporaries in Asbury voice today.

One passenger recalled an unpleasant experience in the ship’s dining room, “I asked for a couple of lamb chops. The waiter said they weren’t on the menu so they couldn’t be served. I reminded him this was first class. He shrugged as if he couldn’t have cared less. I insisted, so he went away and eventually returned with the chops. In one was a nail that had obviously been slipped in after the meat was cooked.”

I have worked in food service and am proud to say I have never messed with any customer’s food as revenge. I’ve also never had anyone badger me with, “This is first class.” I don’t imagine I’d react well in that case.

An awful night, the sinking. September 8, 1934, a fire broke out and ravaged the ship. At 3 a.m., passengers awoke to the smell of smoke but assumed it came from more drunken trash fires, set by the careless ashing of cigarettes into wastebaskets. The S.O.S. call was delayed by 45 minutes due to a chain-of-command misunderstanding and the crew, who had known for months that the lifeboats were decaying and largely ineffective, boggarted the effective survival tools and evacuated themselves first.

Why were the safety concerns, later described by the crew of the Morro Castle, not voiced during the August 1934 inspection of the ship? Two officers answered, “When making a living means not being difficult, then you are not difficult.”

How uncanny today to read the names of familiar towns as theaters of this tragedy. The S.O.S. came off the coast of Sea Grit. Some survivors paddled their way to Point Pleasant (often using corpses as buoys), walked off onto the beach, and told onlookers they had just escaped hell.

The next morning, beaches in places like Manasquan and Brielle drew so many rubber-neckers as debris washed ashore that vendors set up carts to sell them morning coffee and then hot dogs.

This was the end-of-season tourist boom after all.

Asbury Park city officials actually asked if the abandoned ship could be towed to its own shores and left as a tourist attraction. The death toll of this tragedy was 134 lives, the vast majority of them passengers. (Pleasure-seekers!)

The two ships attempting to tug the still smoldering wreck of the Morro Castle found themselves in their own comedy of errors. The ship doing the towing experienced engine failure and the venture was abandoned. The anchor was cut loose and the Morro Castle did indeed run aground on the beach at Asbury Park.

It landed only 300 feet away from a local radio station, which gave a blow-by-blow account of the wreck’s approach. This sparked even more curiosity and drew a larger crowd to gape. (And dine. And shop.) One resident has been recorded as remarking to Mayor Carl Bischoff, “This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to us. They’re going to come from all over to see it.”

Tourists with disposable income: loved, hated, needed.

History isn’t the end-all-be-all of who we are. But I’ve been drawn, in part, to the Morro Castle’s presence in my new beachy hometown, and what it reveals about the culture of this place almost 100 years ago.

I have recently learned that here, September is nicknamed “Local Summer.” The days are still hot enough to walk the boardwalk or lay on the beach. Outdoor dining and concerts are still options. There will be fewer vacationers to fight for space with, is all.

This is my first Local Summer as a local, I suppose. I got here as the BENNIES go home. I can’t tell if I am one or if I am home.

Source for information on the sinking of the Morro Castle: “Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle” by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Labor Day in a Beach Town and What It Means appeared first on Newfound.

I’m learning to kick that controlling brain to the backseat and just let instinct allow words to tumble onto the page. – Jen Soriano

Eppinger: My first question is about genre. What do you consider the genre of “Making the Tongue Dry” to be? Elliptical prose? Creative Nonfiction? Something else? Also—does genre matter to you?

Soriano: Genre definitely matters to me, but not in the conventional sense. I care about the ways genre descriptions can work to help readers understand what they are reading. But I don’t care about genre as a rigid container that writers must fit our writing within.

So, to help readers understand my chapbook I guess I’d describe it as lyric essay and hybrid nonfiction. It’s important to me to name that it’s nonfiction because I’m deliberately trying to capture actuality on the page. Each essay in the chapbook grapples with an aspect of reality as I see it.

The title essay “Making the Tongue Dry” is a reflection on what I see to be the connections between capitalism and climate change. The essay “A Brief History of Her Pain” is an exploration of the centuries-long mistreatment of sick women and women healers.

I’d add “lyric” and “hybrid” to “essay” and “nonfiction” because although the chapbook is nonfiction, it’s not strictly nonfiction in the sense of reportage or even conventional memoir or essay. Judith Kitchen once wrote that for an essay to be lyric, there must be a lyre. I try to aspire to that sense of music in my nonfiction writing. And in terms of hybridity, the chapbook has moments of poetry, echoes of mythology, and quite a bit of speculation on possible new realities to come.

The point in this work is that living with humanity is a choice. Especially at a time like this… – Jen Soriano

Eppinger: The language used throughout this manuscript is fresh and immediate. Are your first drafts this alive? Wondering what your editing process is like, and if you have any advice to share on writing and/or editing.

Soriano: Thank you for saying so! I’m not sure I’d describe my first drafts as alive. More like … unruly.

I’ve worked with three mentors over the past three years—Julie Marie Wade, Kent Meyers and Barrie Jean Borich—who have all encouraged me to surrender to the freewrite of the first draft. That can be hard for me because I have kind of a controlling brain. But I’m learning to kick that controlling brain to the backseat and just let instinct allow words to tumble onto the page. The result is often pages upon pages of content that is less pleasantly meandering than it is a swampy, mucky, overflowing sort of primal goo.

So I guess my advice would be to restrain the thinking brain and allow your gut to exude onto the page. Then let that gut-goo sit for a few days or weeks before you climb back in and embrace it. Editing for me has felt like getting in all the way up to your hips and wading through the goo to fish out the gems.

Then I go to a corner away from the goo and hoard those gems; I start with them on a new blank page and try to follow their shine.

Eppinger: Big social issues come up in this manuscript—domestic violence, the creation of the atom bomb, the crisis in the lack of affordable housing and the drug trade are mentioned in Part 1, “Blow,” alone. Was it your intent to illuminate how implicated we all are in broader issues, or did they surprise you by creeping into your work?

Soriano: That was most definitely my intent, so I’m glad it came through. I’m delighted to hear your reflection on all the issues you saw come up in “Blow.” It’s interesting that you note the issue of domestic violence because that’s an example of an issue I didn’t intend to tackle, but that crept in because I was describing the actuality of what it was like to live below our landlord who also happened to be a druglord. In contrast, I did set out deliberately to juxtapose the creation of the atom bomb with the perpetuation of the drug trade to explore complicity in larger destructive cycles.

I would say I became a writer because of big social issues and so it follows that all of my writing will be about big social issues in some way. We are all shaped by and implicated in larger social issues, whether we realize it or not. And for me writing is a powerful tool to help us look at these issues in new ways.

There is so much wrong with this world that I have a deep desire to change, and writing about the need for change is one of the ways I can manage how painful it can be to be woke and moving through the world as a womxn of color. On the flipside of the same coin, writing on big issues is also one of my favorite ways to celebrate the power and resilience involved with moving through the world as a woke womxn of color.

Eppinger: I sense that this line in Part 2, “Making the Tongue Dry,” is a guidepost through the entire work: “Is this a natural human impulse? To desire bubbles even though they burst?” This project seems haunted by the need to pursue hope and beauty (an infant son is ever-present) even though the harsh world makes this seem futile. … Am I getting this right?

Soriano: Haunted is the perfect word. If there is any one thing that has driven this work, it is the haunting feeling I have as a new mother that I have an important role to play in setting examples for my son that will either encourage him to perpetuate harmful status quos, or encourage him to choose a different path. It’s a frightening sort of accountability.

And you’re right about the work exploring the twin impulses of destructiveness and the pursuit of beauty, and at the heart of this is hope for transformative change.

It’s not just the world that makes this scale of change futile, people make it seem futile. I mean, people often suck. Like what Gandhi supposedly said about how Western Civilization would be a good idea, it seems to me that humanity would be a good idea too.

The point in this work is that living with humanity is a choice. Especially at a time like this, when the government is growing increasingly sadistic, separating babies and toddlers from their parents, banning entire religious populations from entering the country, declaring open season for violent white racists, stripping women of the dignity to control our own bodies, we have to remember that we can still choose to live with integrity and to resist the currents that would have us throw our own humanity and others’ under the bus.

Eppinger: Finally, what are you working on now, and where can we get updates from you?

Soriano: I’m still looking for a publisher for the chapbook and have it circulating through a number of competitions. Speaking of hope, I’m still hopeful that I can land a press and get “Making the Tongue Dry” out there in the world!

I’m also working on turning my MFA thesis into a book manuscript. It’s about the human nervous system and how intergenerational trauma becomes imprinted in our nerves. My father was a neurosurgeon, and ironically I grew up with an altered nervous system which has recently been diagnosed as Central Sensitivity Syndrome, a hypersensitization of the central nervous system. In the book I trace this journey with my neurodivergent system back to impacts of Spanish, Japanese and American colonialism in the Philippines, and explore the ways that the science of neural plasticity and the research of Native American and Black American scholars can teach us lessons about how to reorganize society—toward no less than healing scars as deep as genocide, as deep as enslavement, as deep as cultural annihilation.

So yah, you know, just looking at some of the smaller social issues like that. Lightweight material.

I live for connection with readers so if folks want to connect, they can follow and message me on twitter or instagram @lionswrite or check out my website jensoriano.net.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Making the Tongue Dry: An Interview with Prose Prize Finalist Jen Soriano appeared first on Newfound.

“Assertion” may be too strong a word. These 12 short-short stories employ what I suspect is purposefully dull and vague language, creating characters numbed by the constant stimulation of modern American society. Narrators (often unnamed) drift through recreation activities but don’t have any fun—they don’t feel much of anything. The sparse language evokes Kerouac, but with a more limited vocabulary.

“A Very Small Forest Fire” opens with the titular piece, where a stoned narrator seemingly sleepwalks through roller coaster spins and a theme park evacuation due to fire. Our protagonist was riding the park’s tallest ride while the fire broke out, but not even this woke up his senses. He reports,

We went out towards the parking lot, filled with trucks and crowds of people staring at them. This went on for several hours. We left to go to the bathroom and get hamburgers.

Kerouac’s biography comes to mind again during “Defecation,” a flash piece about a youngish man milling around unhappily in his parents’ house after a move home when college ended. That discomfort of returning to the suburbs after a cigarette-fueled adventure through less manicured places is present here and it was essential to the disjointed existence of Jack Kerouac. (Kerouac’s relationship to his mother: So. Weird.)

Throughout these stories, zoned-out characters are surrounded by books, computers and television programs but don’t focus on anything very closely. Not even food holds any pleasure in the universe of “A Very Small Forest Fire.” I struggle to imagine a less inviting meal than this one described in “Calling Back Home”:

She went to the kitchen. Fried chicken from the night before was left in the fridge. She microwaved it. She scooped some potato salad onto the plate, pushed aside some of the pot to make room at the table, lathered the potato salad and fried chicken in hot sauce.

This artless style is most convincing when delivered by a first-person narrator. It is easy for a reader to believe that these characters experience their own surroundings in fragments and could only describe them in broad strokes. When an omniscient third-person narrator is employed, the delivery is frustrating. The sentiments ring false. Again from “Calling Back Home”:

Patti quit smoking and drinking after her son was born. One reason was she didn’t want to set a bad example. A deeper reason was that she no longer felt the need to fill those desires. She held Donnie in her arms in the maternity ward and felt nothing else mattered in the world.

Probably every mother on the planet would call shenanigans on this. We humans write about motherhood a lot (A LOT) and it is never this neat or easy to describe. The notion that motherhood obliterates all desire isn’t new but it also isn’t authentic.

The most effective piece in this collection is “Everyday Mr. Kent,” formatted as a journal entry of the exclusively trivial aspects in a day in the life of one Mr. Clark Kent, reporter for “The Daily Planet.”  Superman isn’t called into action on this day, so regular old Clark lolls in ennui. He thinks about his own arc:

He imagines someone making a movie about his every day. It would reject all the tenets of conventional literature: plot, character, setting, conflict. It would focus on a man, but not the man as a character, but as an idea. The idea would be profound and simple and normal and real at the same time. There wouldn’t be any romance or drama or arch. It would just be a man, who was just an idea, which wasn’t ever defined, but rather, merely, felt.

This is actually what this story achieves, though perhaps another reason this works is that readers are likely quite familiar with Superman’s back story, so we can plug in the gaps in storytelling. Also, the corresponding cartoon illustrations help convey more ambience and setting.

I’ll leave it up to other readers to determine if the short works collected in “A Very Small Forest Fire,” resolutely minimalist and solipsistic, succeed in any other goals: breaking new ground, entertaining readers, maintaining interest. Though I suppose these characters would snooze through any critique, anyway.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Small fires, dulled senses in the short fiction of Andrew Duncan Worthington appeared first on Newfound.

Characters have the darkest corners of their minds exposed (through their own admissions or by omniscient narrators) and what comes forth is usually disagreeable. At the same time, well-trodden narratives about immigration are upended regularly.

The main character in “Jagatishwaran” is a woman who refuses to feel gratitude for or awe of a sister who has emigrated to the U.S. “But it’s my sister who’s the smart one, the doctor lady,” she rants to the reader.

“She thinks of us as dull-witted rice eaters waiting for her borrowed Anglo china plates and blue jeans, silk ties and pantyhose, perfume in fish shaped bottles, white linen napkins and forks so we won’t eat with our hands, expensive bolts of brilliant cloth—smelling slightly of glue, precious…”

This character has holed herself up behind screened partitions on her family’s property where she covertly smokes cigarettes, listens to news programs from the West, and grows increasingly paranoid. It’s as if “Notes from the Underground” was written by a South Asian woman instead of a preachy-Christian Russian man. Safe to say this story is not like anything I’d ever read and I liked being jolted awake by something fresh.

The collection opens with the titular story, on a disorienting note: a woman walks out into London rain. London isn’t quaint—it’s confusing:

“Things are never named reliably, I understand. Boots is not a shop where shoes are sold; Monsoon has nothing to do with India. W.H. Smith isn’t a person but a generic chain of newsstands selling cheap sandwiches and tabloid rags and things called “health foods” like tiger balm, which isn’t made from tigers at all.”

This narrator is just as unreliable, eventually revealing that she is having a miscarriage. She also shares her denial of this fact, by trying to imagine herself still pregnant. The narrator is addressing the fetus lost, with the same raw emotion of Diane di Prima’s “Brass Furnace Going Out.”

One thread that connects each story in this collection is women in pain, South Asian women in the Global North in particular. No matter their particular ailment, characters are flesh and blood and unmistakably human—never fantastical or exotic. Their bodies are real. Their pain feels real.

There are no easy outs here and magical realism won’t save us. “The Story of the Woman Who Fell in Love with Death” starts off written like a myth. Then a modern day reader inside a Starbucks comes into focus. This precocious young man has an older sister—often a victim of violence inside their family home—who has disappeared. The brutalities of life are not glossed over or redeemed by surreal elements or pretty language.

One of Bhuvaneswar’s strengths is developing emotional connections between characters that are clever and subtle. “A Shaker Chair” is narrated by psychoanalyst Sylvia, who at once disdains her patient Maya for paying for her sessions with “bedraggled wads of cash that looked like the contents of the cash register at some filthy curry restaurant,” but also knows that this money can fuel Sylvia’s penchant for rosewood, teak or bamboo furniture—luxuries from Asian culture. Sylvia herself is biracial and surprised at the ugly stereotypes of Asian women she has absorbed and must unpack outside of her sessions with Maya.

These are complex scenarios, to be sure. Each character has a rich and vast inner life, making them seem real. Still, diving into these lives can be overwhelming, especially when Bhuvaneswar delivers lots of information and it all feels emotionally charged.

From “Shaker Chair” again, consider this one paragraph:

“Sylvia’s mother hadn’t grown up hearing language like that about Indians. Sylvia’s grandmother was an old white Democratic fundraiser. Sylvia’s Virginia-born grandfather, the descendant of slaves who’d escaped. Sylvia’s mother listened carefully to Sylvia’s uncharacteristic condemnation of affluent, educated Maya with her Indian doctor parents, listened to Sylvia say ‘this patient’ in an irritated tone of voice—complaining about how offensive it was to have cash dumped on the table every session. About how Maya must think of Sylvia as being a black cleaning lady.”

Those are five densely packed sentences. It can feel like information overload, or like reading a psychoanalyst’s patient chart. Indeed, this story in particular lists all the ways the interactions between these two women are complicated and uncomfortable.

The unspoken rivalry between these two characters does escalate into a disturbing conflict. I believe the 30 pages of exposition leading to this action pays off—but other readers may not hang on throughout all of the psychological profiles to make it to the climax.

I say: steel yourself to go to those deep, dark parts of the internal lives of South Asian women, and let Bhuvaneswar’s emotional subtleties fascinate and challenge you.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Deep journeys into the psyche with Chaya Bhuvaneswar appeared first on Newfound.

Only recently have I realized that Springsteen is often misunderstood—most gravely by his loyal fan base.

Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential campaign was decidedly not granted permission to use “Born in the U.S.A.” as a theme song, and even today, YouTube videos for songs like “My Hometown” are deluged with barely literate and overtly racist Pro-Trump comments. (If you go searching for what I am talking about, don’t say I didn’t warn you!)

For our part, New Jersey residents can be so blinded by our hometown pride that we don’t actually listen to what the Boss is saying. (To be fair, his mumbly singing voice can be hard to understand.)

One of the most healing things I have ever done, and I mean EVER, to make peace with where I grew up and who I grew up around, is rediscovering Springsteen as an adult. Settle in with the liner notes, because this will be enlightening.

Let’s take him at his word: Springsteen’s memoir “Born to Run” (Simon & Schuster, 2016) details the nostalgia and fear of change that he came of age amidst:

“I was a child of Vietnam-era America, of the Kennedy, King and Malcolm X assassinations. The country was no longer the innocent place it was said to be in the Eisenhower fifties. Political murder, economic injustice and institutionalized racism were all powerfully and brutally present.”

This, he tells us in his own words, was the backdrop to his six-month creative process that resulted in the song “Born to Run.”

Why didn’t anybody tell me this sooner?! I had associated him with all the adults who made me feel like an outsider growing up in the Jersey of the 1980s and ’90s. I thought he fit right in with the mini-vans, the leering soccer coaches, the xenophobia and the suburbs. I wasn’t listening closely.

As I am certain Our Brucie knows, the working class or struggling families of the Garden State (or, anywhere) can feel threatened by political upheaval or the unknown. His memoir details the times he was refused service at restaurants or rides as a hitchhiker because his long hair marked him as a member of the counterculture. I’m sure nobody was as surprised as he when the closed-minded residents of NJ factory towns who long derided him became his fan base. (He uses the term “rednecks” frequently throughout his life story to describe the backlash he faced in Freehold and other NJ coast towns.)

Springsteen worked hard to secure radio play and Top 40 hits. Accomplishing this meant he became part of fans’ summer vacation, teenage boardwalk, first-love-in-a-fast-car memories. Those raging hormones and funnel cake stomach aches were a distraction from the lyrics, or the deeper philosophy of the songwriter or the songs.

These 1970s teenagers had a Simple Bruce, all teased hair and denim. And oh man, he’s singing about where we’re from! I know where that sign for Madam Marie’s fortune telling booth is! Nobody famous has ever mentioned US before!

Those teenage rock fans from the ’70s grew up, settled down, and likely stayed in New Jersey. They had kids. (They had me.) They taught their children to dance in the living room on Sunday mornings to songs like “Working on the Highway,” reminding them that if they jumped too hard, the record would skip.

In some Springsteen-fan households (though I am lucky to say: not mine), children were brought up to defend racist thinking and segregated barriers, ignoring things like how radical it was for the E-Street Band to be composed of 50% African American and 50% white members in the fraught 1970s in Asbury Park, NJ. Parents who claim to love The Boss also rear kids to tear down anyone different. (YOU try being a bookish tomboy in a small-town Catholic school in 1997. Your classmates would verbally and physically beat you up. You’d crack.)

No one ever pointed out, at least in front of me, that these were poor ambassadors of the E Street Shuffle.

No more! Turns out I’m not too evolved or mature to feel justified by learning that I have always been on the same side the Bard of New Jersey, champion of the oddballs and dreamers, Our Sweet Springsteen, AMEN.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post You Don’t Understand Bruce Springsteen appeared first on Newfound.

It’s hard for me to write about horror without drawing from deeply personal childhood experiences with classic TV and film. When I was 10 years old, the 1962 episode of “The Twilight Zone” called To Serve Man played on my family TV. My father cheered! I had to watch this! (He also recommended I read Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” in high school, as the scariest book he’d ever read. AGREED.)

(SPOILER ALERT although my friends, you have had 56 years to watch this.) This classic episode presents one possible scenario for human contact with an extra-terrestrial species: The aliens, called Kanamits, claim to want to help earthlings thrive but have ulterior motives. The episode ends with our protagonist trapped on a spaceship and awaiting a certain death.

The waiting seemed unbearable. I sat with the heaviness of the knowledge of doom. (I was a very fun child.) I was not OK for a long time after that screening, even though there was no gore. Not one single drop of blood was spilled on-screen, but I was terrified of that character’s death.

An even earlier memory: Watching “Gojira” (1954), the Japanese film about the unintended horrors of nuclear war which gave birth to the monster I learned to call “Godzilla.” One of my favorite principles of this movie is that the audience does not see the monster until the very end. Instead we see Gojira’s destruction, his footprint and the evidence of his appetite. All of this suggests his power and brutality.

We don’t even need to see him, because we are building a monster in our minds out of all our own personal greatest fears.

The scene that made me walk out of the room and beg for the VHS to go back to Blockbuster lies in the beginning of “Gojira.” Two journalists try to uncover the phenomenon terrorizing Japanese fishing boats by visiting a lab to learn about radioactivity. They are given a demonstration in a fish tank. At first, healthy fish swim as usual. Then, the lights go out. When they come back on, the fish tank is empty.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FISH?!

Absolutely nothing could have upset me more, because my mind came up with horrifying answers, or decided that the answer was too terrible to even consider.

This birthed my own philosophy of horror: Show less, it’s scarier that way.

To this day I don’t like gore, and for all my swooning over tortured, humanist vampires, the sight of blood in real life makes me dizzy. The elements of horror that draw me in could be accomplished with a low film studio budget and a few sleights of hand. Here are the notions that will always rankle me:

• When the rules I’d taken for granted are somehow suspended, or do not apply. (Simply put: Make me shook. This is the stated purpose of “The Twilight Zone.”)
• Being trapped in my own mind with no escape. (Why yes, I am also obsessed with “Black Mirror.”)
• The notion that something is hidden from my own view, because it is too horrifying to show. The things my mind will invent are so much worse than any director could show on screen, I assure you. (H.P. Lovecraft knows what I am talking about.)

So you can keep the gross-out “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises, I am not interested. All I want is a low-budget peek into a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You don’t have to show the monster.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post “The Twilight Zone” taught me everything I need to know about horror appeared first on Newfound.

Tomorrow is a holiday. If you can, take a break.

I hope that you care for yourself today. You need your strength. I hope that you get involved in activism and advocacy. We need your voice. I hope that you prioritize your writing or other creative output in 2018. We need your work.

I hope that you take a breath. This post will likely take you less than five minutes to read. Breathing is encouraged while you scroll through it.

The rest of this space will be filled with photographs from various hiking trails in Arizona alongside facts about the peoples and ecosystems of this region. Please enjoy this, if you can spare the time:

In what became the Grand Canyon but was not yet the Grand Canyon 10,000 years ago, there lived a single species of squirrel. When the split in the earth became too deep and too wide for this animal to cross, two separate species started to evolve. Today there are North Rim and South Rim squirrels, with different colored fur and degrees of tail bushiness. This is called speciation.

We can date rock carvings, human artifacts or other desert phenomena because of a bacteria called desert varnish. To the human eye it looks like black paint dripping. It isn’t.

Desert varnish has been utilized by human populations to keep records, express the human experience, and track stargazing and other cosmological occurrences for thousands of years. Carve away the black minerals left behind by this bacteria’s life cycle to reveal a lighter surface underneath. The contrast between light and dark makes lettering or pictures possible. Communication and record-keeping are possible.

Rock carvings dated between 600 – 1400 B.C.E. at V Bar V were recently understood to, in part, contain a solar calendar. On the 21st of each month, a different carving is illuminated by a sun dagger. Other petroglyphs, created by Hopi ancestors, remain difficult to interpret.

Agave is the spiky desert plant native to the Americas; aloes are spiky, arid, African plants. They look alike but they evolved similarly yet separately. This is called convergent evolution.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Desert Photographs and Facts appeared first on Newfound.

This week I found an antidote in photography-prose hybrid Blind Spot by Teju Cole (Random House, 2017).

A gorgeous collection of color photography and evocative text, Blind Spot shook me awake from dormancy. Each photo is titled with the location it was taken, featuring datelines like Venice, London, Lagos and Beirut. The accompanying text sometimes introduces the picture or refers to previous shots. Other times, the text muses on a philosophical idea, classical painting, or bit of music where the reader is left to connect the words to the image. (I was pleased to learn that Cole is a fan of both Bjork and Beck, among others.)

Try this: Take a long look at this picture. What catches your eye? What do you make of the clay-colored mound behind the red fence?

At first, I assumed the mound was rubble from a construction site. Something ugly and inconvenient, maybe a new structure being built or a current one undergoing maintenance. Then I read the text of “Piz Corvatsch,” revealing that the seeming pile of rocks is actually the highest peak of the Bernina Alps.

I gasped! How could I have breezed through the picture and interpreted it as mundane? My own assumptions served as a blind spot in this case.

After another look I delighted in the angle of the shot. Cole reminds us that in this perspective, a mound of snow takes up as much space in the photo as the mountain.

Here is one of the “Lagos” shots, which held my attention for hours.

There is a mirror here, but where? The edges are well-hidden. The corresponding text recounts the author’s childhood memory of being challenged to write so neatly in school notebooks that nothing would be crossed out or interrupted. I turned the phrase “smoothed out” over and over in my head as I went back to the photo, looking for a seam.

This is not to suggest that Blind Spot is simply a collection of brain teasers to incite the imagination. Cole takes on blindness and vulnerability, thus invisibility, in bold or jarring ways throughout the book. For one example, one of the longest bits of writing details the undocumented immigrant experience for Black Ethiopian women living and working in Beirut. The text suggests issues of dress, disguise, visibility and vulnerability are worth exploring here.

On another page, a picture of a curtain over a doorway in Berlin is juxtaposed with text describing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay: the pants rolled at the cuff, the hoods to blind the prisoners but also to keep them from looking guards in the eye. These are not easy images to confront, though they are necessary and demand witness.

Still, my favorite pieces challenged like riddles, such as the text accompanying a photo of a man atop a tree in “Baalbek”:

The first time our ancestors climbed a tall tree, or came in a migrating band to the edge of a cliff, they experienced vertigo. Only hundreds of thousands of years later did we experience jet lag… Finally we had figured how to move across time faster than time moves across us. In epiphany, you’re neither here nor there. In jet lag, you’re in duple meter, both here and there at the same time.

While I face down dark December days, I find it a comfort to puzzle over experiences of space and time. (Maybe that’s just me.) A further endorsement of Blind Spot: I read this work slowly over the course of one week, and throughout that time I had much more vivid dreams.

If you dream of mirrors, labyrinths and photographs that leap off the page, read Teju Cole and seek out your own blind spots.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

Cover photo: “Queens” by Teju Cole

The post Teju Cole challenges us to locate our own “Blind Spot” appeared first on Newfound.