Fall 2022

Issue 14

poetry

NOBODY LIVES FOREVER UNLESS THEY

die and get life again or the real deal
according to religious folks up in
Heaven but I guess I'll find out what's what
one day that's not really a day because
I'll be dead and in the Afterlife or
so they say at Sunday School but I wish
that when I learn the truth even though I'll
be dead then I'll resurrect and tell all
the people what to expect, that should clear
up a lot of misunderstanding and 
fear and misgivings and so on and I
wonder sometimes why some dead soul hasn't
done so already, Jesus excepted,
somebody real I mean. I like Judas.

ONE DAY I'LL BE STANDING BEFORE THE THRONE

of Great God Almighty to get my soul
judged and He'll likely ask Aren't you the one
who took My name in vain all those times and
I won't lie, you can't bullshit God any
-way unless He wants your bullshit but
that's another matter so I'll say Yes,
depending on what Thou mean by in vain,
Thou sure weren't much good when I needed Thee
and we'll see how He likes that comeback--what
can He do but deliver me to Hell 
for Eternity and I'm headed there
anyhow. Oh, He could make me live a
-gain, then kill me twice or as much as He
wants. Of course, I could do the same to Him.

—GALE ACUFF

MORNING RUSH—METRO

I am sandwiched, feet planted for balance.
All these people and not a single conversation.

We are buried in cellphones and newspapers,
wearing scowls, blank stares, suits, skirts,
overcoats, ties, belts, lipstick, styling gel
earbuds, briefcases, purses, and ID badges.

And in the middle—a baby in a stroller
pumps her soft plump legs
reaches down with determined passion
and tugs off her right shoe.
Dad, her pilot for the day, can’t stop what happens next.
Blam! She throws it in front of the stroller,
a place he can’t reach.

The shoe sits,
a pretty blue gauntlet
on the drab gun-metal gray floor
at the feet of a scar-faced guy
in leather and chains.

After a few seconds, the guy bends to pick it up,
hands it back to Dad.
A wordless thanks, a nod.

L’Enfant Plaza is next.
The train stops.
Commuters rush off and on, and
Baby is oblivious to all but one thing.
Look! The orange and green stripes
of the tiny sock on her foot sing.
Off it comes. Down it goes.
Five perfect toes astonish the air.

Leather and chains cracks a smile.
The spiked hair guy with headphones grins.
The woolen cap guy with glasses, too.
Leatherman picks up the sweet soft thing
and hands it back to Dad. 

Pentagon next.
Train stops.
Suits and uniforms off and on.

We are riveted now, the core of us on board
who know this baby’s mission.
Her other foot is calling. 

The train accelerates. We hold our breath.
Off comes the left shoe. Down it goes.

We laugh out loud, and off comes the sock,
the last swift tactical snatch,
the final barrier removed.
Ten piggies do their victory dance
and now she croons and coos.

Oh Baby,
while we gather our briefcases
and button our coats
and step out into the cold air
to run or ruin this world,
sing that song for us,
the only one that matters,
that barefoot song
of joy.

—Mary Amato

CATCHING UP

We talk for an hour
about how you’ve quit booze again &

I’d have relapsed by now
if I knew any pushers.

You put down the bottle. You cried.
You went to a meeting. Is that enough?

I haven’t been to one in years &
would rather drown

in a swimming pool like Brian Jones.
Nobody’s happy, & I have a hole

in a brand-new sock, summing up a life
in which bliss feels broken.

—ACE BOGGESS

A COUPLE OF REDS

There were space restrictions. I was dealing with a hard copy, with finite pages. It wasn’t all going to make it, as much as I wanted it to. A lot hit the cutting-room floor, ended up in the trash. Still, I was pleased with the final draft, and I had reason to celebrate.  I went out with a friend, a guy friend.      It had been a long time for me.  I was emerging from that place called “Dead Inside.” We wore blue and black, blue on the bottom, black on top. We hit streets we both knew. We walked. He lit a cigarette, a Red, with a plastic lighter, and I thought, “Fuck it,” and bummed one off him. I hadn’t had one in 19 years. 2003 I quit because I had stopped enjoying it. I had had a kid, and I hadn’t liked what I had read about the hands of smoke. Call it cold turkey; call it a process. Just like that. And just like that… the relapse. I’d look back later at this event as an anomaly, a blip on the screen so to speak. He didn’t light mine with his lighter; he handed me his cigarette because we had that momentum going. The lit met the unlit, and I admit I liked the way the ends mashed in a collision, the two tobaccos ignited. We were thin; we never stopped walking. It was a new dance, balletic, imbued with a masculine grace. I felt an immediate buoyancy, an interest sparked. I also felt an end arise to the anonymity and the lonesomeness fathered by my grief. My lungs drew in the smoke like it was the freshest air ever. You know what I’m talking about if you’re an ex-smoker stepping out of retirement. As we passed this one house, we, at least I, noticed two young women on an ill-illumined porch. They must have witnessed our cigarette dance and our joy because they tittered. I felt their smiles had our backs. This was the attention my old heart needed. I wouldn’t be going back.

—RICHARD GEORGE

NOT A BROWN BOY

On the news, at a slam, not from my mother’s father tongue
In a clean cut classroom where I raise my hand and am already wrong
Rather be called gone-rooted, menudo brained, a tri-tip of tree flesh
Is not my skin, is not my skin
O say the words were never summoned
Say the day never dawned on Tenochtitlan
Say the border never handcuffed the calloused hands of the desert
We’ve been messy kin messed by merry kins
O say that was my name
Say I never could be just me
Say we only fuck in color
Say there was a vision of a dog being kicked and killed and barking still
You never call a tree by the sound of its bark
We’ve never convicted a labeling machine
Say we did convict America
Back into rivers and canals
The dogs searching for the scent
Of a drunken judge, the jury screaming with chile in their asses
Or I mean burro, or I mean buried under boroughs,
Or did I mean borrowed? Did you mean burrito?
A birthplace of karma.
How many of us still need to be released
from the wound?

—RAUL HERRERA JR

PLASTIC CUTLERY

There were times when this spring
swallowed winter. One is never quite home,
the way names serve for plastic cutlery.
As if I knew them once in a house
full of lessons and empties. These hooks
that brought me close to you feign other nights
now changed in me. I met you close to Holy Ground
an unexpected ball in play, and we had things
to say, the day I met you in a time of plague.
How exhausting it is to recall that no memory
is sacred. A car alarm heard in the snow
where the sun lit the woodlands.
This life that is never quite
returning.

—JONATHAN JONES

LILI FREE ON SEVEN DECADES

Sometimes loss is a gift, emptiness
fulfilling. I thought I was leaving myself
behind. What did I find but a new
life in an old body that bears little
resemblance to its past.
Why stand on the side of the gravel
road as you point and say,
There used to be an old tree there,
but the county cut it down,
when you can plant a new one,
could sell your own walnut trunk
or give the seed away.
I’d be as happy to never see
my mother’s favorite frying pan
as I’d feel to cook out of it again,
would rather think about how people once were
than consider their current travails,
similar to my own, based in what
cannot be controlled, only responded to.
I want to move forward without
this heavy pack that carries everything
I ever felt or dreamed, my thoughts released
into the air to become the stars I watch at
night now there’s no distractions.

—SANDRA KOLANKIEWICZ

NICOLE INSIDE HER MOTHER’S LEFT VENTRICLE

She isn’t certain how she ended up here, warm blood pulsing, the steady squeeze of her mother’s practiced heart hugging then releasing. She’d been away from Mom, living almost on her own, when she’d been attacked on the street on her way to work. Stabbed, she thinks, and carted off to the hospital. A couple of days before anyone thought to call her family. By that time the docs had given up. Evidently her mother hadn’t. So here she is, tucked into a corner of her mother’s heart. Alone. But not. When her mother talks, Nicole recognizes her tone even if the words don’t come through. She can tell when Mom is talking to her, sometimes sweet, other times angry. She hears her mother’s lungs fill and empty, feels the pull of her diaphragm. A sneeze halts everything for an uncertain moment before the swoosh and gush settle back to normal. Glad to exist at all, she doesn’t mind being back here, but she worries. What is this costing her mother’s body? Nicole knows that bits from heart or aorta can wash into the lungs and kill. She doesn’t dare let go her hold. She is making up a song with many verses.

SETTING UP HOUSE

Nicole wants babies who will have babies. Wants a stream that loops lazy around her camp. She wants bees circling in her garden, returning and returning. She has taught the birds to sing canons, the sheep have chewed a labyrinth for her. Her step stones go down the garden and back up without beginning or end.  She thinks the irrigation ditch works so well because she dug it as an infinity sign. She’ll named her kids Return and Echo. Instead of saying, the children, she’ll call them her iterations.

—LYNN PATTISON

CHORD

A child is practicing scales at the piano.
            She plays A natural minor

with her left hand, then her right.
            In Kyiv, Ukraine,

a woman packs a suitcase. A map
           catches fire.

A white goat on a shed roof,       
           a postcard dropped

in the street. The child
            sharps the F, plays

both hands together, fingers curled as if
            to pick up an egg.

A man climbs a flight
            of broken stairs, his world       

fragile as eggshells, as petals of crocus
            growing in a Kyiv spring,

as flesh torn from flesh. The child
            moves on to chords,

stretching her fingers
            across an octave. Everything.

—BETHANY REID

RECONSIDER WOUNDED COLORS

Your irises appear charred
by a forest fire you ignored.

But I never grieved for them
before my own eyes matured. 

Yours are not dead or greedy— 
they are the Mother sleeping. 

They are fragments 
of warm hearts, noticing. 

They are a wild autumn, 
skeletal in curiosity, scared 

of what comes next. I am 
only now seeing your potential

for becoming fertilizer. I sense
your eyes will ripen to blue, in time.

THE NATURE OF BEARS

Stars deliciously harvested and away from cold, the healing claws

in the black of wood, misunderstood as bloody-eyed haunting.  

Often, the cosmic gift, in growls, displays its stomach vulnerably soft.

In daylight it purrs songs of community and protection,

unknown to our homes.

We may hike endlessly on a mountain of starvation,

yet no dreams come until the bear comes gently.

Only then would we commune together

in those gardens of fear, enormous, with statues surrounding all.

They are painting healing hues...

not bloody.

—NICOLE SCOTT

LANDING

You might not be coming home / this year / because of the coronavirus / Just last night the first victims in Michigan were announced / In the meantime you might be waylaid / I just left Indianapolis / where every avenue / was a different state / I walked from Vermont / to Oregon in ten minutes / In our hotel my colleague accidently dropped a slice / of pepperoni just an inch / from the door / I also left it there / because what else / was I to leave / but isn’t it / funny / The most exciting thing / to tell you / should not be the mild / winter we had / Does Australia have a coldness like / what we are draped in / here? / I don’t know / what kind of songs you like / but there is a song / where the speaker says their lover / is their home / I’m sure this is many / songs but I play it in the car / every time I drive home / thinking that I must remind / myself / and a place / that I am returning / Do places think? / When I say think / what I mean is / will a city gesticulate / its limbered arms / offer to me a collard / of its warmth / Perhaps the better word is / acknowledge / I try to acknowledge / what remains / put / Even your mother’s house / relocated like a kidney / to another body / is immovable / Years subscribed to new grass / the way no garden / can hold a single species / of flower / I want to say welcome / back / but I do not know / to what / What bushel of memory / can I barter with you / that might reclaim / the loss of roots / I do not know hospitality / except when I am sick / or just visiting / To call landing / from a plane / our respite of home / I’m sure you know this / Leaving is not like / the literal leaf / which withers as it travels / already dead / I think we manipulate / the wind we carry / and I can’t help but say / that leaving / means all homes are always / left / and so to welcome / you means / I’m sorry

—LIAM STRONG

creative nonfiction

THOSE WHO CAN

You open the mailbox and find an invitation to a college graduation or a wedding. Some burly biker dude sends you a Facebook friend request and a message assuring you that you changed his life a quarter of a century ago. Some loquacious girl who tried your patience for an entire semester writes you a note on the bottom of her final exam declaring you to be the best teacher ever .. OMG.  You tear-up and tell yourself that you made the right life choice, but  your memories can’t always agree.

You recall that chunky, silly, little boy who could never make his subjects and verbs agree, how he always charitably chuckled at your teacher/dad jokes. You wish he hadn’t forgotten his Albuterol in that pick-up game, or that the paramedics had been just a few minutes faster, or maybe if traffic had been a little lighter.  You wish his mama didn’t have to tell you thanks for coming, everyone in the church looking at you, wondering who you were, the only pale face in the crowd.

You wish you hadn’t saved that letter of recommendation for 24 years, the Word file you avoid almost every day, the one you never got to send. You wish he had taken a different route, or maybe if he had driven a little slower. You wish you hadn’t lied to his mama, her crying on your shoulder in that intensive care unit when you assured her that he was gonna make it. You wish you hadn’t lied in his eulogy when you assured his classmates that you knew he was in a better place.

You examine that graduation photo every morning, the dark green robe, the valedictorian’s chords, your arm around the smartest student you ever taught, the one who could ace Advanced Placement exams for classes she never attended.  You wish she hadn’t used a shotgun, so at least you could have looked at her face one last time, another psychic landscape catastrophe.

You struggle to understand how an 18 year old boy could write songs like an aged and seasoned poet, tunes you still hear in your head a decade later. You wonder how he could be making us all breathlessly cackle on a Thursday afternoon, and then be breathless and cold in a coffin on Sunday morning, a heart valve older than his muse. You wish you could strum an A-Minor chord without breaking down.

You wish you had known, and you can’t forgive yourself for not knowing, that he, the most perfect human specimen you have ever known, didn’t drop by that morning just to say thanks and wish you a Merry Christmas. You now maintain that he wanted to finally reveal the secret that you had already inferred, long before he could admit it to himself.  Just once, just fucking once, you wish you would have made an exception to your long-standing personal ethical proscription and pressed him for the truth you felt he should evince at his own pace. Maybe then he wouldn’t have felt the need to use his daddy’s pistol to save us all from the shame he couldn’t bear alone.

You now realize that you really only strive to believe in God because you need these shortened lives to go on, somewhere, anywhere. You admit that you can’t possibly write the fourteen more paragraphs it would take to complete this lamentation, fourteen more souls in a yearbook you carry with you always. You look at the faces in that yearbook and long for an invitation, a Facebook message, or a note on the bottom of a final exam.

—ALAN CALDWELL

CATHOLIC

The children’s and young adult area of the Wallingford, Connecticut public library, where I spent a lot of time as a kid, was a basement with stone walls where I was able to sit in peace and look carefully through the books on the shelves to decide which ones to borrow. It felt private, calm, secret: you entered by a potholed alley along the side of the building, through a peeling wooden door, down some narrow stairs--and there you were, surrounded by low bookshelves and stone. It was the perfect quiet place to hunker down, pretend nobody else could see you, and figure out if whatever books you’d found on the shelves were any good.

I was drawn to mysteries, the covers of which would be recognizable to anyone of my generation: groups of kids shining flashlights into mysterious holes, girls in dresses stealthily approaching dimly lit houses at night. I also read ghost stories as well as Gothic novels, those in which a plucky young woman uncovers a secret in the family of the man she’d wind up marrying. I trusted that all these books would take me to the pleasantly dark imaginary place promised by the library’s gray walls and tiny windows.

The Catholic church my family went to then was dark and quiet too, mostly brown, the stucco walls a dull pink and the floors hard, uninviting slate. When I would kneel as required during various times of the Mass, all I could see was the back of the mahogany pew and the shelves underneath for prayer books and hymnals. I found church excruciatingly dull, especially during the week before Easter, when my mother made my sister and me go to Mass on three separate days and listen to the story of Christ’s Passion. Good Friday service was three hours long, and sad.

I did, however, enjoy Easter Vigil Mass, the night before Easter Sunday when the lights went off in the entire church and we lit candles so it was dark and light at the same time. Easter Vigil Mass also involved trumpets blowing when the candles went out and the lights flew on to announce the escape of Jesus from the tomb. I didn’t care as much about the resurrection as I did about the trumpets, because I had never heard such loud noise in the building all year, and for a change the church seemed happy.

****

In April 2019 my mother died, 95 years old and ready to leave: the day before, she’d told a hospice nurse that she had talked to my grandmother, who told her it was time to come home.

My sister Donna and I went to clear out her apartment the day after the funeral; when we raised the shades to let sunlight into the living room, I was struck by all the religious iconography. Our house didn’t have much when I was growing up—though there was some--but upon moving into assisted living, my mother went full throttle. Though there were a number of photos of my kids, her only grandkids, you had to wonder who had pride of place. Or maybe you didn’t: a painting of the Virgin Mary sat on a table in the entryway, so it was the first thing you saw when you walked in the door. Elsewhere hung other pictures of prominent religious figures, notably the famous one of Jesus Christ bearing his bleeding heart in his hand, extending it toward the viewer as if offering a drink. A crucifix I remembered from my youth hung on the wall; the top slid open to reveal tiny candles and empty vials for holy water, to be set up and used for last rites. There were Bibles, prayer books. Donna and I were superstitious about throwing these away, though neither of us had been a practicing Catholic since college. We donated them to the assisted living facility.

We also found, in a dark corner of a desk drawer, an old school photo of my son Nick. He was a favorite of my mother’s: she related to him because he too was reserved and shy, but when I told her Nick wasn’t just reserved and shy but had bipolar disorder, she had a hard time understanding that. Maybe it was just too scary. Maybe she didn’t know what bipolar disorder was. She certainly didn’t know about the speeding tickets, the therapists, the hospitalizations, the medications that didn’t work well enough, the voices in his head saying he was worthless. When Nick took his own life, Donna and I debated whether to tell her and decided not to; my mother’s Catholic upbringing would’ve made her think Nick was in hell, because “suicides go to hell” was church doctrine for many years. She died four months after he did. I’m still glad I never told her about Nick’s death, because I always would’ve wondered if the knowledge had killed her.

***

To my mother’s great displeasure, I stopped going to Catholic church when I was twenty. Though my parents had sent me to Catholic elementary school, Catholic high school, and Catholic university, I eventually decided that any 2,000-year-old organization that had once burned heretics at the stake wasn’t really Christian. Then there was the problem of women not being able to be priests, as well as that of the Trinity: one God but three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I still don’t understand that, but the Catholic Church says you’re not really supposed to, that it’s a mystery, that you’re supposed to have faith. I’ve never been satisfied with that answer. There’s also “Why do bad things happen to good people?” which I’ve pretty much stopped asking.

***

When someone dies by their own hand, police treat the death as a homicide until the medical examiner’s report comes back. It took only a few hours to rule Nick’s death a suicide. We were then able to plan the calling hours and the funeral. The funeral director asked if we wanted the casket open at the calling hours. No, I said, absolutely not. “Are you sure?” she asked, as if I were going to be sorry about that decision eventually. Yes, I said, yes, I’m sure. I hadn’t even been able to muster the courage to see Nick’s body after my husband and our oldest son, Sam, found him in the darkness of our unfinished basement. Though my psychiatrist says it isn’t a problem, I had one friend who looked at me, concerned, when I told her I hadn’t been able to see Nick after he died. “Well,” she said, “that’s something for therapy.” I try not to think too much about that comment, though it’s difficult not to. I’ve made a note to remind my psychiatrist of the Pietà, Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding her crucified son in her lap.

***

In addition to the religious paraphernalia, Donna and I found my mother’s album photos from our first house in Wallingford in the depths of her dark closet. I can describe these photos from memory, particularly those of my mother herself. She had short, curly chestnut hair and green-blue eyes—when I was young people told me I resembled her. She was never as happy in real life as she appeared in her wedding pictures: huge smile, open arms. In the later photos she is sadder. I remember one in particular: she stands with my sister and me next to Niagara Falls, near one of those viewers you could put a quarter into and see the Falls up close. Donna and I are laughing. My mother is looking unwillingly into the camera, trying to smile but looking tired and unhappy.

This was probably because she’d recently lost a baby who was two months premature. In 1962 or 1963 it was hard to save a newborn with underdeveloped lungs. As my mother told us many times, the baby, whom my parents named Mary, died after 18 hours. I was no older than five at the time, and so don’t remember particularly well, but I do remember that for what seemed like forever my mother slept a lot during the day, the blinds in her room drawn to keep out the sun, and would scream at Donna and me if we made too much noise.

After she recovered, she took us to visit baby Mary’s grave every Sunday, making us get on our knees and pray: Eternal rest grant unto her O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her… I liked the rhythm of that prayer, not so much the kneeling in the grass. On one occasion I had seen, perhaps appropriately, a praying mantis, which terrified me. “She’s a little angel,” my mother would say of Mary; I had some difficulty seeing an infant as a person who suddenly, upon death, translated into something more. Angels, as I thought of them, had agency. It struck both my sister and me as odd that when asked in old age how many children she had, my mother would say “three.” After losing Nick I thought this was perhaps less odd; then again, Nick had been nineteen. When my father died at 92, my mother’s last words to him were “Say hello to Mary for me.”

***

We held Nick’s funeral at the old New England Congregational church on the green of the old New England town where I live now. Except for weddings and funerals, I hadn’t been in any church for 40 years. The pastor, Jeff, was the chaplain the police and EMTs brought to our house when Nick died, and he offered the use of the church for the funeral. Church members were good to us, even though they’d never met us. They baked cakes for the post-funeral reception; they picked up the reception sandwiches at the grocery store; they made coffee. I decided I wanted to be one of those people who does things like that, who helps people she doesn’t know, so I started working with Jeff to get a mental health awareness effort going at the church. I’m still agnostic, but the church doesn’t seem to care. Women are ordained. I don’t have to call the pastor Father. There is no such thing as heresy.

The Congregational church building is light, light, light: huge clear windows, no stained glass, no dark pews or slate floors. Noise is tolerated and even welcomed: people use everyday voices to greet each other and mingle in the center aisle before services start; Jeff has to raise his voice to be heard when he calls the assembled multitude to worship. At Nick’s funeral he told the large crowd that he wouldn’t offer false consolation, wouldn’t tell them that Nick was an angel in heaven or that his death was God’s will: “No God I believe in would willingly wrest a 19-year-old man from this earth.” I wondered what my mother would’ve thought about that. Was she a better mother than I because she believed that praying every Sunday, beside a grave, in the grass, would make her child live forever, somehow? That filling her apartment with pictures of Jesus would make the sorrow go away?

I don’t know. I do know this: last night in my dream, the Congregational church was having a tag sale and I was planning to sell some old household stuff, but I had forgotten to bring it. So I went home to get it as the tag sale started. The house I found when I got there was small, dark. Nick was home; he had come back to life and was being given a second chance. I wanted to stay with him to keep him alive--to bring him out of the dark and into the light--though I knew I was supposed to get back to the tag sale. But then all at once my surroundings disappeared, and I couldn’t find Nick, and I was completely lost, and I knew I wasn’t going to solve some mysteries, ever.

—RITA MALENCZYK

RACING IN THE STREET

The whole world is quiet as we sit on the cold steel fence in front of the station. A train comes through Seymour once, maybe twice a year. But my dad says this used to be the town where people came from everywhere for work. The brass factory was in Ansonia, but we had the Bic Pen factory. He says there were so many jobs that if you got fired on a Friday night, you could find a morning shift on Saturday. And the train had a whistle so loud you could hear it all the way over on Church Street.

Will laughs as I cough, cause he’s got a smooth smoke that comes from years of experience. He sits with his shoulders hunched and the sleeves of his flannel unbuttoned. His hands curl around the steel railing, and I try to picture this town the way it’s told in all the stories. The boys with their hatchet job engines and Timberland work boots light up the night. Lining up their bikes, they rev the engines and laugh as if they hadn’t done it every Friday night since they were fifteen. The race comes alive and echoes in the empty streets where creaking wooden doors are shut from the wind and tin storm shutters are pulled down over the liquor store and tattoo parlor. They fly from the town line, and nothing could ever feel as fast as this. Nothing so free.

“I asked my dad why the train doesn’t come around anymore,” I say towards the dead empty street and he lifts his face to mine. He takes the joint from my lips and inhales.
“Yeah?” He exhales, “and why’s that?”
“A hurricane in the fifties.” I swing my legs between the metal bars. “It wiped out everything—houses, jobs, it drowned it all. It was before route eight was finished, but he said it would’ve flooded the whole highway. There weren’t any factory jobs left because the factories were in pieces. So trains just stopped coming around.” Messing up my hair with a hand that’s permanently stained gray by oil, he hops off the fence and lifts me down with him.

“So that must be why no one ever leaves. Let’s go kid.”
“Quit calling me kid. I’m nineteen.”
“C’mon,” he takes my hand and leads me to the car. “This place is wasted.” He turns the key in the ignition and shifts his shoulder as it struggles to start up.
“You think you could ever write a book or something?”
“I doubt it. I write like a virgin.”
He laughs, checking the rearview mirror and backing out onto the dirt road. He doesn’t need to look at me, he’s been laughing at my existential crises for a long time now.
“Well, are you?” I turn from the open window to give him a sideways glance.
“All the best writers were reckless. I should be reckless.”
“Yeah, ‘were’ being the operative word. I think for now, kid, you might be better off.”

He drives a gentle thirty and as the windows roll down and the wind catches in my hair, it feels like we could’ve existed anywhere. For a moment his hand reaches for mine and drifts just over the shifter. But then he pulls back, resting it on the wheel. He shuts off the radio and there’s only silence as the moon follows us towards the main stretch. He knew all of my secrets because I didn’t have any yet. I didn’t know a single word of his. But as he runs every red light, tonight feels like a kind of secret I’ll always keep.

“Don’t you ever feel like quitting the bakery and going somewhere really far away?” He asks as he takes a swig of whiskey and I lie on his roof, somewhere after midnight, looking up at the trees.

“Yeah I think about it sometimes. I don’t know where I would go.” I sit up and the skin of our knees almost touch.

“I’ve been practicing,” he says with rebellion. “I just need a band and some way to get to California or New York.” The words rush out as if he’d been holding them in like a scream. He takes another swig.

“Do you ever think about not going?” My voice is just above a whisper. His head hangs low and he holds the back of his neck. He looks towards the road holding the glass over his knee.

“I’m not gonna end up like my dad.”

He drinks as much as his father. He started to look like him more and more each night as I helped him to bed after he fell asleep on my shoulder.

He wraps his hands around mine to warm them. I see his dark brown eyes beneath lids that weaken as the rest of him follows. But his hands are as strong as they’ve always been. He opens my hands in his, and as he looks at me, I see only his eyes in the dark. At this time of night there’s nothing alive but the air between us. He rests his forehead on my shoulder and continues to dream about lights brighter than the flickering streetlights and cars that drive faster than any he could build. And I feel him sinking the way he does each night. I slip from his embrace. Down the stairs I start on the empty streets towards home. He won’t remember it in the morning. But I always do.

Sometimes I can see it. There’s this house on the corner of Maple street, between the grammar school and the graveyard. It’s painted light blue with white shutters and dead grass. The one next to it burned down a few years ago so the front yard seems bigger than it actually is. Sometimes I think about what it looks like on the inside. What my bare feet would feel like against a winter morning’s hard wood floor. Or how cold coffee being poured into the sink might sound. The end of a long day, or the final quiet when kids are asleep and our parent’s old cars are in the garage. Swaying to Tom Waits under the kitchen light, my head rested on his shoulder and his warmth so close to mine. Two people, never wanting to run away. I wonder how it all might feel inside my hands. That house with the light blue paint and white shutters is just up the road. But it might as well have burned down too.

In the tunnel underneath the station, there’s a single tungsten light that illuminates us as we cast shadows much larger than ourselves onto the cement walls. I wave my arms and he laughs as I try to balance on the narrow cement curb. He sits on the dying grass with his back to the tunnel wall, a beer hanging in his left hand.

“You know, I used to actually do my homework.”

“It did take a great deal of corrupting to turn you into one of the burnouts.” He laughs as I sit down beside him, resting my head on his shoulder as my smile dies down. He takes a drink and rests his beer on his leg. And all of a sudden, he looks as tired as his father.

“You’re too young.” I look up at him, and his eyes are dead in the water as he stares at the tunnel wall.

“You’ve always been too young. You don’t know anything yet. You still think that all this could be something.”

It’s still August, I think. It could all still change. But summer’s youth had let go of its last dying breath. And I can see it. I’m a stranger by his own hand.

My dad says in town they used to say “going west” when someone was dying. Dying and leaving the valley were sort of the same thing. We knew a few people who left for Massachusetts or New York, one for California. People never came back once they left. But most people never left once they were raised.

The end was just that, an ending. He got older and moved a few towns away. But it might as well have been the whole world. To him, I’ll stay nineteen, coughing whenever I smoke. And he’ll always be driving the car with the windows down. It was nothing violent or obvious. I was just young enough to think it would all last forever. That the boys who race in the empty streets don’t grow up to be broken men. The smoke never burns our lungs, and the streetlights never go out.

—CLARE PASLEY

WARM SOUP

We are the same person. I hear we share the same profile, the same smile. Perhaps we also share the same temper. And I know we share the same sense of humour because laughter always fills the room.

Tonight, like every other Sunday night, he and I are making instant noodles.

I smell the familiar scent of a burning pan — comforting and rich, like dark marshmallows above an open fire. From underneath the countertop, my eyes barely meeting the surface, I watch as he tears open a new pack of Kang Shi Fu noodles with precision. I try to memorize his exact motions so I can replicate them one day — when I am the chef and he is the lucky customer. I catch the scent of complex spices, and I wonder how they managed to fit so much flavour into such a small packet. The aroma quickly fills the room and surrounds us in euphoria. As we wait for the water to boil, we walk over to the play area and he places a bucket on my head. We laugh. Monday looms around the corner, but this does not seem to bother him. He grabs a bucket for himself, along with chopstick-swords for us both — we laugh even more. Instant noodles bring instant laughter.

I touch the side of the bowl and jump back in pain. He tells me to wait at the table, and I gaze in amazement as he manages to carry the scalding bowl of noodles with only one hand, without even the slightest wince. I think he’s very brave. I imagine him as a tightrope walker as he steadily walks towards the table. Right before he makes it to me, his hands suddenly tremble, and he is burned by the hot soup. He says nothing, but I know that he is in pain. He refuses to let any discomfort show. I hop down from the kitchen chair and walk over to grab his hand for comfort. His hands are still numb, but luckily no scar has formed. All that remains are the usual lines and creases that also creep up his neck and face. They seem to deepen every time we are not eating instant noodles on Sunday. I wish we can eat noodles more often. Some might claim he is too young for these lines and creases, but being brave comes with a price. You need to be brave to leave one life and create a new one, to find gold in white snow, to stop dreaming to dream bigger. What I don’t know is that he still dreams of becoming a literature teacher. The soup is now warm. I think he is very brave.

I taste the red beef broth through careful sips. Yummy. I smile at him, he smiles at me, and I smile back. I love the taste of instant noodles, but I hear it is bad for me because it is made with MSG. All my friends at school don’t like MSG, and I feel scared to open my lunch box sometimes. It sucks to be in the minority. He hears that I sometimes go hungry and he is furious. He offers to bring McDonald’s for lunch when he has time off work, and he always insists that he brings the paper bag directly to me. And though he arrived just once a year, holding a bag of carefully curated but rapidly cooling burgers and fries, I am embarrassed that my friends will see us, and I don’t give him a hug. He leaves quickly with a frown darkening his face. The McDonald’s tastes ok — everyone rushes to ask for a fry or two — but I go hungry that day. And when we eat instant noodles next, I smile at him but he does not smile back. I do not blame him, though, because his instant noodles have lost their warmth, yet he still burns his mouth with every bite. He eats more quickly as if to try and speed up time, to grip the clock’s hands and reverse their relentless march ahead. But these hands have grown larger and he loses his grip. He takes another sip of his MSG-filled soup. I learn later that McDonald’s also contains MSG.

I hear the sound of warm soup rushing down his throat, boiling steam escaping from his face. He begins to sing his song — the song that always accompanies Sunday night. The verse is slow but fills the room with the thick aroma of anticipation. At first I feel the urge to sing along, but I’m afraid to make too much noise. From above the counter, I see a tabletop littered with half-opened soup packets. He has tried every one, but he is still not satisfied. Suddenly, I hear the sound of shattering against the wall — the harmony to his song. A chopstick sword flies by my head before I have the chance to grab my bucket. The chorus and beat drop are deafening. We sing. I think I sing the wrong notes, and I cover my ears because the song sounds terrible. We sing. The outro is calm, quiet. I leave the room, tears streaming down my face. I think I hear him cry, too. We will sing again.

Tonight, like every other Sunday night, I am making instant noodles. I see myself tear open the packet just right. I have memorized his exact motions. I really want to be a literature teacher. And I hate the taste of instant noodles. 

…

We are the same person. I hear that we share the same profile, the same smile. Perhaps we also share the same temper. And I know we share the same sense of humour because laughter always fills the room.

Tonight, she and I are making noodles and broth from scratch. She mixes the soup carefully as to not burn herself, like a tightrope walker. I give her a kiss and she kisses me back. We sing, and even though we met just one year ago, I sing the right notes and we sing in perfect harmony. We sing all night long.

The soup is getting warm.

—VICTOR WANG

WORK SONG

(SOMETIME IN MID-OCTOBER)

My mother is dying while I am writing this. It’s what she’s been doing for some time, but in these past few weeks, her work has intensified.  When I say dying is “work,” I am not speaking figuratively. To look at her here on what is clearly her final bed, a sleek contraption of wheels and gears, you would think it’s the hardest work there is. Every day brings another indignity, another long series of moments when breathing becomes difficult, memory fails, joint pain overwhelms, and the confusion of time and place terrifies. I see only a fraction of what she has to put up with, and yet it’s more than enough to make me seriously consider an easier way.

She would say her curse is that of living too long – she turned 97 a few months ago – but from what I hear and read, a lingering and painful departure is a common plight. A few years ago, one of my older friends, a well-loved poet, said shortly before she died that it was “awfully easy to get into this world but damn hard to get out.” Amen to that. I almost envy the early birds, the ones who go down in a plane or get hit by a truck, even those who take a bare month to leave, the victims of some fast-moving cancer. When my mother could still speak in coherent sentences, she would often say she had never imagined she’d see the 21st century, almost as if she was apologizing, as if she might have made some different decisions had she known. The irony is that when she was born, the doctor told my grandmother not to get too attached to “this one,” so sick was my mother with rheumatic fever in the weeks following her birth. Nearly a hundred years later, she’s still beating the odds, if you can call uninterrupted days of disorientation, immobility and discomfort beating the odds.

I remember stormy afternoons on my father’s millstone of a boat, when my mother had to grapple her way to the foredeck to wipe the salt spray from the wheel-house windows which were not equipped with electric wipers, how precarious and vulnerable she looked to my sister and me from the inside, one hand holding on to a stanchion and the other smearing the glass with a rag, her face full of terror. I’ve always thought it was a miracle she didn’t lose her balance and keel into the sea, but I’d be willing to bet now, given her current level of discomfort and disorientation, that she might wish she had.  Which is not to say that those who attend to her needs are not doing their jobs. They are, and more. The women -- they are without exception women -- that I have come to know even the little that I do are probably the closest we have to saints on this planet, for their professionalism, for their genuine concern for my mother’s comfort and happiness and for their buoyant spirit in the face of unremitting reminders of our common mortality. I go to work each day like most people, but not to a job where I’m compelled at every turn to contemplate the manner of my own demise. How do they do it?

It’s not as though any of this should be a shock. If I’d been listening a little more when I was young, I would probably have registered the conversations of my parents when they spoke of friends and relatives whose passage out of this world were troubled and lengthy affairs. When I was nine, my father spent evening after evening in the hospital with my dying grandfather, sometimes heading up there immediately after work, forgoing the dinner my mother had made. His devotion and grief were so strongly visible on his face that one day I asked him if I should come up to visit the old man, too, thinking that I might be able to help in some way. But my father declined my offer, saying he wanted me to remember “Uncle Billy” as the person he used to be, not as he was now. Fifty years afterwards, I can see quite clearly that I should have demanded to be there at that bedside staring my future in the face. As it was, my father spent ten long years himself coping with the cruelties of dementia, and, having seen the toll it took on both him and my mother, who looked after him in those hard days, I would not wish his fate on anyone.

And I’m lucky. I have a sister, an older sister, who by definition is certainly more mature, and by nature far more responsible than I am. Together we spell each other off with bedside visits and the preparations for the next stage in our mother’s journey. It’s good to have her to talk to, but hard not to see both of us as a couple of kids out of our depth. They say we never really grow up until we have lost both our parents – Lady Bracknell comes to mind here for obvious reasons – but I think when that moment arrives, I will feel more at sea than anything else. Our parents place us in a narrative, a drama which they act out for us as they go, but when they exit the stage, all that remains for those left behind is doubt and fear. I’m sure they felt the same when their parents passed, but somehow they were better at hiding their feelings. My kids may not be so lucky.

My sister and I used to ride with my mother on the city bus to the fringes of Victoria where her mother and stepfather rented a small home next to a grocery store. It was a long ride, but my mother, who was not fond of driving, made the trip every week with us in tow. Our grandmother spent most days in a wheelchair, stricken with rheumatoid arthritis and had done so for over twenty-five years. My sister and I drank the ginger ale we were offered and played outside in the garden while my mother helped with household chores that were beyond her stepfather and which she knew her mother wanted done a particular way. My grandmother was a proud woman, who had sacrificed a lot for her children, but I never got the feeling she felt she was owed. Her health slipped away, and what money she’d saved dwindled too quickly, so that she spent many of her last years in government homes for the elderly. There was a stoicism about my grandmother, an attitude that probably arose from having to endure two world wars, the depression and her own challenging illness. She had no illusions about life and understood more than most that to make it through this world demands a thick skin and a spine of steel. When the old woman’s time finally came, my mother was in England on a rare holiday, a trip to kick up her heels in a modest way and to shed some of the gloom of the passing of my father a few years earlier. I felt bad for her as I spoke the news on the phone – a lifetime of being the best daughter only to miss the moment of her mother’s farewell – but she said she had been expecting the call; she had sensed something was wrong, even those thousands of miles away.

Her premonition was not lost on me. I was in Spain last year, on the island of Menorca, and one night I dreamed of coming home after a long day’s work only to look up and see my mother trapped on the other side of our skylight, holding on with both hands as though the wind might sweep her away.

“Mum!” I yelled through the glass. “How am I ever going to get you down from there?”

She waved a book at me, one that she said she had written. It was called Sketches on the Edge of a Day, and she said I should read it.  I woke up with a terrible feeling.  Shortly afterwards I received an email from my sister saying our mother was down for the count. She’d fallen prey to an insidious infection and that some drastic measures might be necessary. The next few days were hard ones, but then I received news that the doctor had persevered with my mother to see whether she wanted any intervention. It was difficult, my sister told me, just to get her attention, but, finally, in a lucid moment, she told the doctor a little cryptically,” I have a lovely family.” He interpreted her words as a stay of execution and put her on Prednisone, a drug so strong that, ironically, it often sends people on their way even after it’s beaten their disease. By the time I got home she hardly knew me, and, while I was happy to have the chance to say good-bye, I felt guilty that she had delayed her departure and prolonged her suffering just for me. The infection the doctor had treated would probably have been a less painful exit, and I can understand why they often call pneumonia the “old man’s friend.” Sometimes, it’s good to have nature take such a decision taken out of our hands. We have a tendency not to listen to what the facts are trying to tell us and, instead, invoke whatever measures we can to avoid the inevitable, even for a week or a month.

It is evening now, and another day has passed for my mother. She has slept a lot of it, and for a few hours she rotated through a series of questions I answered as truthfully as I could: where she is, when she will go home to have tea with Aunt Florrie, dead sixty years ago, and why the nurses haven’t brought her baby to her.  What she has really been doing is working hard, putting her back into it, no intention of punching the clock any earlier than she has to. The lights are low, a soft incandescence that mutes the institutional linoleum and ubiquitous beige walls. The big screen TV that has done its best to entertain her for the last few years is tuned to light classical music, a Chopin waltz playing quietly. One of the aides pokes her head in to see how we are doing. She registers me, my sister, my wife and daughter at our posts.

“If I could choose,” she says quietly,” this is the way I would want to go.” Then she leaves on her rounds.

I don’t disagree with her, even though I’d like to.

—TERENCE YOUNG

fiction

BEND, DON’T BREAK

 “You can spend your whole life trying to bend something your way, but in the end it may be better to break it.” That was the last thing my mother said to me the night she left us. Ok, maybe those weren’t the very last words, but they may as well have been. I guess she said all the usual things that night. That she loved us. That none of this was our fault. That she wished things were different. Frankie and I were confused and groggy with sleep, but when we heard the screech of the screen door, we chased her out into the night. A late autumn storm raged. We couldn’t see much through the rain, but the lightning flashed bright over the water. White caps reared up over the surface like it was an ocean and not just the river that wound sleepily through our town. The thunder swallowed up our calls like it knew they would never reach her anyway. We ran right to the water’s edge, but still we couldn’t see her. I snatched up Frankie’s arm as he started to wade in. He was certain he’d seen the yellow of her blonde hair somewhere down the current. I knew, though. Knew that whatever he saw, it wasn’t her. Knew that we could stay on that river bank all night and we’d never find her. Not if she didn’t want to be found.
Later, after they pulled her from the river and laid her in the ground, I realized that she wasn’t wrong when she said sometimes things need to break. Life was different after she was gone. We stopped needing to explain unexplainable bruises at school. We started eating dinner together as a family. My father took Frankie fishing in the summer and I perched on the hill above the water, reading and getting sunburned. One hot night, after we’d eaten the trout Dad and Frankie caught, my father poured all the liquor left in the house down the kitchen drain. It burbled and puddled before exiting our slow draining pipes. I watched the brown liquid swirl against the stainless steel sink and thought of the river when the water is low and looks shiny and clear as glass. When you can see the silver glint of fish, and the mud in the riverbed is silky and soft and begging you to take a step in. And then you do and the mud clouds the water and it ripples out from your ankles and you can no longer see the bottom. I thought about the river a lot in those days.

Ok, ok. Honesty time? Almost none of that story is true. Look, I know we’re here to talk about our pain and our grief and whatever else makes us so angry, but the truth is just so mundane. My mother did leave us, but there was no river, no burial, no closure. She just left and didn’t come back. That thing about bending and breaking? I read it in an old Cosmopolitan at the doctor’s office. And there were no bruises. It’s important you know that. It’s not really fair to my dad. It does give her a reason to go, though. A good one. Better than the truth. That we simply weren’t enough. So, yeah, I embellished what happened. I bent the story a little out of shape. But it’s my story now. I’ll do with it as I please. And isn’t that all a part of the process anyway?

You want the truth?  I remember almost nothing about that night. Maybe there was a storm. Maybe there wasn’t. Did the screen door really screech when she left? I don’t remember. What I do remember is her hand on my forehead, her face close to mine, and the taste of salt as she pulled away. Then I rolled over and went back to sleep, never doubting for a minute that she’d be there when I woke up.

—Alexandria Faulkenbury

FATHER’S DAY

Vida left her wife and kids at home for this, as she did every year. She put on her coat and slipped outside into the quiet, cold air of predawn. By the time she drove her car through the spiked metal gates of the cemetery, the sky was orange to the southeast.

Her feet made a hushing sound as she walked across the neatly trimmed grass toward their graves, still wet with dew. No one else was in the cemetery yet. She preferred to do this alone.

She brought a single flower, as always. A single flower was like a wish, a hope, a child’s memory, and it wilted in days. She didn’t plant anything the way other people did. Nothing permanent made sense to her in the face of such loss.

There were three tombstones in two plots. Two were the same large, blocky rectangles as most of the others in this part of the cemetery. The third was sandwiched between them unofficially, an ordinary rock she’d paid to have carved. Unlike the graves of her parents, her baby brother’s grave didn’t have a body below it.

Vida kissed his stone first, pressing her lips to the cold damp stone the way she had once pressed her lips to his cold forehead when he’d died of internal bleeding in the hospital so many years ago. That’s when all of this had begun, or perhaps, when it had all ended.

Vida placed the flower she had brought on her father’s grave and knelt in the wet grass, not caring for the dampness that quickly touched her copper skin through her jeans like the fingers of the past. She pressed a hand to her heart, feeling rising up beneath it like the slow steady waters of an ocean tide.

There had always been problems in their house, even before she was old enough to remember, but children have an incredible ability to love their parents unconditionally. She had managed to adore her parents until she was seven. Until the day her father had come in and said she was old enough to be punished with a belt. Until the day her mother had watched as cold as a statue while she screamed.

She rolled up her sleeves to see the tattoos winding their ways up her wrists. Flames led up to a phoenix on one shoulder: a reminder of who she was and what she’d been through. The flames were only mostly metaphorical—they covered up some of the scars from the day her father had gotten creative with a fire poker.

Vida began to sing quietly as the sun broke over the horizon, weaving peace into her breath, the wind, the world of the cemetery. It was a lullaby, one that she sang to her own daughters. One that her mother had never sung to her.

A tear slid from her closed eyes and down one cheek, dropping onto the flames of her wrists, and she found herself surprised that she could still have tears left after all this time.

The first time she had come on Father’s Day, it was to have someone to yell at, someone to vent her hate and heartbreak at for why she couldn’t celebrate this day and why she’d never really had a father. But after nearly fifteen years of therapy, of healing day by day through the beauty of Shahira and the children and their teaching her the lessons she should have learned so long ago, this day had come to commemorate what she had lost instead. The father, the mother, the family she should have had. And a beautiful little girl who had been absolutely perfect.

Vida brushed her fingers over her baby brother’s stone, gentle as a breath, and murmured, “I love you.” The stone said only Beloved Brother, with the dates for his short eleven years of life. Perhaps putting his stone between theirs didn’t make sense, but maybe too, it was the only place it could have gone.

Where his real ashes were, Vida didn’t know. After the four years of foster care that had followed her father’s death, she had gone looking for her mother. But her mother had died and her brother’s urn was lost. It had broken her ravaged heart all over again, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Not from the mother who had cremated her beautiful brother to save money, when she had plenty. Not from the mother who had held them and told them it was for their own good while her husband had beaten them within an inch of their lives. Not from a mother who had known nothing of love.

Nothing else would have broken her as her father beating her brother to death had, when Vida was only fourteen. Nothing else would have driven her rage, her hate, to the extreme needed to turn on the person she feared more than anything, and yet had still, somehow, loved. Nothing else would have twisted that tendril of evil out of her battered, lonely heart, and made her truly want to do him harm.

But her father’s evil had felt like hers, too, like something she was part of just by being his daughter and living in his house. And maybe by stopping him, she could redeem something of that evil inside of her. Maybe she could protect someone, as she hadn’t been able to protect her beloved baby brother.

I killed him, she had said to Shahira so many years ago, after sharing with her then-girlfriend her favourite picture of her brother. She hadn’t meant to just blurt it out like that, but even then, only months into their relationship, she had wanted Shahira to know, to understand her, to forgive her, even, if such things were possible.

Your brother? Shahira had asked, confused.

My father, Vida corrected quietly, vulnerably, with a shake of her head, half-sure that Shahira would leave that instant and never come back. When he killed my brother. I shoved him down the stairs. I didn’t…I didn’t think it would kill him. I just wanted to stop him, to hurt him, to save—” her voice had caught “—my brother, but he didn’t get up.

She had been staring down at her hands, held palms up in front of her, as she had the day her father and brother died. Staring at them in horror as the shadows consumed her, and wondering if she had only made a new monster by killing the first.

But Shahira hadn’t run. She had taken Vida’s nut-brown hands in her darker ones, and looked back with more empathy than Vida had ever seen. Maybe, Vida had reflected later, that moment had opened the door to her healing more than anything else had. Maybe that was the moment she first began to forgive herself, and to learn how to truly love.

Vida wiped the tears from her face and stood, humbled by the beauty of the dawn, by second chances, and by a life that kept going so far beyond the nightmares she had once thought were all she would ever know. She hummed Amazing Grace as she walked back through the rows of the dead to her car, sitting waiting for her like some loyal old dog. Waiting for her like her real family waking up back home, the loves of a life she had somehow managed to build out of the wreckage of her childhood, impossible stone by impossible stone.

She slipped back into her car, and took a deep breath. Before her, the sun had fully cleared the horizon, blinding and huge and red and beautiful. She breathed in the memories, and as she exhaled, she let go one more time of the man and the tragedy that had defined her life so completely, and turned her thoughts instead to the people she chose.

Her body filling with a bone-deep gratitude—to have survived, and to have somehow, impossibly, created a life full of love—Vida shifted into drive and headed back out into a better world, leaving her ghosts behind to the whispers of the dawn.

—FRANCES KOZIAR

THROWING LIGHT

The boy’s parents sat on a leather sofa beside the boy. They touched his brown hair at times and at other times did not. They occasionally rubbed his back. The boy groaned when they did this. He traced the tan cracks of the sofa with his finger.

The therapist wore a white blouse with decorative folds and fringe that lined the sleeves. She disliked the fringe because she thought it called attention to her arms, which it did. Her arms were a kind of milky white, with blotches of pink rosacea. She had told herself that she would show her arms, because they were just arms, after all. There was nothing concerning about them, the arms.

She was recommended to the boy’s parents by the boy’s teacher, who had voiced concerns about the boy’s attitude. The boy, she had said, had seemed a little glum. She had used that word: glum. The boy, in her view, was grappling with serious negativity. The boy had brought up the likelihood of contracting Hepatitis C and the ongoing war twice in the same week. Any teacher would be concerned. Then she had leaned in, perched her elbows on her knees, and asked if everything was okay at home. The boy’s parents had assured her that things were great, but they, too, had noticed a certain glumness in his demeanor. They asked if the teacher had any suggestions for the boy’s glumness. The teacher had said that they should practice positive reinforcement and affirmation. She had also said they could see the conversation therapist.

The therapist had been working with the boy, whose name was Edgar, for upwards of two weeks. They had met four times. The parents, being loving and devoted parents, had insisted on being in the room to hear the conversation. Edgar did not like going to see the therapist. The room was too big, he had said. He felt small in the room. The room felt like it was meant to hold bigger people and not him, Edgar. He had said it that way too. The boy’s parents had cooed and rubbed his head. They told him that no room was too big for him.

The therapist was determined to get to the bottom of the boy’s negativity. She had told the boy that he had no reason to be negative. In fact, she had said, the negativity was actually damaging the relationships he cared about.

The parents nodded. They agreed that the boy’s negativity was problematic for them. They were both in finance.

The boy stared out the window at the firmament lidded with gray. A damp, dark branch spread weblike across the window, framing the murky sky in oblong fractures. The therapist pulled at the hem of her pencil skirt, shifting her weight from side to side.

“Let’s do an exercise.”

The boy looked to her and then down to the polished cement floor. His father rubbed the boy’s back. He had a goatee and a cleanly shaved head. His friends called him Dan, but his name was Scott. The boy adjusted the red-and-blue striped shirt, pinching fabric at his shoulders. He felt bunched up.

“Let’s start with ‘Hi, how are you?’”

The boy looked at her again. She had a face that was seventy-percent cheek, it seemed to him. Her lips were painted with a pale pink lipstick. The blue in her eyes never seemed to diminish. He expected that it would disappear sometimes, like behind a lid or what-have-you. But every time he looked at her, she was looking at him.

“What do you say?”

“I say.” The boy coughed into a tightly balled fist. “I say I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”

“A-hah,” the therapist said, “There you are with that ambiguity. We’ve talked about ambiguity.”

“Now, Edgar,” the mother said, “We need you to be clear. Completely free of ambiguity.”

This structured a double-bind for Edgar. If he was totally free of ambiguity, he would be negative, but to be not negative, he would have to be ambiguous, which was a word he had learned two weeks ago and sounded out every night under glow-in-the-dark stars.

“I’m great,” Edgar said. “It’s a truly blessed day to be alive.”

His father made a ticking sound with his mouth, shaking his head. “I apologize.”

“We don’t know where the sarcasm comes from,” said the mother.

This was another new word for Edgar, though he knew the concept. Of course, being eight years old, he just thought it was lying, that he was just not telling the truth, which was also wrong.

“Well, let’s try it again. Hi, Edgar. How are you?”

“I’m good.” He tried to drop his voice an octave or at least to a fourth below its resting pitch.

She drew the sides of her mouth back. “And?”

“Right, right. How are you?”

“Edgar, I’m well. Thank you for asking. How is school?”

“I’m learning a lot.”

“No, but how is it?”

He smiled. “It’s good. I’m pleased with the material, the faculty, and the afterschool activities afforded to me.”

The therapist looked back to the mother and father, who looked a little glisten-eyed.

“I’m glad to hear it. I hear you’re doing sports now. What are you playing?” She crossed one leg over the other.

“I play soccer twice a week. It’s marvelous. I love the uniform.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’re being sarcastic. How long have you been being sarcastic?”

The father tussled the boy’s hair. “You almost got away with it. Focus up.”

“What do you like?” The therapist asked.

“I like rainy mornings. I like the last sip of milk at the bottom of my cereal bowl. I like stories where no one dies but we learn a lesson from a small change in the character’s behavior.”

The therapist looked past the boy to his parents. His mother sighed and nodded, covering her mouth with her hand.

“It’s worse than I thought,” the therapist said.

“We thought he was fine.” The mother said, dabbing at the bottom of her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. “We thought he was just a reflective child.”

“You were right to come to me. We need to meet three times a week.” 

*

It was a high-aperture spring day when the boy arrived. The world felt pastel-hued and enormous and squirrels wove spirals around thickbarked trees. His parents knelt on one knee beside the car and hugged the boy, tucking their chins into the crook of his neck. His pupils were dilated beyond recompense. They said it would only be a little while. Then they got back to the jeep and kicked dust clouds up as they sped away. The sun sat at sixty percent, way out in the distance.

He met Jerry in the front office. Jerry had hair that scooped back like an ice cream cone dipped in chocolate. He wore a uniform of tan canvas material that he was constantly touching and readjusting. He ended every sentence with friendo. He was tall and chipper and had a wide gait. Edgar decided fairly quickly that Jerry was a doofus and probably lacked the capability for polysyllabic thought. But Edgar couldn’t say that, obviously. Not only was that rude, it was downright negative.

Jerry brought Edgar to the Getting to Know Each Other Bonfire Jamboree. Edgar sat at a picnic table and ate a wienie that slipped out of the bun into the dirt. Like most everyone else, Edgar did not get up and Connect with His Peers, opting instead to stare at a blonde girl across the many rows of tables, counting how many times she pushed her glasses up her nose until she caught him and scowled at him with green eyes hugely magnified.

When the light became dim and pale, Jerry took Edgar to a cabin made of felled trees and splintered plywood. Inside were three-stack bunkbeds that required an industrial ladder to get to the top of. As luck would have it, Edgar drew short straw. Edgar’s roommates were named Caleb, Anthony, Donny, Mike, Johnboy, and Cheese. It was unclear whether or not Cheese was his Christian name, but it was best not to pry. They all slept facing the wall and said very little to each other.

The following day, they were awakened by Jerry, who stood in the doorway making himself hoarse trying to sound like a rooster. He wore tan shorts and a mole on his leg that all the campers talked about. The boys wiped sleep, debris, and impatience from their eyes. Today was seminar day, they were informed. They had much to look forward to. On the program was: “It’s a Beautiful Day” with Bill Boyle, “Green Grass and Blue Skies” with Martha DePalma, “The Lord as Thy Beacon” with Reverend Wallace, and “Your Vision, Your Choice” with Steve Gilmour. The campers split themselves into pairs and went off toward designated stages built at the edges of the campgrounds. None attended Reverend Wallace’s clinic.

Edgar and Cheese settled themselves on the top of aluminum bleachers, just as the sun began to warm them. Cheese was a slight boy from Iowa with pitch-colored hair, light blue eyes, and a perpetually runny nose. Sometimes, Edgar learned, Cheese would get so sick of the sputum discharge that he would cram twisted toilet paper or tissues into each nostril, just to get a break from the taste. Cheese didn’t talk much, but spent a lot of time reading pocketbooks on God-knows-what, as he did now. He’d slip them out and attempt to conceal them in the palm of his hand, shifting his face to abstraction to make it look like he was looking at the creases in his skin or something. Cheese would not say what got him here.

Cheese slipped the book back into his pocket just as Bill Boyle came shuffling out in a white suit. He looked damp, and his thin, mousy brown hair was pulled back into a deflated pomp. He did a kind of running-in-place, David Byrne dance to center stage and spread arms wide to all eleven campers.

“How are we doing, campers?”

A brief moment of silence, then, “good,” disjointedly.

He came back with “I said, ‘How are we doing?’”

 “Good,” the campers said, with maybe 3dB more volume.

“That’s great. Real good.” He paced toward the edge of the plywood stage. “Let’s talk perspective. Does anyone know what perspective is?”

“It’s how you see things,” one girl ventured.

“That’s right. Good job. Real good job.” He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at his brow. “Perspective is important. It is the single most important thing in life. Because with perspective comes gratitude. Does anyone know what gratitude is?”

A hand shot up before Cheese, who looked at it with vague disdain. Boyle pointed at it.

“It’s being happy with what you have.”

“Good job. That’s right. Does anyone know why gratitude is important?”

Faces drawn back reflectively.

“I’m here to tell you. Gratitude makes you feel secure in life. Feeling secure is what allows us to talk to each other. To communicate.” He dragged the handkerchief down his whole face. “And communicating—being with other people—is the very best part of being alive.”

Edgar raised his hand. Boyle threw a sideways fingergun at him.

“But shouldn’t we be able to talk about our fears too? Isn’t anger a valid emotion?”

He looked down to the worn planks on the stage and shook his head, making a tsking sound. “See that’s why you’re here. You need to change your—” he made a rainbow in thin air with a sweep of his hands “—perspective.”

“Isn’t that dishonest?”

“What’s your name?”

“Edgar.”

“So, listen, Edgar. We’re not saying you have to lie or should lie. No, no. Not at all. We’re saying you should try to see things differently.”

“That’s stupid.”

“What did you say?” The handkerchief was balled in his hand, folds splaying out between his fingers.

“That’s stupid. Dumb.”

“Eddie,” he pointed to a sandy-haired man in tan canvas, “Take him to the Shun Tent.”

Edgar stood and bounced down the bleachers to the young man’s side. The young man gave him half a grin and started walking, leading him behind the main building of camp. They stood before a six-foot teepee. The boy looked at it and then at Eddie.

“Go on,” Eddie said, throwing his arm limply in the direction of the tent.

“What, in there?”

“Yeah,” he said, taking a step and spitting in the dirt.

“To do what?”

“When you bring negativity to camp, you have to be shunned.”

“You’re giving me a timeout.”

“I’m giving you a chance to think. Don’t think of it as a punishment, think of it as an opportunity for reflection.”

“When can I come out?”

“We’ll let you know.” 

*

So Edgar sat in his own sweat for upwards of an hour, reflecting. Earlier in the month, a neighbor boy had had a huge blowout birthday party. All the neighborhood children had been there. There was a clown, a bounce castle, a petting zoo, four cakes, two tables of presents, and a table for gift baskets. Voices were keening and shrill, the children chased one another. Parents stood with low alcohol content punch and talked, keeping a loose eye on their kids. Edgar sat in his living room, trying to watch TV. Two months prior, Edgar had told the neighbor boy that shark attacks were exceedingly common which, in turn, made the boy reticent to go to the beach and subsequently, to give up surfing with his dear old dad. And the boy’s father was annoyed with this turn of events and had confronted Edgar’s very own dad about Edgar’s behavior and Edgar’s dad had said he would take care of it. But the boy’s father wasn’t going to take Edgar’s very own dad at his word and told him that Edgar could not attend the boy’s birthday party. And Edgar’s very own dad had said come on, Ben, don’t be cruel and the boy’s father said there’d be no more playdates between the two boys, he’d make sure of it. And he was right on all fronts. Playdates ceased and Edgar wasn’t invited to the boy’s party.

Eventually, though, Edgar didn’t want to watch TV anymore, being as he could hear high-octane screaming and fun being had by all. So he went to the backyard and stood on a crate that he had overturned beside the fence, looking at the fun being had, the llamas, and the clown making custom Dali balloons. And he caught the neighbor boy’s eyes for one moment, with his head perched there on the triangles of the slatted wooden fence, and the boy gave him a long look, like he felt bad for not giving Edgar access to the shrill, keening fun. Edgar shrank away, stepping down from the crate and going back across the patio, through the sliding-glass door, and back to the couch to watch TV.

And Edgar thought of this here, in the Shun Tent. He declared that he would no longer be negative and he would change his perspective. He actually sat up and mashed the heel of his balled up fist into his other flatted hand and said “no more.” He shook his head in affirmation. And so now full of resolve, he sat and waited to be retrieved. He peaked outside the flaps of the tent and saw nothing. But he heard a rustling. He took one step outside of the tent and saw it there, almond-shaded and hulking. It moved in terrifying mechanical grace. And by God, it was heading straight for camp.

He stood for a moment, one leg in the tent and one outside. He made a decisive move: he began to run around the opposite side of the building, the sweat building upon his brow. And he began to shout. And all the campers were confused, and the seminar leaders turned to him with concerned looks, and the counselors cocked their head to thirty degrees and waited for explanation.

But all Edgar could do was scream, “My God, what beautiful fur” over and over again until they stopped looking at him and began to look around to find the referent. And it was Eddie who eventually spotted the bear and shepherded the campers into the building, locked the doors, and performed an all-hands-on-deck head count, noting all campers present. And from the windows of the building, they watched as the bear tore into all of their neatly packed lunches for an hour or so, rolled in the dirt, and batted plastic Ziploc bags around until he was finally satiated, and left the camp for good.

Jerry knelt now, got right down to eye level with Edgar and expressed his most sincere gratitude for not only alerting them to danger, but also bringing positivity to the situation. And Jerry reflected that Edgar had, in fact, done some serious reflection in the Shun Tent, verbalizing that that was always its purpose here at Camp Positivo: to encourage reflection on one’s own communication. Jerry grabbed young Edgar by the shoulders and gave thanks in such an earnest way that Edgar was slightly uncomfortable with the whole situation.

Nonetheless, Edgar was awarded the MVC trophy just three short days later and his parents expressed unbounded pride in their little boy when they picked him up. And arriving home, Edgar’s very own father went out and purchased a glass case for display of that very trophy. And so it stood, gleaming, throwing light in all directions—just as his boy had.

—MATTHEW WOOD

heartwood interviews: featured writer series

An Interview with Jessica Handler

HW: WE’RE ALL THE SUM OF OUR CHOICES, AS WELL AS CHOICES OTHERS MAKE FOR AND AROUND US, INTERACTIONS, THE FATES, OUR INTENTIONS AND MISTAKES. CAN YOU THINK BACK TO THE ONE OR A FEW PIVOTAL INSTANCES IN YOUR LIFE THAT SET YOU ON THE PATH TOWARD “BEING A WRITER”?

JH: My family was intensely verbal. According to my mom, I was reading at the age of five (although not always understanding what I was sounding out from the newspaper, which considering that apparently, I was reading about the serial killer Richard Speck, is probably wise.) My father read poetry to me nightly – I can still hear his voice when I think of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Word games like “the minister’s cat,” which is essentially an alphabetical spoken word game, were constant with my mom and my sisters and me. I learned early on about the wonderful, and sometimes terrible, ways that language frames the world.

HW: OUR WRITING LIVES MORPH SO INTERESTINGLY THROUGH THE YEARS OF OUR CAREERS. IT’S NICE WHEN READERS CAN SEE THEMSELVES IN THE SUCCESSFUL WRITING LIVES OF OTHERS. THINKING BACK, SAY, TO THE FIRST THIRD OF YOUR WRITING LIFE EXPERIENCE, WHAT USED TO MAKE YOU MOST ANXIOUS? WHAT, IF ANYTHING, BROUGHT YOU OUT OF THAT ANXIOUSNESS? IN JUXTAPOSITION TO ANXIETY IN WRITING, NOW THAT YOU’VE FOUND A SOLID FOOTHOLD IN YOUR VOICE AND THEMES, WHAT BOLSTERS YOUR CONFIDENCE?

JH: Writing was so much easier when the stakes were low! When I was in high school, I wrote stream-of-consciousness essays for my friends recapping our summer fun (and we were wild, and it was the ‘70s, so think “Dazed and Confused” or “That Seventies Show” and you’ll be close.) While I agree that I have a “solid foothold” on my themes now, getting a solid hold on my voice or my characters’ voices is a new challenge with every project. This is true of fiction and nonfiction. Every new project makes me anxious, sometimes every day for the years a book takes to write or for the months or more that an essay can take. Will it be any “good?” Will I do the subject justice? What bolsters my confidence is a good writing day, when I can immerse myself in the work for three or four hours at a time and see and feel the characters’ interactions and the flow of the narrative. That’s when things are popping for me on the page, and when I feel confident about the work. I hope that other writers find confidence in those good writing days, too.

HW: IN TWO OF YOUR BOOKS – THE NOVEL, MAGNETIC GIRL, AND THE WRITER’S GUIDEBOOK, BRAVING THE FIRE – YOU TACKLE THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CHALLENGES OF INTERPRETING AND WRITING OUT THE SELF. WITH LULU, YOUR MAIN CHARACTER IN MAGNETIC GIRL, YOU BRING HER TO LIFE BY WAY OF YOUR AUTHORIAL POSSESSING OF THE LIFE, HELPING TELL A STORY THAT, WITHOUT YOUR HELP WOULD NOT BE TOLD INTO EXISTENCE. IN BRAVING THE FIRE, YOU ASSIST WRITERS WHO CHALLENGE THEMSELVES TO WRITE OUT THE LOSS IN THEIR LIVES. BOTH ARE PROJECTS OF GIVING VOICE TO TRUTHS IN THE WORLD. WHICH DO YOU FIND MOST CHALLENGING, HELPING OTHERS MINE OUT THEIR OWN VOICES, OR MINING OUT CHARACTER’S VOICES FROM NEAR-LOST HISTORY?  

JH: My MFA work was in nonfiction, I’ve worked as a feature journalist, and I worked in documentary television for many years, which I think is also a form of creative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction does help me “mine …. their [or my own] own voices,” to use your terrific phrase. Making the switch to fiction was hugely challenging! I tried to write about Lulu Hurst, the real ‘Magnetic Girl’ as nonfiction at first, but it just didn’t gel. I’ve read historical fiction forever; probably starting with E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” in high school, or maybe we could call the “Little House…” series historical fiction. I love what the genre can do. Once I accepted that “The Magnetic Girl” needed to be a fictionalized version of a portion of Lulu Hurst’s story, I started to use my imagination differently. Of course I did a lot of research into her vaudeville act and into specifics of daily life in her era, but I also relied on some commonalities in order to create fiction. I had been a teenaged girl, and she was a teenaged girl. I had been uncomfortable in my body, had wanted attention and power (what teenager doesn’t?) and from there, I was able to write her story.

HW: BRAVING THE FIRE, YOUR GUIDEBOOK FOR WRITERS WRITING ON GRIEF AND LOSS, SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN AS CATHARTIC A PROJECT FOR YOU AS THE AUTHOR AS FOR THOSE POTENTIALLY GAINING ILLUMINATION FROM THE BOOK. YOU SPEAK OF A SIXTH LEVEL OF GRIEVING – RENEWAL. WHAT RENEWS YOU MOST IN YOUR WRITING AND INTERACTION WITH WRITERS THESE DAYS?  

JH: I caution against framing creative nonfiction as “cathartic,” since that essentially means to purge emotions. If creative nonfiction does only that, the written work serves the author but not necessarily the reader. I prefer James Baldwin’s comment from his “Autobiographical Notes” about writing making art out of the disorder that is life.

The writers in my life renew me daily. My husband, Mickey Dubrow, is a novelist – his book “American Judas” is a remarkably prescient political satire – and we have a little writers’ retreat here on our porch at the end of the day where we read to each other what we’ve written that day, and we talk about the challenges and rewards in our writing. He’s my go-to for plot challenges, and I’m his go-to for character development.  I’ve been a member of a terrific writing group for over a decade, and we meet regularly in person here in Atlanta (we met over Zoom during the height of Covid.) My work is stronger because of their meticulous care, and I’ve become a better teacher and critique partner because of their camaraderie and insight. I have an accountability partner, too – the novelist & musician Pete McDade, who’s part of that writing group – and we check in by text a couple of times a week with word counts, or complaints, or delights.  

HW: LET’S TALK A LITTLE ABOUT THAT ONE BIG WRITING PROJECT THAT’S STILL IN PROGRESS – THAT’S BEEN ON YOUR MIND THE LONGEST BUT JUST HASN’T QUITE CRESTED TOWARD COMPLETION. WHAT’S THAT LOOK LIKE?  

JH: Two things: a novel that’s just about at a functional first draft, and the revision of a long-form essay that wants my attention and I keep telling it, “soon!” The novel is about women and friendship and the secrets we keep for other people’s safety. The story takes place in Cape Cod and in Los Angeles in the 1970s. I worked in entertainment in Los Angeles in the early eighties, so am having fun revisiting recording studios in my mind. The essay has to do with an urban legend regarding the Johnstown (Pennsylvania) Flood and my relationship to survival.  

HW: YOU’RE TRAVELING ON FOOT FOR AN UNKNOWN ABOUT OF TIME. BESIDES ITEMS FOR SUSTENANCE, AND GIVEN YOU WILL REMAIN AN ACTIVE WRITER ON THE ROAD AND WHEREVER YOUR TRAVELS TAKE YOU, WHAT ARE THE LIMITED CONTENTS OF YOUR “WRITERS GO-BAG”?

JH: Assuming I can’t bring my laptop and charger, I’d bring a sketchbook with unlined paper to write in, and a pen with easy-flowing ink. Probably two pens because I hate when they start to skip. I like to listen to the world around me, but maybe I should also have a recording of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” which I listen to almost non-stop when I write.

HW: YOU MENTION IN YOUR MEMOIR, INVISIBLE SISTERS, HOW YOUR TWO SISTERS ARE PASSED, YET SOMETIMES INTERACT WITH YOU, EVEN TO THE POINT OF INFORMING YOUR WRITING. YOU HAVE, IN EFFECT, “OBSERVED” THEIR LIVES UNFOLDING ALONG WITH YOURS THROUGH THE YEARS, GROWING UP TOGETHER IN SPITE OF THE EARLY LOSS OF PHYSICAL CONNECTION. DO YOU BELIEVE THE WRITING MADE THIS POSSIBLE OR VICE-VERSA.  

JH: I believe that my writing the memoir was a way to make myself think about the family mine could have been: who my sisters were and who I believe they would have grown up to be. I write in Invisible Sisters that Susie wanted to be a nurse. I know this because I have the paper on which she’d written that when she was maybe six years old, in big scrawly little-kid handwriting. Would she have grown up to be a nurse? Who knows? How many of us work in the professions we admired when we were first graders? Looking hard at memories of time together after a loved one has died can be flat-out painful, and I couldn’t do it all in one swoop. I know that Susie and Sarah are dead and are not physically with me, but sometimes I get a feeling or a thought, and who am I to say that it’s not them, for a moment, from wherever they are?

HW: YOU MENTIONED IN A PSYCHOLOGY TODAY GUEST ESSAY (2010) HOW, THOUGH YOU USUALLY DON’T TAKE TO SLOGANS EASILY, THE PHRASE “NEW NORMAL” DID STRIKE A CHORD WITH YOU, ESPECIALLY SINCE IT’S BEEN USED IN THE VERNACULARS OF GRIEF AND RECOVERY. TAKING A STEP AWAY FROM THE THEME OF LOSS, HOWEVER, AND APPLYING THE PHRASE TO SOCIETY’S COMMON EXPERIENCES OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC WHEN ADDED TO OUR WRITING LIVES, WHAT “NEW NORMALS” ARE YOU EXPERIENCING AND/OR WITNESSING?

I’m seeing a lot of grief for so many reasons, ranging from the deaths of loved ones to grieving the way things used to be. There’s a lot of writing coming from this experience, and there will be more. My own “new normal” is recognizing that I like having a smaller social circle, fewer places to be, less rushing around. I find that my friends feel the same way. Maybe that’s age (I’m 62) or maybe it’s the result of becoming accustomed to social distancing. I used to thrive in busy, crowded environments, like the annual AWP conference or running through an airport to make a flight. This no longer appeals to me, and there’s a “new normal” in acknowledging that that’s okay with me.

HW: WHAT’S YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SO-CALLED BLANK PAGE? IS IT AN INVITATION? DOES IT INTIMIDATE? IS IT AN UNDISCOVERED PLACE AND TIME? A CANVAS?

JH: Today it’s an invitation. Tomorrow, it might intimidate me. My hope is that the blank page will stay an open invitation to discovery, but there are days when the spelling of my own name doesn’t look right to me.

Gale Acuff has had poetry published in HeartWood (2019), Ascent, Reed, Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, The Font Chiron Review, Poem, Adirondack Review, Florida Review, Slant, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Roanoke Review and many other journals in over a dozen countries. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel, The Weight of the World, and The Story of My Lives. Gale has taught university English courses in the US, China, and Palestine.

Mary Amato is a writer, musician, essayist, and teaching artist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Mothering, Muse, Teacher, Cicada, New Poets Review, and many more. Her published novels include Guitar Notes, Open Mic Night at Westminster Cemetery, and Get Happy. She is the winner of many grants and awards including the Keisler Poetry Prize, the Maryland Library Association's Author Award, Utah's Beehive Book award, and more. She has been a featured speaker for The National Book Festival, the American Library Association, The National Council of Teachers of English, and other national festivals and conferences. Her own teaching focuses on the therapeutic value of writing and the ways that writing can help us to understand ourselves and others.

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021) and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

Alan Caldwell is a veteran teacher and a new author. He has recently been published in Southern Gothic Creations, Deepsouth Magazine, The Backwoodsman Magazine, You Might Need To Hear This, Black Poppy Review, oc87 Recovery Diaries and is forthcoming in The Chamber, Biostories, and The American Diversity Report.

Alexandria Faulkenbury holds an M.A. in literature from East Carolina University. Her work has been featured in Front Porch Review and The Bookends Review. She lives in central New York with her family and can most frequently be found writing at the kitchen table while the baby naps. She is currently revising her first novel.

Richard George is a Tulane graduate whose work has appeared in Litro, Mystery Itch, HASH, Toho Journal, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, SIAMB!, Red Ogre Review, The Bookends Review, Sunflowers at Midnight and Drunk Monkeys. When not writing, he works as a probation officer. He lives in an apartment in Asbury Park, New Jersey and can also be found at https://www.instagram.com/richgbooks/.

Raul Herrera Jr is a Latinx playwright, educator and spoken word artist. His writing is featured in Coiled Serpent published by Tia Chucha Press, Get Lit Rising which is the winner of the 2016 Silver Nautilus Book Award for young adult non-fiction and, in 2017, wrote Dante, a modern Hip-Hop adaptation of Dante’s Inferno produced by Tim Robbins and The Actor’s Gang Theatre in Culver City. In 2019, Raul was featured as a writer and performer in the film Summertime, directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Jonathan Jones lives and works in Rome where he teaches at John Cabot University. He has a PhD in literature from the University of Sapienza, and a novella 'My Lovely Carthage' recently published in the spring of 2020 from J. New Books.

Sandra Kolankiewicz’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Fortnightly Review, Galway Review, The Healing Muse, New World Writing and Appalachian Review. Sandra is the author of Turning Inside Out, The Way You Will Go and Lost in Transition.

Frances Koziar has published work in 80 different literary magazines and outlets including Best Canadian Essays 2021 and Daily Science Fiction, and has also served as an author panelist, fiction contest judge, and a microfiction editor. She is a young (disabled) retiree and a social justice advocate, and she lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Learn more at https:/franceskoziar.wixsite.com/author.

Rita Malenczyk is a writer, English professor, painter, and printmaker living and working in eastern Connecticut.

Clare Pasley is an undergraduate student at Western Connecticut State University. She is currently attaining her bachelor’s degree in professional writing and has been featured in poetry journals such as: WomenUp and Sidelines but primarily focuses on creative nonfiction. She’s got dreams of writing novels someday, but for right now she’s happy to be here.

Michigan poet, Lynn Pattison, is author of Matryoshka Houses (Kelsay Press, 2020) in addition to three other poetry collections: tesla's daughter (March St. Press); Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press) and Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press). She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times and for inclusion in Best Micro-fiction. Pattison’s work has appeared in Ruminate, Tinderbox, New Flash Fiction Review, The Notre Dame Review, Rhino, Brilliant Corners, The Atlanta Review, Smartish Pace and many other publications. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, most recently: Worth More Standing: Poets And Activists Pay Homage To Trees (Caitlin Pres, 2022) and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017).

Bethany Reid’s Sparrow won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, selected by Dorianne Laux. Her stories, poetry, and essays have recently appeared in One Art, Poetry East, Quartet, Passengers, Adelaide and Persimmon Tree. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their grown daughters. She blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com.

Nicole Scott is a West Virginia native with an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Lindenwood University. She loves exploring wordplay, mythology, and sexuality in her work, while simultaneously debating on another double shot of espresso. She lives in Maryland with her partner and two cats, both of which are probably aliens. Her poetry and other published work can be found on her website nicolescottpoetry.com.

Liam Strong (they/them) is a Pushcart Prize nominated queer writer and has earned their BA in Writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. You can find their essays and poetry in Impossible Archetype, Rathalla Review, Glass Mountain, Lunch Ticket, Chiron Review, Panoply, Prairie Margins, and The 3288 Review. They live in Traverse City, Michigan.

Victor Wang is a Chinese-Canadian, Montreal-based writer, and an undergraduate student at McGill University in Montréal. He was a culture and sports reporter for the McGill Tribune, and he received the 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau High School Writer’s Craft Award. His poetry was recognized in consecutive years from 2016 to 2018 at the Ontario Student Leadership Conference (OSLC). Victor enjoys writing poetry and stories that unapologetically project the voices and experiences of people of colour in Canada.

Matthew Wood is a writer of fiction and poetry. He is a cum laude graduate of CSULB’s creative writing program. He has had fiction published in El Camino College’s Myriad and has been awarded the Tom Lew Prize for Fiction. Currently, he is working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Terence Young lives in Victoria, British Columbia. He is a co-founder and former editor of The Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for younger writers. His most recent book is a collection of poetry, Smithereens (Harbour Publishing, 2021).