All Things Pankish

Ask the Author: Gabe Durham

Enjoy five proses from Gabe Durham in the June issue and then he talks with us about adult diapers, the shame of the body, and the change in you, me, and all of us.

1. What would you like to be in your gift basket when presented with adult diapers?

Candy, cheetoes, colorful fruits, a promotional t-shirt for an upcoming summer sequel. More important than the content itself is that the adult diapers, always in the basket’s center, are covered by the other stuff, lest neighbors (their prying eyes ever-prying) discover my shameful—though natural—needs.

2. What choices did you make in childhood by rays of light on this rocking chair you had?

Don’t get me started, Pank! For instance: If the light hits the chair by noon, eat a cookie. Doesn’t hit it by noon: two cookies. Or if my mom says the light flatters my face when I ask her if the light flatters my face, go into male modeling. If she replies with a firm but fair “no way, José” and only after my tantrum softens her appraisal a little, write little fiction deals and scatter them about the web. If the light really lights up the living room, three cookies. Doesn’t, four cookies. Some combination of light and dark? Mom. We’re out of cookies.

3. If you wanted to be the change you wanted to be, what would the costume look like? How would you make it?

How stressful to be held accountable for my own words like this. The costume would be a meticulous note-for-note recreation of Josh Ritter’s The Animal Years. In the tradition of Beatles cover band The Fab Faux, I wouldn’t worry about dressing up like him, but, youngish slender contemporary sometimes-bearded white guy he is, I might accidentally end up dressing like him anyway. I would “make” the costume by taking twice-weekly guitar lessons and then sitting down to memorize the many words to “Thin Blue Flame,” the really long one.

4. How do you whip yourself into writing something?

I say, “Time to write another story,” then check my email. (ha.) My favorite thing is working on something I’ve already begun, so when there isn’t enough of that stuff around, I remind me that I’ve got to write a first draft to make that happen.

5. How do you shame your body when hungry?

Quietly explain to my body that it’s only grumbling because it’s so accustomed to the regularity with which I feed it. There are some bodies in the world that get used to malnourishment, and mine is bitching because I’m a little late to lunch? Talk about selfish.

the unfirm line, Aaron Burch

“But if you get this far. If you get it.”

Aaron Burch, How To Take Yourself Apart, How To Make Yourself Anew

I love optimism as it relates to distance and the next step. Hope tied to momentum and time. What will be the next step after you have reached the height of the mountain?

Through the blood, the work, the prayer and sacrifice. If you make it. If all the hard work pays off … then.

Electric Parade: Typewriting

The colossus sits atop one of my bookshelves. A black, cast iron automaton rules over the elegant, aluminum unibody tools at my desk. Touch screens. Curved angles. Polished bezel and battery packs. The colossus is powered by human endeavor; its glass keys require the force of fingers riding along some prosaic wave. Important paragraphs. Maybe a secret short story. The first embers of a novel or manifesto. The colossus hungers for words. I sit in front of the television, its shadow looms over my left shoulder. Daring me.

I look at my laptop and PC, my keyboards and mice, and I’m reminded of the times. Things made for the masses. Quick, cheap production to control costs passed to the consumer (and increase profit margins). So instead of writing, I look up to the colossus. The metal casing is cool to the touch; my finger leaves an accent mark through the dust and cigarette smoke collected on it. It’s almost eighty years old. A veritable time machine or a former tool of a writer long dead (or maybe not).

Maybe she wrote an unpublishable story with it, something set in post WWII California or post-apocalyptic New York in the year 2020. Perhaps she was industrious, pragmatic, and used it when needed. Term papers or a thesis on the mating rituals of some rare butterfly. I can’t fathom the possibility that she never used it, that it was a birthday present re-gifted at Christmastime. Moving from house to house through recessions and revolutions. Maybe she used it to write a motion on behalf of Black Americans disenfranchised—allowing me the opportunity to fawn over an old machine today, rather than getting to work, exacting my own little measure of change.

I take it down from the shelf, sit it on the kitchen table, and examine its workings. Dried ink flutters as I blow into it. I lift one of its hammers, a capital and lowercase “S”, and rub my finger over the letters. My limp wrists, fine tuned for touch typing, vibrate like cheap crystal spheres as I push down the keys. I have to reset, reconsider my approach; I crack my knuckles and supplant one verb for another. This time, I don’t push—I strike the keys. I strike though there’s no paper, though I need to replace the ribbons or, if thorough, deconstruct the entire monolith, to then resurrect it from near death.

I think about my computers again, understanding their true values are contained within the hard drives. There will be no history; the iDroidTouchHD will not find itself in a new set of hands in the year 2090. It will be obsolete six months from now and, accordingly, I will abide by the times and upgrade. My data—an antiseptic reference to writings dear to me—will come along, leaving behind a mechanized shell like a hollowed cocoon or marooned spaceship in lieu of a newer, faster, more fingerprint-resistant model.

The bell rings. I reset the carriage. I continue. I strike. My fingertips are sore. My wrists catch fire. I don’t know what I’m writing. What does it matter?

I care nothing for publication, for art and craft or drama and plot. No one will read it, not even me. Pieces of unseen text won’t float beneath a hard drive’s surface, waiting for someone to extract it should I fail to apply a Department of Defense-level wipe to it. My fingers strike and unhitch words bound to my mind, sending them into nothingness. I’m writing for the hell of it.

After my fiancee pokes her head around the corner—for a second time—I place the colossus back on the shelf. And like that, I forget all that I typed. I’m used to seeing end results, even the scraps of a crap short story; without a piece of paper in my hands, I wonder if I just wasted precious energy. Yet new words emerge inside of my head; quiet characters finally begin to speak.

So I sit down at my desk—and strike the keyboard. My plastic home keys are almost cracked by the newfound strength. In time, I return to touch typing, to that delicate balance of mental fervor and physical grace. A patient, postmodern construction of words slathered across a blank screen with millisecond speed. It’s not as fun over here, at the desk. The audience peers over my shoulder; the editor in me murders darlings moments after I type them. I think about perspective—vacillating between first and third person—and I strike the keyboard again.

Ask the Author: Victoria Lynne McCoy

You can read a poem from Victoria Lynne McCoy in the June issue and read on here for more on context in poetry, marriage proposals, and what it would be like on the day it were legal to rape your husband.

1. How important are titles in setting the appropriate context of your poetry?

Every once in awhile, a specific title will seem an obvious choice for a poem, but most of the time I struggle with the naming process. One way I get around this is to rely on the title to provide a context, or necessary information that I felt needed to be edited from the body of the poem. I tend to be wordy in my first drafts, so my revision process consists mainly of paring poems down. Looking at what necessary information I cut helps me to know what specifically the title needs to convey, and gives me a starting point.

In “On the Day It Became Legal to Rape Your Wife,” the title provides the backdrop against which to read the majority of the poem, as the reference to the title doesn’t appear until the end. The title was originally the first line of the poem, but by removing it from the body, I was able to cut out the first few lines that served as merely an onramp to where the heart of the poem began, and by distancing it from the poem itself, allowed for a little more surprise at the end.

2. When writing a poem, do you often work backwards from the last lines or do you let it spill naturally?

It is pretty rare that I start from the end of a poem, but each poem dictates it’s own unique process, and I go where it takes me. The poem itself is a happening, even if written in past tense or recounting a story. Line by line, it is a process of discovery—I want something in me to be different when I reach the end of a poem, and that usually means I can’t know where I will end up when I begin. There have been times when what felt like the last lines came to me first, in which case the discovery comes not in learning where I’m going, but where I came from, which can be just as exciting. And sometimes lines I thought were the end of the poem were really the beginning, and vice versa.

Often, if the poem ends up somewhere expected or comfortable, neither of us—myself nor the poem—are doing our jobs. The most rewarding are the poems in which the end reveals something about the world or myself that I wasn’t aware of on a conscious level. Those are also the most terrifying, but when I feel I may be shying back from those moments, I remember what my thesis advisor, Victoria Redel, said: “It’s not a poem’s job to pass a judgment, but to say, ‘Here, look: these are all the ways we are human.’”

3. If I were to propose to you, what should I not do? What would be your proposal deal breakers?

Although I don’t believe the institution of marriage is right for everyone, or that finding “that one special person,” if it exists, is a given, I do believe very much in love, and I am open to it. I’m resistant to the idea that I need to function within some set relationship formula, so the best proposal would probably allude to a sort of DIY-style of marriage. Anything that referred to too conventional a marriage would most likely be a deal breaker. Or showing uncertainty. If I get married, it will be because it feels authentic for both of us, not just because people “naturally” get married. I think everyone’s really just figuring it out as they go along anyway, so being open and honest about the fact that we have no clue what we’re doing, other than loving each other, is probably the best way to go. And maybe throw in a Jack Gilbert quote or two, since of course you’d know I adore him.

4. How has the MFA process affected your writing?

I know MFA programs get a lot of slack and criticism about whether or not they are effective, and I do think it has a lot to do with the individual, but I can honestly say that my writing has matured and my craft has improved exponentially in the past two years (I graduated in May). Probably the most important lesson I took away from the program was how to trust myself, and my instincts, as a writer. I became more confident and more humbled at the same time, a combination integral to the voice Sarah Lawrence helped me to find and to hone. As an artist and as a human, it is my responsibility to keep growing and keep changing, and the MFA process really pushed me to do that.

5. What would “On The Day It Became Legal To Rape Your Husband” look like?

“On the Day It Became Legal to Rape Your Wife” was a reaction to a news story in 2009 that really upset me. I had to write this poem for myself, to reconcile my hopeless optimism with the reality of what was going on in the world. I had to create a balance, to imagine that in the face of such a tragedy, there was still something beautiful in the world. I imagine a poem about the rape of a husband would emerge out of a similar need, especially since the issue does not receive equal recognition when the tables are turned.

Janice Dickinson’s No Lifeguard on Duty: A Review

Before we begin, let me confirm that yes I do mean that Janice Dickinson, yes she does have a book, and yes I have read it. And I think that you should read it too.

Lest you think that No Lifeguard On Duty is nothing more than gossipy trash (which, okay, it mostly is), let me get a little lit-crit for a moment. Dickinson is not one for messy syntax or flowery metaphors; she knows what she wants to say, and she says it. The men in this book wear jeans “so tight you could read Braille through them” or “so tight you could tell their religion”.

If some of No Lifeguard on Duty’s sentences were in a trendy magazine with your favourite indie author’s name attached, I think that you would admire the simplicity and honesty of the prose. Some examples:

That was the summer I met Pam Adams, who possessed all the security I lacked. I think she was related to John Quincy Adams. She had milky white skin and freckles and gorgeous hazel eyes, and I found her irresistibly beautiful. So did most of the guys at Nova Junior High. And she knew it; she’d slept with plenty of them. She did everything I wouldn’t do. “I wish you had a cock, Janice,” she told me once.

Daniela took me and a group of friends to Tuscany for the weekend, and we drank our way through several vineyards. One of her friends was an Italian film director. He kept accosting me – in dark hallways, in corridors, by the ruins of a once-magnificent castle – to tell me he wanted me, that he couldn’t get me out of his mind. He did it with such passion I felt like I was in the middle of an Italian movie – a bad one, maybe even one of his.

So you’re excited and half-naked and hot and nervous and surrounded by the most beautiful people in the world, and suddenly you find yourself horsing around with a perfect-looking man who wants you – and what do you do? You find a closet and you lift up your skirt and you fuck him. And you fuck faster because the show’s about to start and then you come and he explodes inside you and you barely have time to catch your breath and, boom! – you’re disengaged and heading for the runway.

And Calvin [Klein] is screaming, “Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere!” And the dressers are hovering around you, their hands flapping like nervous birds, trying to undo the mess you’ve made. And then you feel the come dripping down your leg, and you smile at Calvin and say, “I was fucking Tony Spinelli, and it was great, thank you very much,” and then you’re on the runway, trying to keep your knees from buckling.

Most of all, Dickinson is open and honest about sex. She wants it, she likes it, and she’ll have it with whomever she likes:

I’ve been in Europe for seven months and Guy was the only man I’d slept with (okay, I let one other guy go down on me, and maybe there was some fellatio one night when I was blindsided by some excellent cocaine, but what’s a girl to do?)

In pop-cultureland women are still virgins or whores, and Dickinson’s honesty is refreshing. She’s not trying to be shocking, as recent oh-look-women-do-fuck books like Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands and Melissa P’s One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed. She’s just being honest, and it doesn’t seem to occur to her that people might dislike her for this; if they did, she’d just pretend she didn’t care anyway – she’s “Janice fucking Dickinson, motherfucker”, as she reminds us at least once per chapter.

The danger of this book is that you may read it simply looking to find out some gossip, rather than for the lucid and well-paced prose. To help you with this, I will now share all the sexual details Dickinson reveals: Mick Jagger is fantastic but a womaniser, Jack Nicholson is okay but clingy, Warren Beatty is great but wakes at dawn to stare at himself in the mirror, Bruce Willis is a nice guy but a bad actor, Liam Neeson is “hung like a donkey” but still in love with Julia Roberts, and Sylvester Stallone is short, wears cowboy boots with three-inch heels, offered Dickinson a million dollars to abort his potential baby, refers to sex as “bam ham slam”, and calls his penis a “dead rat”. Incidentally, that last tidbit made me feel gayer than ever before.

Am I the only fake-intellectual who really reads celebrity trash? Share your favourite celebreality book! I have many lunchbreaks to fill.

Sasha Fletcher’s When All our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds: A Review By Troy Urquhart

In the second chapter of Walden, the nineteenth-century naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau asserted that the ultimate creative act is, fundamentally, an act of self-creation, an act in which the artist shapes not objects in the world, but his own view of the world:

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.

Sasha Fletcher’s first book When All our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds takes this charge seriously. Its narrator constructs his own vision of the world, portraying it through a flexible lens of creative possibility. For Fletcher’s narrator, the line between imaginary and real is often a tenuous one – one that can be manipulated and crossed almost at will. He tells us, “I kept thinking about it until it was like I did it, which was great”. This is, after all, what the artist, and especially the creative writer, does.

With When All our Days Are Numbered, Fletcher celebrates the creative act and explores the nature of art, searching for the boundary at which the imagined completely – or almost completely – consumes our experience, searching for the ways that art allows us to share our lives with others, but also for the ways in which art can threaten our connection to others, to the world. He demonstrates an intoxicating creative power, magically reconstructing everyday experience through association and metaphor, but in doing so, he also demonstrates the risk inherent in the creative act: that of becoming disconnected from the world. He recognizes the power of language, and he uses it here to find (or, perhaps, to create) a sense of wonder in the world, but he also recognizes that the artist risks losing touch with what is real, risks mistaking the symbol for what it represents.

The book opens with a warning from its unnamed female character to the narrator: “Don’t get carried away out here”. And in fact, the narrator is carried away almost immediately (and quite literally) “by a string of balloons”. Throughout the novella, this pair strikes a balance between the creative possibilities of art and the practical realities of everyday life. When the narrator muses, “Few things are probably outside of the realm of possibility,” she tells him, “Stop thinking about the realm of possibility”. When he creates something, like a pair of trees that form a hammock, and offers it as something magical, she is quick to point out, “You just made that. . . Out of brown paper”. And early in the book, when she reminds him that “There is . . . A world outside what you can build”, he is not so certain: “I wrote the word waterfall on the wall. I hoped for the best”.

It might not be going too far, here, to say that he trusts the written word waterfall more than he would an actual waterfall–that he trusts the symbol of the thing more than he would trust the thing itself, if it were there.

The narrator of this book is driven by his desire to create, and by the desire to share that creation with another person. He envisions a whale, unloved, and tells his female companion, “If I were the whale I would have hanged myself from that old dead tree over there”, and it doesn’t matter that a whale can’t really hang himself. What matters is the reason he would kill himself: the “Infinite sadness” of being alone.

The creative act offers a possibility for companionship, for connection between people, at least in as much as art allows the artist’s view of the world to be shared with another person. And this narrator wants to share his artistic vision absolutely. Holding his companion’s hand, he thinks “about how if I move my fingers right then we will trade fingers”, and this is his desire, to enter completely into another: ”I wanted to wear you like a skin.”

What he longs for is intersubjectivity: not merely to tell her his vision of the world, or for her to tell him hers, but to enter each other entirely, literally to experience the world as the other.

She, however, is not so certain. In the novella’s conclusion, he calls for her to join him on the roof, to see the world from his perspective, and she pleads for him to join her in reality, to “Come down from there,” promising him, “We’ll just sit & we’ll eat & we’ll be so close that we’re touching” (83). But he refuses, and his insistence that she join him comes at a cost: in joining him from his artistic vantage point, a place in the sky, she is “covered in bruises”, and she has to admit, ultimately, that “we all of us got a little carried away”.

There is a line here, a space that keeps people separate, a space that keeps what is imagined separate from what is real, a space which is damaging to cross completely but which must be narrowed, if art is to do its work. Fletcher envisions our lives as the intermediary tension of this space, a narrow band between the isolation of water and the expansiveness of clouds, between the dark reality of water and the electrical creative potential of clouds:

. . . & at that point the water will be right next to the clouds & they will be so close that they could kiss but they will not kiss, they will both just stand there looking at each other until forever.

It is important, here, that clouds and water are, elementally, the same. But the form they take is very different, and it is on the tense boundary of these two forms, the edge of the real and the imagined, that Fletcher’s artist tries to balance.

Ultimately, this book strikes me as enamored with creation, its narrator (and, I presume, its writer) very much in love with art and the way that art allows us to see meaning in the world. He recognizes the power of the artist to re-create or re-envision the world, but he also knows that like a balloon, he needs an anchor to the world, to the real. As much as art offers a new, higher perspective, as much as art offers an escape from reality among the clouds, he fears being lost entirely in that vision, in a world where there will be “no one [to] tell me when I was getting carried away”.

Ask the Author: Emily Howorth

Emily Howorth’s whimsical Look Away, Dixieland is part of the June issue. She talks with us about letting Scarlett O’Hara burn, fact versus fiction, party mixes and more.

1. Would you have let Scarlett O’Hara burn? Why or why not?

A difficult question! It would be tempting. But no—if I let her burn in Atlanta, she’d never get back to Tara, and then we would never get to see her retch after eating a radish straight from the soil, and thus we would never get to the “I’ll Never Be Hungry” speech—one of the few parts of the book/movie where Scarlett seems genuinely strong.

2. What are your cues that would tell me to get out of your house?

Unlike the narrator of this story, I’m not subtle. I’d tell you that the party was over and I was going to bed, and if I liked you, I’d offer you the couch—or, if you were extra special, the air mattress. In the morning we’d get breakfast tacos at the taco trailer down my street.

3. Give us your party mix. Leave no Rolling Stone unturned?

I imagined Scarlett’s party starting off with “Psychedelic Shack.” Not the best Temptations song, but appropriate for the circumstances. We’d get to “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and “Masterpiece” for sure, and maybe David Ruffin’s “My Whole World Ended (the Moment You Left Me)” just because it’s the greatest song ever. At some point, we’d have to play some Stevie Nicks—because Scarlett and Stevie share that whole dresses-resembling-heavy-drapery penchant. As for the Stones? “Stupid Girl” might make the cut. Toward the end of the party, things have to get a bit more intense, a bit PJ Harvey “Rid of Me.”

4. How much of this story is non-fiction? How much of you is fictitious?

I do live in a duplex, and I own a feisty dog. But as far as fictional characters showing up—well, Scarlett hasn’t yet, thank god. What is true to me about this story is that we are all living with the past, literary or historical, all the time, and as someone who is by blood and circumstance a Southern woman (although I was reared primarily in the North), I often think about what it means to have the past lurking.

As far as being fictitious myself? Unfortunately, I’m probably less so than most people. 28%, I’d wager.

5. Frankly, my dear, do you give a damn? How much of a damn?

Yes, I do, although most days I try to just give a dang.

the unfirm line – The Smiths

“I once had a child, and it saved my life.”

The Smiths, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.

(To celebrate the Orange Alert Smith-i-sode, as well as a general shout out for Fathers Day.)

We are lucky to be a father. We are lucky to have children. We are lucky for the saved life. Thank you.

There’s So Much To Love; It’s All Because Of You

Congratulations to Ocean Vuong who recently won the 2010 Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Memorial Poetry Contest for his poem 1967.

We’d also like to mention that Gabe Durham will be taking over as editor of Keyhole Magazine.

Another installment from Matthew Salesses Island of Epidemics is up at Everyday Genius. He is joined by Joseph Goosey and Joseph Riippi. This month of Everyday Genius, incidentally, is being edited by Alec Niedenthal.

Matt Bell is interviewed on the Metazen blog. Metazen, the magazine, hosts a deleted scene from Wolf parts.

Mike Meginnis’s Family Gibson, Summer 1891 is brilliant and live at Dark Sky Magazine.

At Staccato Fiction, Alexandra Isacson’s Haute Couture.

In the Orange Alert Podcast #16, the Smith-i-sode,, you can listen to xTx and Mel Bosworth read some song lyrics.

There’s a new issue of Prick of the Spindle and it includes writing from JA Tyler, Simon A. Smith, Sarah Harste, and much more. You’ll also find both nonfiction and drama from Garrett Socol.

Erin Fitzgerald’s wonderful The Year Away is up at Necessary Fiction. She is joined by Robb Todd and Kathy Fish.

Reynard Seifert, who is also a new contributor at HTMLGIANT, has work at New Wave Vomit.

Discover Discovery by RIcky Garni at Everyday Genius.

The Dirty Napkin includes a wonderful poem, Fundamentals, from Helen Vitoria.

There’s a new issue of Corium with writing from  Matthew Salesses, Sal Pane, BJ Hollars, Mary Miller twice, David Peak, Nicolle Elizabeth, Tim Tomlinson and many other fine writers. Mary also has a free e-book, Foxes, that you can download from Featherproof Books.

Jesse Bradley splits his wrists open at Black-Listed Magazine. His Emphysema appears at Girls With Insurance.

La Petite Zine debuts a new issue with poetry from Jac Jemc and Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.

xTx is hosting Zombie Summer at her blog. Check out zombie writing from Kirsty Logan, Kirsty also asks Who Do You Think You Are? She also talks about the words of Robb Todd, here.

In Requited, new work from James Tadd Adcox, where he is joined by Cami Park, Neil de la Flor, AD Jameson, Arlene Ang, and more. I like their design. Cami also has words at New Wave Vomit.

FYI: Weave Magazine has some open positions.

Jason Jordan’s The House of Ice is in the new issue of Precipitate. He also has a story a story called “House Arrest” (see?) forthcoming in Main Street Rag’s A La Carte: Short Stories that Stir the Foodie in All of Us, which is now available for pre-order for the discounted price of $10. Edited by S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., this anthology also features Molly Gaudry. You can also find work from Molly in Turks Head Review here and here

The June issue of The Legendary includes poetry from Megan Falley.

This week’s Funny Woman at The Rumpus is Summer Block.

At LitSnack, a tasty treat from Ethel Rohan.

Paula Bomer has a story in the latest issue of the Green Mountain Review.

Ask the Author: Kaitlin Dyer

Listen to or read three of Kaitlin Dyer’s poems in the June issue, then rush back here to read about the consequences of rust, organ donation, and making the moves on the denizens of Oz.

1. How would you donate your organs after your death or would you prefer to take them with you?

If I had my way it’d be whole-sale style: everything must go, but I’ve come to think of the way we handle our bodies as being something for the living. If my family wants or needs an open casket, then they can keep the parts they need in order to do that. (It’s not like any one would want my eyes anyway–my right eye requires a -11.50 prescription with astigmatism. Seriously.)

2. What would happen if we rusted on you?

Catastrophe.

3. The poems selected of yours in this issue involve lots of medical science. Why are you so fascinated with it?

It’s not so much a fascination as a forced/natural state of being. As the daughter of a medical doctor and nurse, I’m all too comfortable having conversations about gangrenous sores and syphilis over Christmas dinner.

4. What Wizard of Oz character would be the worst to mack on? How would you deflect the pick up lines?

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

5. What would you like to be sewn shut with?

I’m partial to zippers; however the act of mending a person shows care with just about any choice of thread. Who. Who would I like to sew me shut–that is the important question.