All Things Pankish

Mantle by C.S. Carrier (A Review by Brian Fanelli)

H_NGM_N Books

$12/ 82 pgs

As a poet who started out as a prose writer first, I’ve always been drawn to narrative poetry, work that is character driven and uses some of the tropes of fiction, while still elevating language as only poetry can. C.S. Carrier’s second full-length collection of poems, Mantle, is not work I am typically drawn to. However, as early as the first page and first poem, Carrier’s book grabbed my attention and didn’t let go until the final page. His lines are gorgeous and wild, his images surreal and sometimes deadpan, and his language a reminder of the energy a single poem can contain.

The book opens with the haunting poem “Back in the Day.” Here Carrier blends surrealism, history, and child memories all in a few short stanzas. In one stanza, the poem contains an image of a praying mantis with a Bible wedged in its mouth, and in another God, labeled as an absentee ballot, floats away “on a bowl of magma.” These lines are balanced with references to politics, including Tehran and Ronald Reagan. Other imagery is apocalyptic, even in the first stanza: “I climbed the oak in the yard/The oak began dying/Blood was fermenting in Iran.”  Though the poem’s bizarre images and references to childhood and politics make little sense at first, there is much to enjoy, especially the strange, juxtaposed images.

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The Lightning Room With Changming Yuan

Changming Yuan like a leaf, like water, like a building seven hundred children tall.  (see Changming’s Skyline in our Jan issue)

1) I thought I recognized your name and then I realized you’re one of the first people I published when I worked with the Exquisite Corpse. Reading your bio, I see you’ve been published in almost 600 publications. So I guess it’s not that much of a coincidence. How has your poetry evolved since your first publication?

Thanks so much, dear Ed. DeWitt, for this opportunity to talk about my poetic work, and I feel truly honored! To begin with, poetry seems to run in the blood of my family. When my father died in January of 2012, my mother revealed that he had always wished to be a poet, though he never got anything published during his lifetime. Growing up in an impoverished Chinese village, I fell in love with poetry and dreamed about living like Li Bai at the age of 14 when I had my first exposure to poetry of any kind. Although I did make dozens of poetry submissions in China, I never got even a rejection slip. Luckily, many years after moving to Canada as an international student, I had one of my first English poems published in the summer of 2005 and, ever since then, I have been writing and publishing much more poetry than I myself imagined – thus far, my poetry has appeared in nearly 700 literary journals/anthologies across 26 countries. Also interesting is perhaps that at the age of 15, my teenager younger son Allen Qing Yuan began to publish poetry worldwide, apparently under my influence: Every time I receive a contributor’s copy, I ‘force’ him to take a look at my work and, after much reading, he has turned out an actively publishing poet in his own right. Now we have formed a ‘father-son comraderie in poetry,’ as some editors like to call us, to publish our own newly-started literary magazine called Poetry Pacific (poetrypacific.blogspot.ca), which has been developing surprisingly well – by the way, all poetry submissions are welcome at yuans[at]shaw.ca. While my elder son George Lai Yuan, a busy senior engineer in Silicon Valley, had his first poem published early this year, my poetic work has finally begun to appear in Chinese media since last winter, but ironically only after I became an internationally widely published practitioner of the art.

2) How is your Skyline different when someone else reads it?

For me, every reading (of the same work) is a new poem. Each time my Skyline is read, it may look more like a monster’s mouth, a dream vision, a meeting line between sea and coast, or a limbo between hell and heaven, depending upon the reader’s frame of mind.

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Embrace / Introducing Mia Sara

(c) Tilo Keil , Embrace, 1968.

The rose window, obscured with scaffolding, the sun, more August than April, beaming down on the Church of St.Vincent Ferrer on Lexington and 66^th, firing up the stained glass walls, casting those gathered in candy colored halleluiahs. In his bright blue suit, my husband on my right and I am holding his left hand, rubbing the muscle between forefinger and thumb. I am trying not to look at the enlarged photo, resting on an easel, before a stepped wooden platform, of my mother in law, taken this past thanksgiving, grinning through her glasses, soft round shoulders draped in a scarf that was a gift from my daughter,  exotic floral, on white silk, all bordered in black. A sanctuary crowded with Easter lilies beginning to curl at their edges. I am trying not to dwell on the black metal box, the size of a shoebox, holding her remains. Instead I am thinking about my husband’s body. His broad shoulders, the narrow hips, long skinny legs, all upholstered in a satin hide, pale as milk so quick to burn, and his hands, skilled like his mother’s in animating the inanimate, and how I never thanked her for this gift. This gift that lives on my skin, this gift that even now, makes me a sinner. Because I am greedy and lustful, proud he is mine and no “our fathers,” no benedictions, no stale biscuit dunked in strong wine can ease my mind from ashes to ashes, dust to disease, and the stations of the cross winking on the sidelines, and how we seek shelter in walls of glass. I seek the apple that fell from the tree. I seek the coin through a hole in my pocket. I seek revenge on this faulty design, an antidote to the unbent coil. The man in white robes, standing at the alter, raises his arms, and we all stand.

Yes, I say, perfect, wear the blue suit,
When he asks.

She would have approved, I think
His mother.

A suit fitted close to his still taut skin,
And sharp.

Later, I plan to peel it off,
Give death a run for his money.

Mia Sara is an actress and poet living in Los Angeles. Her work has been published in PANK, Cultural Weekly, The Kit Kat Review, Forge, The Dirty Napkin, St. Ann’s Review, and others. For more please visit: http://wheretofindmiasara.tumblr.com/

Work / Podcast

Welcome to Episode 1 of Work / Podcast. Each episode I’ll speak with a different artist – a creative laborer from any medium – about surviving the arts; how they make a living, how they balance their time, how they find a way to sustain their work over the long haul.

This week, I speak to Tony Milici. Tony is a visual artist living in the California high desert near Joshua Tree. He works with clay, he paints, and he makes what he calls “talismanic pieces,” altars or assemblages composed of found objects. Tony was born in L.A. in 1941. He grew up in Highland Park and Eagle Rock and stayed there until moving out to the Mojave just a few years ago. He and his wife Bobette – a stained glass artist – built a Quonset hut on a large compound with a several workshops, a raku oven, and an enclosed garden. It’s beautiful and every inch of their home is covered with something aesthetically pleasing; either Tony and Bobette’s work, exotic plants, strange little treasures, or some handmade feature built out of wood they brought back from their many years spent in Belize.

I sat down with Tony on a Sunday morning in April in his dining room over a bowl of fresh papaya. It was a perfect spring day and at various times you can hear a woodpecker, a snoring dog, doves and quail in the background, and Tony pounding the table to emphasize a point.

http://www.pankmagazine.com/pankblog/podcasts/Podcast1.mp3

Our Friends at Black Warrior Review are Having a Contest.

The Ninth Annual Black Warrior Review Contest has begun! Send us your dearest-beloved (stories/poems/essays)!

Guest Judges for 2013 are

Brian Evenson (Fiction)
Jenny Boully (Nonfiction)
Kate Durbin (Poetry)

To Submit your Work, or for more details and guidelines, please visit: http://www.bwr.ua.edu Submissions are open until September 1, 2013.

Winners in each genre will receive $1,000 and publication in the Spring/Summer 2014 issue. Finalists in each category will receive notation in the Spring/Summer 2014 issue and are also considered for publication.

Reading Fee is $15 per short story (up to 7000 words), $15 per nonfiction piece (up to 7000 words), and $15 per group of up to 3 poems. Payment must be made online (the Submission Manager will direct you to do so).

All contestants will also receive a complimentary one-year subscription (That’s $1 less than conventional subscriptions!)

The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels (A Review by William T. Langford IV)

Bloomsbury USA 

  $16.00/336 pgs

Carter Sickels fills his first novel with contradictions— religious devotion and the exploitation of the elderly—that the citizens of a fictionalized Dove Creek, West Virginia fail to hear or resolve. “God bless the pillheads,” chuckles Reese, the ex-convict compatriot of protagonist Cole Freeman. “Amen,” Cole intones. Along with the villainous Heritage Coal Company (that specializes in mountaintop removal mining), Sickels portrays a group of characters who mirror Heritage’s evils. The reader comes to see, via Sickels’ deft rendering of Cole’s conflicted conscience, the inability of a single man to impact his community’s fortune.

A host of supporting characters linger in a similar thematic purgatory. When twenty-seven-year old private care worker Cole Freeman ponders his nagging criminal habits (stealing valuables from the elderly, selling prescription drugs to junkies), he cannot differentiate himself from “who he’d become, or who he’d always been.” Terry Rose and Charlotte (Cole’s childhood best friend and on-and-off girlfriend, respectively) exist as specters, drifting in and out of focus and sobriety. An African-American octogenarian, Mabel Johnson, has an apparent third eye; Cole has the sneaking suspicion that Ms. Johnson portends his comings and goings, and that she alone sees through his innocent facade.

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The Lightning Room With Kevin Tang

Kevin Tang’s comic “An Ethnography of L.ipsum” melted (molted) faces in our December issue. HERE GOES:

1. In graphic design, Loren ipsum is the Latin placeholder text that gives the sense of how a presentation will appear visually in terms of layout and typography before it is finalized. Essentially, it’s the shape of the piece minus meaningful content. Are these placeholder humans? Are they what we should worry about becoming?

I think Lorem Ipsum was pulled from a Cicero quote involving “praising pain” or somesuch. Copywriters have great gallows humor. They love words because they’re excellent bullshit detectors, but they’re paid to write things they wouldn’t feed their own children.

I laid out a lot of lorem ipsum text at a huge ad firm, designing web pages for an electronics company. The clients’ memos always said “sleek & trendy” or “luxury minimalist” or “granular user-based brand experience,” which sounded way worse than lorem ipsum. My coworkers were smart people who knew it was a facile, rote idea of presentability that we’re supposed to sell. Whatever copy replaced lorem ipsum was always worse, and more expensive. I honestly can’t revisit an original intent for picking that name. I just kind of snatched whatever wallpaper felt right at the moment and hoped someone smarter than me can build meaning from it post hoc. But yeah, I wanted a cast of stunted, miserable people and back-end ad speak seemed the right language for that.

2. The L.ipsum exoskeleton-moulting appears here as a horrifying occasion that marks the transition into adulthood, where a member of the species is revealed for what he has been becoming all along. If this was our own species, if everything rested on this moment of revelation, how might we behave differently?

I remember my professor Alexander Chee saw the comic and immediately thought it was a satire of Asian immigrant upbringing. And I can’t entirely disagree with that. I grew up in Taiwan with a fairly slacker childhood, but the whole culture of pedagogy there (mostly enforced by nosy relatives) was obsessed with valuating a child’s talent and labor potential at the youngest age possible, and ushering them through hoops by flattering their sense of exceptionalism. I think “elite” educational industries everywhere have vested interest in overselling the idea of life in terms of stages – like you’re supposed to moult into a married senior manager at certain biological ages. I feel like I’ve changed myself drastically every three years since I left Taiwan eight years ago, so the whole moulting thing is a victory dance over the graves of all that.

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An Interview with Dylan Landis: Normal People Don’t Live Like This

Dylan Landis’s debut novel, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, offers readers ten chapters that function together as a novel, as linked short stories, and stand-alone stories, creating flexibility in the perspective, tone, and chronologically pushing through large gaps of time in the protagonist, Leah’s, life. However, all of the stories are brought together with rich links that are thematic, geographical, image-based, and, also, linked by Landis’s evolving cast of characters. I spoke with Landis about the conception, growth, and release of her first novel, touching on her experiences writing the stories as well as how she interacts with the novel three years after its release.

Colleen Kolba: As a linked short story collection, your book functions as a novel, yet each story can be read individually, which makes me think of the revision process and how each story has to function as both a whole, yet also a part of a whole. What was your revision process like? The collection also covers a wide range of time and character. How did you decide what to include? How did you know you were finished?

Dylan Landis: Normal People’s technically a novel-in-stories, which implies something a little more fragmented than a novel—but stories are what I wrote, not chapters. I wrote them chronologically because that’s how I got to know my characters: as they grew up.

So when I stacked these pieces into a manuscript, it was as if I’d knitted a highly patterned scarf in 10 separate pieces without looking at the others as I worked. Not surprisingly, not all the patterning fit together. So in revision I unraveled, I reknitted, I stitched, I reworked. It still was a better method for me than if I’d had to chant, “book, book, book,” as I worked on individual stories.

I’d written eleven stories, ever, and included ten. The first just wasn’t good enough. It got published. It even won a competition. But one of the characters needed to be more sympathetic, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it for the book.

How did I know I was done? I wish I could say the book just felt flawlessly well-rounded. In truth Normal People would have been stronger with one more story on Rainey Royal. But I’ll be frank. I was nearing fifty. This was to be my first book of fiction. I knew I had a good manuscript and I pulled the trigger.

While the majority of your book comes from Leah’s perspective, the narrative moves through many different characters at many points in time. What was your “in” for “Normal People Don’t Live Like This”? Did a character come first, New York City as a setting, one story or part of a story that you had the urge to explore further?

Each story’s first image arrived alone—a character in a New York setting. For “Fire,” I had a clear vision of Leah in a classroom in a particular type of uber-liberal New York City private school, very much of its time, the early 1970s. Every story’s “in” was always twinned: character plus place. Rainey Royal and Bethesda Fountain. Leah Levinson and a Broadway jewelry store. I have to see place very clearly—down to the grout between the tiles, I sometimes say. The story might not open in that spot, but it’s often where I start to write.

As I read each story, I couldn’t help but notice how the gaps in time and hints at the “in-between events,” such as Leah’s father’s death, show what a well developed, full character Leah is. The more I knew about Leah, the more I felt you as an author knew almost everything about her, and that a lot of Leah stayed between the two of you. How do you get to know your characters?

Some critics took issue with those gaps between stories, especially the death of Leah’s father: how could something so momentous be skipped? I’ve since taken apart an extraordinary novel-in-stories, Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich, and understand now that gaps should not be haphazard spaces between the ending of one story and the launch of the next, but must be shapely and engineered. They are like a painter’s negative space; one must be in full control of them. And I was not there yet.

Some of Leah’s life stayed between the two of us because it was mundane and didn’t merit print. Sometimes I had to kill my darlings. And some of it I just didn’t know how to write—but at least I knew it.

I knew it, and left things out, if not always for noble reasons. It works because of Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory. Hemingway wrote, “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

There are many rich links apart from characters and place, such as coming of age, compulsions and mental illness, sex, sensual understanding of people and environment. Once you started noticing links, how did you strengthen those threads without forcing it? Or were the links intentionally crafted from the start?

The links began subconsciously, I swear, and were strengthened later, partly as I wrote the later stories but particularly as I revised. I didn’t sit down to do these things on purpose—quite the opposite; sometimes I wished I could break away from them, write something new.

I think it works best to strengthen, and lengthen, the threads in revision. You see what your subconscious mind has dredged up, what gifts you’ve been handed up from the basement of your mind, and start working with them, aiming for repetition and deepening. Ninety-five percent of this business is revision anyway. Students don’t always like that number, because the five percent of generating writing takes so long, they can’t bear the thought of multiplying that out. My early drafts are so bad you’d think my only real skill is typing. You’d have to wait a few months to discover it’s revision, too.

The narrative doesn’t look away from any parts of coming-of-age; it covers stealing, eating disorders, substance abuse, tackling molestation, teen pregnancy and miscarriage, and sex. And all of these events are rendered in a way that felt real to me, like it was memoir, rather than fiction. How do you deal with the inherent “danger” that writing poses? That you’ll reveal a secret about yourself, that people will assume that you are thinly veiling your life story by changing names and calling it fiction, that you will in some way get caught for the way you feel and experience the world on a personal, intimate level? What do you see as the “occupational hazards” of being a writer?

Most readers believe that most fiction is memoir. Aren’t we writing about being human, something we’ve all experienced? That confuses people, who then make assumptions about fiction-as-memoir, the way they think that the speaker in a poem must be the poet. Students often read the first story, “Jazz,” about Rainey being molested, and want to know if that happened to me. And I say, “Is there anyone in this room whose boundaries have not been crossed in some way?” Everyone starts nodding. “Couldn’t you fictionalize it?” Hopefully they get it. The day my parents sat me down to ask if a family friend had ever molested me was the day I knew I’d written a persuasive book. I think I had to swear on the life of my son that the answer was no.

Is it an occupational hazard? Only for every fiction writer I know.

While you unflinchingly “report” on events in Leah’s and the other character’s she interacts with lives, your book is distinctly literary fiction in the way that you paint a picture of the stories with words through Leah’s intense sensual experience of her environment, and the bias of the narrative perspective. How has your background in journalism affected your fiction writing?

Fiction needs a believable universe in which to take place, and that universe requires concrete detail—detail experienced through the senses. In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor quotes a sentence in Madame Bovary in which Emma plays a piano whose strings buzz, and across the village a bareheaded clerk in list slippers often stops to listen. Why bother writing in such detail about the clerk? Flannery writes, “Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.”

I remember a newspaper editor who said, “Give me the color of the car and the name of the dog,” and that’s one thing journalism taught me: how to scavenge detail for the concrete, believable village.

Colleen Kolba lives and writes in Chicago, IL. She is currently completing her first novel, The Loser Clique Will Be Alright

Work: Surviving the Arts

March 4th was National Grammar Day and has been since 2008. I know this because I was listening to NPR, not because I’m particularly concerned with grammar. Except that of course, as writers and readers, we’re all deeply concerned with grammar (consciously or not), so every day is national grammar day within the boundaries of our own personal sovereign (despotic, financially ruinous) nations. What was interesting about the discussion I heard on the radio was that the conversation focused almost exclusively on the degradation of language as written in text messages and emails, but even more importantly, on the time limitations faced by the authors of those degraded documents.

The whole conversation rapidly devolved to a kvetch-fest about how little time we all have, which seems to be less related to grammar in specific and more related to much larger, arguably far more important things. Like novels.

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The Lightning Room With Molly McArdle

Molly McArdle’s “The Wearied Cords” appeared in our December issue. We talk about rewriting geography, the reversal of colonial power, and building out of loss.

1. Tell us a little bit about the process of building “The Wearied Cords”; where the inspiration came from, what research was involved, etc. What was the initial spark that brought this story to life?

I was born and raised in DC, and I’ve always been really passionate about city history, especially hidden or elided or forgotten or ignored histories. I had (and have) been toying around with this idea of a series of short stories that illuminate iconic – even mythic – aspects of DC history or culture or geography and look at them from an unexpected perspective. One of the first things that came to mind was the Three Sisters Islands, a tiny outcropping of rocks that lie just north of Key Bridge in the Potomac River, right beside Georgetown. I always thought there was something romantic about them growing up, because of their name, because of their size, because of the opaque and imprecise myths about their origin, which the story draws from. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I found the framework of the story on the village’s Wikipedia page, where I read about the capture of this British captain, Henry Fleet – the narrator’s father in the story. I loved this reversal of the traditional colonial power politics that our histories have recorded: unblinking domination by British forces alongside a seemingly inevitable destruction for outmatched native communities. I loved too that Fleet was forced to assimilate into this community’s language and culture, not the other way around. I ended up reading some of Henry Fleet’s memoirs, century-old essays by DC historical societies, websites written by Fleet’s descendants, lots of weird historical flotsam and jetsam. My primary concern wasn’t so much accurately representing a historical moment in time, but allowing this story exist there in a natural and believable way.

2. So much of this piece is concerned with the names of things, the variations in what we call something, whether it’s the name of a colonial force or the place where we live. How does this play into the relationship between the English and the Nacotchtank in the story?

Names are so important. Growing up in DC, I’ve seen Malcolm X Park – located in a once primarily black neighborhood – increasingly referred “Meridian Hill Park” as the area gentrified. The buildings where my family lived in that same neighborhood were once called Clifton Terrace, but are now called Wardman Court – renamed after a renovation (and one’s conversion into condos) that occurred only after money began to flood into Columbia Heights. I’ve seen the geography of my childhood rewritten before my eyes. It’s so disorienting! It’s also a profound expression of power, a way for a new group of people to claim ownership. The erosion of the name of the place I write about in the story, which here I’ll call Nacotchtank, is a testament to this effect. Even though the village was a very important trading center in its day, no firm or authoritative version of its name exists today, just various Anglicizations. But just as (re)naming is an enormously powerful tool for any kind of encroaching force, its also a potent instrument for fighting back against that encroachment. It is a way to say this is who I am; know me.

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