There is a city in Florida called Jensen Beach. It’s named for a Danish pineapple farmer who established a plantation on the Treasure Coast in the mid-nineteenth century. People have been telling me about Jensen Beach my whole life. “I know,” I usually say when they do, “I’ve always wanted to visit.”

*

My first book is coming out in two months and I’ve been thinking lately about which parts of it I’ll have to answer for, which parts my family and friends will recognize and question me about. Which parts are true, which parts I’ll have to own as true even if they aren’t. I wrote a book full of fathers and children and marriages that are once just like my own and nothing like my own. Truth is an odd thing. I wonder if I even know what it means.

*

Last May I visited Jensen Beach. It was a nice enough town, though I didn’t see very much of it. I was there on a Sunday and most shops were closed. There weren’t many people out. We walked around for half an hour or so, finally stopped at a little tourist shop where I bought my kids matching Jensen Beach, FL shirts. The shirts have these black and white images on them — pirates, treasure, mermaids, a dancing shrimp (I don’t know why either) — that turn bright colors in the sun. I made a point of paying for the shirts with my credit card. I wanted the clerk to notice my name and think it was funny. She didn’t notice. Or if she did, she didn’t mention it. The same thing happened at the store where I bought a bottle of water. No one much seemed to care that my name was Jensen Beach and we were in a city called Jensen Beach. I can’t say that I expected them to, necessarily, but I guess I expected something.

*

A few years ago I read in part of an MFA reading at UMass. I read a couple stories from FOR OUT OF THE HEART PROCEED. In one of the stories, a man and his wife have an argument about something they see that could harm their child. My wife was in the audience. Before I had time to really reflect on why I felt like I needed to do so, I looked out at the audience — most of which was friends of mine — stopped reading for a second, looked at my wife, then back to the crowd, and said: “I should say this is fiction.”

*

I’m Facebook friends with restaurants and art galleries in Jensen Beach. Lawyers and real-estate agents too. I always friend people who seem to have found me while looking for the town. Mainly this is because I think it’s funny, but lately, I’ve started thinking it’s because the town really interests me. I want to know more about it. I want to know more about it than Wikipedia and Google searches can teach me. I want to make something out of it. A few months ago, I accepted a friend request from an exterminator in Jensen Beach. His updates sort of disturb me, but they are also a little refreshing. Apparently, there’s been an increase lately in the number blood-sucking flies on local beaches.

*

My impulse is always to want experiences to be greater than they are. Maybe that’s why I fictionalize them. Maybe that’s why I’m writing about an afternoon I spent in Florida still, always, trying to make more of it than is there. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. Mainly I think this is because of the questions I anticipate I’ll get. I’m willing to admit this might demonstrate some immaturity in my writerly development. Maybe writers don’t or aren’t supposed to worry about this. But I do.

*

A lot of the stories in this book started with an event, some action that really happened to me. In some ways, I think the job of a fiction writer is to figure out what’s really and truly true and write toward that in spite of the facts of a place or a time. This movement, I think, should be deliberate. I think of it as purposeful disregard for every part of a memory that doesn’t ring true for the fiction it’s helping to create. There is no worse feeling as a writer (or a teacher) to feel beholden to facts that create a less pleasing dramatic shape than fiction might. Details of place or event lend authenticity; they provide part of the evidence for the drama, but most often they can’t supply the story. That’s what imagination does. I don’t think all fiction needs to be rooted in factual truth, of course, but many of the stories in this book are. And I think you could make a pretty good case that good fiction is grounded in the recognizable, in the true. Even in the most speculative, strangest stories, there is, I think, some element of recognizable truth. We might see a place we know, or feel a familiar emotion, or hear a line of dialogue we know well. We’re always writing about ourselves and how we experience the world we’re in, we’re just doing it differently. Anyway, that’s how I see my job as a fiction writer. I want to always write toward emotional and narrative integrity.

*

In Jensen Beach, we ate lunch at the only restaurant we could find that was open. It wasn’t particularly good. When I paid the bill, the waiter came back to the table with my credit card receipt. He said, “this is your name?” I said, “yes.” He laughed and said, “you should be our mascot.”

*

A car really did catch fire on the street outside my house one night. My oldest son had just been born and in the way that new parents fuss and worry about every possible threat to their children, I stood at the bedroom window for about an hour and watched the car burn. I checked the window periodically for a draft (as if one might somehow miraculously appear) in case some kind of noxious fumes would leak in the house and kill us all. I can remember the burning car well. The flames spread quickly from the engine block into the car’s interior. When I re-read the story now, I picture the car in front of my house. I see the slight uphill of the road, the apartment blocks across the way, the two men standing beside the car, their faces illuminated by the burning car. But that’s where the similarities stop. The scaffolding of this story is factually true. But the dramatic action of this story  – an argument between the husband and wife — reveals something about how they interact, about how they parent, that the real events of that evening can’t really communicate, I don’t think. Stories are how we communicate simple ideas complexly. Which is why fiction will always transcend the facts that create the scaffolding of any particular story. Here is proof. The true events that scaffold the story are boring. They are infinitely less satisfying (to me anyway) than the fictionalized version they let me build. I watched the car burn. Soon a fire truck came, extinguished the flames with a long dousing of white, powdery retardant. Around midnight, I went to bed. And that’s it. There was no story, no drama, no conflict, no resolution. The next afternoon, a tow truck came and loaded the car up on the bed of the truck, and it was as if it had never happened.

*

We were only in Jensen Beach for a couple hours because we had an afternoon flight to catch out of Ft. Lauderdale. As soon as we’d finished lunch we walked back to the car. On the way I stopped and took a picture of a street sign that says, “Push Button to Cross Jensen Beach Blvd.” I wanted so badly to find something better, something funnier, but I didn’t. The only thing I got, the only experience I gained, now that I’m thinking about it, is a way to talk about all of this.

*

Here are some more things from these stories that are factually true, more or less. There really is a narrow wood that butts up to the backyard of the duplex we rented in Massachusetts. I remember reading an article about Manuel Noriega’s extradition to France. I’d recently scratched my eye — though not in a car crash — and the pain made it difficult to focus on the computer screen. I used to live in Oakland, in the basement apartment of tall pink Victorian. My upstairs neighbor was schizophrenic. Once he came to my door wearing a sweatshirt and no pants. He was holding a disposal camera. When I opened the door, he snapped my picture and said, “Feel better, Amigo.” His name was Ted. I guess you’ll have to read the book to understand much of this paragraph at all. The stories in this book represent a patchwork, a stitching together of memories that are unrelated to one another with an idea for creating a story out of it all. It’s kind of a scary process to have it out in the world, but here it is. There are some facts in the book, and there is a lot that is not factual at all, but I hope all of it is true.

– Purchase FOR OUT OF THE HEART PROCEED –

To all of you in or around St. Paul, Minnesota – Saturday, April 21, Seth Berg, author of Muted Lines from Someone Else’s Memory, will be reading in the third-annual Great Twin Cities Poetry Read at Hamline University. There will be readings from over 30 poets, each reading a single poem. If you don’t have plans, you should be there. If you have plans, you should find a way to be there. Your friends will understand.

What: Third-annual Great Twin Cities Poetry Read
Where: Hamline University in the Kay Fredericks Room, Klas Center
When: 7:00 pm, Saturday, April 21
How Much: Free, open to the public

An excerpt from Justin Sirois’ Falcons on the Floor appeared in Issue 13 of Dark Sky Magazine. A brief yet exciting blip of fine writing. In those few pages, he beautifully described a woman in an abaya riding on a rickety tractor toward two Iraqi young men, one of whom was severely dehydrated. I did not know anything about the novel as a whole, but the excerpt read like a short story. It was focused and intriguing and I would have been satisfied with just that. Now, having read the novel, I am relieved that I did not settle for just the excerpt. It was but a hint at the wonderful flavors that would prove to be a very satisfying dish.

At its core, Falcons tells the story of Khalil and Salim, two young Iraqi men who flee Fallujah on the eve of the first siege of the city, but the story unfolds through masterful language (provided in part by the book’s collaborator, Iraqi refugee, Haneen Alshujairy), revealing a multi-layered story of perspective, friendship, and loss.

I hesitate to call this a brilliant first novel. It is a brilliant novel. Sirois demonstrates a succinct mastery of active language that manages to strike a lyrical cadence. The prose is poetry at times.

What’s down there?

The black water says nothing.

Mute leviathans – stripped of pigment and devoid of conscience. The croon hungry, kindles as knives. And the river knows we’re here too. Sons of the river and sons of Baghdad, we’re here, and I know the drops leaking out of our armpits and eyelids were once molecules of the river. It smells us as we float, knowing our bodies belong to its ancient body. It won’t hesitate to swallow us whole.

At times the dialogue and action move so fluidly and with such grace that it feels like he is retelling a personal experience, or like he stumbled upon such a story, which just happened to take place on the eve of the sieges.

There are three ways to approach this book – though, if you choose to keep a singular view, you will limit yourself and miss out on a well-crafted story. You can take it as a war story (a neutral approach to a war story) that demonstrates the emotional and friendly ties that carry on despite the apparent violence. You could also separate the themes of friendship, love, and loss entirely from the sieges and you would still feel Sirois crafting a solid plot while pulling strings inside you. I say that the best way, the third way, to approach this book is to combine the two and let the intended story unfold. Don’t limit Sirois’ ability.

It would have been easy to take a story focused on the eve of the first sieges of Fallujah and construct from it a soapbox of sorts and stand on top of it and scream. But Sirois handles the story with delicate, yet seasoned hands and lets it live in the moment.

One interesting aspect of the book is the change in perspectives. The book opens with the story of an unidentified character telling of pining love and teenage awkwardness. The story is brief and leaves you, at first, unsure about its place in the rest of book. This becomes increasingly apparent as the proceeding pages tell the story of Khalil and Salim. However, the perspective shifts again from third-person omniscient to first-person as the book moves to the “Selected Word documents of Salim Abid.” The book then returns to the third-person omniscient before ending on the perspective of a U.S. soldier, perhaps the same character from the book’s opening chapter.

All in all, such points of view give Sirois principal command of the story. He exists silently as creator, carefully guiding your imagination through layers of internal struggle for each character and how these struggles unite them. He captures the vulnerable youth and fragility of pining love, the strength of friendship, and the way all can ultimately be lost.

Ethel Rohan, Cut Through the Bone, has experienced a busy few weeks with interviews and conversations popping up across the online literary community. Good news, good news. Take a look at these interviews and get to know Ethel, where she’s been and what she’s working on, a little bit better.

Here is her interview in Used Furniture Review:

UFR: First, do you consider yourself a writer? For you, what does that term mean, exactly?

Ethel Rohan: Strange how tricky that little term is: writer. Yes, I do consider myself a writer. Really, it’s a label to facilitate convenience of classification, much like woman, mother, Irish, and so on. The terms help identify and tell some of a person’s story. The bigger story, and truth, behind the term is different for all of us. The written word is my center. Yeah, I’m a writer.

UFR: Your new book, Hard to Say, was recently released from PANK. Can you talk about this book a little? How would you describe it?

Rohan: Hard to Say is a collection of fifteen linked short-short stories that draw heavily on my Irish childhood and some of my worst memories. As I wrote these stories, though, I worked hard at distancing myself from the book’s narrator and her surrounding cast of characters. This felt critical to the fiction and the worth of these stories. Often what actually happened kills a good story.

UFR: What’s so distinct about your stories, I think, is that they’re so honest. When you’re writing a story, how do you find that honesty, that true to life quality? As a writer, how would you describe your voice?

Rohan: I’ll jump first on the last part of this question, if I may. I recently received the following story rejection that I admit amused me: “The story is interesting and strong in the end, but there are several sentences that are awkward or don’t make sense.” Any editor who has ever worked with me knows I’m open to criticism, revision and taking hard, long looks at my work for where I’ve erred and where I can improve. That said, this rejected story is one that fellow writers and editors in my lit group reviewed and supported. I believe in this rejected story and think it very much captures my voice and my writing rhythm. I always write to my own rhythm, lyricism that’s especially evident anytime anyone hears me read my work. I’m also aware that my voice and style can appear awkward and confusing to others. This is the constant struggle for artists, I think: How to stay both true to our unique voice and open to reality checks about the quality and value of the work, particularly in the face of complaint, confusion, and rejection.

I like that you find my stories honest, thank you. That’s not something I consciously do when I write though. Another aside, if I may. A few years back a friend gifted me with a weekend writing retreat in Napa County. While there, I wrote and read from a story where a character mercy-suffocated her dying, demented mother. The following morning at breakfast, another writer confided that after I’d gone to bed the others debated until deep into the night whether the story was fiction or memoir. I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or horrified and spat some of my scrambled eggs. I always write out of a place deep inside my characters, and ultimately out of a place deep inside me. I think readers respond to the honesty of that depth of emotion, and of showing ourselves, in my stories.

UFR: Returning to Hard to Say, the stories revolve around a girl and her family. Did you as an author ever find yourself identifying with the character, or characters? That’s to say, as a fiction writer, how close do you allow yourself to get to your subject matter?

Rohan: It’s quite funny that Hard to Say is such a little book because the personal toll of putting these fifteen short-short stories out into the world has proved enormous. I don’t think I’ll ever write out of myself in the same way or from the same place again. Many of the stories contain actual events and traumas that I’ve never spoken about to anyone. As I mentioned above, I worked hard at gaining distance in the telling of these stories and I very much wanted the work to be fiction versus autobiography—because of my terrible memory, because of a desire to protect others, because of the often limits and dullness of ‘actual events.’

As I wrote these stories I tried to remain outside of the characters and above the scenes, recording everything as it unfolded. To protect myself from reliving past traumas, yes, but also to serve the stories better. I’ve seen many stories ruined by an author who insists on sticking with what ‘really happened.’

As a fiction writer, I allow myself to get very close to and deep down inside my subject matter. I’ve learned, though, that it better serves the work (and the author!) to risk this intimacy with more fully fictionalized subject matter.

UFR: Your first book of stories, Cut Through the Bone has garnered a lot of attention, and was even on the Long List for the 2010 Story Prize. Did you write the book with any sort of expectations in mind?

Rohan: I first wrote the stories individually, without thought of a collection. When I write, my expectation is to deliver the best story I can. It was only when I’d published over eighty stories and recognized the persistence of several preoccupations and obsessions in my work that I realized I had enough material to gather into a cohesive collection, a best of my best at that time, if you will.

UFR: There’s clearly a long, amazing history of Irish literature, and Irish-American literature too. Do you consider yourself to be part of that tradition? If so, why? If not, why not?

Rohan: Honestly, as an emigrant, I often feel caught between cultures. The Irish no longer consider me theirs and Americans don’t consider me red white and blue. It’s whom I consider myself to be that matters, though, and I believe myself to be this very fortunate hybrid of both cultures. When I write, I tap into something very deep inside myself and at that core I’m Irish. Maybe it’s that I write from my beginnings, my anam. I’m fierce in my celebration of Irish and Irish-American literature, both its legacy and its contemporary largesse, but I can’t think about that staggering treasure trove when I write—it would be paralyzing.

UFR: As a writer, what are you trying to explore? What are asking? What are you looking to find?

Rohan: I am trying to explore us. I never plot or outline when I write. Never. I simply start and I am always grateful for—and astounded by—where the words take me. I always look to find the best story I can tell.

………………………………………………………………………………

Here, David Hoenigman from Word Riot interviews Ethel:

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

My upbringing sometimes felt like riding a naked wild horse, with only its harsh mane to hold onto. I’d get so afraid on those gallops I’d let go of the horse and hit the ground hard. I can still sometimes hear the clop of my childhood and feel the build of hooves till they’re pounding.

When and why did you begin writing?

Sometimes a bruise is so lovely you don’t want it to go. Often, the worse the injury the more spectacular the bruise. It can feel good to press and squeeze a bruise, even though it hurts. No two bruises are the same and their range of shapes and colors seem limitless. Sometimes bruises disappear but they remain. Our bodies and minds are a brutal beautiful collage of the memory of bruises. Bruises, like stones, are never silent. As a child, I wrote to put bruises on the page. I still do.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

I’d rather drive tacks through my palms than intend to have a message in my work that I want readers to grasp.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

That my stories are too familiar. Bananas are familiar too, but each is unique and fascinating. Banana skins are green, yellow, spotted, brown, and black. Banana flesh is yellow-white and spined with brown-black. In bunches, bananas are a sun, bouquet, bowl, band of creatures–each with a single black eye. Alone, a banana is a brooch, hairband, mustache, slice of jaundiced moon. Bananas are hard and soft, smooth and ridged. Part-peeled, a banana is a flower. Fully-peeled, a banana is an albino slug. We haven’t yet invented the language to describe the taste of a banana. Bananas, like everyday stories, are sometimes mistaken as ordinary.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m in this cave so long now with a short story collection titled Goodnight Nobody and a novel titled Kisses With Teeth, I’m crusted with bat droppings. Won’t some terrific publisher somewhere please turn these manuscripts into real, hold-to-my-chest books and let me out of the foul dark.

In his “Introit,” Thomas Lynch writes, “If the English master, Auden, was correct, and ‘art is what we do to break bread with the dead,’ then the Irish master, Heaney, was likewise correct when he suggests that ‘rhyme and meter are the table manners.’”

I’m sure Lynch fully understood the truth in these quotes as they relate to The Sin-eater: A Breviary, but these words perfectly set you up for Argyle and his hunger for iniquities. In the book’s twenty-four poems, Lynch not only breaks bread with the dead, he guzzles their beer. This may seem an irreverent gesture, for Lynch only half listened to Heaney’s words. These poems do not rhyme and are written in what Lynch himself calls an “imprecise pentameter.” Lynch seems to have forgotten his table manners, and rightfully so. However, the language, the overall layout of the book, is “suited to the brief meditations and reliance on numbers and counts that were part of the churchy rubrics.”

Among its religious and existential themes, The Sin-eater explores the palimpsestic nature of sin. It is the irreverent tale of Argyle, a “wounded pilgrim” who “by force of hunger”

had his holy orders and his mission.
He had the extreme unction of his daily bread

who travels through Ireland performing his rites, feeding on the sins of the deceased (figuratively speaking, the rite consists of a loaf of bread and a bowl of beer that the sin-eater must ingest in order for the decedent’s sins to be absolved), and collecting a nominal fee. However, to say that Lynch simply tells a story through the book’s twenty-four lined poems would be to barely see them at face value.

Argyle’s situation is complicated. How does one cope with eating the sins of others, the sins of strangers? He hates the legalism and the arbitrary powers the priests exhibit, yet he depends on the people’s religious inclinations and superstitions.

In the self-titled first poem, we are introduced to the ritual, to the character of Argyle and his place, or lack thereof, among the people of the parishes he visits:

Argyle eased the warm loaf right and left
and downed swift gulps of beer and venial sin
then lit into the bread now leavened with
the corpse’s cardinal mischiefs, then he said
“Six pence, I’m sorry.” And the widow paid him.

Then, in “Argyle’s Eucharist,” we see further into the rite and are led to believe that the supposed ritual has relieved the deceased’s soul of damnation:

Perdition due the recent decedent
thus averted by Argyle’s hunger,
the unencumbered soul makes safe to God,
the decomposing dead get buried under
earth and stone. The sin-eater belches, wipes his gob.

Throughout the book we see that this is not merely a profession, but a means of sustenance. In the first poem, “The Sin-eater,” he contemplates

a bellyful tonight is what he thought,
please God, and breakfast in the morning.

There are times when Argyle enjoys his meals. There are times when he struggles not to fling himself from the cliffs he walks along. Upon reading the poems, you understand what Lynch means when he says “Argyle comes by his irreverence honestly.” He is swithering. He is “grudging and grateful, faithful and doubtful, broken and beatified – caught between a mirage and an apocalypse.”

Lynch, who is also a funeral director in Milford, Michigan, is a sort of blasphemous romantic with Wordsworthian affection for nature and Bryant’s morbid proclivities. He takes a classical and yet modern approach to these poems both in language and with the application of medieval religious rites.

It is important to trudge through the book’s “Introit,” which is full of Lynch’s religious family tree, but it reveals his approach to the overtly ecclesiastical ideas and practices about which he writes.

I was surprised and impressed to discover that a Christian press published this book, as many references are unquestioningly irreverent. Perhaps it’s the prodigal in me, but I have a soft spot for irreverence.

Despite its obvious religious influence (again, and unfortunately, reading the “Introit” is key to fully understanding this), The Sin-eater: A Breviary is not just a book for the religious reader or the prodigal, it is a tale of the filth of the human soul, it is the human condition, it is recompense. It is feasting on the world, then purging it over a cliff or on a bed of human bones or expelling it from your bowels. One of the book’s last poems, “His Purgations,” shows just such a scenario:

Argyle shat himself and, truth be told,
but for the mess of it, the purging was
no bad thing for the body corporal.
Would that the soul were so thoroughly cleansed,
by squatting and grunting supplications.
Would that purgatories and damnations
could be so quickly doused and recompensed,
null and voided in the name of mercy.

The proceeding lines of the above poem to tell us that when Argyle stopped to wash

…his body’s immersion
in the tide was not unlike a christening:

Throughout the poems Argyle finds his solace not only in nature, but in the blasphemous deed. In the book’s final poem he adopts his donkey, Recompense, as his “paraclete” – a fascinating word choice and ultimate resolution to the book for two reasons. First, “paraclete” is the name of the book’s publisher. Second, “paraclete” in Christian theology is the term given to the Holy Spirit as counselor and friend.

This book comes with no shortage of side smirks. Lynch crafts a story of transgression and forgiveness, but, in the end, the true beauty lies in the ambiguity of who has committed the transgression and who has been forgiven. And, personally, I gladly forgive Argyle for his lacking tables manners, and applaud Lynch for hosting such a deliciously irreverent feast.

Dark Sky Books published Stephen Sturgeon’s terrific debut collection of poems one year ago. To mark the occasion, all month long Sturgeon will be talking about the book, its individual parts, and fielding questions about his poetry on Twitter. Find out why a poem is titled a certain way, what a specific line in a poem means, and how, now more than one year out, the author feels about a particular poem(s). Those inclined can follow Sturgeon at: twitter.com/stephensturgeon.

Overall, the book has been well-received. Josh Cook, writing in Bookslut, opens his review thusly:

This is what poetry is supposed to feel like; that is my strongest impression of Trees of the Twentieth Century. Poetry should be written toward the “unlanguageable,” about the invisible, seeking the impossible through ideas too abstract, complex, and paradoxical to be contained in the structures of prose. If poetry is candid, it is candid about the concealed. If poetry is obvious, it is obvious about the contradictions of life. If poetry is direct, it is direct about the confusions of consciousness. Works like this should be the baseline of American poetry, the starting point on the path to whatever is next.

And, at Big Other, Amber Sparks writes:

Sturgeon’s book was a surprise in the best possible way. I sat down to read it and realized immediately that I was staring at a small selection of serious talent. Sturgeon’s Trees is much more than a debut. It is a revelation, an entirely new thing, and at the same time feels a bit like coming home.

You can read these reviews or judge for yourself – I’m sure Stephen and/or I will be giving away a couple free copies of the book during the course of the week. So join the conversation on Twitter, harass a wickedly talented young poet, and maybe take home a fantastic collection on this, its very first birthday.

We ask him some questions.

Michael Kimball, Adam Robinson, Double Dagger, Dan Deacon, Joseph Young, Mary Pulcinella, Chris Toll, Joan Sullivan, Shaun Preston, Jamie Gaughran Perez, Margaret Gebauer, Rupert Wondoloski, and Peter with the Moustache all make cameos.

Enjoy!

An earlier me would have read poems that referenced micro-shorts and text messages and immediately written them off. That earlier me would have lost out. The speaker in Lily Ladewig’s debut poetry collection The Silhouettes won’t let me pigeonhole her. She refuses to be predictable. These poems are fashion previews, but they are also history lessons. They are sometimes yoga meditations, and they are sometimes adventures in free diving. They are often French. And while they usually show us the silhouette, they always show us the body.

Poems are often about what isn’t included. And The Silhouettes is a collection of the unfinished line. The series of “Shadowbox” poems spread throughout the book play with space and punctuation. Part of this play is to imply line breaks, but it also plays, as many of her poems do, with suggestion. Just as we guess with silhouettes, we find ourselves finishing the thoughts in lines like, “If I forget to pack enough books//and my lacy underthings” and “To be someone’s cup of tea/or a flight of stairs.”

No matter what context, these are poems about the body. About a body. A body that’s aware of itself and over-aware of itself. A body that is sometimes surprised by itself. That is not to say these aren’t poems of the mind and heart. These are poems of an entire bleeding person. A speaker who is aware of her body when she is moving through the world, when she is in love and when she isn’t. Ladewig writes, “Like if nobody/looks at my naked body then I will never/be truly naked again.” Nobody takes on a new meaning, and we also begin to wonder, “Then what do these/reflections mean?” When she writes, “Do you know/how many people have told me/that I have a lovely figure?” we remember the gloom a person can have living inside a body, any body.

Lily Ladewig’s poems serve as a good reminder. We often mistake the surface for the entire person. We often forget that our minds own bodies. We often mistake a silhouette for an empty outline.

Order The Silhouettes here.
Read more of Lily here.

Order your copy of Ark Codex as a pay-what-you-want PDF or a $40 full color book.

And check out an excerpt we published in DSM 15.

Alan Rossi’s story, “Blackberries,” appears in Issue 15. Here he discusses the story, the fruit, and tells us not to take field trips.

“Black or white, it didn’t matter, they were all pale.” Do you think this relates to an innocence, a lack of experience?

I think that’s a really cool way of seeing it. I can’t say exactly what I meant by this line because I don’t remember writing it. I remember seeing it many times when I was again looking over and working the thing, but I don’t remember writing it. I see it as, yes: that these little beings haven’t been out in the world. Maybe better: they are in the world but don’t know it. They are in the world but asleep to it.

Why do you think the experience leaves everyone “aching to be fed again” ?

This is how all beings are, human or no. And I don’t really know what human means, but you know, people we typically call human who are walking around and eating blackberries and stuff. We are not only wanting and desiring all the time, but many of us are aching with want, painfully wanting. The thing with the blackberries, it may be a small thing, but it’s also an extreme (in that it’s different, new) experience and many extreme experiences, if experienced in some way as good, are one that leaves tracks in the brain that lead to more more more. Wanting it again and again and again.

The hand of the child at the end is “sticky, warm.” Does this relate to the children walking away changed by the blackberry bush?

Yes, change, but also cycle, also circle. It is the step into needing needlessly. The residue of the need, always there now. It is another thing to want, a thing to have hunger over. If they are changed in any way, it is that they want more now. The blackberry bush I think is the object of wanting which intensifies the wanting when the thing wanted is gone, which is a difficulty because blackberries aren’t easy to find the wild dreamy world.

Does the teacher ache to feed again?

He believes he’s aware that one taste is enough, he’s aware of this. And yet he isn’t able to do anything with this awareness. An awareness of the want is not enough to kill the wanting. You can see that to me all over this piece is wanting, wanting. I don’t know why. I wasn’t thinking wanting when I wrote it. The teacher has a kind of sickness, a kind of need for control though he doesn’t know why, control of the kids and their impulses, yet he can do nothing with his own.

What do you think was the teacher’s accidental lesson?

Don’t take field trips. I don’t know. I think it’s more how he now knows that whatever he expected to do here, that didn’t happen. In fact, maybe the opposite happened. And what he expected and the opposite are both uncertain in my mind and unknown in some way for the teacher.