#jersey devil press

For this installment, I’m going to highlight a poem that was published just last week in Jersey Devil Press: “How to Write About Sand” by Jessica Wiseman Lawrence.  As the title suggests, the poem is concerned with how one might convey an experience through poetry.

“How to Write About Sand” is structured into five couplets.  The first two couplets present ways of talking about sand that the speaker rejects, while the last three couplets present options that the speaker finds more compelling.  The speaker does not state explicitly, however, what distinguishes the one group from the other, or why that distinction matters.  Finding that out is an exercise left to reader.

So let’s run through that exercise, shall we?

The ways of talking about sand mentioned in the first two couplets are all clichés.  Sand is routinely connected to “time,” “sunsets,” and “sinking” (lines 1-3).  These are connections that are made so often that they don’t impart any strong emotions onto the reader.  They aren’t striking visuals or witty turns of phrase; they’re just overly-repeated words.  If the speaker wants to use sand to convey an emotional message, such commonplace tropes will not serve her purpose.

How then should one write about sand?  I see two threads running through those last three couplets.  The first is an emphasis on sand as a tactile substance:  it is “in her hair, on her scalp” (line 5).  In fact, the poem keeps returning to sand’s relationship to the body, how it gets beneath your nails and past your lips.  Getting a feeling from sand almost requires actually feeling it.

The second thread is the notion that sand a substance that refuses to leave.  The speaker finds the sand in her nails and bed “a week later,” and she “will never forget the sand in [her] mouth” (lines 7, 9).  Sand stays with a person not just physically but also mentally, as memories, as ideas of a past impressions.

So now we have two aspects of sand the speaker wants to draw out: it is tactile, and it is constant.  We just need to determine to what end these aspects of sand are employed.

The most likely answer is that the speaker is using sand to express her feelings about a past relationship.  For one, relationships tend to both be physical and have lasting emotional impressions.  For another, it helps explain the “her” in the third couplet, a figure distinct from the speaker’s “I.”

What are the speaker’s specific feelings regarding this past relationship?  Those are harder to pin down–and, given the title, perhaps not necessary to know.  However, the final couplet might offer a few clues.  

“A dead dad isn’t an excuse to fail,“ my mother said in a moment of Champagne wisdom. “Dig deep enough, and everybody’s sleeping on bones.”

As if that explained away my misdemeanors. I wasn’t in a hurry to die, but neither was I afraid of death. I grew up with death. He tucked me in at night, dared me to pocket sweets from the Superette, and poured my mom cocktails. Since my teenage years, I had been looking for death on every thrill ride and in every risky decision, waiting to find death on the face of each anonymous lover. I knew the more we risked losing, the more we had to gain. My mother didn’t understand that death wasn’t an excuse; death made the chances worth taking. I think that’s why the oracle woman with her proclamations didn’t scare me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwKA303ZLLA

Sorry to be an absentee around here the last week or two. I’ve gone back into the writing process, this time revising the novel I finished drafting in March, Tsar Bomb. The good news is I’m almost halfway through my first read-through, and it’s the cleanest first draft I think I’ve ever written.

It still needs major work, of course, but I might be sold…

The Jersey Devil Press Sampler III

These arrived in the mail today. They look awesome–great work by the folks at Jersey Devil Press.

As a reminder, you can get your own copy of this very limited edition only at the Asbury Park Comic Con this weekend. The guys from Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash / Comic Book Men will be giving them out FREE on a first-come, first-serve basis.

As a second reminder, if you come into possession of…

One week until The Watchers in the Dark is published in Jersey Devil Press! Also, a brief story about bedbugs–it doesn’t have a happy ending.

These brief whimsical passages about a being named Eliot (once a boy, then a wolf, then a ghost, then a robot, then...) are authored by a talented fella I was once in a writing class with named Matthew Burnside who is in the Iowa Writers Program.

"For Kylie" at Jersey Devil Press

"For Heather" at Bartleby Snopes