The Massachusetts Review

The Massachusetts Review presents the latest Working Titles e-book: “TIME SERVED by Malcolm Garcia–available this week!

From Time Served:

I heard about Jose Chavez-Alvarez by chance, just after my journalism career crashed with the recession in 2008. I survived five rounds of layoffs at a daily newspaper before the sixth round tagged me.

           Out of work for months, desperate, I accepted a job as a groundskeeper at a country club for minimum wage. Emptying trash, cutting golf course fairways, raking sand bunkers. My life as a reporter began slipping away. I determined to hang on to it. When the country club closed for the winter, I had a few months to freelance and regain my footing. Until then, I used my half-hour lunch breaks and the hours after work to pitch story ideas to editors.

           Initially I thought I’d write about homeless Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, a topical subject, good for the holidays when readers are interested in the poor. I had been embedded as a reporter in Afghanistan and knew people involved with social service nonprofits that worked with homeless vets.

           “You really ought to do a story on deported vets,” one social worker told me.

           I had no idea noncitizens served in the U.S. military, let alone that veterans were being deported. My contact gave me the name of Hector Barajas, an army veteran and recovering alcoholic and drug addict who was deported to Mexico in 2004. He crossed back into the United States illegally a short time later but was caught and deported again in 2009. He then started a support house for deported veterans in Tijuana.

"...I had considered myself almost numb to the constant tragedies permeating my community and the communities of people dear to me, but in the cases of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile as well as the Pulse Orlando massacre, my spirit was heavy with grief and frustration. The dance studio afforded me the space to share and cope, to create work that—one hopes—will allow others to do the same."

"Collage, agglomeration, accumulation and declamation, les memes as no more than memes. As the late twentieth-century poet Pete Shelley put it, 'noise annoys.' Call this the dominant trend in experimental writing in French up to around 1940. . . Blankness, absence, gaps and fissures, no choses from which to choose. As the late twentieth-century poet Ian Curtis put it, 'listen to the silence, let it ring on.' Call this a dominant trend in experimental writing in French after around 1945,"

The Massachusetts Review presents the eight Working Titles e-book: "Chaotic Freedom" in Civil War Louisiana by Bruce Laurie–available this week!

From "Chaotic Freedom" in Civil War Louisiana:

    This essay offers additional insight into the motivations of comparatively ordinary soldiers--two men whose Civil War stories have never been told in full. Henry S. Gere and Marshall S. Stearns brought different points of view to their wartime service. Gere was an abiding abolitionist, the kind of soldier described by Manning. Stearns had no obvious politics, and yet both men were strongly influenced not so much by Copperheadism of the heroism of black men in uniform--though this bravery was influential--but by what they learned about race and slavery. They were appalled by what they understood to be the malice of bondage, yet also encouraged by what the learned from personal interaction with fugitive slaves in greater Baton Rouge. Their role in the making of the image of Peter was no accident: it was a deliberate act that captured for them a powerful symbol--an emblem of the cruelty of a system that could not stand.