Wreckage of Reason II BLOG TOUR

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We left Queens in short sleeves to pull into Steel City at snowfall

Felt like we drove through a portal Made of Bronx cheers and cat screams

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My interviewees are three Russian women writers. Each of them – even if they agree to this statement or not – is known for excellent and highly original experimental prose or poetry.  Maria Rybakova, an Assistant Professor of Classics & Humanities at San Diego State University, was born in 1973 in Moscow but now lives in Southern California and writes and publishes her prose in Russian. Olga Livshin, Head of the Russian Program at Boston University, was born in 1978 in Odessa but now lives in Massachusetts and writes poems in Russian and English. Natalia Rubanova, who has been working as an editor for several major publishing houses in Moscow, was born in 1974 in Ryazan' and writes in Russian.

This week's stop on The Blog Tour for Wreckage of Reason 2 is Laynie Browne-- featuring her fascinating interview with critically acclaimed, bestselling author Julianna Baggott:

JB: What’s your advice to someone who’s fallen in love with a writer?"

LB: This is very dangerous.  To be avoided at all costs.  I recommend instead, falling in love with an idea.  Seriously though, in such instances it is important to ask, have I fallen in love with a writer, or with what the writer has written?  Or, am I in love with the possibility of language, the erotic possibilities of language? Poet Lyn Hejinian writes in her essay “Continuing Against Closure, “I would argue that one of the functions of art is to bring dreams and other works of the imagination into the space of appearance.”  Here is the place where I would happily dwell with no end. My advice to someone who has fallen in love with bringing dreams and works of the imagination into appearance, through love, is very different.  No harm can come to you here. Or I should say, possibly the harm that can come to you here may be a useful form of alchemy. This is why writers write. This is why painters paint. You create, exist, within a permeable dwelling. One in which every aspect of life can reach you and also you find yourself within the presence of some unspeakable power. Of love. If it doesn’t feel like a choice, that you have no other choice, than to love someone, to love what they create, then possibly you have arrived at something stunning. You need no advice. You are now in a position to offer advice to others. So I ask you, what’s your advice to someone who has fallen in love with _______ ?

WRECKERS IN THE NEWS:

There's a new radio show that's being carried by public radio stations coast-to-coast called 'The Author's Corner.'

Holly Anderson's 'The Night She Slept With a Bear' was featured. Please take a look and have a listen. The producer, Peter Johnson, has pretty eclectic tastes. Click on the link to hear an excerpt of her story.

This week's stop on the Wreckage of Reason 2 Blog Tour features a short story by Geri Lipschultz, published in  Up, Do-- (Spider Road Press, Patricia Flaherty, Editor)

Spear Maiden to Persephone

All superheroes are violent, so do not marry one, but all who are not superheroes are also violent. A discovery made by one of the female explorers. 

Empty pages, my life has been that for a while. I’ve stepped into someone else’s book.  I’ve skated on their pages. I’ve relinquished my religion and my height. I’ve given up my hair for a good cause. They must pulverize, snip off the tips of my daughter’s fingers. This will make the bees sing again. Birds will flutter at our windows again. Cicadas will stop preparing for war.

Just a small sacrifice, and the snow falls on the buds of the magnolia, what is left after the great storm.  The land has sued the sky for divorce. We walked on the side of the roads, trying not to look at the torn fences, trees fallen. A dry earth, the biologist said, that longs for its herds. We must eat the animals, round them up according to schedule. Tie them to a hook in the earth’s core, where the elders lie.

Her fingertips have grown back. Even the whorls. Her little ridges. I lick them, watched by the cat, whose very tongue is a ridge. His eyes like those of owls. He curls around my daughter’s fingers and stares.

How a daughter came to this world, I will tell you. I don’t have the permit, so do not repeat what I say.  I caught her, wrestled with a squirrel for her. He was atop the maple, chewing buds, and she was up there, as well, had climbed up to see the world. She didn’t want to come down. I thought to send my cat, but he lives indoors. His purrs inflate the house. I didn’t want to come home to a sinkhole, didn’t want the house to lose its balance, to tip.

My fingers bleeding, my tongue full of blood. My eyes dry for the collection of tears that I gave to the Jehovah's Witnesses. Yes, you can have them, I said.  You have lovely wool that was last seen on a drove of sheep.  Dolly gave up her coat, and I gave up my tears.

It’s a long story but must remain short. Otherwise, court-martial. Otherwise, prison.  Otherwise, the degree stays in the file, and the file will be deleted. I will have to be observed.  I will have to show my registration. A small box of index cards with the information written by hand. A relic of my twenty years of labor, for which I was paid a teaspoon of sugar. It adds up. My daughter will tell you. I will send her out into the world with all her whorls reborn, on a berth of roses, her rosette of gardenia, her garden of Eden, her evening posies. Wave goodbye and smile.

For this week's stop on the blog tour for Wreckage of Reason 2: Back to the Drawing Board, an excerpt from Lynda Schor's story in the anthology:

Colonel Sanders Does It Right                                                      

I watch him as he bites into the drumstick he holds between both forefingers and thumbs.  A bit of the crust stays in the corner of his mouth.

  Colonel Sanders has invented a special method of quick-frying chicken so all the flavor and juices are locked inside.

  We are living, Charlie full-time, and me temporarily, in Soap Lake, Washington, a tiny town with a lake that has no fish, plants, or anything, growing in it.

  Before I met Charlie, I ate crab salad everyday, carefully cracking the red shells with my teeth, pulling out the meat gently but firmly.

  Charlie eats his burrito using his fork like a saw.  The blue tattoos on his upper arms ripple as he exerts pressure on the firm tortilla wrap.  They are simple tattoos, almost do-it-yourself, pale and one-dimensional.  His thick blonde hair, longer on top, sways softly.

  “We’ll be getting to someplace decent in a bit,” he says.  I move my knee so he can shift.  He places his wide hand with its blonde hairs over the entire bulb of the stick shift.  I picture him gripping my breast just that way. His hand slides off the stick onto my knee, where it feels warm.  I offer him cookies, one at a time, that we’d bought at our lunch stop.  They are made of enriched white flour and / or bleached flour, niacin-reduced iron-thiamine monotrate and riboflavin, sugar, oatmeal, vegetable shortening with BHT and BHA as preservatives.  Apple filling: corn syrup, apples and modified maize starch, citric acid, salt, spice, natural flavor, with potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate as preservatives, and one or more of the following: palm oil, partially hydrogenated coconut oil, raisins, bicarbonate of soda, molasses, monocalcium phosphate, corn sweetener (corn syrup, fructose, malted cereal syrup), whole eggs, salt, soy protein spice, corn syrup solids, artificial flavor.

Although the woman in the text may be the particular woman writer, in the case of twentieth-century women experimental writers, the woman in the text is also an effect of the textual practice of breaking patriarchal fictional forms; the radical forms -- nonlinear, nonhierarchical, and decentering -- are, in themselves, a way of writing the feminine. (3-4)

From an essay by Ellen Page, "Women Writers and the Restive Text." Postmodern Culture v.6 n.2 (January, 1996)

The stop on this week's blog tour for The Wreckage of Reason II: Back to the Drawing Board is Donna Wyszomierski-- and a story from her collection, Bad Mayonnaise.

"Starting in the Movies"

It was about three years ago that I started in the movies.  I wrote some screenplays based on my life, set them all to music.  I cast myself in the leading role, got someone to produce them.  I soon found myself a star, made a couple million dollars.  Of course there were men who wanted to share my modest fortune.  The first one was head camera man.  He did the movie work, he said, to put bread on the table, his real passion being homegrown crops.  He was fighting agribusiness.  He pictured me a farmer’s wife, waking with the roosters.   I went with him one day for lunch to a café in the country.  In disguise, I wore a wig and an unfamiliar shade of lipstick.  Several women there were dressed in heavy boots and madras.  They spoke about the local beans but also about their sisters, who were researching in a hostile climate.  I took off the wig and told them research like that could feature in a movie.  The country women were intrigued. A week later I flew in with the camera man to scout for good locations.    The sisters had a lovely camp perched on an iceberg.  They served us coffee with liqueurs and described one of their days there.  The sun rises early or not at all they said, so planning is important.  It turned out that time of year was perfect for a movie.  I wrote a quick script with tunes and we planned shooting in the morning.  When we all got up at dawn the camera man was sullen.  I recalled that the day before he’d flirted with one sister.  This morning she appeared aloof and abruptly left the table.   I told the group I wouldn’t stand to have the movie ruined by squabbles.  I grabbed the script, added a part for the camera man as hero.   This made him feel better but he insisted on my adding songs for him.   As soon as I’d written those we hurried to the aircraft.   The sisters guided us to a cove where they pointed out exotic fauna.  Since the camera man was also the hero now, I had to share the filming.  The sisters were naturals in their parts, the aloof one in particular.  As she warmed up for a scene she told me her story.  A fiancé had jilted her but given her some money.   She’d used it to build the camp and buy tools for the research.  The camera man resembled him, that’s why she’d rebuffed him.  But now she found she liked his singing voice, couldn’t help but reconsider.  He’s had an eye on you I know, she said.  I don’t want to offend you.  I told her I’d realized by then I felt no real attraction.  Back at camp the two strolled off and disappeared in moonlight.  When the film was done they went on the road to assist with its promotion.  Two months later they sent a card announcing their engagement.  The film became a big success.  The camera man went on to stardom.  He moved to the sisters’ camp, where he built a greenhouse.  

Publications and Awards from our Brilliant Contributors:

NightBallet Press is thrilled to announce the fourth of five chapbooks to be published this week for Pittsburgh poets in anticipation of the Words Dance in the NightBallet  super-bash:  The Paul Simon Project by Karen Lillis!

Wreckage of Reason II: Back To The Drawing Board by Nava Renek and Natalie Nuzzo (Editors)

A Review by Leora Skolkin-Smith

"They are spare, economic, serious and playful and mischievous, tightly woven with an awareness of the weight of each word; they find simple, remarkable ways to match the unwieldiness of language to the fleeting ephemera of inner experience, memory, ordinary occurrences. …What I mean is, it is possible to pare language down and leave only the essential, and this is what writing can be—again. I have no idea why American fiction has become so uniform in voice and tone, so alike in message, so predictable. There are amazing exceptions, there always are.”