By: Chris Koslowski

Sure, eating all the mom-and-pop food in the glow of holiday lights was great, but after all the cheer and beer and slushy white stuff accumulating outside, I got a little homesick. There’s nothing profoundly special about the office space I share with fellow Yemassee editors Justin Brouckaert and Amanda Mitchell, but it definitely has character. And what I’ve found bouncing from city to city in silly pursuit of this writing thing is that character can grow on someone. Character gets remembered.

So, y’all in for a treat. I’ve snapped some photos depicting the curiosities of the Yemassee editorial office—photos that suggest some interesting stories. So please, come with me on this exclusive tour behind the scenes. Get a glimpse of where, as they say, the magic happens. Hot and wild literary magazine magic.

Here’s home base. The John R. Welsh Humanities Office Building. University of South Carolina. The Yemassee office is on the second floor, as in the second floor above the ground. I can only assume old Professor Welsh loved to mess with the frosh, and so decided to distinguish his Brutalist tower by numbering the floors European style in opposition to every other campus building.

To no one’s surprise, the HOB was built in the 1960s, an era when a wrinkle in space-time transported a dozen of the dark ages’ finest fortress builders into the 20th century where they were immediately employed as college campus architects. Truthfully, my feelings are divided on the HOB. It’s old and has its share of old building problems. I trust its fifty-year-old Westinghouse elevators more than its water fountains, which we’ve been unofficially advised not to slurp from. The HOB is brown and ugly and its most interesting feature—those rectangular flanges jutting out from the windows—render its narrow views even more claustrophobic. Yet, I have to respect what the structure represents: a time when what happened inside college campus buildings may have outweighed how purdy those buildings looked to seventeen-year-olds and their parents on campus tours. You’ve heard of the Cathedral of Learning? Well, we’ve got the Prison of Learning. It’s great to be a Gamecock!

Knock knock. It’s Room 219, the Yemassee office, complete with phonetic spelling, outdated event advertisement, and extremely official editor placard. Fun fact: nobody can pronounce Yemassee, including us. We were pretty confident in stressing the last syllable, but last summer I was “Oh Honeyed” by some SC upstate locals when I butchered the pronunciation of the similarly spelled Lake Jocassee. I now wake in cold sweats, worried I’ll crack under the pressure when someone inevitably asks me to pronounce the journal’s name at AWP.  Yem-ah-SEE or Yem-ASS-ee?

Hey! You’ve made it! Unlike other, swanky lit mags with clean carpet and furniture from this century, Yemassee sacrifices editor comfort for journal quality. Because what do you really need other than a desk and a dream? Well, a lot of stuff, but we make do. Come inside, make yourself comfortable.

You hungry? Thirsty? Can I offer you something? We’ve got everything an editor might need for those late nights struggling to think up blog content. Tired? Our house tea is renowned in international circles. Sick? We’ve got 2,000 milligrams of Vitamin C (that’s two grams!). Peckish? Only the finest Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn. Touch of pica? We’ve got nails for that. Tough luck if you have a cough because I took the Halls last month. I’m keeping the wrapper in case I ever have some gum I want to save.

Ah. I see you’ve found our library of other fine literary journals. We love them all, and have read, well, quite a few! Though we do feel a special bond with the Chattahoochee Review. Everyone knows the coolest journals end in double-e. You might also notice our gavel, which is probably my favorite Yemassee office artifact from the ghosts of editors past. It’s great for making noise and testing reflexes.

That’s good. Go ahead. Let it out. Editing a literary journal is stressful work. If we feel ourselves slipping a little, we always have our handy squeeze ball within reach. Pound for pound, I’d put the Yemassee edit team’s grip strength up against any other lit mag’s. You hear that, Appalachee Review? We’re calling you out, double-e’s or no. We also use our stress ball to visualize attempts to squeeze funding from the University, or in a pinch, we can bounce it against the wall like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.

Wow. Would you look at that? Magestic. It’s the Yemassee backstock shelf. Wonderfully organized by wise and kind former editors. I love seeing how the magazine has changed over the years—from a staple-bound, black and white to today’s full-color matte cover. You should buy one just to touch it. Or, maybe submit to our contest, and perhaps you will be able to touch it while reading your own prize-winning work between its pages. Mmm. Smooth.

Not sure what these plastic squares are, but they have Yemassee printed on them. Coasters maybe? Weird.

So this is probably my second favorite Yemassee artifact. I like to imagine a former editor, five hours into an all-night layout session, was so deliriously overwhelmed with words that she or he decided to do some simple math to straighten out the universe. Phew! Ten times ten is still 100. One times eight? Hang on. Eight. Yes. Eight. All is well.

So the tour is drawing to a close, which means things are getting juicy…or maybe you’re sick of this tour. Maybe you hate it so much, you’d rather self-defenestrate than politely ask to leave. If that’s the case, under department policy I must inform you that due to wind resistance and the height of the Yemassee office above the quad, your chances of survival after pitching yourself out this window will increase upon emptying your pockets of all wallets, keys, cell phones, antique coins, blank checks, and diamonds. Diamonds are extremely deadly for those falling from second (third to you Yanks) story windows. So fork them over. The humanities are criminally underfunded.

Finally, the finale. I swear to you that this poster has been hanging on the wall since my first day in the Yemassee office, and I’m still riveted by its mystery. I thought it was the source piece for an old issue cover, but I’ve poured through the back stock. Ain’t there. Perhaps this is the last remnant of a lost Yemassee--the year it was taken over by bears. Is it referencing Shakespeare, the stock market? Is that one bear standing on the back of the other bear? I think we’ve all felt like that woman—fleeing with a teddy bear from a pack of large and acrobatic grizzlies. We’re going to make it, everybody. Those bears are scary, but slow.

 Well, those are the digs. Thanks for reading, and you know what? We’re not going to kick you out like the celebrities always do. Stay a while. Kick up your feet. Be our guest. We insist. Really. Don’t leave us here. Please. Don’t leave.

__

Reviewed by Laura Carter

The front cover of this magnificent little book by Natural History Press is a horn of some type. I’m wont to call it a Shofar, a “Jewish trumpet,” though I’ve never seen one. I suppose it’s a Viking artifact of some kind, engraved, seemingly old, the type of thing one could possibly smoke out of or hold up to ward off strangers. Anyway.

Yalen’s book is divided into four sections: “Causeway,” “The Beginning In,” “The Hearts of Vikings” (title track—yay!), and “Kaddish,” which reminds me of Allen Ginsberg. In the first section, Yalen moves through “the new world” (a title of a sub-section) with astonishing clarity and a working mind: “At the perfect coincidence of landmass and bias / The new world was given me, the score reset / No rest.” There’s talk of bees, vomit, and homing, and her lines are taut and agile in their resonance and simplicity. No fat, whatsoever.

It’s like there’s a searching going on in this beginning, a looking for something that isn’t obvious, something placed at the center of the heart, so to speak. In these lines, Yalen invokes having been called to something, a sentiment that many poets may share: “Into the glacial debris / We were admitted / If we promised to comb the beach for quartz.” She writes in “Nucleotides” (another section title) of leaving the city, but which city is she leaving? Clearly, this book reads as an origin story. These lines are especially telling:

It might have been night

The way we narrowly escaped anger

But it was fear and technology that

Drove us toward our station

There is also talk of paying the milkman, in dimes, even! And talk, above all, of finding “my perfect opposite to pocket.” If one has read Hegel, this bespeaks the master-slave narrative, and while the opposite is hardly an equal, it is, in a sense, perfect. It’s just hidden, mostly, as this book’s speaker is hiding in a way, keeping out the world of contemporary trivia for the higher things that Vikings, true originators, may have longed for and sought to realize.

This is (obviously) the moon. Yalen writes of how

 A lone gunman got the moon

 But was it the moon we suspected?

 We try to donate this moon to

 The Indians but they refuse the racist artwork

 And grudging life-forms.

In “The Beginning In,” Yalen takes an interior path, and starts at the start. She writes that “[t]he first word was a noun,” and that “[t]he first thing was a box.” She moves through this beginning with taut lines, again, broken into fragments that elucidate the collage tactics of many Surrealists of time past, and present poetry in its purest state. It’s all about moon, sun, words, and systems here, in which “[t]he sun was equal and new / It stood in for one person when another person / Wanted it to.” This section continues throughout with language about purity and beauty, the things that are not of this world but perhaps evoke a classical time in which trees rose above humans, as full of life as anything could possibly be.

In the book’s title section, “The Hearts of Vikings,” we have a poem beginning that is called “tiny mollusk shells beautifully marked.” There are thickets, clearings, the kind of metaphysics that Heidegger may have loved so dearly and sought to make part of the daily life of philosophers as they go about their thinking. Yalen writes that “something / I met once is my name.” Where are the Christmas lights?

Yalen’s poem “The squares are cut out, so that the men stand in them firmly.” tells us about a time period that is long gone. Here is the poem in its entirety:

When you die. When I feel no quivering leaf

or breath. When finally deprived.

 And the construction and the process of his proof.

And afraid. And Beethoven composed his

 music for his God. When forced to be born

all alone again. All normal and alone. When

 without a thought of authorship you slip all

egress from the heavily bolted earth, when

 explosions are tearing holes in iron and

balancing on a peg is no option. When tea

  is served in a patternless dress, various ladies

introduced to me by name. At the

  borderland of grammar. And I can’t seem

to catch their names over the hearing.

This is clearly a terroristic place, don’t you think? “[Explosions] tearing holes in iron” and “the / borderland of grammar.” There is a haunting to this place, something unreal and unlikely to be erased from our memories of this book, yet there is a hope that begs itself at the story’s end. The question, after reading “Kaddish,” which ends with “I know a fox like that / it causes much dismay,” is for the reader of this book to take this image and somehow do better, or to make this interior, this prayerful singing, in such taut phrases, into a more expressive life outside of this coolness. That is my take on it anyway. As a mirror of a time past, something archaic and at once all and nothing, I think Yalen does a fine job of providing a glimpse into this secret history, and one wonders if it will ever entirely disappear.

The Heart of Vikings by Lesley Yalen

Natural History Press, 2015

__

Lesley Yalen’s work has appeared in jubilat, Octopus, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Her two chapbooks—This Elizabeth and The Beginning In—are hardly available. She lives in wondrous Western Massachusetts.

By Justin Brouckaert

For the third year in a row, I set a goal of reading 100 books, and for the third year in a row, I failed miserably. But despite that failure, I’m still happy with my reading list. Like every reading year, 2015 was strange: a mix of novel research, guilty pleasures and recommended reading in all three genres, new and old. To accurately represent the eclectic reading year that was 2015, here’s an equally random list of some of my favorite books.

Favorite Novel

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

Favorite Short Story Collection

Pastoralia by George Saunders

Favorite Nonfiction

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Favorite Poetry

Wastoid by Mathias Svalina

Favorite Detroit Book

Scrapper by Matt Bell

Favorite Running Book

Two Hours by Ed Caesar

Book I Liked Much More Than I Thought I'd Like & Talked About Much More Than I Thought I'd Talk About (& Still Kind Of Want To Hate, Despite All That)

10:04 by Ben Lerner

Books I Think About The Most, Often Against My Own Will

How to Get into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak

We the Animals by Justin Torres

Favorite Book Found Deep In The Recesses Of A Giant Used Book Store & Picked Solely On Geographic Recognition & Aesthetic Appeal Of Front Cover

The Distance from the Heart of Things by Ashley Warlick 

Book I Was Sure I Would Hate & Was Sure I Hated In The Process Of Reading But Actually I Didn't Hate It & Now That I Think More About It, I Kind Of Liked It A Lot

Open City by Teju Cole

Favorite Book That Was Like Nothing I Ever Would/Could Be Capable Of Writing In My Whole Entire Life, But That Only Makes Me Love It That Much More

A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball

Book That Should Have Been One of the Most Entertaining & Important Sports Books Ever But Instead Was Really Tiring and Frustrating, Thanks To The Author’s Constant Misogyny/Casual Sexism/Excessive Dick Swinging

The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons

Book That Almost Made Me Faint/Vomit, Mostly Because I Bought It Used & It Had A Really Weird Smell, But Also Because of Other Reasons

End Zone by Don DeLillo

Book I Finished That I Didn’t Think I’d Finish & Didn’t Really Like But Am Still Mostly Glad I Finished

On Such A Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee

Books I Bought Kind Of On A Whim & Found Really Entertaining/Interesting/Important

There Must Be Some Mistake by Frederick Barthelme

The Great Man by Kate Christensen

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland

Marathon Man by Bill Rodgers

Book I'm Reading Now (But Won’t Finish Before Midnight) That I Should Have Read A Long Time Ago

Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage by Alice Munro

__

By Sam Slaughter

This year, I didn’t read and review as many books as I had hoped (and on that, I wholly admit that the diversity of my reading choices was lacking, something that I will be working to correct in 2016), but of the books I did read, I was lucky to come across some damn good ones. The five books below are the ones that have stuck with me.

1. Slab by Selah Saterstrom (Coffee House Press)

Hands down, this was my favorite book of the year. If I could boil this book down to its essence and inject it into myself somehow, I would. Simply beautiful. 

2. Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press) by Charlotte Pence 

This was one of the last books I read this year, but even halfway through I knew it was going to be one of my favorites. I read Pence’s collection in one sitting, then did it again. And again. I could not get enough of the blend of science, anthropology, love, and loss.

3. On The River, Down Where They Found Willy Brown by Theodore Wheeler (Academy Editions)

Set in Omaha in the early 1900s, the mob mentality of the race riots in the story carry you along until the end. You can practically feel the grime on your face, smell the sweat from hours in the factories.

4. Witchita Stories by Troy James Weaver (Future Tense Books)

The first thing I thought while reading this book was that it’s a Midwestern Project Mayhem and I stand by that. Weaver paints the malaise that plagues the middle of the country with a sable-haired brush.

5. Fallen Land by Taylor Brown (St. Martin’s Press)

Brown’s debut novel doesn’t come out until January, but you’ll want to get your hands on it ASAP. Set against the backdrop of the Civil War, this book haunted me long after I set it down.

Some of my other favorites from 2015:

Scrapper by Matt Bell

Where All Light Tends To Go by David Joy

The New York Stories by Ben Tanzer

Domino Diaries by Brin Jonathan Butler

Small Batch, edited by Leigh Ann Hornfeldt and Teneice Durrant

__

Reviewed by Nick Sweeney

Above all else, and perhaps not even intentionally, Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya is the modern social novel. It is a conflict of faith versus science, fear versus logic, and the push and pull of family. In many unfortunate ways, it is timely. Are we even capable of having decent conversations anymore? Are all issues now set to one extreme or the other? Charmed Particles doesn’t assume much. It doesn’t grandstand, it doesn’t politicize. It doesn’t scream one way or the other. Charmed Particles is that one relative at Thanksgiving who just keeps eating while everyone else fights about the recent election. It’s cool guys, keep using fear instead of logic, I’m going to eat the rest of the sweet potatoes.

When I say social novel, I really mean a deep and detailed exploration of an argument. It’s incredibly easy to cast wide nets on how people act and create caricatures of those emotions. It’s easy to create a Trump-like character. It’s rather difficult to make a character who is by all means “good” in the moral sense, but still on the wrong side of an argument or debate. We’ve moved away from this frame of thinking substantially. Kolaya reminds us why we should come back. She writes effortlessly and she is at her very best when the tension is at its most extreme. 

The central column of the novel revolves around the expansion of the National Accelerator Research Laboratory in the small town of Nicolet, Illinois, specifically, the questionable plan of adding a new superconducting supercollider to the town. The debate of adding this super collider to the town takes the form in two distinctly different families. On one side is the Mital family: Abhijat Mital; the scientist, Meena; his inquisitive daughter with high expectations, and Sarala; his wife who is trying to overcome the “stranger in a strange land” mindset. On the other is the Winchesters: Randolph; the adventurer in search of the last pieces of history, Rose; his bookish wife, and Lily; their intelligent and self-motivating daughter.  Together, these two families must find ways to overcome their own insecurities, their own personal Everests, and help those around them. They must save the town, if only in their own ways.

Logic, one would think, would win out the day, but it is fear that rides into the sunset. Fear that we, the readers of today, have come to know all too well. Like all good conflicts, there are two factions—the scientists who understand that this expansion is key to their livelihood and survival in this town and the locals who fear having it under their own backyards, unware of the science behind such an endeavor. Kolaya, again, works wonders with separating these two sides. The novel has two incredible beginnings, one of the Mital family and one of the Winchester. Both are written in ways that reflect their characters. The Mital sections seem heavy and slow. It is prose written to absorb every physical detail:

Abhijat Mital accepted the position at the National Accelerator Research Lab with great pride. The offer itself was the realization of his greatest dream, now made concrete by the desk he would sit behind, the nameplate on his door, the drive every morning through the gates, where he would present his pass to the security guard who would, after a matter of weeks, begin to wave him through, recognizing Abhijat as one among the parade of scientists he’d been waving through those gates for years, and on that day, Abhijat would feel, at last, like he belonged.

It is nearly the opposite, at least initially, in the Winchester sections: “Randolph liked Rose to travel with him. In her safari khakis she looked like Katharine Hepburn, her long chestnut hair wound into a loose bun, pith helmet shading her pale pink skin, kerchief knotted loosely around her neck.” There is a time for imagination and a time for facts. Immediately, these two families become somewhat necessary foils to each other. There is the idealistic and romantic side of the coin, and the logical and pragmatic side. Both have their causes of concern in the eyes of our main characters and in the end, both are needed for the novel to close.

When Meena and Lily meet, they immediately click. They are the brightest and most intuitive of their classmates, there is a genuine sense of exploration of knowledge, a bond of intellect found joyfully in one’s youth. Their parents are four adults pulling in four different directions: Randolph Winchester is a professional adventurer although he “had begun to wonder if he was searching for a kind of untouched culture that no longer actually existed”, his wife Rose who was an admirer of John F. Kennedy, not because of the tragedy that befell him but because of the loss of a great political career, Abhijat Mital and his exploration of physics and the accomplishments he needs to stay above water, and his wife Sarana who constantly and consistently is in search of the American dream. Abhijat and Rose eventually take up the sides; Rose adamantly against it to prop up a potential political career, Abhijant trying to defend his livelihood and place in the town of Nicolete.

The concern is real for both fronts—if the collider is in town, it adds value to the town and to the scientists but (and there is always a but) people will fear what they don’t understand and not want it in running through their property. The reader must be reminded that all of this takes place in the last years of the Cold War, in the years of government skepticism, of not believing everything you are told. It’s a fair thought, one way or the other and Kolaya is surgical in making this a well-developed conflict.   It comes down to, as Meena concludes, “in each of the articles and editorials on the collider she read, that the people on either side of the issue simply didn’t know how to talk to one another.” This is key, not only for the novel, but for our society itself. Kolaya then adds: “And no matter how unfounded we think their concerns are, the most important thing to remember is that they believe them to be true. All we can do is try our best to educate them and to allay those fears.” We must remember the power of belief and what happens when they collide.

The last several years have included some historic change, for some it has been a long time coming, for others it’s not the future they want to be part of. Kolaya didn’t write for the contemporary issues and hot takes, she transcends it, late in the novel even going as far as advising the following: “Progress always involves risk. We cannot stand in opposition to progress.” Charmed Particles makes you wonder what side of progress you are on and question the reasoning of both sides. It’s not a novel with an agenda in mind, it’s an experiment of fear meeting logic and the resulting crash of those two mindsets. It’s a novel of family, of reaching for dreams, of ideas and identity. It is a novel closer to home than one would like to admit. The Mitals and Winchesters are families we know and love, families we can easily identify with. They will make you wonder, make you reflect—as great characters in even greater novels surely do.

Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya

Dzanc Books, November 2015

Paperback: 272 pages, $15.95

__

Chrissy Kolaya’s poems and short fiction have appeared in anthologies by Norton, Milkweed Editions, the 50th Anniversary Best of Crazyhorse collection, and in a number of literary journals. In support for her work, Kolaya has received grants and awards from the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, the Jerome Foundation, the Loft Literary Center, and the Minnesota State Arts Board, among others. She’s lived in New York, California, Indiana, Illinois, and Alabama, and now lives and teaches writing in Minnesota, where she’s one of the co-founders of the Prairie Gate Literary Festival. She’s the author of a book of poems, Any Anxious Body.

Ben Hoffman’s story “Toeheads” appears in Issue 22.2

Where are you from and where are you now? How does (or doesn’t) place influence your work?

I’m from central Pennsylvania, and recently moved from Madison, Wisconsin to Oakland, California, where I’ve been promised there will be no winter. I have to admit that place carries less importance in my work than it seems to in most fiction—in part, I suspect, because writing physical description of setting is not one of my strong suits as a writer. So place in my fiction is really the people who live in the place; emotional geography is more important than physical geography.

What’s your number one rule of writing?

Listen to Beach House while writing. Just kidding! Sort of. How about: you ought to be extremely generous with your own work early on, then become more merciless toward it the better it gets, the closer you are to finished, whatever finished possibly means. But also the true number one rule is to do whatever works best for you. So that’s three number one rules of writing, for those counting at home.

What is strangest about your writing process?

Perhaps that I write most of my first drafts by hand, which owes less to any romantic notions of pen and paper and more to my lack of focus and forward progress when I use a computer. I don’t just mean INTERNET! though of course there’s that, too. Microsoft Word encourages me to tinker with what I’ve already written, which is important and will come later, but prevents me from ever finishing a story if I move to that stage too soon. Something about writing a bad first draft by hand just feels logical to me. The messiness of the form and the messiness of developing story-like thing go hand in hand: scrawling, crossing out, jotting unreadable notes in the margins that I won’t be able to make out later.

Describe the lifespan of this piece: how did it start, how was it revised, how drastically did it change? What was the most difficult part of writing it?

It began with a wild idea—a girl who grows heads of people she knows on her toes—though where that came from, who can say? Quite possibly I was influenced by Ramona Ausubel’s wonderful A Guide to Being Born, which contains a story in which people grow a new arm whenever they fall in love. I wrote a partial draft of “Toeheads” in the summer of 2014, finished the draft in October, then revised off and on into the new year (it took me awhile to figure out the ending). The most difficult parts of writing this were giving myself permission to be ridiculous or outlandish, and also finding the proper perspective from which the narrator could both make fun of the characters while also transmit them to the reader in a way that might evoke pity or empathy.

How does (or doesn’t) this piece fit in with your larger body of work?

On the one hand, “Toeheads” is drastically different from so much of my work, more playful and fable-esque, with a more removed narrator. On the other hand, it has to do with the consequences of male desire, which fits thematically, for lack of better word, with much of my other work. You asked a smart question about that below so we’ll talk about it some more there!

This piece begs us to consider, among many other things, the way that society reacts to non-normal bodies and the spectacle of deformity (with the cheerleader as object of “the gaze”). How did these ideas feed into the writing of the story?

Yes, “gaze” is important with my work, though to me it’s less about societal reaction to a non-normal body, and more about the omnipresence of the male gaze. The thing about this story is that the male gaze has actually been there all along, but because the object of the gaze had previously been this “hot” cheerleader, this sort of heteronormative ideal, the jock in the story isn’t even aware of his own gaze. It’s baked into the cake for him. It’s only when the object changes, warps into something he can’t quite comprehend—that’s what makes the gaze so apparent. And I’m not sure, even then, that he’s fully aware. He’s trying to get there. As are we all.

What’s your procrastination of choice?

Is Twitter even a choice at this point? I’d say our two dogs. They do a mean “sad dog commercial” face whenever I’m just settling in at the desk. For years I’ve been tempted to start a Dogs of Writers Tumblr, where writers submit photos of their dogs slouched miserable and bored under writing chairs and desks. The curator (me?) would post with captions like: [dog’s name] had to temporarily suffer so that [link to writer’s story or book] could be written; shortly after this photo, [dog and writer] went on a tennis ball bender. I don’t know; possibly this already exists.

__

Joel Hans's flash fiction piece “Ochre Unicorn” appears in Issue 22.2.

Where are you from and where are you now? How does (or doesn’t) place influence your work?

I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and spent 27 years there before moving to Tucson, Arizona for my MFA, and now that I’ve bought a house in the Sonoran Desert, I’m here to stay for a while, happily hiding from those desolate upper Midwest winters. Both places figure in my work, I think, but in wildly different ways: my characters tend to be amalgamations of the Midwest characteristics I love (wholesomeness, kindness to the point of being overwrought, complacency), whereas I find it difficult to place work anywhere but the desert now. The Sonoran Deserts, with its wild-armed saguaro and torrential monsoons, is dramatic wherever you look—most other settings now feel lacking in deadly features and rampant dynamism.

What’s your number one rule of writing?

Probably best to deduce my current number one rule based on what I used to say, and don't any more. I used to say, “Write every day,” but I've come to find that's not necessarily always productive—there's a difference between writing every day productively and uselessly trying to fulfill a word count. I buy, less and less, the idea that getting something on the page is always better than not. I used to say, “Don’t worry about writing what you know,” but then I realized that I really don’t like research, unless it’s about the necropsies of animals, so worrying is a good backup plan. I used to say, “See something through to the end,” but then I ditched the novel I was working on for 5 years because that blindness kept me from seeing that it was, for the most part, kind of bad. Now, I like the feeling of being easily distracted, not looking further past my nose. If something new interests me, I won’t hesitate to follow it. So maybe that’s it: let yourself be distracted (creatively).

Also, it's really tough to write out “number one” when years of editing to AP style makes me want to write “No. 1.”

What is strangest about your writing process?

How imitation-heavy it can be, maybe? At least two of the stories I’m most happy with—one published and one currently out in submission-land—are pretty direct imitations of another writer’s work. Whenever I have time, I try to read what my contemporaries (i.e. non-famous people 25-35) are publishing, whether that’s in fancy print magazines or fledgling online ones, and it’s really easy for me to fall in love with something. The published one is an imitation of the form in Caitlin McGuire’s story, “The Radium Girl’s Undark,” published in Ninth Letter—I loved that story so desperately and wanted to write something that felt like it could be its sibling: a good dose of weirdness but with a lot heart.

Describe the lifespan of this piece: how did it start, how was it revised, how drastically did it change? What was the most difficult part of writing it?

This piece had an unnaturally short lifespan, although part of that is due to its brevity—I went through a period in which I was writing one of these “endling” pieces a day (an endling being the last surviving member of a given species), and compiling them into a chapbook. I think I waited a few weeks after writing this piece before circling back and editing it, but I was surprisingly happy with how it turned out, which is rare, especially in such a short narrative. The language was most difficult, certainly, and was (and is) part of my still-flailing progression into poetic tendencies—I struggled a lot with sound, and condensing, trying to fit as much narrative and image into as small a space as possible. Balancing a feeling of being standalone, while also fitting into my collection of endling stories, proved difficult as well—it’s too easy to hinge a short piece on the story inherent in its siblings, instead of allowing it to exist on its own.

How does (or doesn’t) this piece fit in with your larger body of work?

This piece was part of a larger experiment, in terms of form, that I started on about a year ago, and it’s hard to say now whether it was always part of my larger body of work, or if I expanded that body to include this kind of writing, and the themes it tries to convey. “Ochre Unicorn” is part of a chapbook-length work on the extinctions of various creatures, both real and imaginary, that I’m now hoping to incorporate into a larger collection on extinction in broader terms—the extinction of light, or color, or language, or stars. I became fascinated with the idea of an “endling”—the last of a particular species of creature—and I wanted to not only examine the psychology of a creature/being in that position, but also the ramifications for larger societies, cultures, or environmental habitats. Animals, of course, have and will probably always figure heavily in my work, both in terms of their own psychologies, and their relationships with other animals, like us silly humans.

The ochre unicorn experiences “a litany of firsts” as a mother, which departs from the traditional myth of the unicorn as solitary. Was the ochre unicorn always a mother in your mind? How did this idea come about?

I don't know much about the traditional myth—I tend to write wildly about things I don't fully comprehend—so for me, it's a matter of biology: every species must have some means of propagation. Especially if there’s still virgins running around the forest as lures for ochre unicorns. I'm not curious in that method, whether a unicorn births like a horse or whether its children simply appear into existence one morning, but I am curious about the interiority of a thing that is pursued, that is desired dead, and how that translates to both its instincts and its emotions, particularly when there’s children in the picture.

To me, this ochre unicorn was always a mother, and always will be—the events of this story don’t really change that truth. Her having a child is a fundamental element of her character, as it seems to become for many who have a child. Something I'm really interested in is the border between archetype and individual—I want this ochre unicorn to feel like an individual (as in this is her story, not another unicorn’s), but also representative for the population. That is the role of the endling, the last of a species: it is the one by which a whole identity is remembered. Her tragedy is her own, but it’s symbolic of that extinction.

I go back and forth on animal fables, whether I enjoy them or not, whether I think they’re doing the right kind of work: of course I’m charmed by anthropomorphized animals, but those stories tend to flatten an animal’s interiority and necessarily give them concerns similar to human concerns. I want to illuminate what I see as more universal concerns of living things—making this ochre unicorn a mother is a move in that direction, I hope, to readers—not to humanize her but to animalize them.

What’s your procrastination of choice?

Video games are an obvious choice for me—for those who know I also help run Cartridge Lit, a journal of literature inspired by video games, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. I was actually talking to a few friends about forcing each other to watch films that are creative/emotional touchstones for us, films that we took something out of and carried with us, but one of them pointed out that in my case, video games would probably be the better option. I want everyone to play a game like Chrono Trigger or Earthbound, both of which have wildly influenced my creativity—I think a discerning eye could find, in “Ochre Unicorn” and certainly in other pieces of the series, a little Earthbound inspiration. My hope is that someday the industry finds the right balance between literary merit and gameplay that appeals to non-gamers, so that others can share in these experiences. It’s always such a bummer that I can’t just ask someone to play a game like one would ask someone to watch a movie, or even read a book. I also really like Rocket League. Because you can’t go wrong with rocket-powered cars playing soccer.

__

Megan Kerns’s essay “This Is East Tennessee Punk Rock,” a finalist in our 2015 Inaugural Nonfiction Contest, appears in Issue 22.2.

Where are you from and where are you now? How does (or doesn’t) place influence your work?

My mother grew up in east Tennessee, and that's the place my sisters and I have always claimed as home, even though my family moved around a lot. I grew up in many small towns throughout the Southeast (Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee), and eventually graduated from high school in Logan County, Ohio, which is a very rural farming community. I went back to Appalachia for college because the pull of that world is so strong. I missed my family, and the cadence of the voices there; the sight of the purple mountains along the horizon at dusk, the way they look close enough to touch. I wanted to say y’all again without irony. Everything that I write is influenced by the spaces I've lived–mostly places on the periphery, small towns and wild counties that are often beautiful but isolating. I'm proud to be from these rural spaces. I have no patience for people who turn their noses up at “flyover states,” or the South in general. You don't have to move to New York City or San Francisco to become a writer, to make cool art. Creative people are everywhere. I currently live in Columbus, Ohio, where I am a senior lecturer in the English Department at The Ohio State University, but who knows where I'll end up. My husband wants to move out West, which sounds like an adventure.  If we ever move back to the South, I'd really love to live in Savannah. Or Asheville.

What’s your number one rule of writing?

Revise everything. I have found it is most helpful to leave a piece alone for a little while (days, weeks, months), and then revisit it when I can think a little more clearly about what I'm trying to do.  

What is strangest about your writing process?

I wish that I could say something cool here, like “I can only do serious work if I'm wearing my lucky red boots,” but really my process is pretty boring. I force myself to write a shaky first draft, and then I start the long process of revision.

Describe the lifespan of this piece: how did it start, how was it revised, how drastically did it change? What was the most difficult part of writing it?     

I started writing this piece in September 2011, and I've been revising it ever since. It's the piece that got me into grad school, and it was the first essay that I turned into Lee Martin's nonfiction workshop in autumn 2012. I can't even tell you how many times this essay has been revised–more than twenty, possibly dozens more. The beginning and the ending were the most difficult. As the editors at Yemassee know, I couldn't resist tweaking the beginning one last time before I let it go. My friend Elizabeth once told me that “Everything is a draft, until it gets accepted for publication.” I've realized since that constant revision has almost become a compulsion.

How does (or doesn’t) this piece fit in with your larger body of work?

Well, there are no ghosts or mysterious creatures in this essay, which is unusual for me. My nonfiction thesis included essays about the Devil, Bigfoot, the Mothman creature of West Virginia, ghosts, and psychics, as well as larger questions that revolve around what we can or cannot know through belief systems, through scientific research. If there is one overarching theme to my work, it is: feeling lost in the world, and searching for answers.

Membership in a punk rock band is framed as something of a transformational experience in your essay. What it is about punk in particular that allows for this transformation or moment of enlightenment, do you think? The release of raw energy and rage? The opportunity to shift identity in punk “costume”?

I think my experience might be unique, because the local musicians in East Tennessee were just so welcoming. I don't know if other punk scenes would have allowed me, an outsider, to just show up and start singing. I do think that punk as a movement is supposed to be more open and accepting, but I bet that it isn't always so. Punk was exciting because it was a totally new art form for me–but more importantly, it also meant that I could assume some role of power. As a young woman in a small Southern town, I often felt small and powerless, even in everyday interactions.  

Years later, I watched a Ted Talk with the social scientist Amy Cuddy called “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are,” and I just realized, Oh. Cuddy found that our bodies can influence our minds, and vice versa. She asked lab subjects to assume “high-power” poses for two minutes, which involves nonverbal cues like putting your hands on your hips, taking up space, etc.  She found that just two minutes in a high-power pose allowed subjects to feel more confident, and deal with stress better. I assumed high-power poses on stage by accident! I was just trying on the role, which is exactly what Cuddy says allows us to change the way we think about ourselves. For years, I have wondered why I felt transformed by this dalliance with punk, and I really think Cuddy's research provides the best explanation. She says in the Ted Talk,“Fake it till you make it–even if you're terrified, even if you're paralyzed, until it occurs to you, Oh my gosh, I'm actually doing it!” That's what being onstage felt like, and it's a useful feeling for me to remember, especially in stressful situations.

What’s your procrastination of choice?

Oh, Facebook. It's the devil I love.*

 *Apologies to Neko Case for stealing that line. I'm pretty sure that her song “Hold On, Hold On” is not about Facebook. But it could be.

__

Reviewed by Kurt Hoberg

Alejandro Zambra has only recently received significant attention from the greater literary scene, and it’s not without reason. His most recent collection, My Documents, was named on the shortlist for the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. This attention is encouraging, especially given that it was only near the end of his career that fellow Chilean, Roberto Bolaño, earned the same treatment: interviews, New Yorker features, various story publications, and translated collections. To compare the two is a natural and naturally unfair comparison; most of us don’t have a rolodex of Chilean writers in our heads.

Like Bolaño, though, nationality plays no small role for Zambra. In this collection, all but one story (“The Most Chilean Man in the World”) takes place in Santiago. This represents a challenge, one that Zambra has remarked about; he’s sometimes surprised his work has gotten any attention here in the USA. After all, the material derives from much of his own experience growing up in Santiago. What does it mean if you can’t imagine the Maipu Votive Temple, or even know the socio-economic differences between the neighborhoods of Maipu and Las Condes, for example? Very little, actually. To know that Chile suffered under the Pinochet dictatorship for years is enough. As is the case for most Chileans, that fact is not something that cannot easily be forgotten.

A virtue of Zambra’s storytelling is how the unfailingly candid narration renders accessibility a non-issue. No better example of this is the title story, in which the narrator tries to compile the formative moments of his life in Santiago. The first scene describes his father at work, tinkering with technology, and his mother at home, typing. The vignette concludes with one of the most delightful lines in the collection, weird and perfectly understood, “Maybe I can say it like this: my father was a computer and my mother was a typewriter.” What follows is kite-fighting, homosexual experimentation, a brief phase of religious curiosity—albeit out of boredom—followed by deeper stirrings. There are no codes, no touchstones you need (though if you’ve never listened to Los Prisoneros, it’d behoove you to do so).

Most admirable are the subtle chances these stories are taking. In “National Institute,” the first section features a story titled “34.” After the narrator passes to the next grade after 34 fails, the boy never returns in the story. Instead, what occurs next is a list of events the narrator recalls from his years at school, all beginning, “I remember…”.

“Memories of a Personal Computer” contains scenes of the protagonist, a writer, hugging his first desktop but also raping his girlfriend after numerous fights. The rise and fall of this relationship happens in view of the screen, which finds an unexpected home. In the final story, “Artist’s Rendition,” a pulp writer contorts the memory of a girl he grew up, a girl who was sexually abused, to fit the exigencies of a story assignment he’s given. The reoccurrence of male writer protagonists—a risk in itself, more often than not complicates the relation between narrator and author, and draws the reader further under the surface of what’s happening in these stories.

It also frees Zambra to reveal the artifice of story-telling, to call us out on our expectations of what should happen in fiction. The narrator in “Camilo,” for example, actually exposes our nagging instinct to question certain emotional responses and endings—if they’re earned—and calls us out for it. From the opening words, “I’m Camilo!” we see a teenager eager to be around other males, and soon we understand why: Camilo’s father was exiled. Throughout the story, Camilo acts as an older brother to the narrator, trying to shock him from his shyness, telling him that “if [he] liked guys it was all right.” The more winning Camilo appears, the more we can’t help but regard Big Camilo, his father, as something of a heel, a deadbeat. Finally, twenty-two years and an unfortunate turn of events later, the narrator has to confront Big Camilo and the possibility that somehow this man isn’t a deadbeat.

Certainly, with the reoccurrence of male writer protagonists, often disaffected, a few stories fall flat. The elements that make the title story and “Memories of a Personal Computer” rewarding do not coalesce in the same way for “Thank You,” the shortest in the collection about a surprisingly respectful mugging. This may have something to do with Zambra’s style. He rarely stays in scene for long but prefers swift simplicity, and this has a greater effect when the vignettes or sparing details accrete throughout months or years in an individual story, which is a characteristic shared by the collection’s best. Nonetheless, My Documents is good and odd and it knows it.  

My Documents by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell)

McSweeney’s, April 2015

Paperback: 200 pages, $15.00

__

Sierra Jacob’s poem “Salt Water” appears in Issue 22.2

Where are you from and where are you now?

I was born and raised in Ha`iku, Hawai`i. Currently, I am an MFA candidate at the University of Montana in Missoula.

Which writer(s) do you admire most and why?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always admired the work of N. Scott Momaday. His text “The Way to Rainy Mountain” is a piece of writing I keep returning to. He creates space for oral tradition, historic documentation, and personal narrative to exist simultaneously. I believe that writing, in conversation with itself and with history, is essential. Natasha Trethewey, another poet I have a huge amount of respect for, similarly writes around the interplay of race, memory, and history. By tracking the lineage of an idea, belief, body, etc., poetry can navigate the layers of memory and overlapping of experience.  More recently, I started studying the poetry of William Carlos Williams. The precision of his distilled images and the narrative work within his enjambments, have given me renewed appreciation for a structured line—how the line conducts energy and builds momentum.

What’s the most valuable piece of advice you’ve heard about writing?

Whenever I seek out my professor, Joanna Klink, to remedy my next poetry dilemma, she always tells me to keep writing. If there is nothing left to write about, start paying attention to the world and record what you see. To paraphrase Klink, “Write past what is comfortable and if you are lucky you will find yourself in an unfamiliar, quixotic place.” In the end, you will still be writing.

What do you think is the most unique part of your writing process?

I think this poem speaks towards the most unique part of my writing process. Before I write a poem, I spend a lot of time outside, cataloging the world—call it image gathering. I’ll record the movement of weather over a landscape, frequent museums, browse Wikipedia pages for specific language, etc. Only after gathering do I see which fragments are naturally in conversation with one another and begin to weave a narrative between self, experience, and place.

I love that “Salt Water” describes the speaker’s journey, what I read specifically as the transition from girlhood to womanhood, as an act of gathering. I’m interested in what more you could say about how the speaker is changed and shaped by the pieces of the world she takes into her hands in this poem.

First, I want to acknowledge that the form, repetition, and, I believe, momentum of this poem was strongly influenced by CD Wright’s poem “In Gardening.” I found her model successfully spoke towards the ritual of experience.  

In “Salt Water” the speaker begins in the realm of ‘the self’. She questions the relationship between herself and the world: “I forgot to let edges be edges / I cleaved myself out of the mountain.” My speaker begins in the cerebral space of self-identification. Once she begins gathering physical things—macadamia nut shells, lava rock, deer bones— a transformation is triggered. By naming the things that make up the place she inhabits, she inevitably begins to name herself. It is the gathering of self, place, and ancestry that allows the transition into womanhood: “I watched them yawning out like a new island only in gathering did I stack the dirt within myself and name it.”

__

Dana Diehl’s story “Going Mean” appears in Issue 22.2.

Where are you from and where are you now? How does (or doesn’t) place influence your work?

I grew up in a forested, hilly, river-cut part of Pennsylvania. Now I live in Tucson, where scorpions hide under my bookshelves and it mostly only rains during monsoon season and the sun is blinding and shopping centers block out the horizon.

The stories I wrote in Pennsylvania had a quieter feel than the ones I’m writing now. In Pennsylvania, I would write wrapped in blankets, with cold fingers. Or I’d write with rain on the windows, my socks damp from walking through puddles to class. Everything felt old, and the weather and thick woods kept the world close. During that time, I think I was prioritizing beauty and smallness in my writing.

I like to think that Arizona has brought an edge and weirdness to my stories. The desert is still very strange and dangerous to me. There are huge cities, but between the cities are wide, empty pieces of cactus-ed land that could contain (it feels to me) anything. The sun, the plants, the animals hidden under stones seem to want to hurt me, and that throws me off balance, because prior to moving to Arizona I felt very in harmony with nature. I trusted it, and I trusted myself in it. I think that living in a place that I both love and have a deep distrust for throws complications into my writing and makes it more ambitious. I have this theory that our best subjects are ones that we both love and hate. Maybe I could never be my best writer-self in Pennsylvania, because I have too much love for it.

What’s your number one rule of writing?

Don’t bore yourself.

What is strangest about your writing process?

I don’t think this is unique to me, but I write everything out of order. I start with a skeleton of ideas and lines, and then I go back and add the flesh. I’ll write what I feel like writing in the moment, instead of what comes next. I’m even doing it right now as I answer these interview questions (guess which question I started with!).

Describe the lifespan of this piece: how did it start, how was it revised, how drastically did it change? What was the most difficult part of writing it?

The part that was most difficult to write was the protagonist’s betrayal. I wasn’t sure how much of it to put in the story, or when I should clue the reader in. I also didn’t know to what extent I wanted her to cheat. It felt like a necessary part of the story, but I could never get her actions to correspond with how I wanted her and Philip to feel once they reached Germany.

I’ve been writing this story for a long time, and it’s changed a lot since the first draft. “Going Mean” was inspired by a bad Animal Planet show I can’t remember the name of. One of the episodes was about this man who lived alone in an apartment with his pet baby Komodo dragons. I think he was a bodybuilder. Or maybe a personal trainer. For some reason, this detail still feels relevant. As anyone watching the show could have predicted, his dragons eventually grew up, developed a taste for human, and attacked him in the night. This was all reenacted in shadowy slow motion.

Instead of being grossed out or horrified, I was fascinated. I wanted to know what would drive someone to live with an animal known for its size, strength, and venomous saliva. I wanted to know what it felt like to cohabitate with an animal that could kill you.

The first draft of this story was very short and set in America. I think I was going for something quirky and clever, because that’s what I’d been reading a lot of in online literary journals. Quirky and clever can be a great mode for some people, but it doesn’t work for me. I returned to the story months later for a grad school workshop. I added some flesh. I realized the story was less about the weirdness of the dragons and more about how the protagonist projected her life onto them. I realized that it should be set in a place that made her feel more animal and less capable of communicating through language. It became more like the version you can read now in Yemassee.

How does (or doesn’t) this piece fit in with your larger body of work?

This story feels very representative of the writing I’ve been doing over the past couple years. It has all of my writerly obsessions: 1) weird animals that act as a metaphor for a troubled relationship, 2) science clashing with folklore, 3) characters running away, 4) a woman who wants to know what it means to be wild, 5) a setting I’ve never been to but would really, really love to visit.

My short story collection is actually tentatively titled “Going Mean” after this story.

Why Komodo dragons?

Komodo dragons are so unsettling. They are too large. They have their own island. They are wrapped in superstition and half-true myths.

What’s your procrastination of choice?

I watch bad reality TV shows (I recommend Ghost Adventures, Tiny House Hunters, and Long Island Medium) and convince myself it’s “research.”

__

Gail Langstroth’s poems “Barranco, Peru” & “A Dirty Madridman Faced Me” appear in Issue 22.2.

Where are you from and where are you now?

One way to answer this question is with the following: Born in Ardmore, Oklahoma raised under the Big Skies of Montana . . . but my life really began as I stepped out of the night train from Paris to Madrid in Valladolid, Spain. I was 16. My host mother, a large Spanish woman, greeted me with a warm embrace (I can still feel it). “Hija mía, como te quiero.” (“My daughter, how I love you.”) After that summer I returned to Montana to finish High School. After graduating I entered Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut.

In my sophomore year America did not feel like home anymore: the Vietnam War; the drug scene; the tragic death of my only brother. I returned to Europe. For 38 years England, Germany, Rumania, and Spain were my home. I became a professional Eurythmist. This brought decades filled with training, teaching and world-wide performing.  

This is a way to describe some of the outer steps, which of course, upon looking at them, manifest the inner ones. I will now look at the question from another perspective.

Where do I come from, what is my stream? Where am I now? With caution I dare to call myself a mystic. Between the active preparation and rehearsing for lectures, teaching and performance, I need the balance of an inner practice. I need to attend to an inner listening. For over 20 years now the life and work of two artists have been a focal point of my attention: the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich, (1879-1935) and the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591).

Why, I ask myself, did Malevich leave images from the sense-perceptible world and condense his expression into a black square, a black cross or a black circle – all on a white canvas? How was Saint John of the Cross, after imprisonment in a Toledo tower for nine months, able to translate his experience into language?

En una noche oscura, in a dark night . . .

All this lead to the premiere of my last multilingual performance piece:

TIERRADENTRO / TURFINFINITE, May, 2015, Madrid.

From this attempt to describe my inside where . . . I fast forward. One year ago I felt the need to pull my gypsy self in, to put the whole of my library, my costumes, files, diaries, cases, and documents under one roof. I purchased a home in Pittsburgh, PA. Here I combine my preparation for international performing and teaching with my writing. As an active member of Carlow University’s Mad Women in the Attic, I am in exchange with some of our 200-plus members. These gutsy buddies help me bring my innerings down to earth. The Mad Women are my colleagues and teachers now. Pittsburgh could be renamed, Poetsburgh. That’s why I’m here.

Which writer(s) do you admire most and why?

PAUL CELAN

Without compromise he chisels sound into intimate cosmic hammers. He helps me hear silent thunder.

JEAN VALENTINE

She drops me into poem-space. Knowing, and at the same time, not knowing, where I am, I inevitably come out feeling that my own shaking has been affirmed with a transparent, calming, Yes.

YONA HARVEY

She sings. She sings.

LUCILLE CLIFTON

“My body opens into brothers,” (“adam and eve”). I read Lucille, I perform Lucille, I can simply be in mystery. How she takes the depths of The Good Book and talks it, writes it, shapes it into street-savvy asphalt/concrete: POEM. I am humbled by her courage and style.

EDWIN HONIG

Through his steadfastness in lyric fantasy he copes with discovery.

JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ

I honor his ability to Withstand, Holdout, Remain Attentive.

He entendido rosa el silencio y la soledad,

viví el secreto y la palabra: ¿Qué me falta?

Rose, I have understood silence and solitude.

I have experienced secret and word.

What is missing?

 JAN BEATTY

Her gut, her heart, her honesty. She practices what she teaches: “Access it! Go there!” I don’t know if she would appreciate me calling her a Promethean Sisyphus, but that’s an image that comes. She cares for the flame in rock and the flame in each of us when we gather to work.

CARLOS BOUSONO, MARTIN ADAN, XAVIER VILLARUTIA,

To name a few more Spanish voices. Each dared, dares, stepped into abyss “in order to live more, para vivir más. If I wrote this it means that first I died, si lo escribí fue que primero he muerto.” “Comentario Final,” Carlos Bousoño.

And, I cannot end without naming

MARINA TSVETAEVA

And we think we have it tough. Tsvetaeva is proof: despite tremendous odds . . . attempting to touch word space is the only way to survive. With Gestapo Death pounding at her Hope, she wrote, she wrote. I admire her “woman, thin, / lost—as any creature” who knew . . . “the spirit is my beloved.” Dark Elderberry Branch, a Reading by Llya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine.

What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve heard about writing?

Mess it up. Get dirty. Trust what language can do. You don’t have to be true to what happened. You have to be true to the poem. While acting as Poet Laureate of New Jersey, Gerald Stern gave a commencement address at Princeton. He started with this line: “All poets are liars.”

What do you think is the most unique part of your writing process?

I don’t know if the following is the most unique part of my writing process, but it is something that proves to be true over and over again.

I recognize a tendency: there is often a bunch of emotional foam which accompanies the original desire to get the words out and down. Like a rush. I must not be seduced; rather, I must allow time for the bubbles to pop, for the wave’s foam to sink into sand. Only then can the original desire have a chance to enter a deeper place of alchemical change. Once the stage of forgetting, settling, rewriting and editing has occurred . . . THEN, maybe, maybe then . . . SURPRISE! Something else takes over. Language itself begins to sprout? At this stage there is often NOTHING left from the first draft. How, and what, happened?

What are your thoughts about using a poem as a place to reexamine the world in light of one’s personal experience, and vice versa?

If we look at a few of the other arts: painting, for example. It seems that the feeling realm of the human being is the substance out or which an experience is colored and shaped. In architecture I have an experience of the very building and structure of my physical body. Columns and beams support the roof. When I stand upright I am my column.

When we come to poetry . . . what do we have? Words and sounds, and how words and sounds are placed, ordered, arranged, juxtaposed. The poet recognizes how the WORD is a unique substance. It pertains to his or her identity, to humanness.  

That being the case, I perceive a subtle and divine potential. Through poetry we can be closest our own mystery. With this art we can try to build a bridge to the world and self. All at the same time, yes, the poem is a place to examine the world and meet one’s self.     

__

We’re excited to announce that submissions for our 2016 Yemassee Writing Prizes are now open!

The 2016 Yemassee Fiction Contest will be judged by Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn, Gold Fame Citrus). $15 to enter ($17 with subscription). $1,000 prize.

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Glimmer Train, Best of the West, Best of the Southwest, The New York Times and many others.

Her collection of short stories, Battleborn, won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Her latest book is Gold Fame Citrus, a novel. 

A Guggenheim Fellow, and one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35," Claire is on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.

The 2016 Yemassee Poetry Contest will be judged by Catie Rosemurgy (The Stranger Manual). $15 to enter ($17 with subscription). $1,000 prize.

Catie Rosemurgy's most recent poetry collection, The Stranger Manual, was published by Graywolf Press. Her work has appeared in such places as The American Poetry Review, The Boston Review, and Better. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at The College of New Jersey.

The 2016 Yemassee Nonfiction Contest will be judged by Matthew Gavin Frank (Preparing the Ghost, The Mad Feast). $10 to enter ($12 with subscription). $500 prize.

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and 2 chapbooks. He teaches at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he tempered his gin with two droplets (per 750ml) of tincture of odiferous whitefish liver. For health.

In episode ten, your hosts Justin Brouckaert and Chris Koslowski welcome University of South Carolina MFA candidate Sam Slaughter, author of the forthcoming books God in Neon (Lucky Bastard Press) and Dogs (Double Life Press) for a very special Halloween episode in which we review one of R.L. Stine's original Goosebumps books, Monster Blood. We also interview Sam about the being Reviews Editor at Atticus Review and Yemassee, and talk generally about what we look for in a good book review. Coming to you on All Hallows Eve amid the mournful locomotive cries of Columbia, South Carolina, it's the Yemassee Podcast. 

Ghoulish avian squawking at: @YemasseeJournal | @JJBrouckaert | @kozlowrazor | @slaughterwrites  

Marlin M. Jenkins’s flash fiction piece “We Never Say What We Mean” appears in Issue 22.2

Where are you from and where are you now? How does (or doesn’t) place influence your work?

I grew up in Detroit, and I just moved to Ann Arbor.

Place is usually a huge part of my work, but “We Never Say What We Mean” has, I think, far less tie to place compared to most of my writing. The primary setting of the stairs and the landing is loosely based on the stairs in the house I grew up in, and the family dynamic is a mixture of a little bit of my own and a friend’s family who also lived in Detroit, but place wasn’t a primary/direct influence on this story as I was writing it.

What’s your number one rule of writing?

Let the writing become its own living thing. Intent and direction and revision are all essential, sure, but I think there has to be freedom in drafting and the ability to look at your own work for what it is instead of just what you want it to be. It’s like the Chinese carving of the jadeite cabbage, for which the artist used the irregular white and green patterns in the stone to create something beautiful—I think as writers we have to look at the material and shape it from there instead of stubbornly trying to force out of it what we want. (Same goes for reading, too.)

What is strangest about your writing process?

I do almost all of my revisions on hard copy. For every new typed draft, I print it out and mark it up, and then I make the changes on the computer from bottom-to-top so the new changes don’t move things up or down further in the document, so they’re easier to find. It kills a lot of trees, but I don’t process nearly as well on-screen.

Describe the lifespan of this piece: how did it start, how was it revised, how drastically did it change? What was the most difficult part of writing it?

I got really lucky with this piece; it had an atypically short lifespan. I did a ton of revision the same week that I wrote it, and the first few drafts developed really well so it didn’t really undergo any major upheaval. I sent it to a couple of friends for feedback and made final revisions from there. It was weird that I had a “final” piece so quickly, without dozens of drafts, rounds of feedback, and putting it down to come back to it later with fresher eyes later.

The most difficult part was how close to home it was. It was very close to when I drove my mom to the vet to put our family dog to sleep. I wasn’t close to the dog (not anymore, at least), but it was hard to see how much it affected my mom. It was hard, too, how much the experience conjured up childhood memories—some of them difficult and others that were simply associated with other, semi-related memories and feelings. To be clear, my mother wasn’t physically abusive nor an alcoholic, but I associate my childhood dog with a lot of what made growing up a struggle for me. I think the freshness of that wound is what made this piece develop so quickly and so early, though—why everything fell into place so quickly.

How does (or doesn’t) this piece fit in with your larger body of work?

A lot of my fiction deals with childhood trauma, relationship dynamics, and/or identity formation. I’ve also found that I write about death (and people ingesting things they shouldn’t ingest, which is probably where the jumping into jaws image comes from). My poetry tends to deal more with place, ethnic identity, and mental illness, but this style of surreal flash has become pretty typical for my fiction.

The chaos of this piece kicks into action when the narrator jumps into still-shouting jaws. Did the piece begin with this strange, surreal image for you? Do your stories and poems often begin with an image?

They usually do start with an image. This one started with the car ride and the vet (though the vet didn’t make it into the story and the narrator is much younger than I am). The stairs were the next image, which set the stage for the jumping/jaws image as the springboard for the rest of the story.

What’s your procrastination of choice?

Playing Sid Meier’s Civilization 5 on Steam. I usually play in offline mode so my friends don’t judge me for the long play sessions.

__

Pecchenino’s poems “Early Days” and “My Jam” appear in Issue 22.2.

Where are you from and where are you now?

I grew up in Santa Clara, CA, which is just outside of San Jose in the Bay Area. I’ve also lived in Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and in several parts of Los Angeles, but I’ve been settled in a pretty busy part of Hollywood for the past five years. I joke with people that I’m incapable of living more than 25 miles from the Pacific Ocean, but it’s probably true.

Which writer(s) do you admire most and why?

William Faulkner has been my literary “heart’s darling” (to steal a phrase from him) since college. I’ve been to his house in Mississippi, delivered conference papers on his work, and ended up devoting a huge chunk of my dissertation, more than I meant to, to some novels he wrote that aren’t even that popular. My writing doesn’t really resemble his, but his prose is more poetic than most verse, and I admire him for being so unbelievably productive and for having such a singular vision. There are many other writers whose work has consistently meant a lot to me (Carver, Plath, Didion, Larkin, Baldwin, Fitzgerald), but I always come back to Faulkner and am shocked by what he accomplished.

What’s the most valuable piece of advice you’ve heard about writing?

Two things. First, that reading is just as important as writing. One of my teachers at UC Santa Cruz, Erika Meitner, made a real impression on me when she assigned like ten books in one of our short workshops. While you eventually have to put your own words on a page, you become a better writer by reading lots of good (and bad) writing.

The other thing is something I tell my own students a lot: writing is hard, and a lot of what you write is going to be terrible. Learning to be okay with that is everything.

What do you think is the most unique part of your writing process?

That’s a great question. I’m not sure if there is anything unique about my writing process, but I tend to work best when I have several different kinds of projects going at the same time. When I’m writing a poem, I usually also have drafts of an assignment prompt for my students, a book review, and/or a tweet open on my desktop. Then I ping pong between them all for hours, adding things and deleting things, sometimes forgetting where I am. Somehow, at the end of the day they all end up further along than they were in the morning. Maybe this is evidence of how the internet has changed my brain over the years, or just the result of wearing a lot of different hats, but it’s my process right now.

I am drawn to these poems not only for their strong sense of voice, but also for the surreal sense of place that your speaker conjures: the underworld of Greek mythology becomes a frat bro’s paradise in “Early Days,” and crows seem to tap “jacaranda pods” to the beat of Timbaland’s latest hit in “My Jam.” How would you describe the effect of infusing traditional images of poetry with elements of pop culture? Would you say this is a frequent move in your work?

It is a fairly frequent move in my work, though I try not to overload poems with really specific references. I hope the ones I select have resonance beyond my own experience. If there’s one thing that bugs me when reading a poem, it’s feeling like the author was writing for himself and his friends first and foremost. This may be why I try to pair the pop and traditional. Even if someone like my mom doesn’t know who Timbaland is, she understands the idea of certain summers having soundtracks that take on weird new meanings as the years roll on. For her it might be James Taylor, but the song remains the same.

__

Brandi Wells’s story “Invisible Zoo” appears in Issue 22.2.

Where are you from and where are you now? How does (or doesn’t) place influence your work?

I’m from Georgia and I spent four years in Alabama, so I can say with some certainty that I am from the south. I’m in Los Angeles now. I’ve been told that I’m a southern writer and that I have a southern voice, but I have no idea what that means. I tried to get rid of it for a long time, but I gave that up.

What’s your number one rule of writing?

I am always unlearning rules I’ve learned, so I’m trying to avoid any more rules that I’ll have to unlearn later.

What is strangest about your writing process?

I wildly overwrite. I have to cut more than 50% of anything I do. I wish it were different and easier. Some people think a lot as they write or before they write, so that what they put down is somewhat similar to what their final product will be, but I’ve never been able to do that.

Describe the lifespan of this piece: how did it start, how was it revised, how drastically did it change? What was the most difficult part of writing it?

This is part of the novel I’m working on, Flinton’s Home for the Elderly or Disabled. It’s really difficult to think about pieces of the novel separately, but this part is my attempt at sense-making. I’m told that my novel is confusing.

How does (or doesn’t) this piece fit in with your larger body of work?

This is near the beginning of the novel I’m working on. It’s probably a pretty good example of what the novel is like.

Speaking of bodies, both “Invisible Zoo” and your book This Boring Apocalypse feature body parts that are detached or otherwise mangled. What would be the worst body part to lose? The best? On average, how many minutes per day do you spend thinking about noses?

I could do without certain fingers or toes. I don’t think I make use of them. I’d hate to lose my legs or eyes. Bodies are terrifying. I worry a lot that parts of my body won’t work anymore. I worry about aging. I worry about health and health insurance and my genes. These days I’d say I spend at least an hour thinking about noses.

What’s your procrastination of choice?

I like to read YA fantasy novels. I’d rather do that than anything I ought to.

__