Traveling With a Gun: Janyce Stefan-Cole on Writing



Janyce Stefan-Cole



As a kid I already knew something was up. I was a little different from the others in my family. I remember being relieved when my mother showed us a portfolio of her paintings on paper – most in bright colors. When I was older I was able to see she had flair. She was also known for writing good letters, and at one point she studied French which for some reason excited me and I began wearing a beret around the house. I knew the French to be artists; I was in love with Paris – from photos and movies. But before all that I’d begun creating little worlds on paper: figurative drawings that I would then tell stories about in my head. So I’ve been a narrator with a visual bent since I can remember.

Artistic endeavors were not encouraged in my family and I kept my creations secret. I have a sense my mother had a voice that never found its form. That seems to me a crime against human expression, like a limb allowed to rot, infecting the whole tree. I guess I was louder in voice than she, or more willing to take a chance. I had a terrific teacher in high school, Mr. T., who wanted me to go to art school, but I contracted mono and jaundice from drinking out of another kid’s cup at a party (he got hepatitis so I was lucky) and I missed the first semester of my senior year, and had to have a tutor at home. Art portfolios were due in November so I never had a chance to apply. I did have a story published in our school journal which was my one claim to fame in an otherwise lackluster academic performance.

I studied philosophy and religion at Boston University – subjects also not encouraged by my businessman father. I was painfully sincere at the time and discovered books in a personal way and began devouring them, everything from the Brontës to the Russians – Dostoevsky was a hero – to Camus and Kierkegaard. The book that launched my consciousness as an artist was James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In particular the relationship to one’s name. I understood others had hidden questions of identity too, and difficulty naming themselves, as in, who am I? In a subtle way I think A Portrait influenced my recent novel, Hollywood Boulevard, about a successful actress, Ardennes Thrush, who quits in spite of her very public achievements.

After graduating I was at a crossroads and briefly went to art school, immersing myself in Boston’s many museums. Then I took off with a guy. We spent an entire summer crisscrossing Canada and the U.S. in a converted Hostess Twinkie van. I made drawings as we traveled; they became a kind of glue as I moved farther from anything familiar. The journey ended in San Francisco and after a year or so there, we went south to Mexico where I painted, studied and taught. I was living by my wits; looking back I think I was pretty brave. I did learn how to travel. The problem was I didn’t have a plan and I took the road into visual arts somewhat haphazardly. Having written stories in college, with one or two things published, I could have gone either way: visual or literary. Two and a half years later I left Mexico alone and returned to New York where I began to try to show my work. I did show, but I didn’t feel satisfaction. My paintings became increasingly narrative but it wasn’t enough. The road I’d not taken re-emerged when I decided to paint my studio and came across those college stories hidden in a folder. I sat on the floor to read them and knew I wanted to finish the group. I felt instantly in my right skin. I never did paint the studio and I’ve never looked back.

Thus began my second apprenticeship. I wrote stories about what happened along the way, creating characters that were amalgams of people I’ve known. I’d met a lot of people on the road. Coming up with ideas is tough if you look too hard. I don’t think good fiction comes from dogma, but a writer’s ideas should inform the story. I would say ideas generally find me. With Hollywood Boulevard, Ardennes Thrush came to me unsolicited with a very strong voice. I was in Hollywood at the time (my husband Brandon was at work on an independent feature film he co-wrote and was co-producing) and it made sense to place Ardennes’s story there, and for her be an actress. The idea of quitting ties into the idea of identity, a la Stephen Dedalus, and I followed the thread into researching personality disorders.

A good story is one that draws the reader into a world. This means, in addition to creating a sense of place, taking a character’s journey with her. I’ll follow a good character almost anywhere. Plot for me surrounds the protagonist’s internal dilemma. My writing may not appeal to readers looking to escape or be titillated. I’ll introduce sex – organically – and guns that go off, and I have nothing against a book being entertaining, but I get antsy if that’s all that’s going on. I think I ‘play’ each of my characters; I need to know them very well. I’ll shamelessly steal from all aspects of my own life. Writers are spies, and sponges; not much slips past me. Everything is game once it finds its way into the text, while of course protecting the innocent, or unsuspecting. I create from what I know: people, places and events, but – for good or ill – my characters are all my own inventions. If I am very lucky my writing takes me into a kind of parallel universe where the characters are with me at all times whispering, telling me who they are, to the point where real life begins to interfere: the phone, emails, emergencies, dinner . . . It’s an enchanted place and painful to leave once a book ends. Family and friends know by now I’ll get back to them when I disappear into my work.

I don’t know that I consciously have a message or philosophy for readers to take away from my work, but I do return to the idea of looking within. This would be along the lines of the unexamined life as not worth living – or, perhaps, that God is within – though there’s plenty of distracting candy out there to suggest the opposite. I would encourage readers to take my character’s journey with them; their trip from the inside as the plot unfolds, perhaps leading to greater awareness of the reader’s own journey. Mostly I just want people to read.

I’m in awe of great writing. Not self-conscious pyrotechnics but subtlety, having my breath taken away by an author’s voice and choice of words, characterizations. When I write well I marvel at it later but cannot retrace my steps to see how I arrived there. The opposite has occurred often enough, recoiling over my own bad writing. A book takes so long because each sentence must be gone over many times. Syntax matters. Normal Mailer once said when he can read his manuscript without wincing it’s done.

My writing day begins at my desk by 9am, like any other job. If I am not in control of my time I grab a minute when I can. If ten minutes is all I can sneak in, I’ve learned to take them and write. Ideally I’m alone when I work, with distracting sounds and rhythms at a minimum. In the city I like big fat snowstorms when all the hyper-activity is muffled and hushed. In the summer we go to New Hampshire where the interruptions are few: a snake in the cellar, a porcupine waddling along an evening path, deer grazing, maybe the resident bear showing up. “Conversation With a Tree” was written in New Hampshire. I’m not at liberty to say if the tree spoke or not, but, like the local creatures, the tree doesn’t know or care what a writer is or does: Perfect. I know writers who work in cafes. The author alone is supposed to be passé, and we’re expected to be available to tweet everything from sex to shampoo in so many characters or less. I try to reach people through my writing. I don’t see how I can do that if I’m tooting, hooting and honking all day. It takes up so much time, time being equal parts friend and enemy.

I don’t think in terms of genre as I write, I guess that is the job of publishers and publicists, how to package a book. Hollywood Boulevard has been called a psychological thriller with a noir tone. Psychological works for me because my protagonist’s mind, his or her journey from the inside, is what drives me as I write. To the degree that there is intrigue, characters finding themselves in harm’s way, thriller applies. I enjoy the old fictional noir detectives – detectives in general, perhaps because, like writers, they are always searching for clues. The noir tone appeals, the un-heroic hero, the fumbling protagonist who manages to do the right thing in spite being flawed. It’s fair to say I’ve fumbled a fair amount through my own life, sans outline, following clues.

Jean Rhys of Good Morning Midnight is a writer I admire. An emotionally unafraid writer, personally troubled by demon alcohol, she looked truthfully into her characters’ eyes, and was ahead of her time with an unflinchingly present voice. I saw a sign in a country shop recently: “Well-behaved women don’t make history.” That’s Jean Rhys. I like that. James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime is a wow, a genuinely sensual book with a spare style, not a wasted beat. Monica Ali in Alentejo Blue creates a rich tapestry of types. I admire almost any Alice Munro, Denis Johnson, E. Annie Proulx (The Shipping News in particular), writers I would be proud to keep company with who have perhaps influenced me, though I take no responsibility for comparisons. I recently read Padgett Powell’s coming of age, Edisto, a book where nearly nothing happens, and only the boy’s voice takes the reader along to an unvarnished humanity. This summer I read Edward Falco’s reluctant male of his novel Wolf Point, and Emily St. John Mandel’s mesmerizing, The Lola Quartet. I’m not drawn to wordy books, believing if there is a simpler way to say something without sacrificing meaning that is the way to go. I suppose Hemmingway comes to mind. I just read Varley O’Connor’s under-rated biographical novel, The Master’s Muse.

Several years ago I was at an art colony with the poet C.D. Wright. I read a short piece one evening and the next morning at breakfast she told me about Michael Ondaatje’s novel Coming Through Slaughter, saying what I’d read reminded her of his writing. I was badly hung over because I’d drunk wine to find the courage to read in front of writers like her and Louis Nordan, and then more wine to get over the nerves. I asked her to repeat the title three times. A few of us had stayed up most of the night, deep into the Virginia countryside full of crickets chirping under a star ceiling, and life seemed good and scary and full of crazy hope. When I looked up Ondaatje I was astounded at any comparison with his poignant, pared-down prose poem style in Coming Through Slaughter, and was probably shamed into wanting to be a better writer.

My aim is to write, to keep at it, and die in the saddle. As long as characters present themselves and tell me their stories I’ll write. Read, certainly, and travel some more. Travel shakes out the cobwebs with new sensations and unexpected turns. The world is still a richly wonderful place, problems and all; greed and power aren’t all people are about, though lately it looks that way. My next novel involves an NYPD detective in Brooklyn. It’s a character driven search; there are foreigners, a real estate bubble forming, and there is a gun.

Visit Janyce’s website and buy her book.

Copyright 2012 by Janyce Stefan-Cole

Ivanhoe During Arithmetic: The Soul of a Writer

Stephen Poleskie



Photo: Angela Wong



We dipped our pens in inkwells back then, and wrote properly using the “Palmer Method.” We sat there, upright, endlessly repeating the motions that turned marks into letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g . . . And if learning to write was boring, learning to read was even more so. We used a book titled “Bob and Judy.” The story was very repetitious: “Bob runs. Judy runs. Bob and Judy run.” As I had already learned how to read at home, I often made up my own plots for these stories. This was my first attempt at being a writer.

As I went to a small grammar school that combined two grades in one room, with one teacher, I usually was required to spend half of the day sitting at my desk doing busywork. If I was in the lower of the two grades I eavesdropped on what the other class was doing. The problem with this was that the next year I already knew what I was supposed to be learning, and so had to provide some amusement for myself, while still appearing as if I was paying attention. I smuggled in books and read them during class. My father, who was away in the Army at the time, was a high school teacher so we had a lot of the classics around the house. I was caught reading Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe during arithmetic and punished. Rather than risk being caught again, I took to writing my own stories, my note papers being easier to hide than a bound book.

As a child I was small for my age, and had started school a year early, so was constantly bullied by everyone, long before that word became fashionable. Back then there were no Twitter messages or Facebook posts – your enemies just hit you with rocks, kicked you in the shins, or bloodied your nose. And so, after school and on weekends, I preferred to stay in my room immersed in my artistic activities.

I wrote comic books and illustrated them. I also made a little theater in a cardboard box and put on plays with people I had drawn and cut out of construction paper. These plays were usually improvised, or sometimes written down, but then, as now, I never had a shortage of ideas. As I had lived little of my life, most of these “tragedies” were based on things I read in the newspaper or heard on the radio. Although I would find that later on I enjoyed being a “stand-up comic,” I was never much for writing comedy.

When I got to high school I spent a lot of my time participating in extracurricular activities. I wrote pieces for the yearbook, and had a regular column in the school newspaper. I also did art, theatre, debate, the model airplane club, and sang in the chorus. My essay took second place in the “I Speak for Democracy,” contest, but was declared the winner when it was found out that the original number one had copied most of his text from an article in American Legion Magazine. I won a trip to New York City to see the United Nations building. This was my first trip to Manhattan and I realized then that this was where I wanted to be someday. I also won the Kappa Alpha Delta Literary Award given to the “outstanding writer,” in the senior class and got to sit on the stage at graduation with all the important people.

The next four years, spent studying at Wilkes College, were probably the dullest four years of my life. My father could not afford for me to go away to school, so I lived at home and commuted. After my classes I worked in a discount clothing store called “Bushels of Bargains” and in the summer at an automobile repair shop. Both of these jobs would later provide material for numerous short stories and an unpublished novel. I had to take business courses in college. I was ostensibly preparing to become a partner in my father’s small insurance agency, as he had given up teaching when he returned from the war. I did very poorly in my required writing courses; my choice of essay topics tending to rankle the professors, or so their comments on my papers seemed to indicate. I did do well in a course called “Business Correspondence and Reports.” My final project, a marketing study on Little Golden Books was much praised and received an A+ grade. I did not reveal that I hadn’t spend any time at bookstores interviewing the ninety-six people that supposedly had responded to my survey, but merely used my fiction-writing skills to make the whole thing up. In my free time I painted pictures, and acted in the college theater and in summer stock. In my senior year I wrote a one-act play, “How Like Roses,” loosely based on my mother’s relation to her three sisters, which won the Wilkes College play writing competition. I also wrote a highly lauded paper, “Bottomry Bonds and Respondencia: the Passage of Title in Maritime Law,” for my course in Legal Contracts. For a brief time I even fancied myself becoming a lawyer.

In my first three years after graduating, I lived in a number of different places and tried my luck at a number of different things. I was an insurance agent, a sign painter, a commercial artist, a designer of party favors, a screen printer for a billboard company, and a high school art teacher. While teaching in Gettysburg, PA, I rented an old stone farmhouse that had been used as a hospital during the battle and was supposed to be haunted. There I wrote dozens of unpublished Civil War poems. After that I traveled to Miami, the Bahamas, Cuba, Mexico, California, and Canada, before deciding to settle on East 10^th Street in Manhattan.

I studied painting, drawing and aesthetics at the New School, where I wrote a paper on aesthetics in the philosophy of Spinoza. I also continued writing poetry and even submitted a poem to the Village Voice. They rejected it with the comment that while it was a good poem they just did not publish poems that rhyme. The other writing that I was doing at the time was mostly anti-war letters to my draft board. My number was up. I had scored high on the pre-induction tests. It was suggested that if I enlisted I would be sent to an officer training school. I told them that I was not interested in anything but a conscious objector status. I was stalked by the FBI, and threatened with time in jail. But then someone with some authority must have read my letters, as I was reclassified as unfit for military service.

Unable to get a decent job due to my draft status, I was reduced to doing construction work and preparing canvases for other artists. I rented a storefront on East 12^th Street where I worked on my paintings and made prints using a small screen printing table that I made. I had taught myself to screen print in the basement of my parents’ house using a booklet I had gotten free from a Sherwin Williams paint store. Alfred Jensen, an artist friend known enough to be having an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, asked me if I would do some screen prints for him. We worked together and did four editions. He then sold one copy of each print to the Museum of Modern Art. The story spread around the art world, and I was subsequently besieged by artists wanting to do prints. I moved to larger quarters and hired assistants. For six years I was at the center of the New York art scene doing screen prints with people like Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Louise Nevelson and Helen Frankenthaler. Most of my writing at that time was technical articles on screen printing that were published in printmaking journals. I no longer wrote poetry, but did keep copious notes about the art scene and the people I knew, planning to write a book about this someday. I also wrote a short story which was published in Straight, the magazine of The School of Visual Arts. And I got to write my obituary for the New York Times. I was told that this was a mark of my success as the Times only kept on file obituaries of those people whom they considered to be important.

Nevertheless, I was becoming tired of my screen printing shop and all that it involved: fickle artists, paying bribes to everyone – the building and fire inspectors, the garbage man, and the police, and of art galleries that didn’t pay their bills. Then I was invited to teach screen printing at Cornell University. The prospect of being rid of all this business and to be paid regularly for working two or three days a week, and having the summers free to do what I wished, was something I could not pass up.

In Ithaca I learned to fly. I eventually became quite good at it, even attaining an Air Transport Pilot rating. I became skilled enough at aerobatic flying to fly in air shows, and to win numerous competitions. I also did art performances in the sky, which I called “Aerial Theater” and which were very highly regarded in Europe. During this time I wrote articles for popular aviation magazines and essays on the relationship between art and flight for literary journals like Leonardo and Shiny in the USA, D’Ars and Spazio Humano in Italy, and the anthology Himmelsschreiber in Germany. After 33 years of teaching I retired from Cornell. It was then that I decided to devote my creative activity mainly to writing fiction.

So what makes a good story? Apparently I have very little idea, as I have written 193 short stories, and only managed to publish 21, despite having sent out over 3896 submissions. I have written 12 books, and been able to publish five, one with a small press and four which I published myself. I have also had two books accepted by top NYC agents who were then unable to place them. I suppose this lack of interest in my work could be that my role models are not necessarily today’s heroes, very few of whom I read. My favorite authors, and whose books I read over and over are: Gabrielle D’Annunzio, Georges Bataille, Witold Gombrowicz, Fernando Pessoa, Bruno Schulz, and Robert Walser. My favorite among my own books is my unpublished novel, Johnny Z’s Ultimate Video Memories. Alison Lurie, who read the book some twenty years ago, remarked that although it was well written it was the “filthiest book” she had read since Tropic of Cancer. I am currently going through this manuscript yet another time, probably the sixtieth revision. I may send it around again since books with perverted sex seem to have become popular.

And so now I look up at my clock and see that it is almost 11:00 pm, time for me to put aside this text. I usually work every evening from 8:00 until 11:00. I am not one of those serious writers who start in the morning and work all day long and then again in the evening. Writing for me, as with all my other creative activities, has always been a recreation. In the evening I sit quietly and engage my fantasies, not that I have not been thinking all day long about what I was going to put down on the page when the time came. Now, in my seventy-fourth year, I find that writing occupies my mind and fills my soul. It is the activity that matters. If no one publishes my work, or no one reads the work that is published, it does not concern me for I have already had the enjoyment of doing it.

Ithaca, NY, 3 June 2012

Text Copyright© 2012 by Stephen Poleskie. Photo Copyright© 2012 by Angela Wong

Remembering Davenport

Guy Davenport via Wikipedia

Two Visits with Guy Davenport

(Followed by an Angel)

W.C. Bamberger

In 1991 I drove alone to Lexington, Kentucky in a borrowed Dodge van (borrowed in fact from my ex-wife, Janet) with layers of Abstract Expressionist paintings on paper shifting around in the way-back. My goal: to politely strongarm two writers I admired, neither of whom had I previously met. The most daunting of the two was Guy Davenport, classical scholar, painter, professor at the University of Kentucky, brilliant critic and author of some of the most unusual and beautifully written fictions I’d ever read.

I had recently reprinted Guy’s book length poem Flowers & Leaves. In the course of our business and ever after, Guy was unfailingly gracious; if I wrote him a letter he would feel obligated to respond, however busy he might be. Over the years I learned to end my letters with “No response necessary,” to save him the bother. If I phoned and interrupted him he would always end our conversation by saying, “Bless you for calling.” On this trip I was deliberately taking advantage of this graciousness: I knew that Guy had said, more or less, “I like people, but not meeting them.” He disliked having fans invade his privacy. When Guy had suggested to Erik Reece, a former student, that he send me a manuscript, I’m sure he hadn’t realized he was opening himself up to such a visit from me. But Guy did no readings, had given up participating in conferences, never traveled (in fact he had never had a driver’s license), and very rarely gave interviews. If one wanted to know the man behind the brilliant work, a home invasion was the only open route.

Erik, who has since gone on to well-deserved renown for his books Lost Mountain and An American Gospel, was at that time a young poet whose first book I was planning to publish with my small press. I was hoping to strongarm Erik into choosing a painting by Roland Rayburn, a painter I knew, for the cover of the collection, My Muse Was Supposed to Meet Me Here. This would likely be easy enough; I was, after all, publishing his book. But the shamelessly acquisitive side of me was as engaged as the literary: I was also in hopes of convincing Guy to sell me one of his amazing paintings – I had tried by mail but he was dismissive of the idea, resolutely so it seemed.

Once I’d checked into my motel, I called Erik and went to his home. We sorted through the piles of paintings until he found one he thought would fit, and – to make myself feel like a real publisher – I gave him a (tiny) advance on the book. We travelled to a nearby Shaker colony, a wonderful experience. Erik also talked me into trying a Subway sandwich, a much less wonderful experience.

~

Memory grows hazy after 21 years, but I’m reasonably sure that I went to Davenport’s home by myself just after dinnertime, with Erik joining us later. Guy met me at the door, dressed casually, his glasses dangling around his neck on a string. He showed me around his home: pointing out such treasures as Louis Zukofsky’s chair (which a friend had surreptitiously saved from a dump when the poet’s son had tried to throw out all his things to keep them from just such collectors), the Picasso prints he had salvaged from a printer’s “reject” barrel, the trestle-style writing table he had built, and more. We sat and talked about his work, and Guy was at once serious about the ideas inherent in it – Charles Fourier’s regimented utopianism, Pound’s “rose in the steel dust,” Buckminster Fuller’s insistence that “nature doesn’t use pi,” the cosmology of the African Dogon people – and self-deprecating about himself. A number of his stories and some of his art include naked children, images Guy used to explore the tipping points between childhood and adulthood, innocence and sexuality, utopian community and society’s fallen state, and these images had proven controversial. At one point Guy said, approximately, “Carloads of Yalies drive down here from New Haven and are disappointed to find no tow-headed boys wandering nude about the house. Those who read literature literally are always going to be disappointed.”

Guy also told stories about writers he had known – Zukfosky’s phobia of drafts, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s shell-shock induced fear of enclosed spaces, which meant in order for him to be able to ride in a car he had to keep the door open and drag his foot along the road as the car slowly proceeded. But what made the drive worthwhile, what made me (however guiltily) excuse myself for intruding into Guy’s personal space, was the private art show he gave me. Walking up and down the stairs to the second floor again and again, Guy brought down, one or two at a time, a few dozen of his paintings: portraits of writers and thinkers from James Joyce to Randolph Bourne (who observed that “War is the health of the state”) to Wittgenstein; collage paintings that juxtaposed shells with birds or Roman coins or words in Danish. There were also geometric abstractions, grids and color fields and stripes, with a wonderful vibrating life and structural balance that engaged eye and mind equally. I asked (again) if he ever exhibited or sold his paintings. He told me a story about his department head “ordering” him (his word) to have an exhibit at the university, and of what a humiliating experience it had been. There was a “don’t ask” look in his eye – a resolute “don’t ask” look. In the end I didn’t ask, my own graciousness eking out a victory over my stalking acquisitive side. A few years later Erik wrote a long study of Guy’s art that was published by New Directions with a number of beautiful reproductions of the works; I bought two copies. This is as close as I ever came to owning any of Guy’s art.

Erik joined us after sunset, and we spent the rest of the evening discussing books, ideas and art while sitting before the fire Guy built in his fireplace. When I left he said, “Bless you for visiting.”

~

A few years after this visit, I intruded again. I spent a long afternoon negotiating endless construction zones through southern Ohio and on into Kentucky in my ex-wife Janet’s van – but this time she rode with me. I had told Guy I planned to arrive in Lexington around 3:00 in the afternoon and would call him then. With the construction delays in this pre-cellphone time, it was nearly 5:00 when I called from the motel. Guy was not happy. I explained about the construction, but it seemed he had stopped work hours earlier than he had wanted to, in preparation for my visit, and this time was now irrevocably lost. I could hear in his voice that I would not easily be excused for this. I made matters worse by asking if he could give me directions from the motel to his house. “Me? I am the last person to ask how to negotiate Lexington in a car!”

When we finally made it to Guy’s house he was graciousness itself – to Janet. She was a children’s librarian, and they discussed children’s books. “Children’s book illustrations are art!” Guy told Janet, with a beaming smile. They discussed Maurice Sendak; I said little. When I did speak, Guy repeatedly corrected my pronunciation of foreign names (“Claude Lay-vee Stroowwwss” was particularly vehement), faulted my memory, and generally brushed off any and all of my thoughts. After a time, however, this flinty exterior was put aside. Guy’s voice trembled as he talked about a book that told the story of children from a Polish orphanage being marched to a train, pennants flying, to be taken away and gassed by the Nazis. A tear came to his eye when he played a CD of a young countertenor singing beautiful lieder. I cautiously said little. By the end of our visit Guy’s pleasure in meeting Janet had warmed him to the point where he gave us each a half-hug when we left.

I felt badly about the events of this visit for days, even after receiving a short note from Guy graciously thanking me for visiting. But then I suddenly realized that I had gotten exactly what I had wanted from the visit. I had wanted to get to know “the man behind the work,” and this I had done. I had been given a privileged glimpse of the Guy Davenport I most admired, the dedicated, deeply intellectual writer, translator and painter reacting to having been robbed of a good half day of work time for the sake of having two people sit in his living room and ask (for him uninteresting, because about him) questions. Readers of Guy’s essays and of his few interviews can get just a glimpse of this jealously-guarded dedication, the tetchiness of the brilliant mind having its time wasted, but I’d been privileged to experience it first hand. A fan’s (mildly masochistic?) dream come true.

~

I never visited Guy again. One of our last exchanges by mail came a few weeks before his death from lung cancer. Art was again involved: I had bought a small ink drawing of an angel by British artist Stanley Spencer, a favorite of Guy, though Guy didn’t own any of Spencer’s work. When I heard he was ill, I mailed him the little drawing. He wrote back, “There are no words adequate to thank you for such a wonderful gift, so I will not belittle it by even trying.” Gracious to the end.

~~~~~~~

W. C. Bamberger is the author, editor or translator of more than a dozen books, including the novel On the Backstretch. In 2007 he edited Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters for W. W. Norton. Recent publications include a SF story co-written with his daughter, and his translation of two early essays by Gershom Scholem. He lives in Michigan.

Copyright 2012 by W.C. Bamberger

Inside the Common Boundary

Order a Copy

By Meagan Meehan

When one contemplates the noun immigrant, seldom, if ever, is the word communal meditated upon. That is not to say contemporary individuals are incognizant of the multitude of immigrants who admirably find their niche in ethnic communities, but are more inclined to perceive immigrants as foreign and exotic, rather than readily assimilable. Thus, what intrigues modern readers of Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration (Editions Bibliotekos 2010) is the anthology’s very title. Comprised of two seemingly simple words, the book’s main title makes a commendable statement of its own: the juxtaposition of “common” – an adjective connotative of sharing – and “boundary” – a noun denotative of a dividing line – suggests that, despite stark boundaries, a unifying (yet, underlying) aspect exists. Not surprisingly, then, Editions Bibliotekos has utilized its second anthology to consider the implications of such a paradoxical metaphor. The stories published in Common Boundary explore how immigrants themselves can be a part of others, while simultaneously being divided from them. In a recent interview, several authors from Common Boundary answered inquiries pertaining to their respective works; each response offers a glimpse into the author’s intentions, as well as – in some cases – his or her thoughts regarding immigration.

In “La Santa Papa,” a short story featuring the struggle of a Mexican immigrant to make sense of a giant Peruvian potato displayed at a state fair, author George Rabasa offers a reason for the story’s setting: “To a foreigner the phenomenon of an American State Fair is exotic, including the fetishization of produce and livestock. And while she doesn't think for a moment that the potato is God, she would recognize the ritualization of a relic or religious image from her childhood experience of a Mexican village church. Her sense of alienation is enhanced by her solitude and so in the dark quiet of the tent leads to her hearing the potato speak to her. Whether this is imagination or an auditory hallucination will vary according to the experience a reader brings to his or her reading of the story.”

In another story entitled “The Unmasking of El Santo,” Rabasa claims that the character’s decision to become a wrestler was fueled by a desire to assert authority in a society where his immigration status denied him freedom to do so: “Benito is overcoming his sense of impotence as a minority and a foreigner under the powerful influence of the dominant social order. He overcomes this sense of subjugation by donning the powerful symbols of the unbeatable Santo, easily the most admired of the Mexican wrestlers, a leading figure in the sport since the 1950s. The mystery of his identity has been long concealed behind the silver mask. So, Benito can become El Santo simply by wearing the mask. But secrets and good deeds beg to be revealed. So, Benito is dying to tell who he becomes after his shift at the bakery is concluded. He wants credit for persecuting bad guys, for contributing to the security of his community.”

Patty Somlo’s story “How He Made It Across” uses death as a metaphor to describe a loss of self after one immigrates to a new country: “The poor Mexican farmer that he was before crossing the border has died. My point there was that people become Americans almost as soon as they come to this country and leave the people they once were behind.”  As a former journalist writing frequently on topics such as immigration and Latin America, Somlo used her story as a kind of platform for public awareness, an opportunity not only to voice her own opinions, but also to enhance one’s knowledge of the American immigration system: “The story is one of a series I wrote on an undocumented immigrant named Alejandro. The stories were, in part, an effort to look at what I consider to be an unfair system, in which so many American businesses hire and rely on the work of undocumented immigrants, mostly Latinos, at the same time that there is an immigration system whose purpose is to keep them out of the country or, if they make it in, to deport them. To the immigrants, the entire immigration system is a faceless bureaucracy that they fear, and they refer to it in its entirety as ‘la migra.’”

Like Somlo, Omer Hadžiselimović “An Immigrant's Deal: Two Lives for the Price of One” serves as an account of Hadžiselimović’s personal views on immigration. When asked what made him think of America as strange and exotic, Hadžiselimović replied that it was about “cultural distance,” everything from America’s language to “the natural and built-up landscape, architecture, human behavior, and body language.”  Hadžiselimović particularly stresses the importance of mastering the language of the country one has migrated to: “Generally speaking, for an immigrant, learning the new language is essential, for it is the most important entry ticket to full integration. A people’s language is deeply connected with the life of that people, both past and present, so to know a language means to have a deeper understanding of the culture that has produced it. Words and expressions do not exist in isolation, and one cannot function fully in a new culture with a limited knowledge of its language.”

John Guzlowski’s biographical story “Wooden Trunk from Buchenwald” features a poignant story about his parents’ wooden trunk from Buchenwald, the site of one of Nazi Germany’s major concentration camps. When asked about the trunk, Guzlowski states that his regret for leaving it behind varies: “Sometimes I regret not having the trunk. Other times, I don't. When I wonder whether it was a mistake leaving it, I think about what my mother and dad would say to this. They were not sentimental people. Their experiences in the war taught them not to be sentimental. They were both people who had lost so much and left so much behind. I think that my parents would shrug and say, ‘So you left it, don’t worry.’”  Thinking retrospectively, Guzlowski agrees that, if given another chance, he would act differently – but personal circumstances prevented him from doing so: “Yes, if I had it all over to do again, I would save the trunk. I didn't because after a month of sitting with my mother and watching her die in a hospice, I was exhausted every way. Getting a trunk from Arizona to Georgia seemed impossibly difficult.”

Mitch Levenberg’s “The Plain Brown Envelopes,” highlights an anxious father preparing to bring his newly-adopted daughter home from China. The transition from China to her new home, Brooklyn, New York, is believed to bring the child “towards a future of hope and promise.”  Although Levenberg confirms that the narrator did feel “somewhat” guilty for taking his daughter away from her native culture and heritage, the narrator is confident that his child’s new home will ensure a bright future.

           

The stories published in this anthology explore the notion of a common boundary – a metaphor connotative of the paradoxical treatment countless immigrants endure on a daily basis: while immigrants do indeed share a commonality with the native population (they live in the same country, have the same government, etc.), they are also divided from the native population. Even among various immigrant groups (as these stories demonstrate), similar tales of hope, strength, courage, and love are told – a humble testament to the existence of a common boundary.

~

[Editor’s notes:

1. The writing of this article derives from questions generated by students of a freshman Honors seminar taught by Professor Ghazala Afzal at St. Francis College, which used Common Boundary as a course text. In preparing this article, we assume readers have some familiarity with the anthology.

2. Join us in congratulating John Guzlowski. His story, “Wooden Trunk from Buchenwald” (first published in COMMON BOUNDARY: Stories of Immigration by Editions Bibliotekos) has been selected by Pearson Longman (a global publisher) to be reprinted in an upcoming anthology with a print run of 200,000 copies.]

We are accepting queries for our fifth themed anthology, Faith and Doubt. We’ve consistently tried, in line with our mission, to tackle big themes and enduring issues – obviously this anticipated anthology fulfills that goal. With the help of many talented writers, we have produced four anthologies on important themes, so let’s see if we can do it once again. Details about the call are on this site, behind the Calls/Guideline tab. If anyone should have any question not answered there, do not hesitate to contact us. You know we respond to queries (and polite hellos).

Being Human: Call of the Wild

We are pleased to announce that Being Human: Call of the Wild is finished. The book can be ordered from the publisher by going to the Catalogue page and filling out (and mailing in) an order form, which entitles you to at least a 30% discount. For an immediate order, the book is available online (e.g., Amazon). Or, you can order the book from your local bookstore (via Ingram Book Co.).

Once again, we are grateful to all of our contributors (including those who submitted but did not get into the volume). The contributors are listed below. We are happy with the book (as our consultant readers have been), so we are confident that you too will be quite satisfied.

Twelve authors and fifteen stories on the nature of being human and the human character in both the natural environment and human-made world constitute this stimulating book. The stories are engaging, memorable, contemplative, and even humorous. While we have constructed, over thousands of years, a vast cathedral of scintillating, rational humanity, we can be primal and shadowy with visceral emotions – and so this collection admirably demonstrates. There are many difficult questions posed in the book. Why do we kill certain creatures while nurturing others? When do we draw the line between protecting our property and letting other creatures live and thrive? What drives people to kill others to protect their land? Many of these stories explore the lines cast under the surface of creation, characters looking for a nibble of understanding to make better sense of their place in an evolving world.

“Obsession, aggression, denial, epiphany, qualms of conscience, a touch of magical realism – in these finely crafted stories, ordinary people face unforeseen sides of themselves that range from brutal to compassionate to comic, as writers from diverse cultures probe the inner lives of their characters in rural, suburban or natural environments. Whether solitary or in relationship with fellow humans or other creatures, the moments of truth faced by these protagonists seem oddly familiar, for no matter how unique their circumstances, we’ve all lived similar moments.” – Mindy Lewis, author of Life Inside: A Memoir and editor of Dirt: The Quirks, Habits and Passions of Keeping House

“We are drawn along through humor and pathos into the complexity of human existence, our persistent questions and confusions about our origins, our ultimate place in the universe. . . Being Human wonders in the mysterious, and often whimsical, play of humanity as it interacts with, and seeks solace and identification in, nature.” – Ian S. Maloney, Ph.D., Professor of English, author of Melville’s Monumental Imagination.

~

CONTRIBUTORS: Stephen Poleskie, Arthur Powers, Lisa M. Sita, Andrea Vojtko, Jeff Vande Zande, James K. Zimmerman, Anne Whitehouse, Janyce Stefan-Cole, Patty Somlo, Rivka Keren, Kelly Wantuch, Larry Eby

FOREWORD: Ian S. Maloney, Ph.D.

PREFACE: Gregory F. Tague and Fredericka A. Jacks

EDITED BY Scholar, Professor, and Pushcart Prize Nominee, Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D.

Editorial Assistant, Meagan Meehan
Proofreader, Sharon Dittus

~

BEING HUMAN: Call of the Wild. (Editions Bibliotekos, February 2012). 166 pages; paperback; ISBN: 978-0982481950. $14.95US; Availability – Individual orders via Amazon.com or B&N online and other online retailers, or ask your local bookstore. Distributed through The Ingram Book Co. Kindle e-Book (Spring 2012), $5.99U.S.

~

·   Since November 2009, when we published our first book, Pain and Memory, we have come to work with 58 authors and have published 107 individual pieces.

·   We have published 17 profiles of creative individuals (and have more in the works).

·   We have begun publishing book reviews.

·   We have also worked with students and faculty (8 in all) from St. Francis College on the book projects.

·   We have sponsored 3 readings at St. Francis College (and expect to have more).

·   We are now linked with the ASEBL Journal (and blog) – an academic publication that focuses on ethical behavior/evolutionary biology in its articles.

·   We have one more planned anthology (the Call is up), most likely entitled (and on the theme of) Faith and Doubt.

We are not (and do not intend to be) a publishing behemoth. We are happy and proud to have built our group and hope to keep it growing – all of it due in great part to the authors and readers. Thank you for your support, as we work to support the literary community.

Rite of Passage: Poet, Playwright, and Performer Vivienne Glance

Vivienne Glance  is a poet, playwright and performer. Her poetry has appeared in journals, anthologies and online publications, and she has won places and commendations in competitions. Her poetry collection, The Softness of Water, was published by Sunline Press in 2009, and her work is featured in the anthology Amber Contains the Sun, published through A Few New Words, an initiative of the Government of Western Australia’s Department of Culture and the Arts. Vivienne has been a guest at Sydney’s Night Words, Perth, Big Sky, Sprung and writing WA’s Apropos Writers Festivals. Her full-length and short plays have been produced in London, Edinburgh, Seattle, Sydney and Perth. She runs poetry and playwriting workshops for children and adults, including performance poetry techniques. As an act of cross-cultural dialogue, Vivienne works with Afeif Ismail co-transcreating his poems and plays into English. One of their co-transcreated works The African Magician has been nominated for an Australian Writers Guild AWGIE. Following is the transcript of our email interview with Vivienne, which we are quite happy to share with our community.

~♦~

~Upon first realizing oneself as a writer.

I was sixteen sitting an English exam, looking at the last question on the paper. There was a black and white photograph of a beach with calm seas, a rock pool and a rusty bicycle discarded on its side. We had to write a response to the image, and as I was rehearsing a stage version of Under Milk Wood in the school production, I found myself channeling a teenage girl’s version of Dylan Thomas. It was the best fun I’ve ever had in an exam and that’s when I thought not only that I wanted to write but that I enjoyed it too. Unfortunately we were not allowed to keep a copy of our answers, so that story has disappeared. But sometimes I wonder if my writing life since that time has been a futile attempt to rewrite that story: to recreate the flow of words and the joy of creation I felt then.

As to when I first considered myself a writer, well, that’s harder to pinpoint. I have always enjoyed writing and turned to words to help me make sense of the world as well as record its absurdities and delights. But was I a Writer? The question seems to imply a rite of passage, an acknowledgement from others that I was worthy of this moniker. I remember calling myself an actor after I’d had my first professional job, which for me was straight after Drama School, so I never had a time of uncertainty there. Writing was not so straightforward. I learnt about how to write from school, from life, from reading others, from attending ad hoc classes and workshops. That is, I designed my own apprenticeship. But public recognition for a piece of writing came when I wrote a play that was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1986, which incidentally also received a good review. As for calling myself a poet, that was probably when I was awarded second prize in a national poetry competition in 2003, although I still feel poetry has much more to teach me before I can truly call myself a poet as opposed to someone who tries to write poetically.

~Early Inspirations.

Apart from the sheer pleasure of forming words on a page, my initial inspirations came from trying to make sense of the world. I grew up in a pragmatic family; we were concerned with functioning, with providing food and shelter. As such there was little time for conversation or debates about issues, ideas, literature, science, and so on. I was constantly asking myself questions without getting answers, and writing was a way of mapping out responses to many things. From that grew the idea that characters with different points of view can contest these in a story or a play, or that a poem can open up perspectives and illuminate insights.

~On the Source of Ideas.

I visit as many places as I can and try to meet people from different walks of life. I enjoy representing diversity in all its forms. Sometimes newspaper articles can present an unusual story that can spark a series of connecting thoughts that will lead to a new theme or narrative. If there is a blank page in front of me and no inspiration, I will kick start an idea by noting down two or three “triggers” and find a way to connect them.

~On the Making of a Good Story.

Without meaning to be facetious – a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story in any form has to have a structure that enables it to have momentum, something that keeps the reader/audience/viewer engaged both intellectually and emotionally and wanting to know “what happens next?” This doesn’t mean it has to be fast-paced or a complex guessing game, rather that it provokes curiosity. I try to create drama by presenting opposing viewpoints or personality types through characters in the narrative.

~On Realistic Creative Writing.

Sometimes my writing is realistic, sometimes not. I like absurdist theatre and expressionistic, experiential poetry as well as realism in both poems and plays. Also in my writing I include male characters and people older than myself, and although I know both men and seniors, I don’t “write” these individuals per se. I look for traits, physical characteristics, language use, etc. and mould a composite character from several sources. Although I have to admit, I sometimes put in one or two of my own personal observations about life and attribute these to one of my characters – not telling which though.

~Any Surprises in Writing?

How much I love the joy of editing and redrafting! There is something about crafting a piece of writing that thrills me. The initial inspiration often happens in an unstructured almost trance-like state and in an intense burst of energy, often sustained over a few hours, which can be exhausting. However, the process that follows where ideas are teased out, words rehearsed and rearranged, when characters become “friends” or antagonists, and the writing is shaped on the page, for me this moment is perhaps similar to when a sculptor sees the statue emerging from the raw marble rock.

~What is Your Favorite Writing?

I wrote a performance poem about going to bed with a poem. I love performing this because it makes people laugh even though the writing is not particularly sophisticated. As for my favorite writing of all – I can’t say, that’s too hard.

I’ve never regretted writing anything, or hated anything as I see all writing as a process towards better writing. However, I have cringed at some of my earlier works when through experience I can see their mistakes and shortcomings.

~On the Writer’s Life.

My habit is to write for three hours in the morning if it is new work. Editing and redrafting can happen throughout the day. I prefer to write in blocks of days or weeks rather than a little each day. For longer works I need to hold it in my mind, so an extended time where there are no (or limited) meetings, social engagements etc. works best for me.

~Influential Books and Authors Include.

I read a lot of non-fiction, especially books about the natural world and the environment or current ideas in philosophy (for a general reader, that is). I buy and read books by many local West Australian (WA) poets, such as John Kinsella, Shane McCauley, Dennis Haskell, Kevin Gillam, Lucy Dougan, and many more. I enjoy the plays of Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, John Patrick Shanley, along with Shakespeare and some Jacobean drama. My guide and the touchstone I keep returning to is Shakespeare, even if this may be considered a cliché. He combines both poetry and drama, writes fascinating characters with complex interior lives, tells a good story and uses language imaginatively and beautifully.

~Now Reading?

I’m re-reading Gogol’s play The Government Inspector, reading Dennis Haskell’s latest poetry collection Acts of Defiance, and the non-fiction book by Guy Brown The Living End: the future of death aging and immortality. Two poets have recently caught my interest: T. Zachary Cotler who recently visited Perth and read an amazing poem titled Supplice, and local WA poet Mags Webster whose first collection is titled The Weather of Tongues published by Sunline Press.

~Long-term and Current projects.

I have had a long-standing interest with science (I have a Bachelor of Science degree), but in particular, with how science intersects with public discourse through the arts. I’m developing several ideas around aspects of science and technology at present and will bring my fascination with science and its achievements, and the place of science and the scientist in society, into both my playwriting and poetry. I’ve completed a play titled Staring at the Sun that fictionalizes and explores the ethics around the research of bio-medically-induced immortality and I’m looking for production opportunities. I’m slowly adding to and crafting poems for my second collection, which I anticipate will be ready for publication soon, alongside responding to a collection of photographs of the Athabasca glacier for an art and text publication.

Next year I’m hoping to collaborate on a script about the life of an important nineteenth century female natural historian.

~On getting started in drama.

I love standing up in front of a group of people and pretending to be someone else. I first performed in my friend’s garage at the age of five in front of our parents, and that was it – I was hooked! From then I embraced any opportunity to perform and joined a youth theatre group in Canterbury, England as a teenager. At university I joined the Drama Society, but being an actor was seen as too risky a profession by my family. So I “got a proper job” and rehearsed to perform in fringe shows in London during evenings and weekends. After a few years I decided I had to become a professional performer and re-trained as an actor. Since then I’ve been working in theatre, film, TV, radio, voiceover, etc. as well as directing and writing plays.

~Inspirational Drama Texts.

AS I mentioned before, Under Milk Wood was a magical play to be part of as a teenager with its rich cast of characters and poetic language. I enjoyed the story-telling in works like She Stoops to Conquer and The Importance of Being Earnest, which we performed at school. It was only after I had matured as a person and performed in some of his plays, that I really began to appreciate Shakespeare.

~Motivation to Act.

The love of performing will always be there. However, the roles for women, especially those over forty, are diminishing, both in number and in complexity and interest. My focus has been more on writing for performance, but I hope there will be opportunities to continue practicing my craft as a performer. Like any arts practice it must be engaged with regularly to keep skills fresh and the mind and body in shape.

~Honing Acting Skills.

Performance poetry is a small way to keep my skills honed. If there is no production opportunity, I try to challenge myself through participating in workshops. I recently attended a Magdelena Festival workshop in Perth with the amazing Australian performer, Margaret Cameron. I also perform in play readings when I can, which means I can “perform” several characters in a short time – a little like an acting boot-camp, I suppose. Reading lots of plays informs both my understanding of current trends in drama and my playwriting. 

~Acting and Roles.

I’m told my voice and the way I speak text are good qualities, plus I’m also told I have a “good stage presence.” Both of these are hard for me to judge as I live with my voice every day, and I can’t see myself perform. The last character is usually the all-time favourite! In this case it was the role of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in John Aitken’s play The Ships Pass Quietly. This character wonderfully blended drama with poetry, and she stretched my emotional range. Akhmatova’s story is one of courage and resilience in the face of excruciating oppression.

Image and Text Copyright c.2011 by Vivienne Glance - All Rights Reserved