stymie: a journal of sport & literature

Gary Percesepe: Why I Write

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 28 May 2012 15:39:00 +0000

I’ve written six books, two of them novels. I’m at work on a seventh. But you won’t find copies of them laying around my house.

I guess that’s because they are not that important to me. What else can I say? I mean, I wrote them, I worked hard on them. They meant something to me at the time, but they don’t mean the same thing to me now. Things change. The books remain the same, but I’ve changed in relation to them.

So if you ask me, why do I write, if I am to answer honestly (writers are notorious liars, especially when asked about writing) I have to say that it is not about making a book, and it is certainly not about publication.

So what is it?

I don't really know. But I think it is has something to do with the sound of that funny little IBM Selectric ball striking the page in the 70s and 80s, or earlier, those blue spiral notebooks I filled in high school with my spidery handwriting. My cursive was nearly illegible, so I printed my letters in a tiny script that I cannot read now without glasses. Maybe I couldn’t afford many notebooks in those days, or maybe I wrote small because I knew my ideas were small, and I didn’t want anyone to see them? Or these days, maybe it is about the magic cursor floating, moving with me, accompanying me, left to right, and deeper down the lighted screen of my laptop.

And I’m aware that this thing I do, writing, is not about me at all.

I’m just a way for the work to get itself written.

There are times when I am bored, writing. Frequently, I write with little hope. On my best days, I write through it. I’ve written, or been written through, things I never set out to write. Nevertheless, it arrives. I’d be a liar if I said I knew how.

My marriage is gone. The kids, too, in different cities. One day, you just look around, and it's gone, all of it.

So increasingly, I write these things because these are the things that I remember. And I want them back. At the same time, I guess I like the idea of them moving forward, into someone else's life. A reader, sure. OK, why not. But I feel that I am less and less a part of the picture. Just in the draft of thought, as Heidegger put it.

Maybe writing is that thing you do when you are yourself under erasure. You are the least of it, that's for sure.

Writing is a negative capability, for me. As in last night, at my friend Kate’s house, looking out at an empty field while children played at a birthday party. In the field, I am the absence of field.

For months now, for over a year, really, I have found myself saying repeatedly, I don't care. The list of things I do not care about is growing, rapidly. Opinions. Pronouncements. Newscasts. The puffed chest. Television. Academic conferences. Fiction & poetry readings. Social media. Food. Politics. New York City, my home. I don't care. It is in the emptying that I am finding happiness, in the daily letting go, of everything except the children. Writing, then, becomes the act of receiving, transmitting, what is happening without me.

Gary Percesepe is Associate Editor at BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), and a Contributor at The Nervous Breakdown. A former assistant fiction editor at Antioch Review, his fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews have been published at Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Mississippi Review, The Millions, PANK, Westchester Review, TNB, and other places. He is the author of four books in philosophy, including Future(s) of Philosophy: The Marginal Thinking of Jacques Derrida. He just completed his second novel, Leaving Telluride, set in Telluride, Colorado. This piece on writing is from his memoir-in-progress.

New Fiction: Davis Field

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:26:00 +0000

Title: Davis Field

Author: Andrew Keating

Category: Fiction

He was a short, quick-gloved second baseman, like his father. No coach, or player, or parent would ever describe his movements as graceful, or smooth, or claim that he made anything he did on the field look easy.
Three-tenths of a second separated a winner from a loser in this game, and Danny Leopold could pick a freshly-fielded ball out of his glove and flip it, with a rough pop of the wrist, into the first baseman’s mitt with the finest precision. It was a dance of balance and counterbalance, of momentum, of guesswork and footwork. There were twenty-seven outs that needed to be made, and as a middle-infielder Danny could expect the responsibility of at least nine.
     Danny loved this field, knew it. He had all but examined the individual grains of sand in the infield dirt. He knew exactly how many steps back from the grass, or how many steps onto it, he needed to be for all situations. The smell of grass in spring stayed with Danny year-round, though the winters were long and cut into training season. Nothing kept him from the game, not even when the tarps were rolled out over the field and the coaches were busy with fall sports or their day jobs. Danny and his friend Jeff had dug out patches of dirt in corners of each of their back yards and would host each other in one-on-one home and away games when there wasn’t yet a team to practice with. But these fields, which were loosely defined by items such as a rusty pipe for home plate, or a tree at first, or the corner of a garage for third, and no apparent outfield, they were not Davis Field.
     And now there were talks that his field would be taken away.
     “They can’t cut baseball altogether,” Jeff said, pitching tennis balls into the net between home plate and his house. Danny sat on a picnic table that had been dragged to the edge of the driveway, spinning a baseball in his palm, occasionally closing his fingers over the seams as if to throw. “The game’s been around this town too long, you know.”
     “Yeah,” said Danny. “Yeah, I know.”
     “Has your dad said anything about it?”
     Danny looked into the kitchen window and saw his father sitting at the table with a newspaper in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other. “Nothing really. I’ve tried to talk to him about it a couple times, but all he says is ‘Oh, they’ll find somewhere for you to play.’” Jeff jogged over to the net and started tossing tennis balls back to the rubber in the middle of the yard. Danny watched him but didn’t offer to help. “Thing I don’t understand is why they would dig into Davis. We’ve been on that field forever.”
     “Your dad played on that field,” Jeff said. “My dad too. Hey, grab a bat, see how my sinker is dropping.”
     Danny laughed. “You know you can’t throw a sinker with tennis balls. No stitches.”
     “Still, it’s not like you can hit it.”
     Danny looked back inside and his father was still reading. They tried to play when nobody else was home. It was a lot easier than explaining why tennis balls kept banging against the neighbors’ houses and cars. Danny grabbed a wooden bat that was leaning against the garage. He preferred swinging the lumber instead of the lighter, faster aluminum. Wood meant weight in his hands, stability, and the thock sound that rose up every time he killed a tennis ball was like a good and slow drum beat. He especially liked hitting leather and cork, because when he struck, he could feel a jolt, like electricity, rise up through the bat and into his arms. He felt more powerful with a wooden bat. And, after all, it was what the pros used.
     He whiffed at the first few balls thrown his way. He was swinging at everything. Nobody was counting. He connected for a few grounders, a line drive back to Jeff, and one long fly ball into the next yard, before he heard the screen door close. Danny turned to see his father leaning on the rail of the back steps.
     “Don’t stop for me,” his father said.
     But Jeff didn’t throw. “Hey, Mr. Leopold,” he said. “Why don’t you step in?”
     Daniel Leopold, Sr., laughed. “That may be my bat, but I haven’t used it in a long time.” Danny held the bat out toward his father, gripping it by the barrel. The old man came down the last two steps and took it from him, lifted it to his shoulder, squared his feet where he stood and took a few slow swings. It looked natural, as if he woke up every morning and practiced this motion before putting on his suit.
     Danny had never seen his father play; not even so much as a company softball game. The name Leopold was well known in Armitage, and it was known for baseball. Of course, no Leopold ever made it pro, but Danny’s father, and his uncle Mel had once lit up Davis Field for what was arguably the best high school baseball team in Armitage history. They won county that year, and almost took state. Danny’s grandfather was the coach back then, and had once played ball for Armitage himself to some recognition. This was the family tradition, if there was one.
     Jeff told Danny to keep count. “I just want to make sure your old man doesn’t try to say I didn’t strike him out.” Danny laughed, but his father held the bat up, pointed at Jeff and tightened his jaw.
“Don’t call me ‘old man’ again,” he said. “Or else I’m gonna hit you square in your teeth with a line drive.” Danny’s father smiled and squared his feet, squared his shoulders, and his elbow. The bat was steady in his grip. His stance was picturesque, Danny thought, he was steady as a statue and despite his height, he appeared to tower over the makeshift home plate.
     His father hit balls like he was swatting flies. It didn’t matter how high, low, or out of the strike zone Jeff threw it. Jeff said he was just about done, but Danny’s father insisted on two more balls. He let the first one go by him and Jeff gave him lip about it; so Daniel, Sr., belted the last ball over his head in a sharp line drive that flew over the fence and smacked against their neighbor’s house. Danny’s father’s eyes widened and he ducked down as if hiding behind an invisible object. He suppressed a laugh behind his arm and hurried, bent down, alongside his son, around to the front yard, where he sat down on the front steps and laughed. Danny and Jeff stood over him, laughing as well.
     “Mr. Leopold,” Jeff said.
     “What?”
     “I’m sorry for calling you an old man.”
     After it got dark, Danny turned on the floodlight attached to the garage, and he and his father went out to pick up the stray tennis balls. After gathering everything from their own yard, they walked around the block to gain access to the neighbor’s yard.
     “I heard you and Jeff talking about the baseball team,” his father started while they walked. “You know they won’t end the program, right?”
     Danny said, “Yeah. It doesn’t make sense to shut down the team. Without baseball, there isn’t much else we’ve got.”
     “And you’re good.”
     “Do you think that matters?” Danny asked. “They’re talking about shutting down Davis Field. They’re going to build the new science center over it. I mean, I thought the school system didn’t have any money, but they get however much they need to plow into the baseball field.”
     “They won’t take away Davis,” his father said. “Too many banners hang in the gymnasium, too many plaques in the halls, too many former ballplayers whose kids play ball on that field.”
     “Maybe you should do something,” Danny said.
     “What would you have me do?”
     “I don’t know. Maybe you could speak to the school board or something. Tell them to build on the other side of the school.”
     They were at their neighbor’s house and the porch light was out. They jogged quietly to the driveway, walking along the side of the building. The only light he saw in front of him was his own garage’s floodlight over the fence, and the small beams of light that snuck through the spaces between pickets.
     “Shouldn’t you be yelling at me for doing this?” Danny asked his father in a whisper.
     “Well, maybe if you had actually hit them out here.”
     “What’s that supposed to mean?”
     “You drop your elbow before you swing,” his father said, “Lose all your power.” Danny knew his father was posing in a batting stance, trying to show him the proper way to swing a bat; but he couldn’t really see him through the dark.
     They threw the last of the tennis balls back into a bucket and walked back around the block. “Do you ever miss playing ball?” Danny asked.
     “Well I like watching you play.”
     He knew his father was eluding the question. “But you were good. I’ve seen the pictures; and people still talk about you sometimes at school. You know it’s been 25 years since your team won county and went to the state tournament? People don’t forget that kind of stuff around here.”
     “Yeah, we were pretty good, and I loved playing,” his father said. “But I had to put those days behind me. We all did. None of us went pro. Me, your uncle Mel, we got trophies and plaques, but there’s a lot more to life than just baseball.” He stopped. They were only a few yards from their house. He looked at his son and said, “Look Danny, you play this game now like it’s the most important thing in the world to you – because it is. It should be. Love this game and don’t think about anything else if you don’t want to. At the end of this year, you’ll be going off to college and maybe you’ll play baseball there. But maybe you won’t, and that’s okay too. But after baseball, that’s life.” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder for a moment, then he handed Danny the bucket and went inside.

Talks of the school’s expansion intensified through winter, and soon spring was right around the corner. The principal had even placed a model outside her office of what the school would look like with the new science center expansion. Pictures of blueprints and computerized images of what it would look like after it was built, decorated and landscaped hung on the walls leading to the locker rooms. They reminded Danny of headstones; they marked the death of Davis Field and Armitage High baseball.
     Danny was a junior, a team captain, that year. The rumors weren’t helping him deal with the new responsibility. The other guys, like Danny, were all second or third generation players on the team. He knew that none of them wanted to be the end of a tradition. He wondered what other sports he could play, if any, or if there were decent enough American Legion squads, or leagues he could play in outside of school. But none of that would get him back on Davis Field.
     “I still can’t believe they are doing this,” Jeff said one day, as the two of them stood in front of a 3-D model of the new wing that was displayed outside the locker rooms. Jeff was a senior, and this time next year, he’d be training for college ball. But Danny knew that it wasn’t a matter of where Jeff would play next season. To Jeff, tearing down Davis Field was like tearing down his childhood home.
As they went through weightlifting circuit, Danny and Jeff put together a list of players whose parents had been on the team. How many guys had brothers hoping to start up the next season? How many families would be affected by the closing of the baseball program? Neither truly believed that would be the end result.
     That night, he went home with a plan. He invited Jeff over for dinner and brought up the closing of Davis Field right away. “Maybe you could get some of the alumni together,” he said to his father. “You and Uncle Mel could petition the school for the sake of tradition; say the science center could go somewhere else.”
     “Son, I’ve seen the plans for the new wing at the school,” his father said, “And I think it’s a good thing.”
     Jeff said, “But, Mr. Leopold…”
     “Hold on. Let me finish. That doesn’t mean I want them to dig up Davis. Your uncle and I lived on that field, much like the two of you do now. We didn’t have a backyard, so we’d go out to Davis almost every day to run drills.”
     “I think it’s a shame they can’t just find a way to make everyone happy,” Danny’s mother said.
     “Not everybody can be happy,” his father said. “Sometimes you have to give up, move on.” He went back to eating. Danny and Jeff finished dinner silently and Jeff went home immediately afterward.

The team started the season with a nine-game winning streak. The stands around Davis Field were filled for each game, and after they beat their local rivals, the fans began to bring their own chairs or blankets for extra seating. Every couple of games, Danny spotted his father standing behind the fence a few yards away from the bleachers where his mother sat. He stood with Uncle Mel and they watched the game together. Between innings, they’d toss a baseball back and forth, barehanded, and he wished he knew what they were talking about. Part of Danny believed that they talked like he and Jeff did, that even though they were much older and neither had played any baseball in over two decades, maybe they still dreamed of playing.
     When the team was 12-3, they received word that the field was going to be closed immediately after the season ended. Construction would begin during the summer break.
     They were in the locker room, coach standing in front of three assistance, all with their heads bowed as though they were at a wake. It was as if they were standing before an open casket and their closest friend since childhood lay inside. It was an hour before an afternoon game when they found out, a Saturday.
     Danny was a captain; Jeff was too. They looked to each other, both hoping the other had an idea of how to motivate the team to victory. The team walked through the tunnel from the locker room to the field-house door, then jogged slowly to the dugout, the pitcher and catcher to the bullpen to warm up. During the game, Danny could see that Jeff’s sinker wasn’t dropping, his fastball didn’t have its usual pop. Almost every batter made contact. When the ball came Danny’s way, it felt wet and slippery. He nearly overthrew the first basemen on multiple occasions, two errors on the day. At the plate was not much better. He couldn’t remember anything about the pitcher he was facing and swung at balls he would never otherwise care for. Danny left the field at the end of the ninth with a groundout, a fielder’s choice and two strikeouts.
     After the game, Jeff sat next to Danny in the home team dugout at Davis Field. The sun was just starting to set over the mountains that lined the horizon and the tarp covering the infield was a bright orange reflection of the sky, like a pool of still water in the middle of the dark grass. They weren’t going to run drills, they had already changed into jeans and sweatshirts. It wasn’t the last time either of them would sit in the dugout, but it felt that way. The pair of them sat on the pine, kicking dirt with their sneakers, and watching the darkness envelop the field, neither of them thinking about where they would play the next spring. Instead, they listened for the soft clanging of aluminum striking leather far off in the distance.

Andrew Keating, an avid baseball lover, was born and raised in New England. He now resides in Maryland, where he works in public relations. He attended Wagner College, holds an MBA from Johnson & Wales University, and is a 2012 graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts at University of Baltimore. Andrew is the co-founding editor of Cobalt Review.

Lauren Becker: 21 Reasons Why I Write

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:19:00 +0000

1. I don’t know how to knit and it gives me something to do with my hands besides using them to eat.

2. It gets me out of my head.

3. It connects me to other people.

4. It names me. I didn’t have that before.

5. It is messy and beautiful, which is a totally great combination.

6. I need to say things.

7. I hate my job.

8. I’m not that good at anything else.

9. I want to.

10. It keeps me focused.

11. Even if nobody else reads it, I made something.

12. I grew up saying almost nothing and it gives me a way to say things.

13. Words read you back to yourself.

14. A few people have told me stuff I’ve written has made them feel less alone. Like someone gets them. We all want that.

15. It gives me a place for my anger and sadness and for my wishes.

16. Sometimes something really funny comes out.

17. On occasion, it forces me to take a compliment, and I hate those.

18. It makes me part of something bigger.

19. It saves my life over and over.

20. It makes me more honest.

21. It pays so well.

Lauren Becker is editor of Corium Magazine. She has a crooked nose and decent hair, given ideal weather conditions. Her work has been published in some nice places. She has never been nominated for a Pushcart. Her collection of short fiction, Things About Me and You, is included in the anthology Shut Up/Look Pretty (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2012).

New Fiction: A Family Portrait

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Sun, 06 May 2012 23:51:00 +0000

Title: A Family Portrait

Author: Oliver Lee Bateman

Category: Fiction

On a lonely Christmas Eve in the Anytown suburbs, Eddy Jacks, Jr. and Eddy Jacks, Sr sat down to watch VHS footage of the elder Jacks’ bloodiest wrestling matches.
“Son, there aren’t set-tos like this anymore,” said the original and greater of the Eddy Jackses. “You ever see a 400-pound man do a dropkick like that?”

The imitation Eddy Jacks, who had failed to equal the legendary feats performed by his predecessor, shook his head. “Well, other than you, no.”

“Your old man had the grace of a ballet dancer and the balance of a sumo wrestler,” continued the original.

On the television screen, between the hazy lines created by unadjusted tracking on the VCR, a younger version of the original used his head to drive a series of nails into a two-by-four.

“They loved that gimmick in the Great Lakes territory. Madman Jacks, they called me,” said the original. “God, those were the days. You remember that, boy? Me and you against the whole wide world.”

The imitation Eddy Jacks would never forget the original Jacks’ stint in that federation. The original Jacks was getting a divorce from his third wife and needed a new outlet for his rage. On those nights when he wasn’t at an auditorium delivering dropkicks and using his head to drive nails into a board, he would while away the lonely hours by whaling on his son.

“Yeah, you were pretty great, Dad,” agreed the imitation. “You were really something.”

They stayed together like that until Christmas Eve became Christmas Day, one studying the man he used to be and the other studying the man he never was. Were they still in love, this father and son? Yes, yes—after a fashion.

Oliver Lee Bateman is currently an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. Starting next August, he will begin serving as Assistant Professor of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He and his good friend Erik Hinton co-curate the Moustache Club of America, an online literary magazine that has published over 220 essays and short stories. He is a columnist for The Good Men Project and The Pitt News, and a regular contributor to Stymie.

Stephen Graham Jones: Why I Write

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:21:00 +0000

I write because I can’t draw. I write because I can’t cut to the basket slick enough to go pro. I write because I eat too many sixlets and drink too much tea and my fingers get all jittery, and I have to put them somewhere.

I write because, for a few pages at a time, I can make the world make sense. I write so I don’t end up trolling distant neighborhoods for pets. Not to pet. And not only pets. I write because a lot of what I read disappoints me. I write because a lot of what I read intimidates me. I write because I’m jealous. I write because I’ll drive my wife out of the house if I have to follow her around, tell her all the stories in my head. I write because I think sometimes that I know the truth. Not to say it, but how it feels. And I can sometimes glance off that if I’m not paying too much attention. I write because there’s nothing more honest that I can think of. I write because it’s not work. I write because I want more toys. I write because I don’t know what to say to people I know and love in prison. But I can send them books. I write because I love rollercoasters. I don’t write because I want to live forever. I write because I want to live now. I write because a teacher once read one of my pages, looked at me like maybe. I write because all the rest of the teachers didn’t even look at my pages before deciding about me. I write for revenge. I write because books are legal, and other things aren’t. I write because I can’t sing like Bonnie Tyler. I write because writing matters. I write because if I don’t, I get trapped counting and cutting and cutting and counting. I write because when I’m not writing, I go out and do things that land me in the emergency room. Because I want the world to feel like it should. Like it does on the page. I write because I can’t learn to play harmonica. I write because books have saved my life. I write because I’m petty. I write because lying is the best thing ever. I write because I hate to be lied to. I write because I want to run across the caliche, but that’s too secret to tell. Too terrible. Too almost wonderful. I write because I sometimes feel like I have too many secrets, too many almosts. I write because I don’t know what to do at dinner parties other than go inside my head, where it’s safe. I write because I’ve always been standing in the corner, even when I’m not. I write to scare people. I write to make people laugh. I write to let people cry. I write to hide. I write to see what I’m thinking. I write because the stories are coming out one way or another. I write because once upon a time I read the exact perfect book, and it changed me forever. I write because fiction is magic. You can reach across centuries to another person with it. Across galaxies. I write because my kids might not ever really know me the right way if I don’t. I write because I’m always afraid I’m about to die, because I always wake expecting to die and trying to do jittery little finger combinations to ward it off. I write because special effects are easy, in prose. Provided you’ve got those effects in your head. I write because I might luck on to something nobody else has ever even tried before. I write because I want so badly to just go the party, please. As a person. I write because if I don’t, then I can’t think of what else to try to do. People always ask me this, why I write. And it never makes the right kind of sense, that question. So I just stand there kind of squinting, looking around for when I can leave. Then they ask what inspires me. This makes a bit more sense, but not really. I’m never inspired. I’m always inspired. Inspire is the wrong word. I’m compelled. There are stories out there. There are stories in here. And I’m going as fast as I can, trying to trap them on a page in a way that they can still be alive. That we can still see them flying. That we can still hook on, go away with them. People sometimes write me and call me and tell me that this story I made up, I didn’t make it up at all. It’s their story. But it was mine too, for a little bit. I write because one life isn’t long enough. I write because I lost all my action figures long ago. The game went on, though. The game never stopped.

Stephen Graham Jones writes horror and science fiction and flash fiction and novels and movie reviews and whatever else he can wedge his pen into. So far, twelve novels, most recently Zombie Bake-Off and the Stoker finalist collection The Ones That Got Away. He's also got nearly a hundred and forty stories floating around, from Weird Tales to Alaska Quarterly Review, from Asimov's and Cemetery Dance to Literal Latte and Open City, and a lot of anthologies and best-of annuals and a few textbooks. Stephen's been an NEA fellow and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction. Next up from him is Growing Up Dead in Texas (June, MP Publishing) and Flushboy and Not For Nothing(Dzanc, both). And probably at least one or two more between those. Because why not.

New Fiction: A Perfect Drive

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:40:00 +0000

Title: A Perfect Drive

Author: Richard L. Gegick

Category: Fiction

Saturdays, Bradley hits balls at the Golden Bear Driving Range. He does this every week, trying to fix a serious hook he's developed.
The defect defines his game, and he can't imagine actually stepping out onto a course until it's fixed, but he can't fix it. This frustrates Bradley.

He pulls another ball out of the wire bucket and tees it up. Bradley watches the other golfers blow effortlessly through their shots while the late morning breeze carries their drives a few extra yards. White dots like hailstones litter the range. The red flags ripple. A lone employee rumbles along in a caged golf cart, sucking up balls like a vacuum cleaner.    There have been magazine articles. Plenty of those. Instructional books meant for dummies and pros alike. All the television shows on the Golf Channel, too, have done nothing for Bradley. Neither has the new 400 dollar driver he put on his credit card a month ago without telling his wife, Connie. Bradley stands behind the ball and says a Hail Mary.

Golf, so the experts say, is 90 percent mental. The golfer's mind must be focused and clear of all distractions. Every article and book implores the golfer to visualize the shot before taking it. This is the key. Remain confident in the shot you want, and the shot will come. Wish in one hand, shit in the other, Bradley thinks. He does it anyway. In his mind's eye, Bradley sees the white ball exploding off his oversized club-head. While standing behind the ball with his eyes shut his fantasy shot carries straight and long. Not too high, and not too low. It lands softly with a bounce and rolls ten more yards and stops in front of the 300 yard marker.

Bradley opens his eyes. He's also learned that golfers apparently perform best when they maintain a strict rhythm. He saw this on an episode of Playing Lessons from the Pros featuring Vijay Singh. Singh said that to keep in rhythm, a golfer should count off his shots like a jazz musician counting off a song. One, the address. Two, the backswing. Three, the follow-through.

One. Two. Three.

Contact. The ball sails into the horizon, as Bradley holds the position of his follow-through, his club shaft parallel to the ground behind his head and over his shoulders. The ball sails straight. For a moment, an eye-blink, a weight lifts off Bradley as the trajectory of the shot is a straight line. And in a fraction of a second, the ball twists violently to the left and lands at least a football field away in that direction.

He cannot believe this. Just cannot process. Bradley heaves the 400 dollar driver over his head and smashes it against the metal divider in front of him. The club head breaks from the shaft and sputters into the grass while the other golfers stop and watch Bradley's explosion. He kicks over the bucket of balls and sends them clicking along the pavement and walks to the pro shop gripping the headless shaft while the other golfers scatter to gather his range balls like children gathering candy at a parade.

How does something so bad come from something so good? This is the question Bradley has no answer for. His game was great. His game is shit. He's had dips before. A bad drive here, a three-putt there. Those were problems he could fix, but this hook is something different and it just showed up out of nowhere.

Bradley drives around for awhile, aimlessly letting his hand dangle out the window. He just doesn't feel like going home and the sun is shining. People are out doing things they do on the weekends, cutting grass and washing cars. Bradley just needs to cool down.

At home, Bradley cuts the engine and sees his wife, Connie, working a spade into the lawn. It's not big, just a patch of grass in front of the house about ten feet long and four feet deep. But he waters it every night at dusk and seeds it every spring. A lawn as plush and green as Augusta National is what he desires. Bradley played Augusta once. The grass was so thick. Connie turns up a chunk of sod in front of the porch. She's cutting the lawn up like a public course.

"Connie?" Bradley says. He opens his trunk and pulls his bag out. A few houses down a football thuds off a car hood as kids laugh. "What the hell are you doing to my yard, Con?"

Connie cuts the spade deeper and exposes the concrete under the porch.

"Planting gardenia," Connie says. Sweat rings her t-shirt and stains the blue bandanna she wears around her head. "Where were you all this time?"

"Gardenias?" Bradley says. He hitches his bag on his shoulder. "They don't have those on Augusta. You can't plant those here."

The neighbor across the street in the rental house comes out with a weed whacker and starts it up. Bradley doesn't know his name. People move in and out so quickly, but Bradley can't stand to watch this poor schmuck butcher his lawn with that weed whacker.

"This is Trafford," Connie says over the buzzing whacker. "It ain't Augusta."

"No it isn't," Bradley says, though Connie didn't hear him. He carries his clubs into the house.

Years ago, Bradley was a scratch player. His booming drive, subtle iron play, and fiercely soft short game destroyed every course in the area. Friends told him he should try to qualify for the U.S. Open, but he was happy enough hustling hot-shot club pros out of their paychecks. God, his game was so complete he could fake the bad play he can't fix now with precision. He'd purposely throw holes to sucker guys in to feeling comfortable taking a money game. Easy money, they'd think. When Bradley turned his game on, sticking long iron shots and sinking birdie puts, those guys didn't stand a chance.

In those days, Bradley saved every scorecard. Every birdie and par was marked and filed away in a cardboard box. These scorecards could unlock the mystery of when his game started to turn, there could be a pattern. So after Bradley drops his clubs off on the back porch, he pours himself a stiff drink and wades down into the basement among all the junk and boxes of good china they haven't used in years.

The boxes are stacked along the wall, under the glass block window. Bradley sets his drink on the wood paneled bar. The shelves underneath are lined with dust-coated tumblers, martini glasses, and sticky liquor bottles. He carries the boxes across the basement, one by one, and sorts through them. Old clothes. Decades old tax returns. The de-humidifier rattles, its bucket overflows and a stream of water pools into a crevice along the concrete floor.

Connie comes down the steps carrying the spade. They keep the garden equipment in the small room next to the water heater. She washes her hands in the wash-tub while Bradley digs through the dank boxes of old photographs.

"What are you doing?" she says. She takes a sip of Bradley's drink and leans against the bar.

"Looking for something," Bradley says. He claps his hands and sends a flourish of dust mites dancing in the florescent light.

"What are you looking for?" Connie says. She reclines on their old loveseat, the one they moved down the stairs years ago after they bought the couch. She lets her feet hang over the arm and her sandals dangle off her toes. The water from the overflowing dehumidifier pools in front of the loveseat and Connie dips her fingertips in the tepid water.

It's not that they don't love one another. They do. It's just that their life has taken on an easy beat after all the years. Every Sunday they go out to dinner at the Olive Garden. Bradley orders the chicken parmigiana, Connie orders the mushroom stuffed ravioli. They each drink two gin and tonics and come home to watch 60 Minutes. After that, they have sex. Connie wears her special lacy panties, and they go through the same routine of positions and the same dirty dialogue until Bradley climaxes and goes limp. Connie goes into the bathroom and cleans herself off while Bradley pours two nightcaps that they'll drink in bed.

"I'm looking for my old scorecards," Bradley says. "Have you seen them?"

In one of the boxes, Bradley finds a dried flower, a white dogwood that he plucked off the 11th hole at Augusta almost twenty years ago. That day, his drives were straight and long with a slight fade. He felt holy when he rounded Amen Corner. As the Georgia sun battered his skin, he felt the spirit of all the greats in his bag. Bobby Jones, Sam Snead, Gene Sarazen. Every one of them a green jacket winner.

"I don't know," Connie says. She lets her sandals fall and smack onto the floor and shoves her bare feet between the cushions of the love seat. "I don't think I threw them out or anything. I haven't touched anything down here in awhile."

Bradley picks up the white dogwood flower. The petals are edged in brown and are paper thin. They crumble at his touch.

"They're not here, Connie," he says. A petal breaks loose and floats to the floor. "I didn't throw them out."

The joints in Connie's toes crack. The pool of dehumidifier water crests and floods the floor all the way to the rear wall.

"You're seriously accusing me of throwing them out?" Connie says. She stands, steps right into the stream of water and goes and flips the dehumidifier off. She carries the bucket past Bradley, leaving footprints along the concrete. She pours the water in the wash tub.

"I don't know," Bradley says. "Am I?"

Bradley still gently holds the white dogwood. It could fall apart with one slight squeeze. On the day he picked that flower, he didn't have to visualize anything. Things just came to him. But he did imagine some. That day he saw his last name in black letters atop the leader-board. He heard the gallery hush as he rounded Amen Corner. Saw grown men running like small children, trying to keep up with every one of his shots. He heard the cheering and the flashbulbs as they placed the green jacket on his shoulders. And he really believed that day, almost twenty years ago, that a perfect drive could take him anywhere he wanted to go.

Richard L. Gegick was born and raised in Trafford, PA. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and waits tables. He completed his MFA at Chatham University and his stories have appeared in Hot Metal Bridge and The Cleveland Review.

Oliver Lee Bateman: Why I Write

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:12:00 +0000

Back when I was a snot-nosed kid with a severe case of liplicker’s dermatitis, I wanted to be a pro wrestler. Twenty years later - and now sans the snotty nose and rose-red ring around my lips - I still do.

But I’ve had to settle for second place: I’m a lawyer; a Ph.D. candidate who recently landed the tenure-track job of his dreams; and the co-curator of the Moustache Club of America, a website that publishes “edgy” fiction and nonfiction.

It’s the last of these ventures that’s relevant here, since the good folks at Stymie Magazine—a wonderful, sports-themed literary project I endorse with the entirety of my heart—have asked me to write about why I write.

If forced to answer that question in public, I’d mumble some noncommittal response about doing it to pass the time. And I suppose that’s at least part of the answer, given how few meaningful hobbies I have. But it’s certainly not the largest or most significant part.

When my friend Ryan Powell and I founded the Moustache Club back in 2002, we lacked a clear sense of what we were doing. Ripping off better writers whom we admired, I suppose. Writing bad, derivative, and offensive fiction, no doubt. Type type typing away with nary a useful insight great or small to say, certainly.

Yet it was while I worked long into the night on the Moustache Club that I began to understand one particularly poignant passage in John Barth's short story collection Lost in Funhouse:

“He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator -- though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.”

For so much of my life, I found myself wishing I hadn't entered the funhouse. Nevertheless, as I collaborated with Ryan on the project that came to define all of our subsequent creative work, I realized that there wasn't much I could do about these confused feelings. Nothing, that is, except "construct funhouses for others," which in this case consisted of the corpus I was slowly but surely producing.

And wasn’t this business of “construct[ing] funhouses for others” not unlike wrestling a professional match in front of an audience? Wouldn’t these two wrestlers—who were up there acting out a soap opera-cum-passion play—also rather be in the crowd, sitting “among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed?”

Perhaps I’m taking that analogy a bit too far. At any rate, creative writing serves as a welcome break from my academic career, which I enjoy greatly but which can also prove frustrating and tiresome. And through my work at the MCoA and elsewhere, I’ve tried to do something that I don’t believe is done often enough: to render the lives of complete losers with sincerity, accuracy, and as much sympathy as I can muster.

When I'm not doing that, I write deliberately unsentimental-sounding–yet-secretly-very-sentimental pieces about wrestling for places like Stymie. That’s a heck of a lot of fun, too.

Oliver Lee Bateman is currently an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. Starting next August, he will begin serving as Assistant Professor of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He and his good friend Erik Hinton co-curate the Moustache Club of America, an online literary magazine that has published over 220 essays and short stories. He is a columnist for The Good Men Project and The Pitt News, and a regular contributor to Stymie.

New Fiction: Big Game

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:55:00 +0000

Title: Big Game

Author: Justin Thurman

Category: Fiction

A cabin means something to a guy like me. A fireplace. Antique firearms and crooked metal cookware. A simple bathroom with a simple toilet filled with murky well water that takes on a thin sheen of ice in the pre-dawn cold. I piss through that ice in a cabin. I hunt and huddle and miss my TV in a cabin. Almost every one of us—regardless of income and station—is equally barely adequate in a cabin.
What Fredrick called his cabin wasn’t a cabin. It was a private wilderness estate. A parking lot. A luxury shuttle. Horse stables. A ropes course. Ten separate furnished guest studios. The main lodge’s fixtures and comfort-assuring technologies were worth more than my place in the city. The room Big Game spoke in was a cylindrical chamber of exotic textiles, a room for extraterrestrial dignitaries to meet and decide the galaxy’s fate. He wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for me.

     There were about thirty of us at that year’s sales consultants retreat, all in tuxedos. Most attendees were the globetrotting ex-celebrities, politicos, and capitalist svengalis who motivated the world’s largest, most successful sales forces. They sat and sipped champagne. They were worth millions.
Shortcake and I were not worth millions. We were secretaries who managed the accounts lists and contacts for the sales consultants. We stood in the back with the catering staff. We were sober. We expected a cabin.

     Every year, the sales consultants retreat bedeviled our CEO and founder of Fredrick Sales Motivators, Peter Fredrick. He obsessed about the catering, the activities schedule, transportation, and managing the various SC rivalries and peccadilloes. But the major obstacle was securing a guest speaker for the opening night reception. Enter local legend and playoff hero, Big Game Damon Rayburn. He played outside linebacker for three dominating years at Division II Central Valley State, where Shortcake and I went to college. Cleveland drafted Big Game in the fifth round. He went on to play thirteen seasons for six different teams, mostly as a backup and scout team veteran. In the final game of his final season while the world watched, he made a pivotal play, at a singular moment, subbing for an injured starter.

     He retired to the middling metropolis of his alma mater to raise his three boys with his college sweetheart, Isobel. Here’s where I come in. Isobel and my wife, Leslie, were casual acquaintances when we were all in school. I didn’t meet Big Game until a couple’s night after the Rayburns moved back into town. That’s when Big Game and I discovered our connection: He wanted to demand extravagant speaking fees and I wanted to be better than a secretary. We could help each other, I told him. Be partners. Couple’s nights seldom present these kinds of coincidences and opportunities. Fredrick had never invited sales list administrators to the cabin. If the illusion of equity weren’t so important, Shortcake Dave Pierce would have been at home that night.

     And Big Game could put on a show. His mighty black hands gesticulated through the fourth quarter of his defining Sunday. His championship ring, the diamonds in his ears, the polished gold of his chain, they all sparkled as he stalked the rostrum in the center of the seated audience. A three-point lead. Third down and inches. A minute left and the Jets on the fifty-yard line. Ten more yards for a long field goal attempt. And Big Game busts the line and flattens the halfback on a toss play. Big Game fired his clenched fist skyward to demonstrate how he shook the pulling guard. One of the SC’s yelled, “You wrecked him, Big Game!” The other SCs hollered in approval.

     I shouted, “And Damon still holds the D-II record for tackles behind the line of scrimmage!”

     The room went quiet. Some of the SCs spun around in their seats to see where Shortcake Dave and I were standing. Fredrick looked back, too. Shortcake nudged my arm and shook his head. That I had to carpool forty-five minutes with Shortcake in a rented tux, our overnight effects piled into the useless back seats of his tiny Miata, this should have been enough humiliation.

     But I had been disruptive. I can see that now.

     The audience turned back to Big Game. He launched into his conclusion:

     “Somebody’s always pushing you back. You got to let him push sometimes. But it gets to a point that he wins or you win. That’s when you have to reach deep, find that extra gear, that voice that says ‘Hell’ and says ‘No.’ You need an inch? You been taking whole yards! And some of that’s my fault.

     “But this time? No more inches. I’m a hunt you down and take some inches back. My inches!
“You get those inches back. And he look at you and says, ‘Next time.’ And you look at him and say, ‘Maybe. But not today.’”

     The room erupted. I whistled and yelled. Shortcake Dave admiringly clapped. Fredrick looked pleased. Big Game navigated the room to continued applause, leaned down to look into each set of eyes and thank them for their attention.

     We tried to hobnob with the SCs after his talk. Most crowded around Big Game, though. He regaled them with locker-room lore, let a few slip their undersized fingers into his heavy, oversized ring. How could I have ever believed any of this could happen in a cabin?

* * *

Fredrick’s assistant, Jeremy, summoned us from the party. He led us to Fredrick’s upstairs office and instructed us to sit in two red leather chairs. Jeremy then stood at the right hand of Fredrick. His immense desk was centered in front of a solid glass wall that looked out over the room where the SCs drank and picked at hors devours. Proctor McClusky, one of Shortcake’s SCs, an ex-Broadway actor who left his teaching job at NYU after allegations from female students, slouched on a white leather couch behind us. He’d loosened his tie and collar, shed his cummerbund. His cuffs had lost their links and peeked from his jacket. I smelled brandy, cologne, and vomit.

     “Thank you again, Donny,” Fredrick said.

     “The pleasure is mine,” I said.

     “I remember that game,” McClusky said. “I like the fairy-tale version better. And he’s black. So we’re culturally sensitive.”

     “Fairy-tale version?” I asked.

     McClusky laughed. “Carry on, Pete.” He curled up with his back to us as if to go to sleep.

     Fredrick sighed. “I’m sorry to have to do this, but one of you needs to take Proctor back to the city.”

     “Gladly,” Shortcake said. He pulled it off without a note of despair or surprise.

     “Donny, you can drive the shuttle,” Fredrick said. “We reserved a suite at the Biltwater for Damon and his wife. We’ll need it back tomorrow by noon for an excursion. Dave can pick you up after you drop it off. I’ll reimburse him for the mileage and pad each of your bonuses.”

     “I’m an aggressive drunken egomaniac,” McClusky said, his back still to us. “And Rayburn can’t see the whores.”

     Fredrick and Jeremy forced a laugh. “Please don’t listen to him,” Fredrick said.

     “Be straight with these boys,” McClusky interrupted without moving. “I’m leaving tonight because Lance Timmerman is a conniving twat and I can’t stand to be around him. And I’ve nailed at least one whore every retreat since I added Boeing to my list. To know this is essential.”

     Timmerman and McClusky had quarreled for most of that year, primarily about one bird-dogging the other’s accounts. Timmerman was my SC, a retired gymnast whose pommel horse routine cost him a spot on the ‘84 Olympic team. I got an earful from him about once a week, mostly about McClusky.

     “Proctor, please,” Fredrick said.

     “No, Pete,” McClusky said. “Timmerman’s an amateur. He insulted me. I won’t stand for it.”
Fredrick continued, “In any event, Damon can’t see our top-flight consultants shedding their inhibitions or calling one another names.”

     “Sounds like a plan!” Shortcake said. He always said this.

     “There’s more,” Jeremy said.

     “Donny. We’ve expressed interest in bringing Damon on as an SC. The interest is mutual,” Fredrick said. I took a deep, muted breath and tried to contain my smile.

     “We cannot pull up the hook,” Fredrick continued. “And we cannot poison it.”

     McClusky sat up. “Wait. This doesn’t make any sense. Dave shouldn’t have to drive his car down the hill, back up the hill, and then down again. We’ll all go in the shuttle. Dave can drive up tomorrow and grab his car.”

     Fredrick shifted uncomfortably in his chair. If I could see that Fredrick was trying to keep McClusky away from Big Game, surely McClusky could see it. Now McClusky was going to force him to admit it. Because I had to deal with the SCs daily, I sympathized with Fredrick’s position. McClusky was a big earner and could take his accounts elsewhere. Fredrick had to be delicate, diplomatic. Sitting there, I tried to puzzle through some other solutions that would satisfy Fredrick’s many publics and purposes. I came up empty.

     “That’s more logistically feasible, I suppose,” Fredrick admitted.

     “Damn right it is,” McClusky said.

     “Can you handle that?” Fredrick asked me and Shortcake.

     “Of course we can handle it,” Shortcake said. “Keeps miles off the old Dave-mobile, too.”

     “We’ll figure it out,” I said.

     “And we’re stopping for a drink,” McClusky said. “I’m buying Big Game Rayburn a goddamn drink.”

     “Sounds like a plan!” Shortcake repeated.

* * *

A word about Shortcake’s nickname: About her favorite Strawberry Shortcake doll, my niece once told me, “She’s always happy and polite to her friends. Grumps get sad and run away from her deliciousness.”

     The characteristics that made me resent Shortcake Dave—his deliciousness, if you will—suited him to that night’s circumstances. Without discussion, I took the driver’s seat and he sat in the back with McClusky and Big Game. I hadn’t the gift to kiss two asses at once in the back of a moving vehicle.
About halfway between Fredrick’s and the city, McClusky spotted a dive with some welcoming neon.
     He and Shortcake harangued me to stop. Big Game didn’t appear to mind. “Isobel and the boys probably sawing logs,” he said. Big Game laughed, clasped hands with McClusky, and yanked him close for a ragged hug across the aisle of the shuttle.

     Despite this display of brotherhood, I couldn’t decipher how McClusky and Big Game were getting along. In the cold and empty parking lot, I pulled Shortcake aside while McClusky and Big Game entered the bar.

     “You worry too much,” Shortcake said.

     “Do I? Cultural sensitivity? Whores?”

     “Proctor is a professional.” Shortcake said. “He and Fredrick were just sparring back there. One drink and I’ll shepherd us back to the shuttle.”

     “So you admit he’s spoiling for a fight,” I said.

     “I’ll admit he likes to show people like you and me what’s what. But Rayburn’s different. He’s good for Peter and the company. Proctor sees that.”

     “He doesn’t care,” I said.

     “Of course he cares,” Shortcake said. “But be prepared to take full responsibility if I’m wrong.”

     “Me?” I said.

     “I’m here for optics.” Shortcake said. “You brought us this relationship. We’re running your play.”

     Shortcake was right. Unwritten but understood in our job descriptions was that discord among the big-money stars lived and died with us. And the nuclear option for resolving conflicts? Own them. The fault was always with us. Or an intern. Or the database. Or technical support. The only question was whose turn it was. Shortcake wasn’t going to cut in line. It was my turn. My play. My time.

* * *

The place smelled of old smoke, mold, and a single functioning lavatory. McClusky and Big Game sat at the bar on either side of a damaged regular. She and McClusky shared a cigarette. They hunched and stared at one another. Big Game entertained the bartender. The rest of the place was empty.

     McClusky called to the door, “David Pierce and Donald Boyd. Come over and meet Midge.” We walked over and introduced ourselves. Shortcake shook off the bartender after he delivered McClusky’s neat scotch and Big Game’s cranberry juice. I tried to signal for him to settle the tab.

     Midge wore a sleeveless flannel shirt, gray cotton stretch pants, and a pair of laceless, muddy tennis shoes. Her face sagged from her skull. She flashed a jagged smile and handed her cigarette to McClusky, surveyed our tuxedos. She asked, “You guys coming back from a wedding?”

     “More like a funeral,” McClusky said. For as drunk as I estimated him to be, he had a growling lucidity. He finished his scotch and called for another. “You see that gentleman behind you?” he said to Midge. “The big black fellow? He gave a speech tonight.”

     Midge turned to look at Big Game. “Is that right?”

     Big Game nodded and smiled.

     McClusky continued, “It is.” He smashed the cigarette in the overflowing ashtray next to Midge.
     “He had the whole room by the shorthairs.”

     Big Game said, “I don’t know about that. But everyone was real nice.”

     “What’d you talk about?” Midge asked.

     “That’s the best part,” McClusky said. “A real gladiator, this one.”

     “Midge doesn’t care about all this,” I said. “Let’s finish our drinks and get to bed.”

     McClusky winked at me. “What Big Game doesn’t say? What all the hero worshipers around these parts leave out? The Jets had one more down. And they imploded. Two procedural penalties and a fumble. Big Game didn’t take any inches. They gave them to him. With or without him, the world spins. That’s not so sexy, though, is it? That’s not as good as ‘irrelevant old man redeems himself in the final act of his miserable career.’ And now he needs a gig. So here we are.”

     Damon rose out of his stool. I stepped over and put my hand on his shoulder. Shortcake chuckled nervously and said, “Proctor is very competitive.”

     “These two clowns,” McClusky looked at me and Shortcake, “have no discernible value other than how gleefully they accept commands. They answer phones all day.”

     “What about you?” Midge asked.

     “Me? I inspire people. What do you want to sell, Midge?”

     The bartender delivered McClusky’s scotch.

     “I don’t know,” Midge said. She produced another cigarette and lit it. “Avon?”

     “Avon,” McClusky said. He took a judicious sip. “After a week with me, you’d be selling body butter and cold cream to coal miners.” He called over to Big Game, “What can you do?”

     “I could bust your head wide open,” Big Game snapped.

     “Bingo!” McClusky shouted to the empty bar. “You see, I am a vapor. Big Game is a battering ram.
     And because most people who need us are weak, white, and mediocre and feel they’ve achieved something simply by being in the same room with a millionaire, you’d probably get your dick wet.

     “But you can’t make people buy you. You have a history. You’re huge. You’re black. People like all that. But you don’t have the temperament to do what I do. You don’t have the restraint.”
Big Game scowled. Each fist clenched. My hand on his shoulder couldn’t contain him, only remind him that other people existed outside of his cloud of rage.

     McClusky gulped down the rest of his scotch. “And you certainly don’t have the brains.”
I took my right hand off Big Game. I swung it hard and slapped the side of McClusky’s head. He tipped back off his barstool. One of his legs kicked up and hit Midge in the mouth and nose, flicking her lit cigarette into her left eye. The back of McClusky’s head smashed against the corner of the barroom’s pool table.

     Midge cursed and screamed for water. The bartender revealed a baseball bat from under the bar.

     “Sweet Jesus,” Shortcake said and went down to help McClusky to his feet.

     McClusky felt the back of his head, came back with a palm full of blood, and wiped it down the front of his tuxedo shirt. He laughed. “You see Midge?” he said. “Weak, white, and mediocre.”

     Big Game shot off of his barstool for the door. The whole bar shook with each step. He turned to me and said, “You think I need that? You think that matters to anybody but you? Now what you going to do?”

     Own the crisis, I thought.

     “Weak, white, and mediocre,” McClusky said again and laughed. He reached into his tuxedo jacket and pulled out five hundred-dollar bills. He placed them on the bar in a thoughtful row, one by one, grabbed Midge’s hand, and staggered out to the parking lot.

* * *

McClusky held a bar rag to his head and emitted sporadic bursts of laughter the rest of the way into town. Midge kept a cold compress over her eye and nestled into him. Big Game kept silent the entire trip. We delivered him to the Biltwater’s VIP valet window framed in gold and tiny lights. He stormed through the glass double doors and didn’t look back.

     “I think you poisoned the hook,” McClusky said. He laughed and laughed.

     I left him, Midge, and Shortcake with the keys to the shuttle at the emergency room. McClusky was going to need stitches and Midge some antibiotic and an eyepatch. Shortcake could control the damage for the both of us. For the first and only time, I felt a kinship with him, that in another place we could have been—perhaps even should have been—better friends.

     “What about Midge?” Shortcake called to me as I walked out of the emergency room. “What’s the plan?”

     I couldn’t give him an answer. I asked him to drop off my luggage in the morning. I then stuffed my hands into my rented tuxedo and shuffled back home through the dark.

Justin Thurman teaches writing at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two children. He received his PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Ekleksographia, Petrichor Machine, and WOE: Writing on the Edge, among others.

Sara Lippmann: Why I Write, From Both Sides Now

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:11:00 +0000

My daughter is a fountain of questions. How do ladybugs pee? Why can’t we touch the sun? Will I still get to eat my favorite cereal when I am growed?

She is at that age where it is rarely quiet, where her hunger for knowledge outlasts her sweet tooth, where answers can only be swallowed in absolutes. Recently, she’s heart set on delineating what’s real from what is unreal, as in pirates and mermaids, Christopher Robin and Pooh, castles and dragons, Neverland.

Can a person lose a shadow? M asks, scooting home from nursery school. It is a sunny day in winter and our bodies stretching out beneath us are funhouse long. What do you think? I say. Between her helmet and our aggregate limbs we cast a cockroach onto the pavement. There is barely a beat before she wants to know if a shadow can be sewn on – you know, like Peter? Again I throw the question back for her to mull over as she peels colored foil and pops a chocolate from her pocket and takes off down the block, steering through life’s pressing mysteries, where do stars come from, who is Aiken Drum, what happens to your bones when you’re dead, screeching to a stop before the traffic light at the curb. “I think,” she says, facing me. “Your shadow goes everywhere with you.”

I write. I don’t write. I think about writing. I’ve written. Inconsistency may be the only constant to my practice. It’s always been like this, with few exceptions: the fury of grad school deadlines, the seemingly interminable sleepless haze of babydom. I work in fits and spurts, enjoying spells of productivity followed by unhappy droughts, as if that Biblical law about letting the ground lay fallow after a series of harvests applied to writing. (Only I’ve never enjoyed the bounty of a finished book.) Voices of self-doubt arise as the clock ticks: I am no longer young. Now or never, Bucko! (Yes, Bucko.) I am my own worst enemy. As a child I wrote feverishly only to trash journals, distrusting my words on the page as much as I cringed at the recorded sound of my inarticulate voice. Perhaps I’d detected the falseness inherent in any conscious effort to construct a diary; perhaps, rather, I merely feared it would be read. Not until high school did I learn to hack at it without self-censorship, without letting the pen waver or still, my wretched scrawl becoming less legible as it struck a vein, protecting me from myself, enshrouding new worlds in a haven of privacy.

I have a friend who is a yogi and she can pull her foot over her head, so when she speaks I listen. “Where there is darkness there is light” she says. (She also tells me to drink green smoothies.) The only way to achieve personal balance, she says, is to embrace both sides. “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is,” Carl Jung wrote. I don’t know much about Jung or psychology, but I do know that our shadows, as much as we may fear them, as much as they may not cast us in such glowing light – cannot be outrun. Deny them, and they boil and fester. When we deny our shadows we are denying an integral part of ourselves.

Perhaps that is why I write. My shadow may be ragged and snaggletoothed and at times buried beneath a heap of plastic ponies as I walk the tightrope of who I think I am vs. who I’d like to be, who I may project and who I am, but it remains as inextricable to my core as motherhood. My best shot at equilibrium is when I’m actively incorporating the two. Still, it’s a daily struggle. How to pluck oneself from the loom of narrative when it’s time to play Chutes & Ladders? More, what would my children think? Questions like these and I lose footing, fall into the well of futility, I give up.

It has been a dull, dry winter. A fallow season. Forget about the book I’ve failed to deliver and take this essay, for instance. When asked to write it, my initial response was shame – but I haven’t been writing! Immediately, I resolved to become better disciplined, take fewer snack breaks (by snacks I mean the internet); someday, perhaps, I’ll follow through. For now, it’s another March afternoon. School ends in an hour. The sky is the gray of erased pencil.

Irregularity is the only pattern I know, so I must trust it. Nothing good may happen on the page today, but eventually I’ll get there. Stories await. There is a persistent curiosity that cannot be ignored. Before long I will heed the imperative and the unknown, the driving force that sends me to my knees, peeling dark scraps off the floor. I will cradle the film like a broken ghost in one hand while sucking a thread and slipping it through a needle’s bright eye to resume once more the humble work of stitching shadow to soles of feet.

Sara Lippmann's stories have appeared recently in PANK, Sententia, BULL: Men's Fiction and elsewhere. She co-hosts the Sunday Salon, a monthly NYC reading series, and lives with her family in Brooklyn.

New Fiction: Spotlight

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 23:34:00 +0000

Title: Spotlight

Author: Devan Goldstein

Category: Fiction

Thursday at midnight, George climbs the tunnel ladder to the top of the lookout tower and settles on a lattice pattern for the spotlight. He hasn’t tried the lattice for months, but he feels up to it tonight.

As George weaves the light back and up and forth and down across the prison grounds, he imagines his wife Susan laying strips of dough across a boysenberry pie. Under a sliver moon, his eyes sometimes register golden-brown crust where the spotlight has just shone.

The other lookout men think the warden’s crazy, but George understands. You have to keep the prisoners guessing. There’s only been one successful escape attempt at Appaloosa, but all the unsuccessful ones ended with dead prisoners. The warden says he’d rather they not even try to get out.

So the lookout men have to change their spotlight patterns every night, and not on any kind of schedule. The prisoners have nothing but time, the warden says. They’d notice if the third Monday of every month was Spiral Night on the lookout tower.

At first, like everybody else, George tried not to use any patterns at all, to just move the spotlight willy-nilly. But on his first night, not fifteen minutes in, he had already started making concentric squares. The patterns came, he thought, from the part of his brain that was afraid of unknowable things, like God or the bottom of the muddy pond behind his house.

Just before dawn, the chirping crickets and the gurgle of Appaloosa Creek become the roar of the crowd at Fenway as George paints the outfield onto the grounds. He remembers Susan crying at Game Four of the 2004 World Series, when the Red Sox finally broke the curse. “At least I got to see them win one,” she said through her tears.

They diagnosed the Huntington’s just after Spring Training, and by the time the playoffs started, the idea of taking two decades to die was too much for Susan. One morning in December, George came back from a shift making a chain-link pattern with the spotlight and found her in the bathtub, her lips blue and her eyes open and foggy. In her letter, she told him that she didn’t want to steal the next twenty years from him, from his next wife, from the children he would have someday.

As dawn breaks over the plains east of the prison, George decides not to try the lattice pattern at least until till next season.

Devan Goldstein's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, The Collagist, Annalemma, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA, and keeps a blog at devangoldstein.com.

Jesse Cheng: Why I Write, and Why I Write What I Write

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:31:00 +0000

Writing creatively is my favorite way to write. I don't have much time for it, though.

And when I do indulge, production is a stodgy and plodding affair. I sit. I stand. I brew a cup of coffee, then delete a single comma. Then I put it back in. I sip my coffee, and enjoy myself immensely.

I write little, and I write slowly, so one might think I'd write with Serious Purpose--to advocate a noble idea, or resolve a personal conflict, or discover something new about an issue I thought I'd already figured out, as the demands of considered expression will make one do. But when I set out to write this way, I find I don't like the author all that much. He's self-righteous, or self-absorbed, or intricately pedantic. So, instead, I write to play.

How lucky for me that it's in this journal, "of literature and sport," where I get to talk about the writer's endeavor as a game. In one as in the other, I've learned I can either fret about the stakes, psyching myself out of the action, or I can just say, "Game on!", trusting my creative faculties to zip, dodge, or linger where they will. And the Serious Purposes? It's funny but somehow, when I'm able to stay true to myself and the game, the important things manage to take care of themselves. I'm sure some readers out there who think deeply about sports can help me explain why.

With a baby coming, I've been writing less and ruminating more, especially about what I want this little girl to know. I'm grateful for the time I've had creating prose, the things it's taught me that I'll one day teach her. If sport can be a metaphor for life, then the writer's endeavor is a metaphor for the life I want my child to live. The grind is reality. Reality is a beautiful game. What to worry about, really, just so long as we play fair, play with joy, play for the honest love of it all?

Jesse Cheng is from Southern California. Works are forthcoming in NANO Fiction and r.kv.r.y. His website is jesse-cheng.com.

New Fiction: When the Browns Win the Super Bowl

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:24:00 +0000

Title: When the Browns Win the Super Bowl

Author: Steven Casimer Kowalski

Category: Fiction

*Editor's Note: Steven Casimer Kowalski brought down the house with this piece at the recent Stymie AWP reading. Consider it a taste of what everyone enjoyed that night, and a preview of what will happen at future such readings.*

When the Browns win the Super Bowl, I am going to tell my boss to shut the fuck up. When the Browns win the Super Bowl, I'm eating macaroni and cheese for all three meals the following day. I will use a different cheese each time. When they win, I will walk the city streets with my hands in my pockets and let the rioters punch me in the face and stomach. I will feel like jesus. When the Browns win the Super Bowl, I will call my father on telephone and say, "I can't believe this." He will be crying and I will say, "Stop crying, you pussy," and he'll hear the gasp and crackle in my voice and say, "You're the pussy!" And we'll just sit on the phone and cry together until my mother beats us both with a rolled newspaper. The next day, I will see my sister and she will be in shock. "We are champions!" I will scream. "Who the fuck smashed up my car?" she will say. I will drop the tire iron and spray paint and hold her close and whisper, "I don't know, I really don't know." At the moment of victory, at the very moment time expires and our score is higher than the score of the team we are playing (maybe the Redskins but probably not), I will be holding hands with strangers and will say to them, "I've waited for this my whole life." They will look back, their eyes set deep, their stomachs starved, skin all pallor and spent muscle, "We can't even smile anymore it has been so long." I will smile for them, my teeth at their goddamn whitest because this season was special, this season was the one and I bought whitening strips in week 4 because I said to myself, I said, "friend, there is some talent out there and these guys could go all the way." And when the Browns win the Super Bowl I will be proven right. I will stroll the wreckage of the municipal lot twirling a cane and pissing out fires. An old man will give me a top hat. He will say, “I died in this.” Then he will disappear in a puff of smoke. There might be some money stuffed into the hat. That would be awesome. Our victory will be one of attrition because Cleveland knows what fucking attrition means. Our victory will manifest itself physically in the shape of empty supermarket beer isles. Night into morning, we will throw ourselves at one another and conceive child after child. "These kids are gonna be winners, goddammit," we will say. And they will be winners. And a newness will peal back the land and swallow the blight. When the Browns win the Super Bowl the clothing in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will come to life, pick up instruments, and play Celebration by Kool & the Gang until we bash them all with folding chairs screaming, "learn a new song, c’mon." When the Browns win the Super Bowl, millions of gnats will bloom from the lake and fly over the city carrying tiny championship pennants. It will be so scary and I will hide from it. When the team wins they will put an “I” in team and it will be me. When the Browns win the Super Bowl, I will smoke my last cigarette(s). I will swim the Cuyahoga. My wake will burn, when the Browns win the Super Bowl.

Steven Casimer Kowalski lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. He is your favorite writer's least favorite writer.

Nick Ripatrazone: Why I Write, A Timeline

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:27:00 +0000

1981

Born on Ash Wednesday, during a snowstorm. Ritual and snow, two elements of life that coax wonder from the mundane, two spheres of existence that still fascinate me.

My favorite novella is “The Pedersen Kid” by William Gass, a story about a snow squalls and an abandoned baby. Gass said he wrote to “entertain a toothache”; I first read his novella in a dentist’s office.

Reading is a ritual: allowing arrangements of letters, black print on a beige page, to become images and narratives. It sounds impossible, and yet it happens constantly. It is strangely like transubstantiation, a transformation through ritual, and though intensely personal and unique, it often reaches a new level during the collective experience (I think Mass, or James Salter reading “Last Night” at Rutgers-Newark).

Yet, in order for that reading experience to exist, someone, somewhere, must write.

1982-1997

My parents told me stories (Dad talked about water-less, mid-August double-sessions for football, Mom about the last working automats in Newark). My older siblings told me stories, and I found cassettes my oldest brother had made from hiding a tape recorder under the kitchen table. I listened to a world of laughter and language that existed before I was born. I began to read, and I loved: books about Navajo basket weaving; Punt, Pass, and Kick reissues; Amazing Spider Man and Uncanny X-Men; and later ordered dissertations on UFO propulsion from universities in Texas.

I loved odd concoctions of language and subjects: I would read about an old couple photographing a wobbling disk in northern Oregon, and then would study statistics for triples, which felt more difficult than home runs.

My family supported me, whether I was playing basketball or writing. They read my own earliest attempts at fiction: “The Being,” a story about aliens who harvest fish blood for fuel. Attempts at mimicking The Twilight Zone. I’m amazed at their patience: I would copy college football standings from the newspaper and give them as Christmas presents, and they would actually read them.

1998-2011

I took an Independent Study at Whippany Park High School with Tom Shoemaker, who helped me understand research, listened to my endless theories about the paranormal, and gave me confidence to write. I attended Susquehanna University, and studied fiction with Gary Fincke and Tom Bailey, who taught me that sometimes only one word was worth saving from a draft, that constant reading was necessary for writing, and that literary magazines were the proving ground for each generation of writers.

I learned the incredible gift of an endlessly supportive spouse.

I realized that teaching other writers was a continual source of renewal, and that teaching literature helped me appreciate the decisions of expert writers, from William Faulkner’s dexterity with point of view in As I Lay Dying to Flannery O’Connor’s ability to create a unique world in “Parker’s Back.” I read End Zone by Don DeLillo again and again, drifting into the autumnal rhythms of football, the refrain of “Hit somebody, hit somebody, hit somebody.”

I learned from more writers at Rutgers-Newark. Alice Elliott Dark taught me how awareness of one’s “interior shorthand” could transform a writer’s ability to communicate. Tayari Jones taught me that the first page of a story was “prime real estate.” Jayne Anne Phillips taught me that every last word had to be refined, since a story could be made or broken through a single phrase. H. Bruce Franklin taught me that audience matters.

2012

I write because words are worth the attention.

DeLillo once said: “I write for the page.”

Sure, the page receives the words first, but the real goal of writing is passing those words on to a reader, earning the time of someone who could be doing a thousand other things. What an honor: for someone to care, even for a moment or a minute, about something you’ve created. That’s why I write.

Nick Ripatrazone is the author of two books of poetry: Oblations and This is Not About Birds (Gold Wake Press 2012). His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, West Branch, Colorado Review, and The Mississippi Review, and has received honors from ESPN: The Magazine.

Join Stymie Magazine at AWP in Chicago!

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:03:00 +0000

Friday. March 2. 7pm. Theory.

As Stymie equipment managers gather the gear, and rooks carry the bags to the bus, you can feel the excitement in the air. Game time arrives soon. All-star readers at a fantastic venue in a great sports town. Come be part of the fun!

Readers include: Cynthia Hawkins, Tim Kahl, Jeanie Chung, James O'Brien, Alex Moody, Steven Kowalski, Joseph Baron-Pravda, Diane Durant McGurren, Shaindel Beers, Sal Pane, Erin Elizabeth Smith, Joe Ponepinto, J. Bradley, Megan Cass, Elijah Burrell, Ilan Mochari, Mark Cugini, and Maria Nazos.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe: Why I Write (Fiction)

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:22:00 +0000

I write because I’m awed by the way this chicken scratch—infinite combinations of 26 letters—turns into story.

I write because story is the most essential nutrient of culture.

I write because I get confused and frustrated by our culture, and writing helps me explore what it means to be human.

I write because I believe imagination is the most exciting human attribute.

I write because I’m awed, nurtured, confused, frustrated, and excited by humanity.

Through story, I engage and connect and imagine and explore and sometimes understand.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s most recent novel, The Big Bang Symphony, was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Fiction Award, as well as the Ferro-Grumley Fiction Award. Her stories have been published in Shenandoah, Arts & Letters, Hot Metal Bridge, Bloom, Terrain, and ZYZZYVA. She is a recent winner of the Sherwood Anderson Award for Fiction and the Arts & Letters Fiction Award.

New Nonfiction: Bingo and the Super Bowl

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:25:00 +0000

Title: Bingo and the Super Bowl
Author: Ray Scanlon
Category: Nonfiction

My son-in-law Jeff invited me over for the Super Bowl, and mentioned that Bingo had died. The news of a family cat's death did not, on the face of it, augur well. There's plenty of mischief to be had by paying any attention at all to omens, but the only casualty I can ascribe to this one was the obvious feline. My own day couldn't have turned out better.

     I've heard of more than one criminally insane cat whose demise would make the world a better place, but Bingo wasn't one of them. My grandchildren named Bingo in his kittenhood after a dog—Bingo was his name-o—in a song they'd just learned, and had sung over and over. And over. He was eccentric even for a cat—a recluse and a wanderer. He mostly stayed in the house, and mostly never showed his face. But when he appeared, he was insistently friendly, purring and hooking his claws in my waist as I walked by him—did I mention he was wicked long, as well as almost entirely black? Twice, when he went outside, he didn't come back for two or three months. The last time, we guessed that the coyotes had gotten him, but he showed up Halloween night, skittish, thin, and a little worse for wear. We figured he was the ultimate survivor. Even though he deliberately proved us wrong, we'll miss him.

     When I arrived, Jeff was finishing up his Sunday house-cleaning routine. We soon settled in with our adult beverages and chips and dip to watch the game. A couple of touchdowns later, my three grandchildren came home from Auntie Carmel's birthday party. The turbulence in their wake as they burst through the door nearly drowned out their three separate comments about my fresh haircut, and football lost its tenuous grip on me as I marshaled facetious comebacks. As it always does in the presence of the grandchildren, my Grinch heart swelled.

     The three dogs sprawled placidly; occasionally a wagging tail thumped the floor. The two girls and I went into the study, where Hunter worked on her book report, not due for at least a week. Alison was trying to finish a report about King Khufu, unsure of whether it was due the next day or sometime during the following week, the documentation specifying the date lying forgotten at school. In some ways so unlike, Hunter and Al are still twins. They spontaneously started to crack their joints: knuckles, wrists, ankles, shoulders, necks. Al announced she could crack her nose, then sandwiched it between her two hands and jerked it sharply side to side as she surreptitiously snapped her thumbnail across the edge of an upper front tooth. She had me hook, line, and sinker, and her face lit as she saw her success.

     Jord stayed with his father in the living room to watch the spectacle. Jeff knows and cares about sports, and I could hear him explaining the appropriate strategies as the game progressed. Dogs and humans exchanged brief visits between the two rooms, and Jeff brought out new courses of shrimp and buffalo wings. We all chatted easily, sometimes goofy, sometimes serious.

     We were a family, three generations of us, content in the moment, yet not constrained to that particular moment or place. With no effort at all I could easily imagine our scene, its essence unchanged, in far distant times and surroundings. These transcendent moments of timelessness are extraordinary and rare treasures. Time seems to lose its linearity, and becomes more compact and three-dimensional—any moment is within easy reach.

     Yes, we were participating in one of the major cultural phenomena of a great and gaudy nation, and it felt right and proper—we belonged. But bigger still, we belonged to the entire universe. I could sense our insignificance in the vast starry still winter night, balanced by the profound feeling of inclusion that those so inclined are willing to accept as proof that God exists.

     Ill-equipped to swim in such seas of emotion, I was grateful for the chance to regroup and quietly sip my anise cordial—sweet and heady—while the girls got ready for bed and Jeff took Jord out for a brief moonlit cross-country ski run in the neighborhood field. On the way home I ran the brain diagnostics: the onslaught had fried my metaphor generation circuits, my basic vocabulary retrieval functions were shorted out, and my rudimentary capacity for coherent speech had sustained a severe hit. The emotional tide was still running high when I arrived; I'd not yet regained my usual detached tranquility. Cheryl asked about the evening. Teary old fool could only just manage: “It was freaking perfect.”

Ray Scanlon. Massachusetts boy. Has grandchildren. Extraordinarily lucky. No MFA. No novel. No extrovert. His work has been published in more than one place. On the web: http://read.oldmanscanlon.com/.

Alex Moody: Container #7

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:26:00 +0000

I have arrived here after the failure of six other containers. Hulls have been breached, seams exploded, sutures popped, on and on, everything vaporized. I can’t construct a satisfying answer. I return to the beginning, the beginnings all look the same. Why do I write? I don’t know.

When I write nonfiction, I place memories in sequence until they form a tidy package. On second thought, the package may not be that tidy. There may be some questions about the package. But the questions are usually accompanied by potential answers, and I wouldn’t have thought about those answers had I not assembled the package.

When I write fiction, I understand people. They make sense like an equation makes sense: stability plus surprise divided by indecision times thunderstorms equals epiphany. Or, they don’t make sense at all. Either way, there’s a hint of order in a fictional world -- even the characters who end up in odd equation-busting places are easy to find when tucked into a tiny page. They’re always where I’ve left them.

This is what I do know, then: when I write, I’m building a container.

More importantly, why do I show people what I write? I have a lot of questions. Or one big question. I wonder if there is order in the world. Frequently, I think I have everything figured out. Then other people show up. Also, I keep returning to one idea: that nothing matters or can be changed or can be understood, but we all move forward anyway. Well, we move. Sideways or backwards or up or down. Even if we hold ourselves very still, we’re doing so on a spinning planet that’s whipping through a galaxy. We all have to deal with this. I find the situation amazing and hopeless. I don’t know what to do about it. The people filling my stories and essays draw circles around these questions. They come up with varying solutions to the overall problem. None of the solutions, to date, are definitive.

I can’t say that directly to you if you’re standing in front of me. I’m afraid that I’ll look lost or sound like I can’t manage the words properly. You’ll frown and smile a polite smile. The worst kind of smile. I have to say these things here. When I send a container of words into the world I hope that you pick it up and see something you recognize. I picture you staring at the container, turning it over and over, and thinking maybe just part of what I think. Then I picture us as friends.

I write because I don’t know, and I need you to not-know, too.

Alex Moody lives in South Carolina. His stories and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Southern Humanities Review, DIAGRAM, Johnny America, Pisgah Review, and FRESH YARN, as well as Stymie Magazine’s Trading Card Fiction contest.

The Poetry Supplement

noreply@blogger.com (Erik) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:53:00 +0000

Our latest issue is live -- Stymie's first every all poetry mini-issue is live and features some outstanding work.

Contributors include:
Dana Yost's “Bending Einstein”
Elijah Burrell's “Final Triumphs”
Kevin Vaughn's “Home Opener”
Heather Wyatt's “Driving Blind in the Ozarks”
Maria Nazos's “Confessions of a Nam Amputee to the Archaeologist”
J. Bradley's “How to Fight a Biter”
Erin Elizabeth Smith's “Eruzione”
Donna Lee's “To Wake Us”
Rick Marlatt's “Tetris” and "Morning Duty"
M. Clara White's “He Watches”
B.J. Jones's “Gutterball” and “My Chucks are Grey Hightops”
Matthew Lippman's “Be Bobby Riggs,” “Commoner Baseball Blues,” and “Field of Marigold”
Del Doughty's “How to Pick a Melon” and “Grace to the Learned”
Chad Redden's “Cattle Barn”
Rachel Marsom Richmond's “She Pulled Out the Razor”
Tyler Gobble's “Charming”
Molly Sutton Kiefer's “Derby”
Ed Coletti's “Boxing With Poet David Madgalene” and “Synchronicity of Sport and Sex”
Charlie Gadol's “A Friend”

New Nonfiction: Kneepads

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:06:00 +0000

Title: Kneepads
Author: Jesse Goolsby
Category: Nonfiction

I’m a college sophomore in Sterling, Colorado, far northeast part of the state, where Rocky Mountain seekers shake their skulls at combines and cows, at how Kansas has reached in and stolen half the state.

     I’m wearing my blue basketball uniform, and tonight I sport massive, white kneepads as I stretch, minutes before tipoff at the Northeastern Junior College gym. Their cartoonish mascot, the Plainsman, waddles up and down the sidelines in front of the run down wooden stands quarter-filled with locals hiding flasks, spitting pulped tobacco into Coke cans.

     We’re the visitors, from down in Colorado Springs, and from the bleachers a nasally twang calls out to me, asks how many dicks I’ve sucked, screams above the blaring warm-up music that a guy with that much padding on his knees could gulp his horse dry.

     I glance over, but I’m too anxious to stare across the twenty feet to him and his hunched group. They all lean into one another, some donning wide, white-brimmed cowboy hats; almost all wearing the red faces of hard boys that wouldn’t mind a fight, win or lose.

     My teammates avoid me as we pull our knees into our chests and fold our arms over our heads. I try not to listen, but the locals keep on me—it’s a cow now—and I glance around for security, but there’s none.

     I don’t know if it’s the flat brown fields, the off-kilter traffic light in town, the county sign they’ll rarely pass, or the fact that they’ll have to wake up and slip into their warmest clothes to work the dirt, but something, a mash of these things pumps out apathy for these foul-mouthed hecklers.

     There are others: a thirty-something in a business suit with his young freckled son, disinterested teenagers with headphones and far off stares. There’s not a single person in the stands on our side, and yet I look around for someone to save me.

     I recall my cramped high school gymnasium two states away, where one by one, smiling ex-loves sat amid crowds calling my name. But this isn’t home, and no one waits for me, anywhere.

     I glare down at my kneepads, their excruciating size, the way they bulge out and up and around my knees like gigantic marshmallows. I contemplate my body and its joints, my bruised elbows, clicking ankles, but most of all, my kneecaps, how both have cracked and split, how a tender bundled mass seeps through to fill the gap just below the skin.

     I consider how, when given the chance, I’ll dive again, landing knees first on the waxed hardwood, feeling, but not comprehending, the unzipped pain of pride.

     I don’t consider that whatever happens this night no minds will change. This is no place for games. Who will remember my leap into the stands, the spit can spilling into my hair, the local boys’ taunts, or the moment on the bus, post-game, when I peek out the frosted window as two ice bags work their magic on my slowly dying knees?

     It’s the vocal asshole from inside: short, lean, flannelled. He shoulders the bricked gym wall bathing in a dull yellow light. And with him, a red-haired woman six inches taller in thin jeans takes his white hat and puts it on. Their faces disappear underneath the wide brim, and she lifts her hands and places them on the backs of his shoulders and pulls him close. I want her to be ugly, but when they turn around I see her clearly, and I wonder why the hell she hasn’t left.

     When they walk away he sways wildly, and then he swings his truck keys in a lazy orbit around his index finger before they jump into a dented blue Ford and drive away.

     On the slow roll back to the Springs I quickly dismiss the game and my knees. It’ll be years before I require cortisone to stand upright; so tonight, through oversized earphones, I listen to loud love songs. Night is good for that.

     The stiff bus seat forces my tired head to the window where I think of the size of the world. I think about the blue Ford, the now-falling snow, how she’s somewhere in Sterling, Colorado.

Jesse Goolsby's work has appeared widely, to include recent publications in Alaska Quarterly Review, Harpur Palate, The Greensboro Review, and The Journal. He serves as the Fiction Editor at War, Literature & the Arts. "Kneepads" comes from his brief experience playing small-time college basketball in the late 90s. Follow him at jessegoolsby.blogspot.com.

Corey Mesler: On and Off the Creative Spark

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:48:00 +0000

Why write? Why create? Why bring something out of nothing? Why try to pin the universe to the mat with a cogent metaphor? Hell, if I know.

I have been asked to say a little something about creativity, or more specifically, how I create as a writer of prose and poetry. I would like to throw some quotes about creativity at you because, for one thing, all artists, writers, etc. stand on the shoulders of those who have come before and, secondly, it makes me sound smart to quote someone smarter.

Quote #1: “If you have real talent--which means that you are enough in love with the world to describe it and respond to it--then the most crucial element in your life is energy.”

--Frederick Busch, in interview

Now, as I attempt to say something about the shadowy part of the human being from whence art comes, I hope you will keep in mind that all theories about how this works are at least partly bushwa. Talking about creativity is talking about that part of the mind that doesn’t do equations or start the lawnmower or drive a nail, though one can be creative doing all those things. John Fowles said, “If I had to prescribe a future type for humankind, the writer (reflective of ego) and natural historian (seeking beyond it) would rank high above the technologist and computeromane.”

Talking about creativity is talking about where art comes from and it’s a sticky wicket. Centuries untold and volumes written about it but it still remains a bit of a mystery, an ambiguity, a question about a question. It is like trying to pin a drop of mercury to a dartboard.

You hear the old cliché, the question writers (or maybe all artists) roll their eyes at: where do you get your ideas? Well I am going to answer that as if someone asked me and I didn’t roll my eyes: I get many ideas from reading other writers. I don’t know if other writers feel this way. And I don’t know if it makes me not very original. But, reading my contemporaries and marveling at the varied and recondite ways they express themselves makes me want to create, too, makes me want to be part of that clan. I am frequently completely baffled by what other writers do and most often completely delighted by being baffled. It allows me to admire both writers who write very differently than I write and writers with whom I share at least a small bit of the same kind of ingenuity.

When I sit down in front of the keyboard I rarely know if it’s gonna be a good day writing or a bad day. How does one know in advance? Even those poems that come to me in the bathtub and I have to repeat them to myself like a pretty girl’s phone number, over and over, until I can get out of the tub and dry myself and get a pad of paper are just as often the start of nothing as the start of something. Sometimes the piece of string I grasp finds a flying kite on the end of it and sometimes an unraveling sweater. Yet, I do it. Every day. I sit down every day and try. This is what Frederick Busch meant about having the energy to do it.

Quote #2: “Do I believe in God? Yes, when I work…”

--Henri Matisse, from Jazz

I do know this: I always think the thing I am working on is the best thing I’ve ever written. Somehow I think the secret lies in that faith, and it really is faith, faith like the lushest of convictions. And the planning stage and the post-partum stage are nothing compared to the creation itself, whether a few days on a poem, a few weeks on a short story, or, my favorite, a couple years on a novel, when the writing itself is flowing, I feel like a god. A minor god, but a god. Forgive me for putting it this way. I do feel at my best, as a writer, when I am working on a novel because it takes a year or two. It’s purchasing the future, if that’s not putting it too grandly.

Quote #3: “I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did’.”

Kurt Vonnegut, from Timequake

Now, to me, here is a key element of creativity. Joy. Add some joy to the world. I know there are artists of the dark corners—I’ve explored a few myself—and some of them are frankly too disturbing for me. I don’t like harsh anymore. I used to when I was younger. I had a higher tolerance for street novels, for junkies and rough talk and bleak, dispiriting characters. I don’t so much anymore. But I think the joy Vonnegut is talking about is the joy of creation, the joy of observing the world carefully and writing about it in such a way as to bring things into focus that perhaps were unfocused or even frightening. Writing, to me, is a way of making love with the world, of romancing it. If I approach it that way there is great delight in the process, no matter the subject. So, one can write even about junkies and suicide and terrorism, and still add positive energy to the world. How? By being a truly gifted artist. I make no claims for myself in this realm. But the writers I love most do it, like Kurt Vonnegut, like the Beatles.

And I would like to close with a quote from James P. Carse, whose book, Breakfast at the Victory, had a lot of pithy things to say about life and living and creativity and art. In other words, about Story with a capital S, the story of us all, how we got here, what we are doing here, how we can do it better together than separately and how important it is to pay attention. If I had to hone it down to one epigrammatic phrase I would say creativity starts with paying attention.

“To ask where stories or babies come from is like asking where springs come from…At the deepest level of any memorable story is the haunting presence of another story or maybe even many other stories.” --James P. Carse, from Breakfast at the Victory

COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published five novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010) and Following Richard Brautigan (2010), Gardner Remembers (2011), 2 full length poetry collections, Some Identity Problems (2008) and Before the Great Troubling (2011), and 3 books of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009), Notes toward the Story and Other Stories (2011) and I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (2011). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written, “Coronet Blue.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis TN, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

Introducing Our Newest Editor

noreply@blogger.com (Erik) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:51:00 +0000

The editorial team would like to welcome Danny Goodman to the fray as our new Social Media Editor.

More information on Danny, his writing and other awesome facts can be found at www.dannygoodman.me -- we're excited to have Danny on board and have high hopes for some of things he'll soon be doing on this site and elsewhere under the Stymie name.

New Nonfiction: Whatever Happened to Big Van Vader?

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:40:00 +0000

Title: Whatever Happened to Big Van Vader?
Author: Oliver Lee Bateman
Category: Nonfiction

I don’t think much about my childhood, which means I’ll probably never be able to write the kind of abuse-laden bildungsroman that winds up getting selected by Oprah’s Book Club. That’s a shame, because I could really use the money right now.

Professional wrestling, particularly the NWA-into-WCW wrestling of 1989-1995, occupies a place of prominence in the han

dful of memories I’ve bothered to keep around. No one else in my family cared about it—and rightfully so, given that it's ridiculous—and thus I was left alone to consume as much of it as I possibly wanted.

     Each appearance by a wrestler who struck my fancy prompted an expensive dip into the archives. I bought back issues of the “Apter mags,” participated in VHS tape trading, and—fascinated by NWA promoter Jim Crockett’s importation of Japanese talent in late 1989—began purchasing videos from Japan.

     It was a huge waste of time, of course. I became knowledgeable about pro wrestling, to the detriment of other aspects of my life. I was never picked on by the other kids in school—I even managed to get along with them, I suppose—but I didn’t enjoy their company.

     What I did enjoy were performances by Dusty “The American Dream” Rhodes. Rhodes, who was probably the favorite wrestler of at least half of the kids from the Deep South, never let his obesity get in the way of scintillating interviews and well-worked sixty minute “broadways” with the likes of Ric Flair and Ole Anderson. During his most important matches, he almost always “bladed” or “gigged” the purplish patch of scar tissue on his forehead—a decision that enhanced the legitimacy of his efforts, and distinguished Southern wrestling from the bloodless squash matches staged by Vince McMahon’s cartoonish WWF.

     By 1990, though, Dusty had begun to decline as an in-ring performer—and when he bolted WCW for a brief, polka-dotted run in the WWF, I gave up on him. But it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway: Once I saw Leon “Big Van Vader” White demolish Tom “Z-Man” Zenk at the Great American Bash in 1990, I had a new obsession.

     I had always admired the sport’s so-called “giants”—huge, overweight men like Bam Bam Bigelow, Kamala, John “Earthquake” Tenta, King Kong Bundy, and the One Man Gang—but most of these men were immobile and unathletic. Some, like the legendary British superheavyweight Giant Haystacks, appeared to be in danger of suffering from heart failure each time they stepped into the ring. Promoters went out of their way to depict these men as dangerous monsters, but few of them seemed particularly imposing.

     Big Van Vader, on the other hand, was an absolute beast: He wrestled stiff, often throwing real punches instead of the lazy “potatoes” delivered by most grapplers, and manhandled the opposition. Unlike other wrestlers of the era, he didn’t need his foes to leap into his power bombs or assist him when he pressed them overhead.   From the outset, he struck me as more than a mere performer; what he did looked real.

     In 1992, I watched a tape of a match where Vader, representing New Japan Pro Wrestling, wrestled Stan Hansen, another badass gaijin performer for Giant Baba’s All Japan Pro Wrestling outfit. This is still the match most people associate with Vader—well, this match or the one in Germany where he was wrestling Mick “Cactus Jack” Foley and Foley wound up losing his ear.

     Hansen, who was near-sighted and even more prone than Vader to landing stiff punches, opened the match by breaking Vader’s nose with his bullwhip. After an exchange of blows, Hansen dislodged Vader’s eye from its socket. What follows is a wonderful moment where Vader, who was wearing a black mask, leans back against the turnbuckle to remove the mask and push the eye back into the socket. When he turns to face the camera, Vader’s injured eye has swollen to the size of a grapefruit. And then:  he goes on to finish the match.

     In the early 90s, I still didn’t grasp the intricacies of the pro wrestling industry. Although I consumed SLP tape after SLP tape of un-dubbed, un-subtitled NJPW matches, I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening in Japan. I realized Antonio Inoki, the owner of that promotion, was some kind of a big deal. I understood that wrestlers like Keji Mutoh and Tatsumi Fujinami were top stars, and far superior performers to juiced-up freaks like the Ultimate Warrior and Sid Vicious. Nonetheless, everything that was happening over there seemed strange and compelling: the matches were presented without storyline buildup, almost as if they were actual sporting events, and the quality of the work—the so-called “strong style”—was far rougher than the US equivalent.

      Even still, what happened between Vader and Hansen was unbelievable. It was, for reasons that are now obscure, perceived by my ten-year-old self as the greatest thing that ever happened. I had always viewed sports stars with a certain kind of apathy—Joe Montana and Michael Jordan were too slick, too polished for my liking—but Vader was just awesome.

     I still stand by that assessment. Judged purely by his in-ring performance, Leon White—who began his sporting life as an offensive lineman for the LA Rams, segued into real estate development, lost a crapload of money in that venture, started wrestling in the AWA as “Bull Power” under the tutelage of Greco-Roman specialist Brad Rheingans, and was given his Big Van Vader gimmick by Inoki—was probably the best super heavyweight of all time. He moved better than the Undertaker, he was scarier than Andre the Giant, and he had as much raw strength as Mark Henry. Here, for all to see, was a 400-pound man who could perform moonsaults, hurl wrestlers unaided into the air, and take ridiculous bumps.

     His matches against Sting—easily the best worker of the various domestic face “superstar” wrestlers of the late 80s and 90s—were classics. His series against Mick Foley in 1993, including a bloody bout on WCW Saturday Night and a Texas Death match at that year’s Halloween Havoc, trumped anything Foley did before or since, including his legendary Hell in a Cell showdown against the Undertaker. Even his WWF work, most notably his feud with Shawn Michaels, still holds up.

     But Vader proved a very difficult man to work with, at one point brawling backstage with Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff and later attacking a talk show host on Good Morning Kuwait. He got fatter and slower as his career progressed, understandable given that his peak years had come during middle age. His final appearances in TNA and WWE—which I saw years after the fact—were phoned-in, lackluster.

I suppose many people wallow in the past—how else to explain the spate of raunchy teen comedies written by 40-year-olds and marketed to 30-year-olds?—but I have nothing especially noteworthy about which to wax nostalgic. My youth is a faraway and alien country, accessible only through YouTube videos of bloated men trading chair-shots and dragging razor blades across their foreheads. Those grainy clips remind me that Vader used to be my hero, whatever that meant at the time.

It’s one of the few things I don’t want to forget.

Oliver Lee Bateman is one of the co-founders of the Moustache Club of America, a literary collective (or "beehive," as the kids like to say) that specializes in postmodern flash fiction, schoolgirl diary entries, navel-gazing coming-of-age stories set at prestigious New England preparatory academies, and good clean fun. He is also a Ph.D. candidate and Andrew Mellon Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh.

Carol L. Gloor: Why I Write (Mostly) Simple Poetry

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:28:00 +0000

I write for two reasons: to assuage loneliness and to share my only real gift.

First, writing comforts my loneliness because my head has always been full of strange words, images, connections and terrible empathies: like my mother’s wiping down the kitchen counter before going to bed reminding me of our dog circling and scratching in the dirt before he laid down to sleep, or my “slow” aunt’s heartbreaking vulnerability because she couldn’t tell time (back when there were only clocks and watches with hands). When I learned to put these on paper and show them to others, I discovered I was not totally alone—there were and are others out there like me. Second, although I was a fair athlete when young, and can still enjoy swimming, biking and walking, and although I’ve learned to crochet pretty well, writing is the only thing I’m really good at. Being able to write clear prose has helped me as an attorney, but poetry uses my real gift of putting words together in a way that is, hopefully, unique. I believe God gives each of us a talent, and we are to share that with the world. My son can draw impromptu pencil sketches that knock your socks off—I can barely draw stick figures. My husband creates beautiful shelves and stairs—I can hardly hammer a nail in straight. But I can write, and I can share that gift through publication and oral readings.

I try to make my poetry both intelligent and accessible. I dislike the old image of droning intellectual poetry in college parlors with polite approvals and tea as much as I dislike slam poetry screamed in bars over the heads of drunks. I want people who read my poetry to both understand it and feel they have learned something new about the world, or at least something they already know expressed in a new way. It’s a hard tightrope to walk, but I keep trying.

Carol Gloor is a semi-retired attorney, writing for forty years, mostly poetry. Her work has appeared in many print and online journals and anthologies, most recently in the magazine Christian Century, print journals Freshwater and Sow’s Ear, the anthology A Bird in the Hand: Risk and Flight, and here in Stymie. She is a member of the Chicago poetry collective Egg Money Poets.

New Fiction: The Fugitive

noreply@blogger.com (Year2Year) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 02:06:00 +0000

Title: The Fugitive
Author: Charlie Coleman
Category: Fiction

Perchance, perchance to dream, perchance to dream of that elusive little creature, that evasive sphere of milk white beauty adorned lovingly with braids of crimson red. Continuously, despite my constant enterprise, she rebukes capture.
     When you least expect it she appears with little or no warning.   Proving to be fiercely Independent and possessing a strong sense of self-determination, she arrives blistering like a bullet or prancing like a marionette in the clutches of a master puppeteer. Sometimes she cuts an aggressive path and is difficult to corral. At other times she languishes through the air and is amenable to surrender, just not to me. She crosses flirtatiously ever so close leaving behind her a trail of seductive rosin kissing the air. Despite her fickleness , she is always welcome.
     She’s capricious. She lands where she chooses as suits her whims. There are those diminutive in physical and chronological nature that I tower over who have succeeded. There are those whose faces reflect the sunrise and sunset of numerous brilliant diamond careers who have not achieved her favor. If it pleases her she will dance past those of fine threads and favor those whose threads are worn fine.
     I’ve wooed her in the starry skies of Los Angeles, the anonymity of New York and the heat of Arizona. Location has not diminished her aloofness nor assisted my endeavor. Laboring in numerous crusades in various venues in quiet frustration I’ve embraced failure as my everlasting friend.
     I fear that she will be eternally elusive.

Charlie Coleman is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. He has been published in Pulp Metal Magzine and The Subway Chronicles among other venues.

Timothy Kercher: It Is More Than This

noreply@blogger.com (margosita) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

After a bit of a delay our Why Do You Write? series is back with Timothy Kercher. This one was well worth the wait, a reminder of how important literature is in difficult times and across borders.

After a year in which my life has radically changed by moving to a new country and my wife Allison giving birth to our twin girls, Ani and Ketevan, our first children, a year where my time to write and think has been reduced significantly, I have realized with renewed zeal how important the act of writing is. Before, if you would have asked me why I write, I would quote Robert Frost’s observation that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom,” an idea I still find important, that poetry and writing begin in a playful place. Many of my poems fell into the category of being experimental, which, in my mind, means I was just playing around and trying to be clever.

There was always another element, though, and this element was something I had a harder time putting into words (another function of poetry). I became a poet more or less because it was the only mode of expression I could find to help me make sense out of my reentry into the United States after spending nearly a year as a relief worker in Bosnia in 1996/97. Before this, I considered myself a writer, but certainly not a poet. I spent about six months in 1999 writing some of the worst war poetry in the history of war poetry, but it was during this time that I realized that the writing of poetry was something that came natural to me—and it was somehow helping me make sense of the world.

Since then, two things my poet friends have said to me have guided my writing: my friend, the poet Martin Balgach, says that my poetry comes from “a stuttery place of existential restlessness,” which maybe explains why I wrote so much poetry to figure out my time in Bosnia. One of the Georgian poets I translate, my friend Zviad Ratiani, perhaps, put it best when he said, “I write to force myself to understand my life.”

In the past week, I’ve driven from Kyiv, Ukraine to the Carpathian Mountains and back. This after not driving since August, and already a school year in my pocket where I did not drive at all. This doesn’t sound so bad, but driving is intimately connected with my writing.

For a little over a year, my wife Allison, our two girls, and I have lived in Kyiv, but, because of our girls being so young, have not had the opportunity to get out of the city. We live across the street from the school we work and don’t own a car. What I’ve noticed this week is that I have a great deal more time to think when driving, and that this thinking is so crucial to writing—this time to let the life’s big questions bounce around in my head, where I confront life’s absurdities and inconsistencies, where I celebrate love, beauty, and passion, where I try to enjoy each moment by weighing it always against my own mortality. This thinking is essential to my feelings of wellbeing.

In the Republic of Georgia, the last country we lived in, we owned a Lada Niva, which is a small four-cylinder Russian four-wheel drive. It didn’t go fast, but it went anywhere, and we took it anywhere and everywhere in the beautiful Caucasus Mountains, including Armenia and Eastern Turkey. So many of the poems I wrote in that four year period we lived there were either written from experiences that the Niva either was part of, or at least, took us to. In fact, many of those poems included the Niva as a character. But the main thing is that it was in the act of driving that I was able to think about the world, to fill my mind up with imagery that I could imaginatively blend into my poetry.

And in the last week, in the landscape of Ukraine, seen from the vantage point of our rental car’s driver’s seat, my imagination has come alive, inspiring me to write. This could somehow be a modern equivalent to Wordsworth as the “walking poet,” and I have long felt some kinship to him—there is something of the Romantic impulse in this, being from Colorado and missing the mountains, just seeing the natural beauty of the Carpathian Mountains in Autumn is inspiring. But it is more than this.

There is a sense of culture here—the old mountain culture of the Hutsuls, the folk art manifested in houses and churches, the pressed-metal art, the tiles on walls, the intricate patterns and bright colors of the wooden houses, the horse-drawn carts clopping along, full of wheat, hay, cabbage, or whatever else you can imagine. And this in a landscape where the leaves are changing, a landscape exploding into Autumnal colors.

There is also a sense history here. The Soviet era buildings—many in ruin, the old cars and bicycles, and the monuments of heroes from World War II. And hidden behind all this is Hitler and Stalin. First, the great famine of 1932/33, a result of Stalin’s collectivization policy. And then, of course, Hitler’s Nazis march and subjugation of Ukraine, and subsequent murder of the Jewish and other populations. The layers of history, of suffering, of human cruelty is incomparable to anything else in Europe in the 20th Century. And this brings me back to Bosnia—everything does this eventually. But it was in Bosnia where I started questioning the world, what is my place in it, and where I began to try to understand why we humans act like we do. I haven’t found an answer, but for eleven hours yesterday, it was these questions staring me in the face even as we drove through the beautiful landscape of Ukraine with my two beautiful twin daughters in the back seat.

Writing to me is the process of making sense of life. And I can’t claim to have made a lot of sense of it beyond achieving little pieces of “wisdom,” as Frost explains. The act of writing poetry is no more or less than the act of understanding how wonderful and how cruel this existence can be at any given moment. Because I write, I’m saying I want this question to walk—or ride shotgun—beside me. I want to celebrate beauty. I want to condemn the moments when humanity turns ugly. I want to figure out where I belong amid all this. I want to seek out what is best and makes the most sense in life. My writing life is the struggle to do this.

Originally from Colorado, Timothy Kercher now lives in Kyiv, Ukraine after living in the Republic of Georgia for the past four years, where he has been editing and translating an anthology of contemporary Georgian poetry. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in
a number of recent literary publications, including Crazyhorse, upstreet, Versal, The Minnesota Review, Atlanta Review, The Dirty Goat, Poetry International Journal, Los Angeles Review, and others.