stymie: a journal of sport & literature

Alex Moody: Container #7

2012-02-06T05:26:00.005-06:00

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

2012-01-30T10:53:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-30T07:06:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-23T06:48:00.005-06:00

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

2012-01-19T08:51:00.000-06:00

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?

2012-01-16T09:40:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-09T09:28:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-01T20:06:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-14T07:00:00.001-06:00

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.

New Fiction: Bethpage Black

2011-12-12T05:55:00.001-06:00

Title: Bethpage Black
Author: Nathan McAlone
Category: Fiction

I was worried about my heart. It had been running approximately twenty beats-per-minute above usual and I was losing sleep because of this. I was afraid that in the middle of the night I would suddenly awake from a nebulously erotic dream, have a massive heart attack, and die alone in my bed at the age of twenty-four. My doctor told me there was nothing wrong with me, that it was probably just anxiety. However, she hadn’t been in my good graces since we argued about the merits of codeine versus ginger root. She also had long dreadlocks that I didn’t believe were quite sterile enough for a doctor’s office. All in all, I didn’t really take my doctor’s opinion into consideration.
     I was working at The Active Pearl, a boutique sports website that specialized in only elitist sports like golf, polo, and tennis. I took the job as quickly as I could snatch up my diploma in journalism from UCLA. It had seemed like a fun place to start a career at the time. Truth be told, the site turned out to be more about the rich, athletic, country club lifestyle associated with certain sports than it was about the games themselves. I had the claustrophobic feeling that I was the only one in the office who really cared at all about tennis, which was my beat.
     “Have you ever actually played tennis?” I asked my coworker Brad when he handed me a particularly dreadful article to edit on the differences between Venus and Serena Williams.
     “Have you?” he shot back and sat looking smug. I was too disgusted to tell him I was the number-two player on my team in college and that my dad had taught me to play tennis when I was just three years old. Don’t get angry, I told myself. It’s bad for your heart. I was working for the site on a part-time basis and spinning my wheels as much as possible to stop the job from becoming permanent.
     One Thursday in June, Greg, my boss’ boss, asked for volunteers to go out and cover the U.S. Open at Bethpage Black. Greg always had to bully people into covering large sporting events because most of the office considered them too crowded. Bethpage Black was only a short Long Island Rail ride away from the city and there was going to be playable rain! so it wouldn’t be that crowded. Greg included this as a plus. I thought watching golf would be a nice, relaxing day out of the city. Greg used to say, “golf is the gentlest game, which is why gentlemen are the ones who play it.” He hadn’t said this phrase since a stray ball hit him at Augusta, but I think in his heart he still believed it. He was just nervous that the office would burst into a grand chortle session at a reminder of the personal apology he received from Phil Mickelson, Greg’s newest idol. Whatever the truth was about golf being a gentle game, I decided to cover the Open with Greg on the pretext that it would be good for my heart.
     Greg was an overweight forty-three, with two mortgages, two ex-wives, and two children (from the same mother). All of these unhealthy responsibilities were located in Long Island. Golf was what kept him going and the U.S. Open at Bethpage Black was the one time, every five years or so, that he could go to Long Island for fun. I thought it was something I needed to experience in person. Greg was delighted.
     “Splendid,” he beamed, “just splendid. Big tennis star like you. Covering the Open. Well I’ll show you a thing or two about golf. Yes.” I hoped I could give him the slip early to avoid his enthusiastic commentary and find him again when he was too drunk to give me a play-by-play. This eventual reunion would be made more difficult by the fact that no cell phones were allowed at Bethpage Black, but I figured this in itself gave me a good enough excuse for losing Greg for an indeterminate amount of time.
     Unfortunately for me, Cindy was also going to accompany us, and I thought giving her the slip would be a bit more difficult. Cindy was a rail-thin redhead who wrote code for the website. She was the brain behind all the bare bones functionality that brought the men and women of leisure together in sport. In Cindy’s thirty to forty years of life, I would have guessed that she had attended less than ten professional sporting events. I had no idea why she had volunteered to help at the Open and I had even less of an idea why Greg had let her. By the rules of the office, Greg could pick anyone he wanted to help him cover the event, and Cindy seemed like an illogical choice, for obvious reasons. She wasn’t even a writer.
     I pondered this mystery on the fifty-six-minute train ride from Penn Station to Farmingdale, where complimentary shuttle buses would take us to the course. My best guess was that Cindy had heard the rumors about the open bar, something that had factored prominently into my decision, and had browbeat Greg into letting her come. It was no secret in the office that Cindy was a borderline alcoholic.
     The whole ride, Greg babbled on excitedly about Tiger making a big comeback after that scare with his knee or his ankle and Cindy nodded in agreement. I stared out the window and watched Long Island go by. It really was a depressing place, especially with the light rain, which was just as Greg had predicted. I decided there was too much brick everywhere, far too much brick, and concluded that I could only ever stand the inherent depression of the suburbs if it was sunny all the time like in South Pasadena, where I grew up.
     “Eric, who’s your favorite golfer?” Greg asked, snapping me out of my musings.
     “Sergio,” I said.
     “Good man. Good man. Cindy?”
     “I don’t know. I don’t really have one,” Cindy replied.
     “Why are you coming to the Open if you don’t even have a favorite golfer?” I asked, annoyed.
     “Come on now, Eric,” Greg cut in. “She likes them all, don’t you Cindy? Don’t worry. We’ll get you a favorite by the end of the day. Won’t we Eric? My favorite is the lefty. Mickelson. Such guts. Such finesse.”
     By the time we got to the Farmingdale station, Greg was practically jumping up and down in excitement. Though it was barely seventy degrees, he was already showing signs of sweating through his generic, high-end golf shirt. He was still talking animatedly with Cindy and I began to suspect his reason for letting her come to the Open could perhaps have been a romantic one, or a sexual one at the very least. During the crowded ten-minute bus ride from the train station to the course, Greg and Cindy bumped into each other much more frequently than the other passengers, especially if we went around any bends in the road. By the time we reached the course, it was beyond suspicion that both of them were in the sparking phase of a mutually desired liaison. It seemed I might have the day to myself after all. It would be just me, among hundreds of anonymous golf aficionados, enjoying some world-class swing form and some much-needed rest.
     As soon as we entered the course, Greg and Cindy made a beeline for the Champion’s Pavilion. Cindy had forgotten to leave her phone at home and had it forcibly removed by the security guards at the entrance. This gave Greg the perfect opportunity for some playful teasing about Cindy’s forgetfulness, which he continued across the muddy, straw-dirt path that led to the Pavilion. I remained a respectful few paces behind them, already itching to take off in my own direction.
     “You’ll love this tent,” Greg assured Cindy. “Top of the line. First class all the way. Everything a girl could want.” The Champion’s Pavilion was an enormous white tent that housed the free buffet and open bar for those fortunate enough to be holding special tickets. Inside, it was completely air-conditioned, even in the rain, which I thought would help Greg’s budding pit stains.
     Looking around, I felt that I was the skinniest person in the tent, besides Cindy of course, and that the pair of us had to be at least three pounds-per-inch lighter than anyone else with a VIP ticket. This seemed strange to me, since the image our website always promoted was one of a fit, middle-aged man who was, despite his age, still close to his peak fitness level. I had always believed without question not that we were honest in our promotion, but that a certain caliber of gentleman had the cash to buy himself a nice body well into middle age. From the looks of the men and women all around us digging into the Spicy Italian Sausage Links and Three-Wood Chicken Fingers, this wasn’t always the case.
     The open bar was in the middle of the Pavilion and was squared off so there were four possible surfaces to order from. This not only maximized the amount of alcohol consumption that could occur during the course of the day, but also allowed me to get as far as possible away from the lovebirds while ordering. Greg was trying to impress Cindy by dictating the recipe for an obscure drink while making wild accompanying hand gestures.
     As I tried to casually retreat away from the bar area with my Negro Modelo, the highest-end of the three beers being served, I must have accidentally jostled a stray chair because upon making my full turn around, I was confronted with the picture of a young woman tumbling to the ground in front of me. Luckily I am surprisingly quick, as my high school coach used to say, a talent that has been useful on the tennis court and in the streets of New York City. I threw out my arms and managed to catch her while engaged in a sort of half-roll that brought me onto the carpet and her right on top of me. I am proud to say that neither of us was hurt in the process and I managed to maintain my beer in an upright position that prevented all but minimal to moderate spillage from occurring. If I had been holding a glass instead of a bottle, both of us probably would have been covered in Mexican beer. As we rose to our feet, I was embarrassed to hear a small round of applause coming from the spot where Greg and Cindy were almost intertwined on the bar. I smiled awkwardly at them and gave a mock bow before turning back to introduce myself to the girl I had just either tripped or saved, depending on your preference.
     “It’s so nice to find someone with some gallantry in New York,” she burst out before I could begin my introduction. Apparently, I was more of a savior than a tripper. I looked at her clearly for the first time. She had beautiful blonde hair that fell in waves down her back and the lightest blue eyes I’d ever seen, almost white. She smiled at me and extended her hand. I guessed she was about eighteen or nineteen.
     “I’m Jill,” she said. I hated her teeth. They were terribly straight and reminded me of how a kindergartener would depict a skeleton’s. Her lips were likewise uninviting, thin and wind-cracked, not at all kissable. Perhaps it was really her lips that made her teeth look so awfully bizarre. After all, what is a skeleton but an ordinary girl, perhaps even a beautiful one, with no lips to frame her smile? Yes, I’m sure now, it was her lips that bothered me, not her teeth.
     “I’m Eric, pleased to meet you,” I replied. And I was being sincere. There was something alluring about her if you ignored her lips. She had a certain falseness in her manner that attracted me. The way she told me I was gallant had not rung true at all. She was intentionally exaggerating, as if she was buttering me up for something. I could tell she was a saleswoman at heart. I was a mark and there was something magnetic in knowing that. The offhand fantasies I began to conjure up about us were embarrassingly masculine.
     “So where are you from, Eric?” she asked. “Did you fly in for the golf or was that chivalry a product of the state of New York?” More exaggeration and flattery. I told her that I was from Southern California originally, but that I had come to New York after college to cover sports and had never left. She asked me if I had any plans to move back home and I told her I did not, at least not anytime soon. She said this was sad and that she couldn’t imagine permanently living anywhere besides her home state: Utah.
     Utah. Every single warning bell in my head went off. She was in her late teens, with a saleswoman vibe, from Utah. Ding. Ding. Ding.
     “You’re a missionary,” I exclaimed incredulously.
     “How did you know?” she managed to giggle, clearly caught off guard.
     “I support gay marriage,” I blurted out. This missionary business was bringing back all the shame I felt when my home county of Los Angeles had bought the dropped-in Mormon propaganda and been responsible for the Prop. 8 fiasco that banned gay marriage.
     “That’s okay,” she began.
     “I drink, I smoke, I take the Lord’s name in vain, I lie frequently, I have sex before marriage as much as I can, please don’t try to sell me, I’m not interested.” Even as the words left my mouth, I thought they sounded a bit too harsh. “I’m sorry,” I started, but now it was her turn to cut me off.
     “Why do you New Yorkers always think everything is about buying and selling? I stand outside the Mormon Temple on Fifty-seventh and Broadway every day just trying to talk to people, just trying to bring some happiness into peoples’ lives, and you people look at me like I’m the latest rat that jumped out of a trash can in front of you. I’m not asking you to give me money. I’m not asking for anything. I’m trying to give you something. It’s your ignorance and prejudice that prevents you from seeing that, not mine.” It was an earnest speech and despite the considerable distaste I had for the corporate religiosity of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints, I regretted my earlier rudeness.
     “Look Jill, I just don’t really like the concept of converting people or being converted. It rubs me the wrong way, but I shouldn’t have snapped at you. It was uncalled for. Do you accept my apology?” It was lame, I’ll admit, but I really wasn’t in the mood to try very hard to win back the favor of a missionary.
     “Well, now that you’ve blown my cover as a missionary you’ll have to address me by my formal title, Sister Bloom, but other than that, I’d say I could forgive you if you’d be willing to explain to me how golf works.”
     We both laughed. I asked her why she was at the Open if she didn’t even know the rules of golf. She said golf had always fascinated her in abstract, and that there was a free ticket floating around the Temple so she’d decided to see what it was like. I told her that golf was probably one of the least complicated sports in history.
     “All you have to do is keep hitting the ball with a club until it goes in the hole. Then you move on to the next hole.” She laughed at this and admitted she’d guessed as much, but thought there must be more to the game that she didn’t understand. I told her that was pretty much it, but to not tell Greg, whom I pointed out was sitting on the other side of the Pavilion with his hand on Cindy’s leg and seemingly no desire to actually watch any golf in person until he was sure he had won her affections. He was however, still watching one of the many television sets scattered around the Pavilion out of the corner of his eye.
     Jill (who I refused to call Sister Bloom) and I decided to trudge out of the Champion’s Pavilion and through the mud about twenty yards to the eighteenth hole, where I thought we could catch Tiger finishing up his first half round of play (he’d started the day at the tenth hole). The rain had cleared up enough for the crowds to have reluctantly lowered their collective golf umbrellas and deal with the drizzle themselves.
     “So are your parents Mormon?” I asked her, apropos of nothing. She laughed.
     “It’s okay,” she said when I attempted to apologize for being rude again. “In New York, I’m used to being treated like a foreign curiosity on display. At least you didn’t ask me how I sleep at night. I’ve gotten that a few times. But to answer your question: yes my parents are Mormon and yes that’s probably the reason I am and no I don’t agree with every fine point of the doctrine but no that does not mean that I’m going to give up on the church. It brings people together. You can’t understand living in New York City. This is the worst place for me. I don’t know why they sent me here. Does that about cover it all?”
     “You’ve practiced that speech,” I said.
     “Maybe a little.”
     “So you don’t get to choose where you go?” I asked.
     “No, the Church chooses for you. Then you’re gone for two years and paired with a missionary of the same sex that you may or may not like, who you have to be with twenty-four hours a day. It’s very confining, to say the least, but I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
     “It’s okay,” I replied. “So where is your partner then, or whatever you call her? Shouldn’t she be with you now if you guys have to stay together at all times?”
     “Technically, yes. Her name is Sister Wadsworth. We like each other, but sometimes it just gets to be too much. We decided we’d let each other have the day off while we’re here and blame the lack of cell phones for being alone if anyone we know sees us.”
     I smiled at how similar our plans were. Jill’s disingenuous aura seemed to have almost entirely disappeared. She looked more relaxed. However, I was still not willing to rule out the possibility that this was just another trick in her evangelist’s arsenal. Our conversation was cut off by a barrage of shh’s in various tones and I realized that Tiger must have been about to tee off. Jill and I crowded against the rope barrier and watched the tiny white ball soar through the air. It wasn’t a great drive and Tiger proceeded to miss an easy putt and bogey the hole. Jill thought it was exciting anyway.
     We decided to make our way over to the grandstand by the seventh hole, where we’d have a potential view of three different holes at once, and hopefully find seats that were not still wet from the rain. When we got there and began to casually watch the action move through the course below us, I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
     “But seriously, gay marriage? Why not? Why is it so bad? Why did your church spend millions of dollars to stop it? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.” She laughed. It was the same easy laugh she’d had when I’d pointed out Greg and Cindy, inches away from a full-blown make out session in the Pavilion. I didn’t find it charming now. I found it infuriating. This was a serious issue that had a profound effect on the life of one of my closest childhood friends back home and she was laughing like it was a harmless doctrinal dispute between two obscure clerics.
     “I know you want a fight, Eric,” she said, “but I’m not going to give you one.” She was right. I did want a fight. I wanted her to show her true religious fanatic colors instead of tiptoeing around the radical issues. I wanted to prove that my prejudices against her had a basis in fact. I wanted her to stop being so damned normal for a second and become a creature of intolerance.
     “So what are you saying?” I pressed on. “You support gay marriage then?”
     “No, of course not,” she laughed again. “But,” she added conspiratorially, “I think my church might have been a little overzealous with that whole situation. Let Babylon be Babylon, I always say.”
     “You don’t sound much like a missionary,” I replied.
     “I guess I’m not. New York has jaded me. I wish I could go door to door to in small towns like my brother did on his mission. He went to Croatia. He said it was one of the best times he’s had in his life. I wouldn’t even be able to make it up to someone’s door in the city. The doorman would tackle me in the lobby before I got to the elevator. It’s actually kind of pathetic. I stand out on the street like some Scientologist, or someone trying to get you to go to a comedy club. It’s degrading.”
     I couldn’t think of anything cheerful to say to her and, though I wanted to, I didn’t have the heart to continue attacking her about gay rights. We sat there in silence for a minute as it began to rain again. Umbrellas popped up around us as if out of thin air and I heard someone yell from below. She rested her head lightly against my shoulder, where it would be protected from the rain by the large umbrella of the man sitting next to me.
     “ERIC! Over here! We thought we’d lost you.” It was Greg and he came bouncing up the stairs with Cindy in toe. “Have you seen Sergio today? Radio says he’s on fire,” he said, pointing to the single white headphone on his left ear. “Why, hello, who’s your new friend? Is that the girl you saved from hitting her head in the Pavilion? Great move. What quickness. Exactly the type of fitness we talk about at the site. I’m Greg, by the way. Greg Danielson.”
     “I’m Sister Bloom,” Jill replied, sticking out her hand. Greg looked at her as if she’d said Tiger was about to retire.
     “You’re a nun?” he spluttered. It was obvious that he’d already put back more than a couple of drinks in the Champion’s Pavilion. “Don’t you have to wear a cape in public?”
     “You mean a robe, Greg,” Cindy said from behind him, pinching him in the side. She seemed undeterred by his obvious inebriation. “Nuns wear robes, for modesty.”
     “She’s not a nun,” I said. A flood of relief poured out of Greg.
     “Well, thank God for that. Knew she couldn’t be. Nuns don’t golf. She’s your sister then? Bloom? That’s not your last name, Eric. It’s Davies, Eric Davies. Knew she couldn’t be a nun though. Far too pretty.” At this last comment, Greg flashed his bulbous, boyish smile at Jill. Cindy looked furious and her cheeks began to rouge towards the color of her hair.
     “I’m not related to Eric, I’m actually a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints,” Jill replied. This time, Greg looked as if she just told him Tiger had been beaten to death by his caddy on the third hole. However, it was Cindy who spoke up.
     “You’re joking, right?” she said in a tone that suggested she didn’t think Jill was joking at all. I guessed she was still upset about the grin Greg had given Jill. “You are a spokeswoman for the magical underwear company? This is too much. A real life Mormon in New York, now that’s something you don’t see everyday.” Apparently, Greg hadn’t been the only one getting loaded.
     “Cindy,” Greg interjected pleadingly.
     “No, I want to know some things,” Cindy continued. “So are you part of some sort of harem Jill, or are you not allowed to marry yet since you’re a missionary?” Even though I also wondered what Jill’s thoughts were on polygamy, I was still resisting the urge to throw Cindy down the grandstand and into the mud. My heart quickened uncomfortably and I tried to calm it by telling myself that Cindy was just a middle-aged computer nerd who didn’t understand social interaction. It wasn’t convincing. Cindy knew exactly what she was doing. I readied my throat to yell at her, but Jill put her hand gently on my arm.
     “The Mormon Church actually doesn’t condone polygamy anymore,” Jill spoke calmly. “And we can get married whenever we want, but I’m not. Some of my friends from high school are married already, but I think I’m too young for that. I don’t even have a boyfriend.” Greg tried to catch my eye, but I pretended to be watching the grounds crew squeeze water off the green.
     “Perfectly right. Play the field. That’s what I always say,” Greg belted out giddily. “Don’t get married until you have to. I should know. Been married twice. Cindy, we need to get moving if we want to see Angel play that nasty fourth hole.” Cindy looked torn between wanting to take another verbal swing at Jill and having Greg all to herself again. Her desire for Greg won out and she clanked absurdly down the grandstand after him in her mud-splashed high-heels.
     “They’re alright once you get to know them,” I said. “Actually, just Greg. Cindy is pretty much always like that.”
     “Are they, together?”
     “Who knows,” I laughed. Jill and I sat silently for a few moments. A young golfer who had qualified for the first time hit a beautiful chip out of a sand trap and onto the green six inches from the hole. The crowd around us went wild, waving their umbrellas up and down, spraying each other with water. Nobody cared about that. The golfer turned and pumped his fist to the crowd. He looked elated. I knew that feeling. I wished Greg had been here to see this. He would have appreciated it more than Jill or I could.
     “Do you play golf, or just like to watch?” Jill asked pleasantly. I tensed.
     “No, I don’t play golf. It’s too much of an old man’s game for me. I figure I’ll pick it up when I put myself out to pasture in Florida or somewhere like that. I played tennis in college, but I haven’t in awhile.” I tried to sound casual, but my heart was beating angrily. I hadn’t even been able to watch tennis on television in months. It was too painful.
     “I’m sorry,” Jill said softly.
     “Don’t be sorry for me,” I snapped. “I’m fine. I just got sick of tennis that’s all.” I turned away from her and looked past the course, towards the rest of Long Island.
     “I understand. Sometimes I get sick of the whole missionary thing.”
     “No it’s nothing like that,” I threw back. “You still do it. Every day.” I was struggling to keep my breathing under control.
     “What does that mean?” Jill asked.
     “Nothing,” I replied. “I just don’t get you. You can’t really believe it.”
     “Believe what, Eric?”
     “I don’t know. Like, that Jesus came to America. Or that Joseph Smith could read some secret Indian language no one else could. Those things. They aren’t real.” For a long time Jill didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I didn’t know why I was so upset. My chest began to feel like it was in a tennis racquet stringer that wouldn’t stop tightening. This had never happened before. I grabbed Jill’s hand and squeezed it hard.
     “Are you alright,” she whispered.
     “I need some air,” I croaked, ignoring the obvious fact that we’d been outside the entire day. I hobbled down the grandstand with Jill on my arm. When I reached the grass I collapsed to a knee. I breathed in the smell of horse manure, cut grass, and muddy shoes. I hadn’t noticed it smelled like horses before. It almost made me smile.
     “Do you want me to get a doctor,” Jill asked. She dropped down on her knees, getting mud all over her skirt. She put her hand over the one I had planted on the ground. I tried to breathe in deeply and coughed, but I felt my chest loosening.
     “I’m alright,” I managed, rising to my feet and waving off the small crowd of onlookers who had gathered to look concerned.
     “Are you sure,” she asked.
     “I’m fine,” I said. I really was feeling better. My breathing had returned to more or less normal, if still a bit shallow. I no longer felt like my heart was taking a nine-iron to my chest. I wanted to put her at ease. “Look at you,” I said, gesturing to her dirty dress and arms.
     “You should see yourself,” she smiled, picking up my mud-caked hand and putting it in front of my face. I told her one of the best parts of the Open, and the Champion’s Pavilion in particular, was the abundance of luxurious portable washrooms. They had wood paneling, faux marbling, and as many baby-soft paper towels as you needed to scrub the grime off your arms. When we were both as clean as we could get under the circumstances, we sat by one of the café tables that lined the deck of the Champion’s Pavilion. We were half-protected from the rain by a thick plastic awning that flapped lazily in the wind above us.
     “About what you asked me earlier,” Jill started.
     “Forget about it,” I said.
     “No, I won’t. I get it. You think I’m stupid because I go along with beliefs you think are ludicrous. That’s what you’re saying right?”
     “But don’t you think they’re ludicrous?” I asked.
     “A few. Maybe. Sure. So what?”
     “So what? It’s your life, Jill. How can you settle like that?”
     “I’m not settling. I know what I love and it’s my family and my friends and the place I was raised. It’s a beautiful place, full of the kindest people. I’m not going to try to convince you, but it’s true. If I have I have to wear special underwear to be a part of my family, who cares?”
     “But it’s not just that,” I interjected, “you know it’s not.”
     “Then what is it?” she asked.
     “I don’t know,” I replied. I looked out over at the throng of people trudging their way towards the exits. These were the early birds trying to get back to a dinner reservation in the city. The golf day hadn’t quite finished up yet. I saw Greg trying to cut his way across one of the columns. He spotted us and waved. Cindy was nowhere to be seen.
     “Where’d Cindy run off to,” I asked him when he finally panted his way up to the deck of the Champion’s Pavilion.
     “Don’t know. Lost her. Ran to see Mickelson on twelve. Thought she was right behind me. Guess he wasn’t. She was weighing me down a little anyway. She doesn’t understand golf at all. Don’t know why she wanted to come. I wasn’t going to waste the whole day. ” We all laughed at that. Greg looked considerably redder than he had at the beginning of the day. He sunburned easily, even in the rain, but I didn’t think this accounted for all of it. He was flush with life and a considerable amount of alcohol. He reminded me of the young golfer we’d seen on the seventh hole.
     “I thought you two were together,” Jill said.
     “Cindy and I?” Greg asked.
     “Yeah.”
     “No,” he replied firmly. “I mean she’s a nice woman. Real sexy.” I cringed at that. “Just knew she wasn’t for me. Know what I mean? And I’m not the best judge of women either. Been divorced twice. Did I mention that? Anyway, I’m going to look at souvenir golf shirts before the merchandise tent closes. You want anything Eric?”
     “No, I’m okay. Thanks though,” I replied.
     “Sure?” Greg asked. “Great to wear around the office. Everyone will be jealous.”
     “No, I’m good.” We watched Greg race across the grass to the merchandise pavilion, almost knocking over a man carrying a toddler on his shoulders.
     “I like him,” Jill said.
     “Me too,” I replied.
     “I like you too,” Jill continued. “Even though you hate my religion and think I’m a pathetic sellout.”
     “I don’t think you’re pathetic. I just can’t be as sure as you are about everything. I’m not built that way.”
     “Maybe you are. Maybe you aren’t, Eric. I think when you find something you really love you’ll stop looking for ways to knock it down. I think everyone does.” I thought that was a little cheesy, but the way she said it made me smile anyway. It was a nice thought.
     “I told you not to try to sell me,” I said, but I knew she was being sincere. Jill knew I wasn’t going to move to Utah and have lots of Mormon babies and she didn’t care. She wasn’t selling anything anymore. We sat there in a pleasant silence, watching as the fickle rain began to dry again.
     “ERIC!” It was Greg. He was standing outside the merchandise tent, holding up two matching U.S. Open 2009, Bethpage Black golf shirts, and gesturing towards the exit. “We’re going to miss our train!” he yelled. I hoped one of those shirts wasn’t for me.

Nathan McAlone is a recent graduate of Columbia University's creative writing program, living and working in New York City. His love of sports comes from his dad, who once quite gloriously struck out Reggie Jackson.

2012 Pushcart Nominations

2011-11-30T10:31:00.001-06:00

The editors of Stymieare pleased to announce that the following contributions to the journal have been selected as our Pushcart Prize nominations forthis year.

Poetry – “Stewart Lake” by Carol Gloor

Nonfiction – “Another Cold War” by Curtis Smith

Nonfiction – “Huntington Drive” by Jesse Cheng

Fiction – “Rocket Man” by Stephen Graham Jones

Fiction – “Bully” by Nick Ripatrazone

Fiction – “Cry” by Claire Novak

We thank these writers for their contributions to Stymie and wish them the best of luck with these well deserved nominations!

New Fiction: Super Fly-Weight

2011-11-27T19:25:00.000-06:00

Title: Super Fly-Weight
Author: F.D. Pelzer
Category: Fiction

They call me Light-Weight Leonard. But really I’m super light-weight, I’m fly-weight, I’m super fly-weight. I can slip between the elastic bands without touching either. I’m in the ring with Kellen and he eyes me with his one twisted eye but it doesn't do anything to me. I punch my gloves together and duck my feet around.

     The ring of the bell. He comes on heavy, since he outclasses me. I came into the gym and queued up next to Kellen, never mind his crazy eye that peers at you from the future. It’s practice so nobody cares that he’s got thirty pounds on me, towers over me in the ring. Even I don’t care. It doesn’t matter that I’m taking the hits on my arms, my chest, my head. And for Kellen, well for Kellen I’m a punching bag that can move. I’m a guy he can pound without worrying about it.

     But when you're my weight and you still keep fighting in the ring you learn a few things. You learn how to slip a knee at the balls without the ref or coaches catching it. You learn how to pack the padding of your gloves without making them clunky or heavy despite the new stiffness. You learn to track down a motherfucker who's been seeing your girl behind your back.

     Stacy probably called Kellen, let him know what was coming for him in the ring today. But he thinks checking his phone before lacing up was bad luck. He hasn't heard about Stacy in the hospital or the sirens heading our way. He just sees my slim shoulders, and nothing about my oversized fists coming for his head like justice.

F.D. Pelzer is a recent graduate from the University of Pittsburgh and new arrival to Chicago. He writes for the webcomic Bananas for Breakfast, and has had plays produced by Pitt Rep and Redeye Theatre Project.

New Nonfiction: Surviving the Apocalypse

2011-11-14T21:56:00.000-06:00

Title: Surviving the Apocalypse
Author: Ray Scanlon
Category: Nonfiction

If the folklore's not apocryphal, during the war GIs in the ETO used baseball questions when they needed to test the authenticity of any ostensible American who didn't have the proper credentials. I'd have been shot as a German spy, fine Irish name and command of English notwithstanding. Complete lack of interest in baseball, indeed, any sport, would have been the death of me.

     My memory was adequate—I remember an old girlfriend's license plate number and my locker combination—I just refused to store player rosters, batting averages, and World Series data in it. My dorky body, now an old but untrustworthy friend, was never much use in athletics. Combine these two factors with an inclination to shy away from anything that I knew I couldn't do on the first try, and you've got a sure-fire recipe for sports incompetence, and then avoidance. So why do I now find myself sitting in front of a television enjoying Red Sox games? I could say that I'm researching to meet the obligation of all American essayists to write about baseball, but it's more likely I'm now in my dotage.

     You'd think your brain would know when it's broken, but usually it just can't do it. It seems to have some sort of adaptive software that constantly weighs what it's doing and thinking, and finds it always to be internally consistent. I have experience with hypoglycemia and depression, both of which cause behavior that's clearly aberrant to the nominally objective external observer, but which the affected brain insists is perfectly normal. It's like hardware diagnostics from PDP-11 days—the only software that would run when your computer was so messed up nothing else would. Maybe it's just the nearly infinite human capacity for self-delusion. But watching baseball is so anomalous that even my brain recognizes it as a sign of serious derangement.

     More truthfully, I don't really believe that I like baseball now because I'm senile. My conversion to the Dark Side was gradual, starting with my grandson's participation in Tee-Ball. Following that I spent many a frozen-butted April Saturday watching him progress through his Little League years, until at the end he was playing something that really looked a lot like baseball. And watching him play catch with his dad taught me it was possible that a normal, fulfilling life might include sports.

     As pack animals, it's our nature to identify with a team, and say “we” instead “the Red Sox.” As an antisocial loner, I don't go there. I have no emotional attachment to even the Sox, our local team. I'm not “devastated” or “gutted,” to quote fans, that the Red Sox failed to make the playoffs: with no little sarcasm my friend Rene countered such news with, “This affects my life how?” I don't care that their September collapse was historic. I don't care if Terry Francona gets fired. I don't care who wins the World Series. I don't care whether the Yankees suck.

     But I love to see the Sox pack get its teeth into a ball game. I love to see sport in which a team doesn't subsume its members, whose individuals remain identifiable. I love to watch players who may be egotistic prima donnas but don't seem like thugs. I love to watch experts perform amazing feats, observe their behavior dealing with mistakes and the randomness that the game throws at them, and listen to the cognoscenti bitch and moan and prognosticate. I love the spectacle of fans turning on erstwhile winners. And I prefer to do it from the detached vantage point of invincible ignorance of any but the simplest rules, strategies, and politics of the game. The time is past when I would have been embarrassed to admit my ignorance; increasing age brings me the gift of shamelessness. I don't need to be one of the experts.

Ray Scanlon. Massachusetts boy. Has grandchildren. Extraordinarily lucky. No MFA. No novel. No extrovert. On the web: http://read.oldmanscanlon.com/.

Because I Can, by Curtis Smith

2011-11-09T08:18:00.003-06:00

Today we continue with our series, Why Do You Write? Curtis Smith's deceptively simple response speaks to the myriad of reasons we approach the blank page.

I write because musical notes might as well be Russian.

I write because the thought of my desk can lure me from bed before a January sunrise.

I write because I’ve found joy in ending a sentence with just the right word.

I write because I’ve dropped my anchor and declared my art form in this world of endless diversions.

I write because I hear voices when my pen glides over a page.

I write because notions of time turn slippery behind my study’s shut door.

I write while the rest of the house is asleep.

I write amid the din of crowds.

I write to be immersed in a place of my choosing.

I write as I eat my hurried lunch, the crumbs swept from my pages.

I write to honor my days in this strange and beautiful place.

I write to know myself better than I did yesterday.

I write because I can, and I know one day I won’t be able to.

I’m thankful today isn’t that day.

Curtis Smith is the author of two collections of flash fiction, two story collections, and three novels. His most recent book is Witness, an essay collection from Sunnyoutside Press.

New Fiction: The Light in Coach Morgan's Office

2011-11-01T05:52:00.000-05:00

Title: The Light in Coach Morgan's Office
Author: Mark S. Bacon
Category: Fiction

Coach Morgan retreated into his office, slapping the hanging light fixture as he went by.   The lamp, seven feet above the floor, was his surrogate punching bag.
Slumped at his desk, he scanned his roster. When he'd played college hoops, Morgan always wanted to coach high school basketball. But five years of losing seasons and talent-starved squads were discouraging.
     "Coach, that transfer sophomore's here," said an assistant.
     What's the point? Morgan thought. "Okay, send him in."
     When Morgan heard the bang, he looked up to see a muscular young man holding his forehead where he'd hit it on the lamp.

Mark S. Bacon is an independent writer most recently a regular contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle.   He's the author of three business books and many newspaper and magazine articles. This story appears in Bacon's Cops, Crooks and Other Stories, a forthcoming ebook of 100-word fiction.

Writers Are Boring, by Julia Patt

2011-10-26T08:00:00.001-05:00

Julia Patt, the winner of our first ever Trading Card Fiction Contest, is kicking off our series in which we ask: Why do you write? Click on through to read Julia's contribution, and order your set of trading cards to read her first place story, "Fall 1970."

So, it all started with my childhood. I grew up rough on the streets of Baltimore. I survived only by my wits, and struggled through a difficult and often dangerous adolescence until I learned to find solace in the written word. I read David Foster Wallace and Gustave Flaubert and William Faulkner and they turned my cynical worldview completely upside down—or at least focused it to something purposeful. Art, I decided, was the answer.

Well, actually. That’s not my story.

Really, it all started in Naples, Italy, when my parents decided to immigrate to the United States in hopes of a better life. We settled in New York and began the near-insurmountable task of assimilating with American culture and finding work in an unfeeling city. We were often cold, often hungry, and at one point my siblings and I were placed in an orphanage because our parents could no longer afford to feed us. While there, I came under the tutelage of a young sister, who gave me contraband copies of Allen Ginsberg and J.D. Salinger.

Sorry. Not me again.

I’ve also never fled the tyranny of a totalitarian regime, explored the machinations of organized crime, or invaded a foreign country. I’m not a veteran or a political prisoner. I’m a vegetarian, but that’s hardly subversive nowadays, is it? I jaywalk more than I should. And I got a speeding ticket in Virginia once. It kind of sucked. I called my Mom. (Hi, Mom.)

And it gets worse. I wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider. Gamma rays didn’t hit me and turn me into an angry, green person. I‘ve never (to my knowledge) fallen into a vat of ambiguously radioactive material. The Empire’s troops didn’t kill my foster parents. And my escape pod didn’t crash on Earth after my planet was tragically destroyed. No one’s ever delivered the maxim, “With great power comes great responsibility” to me in a serious and sincere tone—or any kind of tone.

That’s the problem with contemporary writers. We have lousy origin stories. We’re students and baristas and telemarketers and IT professionals and teachers and communications assistants and media-marketing specialists. I mean, maybe one in a thousand of us is personally interesting. And I’m very suspicious of those people—when, exactly, did they find time do such exciting things? And why do they bother with something as silly as writing when they have fascinating lives to lead? It defies comprehension.

Or it would, if the daily mechanics of living had anything to do with why people write. Which they don’t. That’s the point—at least for me. I write, not because of the minutiae that make up my day and not because of my well-adjusted and suburban upbringing, but in spite of those things. I write to get at the good stuff, the stuff that moves me. What’s going on in the world, good and bad; what’s going on with people, collectively and individually and psychologically (and other adverbs); and what might happen with all of it. That’s interesting. Way more interesting than what I had for breakfast or the walk I took to the park. The good stuff, the stuff that makes you stay up all night reading because you have to know what happens next, who wins and who loses or who lives and who dies, because it’s a damn good story.

It’s the same impulse that keeps me up writing—and I think it’s born out of that love of reading, that love of story outside of our experiences than makes people write. Honestly, if you ever meet a writer who says he doesn’t like to read, that all he needs to write is his own life, do me a solid and slap him.

You could also chastise him quietly but fiercely. That might work, too.

So, honestly, why do I write? Really, it all started with books. The ones my parents read me before I learned to read—Go, Dog. Go! and The Cat in the Hat and Aesop’s Fables. The ones we read for school—The Giver and Matilda and later Pride and Prejudice and Catcher in the Rye. And the stuff I picked up on my own—first anything with a dragon or an elf on the cover and then anything written by Stephen King and then the stuff I really learned to chew on—Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon and Italo Calvino and Kelly Link and José Saramago and dozens of other writers who have not only given me the pleasure of reading their stories, but have taught me by example how stories can work. And made me consider what I might write.

Because that’s the other part of it, of course. So, you want to write, good for you. What are you going to write about? How’re you going to do it? But it always feels a little gross to me when writers talk about their work. It’s more than a bit like an act of public masturbation (sorry, Mom)—and I’m a very young writer, so it’s even an unwarranted act of public masturbation, because what do I really have to say about it anyway, being so young and so inexperienced and, as we’ve established, so boring?

Not much, but this: I like to write strange stories. And sad stories. I want to write the kind of story I want to read, the kind of story that puts me in touch, not with the world I know, but the world I don’t know. I like the kind of story that makes you scratch your head. If I’m going to spend hours with a story, I want it to be a little bit odd (if I wanted dull, I’d write about myself): one brown eye, one blue eye, mismatched socks, a bad attitude. The story that wouldn’t go to the pep rally and doesn’t eat its vegetables. The underdog. The one that bothers you late at night when you’re trying to fall asleep. The one that makes you miss your stop on the train. The one that surprises you, unsettles you.

And that is my story.

Mostly.

Julia Patt hails from Mitchellville, MD where her parents raised her pretty well and supported her brazenly impractical desire to be a writer from day one. She studies creative writing with the UNC Greensboro MFA program—they’re nice to her, too—and studies everything else via the internet. Her work appears in Surreal South ’11 and PANK, among others, and her flash fiction, “Fall 1970,” won the inaugural Trading Card Contest at Stymie, which totally made her year.

It's Alive!

2011-10-19T12:38:00.000-05:00

The Autumn & Winter issue of Stymie is live and available for reading.
Our latest issue features an outstanding lineup of writers including D.N.A. Morris, Dave Housley, Nick Ripatrazone, Lucy Bledsoe, Corey Mesler, Carol Gloor, J. Bradley, Curtis Smith and more! To take a peek, share with your friends and neighbors, or to just stare in awe at the amazing cover art by Jennifer Lewis -- check out our ARCHIVE page.

New Fiction: When They Take Your Dad

2011-10-17T22:07:00.000-05:00

Title: When They Take Your Dad
Author: J. Spinazzola
Category: Fiction

The day the agents knocked on the door he’d been reading comics in the basement. Stephen was the only one home, and they wouldn’t stop knocking. The comics would have to wait.
“Your dad home?”

“He’s working.”
“When’s he get home?”

“I don’t know. I was just reading some comics.”

Stephen didn’t know what else to say.

One of the agents showed his badge with an eagle crowning the top and then asked if they could take a look around.

Stephen noticed the other agent gave his partner a look as if they weren’t allowed to ask a kid for permission to enter.

“I think you should wait for my dad.”

“We can wait. We’ll be out there.” Their car, an intense gray like a stare, was parked outside the house along the curb.

Years later Stephen would remember a long conversation that night with his mother, a crash course on tax evasion, and what it felt like to have the FBI take your dad. He’d remember all kinds of things he used to do with his dad when he was little: throwing a baseball back and forth in the front yard, his first trip to the comic store, and the cold slush his dad brought home the day Stephen had his wisdom teeth removed. He’d remember his dad always knew what to do and that, for once, he did, too.

He called his dad from the house phone. These were the days before caller identification, and it didn’t occur to him that his dad might think he was lying. Stephen always told the truth, but in times like this, the truth wasn’t important.

“Dad,” he said, his voice cracking.

“What’s wrong?” His dad always knew.

“I’m lost.”

“What do you mean you’re lost?”

“I went to a friend’s house and got lost on the way home. I’m by that park where you used to take me on Saturdays. I’m calling from a payphone. I’m on my last quarter.”

“Stephen,” his dad said. “This doesn’t sound right.”

“It is right, Dad. I’m at the park, and I can’t find my way home. Please, I need you to come pick me up.”

“You’ve walked back from that park a dozen times on your own. It’s only a few blocks from the house. There’s a key outback. You know where. Did you lose your key?”

Everyone knew their way home from that park: the only one in town with lights over the playing fields, it was like a landmark.

“Dad, I need your help.”

“I’ll pick you up at the park,” his dad said. “Don’t go anywhere. Fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Stay where you are. Your dad loves you.”

Stephen had just finished seventh grade and hadn’t heard those words from his dad in what felt like a long time. He didn’t need to hear the words to know they were true.

Fifteen minutes was more than enough time. There were two gloves and a baseball in the garage. A door from the kitchen opened to the garage, and he crawled along the garage floor where the agents wouldn’t be able to see him through the windows. That’s how they used to make garage doors, with windows, and Stephen had to be careful when he reached up for the gloves and ball or else the agents might see his arm from where they were waiting at the curb. When he pulled the gloves down, the ball slipped out, but he dove forward like one of the school athletes and caught the ball before it could hit the hard concrete. His other hand, holding the gloves, broke his fall.

The gloves had been in the garage since he gave up baseball when middle school made it clear which kids were athletes and which ones read comics and cheered for their friends from the stands. His dad loved baseball more than Stephen ever did, and the gloves had sat on the shelf too long.

Stephen crawled back toward the kitchen with the gloves in one hand and the ball in the other. Then he snuck down to the basement where he kept his comics, found a pair of sneakers by the couch where he’d been reading, laced up, and headed out the sliding glass door in the rear of the walkout basement. From there he climbed over a couple of familiar neighborhood fences, careful not to drop the gloves or baseball, then took the long way around to the park.

When he got there, his dad was waiting.

“Stephen, I thought I told you to stay put?”

Stephen was sweating. He’d run the whole way. His dad, still holding the car keys, had obviously taken less than fifteen minutes; he must have left his papers at work and sped to get there.

“Put this on,” Stephen said, extending a glove.

“What is this all about?”

“Please, Dad. I need you to put this on.”

His dad shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and dropped the car keys to the ground. His dad always knew what to do.

After taking the glove, Stephen’s dad asked the obvious question. “I thought you didn’t like baseball anymore?”

“Let’s just toss the ball.”

No one loved to toss a ball more than his dad, and they tossed the ball like that without either one of them saying anything about it. They just tossed the ball back and forth in the park until they couldn’t see the ball, and when the park lights came on overhead, they tossed it some more.

J. Spinazzola is a writer and former attorney. His stories, poems, and legal articles have appeared in print and online. Most recently, Charlotte Viewpoint published his short story,“The Next Big Thing.”

COMING SOON!

2011-10-13T08:58:00.000-05:00

Have you ever wondered why other writers write? Have you wondered why they write what they write? Starting next Wednesday: a new web feature that answers these important questions. Stay tuned for our running series of essays by Stymie friends and contributors. You won’t want to miss this.

New Nonfiction: Huntington Drive

2011-10-03T05:34:00.000-05:00

Title: Huntington Drive
Author: Jesse Cheng
Category: Nonfiction

We were losers and misfits, most of us uncoordinated geeks who couldn’t hack it in a real sport. Every week coach insisted that we were the true B.M.O.C., Big Men On Campus, but it was hard to argue with the jerks blasting line drive field goals in our direction as we tried to stretch in their end zone. We were cross country runners. What did all those banners on the hallway walls mean to us—Go Titan Gridiron!, with their little pink hearts hand-painted by cheerleaders—except to wave us away to our place in the prevailing order, beyond the peripheral boundaries of the school grounds—out, literally, into the streets.

The most familiar of these was the median strip on Huntington Drive, a wide swath of thick grass that divided the main thoroughfare of San Marino, California. Named after the railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington, the road was once a major vein of the Pacific Electric Railway. During its heyday in the 1920s, it was the largest electric rail system in the world. After the peak, though, came the decline; one final whistle tooted for the locomotive era, and then the four-track lane that ran the length of the city was laid over with greenery, scraggly trees, and artfully-manicured flower patches.

Since the median strip’s cosmetic makeover, its plush, matted grass has provided generations of local harriers the ideal surface for an end-of-the-week recovery run—three miles out, three miles back. With the past so securely underfoot, it was perhaps fitting that a group of young males coming of age would devote our full attention to what came ahead: league finals, then Southern Sectionals…maybe even the Division III state title. Things were simple to us. Get picked on, kick ass, obtain respect.

We ran hard, and it turned out we were pretty quick, too—fast enough to win the Rio Hondo League my first season on the varsity squad as a junior, and then, in a spectacular upset from nowhere, the Southern California regionals during my second, and final, year. The state athletic commission gave us special patches to sew onto the shoulders of our letterman jackets. They were much better than trophies. We stitched them into the very fabric of our identity, these large red octagons, like stop signs, arresting the gaze of passer-bys with our official status as Southern Section CHAMPS. We wanted the jocks to see. They did. The geeks on our team who wrote for the school paper made sure everyone else noticed, too.

And at the end of every week, after the hill repeats, the interval training, the intense distance runs, we always came back to that familiar route down the middle of Huntington Drive, right through the heart of a town that was suddenly excited by its unlikely athletes. We jogged shoulder to shoulder, the men’s varsity seven, breaking formation every so often to let pass the weekend warriors. They smiled, waved, exhorted us to bring home the gold. As we shuffled across the street’s expansive intersections, patrolling officers nodded from their squad cars. Technically, we were jaywalking—no crosswalks traverse the center median—but under a larger prevailing order, one that extended beyond the school campus, that strip was our territory.

The state championship! Could we really take it? The springy grass that propelled our footsteps seemed to suggest we had the tailwind of history itself, as if Mr. Huntington’s epic vision of electric-powered transport had ceded its literal ground to the rise of the Titan cross country machine. And even though we were shellacked at State Finals—sixth place—no one could ever take away that time in our lives when a group of scrawny misfits had become emissaries of their sport, their youth, the very idea of what the future could hold. We were cross country runners, and the football team could keep its stadium. For one brief moment in the chronicled course of human events, we had the entire city.

Jesse Cheng is from Southern California. Works have appeared or are forthcoming in Prime Number, Pure Slush, The Christian Science Monitor, and Asian Pacific American Journal. His website is jesse-cheng.com.

New Fiction: Veteran Leadership

2011-09-19T15:57:00.000-05:00

Title: Veteran Leadership
Author: Oliver Lee Bateman
Category: Fiction

I’m sitting in our team’s locker room, slumped down in a folding chair, trying not to look at the man who took my job.

“How does it feel to play with someone like J.P. Crackerjack?” a woman who shouldn’t be allowed in here asks me.

Her face is the color of an eggplant. I can see spray-on tan lines on her shirt. I already hate her guts. Why shouldn’t I, you know? I’m having a hard time of it these days.

“It’s an honor and a privilege, Miss McCleary,” I say in my sweetest and most gentlemanly voice.   I’m a proper southern boy, kept around to provide veteran leadership, and interviews like these are my bread-and-butter. “Honest to gracious, it is such a thrill to watch him play.”

J.P. Crackerjack, who probably doesn’t have brain one in that big fool head of his, is a prodigy. He stands to break “Herc” Broadsides’ single season home run record and I doubt he’ll stop there. He’s also the worst fielding first baseman of all time, and I should know because we play the same position.

“What I mean to say, Miss McCleary, is that he’s redefining the position. He’s doing things out there that nobody else can do. He’s special, one of a kind, once in a generation.”

Eight years ago, I was this team’s third round draft pick out of State University. Fifty-seventh best prospect in the majors two years after that. When “Two-by-Four” Riggs left as a free agent, I took his place in the lineup. In my four seasons as a starter, I got on base 35 percent of the time, averaged 20 home runs a year, and played flawless defense.

“Do you think he has a chance at the record?” When she says this, she runs her tongue over her lips in a way I find suggestive. I shouldn’t find anything about this woman arousing, seeing as how she’s so terrible, and yet there it is. I wish I were the kind of guy who could ravish a woman like this, the kind of guy who couldn’t care less about his ex-wife, his kids, any of it really.

“Sure as shooting I do, ma’am. I think he has as good a chance at 71 as anybody does, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.” She laughs at my corn-pone turns of phrase, which I guess is what someone in her position has to do.

While I’m talking to her, J.P. Crackerjack is picking his nose. I can’t help glancing over at him, and I see he has this huge booger on his index finger. He puts the finger in his mouth, removes it, and I see that the booger has vanished.

Do people see what I see? Could they?

“What do you think is the key to Mr. Crackerjack’s success, ‘Toe?’”

People see a 6’4”, towheaded rube with Popeye forearms and a winning smile. I just watched this man eat a booger, and because I’m five inches shorter and can’t hit the curveball I’m his backup.

“Well, Ms. McCleary, J.P. is darn near the best bad-ball hitter in the league today. You can’t throw him a pitch that he won’t go out of his way to hit.”

J.P. Crackerjack will set records for errors by a first baseman and strikeouts and nobody is going to say a thing. He doesn’t bring anything to the table except these moon shots, only lucky for him the moon shots are all the fans want to see.

“Do you think you’ve been able to mentor him, to help him grow as a first baseman and as a person?”

She asks me this because she knows that’s the only thing I’m good for now. It’s kind of sickening, and I’d much rather be a starter on a terrible team than a backup on this one, but here I am. I hold this guy’s jock and the paychecks I get each month just about cover my alimony.

“J.P. has grown as a human being, grown by leaps and bounds. More than that, he is starting to understand the little things, the inner game, the finer points. Miss McCleary, he is going to be a great one, mark my words.”

A couple months back, J.P. Crackerjack raped some girl outside a bar in Texas. Well, I don’t know if he actually raped her, but whatever happened wasn’t entirely aboveboard. There was a settlement and not much media coverage, almost exactly like what happened last year when some Atlanta doctor got busted and claimed he was selling steroids to J.P.

“And how do you feel about your team’s chances? Three years ago, you were two runs away from winning it all. Do you think this is the year it comes together for the Spartans?”

This is the year, like the other years, where I wish I were J.P. Crackerjack. It hasn’t been a bad ride for me, all things being equal, but I want something inside me—something decent and something awful at the same time—like whatever is inside him.   He ravishes women, graces billboards, endorses products, lives the dream.

“I sure do hope so, ma’am. I have a good feeling about this one, but I’m an optimist at heart and I suppose that’s the feeling I have every season. You play this game to win, you know. The second you just start playing it just to play, well, you need to hang up the cleats.”

Who is J.P. Crackerjack? He’s God’s gift to baseball is who he is, and right now His gift is naked from the waist down and scratching his crotch.

“Where do you see yourself next year, ‘Toe?’ Have you given any thought to coaching? Maybe a position in the front office?”

Last week one of my daughters—both of whom are growing up just fine without my help–asked me if I would take her to the state fair so that she could watch the ponies. I told her that I couldn’t, that I was traveling for work, and that maybe we would have some fun when I was off during the fall.

“You don’t even know if there are going to be ponies there,” I say, realizing almost instantly that this won’t, in the context of the interview, make the least bit of sense.

“Say again?” she asks, which is of course the polite thing to do. She’s a beautiful woman, this McCleary. I’d give a decade of my life to sleep with her. I don’t have anything to say to her except for these sports clichés, but even if I had anything else I wouldn’t say it. Maybe J.P. Crackerjack—that prince, that prize!–could sweep her off her feet. Before today’s game, I watched him cry while he was losing at a baseball video game. Should I mention that now? Is it important?

Oh my burden, so heavy and so light.

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.

New Fiction: The Torpedo Show

2011-09-05T20:32:00.001-05:00

Title: The Torpedo Show
Author: Peter Kispert
Category: Fiction

Jeff had never tried the stunt before, but Miklos insisted—the double corkscrew into a synchronized barrel roll was well within his capabilities. Miklos had been commissioned for the traveling stunt plane show, which had been tailgating one carnival through its ambulatory Midwest tour: Iowa, Illinois, Arkansas. And now in Michigan the show saw enormous crowds; even the hours passed as blurred applause, smoke rings. Everywhere the carnival went The Torpedo Show followed, leaving in its wake a stream of evanescent smog and a crowd of spectators who didn’t expect the music to be so catchy, their planes to cut the distended clouds with such inverted, corkscrewed precision. Jeff had been stunt flying since high school and willed himself toward the occupation with constant evening practice, but even he wasn’t sure the whirling dervish was anywhere near a good idea.

After polishing his plane’s double wings to a burnished shine, Jeff consulted again with Miklos, whose foreign intensity somehow felt both admonitory and encouraging. Each word the man spoke carried in it heaviness and brusque direction.

“You step on zee left pedal, then a sudden sving to zee right, and you do not slow down.”

“I don’t slow down. Why not?”

Miklos discarded Jeff’s concern, running his hands along his plane’s immaculate exterior. Jeff had, in all his time working with the esteemed foreigner, never planned to maneuver so much so quickly, and with such noted accuracy. People had died during the shows. Ten years ago, one man traversing the ribbed edge of his plane’s wing—actually walking it while his partner operated the controls inside the plane—fell to the time of a rioting ovation. The show continued for minutes, until the pilot noted his double’s knitted scarf in the rearview mirror. Jeff had seen Miklos perform the same act to the chagrin of the show’s sponsors, though even they admitted the sight was an exhilarating—though wildly irresponsible—pleasure.

“Too vindy—could helix,” Miklos said, looking to the sky. The day had begun with a frosted current and had since tensed to a series of deep, blustery whirlwinds, of which the flatness of the land was already prone. “You practice now. I vatch.”

Jeff popped the plane’s door shut with a tinny snap and incited the thin propellers, their vacillating concentricity whipping his hair in wild strokes. He imagined himself falling through the clouds—first slowly, then rapidly—as he rose above the horizon, stirring the thought from his mind as he warmed up for the afternoon show with a planned series of loops and feigned engine failures, which had always been a crowd favorite. Several townspeople gathered to watch, but Miklos turned them away, one by one, mentioning that during the afternoon show he’d be flying, and anyone who wanted a real spectacle should return then. He folded his arms, his eyes tracking Jeff’s clotted engine smoke as it traced cursive into the placid morning sky.

Leila had lost sight of her boyfriend, Tim, mid-afternoon, somewhere between the merry-go-round and the fried dough stand, her most unwelcome temptation. In her haste to locate him and leave—to finally free herself from the clatter of the prize bell, its shrill ring saturating the midway—she encountered the entrance to the ferris wheel. Her initial assessment of the wheel had pinned it as a place for the lonely and big-hearted, a place not fit for her. But in the hopes of acquiring some view from which to spot Tim, she reluctantly entered the singles line, which was waited on in a much more timely manner than those who chose to board collectively, though at the cost of some residual social stigma. Leila forced the thought of such social relegation from her as a bearded man operating the ride motioned for her to enter the whitish-lime cart while gnawing a block of fresh jerky. He smiled at her, revealing four teeth from which Leila quickly turned.

Inside the cart slouched Brian, a forty-something year-old man who Leila immediately deemed in need of sleep. He had lost most of his hair, and Leila assumed he would exit the ride once she boarded. Instead, he continued staring somewhere in the distance, his vision fixed on a thin line of smoke pricking the sky, occasionally turning to examine some ramshackle boutique from which people purchased stuffed animals the carnival games had, in their innately rigged nature, withheld. Leila sat opposite him, moved her long, brown hair toward her chest and away from the inscribed scratchings near the linked wire: Dylan luvs Brad. Dawn wuz here. A few hearts, a few phone numbers with unrecognizable area codes, one picture of a stick man pooping. Leila had hoped Tim’s polo could be seen through the mass of the other refulgent, discordant colors, and she squinted to begin her search. Both she and Brian kept in complete silence, as if catering to a necessary vow, or willing themselves from a life tilted precariously—only for the moment forgetting the things they could do without.

By mid-morning, Jeff had completed his set of practice tsunamis, the hands-down most feared and difficult stunt both Miklos and he performed simultaneously; the show’s anticipated finale. The two separated a half-mile, hundreds of feet in the air, and rapidly descended toward the ground in an enormous, concave arc of smoke, coming within inches of each other and the landing strip. Jeff’s nerves calmed considerably after each show as the applause from the maneuver bloomed around him. Miklos had performed the stunt for years in Russia, where on several occasions he claimed to have performed the feat while flying upside-down. Jeff initially doubted this claim, though he later grew to understand that Miklos, all things considered, had likely accomplished just that.

Jeff and Miklos spent their lunch hour preparing the planes for their scheduled afternoon ascent into the sky, which looked—in Miklos’s words—to be “ready for flight.” Both toiled over the refined gloss of their windshields, the loose, oiled area around the adjustable brakes, the momentary dust settled in the propellers. As Jeff began to walk toward his packed lunch (two ham sandwiches and a pile of thin, day-old grapes), Miklos approached him.

“Jeffrey, you know vhat to do, yes?” To Jeff’s consistent amusement, Miklos was never able to grasp the concept of abbreviating one’s name.

“About the dervish? Yes. I know, Miklos.”

“No, Jeffrey, zee spinout.”

“The spinout?” Not only had anyone neglected to tell Jeff about the additional maneuver, but the thought of a nauseous spinning post-stunt had him wondering how many additional hands he’d require to gain reasonable control over the plane.

“After zee zunami.”

“Miklos, I’m not trying it—not without practice.“

“Vell, I vill.”

Miklos turned toward his stunt plane, glopped another liberal polish onto its hood, spread it to a thin, silver luster.

As the oscillating whir from the afternoon stunt show waned in the distance, Leila and Brian had somehow managed to further the space between them in the cart. Leila’s search for Tim had, in keeping with her recent study habits, quickly turned sour, and she picked at her sundress, awaiting the wheel’s final full turn, at which point she hoped to exit and walk to the town bookstore. Brian sighed at the sight of his wife, clad in a lumpy knit sweater, shepherding their two boys from the bingo hall. He straightened his posture a bit then spoke, as if cued to.

“She’s doing it again.”

Leila wondered, for a moment, if she could ignore the man. The wheel had turned several times since she had boarded, but had not neared its pinnacle, its halfway point. She responded out of obligation, an insecure mumble.

“Who’s doing what?”

“My wife. She’s doing it again.”

Brian had focused on the carnival’s token ring toss, where his wife had strategically positioned their eight- and ten-year-old boys to wrap rings around the necks of peripheral bottles whenever the barker averted his neurotic gaze. Brian had been unemployed for four months, and his wife operated under the injurious presumptions that if a game could be beat it should be beat and that there was room in the backseat of their station wagon for an oversized plush gorilla. One pang of the prize bell announced the luck of a recent winner, and Brian slumped further in his seat.

“What’s she doing?”

“Nevermind.” Brian had realized unfolding his personal life to a young, female stranger was, in the moment, unnecessary and candid, though his desperation for some small talk held him in a state of only half-regret. Two planes surged into the air in a sudden swell, and for a moment even the ride operators’ eyes fixed on the sight. Leila’s surprise at the concentrated frisson in the air had her turn away from the sight, toward the space behind the carnival, where Tim and another girl stood; between the fried dough stand and the broken portable toilet. Leila shut her eyes and, for the moment, thought about how many senses she could close off simultaneously.

Jeff and Miklos had been performing for nearly a half hour, taking turns eliciting praise from the afternoon’s first crowd with various perilous maneuvers. Per usual, Miklos deviated from the scripted show with additional quick turns and spirals—even spinning out as a demonstration of his mastery over the skill. Jeff prepared for the whirling dervish, and though jarring his consciousness and acquiring a heaving blood rush to the head, he accomplished the stunt with only temporary hearing loss, which he learned to shake swiftly through the generous applause. Both planes arced and rose dramatically in preparation for the final act, the tsunami.

As Jeff’s plane dove, Miklos unexpectedly rotated his, the convex tin belly and wheels of his plane facing skyward. Having never seen Miklos perform the stunt upside down, Jeff assumed that, in another attempt to overshadow his own safer aerial acrobatics, he had chosen to deviate from the scheduled maneuver last-minute. Jeff’s concern at either catching a wheel on the ground or backing out and looking like a complete fool dominated the seconds of his earthbound plunge. Miklos hooked a small loop of smoke in the air before immediately jetting toward their paths’ intersections.

The two met a nearly perfect current of air as both planes—one inverted, one righted—approached the earth. Jeff’s focus on the things around him blurred. His vision felt obstructed around its peripheries. The sound of the two planes ripped into the air, and Jeff pulled suddenly upward, unwilling to risk contact as Miklos whizzed by with a surreal, angled flourish. A click—some minor pop—and the sounds of pulverized metal and cracking sparks instantly quieted the applause. Jeff only saw the accident as he turned with a wide loop, a maneuver normally employed to end the show. Miklos’s right propeller spiraled from its place on the plane into the horizon, as if required to continue with some performance. Jeff thought about how perfect his departure from the scene could have been—one full tank of gas, a spritely shine to the vintage plane—but instead touched down with extra care, running to the sight of the crash, which steamed with hot tin and serrated flesh and a tincture of engine oil. In that moment, Jeff raced through the angles in his mind—the spinout he had failed to allow adequate space for, the buffer zone he had irrefutably violated—and turned back toward his plane.

Both Brian and Leila hadn’t seen it, but immediately after the impact, a pink mist hung in the air. They pressed their faces against the cart’s wires. Below, in the tangled disorder of the carnival, Brian’s wife stole two enormous stuffed pandas and an inflatable guitar. Tim had drifted with the other girl toward an apple tree and kissed her there, as planned: forehead, cheek, lips. Brian and Leila saw none of this. At the edge of the carnival, a limber women covered in red sequins curled into the barrel of a cannon, and two carnival barkers sold makeshift tickets to see what they pronounced the greatest wreck of them all. The ride lurched forward as final smoke from the crash met the clouds in ribbons, plateauing beneath them in pools and rising above in one massive clot, a night sky pushing through the firmament.

Peter Kispert is an undergraduate student currently living in New Hampshire. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in South Dakota Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pear Noir!, Mud Luscious, The Catalonian Review, decomP, and others. He is the Editorial Assistant with The Medulla Review.

New Nonfiction: Knucklehead

2011-08-15T09:57:00.011-05:00

Title: Knucklehead
Author: Guinotte Wise
Category: Nonfiction
Image: Guinotte Wise

Maybe I inhaled too much model airplane fuel when I was building those free-flight gasoline-powered planes as a kid. I know I loved the smell of garages and anything that ran on any kind of fuel at all. I got to mow lawns in the 50's with a rope-start power mower that belonged to a neighbor--I got paid but I'd have eagerly done it for free. I internalized internal combustion. Those little airplane engines went from stone dead to snarling angry life with the help of a battery and a finger placed just right on the prop, then flipped. You learned early how to do that after the propeller chewed up your index finger. There was danger involved with all of this stuff. Adrenaline. Proximity of combustibles. Heat. Heady vapors. A world of its own, and I loved it.

So, 1953. Before Elvis. Saturday. We were hanging out, bored. Levis, t-shirts, hoodlumesque enough to get a peek from a neighbor window, the curtain falling back into place as we looked. I was barely fifteen.

"Let's go to a show," said Maury. He knew all the movies, what was showing. "The Wild One" is on at the Plaza. It's about gangs. Motorcycles. They take over this little town."

Motorcycles. Yikes. I had always wanted one. I rented BSAs with a driver's license not my own. I borrowed a Cushman Eagle from an older friend who was outgrowing it. I borrowed a Zundapp from a rich kid who didn't care about it. I borrowed a lowly Solex from another friend--it was a bicycle that you pedaled up to speed, then lowered a little kerosene-powered motor on a hinge down on the front wheel and it would keep you going for an hour. Pretty dorky, but it had a motor. I had lots of miles on bikes with playing card spoke-motors, and then motor-propelled scooters and motorcycles. And here was a movie about people on such conveyances exercising undreamed of powers. A true must-see.

We saw it. My God. I can remember parts of it to this day. I absorbed it like model airplane glo-fuel, inhaled it, lived it. When that waitress asked Brando what he was rebelling against, and he said "Whaddya got?" it caused me to wait, in vain, for years for someone to ask me that, so I could answer, in a barely intelligible mumble, "Whaddya got?" The question never came.

An aside. Never see a movie, over again, later in life that affected you deeply. Just don't. If you have, you know what I mean. See it in your head, and it will retain its power. See it on the screen, many years later, and it's WTF? This movie was, is, an embarrassment. It's, well, stupid. Poorly directed. Sucky dialogue. Just dopey. They didn't even ride Harleys, most of them. What did I know? I wanted a Velocette that I'd seen in Popular Mechanix. A French motorcycle! With a shaft drive! Zut alors!

But it wasn't dopey in 1953. It was revelatory. It was a religious experience.
I emerged, slit-eyed, into the sunlight, barely listening to my friends. It was a new world. I was changed. Within days I would own my first Harley-Davidson. I would wear motorcycle boots. I aspired to take over a small town with a newly-acquired band of friends, nascent criminals and mentally unbalanced pals. We would mumble like Brando. Roll our eyes. Smirk.

I had a small stash of paper route money that I had saved up due to my mom often declaring we were bankrupt. She used that term whenever something like a new car or a move was out of reach. Then she'd paint the living room.

So, instead of saving the family I made a down payment on a well-worn Harley-Davidson knucklehead. The knucklehead nickname derives from the fact that the rocker boxes atop the finned cylinder heads resembled two knuckles of a fist. I negotiated for $5 a week payments on this monster. The older kid I bought it from fired it up for me and that whole gasoline/olfactory thing kicked in--plus the unmistakable sound effects of that big, chunky Harley-falling-apart sound. I was in heaven. I never knew the year of this hog, just the aura. It had a tank shift and a scary clutch which was later to be my downfall. I'm embarrassed to say I don't know if it was a 61 cubic inch, or a 74. I'll say 74 because that's preferred, these days. I was never not scared on this thing. And always delighted.

One small problem. Well, about six small problems. I didn't have a driver's license. There was no way I could title the thing so I had no license plate. And my folks were death on motorcycles. A big NO. End of discussion. So I bypassed them, kept it at Ray C.'s house, a two-block walk from my own. My paper route got me up at 5am--after throwing the route (from Mr. Ehlers' paper truck; I had the right side and a left-handed kid took the other. We could lead a dog with these flat sailing Kansas City Times and bounce one right off his head. We were good.) I had free time until school and it was still dark at that time of year. I'd coast down Ray's driveway and jump-start the knucklehead halfway down the block. And I'd cruise Brookside and all around mid-town, the wind in my face, the Harley thrumming a deep, dirty sound bubble all around me. Dark, chilly freedom. Citizens slept unaware of the grinning, budding menace in goggles invading their streets.

I don't think any non-biker can know the ... theosophy of this. The zen. Maybe a surfer would know. A skier alone on an expert run with that once-in-a-season rhythm on the moguls. Yeah there are parallels. But, in the main, it's like the t-shirt says: "It's a Harley thing. You wouldn't understand." I don't think the graying, paunchy baby-boomers, the Rolex Riders, understand, but I could be wrong.

I was fifteen. Elvis and James Dean and Catcher in the Rye would help mold my persona a bit later. For now I was putty in the hands of William Harley and Walter Davidson.

Later in my life I would move my family to Milwaukee for the chance to work on Harley-Davidson advertising. To this day I own a Harley. There is no antidote.

I digress. There was, as I said, no license plate on the knucklehead. Fortuitously, at that time, Wheaties cereal packaged small license plates in their boxes for a premium. These plates were embossed metal and about the size of a motorcycle plate. Missouri motorcycle plates were white with black letters back then, and the only ones that Wheaties offered in that color combination were Maine, Quebec, British Columbia and a couple of other oddball plates. My memory tells me I got Alaska, even though they weren't a state until 1959 but I'll go with that. I hung it on the back of the tractor-type saddle with hanger wire. I was never stopped. My folks were a bit puzzled at my accelerated appetite for Wheaties (until the plate showed up), but dismissed it; "He's a growing boy."

Memory. This is the strange part; I can't even remember the knucklehead's color although I think it may have been red. I'm pretty sure it was. What I recall in detail is the total and complete emancipation from the humdrum, the routine. The liftoff. I had no loyalty to brand or configuration or fine points back then. I was in it for the fix, the release. The Harley loyalty came later, and it was always tied to my first, albeit brief, ownership experience.

A few weeks and about thirty bucks more of payments into this adventure, Maury and I took the Knucklehead over to Loose Park with a stopwatch. Loose Park had a paved sidewalk all around it in 1953, and we used it for lap timing runs. He'd clock me and vice versa, and we'd try to beat one another's times. That day, under a cloudless, sparkling blue sky, on my third or fourth attempt, I decided to wind out low gear much faster, and pop it into second, get up to speed early. The clutch was referred to as a beartrap and it wasn't made for such shenanigans. Something sickening happened. I missed the shift, the bike lurched as though I'd hit the brakes and the sound of gear parts and transmission crunches were evident. Then it freewheeled. We walked it home.

Later that week I called the kid I'd bought it from. Said my folks wouldn't let me keep it and something was broken in the transmission anyway. He said no refunds, I agreed. And he came and picked it up in a panel truck.

But I was hooked. And beginning to figure out that Harleys had magical properties built into them at the factory, probably with incantations and ceremonies. I wasn't far off.

I visited the factory back in the 60's having moved to Milwaukee and signed on to Harley-Davidson's advertising agency. I'll never forget two things about that visit. The first was, Walter Davidson, son, or maybe grandson to the original Davidson I believe, despised any changes to factory Harley-Davidsons so he made all the chopper owners park their machines outside the chain link fence to the parking lot. This effectively advertised the choppers and called attention to their modifications and bizarre designs, propagating more of the same.

The other thing that imprinted on me was what I call "The Skronk Effect." On the tour I was led past a bearded and tattooed worker with a chain-drive pocketbook and a weathered leather jacket. He would affix a two sided flyweel counterweight in a vise, then take a two-by-four, insert it in between the two pieces of iron and force the pieces apart with a noise that sounded like "skronk." Then he would un-vise it and toss it atop a growing pile of these things.

I asked my guide about this operation and he said, "Well, ol' Ernie is adjusting counterweights so they don't wobble and shake the bike too much." My next question was, "Are they adjusted further somewhere down the line?"

"Naw. Ernie's got a purty good feel for this."

I only vaguely recall their museum. In my memory it was a big, dark unheated room with broken factory windows and old motorcycles parked along the walls, then above these, was a shelf-like rack where more were jammed in together. I believe there was one for each year since their inception but it was such an agglomeration of frames, pipes and motors that the initial visual effect was that of a parking lot at a biker bar at night.

"Easy Rider" came out that year, and outlaw bikes took on longer front forks and higher handlebars than ever before. I had bought a Harley-Davidson police bike from precinct #5 in Milwaukee at about the same time. The main bearings were fried and it was otherwise in disrepair. I hauled it home and began tearing it down, but I borrowed so many tools from my mechanic neighbor that he wordlessly wheeled the hulk over to his barn and that's where it was transformed.

I took the v-twin motor to the factory where it was rebuilt and bored out. I had admired the front tube forks of Fonda's Harley in Easy Rider (they were 8" over stock length) so I ordered a pair from Cheetah Motorcycle Parts in California. I waited for that box with the same anticipation and impatience that, in boyhood, I'd exhibited while awaiting a Lone Ranger Atom Bomb ring (really, there was such a thing, though it makes no sense whatsoever) from Battle Creek, Michigan.

There had been a mistake and these were not 8" over stock length, they were 18" over stock length! We re-raked the gooseneck on the frame, and installed them. I was on the way to owning a chopper that would never be allowed within miles of the Harley-Davidson plant. No front fender. Curlycue handlebars. Camel hump seat. Bored out "eighty over."

The tank...we cut the fatbob double tank in half lengthways, so it had the same profile from the side, but looking down at it, it was long and skinny. It was a tank shift motorcycle with first, second, third...and reverse! It had been set up for use with a sidecar for some reason that was never satisfactorily explained to me, but the reverse now came in handy. With the super-long fork, it was a bear to turn around in tight spaces, but a reverse gear would make it more manageable.

My mechanic friend declared it unsafe at any speed or standing still, wiped his hands and turned to more conservative endeavors. Like installing a huge hemi engine in a small hatchback, mid-engine so the driver was inches from it.

This perversion of the Harley-Davidson ideals would have had a longer story but economic realities cut it short. The deep well pump failed at the house we had bought on the rural outskirts of Milwaukee, and the first item up for sale was this chopper. My wife and kids weren't going to give up showers. A member of the Milwaukee Outlaws club bought it, paid cash in $100 bills, slapping them down on my kitchen table. The motorcycle was unfinished, frame apart from engine, but savvy eyes could surely see the possibilities. I like to think it is bellowing somewhere on the Wisconsin streets and highways, emitting menace, exacting awe.

It would have narrowed the eyes of the older Mr. Davidson to Clint Eastwood gun turrets. I think Willie G. Davidson, a progressive sort, and designer of the wildly successful machines to come after the buyback from AMF, might have grinned. He might have withheld enthusisatic approval however, just on the basis of engineering principles, if not aesthetics.

I have owned Harleys since then. And Triumphs, and BSAs, and a BMW. But Harleys have been the stalwarts over the years. I still own one. Chopped, raked, lowered. It sits in back of a 1949 Ford in the metal building where I weld steel sculpture. It's a beauty. But it's no knucklehead.

A drug addict once told me that his whole life until rehab had been an unrelenting search for the euphoria of his first original high. I know my first cup of Kona coffee in the morning on a Saturday is the best. The subsequent cups are really good, don't get me wrong, but the first sip of the first cup is nirvana. And, sometimes, as I'm sipping that, I'm looking at email or the saturday paper, and wasting that effect on some level. Like the knucklehead I surely am after all these years.

I didn't have any such sidebars or distractions when I first straddled that Harley. I was into it. I twisted that throttle and the sound went from the distinctive "potato, potato" idle to a ragged elk holler. It went through me. I was that sound. I was that knucklehead. Like the t-shirt says, "It's a Harley thing. You wouldn't understand." I'm not sure I do either.

Guinotte Wise is a Creative Director in Kansas City. His writing has appeared in Crime Factory Review, Stymie, Opium, and Telling Stories Press Anthology 2011. He was a semi-finalist for the Nimrod 2010 Katherine Porter Prize for Fiction, a 2nd place winner for the 2010 Medulla Review Oblongata Flash Fiction competition, and received an Honrable Mention in the 2010 Oaxaca Film Festival and Literary Awards. He sculpts in steel, as well as words, and his work can be seen at www.wisesculpture.com. He lives in rural Kansas with his wife. That's his Harley, but it's no knucklehead.

August in Submissionland

2011-08-02T10:29:00.002-05:00

Hot sun, late summer, lazy days, and the sound of crickets. Break your summer malaise and send some writing to Stymie for consideration as a web feature. Cricket submissions welcome.

New Nonfiction: Timber

2011-07-18T05:40:00.002-05:00

Title: Timber
Author: J. Bowers
Category: Nonfiction

His name should have been warning enough—that lumberjack bellow with its hint of plaid flannel, the insistent chorus of the Monty Python song. I was at that age. Timber was twenty according to Anne, who kept horses in her backyard, gave lessons. She’d collected strays for decades—slow racehorses, skinny broodmares with foals tucked inside like cereal surprises, me.

Each day we mobbed her kitchen table for instant iced tea, waiting for her to say who we could ride. Foxtails hung from the corners of frames on the wood-paneled walls. The girls in the photos, long since lost to colleges and husbands, posed with horses we didn’t recognize outside the barn we thought had only ever been ours. Anne usually remembered the horse but not the girl, buttering bread as she kneed Winnie the poodle out of the dishwasher. Oh, I don’t know, girls, she’d say. That was so long ago.

Timber was just another Appaloosa, history unknown. His papers called him “Night Fever,” which made sense, I announced, since he and Travolta were both past their prime. I was determined to be the funny one. Jenny kissed boys with tongue. Sarah’s parents were buying her an Arabian “for college.” I slept beside a penguin-shaped baby monitor, thanks to midnight seizures that clacked my teeth. Inexplicably, my folks still let me ride. I can only assume they trusted the photograph girls, their red jackets radiating success, promising their wan and only daughter might sit up straight.

Summertime was Jenny blasting Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Sarah streaking her hair with lemon. We raced the colts through neighboring fields, trampling soybeans, and mocked young Mariella’s confusion when the ghost of Dude’s balls made him mount the mares, feeling smug that we half-knew what was happening. We were cock-shit.

So I wasn’t worried when Anne asked me to jump Timber in lessons, as an example for the younger kids. Mariella went first, popping Cupcake in the ass before take-off. Anne deemed this very good. She perched atop the fence rail, shading her sunglasses. She wore the new kind that darkened automatically outside. They made her hard to read. “Trot along the rail,” she said. Somehow Timber stumbled into the correct diagonal. I was proud to use terms like “diagonal.” I thought jargon meant mastery.

I’m so sorry about that.

Timber bore down on the jump snorting like a chainsaw, and tore the reins through my hands. Briefly, flight—then I was a heap, cold shit seeping through my shirt, my hair. Timber gleefully sailed by, stirrup irons flapping like sneakers on a honeymoon car.

Of course I had to get back on. But Anne said I could quit with that. That’s when I knew she knew. I can still see her there, eyes wide behind dark lenses. I wondered if she’d been coddling me, if she’d start. Oh, from my brain is where I bleed.

Jenny and Sarah came out of the barn to stare. Someone called my dad. He came quick, car seats covered with towels. Well, it’s not the first time you’ve been full of shit, he kept saying. Tim—berrrrrrr!

If Anne developed the negative—if we’re there, framed by foxtails, I am still wearing a shit-stained Hypercolor t-shirt, and there is a smug light in Timber’s liverwurst eye. It’s not our finest hour, just the one that’s left. Pennsylvania absorbed that horse hoof-first. I like to picture his bones leaching into the trees, bringing his name full circle. And the girls still surrounding Anne’s table, crosslegged in purple britches, eating franks and beans and trying to guess our names.

J. Bowers’s short stories have appeared in Redivider, Fringe, 3:AM, DOGZPLOT, Zone 3, and other journals, online and off. She holds a B.A. in English and creative writing from Goucher College, an M.A. in the same from Hollins University, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in fiction writing at the University of Missouri. In her free time, she thinks about the hungry ghosts of silent Hollywood while riding her little yellow pony, Billy, through the totemic Missouri wilderness.

New Nonfiction: Derailleur

2011-07-04T05:03:00.001-05:00

Title: Derailleur
Author: Ray Scanlon
Category: Nonfiction
“Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I demonstrated Arthur Clarke's Third Law—a couple of years before he posited it in 1973—when I first saw a derailleur-guided bicycle chain hop from one sprocket up onto the next bigger one, and back down again. Shock. Disbelief. Delight. Tell me that @!%# chain didn't just jump back and forth. In my case, magic was old technology cast before a sufficiently naïve observer. You'd think two or three years at a fine engineering school would have prepared me better, but I was, after all, a math major.

Although modern medicine has saved my sorry butt more than once, and computers have enabled me to live fat, dumb, and happy (at least until I blundered into the dot-com bubble), it's this unassuming nineteenth-century technology that seizes my heart. I'll bike with a Huret derailleur any day. I think it's no coincidence that a German invented the linotype machine, an infernal Rube Goldberg behemoth that can't possibly work, and a Frenchman invented the derailleur, a simple, elegant little machine that can't possibly work.

In this new century derailleurs are no longer rare and novel; you can avoid them only on low end and the smallest of kids' bikes. One afternoon my grandson clamored to shed his training wheels and try his new, bigger, derailleur-equipped bike. I girded my loins, fully expecting to jog behind him, keeping the bike vertical, trying to shield him from the unnaturally intense gravitational pull that trees, telephone poles, and pavement exert on fledgling riders. I rehearsed my pep-talk for persuading the owner of newly-skinned knees to remount and try again. I dearly hoped I could take credit for teaching him to ride a bike, but that's not what happened.

That day one after another three fully-formed cyclists sprang forth from my forehead. I shifted the bike into granny gear. I held it so my grandson could climb on. He pedaled like crazy. I took only three steps before he pulled out of my grasp. He weaved all the way around the house, twice, finally slowing down and toppling onto the lawn, laughing maniacally. Thinking it premature, I hadn't bothered to teach him the controlled dismount, but he learned that by himself in a day or so. After a couple more tries he didn't even need the grandfather-assisted takeoff. Both of us were astonished. The derailleur changed everything: at that cadence, he was going fast enough that he didn't have to think about balancing, slow enough that he could avoid hitting things, and he didn't need to strain to propel fat tires through soft clinging grass.

Then his two younger sisters did the same thing. I was a little peeved that a clever inanimate object had deprived me of a teaching gig the most benign grandfather would kill for, but I'm over it now. It's not every day you get two low-grade epiphanies for the price of one, forty years apart.

Ray Scanlon. Massachusetts boy. Has grandchildren. Extraordinarily lucky. No MFA. No novel. No extrovert. On the web: http://read.oldmanscanlon.com/.

New Nonfiction: Outward Bound

2011-06-20T08:11:00.002-05:00

Title: Outward Bound: To Serve, to Strive and not to Yield
Author: Matthew Dexter
Category: Nonfiction

Day 1: Welcome at-risk degenerates, juvenile delinquents, chronic masturbators, squirrel murderers, hipster emo sadists. Mobile devices, beauty products, makeup, deodorant -- forbidden -- we will dig a hole and shit in the woods -- if you cannot wipe with a leaf you can carry your own toilet paper in a plastic bag inside your pack. If you’re too weak to do this I can carry it for you in mine. Everybody must bring sunscreen, bug spray, sunglasses, toothbrush, toothpaste, foot powder. Girls, don’t forget your biodegradable tampons and menstrual cramp medication.

Day 2: Wake up broken with sore legs; get used to it. Stoic girl walking back from forest with shovel, her head down, hands the baton over to another and off to dig a second hole, disappearing into Uncompahgre National Forest. Wish we could follow. Students roll out of bedbug-ridden sleeping bags, crawl from semen-stained tarps, and become cockroaches in Colorado. No time to tunnel more than an inch into the moist earth. The ground steams as thighs burn, crimson sunrise scatters caterpillars out from the moss of splintered logs as splintered sunlight swallows termites.

Day 3: Pour porridge with raisons underneath an uprooted tree because it tastes terrible. Instructor admonishes the group on your behalf.

Day 4: Wilson Peak beckons; Lizard Head Pass has swallowed your intestines. Girls start smelling funky with crusty faces and scruffy hair. It turns you on. The spade is loaded with bacteria; desecrated toilet paper festering in the top of instructor’s pack. Testes shriveling; nipples bloodied; there is no end in sight.

Day 5: Summit a peak. Start using smuggled Old Spice deodorant despite the mocks of fellow males.

Day 6: Snow school. Practice self-arrest techniques. How would it feel to fall off a mountain; to shatter your skull with an ice axe?

Day 7: You are group guide: chart maps, control rations, write in group journal. At night you steal graham crackers and nibble them alone in the woods with the shovel as you scratch your neglected privates, observing squirrels gathering nuts.

Day 8: Climb summit of Mt. Wilson; in the middle of the night begin ascent with headlamps and snow clamber. Make it to the top just after sunrise. Fly down mountain of skeet; end up taking a siesta in magic field of poppies.

Day 9: Solo; all allotted designated areas to think. Supplies: whistle (in case another student smashes his head open using a rock to hold the folded edges of a tarp); two small bags of raisons and peanuts. You journey outside your territory; spy on a blonde through the trees hanging clothes on branches, eat most the food your first day, masturbate the nature of her madness.

Day 10: Hungry as hell. Vision fasting begins at sunset.

Day 11: Instructor finds students, brings everyone together to feast on an elaborate breakfast; labyrinthine spread of eggs, ham, bacon; items you never knew existed in instructors’ packs. Almost everybody vomits afterwards, or trudges into the wild. No shovel required.

Day 12: Apply lessons learned on an extensive eleven mile quest running through the mountains. You finish fourth. The instructor looks at you like a proud father during encounter at the half-way turnaround point.

Day 13: Chop up some aspirin from the supply kit to snort up your nose with rolled-up topography map.

Day 14: Hitch a ride from the guides instead of taking school bus with the degenerates. Wish you could eat magic mushrooms and smoke cannabis with them at the hotel.

Day 15: The shower is magic. You are the same.

Matthew Dexter lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Like the nomadic Pericú natives before him, he survives on a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet of shrimp tacos, smoked marlin, cold beer, and warm sunshine.

Trading Card Fiction - Winner & Finalists!

2011-06-16T09:48:00.007-05:00

Thank you so much to all the writers out there who took the time to craft a short piece of fiction to submit to our Trading Card Fiction Contest! We had many fabulous entries and could not have done it without you.

We are now announcing our Grand Prize Winner and Finalists!
Below you will find the winners and can learn how you can order your very own set of 9 trading cards with these stories!

Winning Story: Fall 1970 by Julia Patt

Finalists (listed in no particular order):
1983 by Alex Moody
Street Scene by Claire Novak
At the Speed of Snails by Diane McGurren
Sand Lot Hockey in Tulsa by Guinotte Wise
The Difference by Lauren Becker
No Speedo for You by Joseph Pravda
The Shirt from '84 by Steven Kowalski
I Still Love You, Richie Sutter by Sarah Kuntz Jones

Congratulations to all of our finalists, and to Julie Patt who takes home both bragging rights and $150!

If you'd like a set of these limited edition trading cards, you can pre-order them now! Trust us, you don't want to miss out!

Spring & Summer 2011:Chris Duggan

2011-06-16T07:23:00.007-05:00

"The sky was gray and the air crisp. It was close to 1 p.m. on a Sunday in late October and the temperature hadn’t made it out of the 40s all day. On the Metro platform, my kids stood and waited with me as the wet wind whistled past."

To read Chris Duggan's essay, "Still Life in Gray" please check out our Spring & Summer 2011 Issue (and turn to page 35)! Today Chris answers some questions for us.

Stymie: You essay reflects on a weekend in 2005 and the loss of a loved baseball stadium. How have the memories you discuss in the essay played out against the experience of the new Cardinals stadium?

Chris: Actually, I love the new stadium. The essay was all about this time of inexorable change for me, and everything that was happening then was wrapped up in the destruction of that place that had meant so much to me throughout my life. Going to ballgames in the new place and making new memories there with my kids, my friends, and my loved ones has been analogous the larger process of moving on and starting over, and it’s been great. What I came to realize is that in the midst of those big changes, the most important things are still with me. My daughter, who is a talented singer, has sung the National Anthem with two different groups at the new park; as memories go, you can’t get much better than that. My kids, my girlfriend and I saw Yadier Molina win an exra-innings game with a clutch base hit on his own bobblehead night. The Cardinals winning the World Series in their first year at new Busch didn’t hurt either.

Stymie: Do you have favorite sports writers (fiction or nonfiction)? Who are the
writers you turn to for inspiration?

Chris: I don’t think you can beat a good baseball story, because it is so easy to see baseball as a metaphor for life. My favorite baseball book is “The Greatest Slump of All Time,” by St. Louis writer David Carkeet, whose short story writing class I took at UMSL in 1985. It’s about a fictitious World Series-bound baseball team whose members are dealing with all manners of emotional issues. It has a great collection of characters, it is funny and touching, and it really takes the reader inside the game.

My all-time favorite writer is Ernest Hemingway, and I love the stories of Anne Tyler. Since last fall, I have been working toward my MFA in writing at Lindenwood University, and I can honestly say the writers that inspire me the most right now are my classmates. The fact is there are great writers walking next to us on the sidewalk every day.

Stymie: What are the baseball traditions you hope to pass on to your kids? (Always buy a hotdog? Never leave before the final inning?)

Both those things, of course. I see people leaving a ballgame with the score tied in the bottom of the eighth inning, and I wonder, “Why did you even come?” The other thing I try to impress on my kids is that you’re either a fan of your team or you’re not. That means you don’t boo your own players, even if your closer just blew his fourth save in five tries, and in St. Louis, we don’t throw the ball back on the field when the other team hits a home run. That’s a Cubs thing. It’s easy to be a fan of the Cardinals, because the organization’s heritage is so rich with players, like Stan Musial and Lou Brock, who play the game the right way. You can teach your kids about respecting your opponents and the game itself when the players model that behavior, and the Cards players have always done that for the most part. It would be more difficult explaining to them the antics of someone like Brandon Phillips.

Stymie: What are you working on or writing now?

Chris: Most of my creative writing these days is connected to my MFA coursework. Currently, I am in a cluster of flash fiction classes taught by Lindenwood’s MFA program director, Beth Mead. I had not done very much of that previously, and it has been a blast. I also have a novel about a guy who works as an artist in a greeting card company. Once I’m done with the MFA program, I’ll pick that up again give it one more revision.

Chris Duggan has worked since 1989 as a newspaper journalist and public relations professional, in that order. He is currently public relations coordinator at Lindenwood University, where he is also pursuing an MFA in writing. He lives in St. Charles with his two kids and exorcises the demons of a frustrated little league career by playing vintage baseball in the warm weather months (old-style uniforms, 1860 rules, and no gloves).

New Nonfiction: Never Famous

2011-06-06T19:17:00.001-05:00

Title: Never Famous
Author: Renée K. Nicholson
Category: Nonfiction
Enter the blank room: walls flanked by two levels of barres except the one wall of mirror. Sometimes you must study what’s reflected; other times you must ignore it. Eyes deceive, especially your own eyes upon your own form. Breathe. Demi-plié. It’s a way to begin. Work the foot: crease to demi-pointe, feel the instep. Stretch to full pointe. Don’t crunch the toes. Crease again. You are waking the muscles of the foot. Warm up the body from the feet up to the head. Slow. Methodical. Maybe light filters in through a window. Maybe you’re in a box. It could be raining or snowing outside. Sun shinning bright. In here, weather doesn’t exists. This is the atmosphere of music. 4/4. 6/8. Allegro. Adagio. Waltz. You’re here for hours. Six, eight, ten, more. You repeat combinations over and over. Lots of posing in lines. Then move. Go! Your body tires. Dance harder. Sweat beads, drips, dries. You sweat again. Layer in sweatshirts and leg warmers between one studio and another, strip them off as you move again, glissade arabesque. You snack on fruit, lunch on tuna, drink Diet Coke for the rush of caffeine. Whatever keeps you trim but keeps you going. Tea, coffee, Advil. Your eyes tell all. Sorrow, elation, frustration, tiredness. Your hair is pulled from your face, pulled and pinned in a knot. This emphasizes the eyes even more. Wear mascara if you think it helps. Sew ribbons and elastics on shoes during breaks. Read paperbacks you swap with others. Read paperbacks your mother sends in care packages. Keep medical tape and band aids in your bag. Sprinkle baby powder, but not perfume. Pack extra everything: shoes tights leotard bobby pins t-shirts. Bring a chiffon skirt if you need to feel pretty. Sometimes you just need to feel pretty. Take barre next to dancers better than you. Practice. Practice more. Pray. There are a few things I know for sure. Ballet is work. The work is beautiful and often thankless. Some performances you get flowers. Other times you don’t. Mostly you rehearse. There are no flowers for rehearsal. Most dancers are never famous. Don’t worry about that. Dance like you are the most beautiful creature that ever existed, even when—no—especially when your practice tutu is dirty and your pointe shoes are dead and you feel all but spent.

Renée K. Nicholson balances teaching classical ballet and choreographing, and writing. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia University, and is a certified teacher through American Ballet Theatre. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chelsea, Mid American Review, Perigee: A Journal of the Arts, Paste, Poets & Writers, Dossier, The Superstition Review, The Gettysburg Review and elsewhere. She has been named the 2011 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State-Altoona.

Spring & Summer 2011: Claire Novak

2011-05-19T07:00:00.002-05:00

"They go to dinner at a trendy restaurant. Their guest is an upbeat reporter who has come to write a story about him because that is what reporters do these days, interview athlete-celebrities over plates of drizzled lettuce and Atlantic pink salmon and just a glass of water, please, thank you very much. None of that locker-room-game-following stuff; this is human interest, this is the inside story, this is what readers want to know."

To read the rest of Claire Novak's "Cry", check out our Spring & Summer 2011 issue (all about baseball!) and turn to page 74. Here's more from Claire.

Stymie: What inspired you to write "Cry" from the viewpoint of an athlete's significant other?

Claire: The media has always been interested in athletes' personal lives and the social pressures they face, and in some ways I think we've broadened that view to include an interest in their wives (or husbands) and children. But so many girlfriends are involved with male athletes in these slightly ambiguous relationships, and I think because we're not quite sure where to place them, we tend to overlook them aside from the typically shallow "hot chick at her boyfriend's ballgame" coverage. That's why I wanted to write about this woman who is caught up in a relationship where the guy's public persona is completely different from the man she knows he really is. She gets the real guy, not the media facade, but she's helping build this hypocritical public image and in the meantime she can't stop the interior battle over why she's still with him when she knows it's destroying every part of her.

Stymie: Do you think there is a unique aspect to the fame of athletes (versus, say, a movie star) that would impact their relationships?

Claire: Absolutely. I think athletes, especially in certain sports, are certainly unprepared to deal with the overwhelming fame they encounter. It becomes very difficult for them to maintain meaningful relationships with people they can trust, because so many people are ready to take advantage of them, especially in their younger days. Is this girl dating the guy for who he is as an individual, or is she dating him because he's so-and-so the baseball player? There's that development of the public image accompanied by this kind of wariness that hardens as the athlete becomes more seasoned, and letting someone in past the superficial level becomes increasingly difficult. Also, I think the highly-physical aspect of athleticism ends up playing a significant part in domestic violence issues.

Stymie: Tell us a little about your sports interests and writing beyond fiction!

Claire: Lit fic is my hobby and a definite passion, but my full-time job is to cover horse racing for ESPN.com and a variety of other media outlets. I started writing about the sport because of my personal interest in horses and also because of the game's rich human interest aspect. Racing isn't over-commercialized where media coverage is concerned, and I like that. You can still find these great stories that aren't being pushed by agents or communications departments, and most of the sport's "big stars" are easily accessible and approachable. There's a real love for the game among a high percentage of the human participants, and thanks to the fact that the races come down to equine athletes competing against each other, the game maintains an aspect of purity that has been lost in many of the "big money" sports today.

Stymie: Where can we keep up with you and your writing?

Claire: You can catch a Voices column from me in the current issue of ESPN The Magazine, where I take on the issue of drugs in racing. You may also find my coverage of the Preakness this weekend at ESPN.com and follow me on twitter @clairenovak.

Claire's full bio and website are here.

New Fiction: Second Inning

2011-05-16T06:43:00.000-05:00

Title: Second Inning
Author: Gail Jeidy
Category: Fiction
You might think my childhood was dull because I had few toys. And no brothers or neighbors. But the thing was, I had rocks and a cracked 35-inch Harmon Killebrew. I grew up batting rocks over and through fences into the cow pasture, pig lot and chicken yard. Every summer, I batted roughly 60,000 rocks. It was like this: pick, toss, swing, match target to destination then multiply swings by hours. Not to have a big head, but I’ve probably batted more rocks than anyone in the last seven centuries, even if you are the first person I’ve told.
     Over time, rocks gouge through wooden bats the way beavers gnaw through trees. I went through three rock bats in my youth. In years my bats lasted eight, five, three, in that order, a reverse Fibonocci sequence. Dad and me always talked numbers like that.
     The summer I turned 13, things changed. Early June, I was king of the mountain standing tall on the biggest rock pile in the county gazing over acres of contoured domain, sending rocks sailing in best of three, five, seven sets. Mid haying season, Dad bought a new John Deere and the next evening after nine hours baling (a record 850 bales) he flipped it hauling the hayrack up the hill behind the barn. I was batting rocks in the abandoned quarry on the west quarter when Mom found him crushed beneath a tire. After the funeral, Grandma told how Dad batted rocks as a kid. He never told me that. Then she went home to Chicago leaving me with Mom’s crying. I laid my bat to rest, did the chores and hid beneath my pillow. The days dragged on and Mom wouldn’t stop crying. One night after she was asleep, the thing about Dad batting rocks and me wondering how many piled up inside so loud I grabbed my bat, walked the mile past the railroad tracks to the John Deere implement dealer and put out every window from forty feet away. No one ever suspected me because I wasn’t that type of kid. You’re the first I’ve told that apparently I was.
     I still feel guilty, but admitting my sin wasn’t an option at the time. All I knew to do was bat rocks. I started swinging again on an August afternoon so sticky-hot my tee formed a second skin. I found the rhythm place and dug in until my world tumbled into a fierce switch-hitting competition. I launched homers, Mantle with my right hand, Whitey with my left. I batted and battled, cracking rock after rock until the sky changed, clouds passed, a rainbow formed and light flooded the valley. I aimed for the jeweled spotlight but it kept moving. I batted right. Batted left. Right. Left. The light kept shifting and I batted until the immortal moment came when I realized: there was no way I could lose.
     And suddenly I became the one who couldn’t stop crying.

Gail Jeidy grew up around boys and baseball and married one who inspired this story. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. Her novel The Truth About Rocks is currently seeking a home.

Spring & Summer 2011: Kenneth Weene

2011-05-12T07:21:00.000-05:00

"Horatio tries to chew his gum in a manly way. He wants desperately for the other boys to think him one of them, to count him a teammate. They do not. He doubts they ever will. It would help if he could blow a bubble – not a puny popper, but a real bubble – the kind that would leave a skein of pink gum to peel from his pasty face."

To continue reading Kenneth Weene's short story, "Horatio at the Game" check out our Spring & Summer 2011 issue (and turn to page 24!). Here's Kenneth, talking to us about baseball, childhood and writing.

Stymie: One of the most interesting aspect of "Horatio at the Game" is the exploration of what kids expect versus what adults expect of kids in sports. What attracted you to this divide?

Kenneth: As a psychologist who specialized in children and family problems, I've always been very aware that children and parents had completely different agendas. Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of athletics.

I do want to point out something else about "Horatio." The two boys, Horatio and Alex, also have totally different feelings about baseball. Horatio wishes desperately that he could be the hero, the really good player. Alex, who is put in the position of hero even though it is beyond his talents, wishes that he could perhaps stop playing altogether or at least have the relative obscurity of sitting on the bench with Horatio. They have a mutual envy. Often we forget that some of the highest achieving youngsters just wish the pressure would stop.

Stymie: Tell us a little about your experience with baseball: did you play as a kid? Did you collect baseball cards? In what ways does it work well in fiction?

Kenneth: I grew up a nerd. And, since I was a younger brother, I was usually following bigger kids who didn't want me playing in their games. So I didn't play much baseball as a kid. However at summer camp I did play some softball - usually as the extra outfielder. (Yeah, I was that bad.)

Since I was at camp in Maine during the summers, far from my home town of Boston, I only got to one professional game as a kid - Red Sox versus Indians. Ted Williams didn't his a home run, but that was okay as I was more a fan of Dom Dimaggio. After all The Little Professor was the youngest brother and the kid with glasses.

We also had the Braves in Boston in those days, and I liked to collect Braves cards so I could say I was a Brave's fan and not rooting for the Sox. In reality I didn't care much but it made me sound like I knew something about the sport.

So what did I like about Baseball? And I did, in my own way, like it a lot. Let's go back to Maine. Baseball was almost a religion there. People weren't just Red Sox fans; they were fanatics. Every town had a team. They may have been playing on converted pastures and with frayed equipment, but play they did with their entire hearts and souls. A few times one of the local teams played against our camp counselors - just for fun. It was the hicks versus the sophisticated guys from the city. The games were disasters - at least from the camp staff's perspective. I enjoyed their humiliation.

Much later I lived in New York and started going to Mets and Yankee games - mostly Mets. Strangely I had come to enjoy watching the game. Now I live in Arizona, try to get to some spring games and to a few Diamondback regular season contests as well.

Stymie: Tell us a little about your life as a writer: what are you working on now? What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten? Could that advice be applied to the game of baseball?

Kenneth: Since I'm now a retired man of leisure, I write most days but without pressure. Right now I have two finished novels waiting to get published (in addition to the two that have been). One features a softball tournament, or at least the idea of a tournament. That book is titled "Tales From the Dew Drop Inne: Because there's one in every town. The other novel is a coming of age/conspiracy novel called "Time To Try the Soul of Man."

The best pieces of advice I ever got about writing were:
Write, write, and then write some more;
Read what you write aloud preferably to others;
Be sure you have an editor look at your work.

How do these relate to baseball? First, practice, practice, and then practice some more. I guess that's a universal piece of advice. Second, be sure you're part of a team; you can't accomplish in a vacuum. Also, be sure you actually look at what you are doing and how you are playing. Don't just practice your mistakes. Third, since you are going to make mistakes, listen to the coach. If you think you know it all, you probably know nothing.

Ken Weene is both a poet and fiction writer. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications
– most recently featured in Sol and publication in Spirits, and Vox Poetica. An anthology of his writings, Songs for my Father, was published by Inkwell Productions in 2002. Ken’s short stories have appeared in many places, including Legendary, Sex and Murder Magazine, The New Flesh Magazine, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Daily Flashes of Erotica Quarterly, and Bewildering Stories. He also contributes to Basil and Spice.

New Fiction: Hard Enough

2011-05-02T08:07:00.000-05:00

Title: Hard Enough
Author: Albert Waitt
Category: Fiction
Wallace parked at the far end of the lot and sighed. The coaches’ cars sat across the way next to the locker room, two pickups and three SUVs, all Timberline High ruby red. Those bastards would be on his ass all day. He was quarterback by default. The two juniors who wanted it so bad were useless. Eddie Montego whipped the ball all over the field in practice, but couldn’t remember the plays. And though Richardson ran the offense as if he were playing Madden, his passes fluttered and dropped like drunken pigeons. What else could they do but start him, Jeff Wallace, the senior?
     He took the Altoid tin from his duffel on the passenger seat. Without looking, he snapped it open and pulled out the joint. On the field below, one of the maintenance crew trimmed the far end zone. Wallace slid down in the seat and lit up. As the smoke singed his throat he gazed at the tops of the pines lining the street in front of the school. Phone wires ran across them like iron bars. He’d studied that black-on-green before, in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen on Pond Street where they used to go after his Little League games.
     “You can stay in the car,” his father had said, opening the door so his brother and sister could go get cones. “You didn’t get a hit.”
     “Neither did Danny.”
     “Danny’s not like you, and you know it.”
     “I tried.”
     “Apparently, not hard enough.”

When the ball is snapped Wallace pivots and fakes to Johnson. He scampers back and sets himself in the pocket.   The Mike linebacker has bitten, and Wallace waits for Regan to square into the open space in the middle of the field. He breathes in, pats the ball, breathes out. Palermo, on his blind side, utters a mongrel of grunt and moan; he’s losing his man. Wallace steps forward and throws. The ball sails. Then the pain flashes through his back and he flies forward and down. His face mask hits the turf. The grass smells fresh and clean. There is applause.
     Palermo grabs him by the shoulder pads and yanks him to his feet, asks if he is okay. Regan is handing the ball to one of the officials. Five steps onto the field, their coach screams at the referee about a roughing-the-passer penalty. Jeff Wallace grins and shakes his head. As long as he’s standing, they’ll let it go. He’d be a fool to expect otherwise.

Albert Waitt’s short fiction has been published by Third Coast, The Beloit Fiction Journal, The Literary Review, and other journals. He is working on a novel. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, he currently teaches creative writing for the University of Phoenix.

Fred Venturini: Questions and Answers

2011-04-21T07:00:00.002-05:00

Last week we had a review of Fred Venturini's debut novel, The Samaritan. This week Fred talks to us about his publishing experience, research and baseball.

Stymie: This is your debut novel. Congratulations! Can you tell us a little about your publishing experience working with Blank Slate Press? What has it been like now that your work is out there for readers?

Fred: Blank Slate was a great place for me to land early in my writing career. They’re focused, dedicated, and available. The advice is sound, the support is incredible, their input is creative and unique. New ideas are always flowing, and the best part is it’s not a half-assed, one-week push on your book and then it disappears into the night—it’s a sustained effort. When they’re reading new work, writers should get their pages in front of BSP—they won’t regret it.

As for having my work out there, I’m used to trickling short stories into market. Your friends, your family will usually pick up an issue, read the story, let you know what they think. What’s different about having a novel out with a promotional push is that you start connecting with a lot of new people that are outside your inner circle. When I get a random email, friend request, Twitter mention, etc., from people I don’t know personally, that’s something new for me.

Stymie: While the plot of THE SAMARITAN is definitely unique and interesting there is also a very strong voice in the novel. What is the relationship between Dale Sampson's voice and the plot of the novel? Did one come to you before the other, or was it always a package deal?

Fred: I developed my “voice” a lot more during my MFA experience. Doing so much writing, I started to delve into first person a lot more, discovering how the voice differed from my third person style. I noticed less simile, less filtration. It seemed more minimal and raw to me, and I enjoyed operating in first person as the MFA progressed. So my first person “voice” truly started to develop before the character did—it was an easy connection for me, once it came time to develop Dale in the first person. It’s not like he’s a Kenyan scuba diver or anything exotic—he’s a kid from a small town, so the voice match came naturally, making it easy to operate inside his head.

Stymie: I like you use of the word "raw" in describing Dale's voice. He often appears to be a tough character, though more vulnerable then he realizes and I noticed this especially in his friendships and interactions with his best friend, Mack. Did you set out to write a novel exploring friendship in this way?

The book is in many ways about friendship. In fact, only when my friend and former MFA classmate Deb Garwood made an insightful statement about the male friend dynamic (“Boys are friends forever, long after they should have outgrown each other”) did I discover the friendship thread that helped me get from a premise to a book that was inhabited by actual characters. Friendship is part of the book’s soul. I think all friendships like Mack and Dale have a façade of toughness that only occasionally breaks down, offering those realistic and tender moments. I really dosed up the tough talk and tried to find those moments of vulnerability. From the feedback I’ve gotten so far, people are responding to it, which is always fulfilling.

Stymie: THE SAMARITAN is deeply grounded in place and time, with many references to geography, states and pop culture influences, and of course reality TV has a very direct role in the story. What was your writing process like with regard to these elements? Did you do a lot of research, or was it drawn mainly from your own observations and life?

Fred: Most of the small town stuff, the baseball stuff—those are my own experiences. Research is always part of the writing process for me. It’s the way you unearth those little nuggets that add authority to your work. The big research projects for this one were reading surgical memoirs, getting inside a doctor’s head to help develop Doc Venhaus. Getting a gall bladder surgery to go wrong isn’t something I can draw up from my experiences—hence, a lot of reading to create one page or so. Same thing with reality TV—everyone has seen a program or two, knows what it is, but how is it created? More research. More reading. I sort of knew the shows were manipulated and packaged, but to find out how it was done took a stack of books. Same for the black organ trade, the organ donation system in the United States. Tons of research went into the book.

Stymie: And how much research went into writing a character with Dale's unique ability?

Quite a bit. Learning about the potential for human regeneration, about salamanders and other animals that can pull it off, about the black market for organs—all of it took a stack of books and a lot of notes. I’m thankful I live in the Google era—supporting articles were easy to find, notable books on the subject plopped right into my Amazon cart. This is the golden era of literary research, that’s for sure.

The healing part of his ability, I used my own extensive healing experience— healing from cuts and bone breaks and burns. The perpetual healing that Dale goes through, well, I share his pain. It’s where I truly relate to the character.

Stymie: Tell us a little about the baseball elements of THE SAMARITAN. Were you a high school baseball player? How important was it that they characters were baseball players, say, and not football players, for the arc and themes of the novel?

Football has always been my first love. This despite the fact my small high school didn’t even have a team. This didn’t stop me from giving it a shot in college—which helped me capture much of Dale’s awkwardness from the outset, his dread and fear that keeps him from joining the team.

I played high school baseball (not particularly well) and recall how that first practice, everything felt like it would be impossible. But I settled down and pretty soon felt slotted into the team dynamic fairly quickly. I mined all these little experiences for the novel—for one, baseball is one of the sports a small town school like that will be able to play and compete in. In baseball, one stud can win a high school game—he can pitch a shutout while going four for four at the plate. You don’t see that type of total dominance as specialization takes over at the higher levels of the game.

I could have chosen basketball, that’s always huge in small towns, but baseball had the right pastoral feel to it. It’s a game of grace and calm and sportsmanship—so bringing the battles to the ball diamond had the right rub for me. In hoops, it’s physical, there were always scraps at a competitive practice. A fight like the one Dale, Mack, Clint take part in wouldn’t seem like a big deal on a basketball court.

Stymie: Finally, what are you writing now?

I am chewing through some short story ideas, seeing what sticks while my next “long form” idea marinates a little bit. I read the Book of Revelation once—okay, more than once, it’s freaky and horrific—and got to thinking about a lot of the iconic items in that text. The Four Horsemen, seals, bowls of wrath, beasts—what if we had to literally confront this? What would you do if a beast with seven heads and ten horns came from the sea? I’m tinkering with bringing some of this into the real world, and the idea of a reluctant horseman really intrigues me, so that’s what I’m hashing out right now.

Fred Venturini grew up in Patoka, Illinois, where he survived being lit on fire by a bully, a neck-breaking car accident, and being chewed up by a pit bull. His fiction has appeared in places like River Styx, The Death Panel, Sick Things, Johnny America, and Necrotic Tissue, and he is a two-time Chuck Palahniuk anthology finalist. He lives in Southern Illinois with his beautiful wife, Krissy. The Samaritan is his first novel.

A Story of Future Promise

2011-04-18T07:03:00.004-05:00

Title: You Choose!
Author: You
Category: TBD

Stymiemag.com currently seeks new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Submit your sports-related stuff through our online manager (click on Guidelines above), and choose "Featured Content...(Website Only)." On a future Monday, your work could appear here!

The Samaritan, by Fred Venturini

2011-04-14T10:02:00.009-05:00

There is the sense, at the beginning of The Samaritan, that maybe you've heard this story before. Dale Sampson is an awkward adolescent, striking out with girls and living in the shadow of his talented, charismatic best friend. Dale struggles with an absent father and sick mother while Mack brags about his latest female conquests and dominates on the baseball field. Though this may feel familiar, Fred Venturini doesn't stay on predictable ground for long. A violent tragedy not only changes the course Dale and Mack had set for themselves, it also reveals that, finally, Dale Sampson can do something no one else can do.

Dale Sampson can regrow lost body parts.

It's at this point in The Samaritan that it is probably best to give up trying to define the genre of the novel. It's not exactly a coming of age story and it doesn't belong entirely to the realm of science fiction. Despite discovering a seemingly miraculous ability, Dale's life continues to be marked by loss and hardship. It is not until a chance encounter with the twin sister of the high school girl he was almost able to love does he find the purpose that will drive him back to his best friend and west toward the lights of Hollywood.

Fred Venturini writes in a crisp and often brutally honest style, sparing few details even in the most graphic and violent scenes. But beneath the often gritty exterior the characters present is a story about friendship, vulnerability and the way every dream changes as we grow older. The Samaritan is one of the first books to come from St. Louis publisher Blank Slate Press. If this novel is any indication, we have a lot to look forward to from both author and publishers.

Next week we'll be talking to Fred Venturini about sports and first novels. Watch for the interview, here!

New Nonfiction: Wayne Gretzky and God

2011-04-11T06:13:00.001-05:00

Title: Wayne Gretzky and God
Author: L. Charlie Holman
Category: Nonfiction

They were Bauer hockey skates with stainless steel blades, and I could turn on a dime.

I would soar around the rink with indisputable style, hell-bent on showing my skill and the older boys would say, “fuckin’ eh” every time I bent into the turn.

Every winter, the neighborhood kids flooded the pond beyond Michael Langford’s house—seven, maybe eight garden hoses connected together and barely making the distance. And late at night, I’d wave to Michael and Lesley and Dennis; Kate, Andrew, and Mark, each one of us watching out our bedroom windows, our houses that close together. We watched winter bring layers of fat snowflakes, each the size of maple leaves. Every day, we tested the thickness of the ice; we swept and leveled the uneven parts with the soles of our snow boots, and the ice grew flush and translucent, a kryptonite varnish. Eventually the ice expanded to the edges of the pond, a rectangle heaven with blond saw grass peeping up over the elevated banks, and then one morning, on the way to school, we stopped to check the ice.

“Perfect,” Michael said.

“Perfect,” we all echoed.

And after Sister Trudie’s seventh period science class, the neighborhood would choose teams: Midnight Dread and The Holy Ghosts. Michael would point to Andrew and Kate, “Defense.” He’d say, and to Mark he’d say, “Wing.” Lesley would look at him, “center?”

“Yeah, center.”

But me and Michael see, we already talked about it, and since I was the best goalie in North America defending The Holy Ghosts’ territory, I would stay put. I’d defend the space between the goal post with pillows tied to my arms and legs for protection, welding glasses for eye wear and boxing gloves from the Goodwill for trapper gloves.

And near the third week of October, I’d polish the leather of my Bauer skates; I’d take them over to Nova Scotia Phil, down at the east side skating rink, where they charged two bucks admission just to skate, and Phil would sharpen my blades for free and say, “That’ll hold till the playoffs.” And yikes they were sharp.

Halfway through the season Michael got a puck to his face, so I put his brother’s red motorcycle helmet over his pirate patch eye, and I taught him how to goalie. And by the end of the season he still couldn’t save for shit, but we came up with a pretty good name for next year’s team: One Eyed Puckers.

Back then we could say stuff like that.

Back when imagination filled in for money and gear. Back when I was the best goalie in North America. Back when Wayne Gretzky was god.

Back then. We had some garden hoses and a motorcycle helmet, and God floated above our homemade rink with fat snowflakes in his mouth, building up the pond behind Michael Langford’s house.

They were Bauer hockey skates with stainless steel blades, and I could turn on a dime.

Leona Charlie Holman appreciates what flash nonfiction/fiction can accomplish. Charlie spends the better part of every weekend whittling down longer stories and essays to fit the conventions of micro writing. And yes, she played hockey when she was a kid, practices at archery now, and hopes to learn the art of white water rafting this summer.

New Fiction: The Closest They Came

2011-04-04T08:13:00.002-05:00

Title: The Closest They Came
Author: Erik Doughty
Category: Fiction

A half hour before the season opener at Yankee stadium, Milton Chang parks at the Princeton Cemetery. He walks down the hill holding a shoebox and passes the headstones casting shadows on the yellow grass. It’s the first time since his father’s death two weeks ago that he’s left the house.

When he reaches his father’s grave, his friend Norm is there waiting. Their fathers have neighboring plots and once had neighboring businesses—a bagel shop and a Chinese restaurant. There were rumors around town that they were sleeping with each other’s wives, poisoning the lox or the Peking duck, and sparring chopstick vs. butter knife. But Milton and Norm both knew that behind the CLOSED signs and safe in the light of the refrigerators, their fathers shared straws, pots, and punchlines. The “rivalry” was just good for business.

Milton sits next to Norm, both their backs leaning against their fathers’ headstones. A cardinal flits across the cable wires above, and Norm takes the shoebox from Milton. He finds inside a baseball, a portable radio, and a corner-bent trading card of Wade Boggs.

“Mint condition, it might have been worth three or four bucks. Now it’s completely worthless.”

“Point is, I never traded it away,” Milton says.

After Norm’s father passed last September, Milton kept the restaurant open past midnight and the whiskey on the house. There were other places in town someone could go for a drink, but not many other men understood a good talk, that the words were the beverage, and the bottle just kept the hands from shaking.

From the shoebox, Milton places the radio amongst the broken neck flowers fossilizing around the stone’s base. When he was six, he sent away for the radio with 110 proofs of purchase of Kraft macaroni and cheese. All summer, they listened to it beneath the Jersey Shore boardwalk—Dad drawing the diamond and the score card in the sand—until the lifeguard stands flipped on their sides, the sun puddled up on the horizon, and Mom came yelling for them to get their asses to the car.
Norm grabs the ball from the box. “I’m selling the shop,” he says.

“Go to hell.”

“I mean it. I can’t fill the old man’s shoes. I feel like a clown.”

“And what are you going to do instead?”

“Come work for you.” Norm tosses the ball to Milton. He runs his fingers over the scuff marks on the red threading like a palm reader feeling out the past.

“He caught it at the game Jim Abbott threw the no-hitter. I was eight,” says Milton.

“September 4, 1993.”

“I wasn’t watching the game. I was watching him because everyone was standing with their arms in the air. All I could do was look at his face to see if something good happened.”

Norm picks up the radio and holds it to his mouth like a walkie-talkie. “Carrrlos Baerga, batting .318—hitless on the day,” he says with a commentator’s inflection.

“When Abbott threw the last pitch, everyone jumped.”

“Abbott deals.”

“Before I knew it I was flying.”

“It’s a ground ball to short.”

“Dad shouted, ‘Hot diggity dog!’”

“Velarde—to Mattingly.”

“And he grabbed me and threw me above his head so I could see the final out and the pile on.”

“Abbott’s done it. No-hitter, no-hitter for Jim Abbott.”

“Then he dropped me over the shoulder of the guy in front of us, and my face splashed into his cup, but it didn’t matter. It was a no-hitter and everyone was drinking each other’s drinks.”

“What about Abbott? You left out his missing hand,” says Norm.

“It’s not important.”

“Tell that to Jim Abbott while he’s doing chin-ups.”

Milton puts down the ball. “That was my first beer when he dropped me. It smelled terrible.”

Norm looks at his watch. “Game’s about to start.”

“Don’t sell the shop, Norm.”

Norm drops his head and stares at his shoes.

“You don’t trade that shit away,” says Milton.

Norm reaches for the radio. It will take time, late poker nights, and several shouting matches, but Milton knows Norm can be convinced. Norm extends the antenna and places the radio between them. As the national anthem crumbles through, Milton folds his hands behind his head and lies down in the shade of the tall stone. He recalls his final game of little league, the last time he heard the anthem sung live. Remembering the smell of lemonade and dugout dust wrinkles his cheeks to a smile.

He’s a small kid whose bowl haircut tousles in the wind when he places his hat over his heart. While the pitcher warms up, the boys in the infield take turns hitting each other in the crotch to test the durability of their cups. Milton sprints towards the outfield, dragging his hands across the tips of fresh grass, stealing the morning dew to wash his hands. The batter steps into the box. Milton coughs up a little chatter, but realizes he’s out of earshot from the mound. Out in left, he bends his knees and the brim of his hat thinking, this is the closest I will ever come to outer space, and when Toby Ferris clocks a shot towards the fence, he gives chase as if it were a shooting star, a final chance to make good on an eternal hope to sit on the shoulders of his teammates, look at his father chin-to-chin, and in a moment of triumph, know with little uncertainty that he kept his eye on the ball, just like he said.

Erik Doughty is an Asian American writer from New Jersey. He lives in Boston, working as an editor at Digi-Block, Inc., and carries a notebook, air guitar, and inhaler with him wherever he goes.

Attention! Poets!

2011-03-30T09:19:00.008-05:00

Stymie Magazine publishes two issues per year. We like our issues to be encompassing and beautiful and this schedule allows us to put a lot of thought and work into our magazine. But this year we want to give you a little bit more Stymie!

In addition to our Spring Issue (to be released in April!) , we are planning on releasing a special Summer/Autumn supplement, focused on poetry. Sports and poetry! Can you think of anything better?

So, please submit! We are looking for poetry that crosses styles and encompasses a modern aesthetic. We want short poems and we want long poems, we want poems that crack like a ball against the bat and poems that sail like a football spinning towards the end zone. Our only requirement is that the poem address, in some way, the theme of sport and/or games and literature. (And we aren't too strict on what that means, and don't play favorites. Tennis! Bowling! Rodeo! Biking! Dance! Video Games! Rock-Paper-Scissors! The list goes on and on!)

You can submit via our Submishmash page. And tell your writer and poet friends!

New Nonfiction: The Shed

2011-03-28T08:16:00.002-05:00

Title: The Shed
Author: Elizabeth Wade
Category: Nonfiction

I should have known that it was going to be weird when Colin asked “Is it going to be weird?” I should have remembered how, in the days after the mammogram, he would run his fingers across my clavicle, then straight down the valley of my sternum, as if he feared that by touching the thing that felt like a seed in my breast, he would cause it to germinate and blossom inside my body. I should have remembered that I am not always the one who is reserved. But standing in the kitchen the night before, these things did not come to mind, and when the relative hosting our visit to Kentucky asked, “Wanna see a Derby winner?” I never considered saying no. So there we were, up at dawn on a Sunday morning, piling out of the cab of the horse van as our host unloaded his mare.

Like the Coast Guard, the teaser is always ready. He snorts and whinnies, bares his teeth, unsheathes and displays himself. Unlike the Coast Guard, he is never deployed. He has the worst job on any farm—testing to see if mares will be receptive to the stud’s advances. This mare proved eager, teasing so quickly that although Colin was watching, he did not seem to realize what had happened, how she had been led to a grate in the stall and placed nose to nose with the teaser, how her tail rose, how her breathing grew audible.

As the grooms washed the mare, we stood outside, watching the dappled Kentucky Derby winner trot down the lane that connected his paddock to the breeding shed, his neck arched, his erection bobbing with each stride. (When rigid, a Thoroughbred’s penis can measure approximately two feet long. I knew this from growing up around horses, but I had forgotten that it can seem sensational until I heard Colin whisper, “Fuck.”) I’d also forgotten the hobbling—how grooms put a leather strap around the mare’s front leg, holding it up so she cannot kick the stallion. And I’d forgotten the twitch—the rope or chain used to grab the mare’s upper lip, then to twist it, thus controlling her head and preventing her from bolting.

When it happened, it happened quickly. The stallion settled on the mare’s back, grunted and thrust. She stood, hobbled and twitched. The horses’ owners talked about sports. I explained to Colin, helpfully, I believed, that this was not properly called mating or coupling or even fucking; according to Jockey Club language, it was a cover. Colin did not comment. The stallion’s tail flagged, shooting up into the air and signaling ejaculation. His owner said, “Call me in the morning,” hopeful that the veterinarian would send a positive report, that this time the mare would catch, would harbor a foal that would stand and nurse some eleven months later, a colt that would win stakes races and bolster his sire’s stud fee.

On the way to the stallion farm, the mare’s hooves had drummed out a rhythm on the back wall of the trailer, registering her anger at being separated from her foal, perhaps, or her confusion from being tranquilized. Colin had leaned across my lap, straining to hear our host’s words. On the return trip, though, the mare was subdued, and I noticed a strip of cracked green vinyl visible on the seat between my right leg and Colin’s left thigh. Above the diesel’s hum I heard a peal of church bells sounding out across the Bluegrass hills, calling people to come and be cleansed.

Elizabeth Wade holds degrees from Davidson College and the University of Alabama. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Kenyon Review Online, DIAGRAM, Oxford American, and others. She lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and teaches literature and writing courses at the University of Mary Washington.

New Fiction: The Tiny Man in the Baseball

2011-03-22T05:57:00.001-05:00

Title: The Tiny Man in the Baseball
Author: K.C. Wilson
Category: Fiction

Once there was a tiny little man. He was so tiny he could fit inside a baseball. In fact, one morning, he woke up and he didn’t know where he was at first, but he was inside a baseball.
He also didn’t know how he got in there. Either it was some kind of magic baseball or else some mischievous fairy must have put him in there. Anyway, it was a little stuffy inside the baseball and the tiny man was having quite a time of it trying to breathe through all the string and stitching.

The baseball was lost in the tall grass near the home run bushes. The outfielder couldn’t find the ball, so the boys used a different ball and kept playing.

The tiny man was out in left field when it happened, taking a nap in the tall grass when the baseball came bouncing into his little world. It bonked him on the head while he was sleeping and he then may well have uttered an epithet that was quite possibly offensive to certain hypersensitive forces in the spirit world that may have had something to do with him ending up inside the baseball. The tiny man could only guess how in the wide world he got in there. But his guess was that a malignant, spell casting fairy had put him in there to teach him a lesson over something he must have said when the baseball bonked him on the head.

That was the last thing he remembered, getting bonked in the head.

And he had a tiny little headache to prove it. But he wasn’t concerned about that. He spent the whole night wide awake thinking about his little problem without coming up with a single good idea. Inside, he barely had room to move around. And there was nothing at all to eat except string. There was plenty of string. But it wasn’t looking very appetizing. He hoped to find a better way than having to eat his way out. The truth was, he was getting a little worried.

What if no one ever found the ball? Or worse, what if those boys did find it? What if they started batting him around? What would that do to his headache? Make it worse, no question. He worried half the night and racked his tiny brain the other half to no avail. When morning came, he had no bright ideas about how to get out. And he was so hungry for having missed not only his dinner and breakfast but also his midnight snack that all that string was beginning to look like noodles. By mid-morning, it looked almost like spaghetti.

By mid-morning, also, the boys who had lost the baseball the day before were back, scouring the outfield for their lost ball. The tiny man could hear their voices searching and calling to each other. He was afraid it might go badly for him if they were to find the ball and use it, but then, he thought, how much worse could it be than sitting idly in a field eating string? Finally, he began to call out to them, “Here! Over here!”

Of course, they couldn’t hear him. But suddenly, his little world was turned upside down and sent spinning through the air as one boy found the ball and after smacking it twice into his glove, threw it high and far to another boy who deftly caught it and, after examining it for possible defects, smacked it into his own glove several times with a pleasure the tiny man could sense but found himself hard put to share.

“Batter up!”

The tiny man knew what those words meant. He’d often sat in the high grass watching with fascination the boys’ baseball games. He knew the pitcher was on the mound, rolling the ball around in his palm, fingering the threads. He braced himself for the crack of the bat against his head and was glad for a moment that he had not eaten any of the string which would be his only protection and padding in the game of hard knocks that was soon to begin. He felt the swing of the pitcher’s windup, and the sudden whistling speed as he went sailing toward the strike zone, smacking into the catcher’s mitt as the batter swung and missed.

“Steerike!” He heard the players’ catcalls and advice from the sidelines. “Knock the cover off the ball, Willie!”

“Yes, do,” the tiny man enjoined, as the catcher tossed him back to the pitcher, intent on repeating the terrible procedure.

Was that his only hope, he wondered, to have a batter knock the cover off the ball? Then what? He’d still have to unravel all that string, and how could he do that, trapped on the inside? Like it or not, he was going to have to start eating that string, but not yet, not while he was being pitched around and swung at, and beaten with a baseball bat. How could he eat when his nerves were so on edge? With every pitch he felt like he was falling off a twenty story building. Maybe the catcher would catch him or maybe he’d hit the sidewalk. Either way, his nerves were shot.

After a while, he just relaxed, and he barely even felt it when the batter connected with a line drive to the shortstop. It was no worse than being whacked with a shillelagh. It knocked his little hat off, knocked the wind out of his tiny lungs. That was all.

Suddenly, he smacked into the shortstop’s glove, then he was being whipped around the bases, smack, smack, smack, smack. He didn’t have time to dwell on the effects of any one impact. Overall, he began to feel like a lump of jelly, and it didn’t bother him all that much to be whacked and whacked again all the livelong day. He only wished some young Babe Ruth would gather up and knock the cover off the ball. Which, eventually, one did, but not before the tiny man was black and blue in a hundred places.

To begin with, the ball was far from new. And there was a place where the threads had already begun to shred apart. Every time the ball was hit the threads unraveled a little more. Inside the ball, the tiny man thought it was beginning to seem a little drafty. He could hear the boys’ voices better and he knew the ball was no longer the perfect spheroid. The pitches didn’t whistle like bullets anymore. There was a slight flapping sound when the ball went sailing through the air. And the game became less serious because all the boys wanted now was to see the cover knocked off the ball. They let the threads unravel more and more and even helped them along until they were playing with an unwieldy flapping pretense of a baseball. Still, the game went on.

The tiny man located one end of the string and began to gnaw on it. He didn’t gnaw for long, nor did he chew, because there was just too much of it. He started swallowing. Inch by inch he swallowed string until he was full and still he’d barely made a dent in the wall of string that surrounded him. But his little room was getting bigger.

And the knocks, when they came, were not as hard as they were because the ball was more like a bedraggled bird with a broken wing than a baseball, but still the game went on, and the tiny man kept swallowing string. He had to unbutton his little shirt because his little belly was stretched like a bubble. And he had to unbuckle his little trousers for the same reason. He kept swallowing string. He swallowed and swallowed and finally, after swallowing a hundred yards or so of string that did not taste at all like spaghetti, he saw the first tiny crack of daylight through the split seams of what used to be the baseball.

He could hear the boys laugh louder now. “Batter up!” He heard them call. And the pitcher was no longer hurling curveballs and fastballs. He gripped the ball by its flapping cover and slung it with the clear intention of ripping loose the remaining threads. Only a piece of the ball’s original stitching remained intact when the pitch crossed the plate, the rest of the leather flapped in the breeze like a flag.

At the crack of the bat, the boys sent up a cheer and a howl of triumph. Big Willie knocked the cover off the ball and it landed on the grass of the infield while the ball sailed high over second base, trailing a line of unraveling string far out into center field. The ball was unraveling in mid-air, getting smaller and smaller as the center fielder maneuvered to get under the dwindling speck in the sky. At the high point of the ball’s trajectory, the tiny man stopped swallowing and began to feel the string being pulled the other way, out of his little stomach. The ball had unraveled to nothing more than what was left inside his swollen little body. On his way down, with his mouth wide open, the string kept coming out. He was falling backwards from such a great height in the sky with the string unraveling out of his stomach. He didn’t have much time to think, it happened so fast, but when he landed in the center fielder’s glove, he spit out the last tail end of the string and turned to tip his hat to the boy who had caught him. Meanwhile, he was quick to buckle up his little trousers and button his little shirt, all the while grinning and twinkling a merry eye at the dumbfounded boy, who had never seen a tiny little man before and was, no doubt, expecting to catch a pop fly.

“Well, be seeing you,” said the tiny man, as he hopped to the ground from the boy’s glove. “It’s time I had a bite to eat.”

And, quick as the boy could blink twice, he disappeared into the tall grass.

K. C. Wilson lives in North Florida with his wife and two children. His first novel is The Route (Barnyard Books 2001). Short fiction of his has appeared in Delivered, Thema, Faraway Journal, Cavalier, Mississippi Crow, and is forthcoming in Kerouac’s Dog. He is the songwriter for The Rubes.

New Fiction: Pennant Fever Penance

2011-03-14T08:44:00.001-05:00

Title: Pennant Fever Penance
Author: Sean Ulman
Category: Fiction
Photo: D. Sharon Pruitt
Seward’s Little League coordinator called in sick from work and phoned school to excuse his ‘sick’ son, so they could watch the Mariners opening day game vs. the Athletics.

“Opening day is a holiday,” the former high school All-Star pitcher told his son after he hung up the phone.

And the 9 year old did sense a twist of Christmas when his dad, a pot-bellied typically jolly guy with a graying beard, hauled in a mesh bag full of mitts and equipment and flopped it on the living room floor in front of the TV.

Through the first three innings they re-strung and oiled-up gloves. Every time Felix Hernandez through his yo-yo curve the dad would punch the pocket of whichever glove he was working on and reflect on a similar slower pitch he used to throw. During the seventh inning stretch, with the Mariners coming to bat up 6-0, they stepped out to play catch.

While dressing, the father told his son a story about him and his friend starting outdoor training in March, “… Nice and easy, just to remind the muscles, get the motion. Before the snow’s gone you’re feeling strong.”

So caught up in picturing his dad, the young hard-throwing righty playing catch in the snow in the past, the boy forgot to put on his jacket. His dad wore a T-shirt. Both shivered once they stepped outside. 25 degrees, a cold breeze. When the boy mentioned running in for his jacket, the dad said, “No. You’ll be fine in no time. Your body warms up warming up.”

The driveway was too icy so they threw in the street, sidewalk to sidewalk. Their arms were rusty and the ball kept sailing wide or bounced by them. Landing in the snow over and over the ball got damp. “That’s okay, that’s good,” the dad said as he set his curveball grip on the ice-chip-pricked ball. “It’s good to throw a heavy ball this time of year.” His curve bounced in the middle of the street and skipped into the snow way left of his son. Something in the old pitcher’s shoulder seemed to slide or slip, and as if he were competing in a game in the past he scolded himself for throwing a curveball so early. “C’mon, Pitch. Discipline. Wasted the elevator, it’s gone for the game.”

The boy’s attractive teacher lived on the same street and she happened to drive by when the boy trotted back to the curb. The teacher shook her head. The boy waved and smirked in that coy flirty manner of young boys and threw the ball back. His dad went to throw a slow pitch and stopped because of the pain. Like a pitching coach, the son cautioned, “that’s a good first day,” and they headed inside.

The A’s were down to their final strike. When the batter swung through a filthy curveball, the boy cheered excessively and went to give his dad a hard high-five. The humbled former pitcher weakly raised his uninjured non-pitching arm for his son to smack.

The next day both the father and son had to stay home sick with legitimate fevers, no doubt caught yesterday from playing catch outside underdressed. After eating a late lunch of chicken soup, the dad, now entirely committed to the role of mentor and coach, easily convinced his son to have a short catch outside, saying, “It’s good to exercise when you’re sick. We’ll bundle up.” They had a short short-toss. The dad had to flip the ball back underhand with his left hand since his right was not right. They made a point of going back inside a good hour before the hour that the teacher had driven by yesterday. They caught a brief energy boost from the cold fresh air, then crashed. They slept through the late afternoon Mariners game, dinner and the night.

Sunk in deep sleep, the dad dreamed of a healthy ancient version of himself (500 years old) sweating profusely in outer space hurling freezing fragments of space rock that hurtled (sank cut curved sped) and hit the center of the sun strike zone every time; the boy dreamed he was suckling from his teacher’s bosom, one nipple issued swirled ice cream like a soft serve machine and the other dealt a stream of root beer. When he lifted his hands to touch her ‘hot apples,’ (his dreamer had dubbed them) her breasts became baseballs and the teacher morphed into a leafless withered tree. The baseballs, damp cold and heavy like the ball they had played catch with, promptly rotted to mushy apples.

Sean Ulman, a pickleball enthusiast, hit three free throws with no time left to force OT in a 5th grade Rec basketball game which his team went on to win. 17 years later he replicated the 3-shot feat in a game of Beer Pong but lost the 1cup playoff. 'Pennant Fever Pennance' is an excerpt from his long ongoing novel about Seward Alaska and Art. Other excerpts can be found at Thieves Jargon, Emprise Review and the2ndhand.

New Nonfiction: The Unnaturalist

2011-03-08T13:10:00.001-06:00

Title: The Unnaturalist
Author: Guinotte Wise

Category: Nonfiction

I can remember the moment I stopped hunting forever. I was outside Omaha, great pheasant country then, in the 60's. I'd gone out alone, a friend having bailed due to another obligation, and, though I'd miss the company, I did like the fields and the woods on a fall day when winter was clearly setting in. There was an edge to the cold, and a grey forbidding sky.

I still smoked back then, and I was in a small clearing by a deserted farmhouse; I laid my shotgun in a solid spot, fished out my cigarette pack, shook one out and lit it. It was the clink of the Zippo that spooked them out. Pheasants were everywhere, it seemed. As I recounted it later, there must have been fifty of them, and I see no reason to modify that figure, unbelievable as it seems, especially today.

I was transfixed, cigarette in one hand, lighter in the other, mouth undoubtedly open. The noise was like several clothes lines of wash in a fierce wind, and suddenly over. The birds, iridescent necks of blues and greens, flashed by, out of the weeds and brush in the farm yard, and I was struck by the beauty of them. And the question occurred: why shoot them? Followed by others: what's it prove? I know I can. But, man, they are beauties.

I sat on a log, opened my thermos of coffee, and poured in a splash of bourbon, something I did usually after hunting was done.

And, hunting was done. Was it ever. I drank and smoked and marveled at what I'd seen, and a few small snowflakes drifted into the farmyard.

By the time I'd finished the coffee toddy, the snowflakes were larger and I began to think of home and the fireplace, the latter unused since the year before. I hadn't fired a shot that day. The gun, a fine old Ithaca 16 gauge pump, hasn't been fired since, though I still own it. That was 45 years ago, maybe more.

Kansas spring, 1990 or so. One of my Australian Shepherds had something in her mouth, and she had that head-down, trying to be unnoticed look that led me to believe I should check into this. It turned out to be a robin chick, fallen from its nest I imagined. I opened the dog’s jaws, and she dropped the robin on the grass. It seemed unharmed.

I took it and looked around for a nest but found none. Nor was there a worried mom robin flying around trying to fool us with a damaged wing act. Nothing. I was stuck with this bird. I took it inside and put it in a laundry basket. I may have had a computer at the time, but Google wasn’t around yet, so I had to rely on lore that I had processed.

I knew baby robins had to be fed often. Water might be best administered from an eyedropper. Luckily I checked with a vet and found that’s a great way to drown a bird. Best to soak what it’s eating, and that’s all the moisture the little bird needs.

I fed the bird canned dogfood in little bits, some cut up grapes, a bug or two. It seemed to be a little eating machine. That night I put grass and sticks in an approximation of a nest in the laundry basket, surrounded with a towel, and expected to find a dead little carcass the next morning.

I found, instead, a healthy hungry baby bird, beak open. And vocal. I knew birds fed their young all day long, and it being a weekend, was able to accommodate the schedule. But come Monday I had to work and so did my wife. We both drove separate vehicles into the city, 50 miles north of us. I would have to take the bird with me to the advertising agency where I worked.

Soon, a routine was worked out. The bird was relatively silent if I put a towel over its laundry basket, so for the hour commute to and from work, it slept. Or whatever it did, it was quiet. Then, at work, in my office, it was fed during the day whenever it peeped. And it peeped a lot. Colleagues at the agency soon learned to be quiet around the sleeping bird, and I became known as The Birdman of Advertising.

As the robin gained weight and size, I realized it would need flying lessons and, possibly some other education that I was ill-equipped to provide it, so I called a wildlife bureau and asked the lady what to do with a growing robin. She was aghast and told me I had ruined the bird, that it had “imprinted” on me by now, as its surrogate parent, and it had no chance to resume a normal bird life in “the wild.”

She then told me this was illegal and carried a fine, asked for my name and address. I hung up, quietly.

The bird sat on my shoulder, on my head, on my finger. It was clear it wanted to be with me, to the consternation of my two Australian Shepherds, who were warned time and again to leave it alone. The whole thing was weighing on me. The robin needed schooling and it was only going to come from me.

It was waiting. It knew.

Early on a Saturday morning after its bird breakfast, the dogs, the bird and I went to the front yard for flying lessons. I tossed it in the air from a kneeling position so it wouldn’t fall from too great a height. It fluttered to the ground and walked around. I sighed. The dogs sat and waited. I tossed again. It fluttered again. Walked back to me. Then, the third time it actually flew to a nearby tree that leaned, landed about three feet up on its trunk. I carefully pried it loose, tossed again, and this time it sailed around the yard a bit, before it came back to me. I was holding my breath. With luck, this could be the end of my stewardship, my bird term.

I tossed it into the air again and it flew around. I left some grapes and dogfood on the propane tank, plucked the bird off my shoulder and set it down near the food, went inside. I looked out the window and, horrified, saw the bird walking around on the ground and the dogs in pounce mode. I ran outside, shouting, and the bird flew to me, landing on my head. How does one teach a bird survival techniques? Flying, obviously, wasn’t going to be a problem.

Fortunately, the bird found higher perches to its liking, the eaves, a tree branch. And cats didn’t frequent the area because of the dogs. So it was relatively safe for the weekend. My plan for Monday was to go to work, leave the bird outside, dogs inside, and put some food out for it. It would probably be gone when I got home.

I heard a shriek from my wife.

She was in a bikini, sunning on the deck, reading a book, and the bird had landed on her toe. The shriek didn’t dislodge the bird—maybe it thought it was a greeting. She was laughing now, looking at our robin. The bird wanted to be near its folks. It walked over to the dogs’ water dish, took a drink, a little fluttering dip as well.

Robins often congregated at the end of our drive, possibly for the gravel, and to dust themselves. I took her out there (we had determined her to be female), set her down on the gravel where she pecked around, and I backed away, quietly. A couple of robins landed near her, and she walked toward them. They flew away. That happened again, later. I felt as though I’d sent my kid off to the school bus and she’d been ignored, ostracized by the others at the bus stop.

The robin and I had developed our own language. I could summon her with a sort of high-pitched kissing sound that I used with the horses to get them to move. When I made the sound, she came to me, lighting on my head or shoulder. I made the sound now and she came. I wanted her to know that she would soon be one of the gang, it would all work out.

Monday morning, I laid out some food on the propane tank, said goodbye to the robin, and headed for work. I felt a mixture of liberation and guilt that day, but lost myself in the work and the day passed soon enough. I didn’t think about the bird much on the way home, distracted by city traffic, the radio and thoughts of what I was doing at work. When I pulled in the driveway, there she was, on the eave of the front porch.

As I got out of the truck she flew to me and beat her wings, hovering about my face, then landed on my shoulder. I put my hand near her and she perched on my finger. I got a lump in my throat thinking of her there at home all day, not knowing what had happened to her…parents. Maybe the bird nazi at the wildlife office was right. Maybe I would have this robin for the duration. How does one house-train a bird in the winter time? I could see newspapers covering everything all over the house.

I needn’t have worried, but as the days progressed, though she became more and more robinlike, she still waited and greeted me and my wife when we’d come home. She flew beautifully now. She would circle us, then execute a neat landing on an outstretched hand. The weekends were special times; the dogs enjoyed our company on these R&R days and so did the robin. We never named her, curiously, but she was a part of the family. When I’d be outside and wouldn’t see her, I’d make the sound and there she’d be. She was fending for herself now, but I still left the occasional grape or tidbit out there for her. And she was associating with the other robins out on the gravel drive.

Well before summer was over, but on a day when the first hint of a northwest breeze alerted the senses that fall would come one day, I saw her on the fence with another, brighter red-breasted, robin. The brighter colored ones are males.

As I approached, she flew toward me. I made my noise and she flew close but didn’t land. The other bird, her mate I soon determined, was obviously alarmed. He left the fence and flew erratically, making sounds that were distressed and she flew back to him. Something passed between them, and she once more flew to me, circled me fairly closely, rejoined him and they flew away together.

I knew I was losing her, but I also knew she was okay. We had imprinted on her all right, we would always be her parents, but now she was on the way to a family of her own. She wasn’t attracted to other humans so that wouldn’t be a problem. And her new mate would lead her to more birdlike behavior, that was obvious. Later I told my wife our bird had found her mate and was most probably gone.

I told her in a casual way, fairly quickly, because I had to turn away to hide an emotion that has returned to me now as I think of that moment.

I’d see the robins each spring, dusting in the gravel, and used to wonder if she was among them. Then I checked an ornithology site and was a bit startled to find that the life span of an average robin is a little over a year. I hope she did better than that.

It occurs to me as I glance at the Ithaca above my desk that a lot of pheasants and quail beat the odds on life span when I was the determining factor. I liked bird hunting. I just wasn’t very good at it. Unmolested robins with human parents should get two years just for getting through it.

Guinotte Wise has been a Creative Director at VML in Kansas City for the last 17 years, a group CD before that in Los Angeles at Saatchi & Saatchi. Semi-retired, he’s a sculptor, welded steel his material. His work can be seen at http://www.wisesculpture.com, he lives in rural Kansas with his wife.

New Poetry: Training Camp

2011-02-28T06:25:00.000-06:00

Title: Training Camp
Author: Christopher Lowe

Category: Poetry
I was no quitter.
Heat-stroke, a heart-condition.
Still, you listed me
With the other washouts,
Boys too slow or soft
To make it through
Your camp.

It was a show.
To teach the others
The price of exhaustion,
The price of pain.
At our two-a-days,
You hounded us
Like some frenzied cleric,
Preaching a gospel
Only you understood,
Though we huddled
Like disciples,
Fingered our chinstraps
Like rosaries, muttered
The names of plays
You’d drawn up,
As though reciting
Some vague benediction.

When you told us
Of the quitters,
I sneered, secure
In my own strength,
Until the day I dropped,
Weighed down by
The muscle you helped
Me chisel free of the flab.

I wonder what lies
You told yourself that night
In the coaches’ office,
To justify that brutality,
To take a boy’s name
And abuse it so rudely.
The last indignity,
Renaming me one of those.

That year, our team –
Your team – went undefeated,
Ran through the playoffs,
Beat Millport and Southbank
And Reform. I watched
Each game from the stands,
Where my heart raced
And thrilled at each
Missed assignment,
Silently wishing that
The team could be
Something other than
Perfect.

Grown now,
Heart still weak,
I find myself return
To those oven-hot
Days. I tell my child
About the feel
Of drenched cotton
Over hard, molded plastic.
When I speak your name,
Why isn’t my voice
Hard with spite?
Why doesn’t anger
Coat my words
Like a sheen of sweat?
When I say, Coach Ledbetter
Was a hard man,
Why is it with the reverence
Reserved for a harsh father,
One who casts his son
Out of some terrible Eden.

Christopher Lowe's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Bellevue Literary Review, Fiction Weekly, New Plains Review, Zahir, and War, Literature, and the Arts. His collection of short stories, Those Like Us, is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin Press.

New Fiction: Tennis is Science

2011-02-21T06:13:00.001-06:00

Title: Tennis is Science
Author: David Whelan

Category: Fiction

If you hit the ball just right you’ll hear a poc. It’ll be quick – so keep your eyes alert, curled back, open – but it’ll be distinct. P – O – C. That’s when you know you’ve hit the best shot possible. The little yellow ball will get caught up in the strings for just the perfect amount of time, cushioned in the center, for one, maybe just under one, second, and poc. Point won.

“It’s simple mathematics, really.” James is saying that, between a gulp of water and a sigh. “That’s what tennis is. You can run around the court for as long as you want but if you really want to win, just know how to hit the goddamn ball.”
“I know how to hit a ball, man. It’s about the feel of it, you know. Tennis is natural flair.”

He just looks at me.

“Dods, you can look as pretty as a painting, but if you don’t know how to hit a ball properly, you ain’t gonna win a thing.”

His serve comes in. It’s fast, but my reactions are better. Gentle push back deep into the court. He moves onto it, a bit sluggish. His short legs look stocky in white shorts. Sinews bend and brace as he slugs it back at me. I hear the poc. The ball is back now, to my left, and I have to adjust – fast – onto my backhand, but I don’t have time to arrange my feet and the shot falls short and dies in a pathetic ripple across the net. In my head I’m playing like one of the great artists of the game – a Federer – but my shots keep failing me. My hands can’t stroke the ball like he does – the way they do.

“Man, you need to work on your ball control.”

He hits in another serve. An ace. My feet feel like clay. So much for speed. I’m sweating, too much, and I’m short of breath.

One more serve and I swing my racket and – there, my eyes are shut, but just, just, there, the sound moves differently and the ball is cushioned in my racket, P-O-C – and the returns sweeps off the strings in a smooth, low motion, bounces off the white chalk of the furthest byline. He moves, like a dove, and brings the ball back into play – somehow. It bounces in the centre of the court, but I’m too far away and it’s gone well before I can react.

“You know, when your mother asked me to coach you, I thought you’d at least try to get better. Listen once in a while.”

“I’m trying my best. But all this crap about equations, angles, lines. It’s about who can hit it hardest.”

He lowers in another serve. My return goes long.

“It’s all about the math, man. Hit the ball right and it’ll come good. Trust me. Tennis isn’t like football. Tennis isn’t an art. Tennis is science.”

The match ends 6-1, 6-0, 6-1. I’m at the receiving end.

I’m tired, physically exhausted and down. James looks absolutely pristine.

“You’ll get there, man,” he says as he turns to me. “Just watch more tennis. Read some Foster Wallace. Do some algebra for Christ’s sake. You’ll get there.”

And I watch him walk off ahead of me toward the early Surrey sun, as his silhouette burns away amongst the golden rays and the birds take off by my feet and for some reason, I begin to cry.

David Whelan is a fiction writer, some-times-journalist and student. His fiction is available at 3:AM Magazine, Shortfire Press, Cellstories, Marco Polo Quarterly, Deadman's Tome, SNM Horror Magazine, Pulp Metal Magazine and Tengen Magazine. He's written about tennis and golf for The Guardian newspaper and on football/soccer for The Equalizer and My Favourite Player.

New Nonfiction: Coach

2011-02-14T07:11:00.002-06:00

Title: Coach
Author: Jim Miller

Category: Nonfiction

It was worth the gut-punch I received from your ten-year-old son, Jeff, that time when I struck out and lost the game. We needed two to tie, three to win. With two outs, and with runners in scoring position, you grabbed my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “You know what to do, right? Please, tell me you know what to do.” I knew what to do alright, the same thing I had done every game, every at bat: stand real still, hunker down, and don’t swing at anything. I was supposed to do this because I—how did you describe it to my dad after our first practice; oh yeah—I swung like a little girl.

So I swung the bat. Not because I wanted to hit the ball and be the hero. I swung because I knew I’d strike out and end the inning—end the game. This game was not just any game; this game was for the league trophy. If I took the walk, I’d give your son, Jeff, the chance to win the game and I would probably have a trophy—a trophy for my 22 walks that season—a single trophy to make my dad proud.

I wonder if, almost 30 years later, you still have a shrine of Jeff’s greatness in your den. Shelves filled with the trophies he won before that game, the trophies he won after that game, and all the trophies, plaques, and ribbons from junior high, high school, and college. I wonder if, almost 30 years later, you still see the trophy he didn’t win.

It’s not like I planned this moment. This was no grand scheme. It was more like the straw and the camel. You sent me to the plate and as I passed Jeff standing in the on-deck circle, he whispered, “Don’t mess this up, dickhead.” When I passed him with a smile on my face, after I did mess it up, he gut-punched me. It didn’t hurt, not really. And if I could be so bold, I think Jeff punches like a little girl. Having told you this, I wonder how it makes you feel, knowing your son can’t make the smallest and weakest boy in school cry.

Jim Miller received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida. His work was recently published in Alligator Juniper, Florida English, The Clever Title, The Armchair Aesthete. He is the Graphic Nonfiction editor for Sweet: a Literary Confection and teaches creative writing at USF–Tampa, Eckerd College, and Florida Southern College.

Questions for Ben Loory

2011-02-10T07:00:00.004-06:00

Ben Loory's short story "The Woman Who Skied on the Rooftops of Houses: A Fable" appeared in our Spring & Summer '10 issue. It was one of our nominations for the Pushcart prize and today Ben answers some questions for us about inspiration, influence and finding our own answers within a story. Here's Ben!

Stymie: You said that you'd been kicking the idea for "The Woman Who Skied on the Rooftops of Houses" around for 10 years before you finally wrote it. What was the inspiration for the story, and why did it take you so long to start writing it?

Ben: Well, not to be incredibly boring, but… the inspiration was a dream. That I had back in 1998. In the dream, though, it was a little different… in the dream, I was the main character, this guy in his house trying to get some sleep (a very common dream of mine), but then there were all these bumping noises on the roof-- THUMP, THUMP, THUMP-- that wouldn't stop, and I opened up the window and looked outside, and I was living in this town on the side of a hill, sort of sloping down to the sea, and it had snowed overnight and the whole town was covered in huge, ten-foot drifts, and even though the sun was shining and it was clearly 85 degrees, all my neighbors were dressed up in puffy jackets and scarves and were slaloming down over the rooftops, jumping one roof to the next, one roof to the next, THUMP THUMP THUMP, all the way down the hill and then splashing into the bay at the bottom (which was unfrozen (and rather Mediterranean in feel)). And in the dream, I was upset, because I was trying to sleep (I can never sleep), and I kept yelling out the window and shaking my fist, "Get off my roof! I'm trying to sleep! I'm trying to sleep!"

So when I woke up in the morning, I laughed a lot, and then looked out the window to make sure it wasn't real. Then I went out into the living room and wrote the dream down. And I went around thinking about it for weeks and weeks, telling everybody about it like an idiot, and then one day I met this girl who was an artist and I told it to her and she immediately got out a piece of paper and some colored pencils and drew me a picture of the whole thing. Town, snow, skiers, the whole deal. It was really great and I hung it up on the wall. Every day I'd try to figure out what to do about it. For a while, I thought I could write it as a screenplay (at that point I was a screenwriter, not a story writer), but I could never figure out how to make it work… all the outlines I wrote seemed to revolve around the main character leaving the town in a sleep-deprived huff, and as soon as I left the town of the skiing people, I stopped being interested in the guy, who was just kind of a boring Scrooge-type character who only wanted to be left alone so he could sleep (story of my life). Which wasn't much of an engine for a screenplay. So after a while, I gave it up.

But I always had that picture on the wall, and it was never really far from my mind.

So anyway, skip ahead about ten years, and finally, I started writing stories. I had this very strict rule (which I still go by), that I start every day writing clean, no ideas, just a blank page and whatever the first image is that pops into my head. So I sat down to write one particular morning, and as I did, I noticed that drawing on the wall. Oh, I said, and next thing I found, I'd written the entire story. Which was the same as the dream and yet totally different; sort of flipped onto its head, and about a woman. I'm not exactly sure how those changes happened, but the whole thing makes me really happy. It's one of the few stories I've written where I read it and say "now where the fuck did that come from?" Which is pretty weird, because of all my stories, its origin is probably the most clear.

Stymie: Once you started writing the story, did you feel like the writing process was smoother after having mulled it over for so long?

Ben: No; it was about the same as usual. I mean, the desires were new, only the imagery was old. So I guess really it's more of a "loosely based upon" than an "adaptation of" kinda thing. I wrote the first draft in about half an hour and then edited it many times over a period of about ten months. Which is about on par with how I generally work (though I sometimes edit for much, much longer).

Stymie: In the story, the woman finds that she's most happy flying from rooftop to rooftop, regardless of what others think. But she has to lose that ability and that happiness, then regain it in a different form, before she can please her angry neighbors. And she smiles when she gains their approval. How much of her true happiness is she sacrificing for her neighbors' acceptance? Is it another type of happiness altogether?

Ben: I hope you don't mind, but I'm not going to answer that question; I think it's better left to the reader. I will just say that, in a general way, I think stories are about finding balance: balance in the characters, balance in the story-world, balance in the reader and the writer. And balance comes only through the sacrifice of something (even if it's the sacrifice of the hope of balance). Any time there's an ending where people find "true happiness," my guess is it's a bunch of crap. (Unless, of course, you have a sane sense of happiness; which is a rather rare thing.)

Stymie: In this story, and in your other stories, you certainly take to heart the phrase "economy of language." From the exposition to the very last sentence, the language is sparse and mostly absent of fine detail. Is this a style choice?

Ben: Yes.

Stymie: Who are your favorite writers, and which writers do you feel have most influenced your writing? Are they one in the same?

Ben: I have about a million favorite writers, but here are a few that come to mind: Beckett, Borges, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philip K. Dick, Jean Rhys, P.G. Wodehouse, Kafka, Kapuściński, Clarice Lispector, Nathalie Sarraute, Patricia Highsmith, Richard Brautigan, Jim Thompson. I also like Walt Whitman, Kenneth Koch, John Donne, and the poetry (not the prose) of Stephen Crane, Tennyson's "Ulysses," Paradise Lost, "Jabberwocky," and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." And there's this mid-century cartoonist named Abner Dean, whose book What Am I Doing Here? is pretty much my favorite.

I guess, to generalize, what I'm looking for when I read is a unique, coherent, original vision which subsumes and electrifies me while I'm reading, and changes who I am in the process. I don't want to sip and stroke my chin, make notes in the margin and do a scholarly, pensive thing. Basically I'm looking for a rollercoaster ride that spits me out at the end as a different human being. (Preferably a human being with wings and X-ray vision who understands the thoughts and feelings of all.)

As for influences, it's hard for me to tell, but my guess is they are a different lot… probably the books I read and loved as a child: Aesop's fables, Roald Dahl (esp. Danny, the Champion of the World), Dr. Seuss, Choose Your Own Adventure, the Bible, Michael Moorcock and Tolkien and MAD Magazine, and this book called A Child is Missing, about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, which I read over and over til it fell apart. Plus of course all those books about monsters and UFOs, pirates, serial killers, and ghosts.

Though really, when I compare those to the things I love most now, they seem pretty much of a piece. I've never liked dry, realistic stories about dry, realistic things. I want madness and passion, Herzog's ecstatic truth; I want a window onto other, better worlds. The day I write a story about professors and affairs, I'm off to find Ambrose Bierce in Mexico.

Stymie: What are you working on now?

Ben: I seem to have about a hundred projects, with more coming and going every day. But the ones that seem to always be sticking around are: two differently styled story collections (one about a town in which the stories are linked), a couple screenplays, a memoir about a pair of scissors, and a long crazy (not-)novel kind of thing which for some reason I refer to as a circus. But the editing and copy-editing of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day has been my focus the last couple months. That should be over in the next few weeks, and then I'll be making a decision. (A hundred roads diverged on my hard drive, and me… I don't know which I've taken yet.)

Stymie: What is your favorite mythical animal?

Ben: Pegasus, of course! And Santa Claus.

Ben Loory lives in Los Angeles. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. His book Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day is coming July 26 from Penguin Books.

New Fiction: Bounce

2011-02-07T08:11:00.001-06:00

Title: Bounce
Author: Jeanie Chung

Category: Fiction

A leather ball, pebbly-skinned like an orange and the same color too, sits packed away until someone buys it, immobile. What a shame, because all the ball wants to do is move and bounce.

Bouncebouncebouncebouncebounce. Bounce and fly, maybe bounce and roll sometimes, but mostly just bounce.

A child, in this case a boy, around nine or ten, walks into the store with his proud parents and a little sister. Wants a ball. Picks this kind because his coach says it’s the best.

“But it ain’t what Andre and them have at the playground,” the boy had argued.

“That’s an outdoor ball. You want one for the gym,” the coach said, then sniffed, “Andre and them. You best not do anything Andre and them do. Don’t even get the same kind of basketball.”

The boy takes each one off the shelf, looks it over and over, like a jeweler examining a diamond for flaws. Pokes it, squeezes the third of it that isn’t walled off by cardboard.

“Just pick one,” his sister whines. “They all the same.” But he knows they’re not. He needs to find The One. When he’s older, he’ll realize he might’ve spent more time deciding on a basketball than on a wife. But for now, he tells his family and the store clerk that he’ll be back tomorrow. He has to think about it. He walks out of the store dribbling an imaginary basketball: bounce, bounce bounce.

The next day, he asks the clerk if he can take the balls out of the boxes. Doesn’t seem like a good idea to the clerk. The boxes have the security strip in them. What could stop him from stealing one? He has better things to do than watch this kid.

“Please,” the dad says. “I’ll put a deposit down, or something. And we’ll help you put the others back.”

The clerk gives up, lets the boy dribble ten basketballs, one by one, up and down the aisles. Something about the kid and the dad tells him they won’t walk off. Just please, be careful with the boxes, he says. After the boy leaves, the clerk will reassemble nine of them and put the balls back in. He walks back to his register hearing: bounce. Bounce bounce. Bounce-bounce, bounce-bounce. Bounce – bouncebouncebouncebouncebouncebounce.

An hour later, the boy and the dad walk up to pay for the ball. Everybody smiling, even the basketball, the clerk swears.

The next day, the boy takes the ball to the park district gym. He doesn’t walk down the street dribbling it. Oh, no. This ball won’t touch concrete until it’s much older, a little more worn. Coach told him it was an indoor ball and that’s what it’s going to be. However, he does dribble it all over the house: the living room, his bedroom, the kitchen during dinner. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce, bounce, bounce.

The boy picks up the ball and holds it up to his face, almost like he’s going to kiss it. Instead, he says, “Today we gon’ learn the crossover.”

Of course. What else would a young boy and his ball be doing in Chicago, home of the great Tim Hardaway? Dwyane Wade, who’s in college now, he’s a Chicago boy. Whether you’re talking about the playground or the NBA, you gotta have a killer crossover move.

First, the boy starts dribbling the ball low to the ground. Keep it down by your knees, one of the older kids tells him. Start out slow. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. Then faster: bounce, bounce, bouncebounce, bouncebouncebouncebouncebounce – oops. Start over: bounce, bounce, bounce, bouncebbbbbbbbbbbbbounce.

Now, while dribbling, bounce the ball over to the other hand and keep dribbling. Bounce, bounce, bounce, switch, bounce, bounce, bouncebounce. Back again: bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, switch, bounce, bouncebounce. Boun-oops. Off the foot. Runrunrun to get the ball, back to where you started. Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, switch. Bounce-switch, bounce-switch, bounce-switch, bounce-switch.

“Look at me,” the boy says to the ball. “I’m Tim Hardaway. Look at us.” And he starts narrating his moves sportscaster-style, the way kids do.

“He faked that guy right outta his socks! And now he got the whole lane open. He drives to the hoop for twoooooooo!”

The older boy comes back over and laughs. Please, he says. You standing still. You gotta learn to do it while you’re moving. So he starts again: bounce, bounce, bounce, switch. Now, the older boy says, step one foot in front of the other, like you’re walking. Your legs and the ground make a triangle. Bounce the ball right through it to your other hand. Boun-oops. The boy hits his leg. “Keep working,” the older boy says. Boun-oops. Boun-oops. Bounce. Ba-oops. Shit. The boy looks around to make sure nobody heard him cuss. Bounce. Bounce. Oops. Again. And again. And after a while – not as long as you might think, because this kid is a quick learner with a basketball, but longer and with more patience than he or any kid would show for anything else – bounce, bounce, bounce, through the legs, bounce, bounce, bounce, through the legs, and off he goes.

Now it’s not such a big leap to get to walking and crossing over. Step (bounce), step (bounce), through the legs, step (bounce), step (bounce), step (bounce). Then running: step, step, step (bounce, bounce, bounce), slow down slightly, through the legs, step (bounce), step (bounce). The older boys are impressed, but not surprised. They could tell this one had something going on.

Now, they tell him, you gotta learn how to use it. You get your man leaning one way, then bam! You cut back the other way and you’re wide open. The boy knows. He’s seen it countless times on TV, at the playground, at the high school games. It looks easy.

“Come on,” another older boy says. “Try it on me.” He does everything he’s been taught to do, but when the boy cuts back, there’s the defender right in front of him, laughing.

“That,” he said, “was the worst fake I ever seen. You can’t be movin’ your head all around, makin’ it so obvious. Watch me.”

The older boy dribbles the ball just in front of the young boy’s right hand. He looks a little careless with it. In fact, if he’s quick, the young boy can just reach out and –

“Boo-ya!” The older boy stands up, grinning and dribbling the ball with his other hand. “See? Like that. You gotta be quick. Like this.” Now he’s just showing off, dribbling the ball from one hand to the other so that everything’s a blur. It reminds the young boy of the time his mother took him and his sister downtown on her day off to see the Christmas windows at Field’s. On the train that day had been a man in a knit cap and checkered coat, trying to make people find a pea under one of three bottle caps. He shuffled the tiny pieces around on a piece of cardboard, hands moving so quickly and yet never losing a piece or letting anyone see where the pea ended up. His mother said those people were not much better than panhandlers, but the boy could’ve watched it all day. He thought that’s what the people were paying for: the show. He would’ve paid for it if he had money.

He thinks about that man and the show while he practices, and in the end, for him, again, the crossover and fake aren’t exactly easy, but they’re not that hard. They come pretty naturally after some practice. Dribble up, meet his man. Stop for a second, bounce, bounce, get him leaning, then bam. He’s gone. Wide open. Stop, pop, swish. Then, bounce. Bounce. Bounce-switch, bounce-switch, bounce-switch.

* * *

They used to go in a sort of numerical order. The point guard was 11, then 21, 31, 41, and the center was 51. But then people started wanting to wear the year they were born or their street address or the number of somebody who played football or baseball, or the number of times they’d seen “Scarface” or whatever, and that system all went to hell. Depending on the team, you don’t even have true twos or threes or fives anymore anyway. If your point is 6-5 and can dunk, so much the better for you. If you don’t have any fours or fives, or even threes, then that’s harder. But you got to learn to work with what you have. If you’re too big and slow? Get the ball inside and let the big guys just knock everybody down. Too short and skinny? Run like hell and get down the floor before the other guys do. Work that ball.

* * *

Remember that one gym, had a big, brown burnt-looking spot about the size of a tire? Looked like someone had stubbed out a giant cigarette on the gym floor. Nobody cared; it wasn’t like it was inbounds or anything. Because once the game started, all the gyms were the same. Ninety-four feet from baseline to baseline. Sixteen and a half feet from the baseline to the free throw line. Twenty-four feet for the three-point line. Lines, nets, hoops, lights. Nothing else mattered. Hell, on the playground you didn’t even need nets or lights. For a while, they had to play games without any fans. The school officials were tired of breaking up fights. OK, that mattered a little. Anyone feeds off a crowd. But it didn’t matter that much. The sounds that mattered were the whistle, the domp, domp, domp of the ball hitting the floor, the squeak of rubber soles on wood court, the smack of ball on skin when you caught the pass. Sometimes, someone calling out a play or reading the defense, coming over to help. Sometimes, wide open out on the wing, calling for the ball. That was important, but not as important as the bounce. And the swish. Always the swish. OK, sometimes, the chunk-swish after the ball hit the rim, or the thop-swish if it went off the backboard, or the chunk-slap-swish on a tip-in. Still. The swish. The best sound you ever heard.

It didn’t really have a taste. Sweat, maybe. Blood, for a short time before they’d bandage you up. Didn’t want anybody catching AIDS. Don’t try to say it tasted like victory, or competition, or adrenaline, or shit like that. Truth is, you had too much else to do to think about what it tasted like.

There were no smells when you started, but soon, once everything was warmed up. Again, sweat. The new sweat from this game and the sweat from every other game that had been played in that gym. Leather -- the ball and the shoes. Sometimes you swore you could smell the rope in the net if they’d just replaced it. Floor wax. And as the gym and the people warmed up, everything smelled a little more.

Because yeah, it was hot. Even in an unheated gym in February, where your muscles were all creaking and stiff until they started to loosen up. They loosened up, but everything else was still hard. Hard, not just as in difficult, but hard surfaces hitting everywhere: feet on floor, ball on floor, ball on skin, body on body. The shirt, if you were wearing one, was soft, but you didn’t care about your shirt until someone grabbed it. That was the crucial trick: to take all of that knocking around and make it soft. Dance down the floor with the ball, so that only you could make it do what you wanted it to do. Zip that pass right into your teammate’s hands soft as putting a baby bird back in the nest. Float that shot up there and just let it drop through the hoop. See? Not hard at all.

Feel. Touch. Those are the absolute most important parts of the game. You’ve seen the people who can shoot free throws blindfolded, right? That’s touch. Nobody’s saying the game is better if you can’t see and hear. But without touch, there’s nothing.

* * *

They come out on the floor, shake hands. The crowd roars, and if there are cheerleaders they cheer and sometimes there’s music pumping too. If it’s a big game the TV cameras switch on and the players call out their defensive assignments and stand by their men and the big men come to the center circle, swaggering just enough to intimidate if they’re lucky, eyeing each other in an attempt to psych the other one out, and they step one foot back and everyone’s eyes go up toward the ceiling as the referee puts up the opening tip. Game time.

Jeanie Chung is a former sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times. This story is part of a collection in progress based on her years covering high school and college basketball. Her fiction has also appeared in upstreet, Madison Review, Hunger Mountain and Timber Creek Review. Her author interviews have appeared in Writer's Chronicle and Rain Taxi online.

Some News and Updates

2011-02-03T07:21:00.003-06:00

It has been a busy few months for Stymie Magazine! There has been a lot going on our homepage and behind the scenes, and we want to take a minute to tell you about it. (We'll return next week with more interviews from our Pushcart nominees.)

We have recently welcomed THREE new staff members to the team! Kari Ngyun is taking over Sara Lippmann's post as nonfiction editor. We are also welcoming Nickolas Butler and Courtney Davison on board as poetry editors. Make them feel welcome and send your best nonfiction and poetry!

The finalists are in for the ESPN/Stymie Magazine Short Fiction contest. Congratulations to Aaron Burch, Jon Morgan Davies, Nick Ripartazone and Todd Zuniga! The finalist stories will appear as a special part of our upcoming Spring issue. We will be announcing the winning story, which will be published by ESPN Magazine, very soon!

We're also busy reading! We are always accepting submissions for the magazine, but we've recently begun accepting and running short pieces for front page publication! We've had some great submissions so far. If you haven't been reading along, please check out our new fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

We are also still accepting entries in our Trading Card Fiction Contest! Have you sent us something yet? If you haven't, send it here. And if you need some inspiration, take a look at our Proof of Concept here and start writing!

If you have ideas or feedback about what we're up to, leave a comment! We are also considering another themed issue and would love to hear from you if you've got something great for us!

New Fiction: Blue River

2011-01-30T07:06:00.002-06:00

Title: Blue River
Author: R. Brandon Horner

Category: Fiction

When Hoyt Wilson approached me in baggage claim, he fit the description of most clients I’ve guided: mid-fifties, wealthy and arrogant, hanging onto the threads of an attractive youth. He pointed at the sign in my hand to signal he was ready for me, and gestured back to his wife, who struggled with the weight of her luggage. They had too much gear for one weekend of fishing.

Hoyt had called me to say he was going to be in Denver and wanted to fish the Blue. He emphasized he was hiring me as a guide for his wife. He was, in his words, a man who could take apart a river on his own. Most of the men who hire me express the same exaggerated self-confidence, and I understand why. At three hundred dollars a day, they don’t want to be reminded that the stream is stocked, or how expensive their equipment can be, or that I’ve shown them where the fish hide and which flies to use. Their wives are their excuse.

The Blue runs along Highway 9, sixty miles west of Denver. Most of my clients fish the morning and afternoon before heading back to their conferences and travelers’ hotels. But Hoyt hired me for two days, and insisted that we stay on the river overnight. It was our plan to fish then camp on the bank, to work our way north from Dillon toward Green Mountain Reservoir.

During the drive Hoyt asked questions about water levels and hatches and how successful a season I’d had. Apart from our brief introduction, his wife hadn’t said a word, but I could feel her eyes on me when I spoke to her husband. When I glanced back at her in the rearview mirror, she turned toward the window. She looked tired, and her husband continued to try to impress me with his knowledge of gear and water.

He said, “I’m a Winston man. Nothing like the classic action on a Winston – smooth. I even got Janet one, last Christmas, a five weight with this special small grip they make for a woman’s hands.”

I looked back at her in the mirror, and she rolled her eyes. He kept going.

“Now you’re going to find, Dave, she’s quite the little caster. I’m sure a lot of men come here and brag about what they’ve taught their girls, but she’s the real thing. She’s got the right rhythm for it, doesn’t rush it. She can’t read water, though. I can point out a dozen fish in a hole, but she never sees them. Janet, did you bring those polarized glasses? Make sure she wears those glasses.”

I said I would.

We reached the access point outside Silverthorne. We would have six or seven hours of fishing before we had to make camp. I unpacked their bags – goddamn Orvis bags embroidered with his initials – and began to rig their rods. Hoyt walked down to the bank of the river as I put their rods together and picked out flies. I hadn’t said a word to Janet, but after the ride out, I was glad I would be fishing with her. She stood beside me as I doubled the line and ran it through the guides, and she watched her husband pace the bank and study the water.

“This is the first time he’s taken me on one of his trips,” she said.

Hoyt walked ahead on the path to find an upstream hole, but Janet and I stayed in the pocket water downstream. It was quiet and gentle water, and there were dozens of seams she could use as targets. She was a beautiful caster. Both ends of her stroke accelerated to a sharp stop, and I saw in her motions that she understood that casting a fly rod has nothing to do with strength. It’s about making the rod bend, about pressure and control.

I stood behind to her left as she worked her casts across the water, always picking the line up as soon as the fly settled on the water. I wanted to tell her to leave it there, but she wasn’t interested in catching. Every time I would point out a new section of water for her to work, she would grip my arm below the elbow for support and lean into me as we waded upstream. She stumbled and I braced myself against my wading staff, and she smiled and her eyes widened. Her face came so close to my own that I imagined she was hugging me. She seemed younger that close, and with the brightness of her teeth and her ponytail coming out the back of her hat, and with the sun on her wet wrists, I imagined she was a friend of my older sister or a babysitter I had loved too early.

A tree had fallen across the far edge of the river. I pointed out the slot because it was a long cast, maybe fifty or sixty feet. She had to carry the exposed section of the tree, and mend downstream so the line wouldn’t snag. She turned back toward me in surprise when the cast landed perfectly, and her fly drifted down through the seam. Neither of us saw the trout rise and take the fly, but I heard the reel buzz, and I knew it was a good fish. She tried to hand me the rod, but I refused. I took her arm and we bent the rod horizontal against the fish and her hip pressed into me as we leaned against it.

We let the trout run and tire and pumped it back in as it slackened. She steered it away from the tree and the low bushes on the near side, and walked it up toward the end of a riffle where we could land it safely. I netted and unhooked the fish, held it upside down, and it calmed. I handed it to her and she posed for a picture and then we held it upstream together, my hands over hers. We held it and the life flowed back into it and it slipped from our hands fat and slick and back downstream.

I wanted to congratulate her but we were already too close and she hugged me. I felt her mouth next to my ear and she thanked me and kissed me on the cheek.

Hoyt cleared his throat in the brush.

I turned in guilt. He stood behind us on the bank, holding a tangled nest of tippet at the end of his line. They’re called wind knots, but they’re the result of sloppy casting, of accelerating the forward stroke too quickly. Hoyt had himself a real mess. Janet tried to explain the fish she had just caught, and Hoyt kept one eye on me. I untangled his line, and he fished within sight for the rest of the day.

That night, I heard him talking in their tent. He described the few fish he had caught, and she didn’t try to mention hers. I thought she might hear me, holding my breath in my tent, listening for her, willing her to speak. Later he was snoring, and despite his labored breathing, I could hear the even spaces between her breaths. I imagined her laying on her back, sickened by the guttural sounds of her husband. I imagined her waiting until he was deep asleep to come to me.

But before that image could comfort me, I heard the muffled movement of their bodies. He wasn’t asleep. Her even spaces disappeared, replaced by a new rhythm, quiet and heavy. I closed my eyes to block it and tried to see her casting tomorrow’s waters, reservoir waters, her line unrolling and dropping into currents impossible to read.

R. Brandon Horner teaches middle school English at a private school in New Jersey, where he also coaches soccer and baseball. He is a graduate of Davidson College and Drew University, and his work has appeared in Ducts. He is currently at work on a novel.

Cameron Conaway: Questions & Answers

2011-01-27T09:06:00.007-06:00

Caged: Memoir of a Cage-Fighting Poet, a new book from Cameron Conaway, is forthcoming in August 2011 from Tuttle Publishing. The book’s opening essay “Across the Middle” was published in our Autumn & Winter 2010 issue, which you can read here.

We asked Cameron a few questions about his memoir.

Stymie: First off, congratulations! Great news. Can you tell us a little about Caged?

Cameron: First, thank you for interviewing me. I was honored to have “Across the Middle” published in Stymie and it’s great to come back to you with news of the publication.

Caged is a metaphor that spreads like roots to soak up lessons learned throughout my life. I was a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter before I was the Poet-in-Residence at the University of Arizona, and MMA bouts take place inside a steel cage. I’m caged because I share my father’s name. I haven’t talked to him in fourteen years and most memories of him are painful. On a broader scope, humans are caged by many things – from our past experiences to the rectangular piece of paper where we try to fit words. Caged has been called the first piece of literary writing about the sport of mixed martial arts, but I see it as just a story of how to learn from pain and pasts and how to let it positively shape but not define who we are.

Stymie: The memoir opens with “Across the Middle,” a startling essay about a Super Bowl party that you attended as an eight-year-old boy. The events that took place left you seeking a safe space, a way to become invisible, as you put it. In what ways does this essay set the tone for the book?

Cameron: You nailed it with “safe space.” “Across the Middle” is the earliest memory I have of my father, and because Caged is a series of essays assembled by threads of violence, reflections and social connections rather than chronologically, I sought to control space at the beginning because control (or lack of) is a central theme throughout the book. Also, the essay sets the stage for the relationship with my father, the violence to come and my development into a self-conscious, borderline OCD, unconfident young man.

Stymie: When did you first discover a love of poetry, and how has your experience as an athlete influenced your writing?

Cameron: I discovered a love of poetry as a child when I would read or hear quotes by Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali, but I didn’t discover that I had discovered it until I was a Criminal Justice major at Penn State Altoona and took an intro-to-poetry class on a whim. It was taught by award-winning poet Lee Peterson, who soon became a mentor, and who introduced me to another poetry professor named Todd Davis. Todd quickly became a father figure to me. He’s an athlete-turned-poet and could not have come at a more perfect time in my life. Before I was ever published he told me, “You are going to be successful. You’ve got some raw talent as a writer, a story to tell and the drive of an athlete. There is no better recipe than a creative writer who has an athlete’s mindset.” I look back now and realize how much confidence his quote gave, how much truth there was in it. Athletes – particularly combat athletes like MMA fighters, boxers and wrestlers – are the most intensely driven individuals I’ve ever met. I had this quality, and when Todd recognized and showed me that I had some innate skill as a creative writer I embraced it fully. My days became essentially split in half. I’d either be engaged in hardcore physical training or deeply contemplating poets like Ted Kooser and Wallace Stevens. It wasn’t until graduate school that I realized this fusion of fighter and writer was a rarity, that the essays I’d written over the years through this lens could someday become a book.

Stymie: We usually learn about ourselves when we write. If you would, please talk about the process of writing a memoir. Was there anything in particular you learned that surprised you?

Cameron: You know, I’d always heard acclaimed writers say things like, “Writing is the deepest form of thinking” or “Writing is the greatest way to learn.” Honestly, I thought they were great quotes but I never understood them until the process of writing this memoir was nearing the end. The below paragraph is just one associative-leap example of how learning through writing can take place. You’ll notice the leaps take place simultaneously with editing so as to create the exact sentence from the clearest memory. The end result is the most truthful sentence that can possibly be evoked from deep reflection on memory. Memory is not simply sifting through your life and choosing what to share. It’s sifting through your memory reserve, organizing it in a way that not only makes sense, but that accurately captures the energy of what is being shown on the screen of the mind’s eye.

“Okay, my father beat me with ski poles. Where? Hmm. Blue Knob State Park. Yes. Okay, he hit me. Why? He was angry? Maybe. Why? He didn’t want his son to be a wimp because he was a wimp when he was younger and it still bothers him? Hmm…okay, but why did he act out so violently? His father beat him. Yes. This is how he learned to handle emotions. He didn’t develop the tools of communication. So what did he say when he beat me with the poles? I can’t remember right now. Oh, he called me a pussy. Over and over. And he didn’t so much as beat me with them as he did poke at me hard. Like I was a steak or something. Yes!”

Stymie: Your website mentions a warrior-poet spirit as it relates to your vision of the world. How would you describe this warrior-poet spirit, and what does it mean to you?

Cameron: A Warrior Poet:
(1) is on a lifelong mission to develop fitness of the body and fitness of the mind
(2) realizes that happiness is a skill that needs to be practiced daily
(3) is passionately empathetic and dedicated to improving humanity

Stymie: What’s next for you? What are you working on now?

Cameron: My fiancée Maggie and I sold everything we own on Craigslist so we could afford to travel across the country for six weeks. We’ve been visiting museums, taking tours, trying new foods and just doing our best to fully absorb each new city we enter. We want to learn as much about life as possible, and travel felt like the step we needed to take in order to do this. Right now we’re in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico. On February 13, we fly from Los Angeles, California to Bangkok, Thailand where we will spend the next year of our lives. Maggie will teach English there. She too is dedicated to improving humanity. And thanks to a sponsorship from www.WhatsYourFight.com, I’ll be able to train in Muay Thai kickboxing while exploring the country and culture. I hope to volunteer at a children’s shelter as well.

My debut book of poems, Until You Make the Shore, will be released in January 2012 by Salmon Poetry, so my focus now will simply be on accruing the worldly experience necessary for me to have a large enough reservoir of images and ideas to begin the next book. A few ideas are already brewing.

Cameron Conaway was the 2007-2009 Poet-in-Residence at the University of Arizona’s MFA Creative Writing Program. He is 2-0 at 155lbs as an MMA fighter. He has trained with Renzo Gracie, the London Shootfighters and will soon study Muay Thai in Thailand thanks to the sponsorship of www.WhatsYourFight.com. An MMA fighter and an award-winning poet; an MMA Trainer at Gold’s Gym and a creative writing instructor for Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth; a certified personal trainer through the NSCA and a dynamic anti-bully spokesperson, Cameron is known worldwide as the Warrior Poet. Tuttle Publishing will release his memoir, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet, in August 2011. Salmon Poetry will release his book of poems, Until You Make the Shore, in January 2012. For more information visit: www.cameronconaway.com.

New Poetry: Pitch and Swing

2011-01-24T14:10:00.002-06:00

Title: Pitch and Swing
Author: Tami Haaland

Category: Poetry

Tonight we play the undefeated team, mostly little guys. Base hitters and one  slamaroo kid. First inning one of our players hits a homerun and catches two flies. The whole team is hot, then confused in the middle innings when a new pitcher tricks the batters with his changeup.

The last few plays are slow motion. We’re up by one but a good hit can alter everything. I can’t help but think what it feels like on the other team, to be twelve years old at bat, two out already, two strikes and the next pitch coming in. Poor kid, he’ll feel like it was his fault. And then he thwacks it, nice line drive to center field. He smiles, and our team has to start over, more risk because the kid on second could make it in. Next kid, two strikes, and I feel sorry again.

Coach says that’s the best thing about baseball. You lose and you win. The batter digs  his back foot into powder, ready to spring. The umpire and catcher become concentric, the infield players crouch toward the plate. It depends, now, on the pitch. It depends on the swing, and now the pitcher nods to the catcher, digs his toe in.

Tami Haaland is the editor of Stone's Throw Magazine. Her work has recently appeared in New Poets of the American West, Letters to the World, Red-Headed Stepchild and High Desert Journal. She is the author of one volume of poetry, Breath in Every Room.

Questions for Tamara Shores

2011-01-20T06:04:00.000-06:00

Stymie Magazine nominated "A Bird in the Hand" by Tamara Shores for a Pushcart in nonfiction. It was published in our Autumn & Winter issue. She answered some questions for us about the piece and her process. Here's Tamara!

Stymie: Your essay, "A Bird in the Hand," draws readers into the world of competitive powerlifting. This is not a sport that is often explored in literature. Were there any authors, stories, novels or essays you looked to for inspiration (even if they are not about powerlifting)?

Tamara: There's a David Borofka story that appeared in the Idaho Review about ten years ago, “The Soul of The Gorilla,” that I love for its humor and tenderness and especially for its vivid detail. It's about a high school boy who acquires a gorilla costume and discovers it has a, umm, beneficial influence on girls, particularly the cheerleaders at baskeball games. I turned to that story quite a few times while working on this piece to help me think about the business of treading the really difficult line between fairness and silliness.

Stymie: The narrator in "A Bird in the Hand" is becoming a competitive powerlifter at the same moment that she is going through adolescence. What was your experience in writing about those two environments? Was it more like training, or going all-out on a third, long-shot lift?

Tamara: An environment like a gym—and especially a small town gym—is jammed with sensory detail. In some ways it was a luxury to have such a lush environment to write about. At one point I ran this piece through a writing group and they hated the excess of detail, including a really, really lengthy passage about the exact rules and paramaters of the sport. Of course, editing served the piece well, as eventually it moved more and more toward a narrative structure. (That said, after we workshopped this piece, I believe I lifted every guy in the writing group as proof of its authenticity).

And, of course, I spent years working on it. One time I had a story written and accepted for publication in eleven days, but nearly everything else I've written seems to require a substantial development period. Training may have prepared me for writing in this way: competition, like publication, is a rare event; in the two or so years I trained I only ever competed in two meets.

Stymie: We also see the narrator's interest in powerlifting sparked by a "meathead" at the gym. Lust, love and dating is a whole other kind of competition than we get in sports, yet we see beautiful similarities between the two in your essay. But, in what ways do you think one competition might make us ill-equipped to deal with the other?

I suppose one would have to parse the differences between lust, love, and dating. Dating is a lot a like sport—there are a few competitive edges one might employ—i.e. ideal physique, wearing an appropriate uniform, focus, courage, risk taking, etc. Sport probably is good training for dating, which is possibly why we have the trope of hating high school athletes for all their apparent potency. Love, however, is obviously some kind of voodoo, hard to explain, harder to believe in, and wildly dismissive of rules. Lust is probably provisional love.

Stymie: There are a number of surprising images in this essay, like the opening description of the gym and some of the similies that pop up in reference to the way muscles look or move, which I found powerful in visualizing a sport I did not really have a frame of reference for. How intentional were the images you chose? How much were you thinking about how unfamiliar readers might picture the setting and action as you wrote and revised?

I was hoping to capture not just the strangeness and unfamiliarity of this sport, but the setting—the store-front gym, the small town, the rural setting. Even now, when I visit my hometown I sometimes drive past the gym (which is still there) and am flooded with disbelief. I've never had the nerve to go back inside, not even once since the last day of training before the competition in this piece. It really was such a weird and isolated little pocket in the universe, and yet, once inside, was big and meaningful and important.

Limiting tedious description while explaining something unfamiliar was tricky. Those “surprising images” and similes were important, muscular even, for conveying mechanics as well as meaning—emotional and competitive.

And finally, some of the description was chosen to pull the curtain back and expose that this was an absurd sport, especially for a sixteen year old girl, and I knew it, even at the time. A coming of age story is often comedy, but many drafts of this piece veered toward farce and, perhaps, rightly so. At different stages the story was more or less slapstick. I hope it has drifted only a little away from that.

Stymie: We'd all love to know what you're working on, now!

A novel, of course. It's about a young woman who believes she might be pregnant and decides to visit her estranged father in Idaho and they end up going hunting. There's a lot of blood and death, though not much of it is attributable to hunting. Mostly it explores the perils of identity.

New Fiction: Shooters

2011-01-17T10:16:00.001-06:00

Title: Shooters
Author: Garrett Ashley

Category: Fiction

They take turns out in the field shooting. The boy is shooting and the father turns once and smiles and looks back towards the doves and he is shooting.

The men across the field begin to shoot, and the surviving, confused doves make a circle back to the hay bale where the boy and the father are kneeling in the dirt. The boy shoots and a dove falls.

"Got one," says the father.

The boy is supposed to be a man now. He runs to the dove and watches it squirm like a fish out of its element. "Papa," he says.

"Got it," says the father.

"It's moving."

"Shoot it again, you grazed it."

The boy holds his Browning to the bird's ancient gray feathers and looks away. The explosion sounds and the bird is dead.

The man's face turns red. "When you shoot you don't look away," he says. "When you're a man you don't look away."

The boy does not cry. He no longer wants to be the man his father taught him to be. He wants to be young forever like the bird so he can fly away and take his own orders and make his own destiny, though every bird takes a bullet every once in a while.

Garrett Ashley lives in MS and studies English at the University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in several places including Neon Literary Magazine and Brain Harvest, and he is currently trying to keep A Widowmoon Press running.

The Finalists!

2011-01-14T11:25:00.000-06:00

The stories have been read and the decisions have been made. We are now ready to introduce our finalists in the ESPN/Stymie Short Fiction Contest! A hush has come over the crowd, and everyone is on the edge of their seats... Our finalists are...

Aaron Burch, “Backswing”
Jon Morgan Davies, “Your Life in Packaging”
Nick Ripatrazone, “Bully”
Todd Zuniga, “Hand Ball”

These stories will be included in a special in our upcoming Spring issue with the winning story -- which will be featured in an upcoming fiction focused issue of ESPN The Magazine -- to be announced very soon. We could not be more excited to share these with you!

Questions for Sean Lovelace

2011-01-12T15:48:00.008-06:00

Stymie Magazine nominated Sean Lovelace's story, "John McEnroe Visits His Musical Side" for the 2011 Pushcart awards. You can read the story in our Spring and Summer '10 issue, here. Today we continue our celebration of the new year with a few questions for him. Here's Sean!

Stymie: "John McEnroe Visits His Musical Side" is a fictional story told from the point of view of John McEnroe, the tennis superstar. What drew you to writing from a famous athlete's perspective, and has your re-imaginings of him changed the way you think of John McEnroe when you hear of him now?

Sean: Once, during a Wimbledon match, John McEnroe screamed out, “I’m so disgusting. Don’t watch! Everybody leave.” I found this fascinating, a man who seemed to be womped by something twisted up inside. He seemed to glow energy from hating himself and the sport. The very racket—which in a famous photo he twists and snaps in two. Its stringy neck. I can’t remember why I write about celebrity personas. Possibly because they are pretty and have the best drugs. Or, possibly because they are gods to us, gods we worship without understanding why. Like Roman or Greek deities, each god has its story. I think McEnroe’s is a mythical tale of the self collapsing into the self, the dog chasing wind or the whirring wheel of an Audi, the flipping off into mirror morning, the drives we can’t comprehend, the way we might loath the very skin we’ve found ourselves in…Then again I need coffee.

Stymie: There is a strong physical element to this story, and even the thoughts inside the narrator's head are exploding outwards. How did all of the movement and action help you find the right voice for the character of John McEnroe?

Sean: Well, a professional athlete at that level is contained energy. When in public, when off their court of field or boxing ring, I think many of these people are roiling, pacing panthers—with too much energy for the cage of societal restraint. I used to be an incredibly fast runner back in the day, and I certainly felt this: like everyone was walking too slowly, like I wanted to climb up the walls, like I was about to explode. I use to toss table into drywall the way mortgage-backed securities might toss an economy. Then again, I was dating a Brazilian woman at the time, and this also made me feel like I had a curling jalopy of gallantry in my thorax. Then she dumped me for an Olympian, but I digress. Here, I just channeled the character’s voice as one of a massive force, a floodwater straining against the dam walls of “the proper way to act.” It’s a good question: Once you find the voice, persona fiction is remarkably easy to write. The trick is that the characterization is already done for us: the reader already somewhat knows John McEnroe. It’s very possible I write persona fiction because I am lazy. And often ill of drink.

Stymie: The fictional Eddie Van Halen in "John McEnroe Visits His Musical Side" refers to athletes wanting to be musicians. What do you think writers wish they could be? Sports stars, perhaps?

I think most writers wish they could be something physical, or something working class and concretely useful, like brick-work or hitting a tree stump in the forehead with an ax or nursing. A lot of writers feel guilty about writing possibly being a selfish, useless act. About what exactly is the difference they are making during this short act on the stage? Naturally, they work it out eventually, or quit asking, or follow some other snapstick path. I am a registered nurse (prior career) and often try to run so hard that I grind myself into the road and disappear—that’s my goal on some runs, for pain to consume me in flames. So. These issues persist.

Stymie: This Pushcart nomination is your second, and the latest in a long list of writing awards you've won. What is your feeling about these nominations and awards, and how do they affect your writing life?

Sean: They are sort of embarrassing, an award for writing. But then again I am a professor of creative writing, and, in a practical sense, in a very real sense, my university adores rankings and awards. They like to see these things, and I’d like to be tenured. So.

As an artist, what does it mean? I hope nothing. I hope I smile and say “that’s cool” and can contain a moment of thanks and then get right back to writing. Woody Allen has never seen a film he’s made—that’s the correct idea, yes?

Stymie: What are you writing, now?

Sean: A series of large checks. Sorry, lame joke. What AM I writing? Not that much. Honestly, work is sort of overwhelming me right now. But one cool thing is I get solicited quite often to write something, a story, an introduction to something, an essay on flash fiction—and I never say no! You see, I force myself into commitment. So then I’m screwed: I MUST write. And I always do. I do deliver. This is a lesson, writers of the world. You can actually MAKE yourself write. It’s not magic or muse, it’s actually just work. (Sort of like running…) Just sit down and hit a sliver of a tree stump in the forehead with your eyeballs and finger-gravity and jolly company of synapses. Yes. Sit down and write and words will appear. That’s pretty cool.

Sean Lovelace is just about to drop a fog/book from Publishing Genius Press. He likes beer. And to run, far.

New Fiction: About the Game

2011-01-10T06:21:00.000-06:00

Title: About the Game
Author: J. Bradley

Category: Fiction

There is a toddler holding a small orange Wiffle bat in the hallway of a house that may be yours. What is at peril will be based on your gender and social class when you meet that toddler in the hallway.

If you are a male, you will hope no cameras are around to capture the toddler's impression of Alex Rodriguez during the 2004 ALCS, swinging and chopping at everything that's round and pallid. If you are also poor, you will wish you could afford a camera, make money the 1980s way.

If you are a female, there are probably picture frames on the wall in the hallway. The thump against the wall will be enough to break the photo of you and the toddler on its first birthday wearing cake like a grin out of the K-Mart phantom zone. You will have to hold the toddler away from the crop of glass, whether you are poor or not.

If you are a hermaphrodite, you will never be in peril.

According to the rules of Wiffle ball, an ordinary broom handle serves as a suitable substitute in the event a Wiffle bat is not readily available. In this case, how does who you are affect how much peril you might place yourself in? How many runs will the toddler score? How will your body keep track?

J. Bradley is the author of Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009) and The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot (Safety Third Enterprises, 2010). He is the Interview Editor of PANK Magazine and lives at iheartfailure.net.

Questions for Cynthia Hawkins

2011-01-06T00:01:00.004-06:00

To kick off the new year, Stymie is interviewing our 2011 Pushcart Nominees. We start off with Cynthia Hawkins. Her essay, "Smaller in Person" was published in our Spring & Summer 2010 issue, which you can read here.

Here's Cynthia...

Stymie: Your essay, "Smaller in Person" examines the fame and mythology we wrap around sports (and stars) as much as it about your personal experience. Did one theme grow from the other, or were they intertwined from the start?

Cynthia: This is one of those rare times when I’ve written something especially for one journal’s call for submissions. At the time, Stymie was asking for works about baseball, and I was already working on a series of essays about film (which explains why my mind was in movie-reference mode). So, I made a list of baseball experiences I’d had, including with film, and began writing about each one. I’d work on one thread until I hit a wall, and then I’d take a break from it to work on the other. The transitions are where my mind insisted on switching gears. I'd say one segment naturally informed the next, and then I made sure it was thematically cohesive in revisions.

Stymie: You invoke a number of movies in the essay, at times for their plot and at others to set a scene or reference a famous actor. You also admit that you were drawn more to fictional (film) baseball than to the real sport. What do you think fiction can add to the narrative of sports and games that we might otherwise miss in real life?

Cynthia: One of my favorite creative works about sports is Joyce Carol Oates’ On Boxing, and in it she writes that “each boxing match is a story.” The way films have to distill a sporting event, be it boxing or baseball, etc., in the interest of time tightens the focus on that inherent story, unpacks that story. The same goes for fiction. I’m not sure I would say that intimate story is lost on a sports fan watching a live game. I would say film or literature is just a different way to explore it, or maybe even that it explores it more methodically.

Stymie: Your website mentions that you have two daughters. Do either of them play baseball, or other sports? What advice do (or would) give them, based on your experience?

Cynthia: My oldest daughter is exactly like me in regards to sports. It’s painful to witness. She desperately wants to play sports but she’s also over-cautious and self-conscious. Not long ago, she wanted to play volleyball, and I told her about how I’d tried that as well but after I kept getting pelted in the head they made me the scorekeeper. I’ll just say it didn’t go well for her either. My other daughter is only two, but she’s completely fearless and full of endless energy. I predict she’ll be a sports phenom.

As far as advice in regards to sports, I tell Hannah to try different sports to see what fits. Golf, for example. She’s pretty good at golf, and golf is non-contact. People warn you when the ball’s angling for your head. Perfect fit. I’m very sympathetic when it comes to her feeling embarrassed or disappointed or afraid, so I think I’m not as good with the advice as the consoling. Then my husband will walk in and tell her, “Suck it up and keep trying! No one’s perfect at first.”

Stymie: In what ways would your advice change or remain the same if they wanted to be writers?

Cynthia: Suck it up and keep trying! No one’s perfect at first. I’d stick with that.

Stymie: Tell us a little about what you're writing, now!

Cynthia: I’ve just finished final revisions on my nonfiction collection Girl on Film, which includes “Smaller in Person,” and I’ve been writing about film for The Nervous Breakdown since March. Ben Loory’s story in the Spring/Summer 2010 issue made me want to spend more time writing fiction again, so I have a strange little story forthcoming in the strange little Used Furniture Review. Stymie’s always a great place to go for inspiration.

A graduate of SUNY Binghamton, Cynthia Hawkins' work has appeared in publications such as Monkeybicycle, ESPN the Magazine, Passages North, and Our Stories. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas where she works as a freelance writer, contributes regularly at The Nervous Breakdown, and blogs at http://cynthiahawkins.net.

New Nonfiction: The Real Reason I Like Shooting Alone

2011-01-03T07:04:00.001-06:00

Title: The Real Reason I Like Shooting Alone
Author: Liam Day

Category: Nonfiction

I don’t remember when I started playing basketball. My father was a coach. My apprenticeship was no more or less ordinary than that of any child who follows in his father’s footsteps. I played in school, for two injury-riddled years in college, and a cup of coffee overseas after graduation. I continued playing for a while thereafter in men’s leagues, but soon grew tired of it.

There’s a gym in my office building, with a full-length basketball court – old, worn, lubricious – where, after five, if no one is using it, I go shoot by myself to work out the knots in rusty muscles and the tension that comes with being part of a large professional bureaucracy.

There are any number of reasons why I prefer solitude on the basketball court. Maybe I’ve matured and no longer feel I need to lock horns with other males to determine who is stronger, faster, has a better jump shot. It could be I’m afraid to compete because I’m not as good as I once was. Or just maybe those I’d play with in a pick up game won’t be as good as the players I played with at the levels of competition I achieved as a younger man.

The last reason may seem like a cop out, but it isn’t. There are activities in life everyone thinks they can do and basketball is one. Part of the reason is the sport’s simplicity. Basketball, as its name indicates, requires but a basket and a ball. No sticks, bats, gloves, masks, pads, clubs or helmets. It is matched in the beauty of its simplicity only by soccer. It is why so many people, who would never dream they could line up as a quarterback in the shotgun and read two-deep coverage, believe they can step onto a basketball floor and execute a pick and roll.

Like anything, though, simple or otherwise, the pick and roll takes hundreds of hours of practice to perfect. And that is to say nothing of the back screen, flare screen, down screen, shallow cut, or back door cut. It is presumptuous to believe you can casually step onto a basketball court and execute these moves with precision. Yet, every day, all over the world, armchair heroes attempt it. As someone who spent hours by himself in gyms in winter and on hot blacktop in summer, I admit to being slightly piqued, my frustration heightened by the fact that, as I get older and my skills wane, I can no longer demonstrate the benefits of long hours of practice by schooling the armchair heroes who would challenge me, an indication, perhaps, my competitive drive has yet to abandon me completely.

Of course, shooting by myself after work has everything to do with still-smoldering competitive fires. It’s about keeping skills sharp so I don’t have to be afraid to compete against younger, stronger, faster players. Part of me still longs for the chance to play at the level I once did and an even more delusional part believes I still can.

A lot of players hang on too long and, occasionally, we find the old mark. And to do something well you’ve done your entire life, even one time out of ten, keeps you coming back. The German word for it is funktionslust — pleasure taken in doing what one does best.

I’ve done many things as an adult. I’ve taught, I’ve written, I’ve acted, I’ve run political campaigns, and raised money for and managed non-profit organizations. None has ever given me the satisfaction of shooting a basketball. Teaching came close. Writing’s satisfactions are delayed; the process of editing and submitting a work can drag on for weeks, if not months and years. Political campaigns are too hectic to be conscious of whether you are happy in the moment. And managing an organization sometimes seems like it requires little more than receiving and sending e-mails.

Acting was fun, but I was not versed enough in the craft to take any pleasure in doing it well. Whether I nailed or muffed a scene was all the same because I had no awareness of what it took to be successful. Conversely, I know the moment a basketball leaves my hand whether it will go in and, if doesn’t, I know why — my balance was off, my follow-through flat.

Jump shooters have sweet spots. When you feel yourself perfectly balanced. Straight up and down. The follow-through smooth and high, the arm extended, wrist snapped. The sound of the ball touching nothing but the net.

To do it once, you want to do it again. But, then, you never want to leave on a miss. And so the cycle begins: shoot until you achieve perfection, then until you lose it, and again until you regain it.

The cycle draws out — ten minutes, twenty, a half-hour. In letting it I am in a small way stealing back a piece of my youth. Neither youthful glory nor youthful vigor, but, rather, youthful abandon. Stealing back to a time when time had no meaning, spread like blacktop, to play on if you would for as long as you would, when the future lay like a pair of train tracks stretching to the horizon.

And, finally, here’s the real reason I like shooting alone. It’s not maturity or fear or impatience with others, and it’s only partially a matter of funktionslust. Those tracks now stretch in opposite directions, back as well as forward, to life’s dawn as well as to its sunset and, before I carry on, I’d like to catch a last glimpse of the early morning’s garnet sky. On those evenings I spend in a windowless gym, in the flickering light of badly wired bulbs hanging in metal shades, past, present and future converge, time slows to a crawl and I’m in no rush to get home for dinner.

Liam Day was born and raised in Boston, MA and attended Harvard College. After graduation, he spent a year playing and coaching basketball in Northern Ireland. Upon returning to the States, he earned an M.A. at the Bread Loaf School of English in 2004 and is now Director of the Boston Area Health Education Center. His work has appeared in New Beginnings, Slow Trains, Apt, Annalemma, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Herald.

New Nonfiction: Cubbies, Seventeen . . .

2010-12-20T07:55:00.004-06:00

Title: Cubbies, Seventeen, and the Proximity to Great Things
Author: Tricia Fox

Category: Nonfiction

We were never actually baseball fans, my friend Karla and I.

More so, we were fans of the tight, white, stretchy athletic pants and endless stream of solid looking crotches jostling for position on a fresh, salad green field. The balls lofted into mid-air by a strong-armed bat were nothing compared to Ryne Sandberg’s ass as he bent over to tie a wayward shoelace, or Raphael Palmeiro’s dark, Latin-lover stares towards the big-busted, big-haired female groupies hanging out over the dugout, begging for an autograph, if not something more. But we were in high school then, and the boys we were used to seeing on a day-to-day basis paled like a British man in comparison to the tall, well-coiffed, hairy-chested American specimens in front of us. The muscles, the testosterone, the beer (without being carded)…it was a seventeen year-olds dream come true. And, it was one of my proudest moments and fondest memories, that brave Friday afternoon when we took a chance and skipped school to bask in the spring of our lives and the sunshine of Wrigley Field.

Contrary to what this story might allude to, Karla was a good girl from a nice Tupperware family with a plump, happy farm-girl mother and a newspaper reading dad. My father, on the other hand, read Playboy, had affairs with his secretaries, and hunted animals like Tennessee Boars. I was a good girl too, just with a more colorful home life. Still, despite our polar opposite upbringings, we were kindred spirits and the best of friends, each with a bit of a wild streak and a love for breaking the rules and escaping our angst-ridden teenage selves whenever possible. Also, our proximity to the great city of Chicago meant that we were both self described Chicago Cubs fans. Thus, for all intents and purposes, it meant we were ignorant of the need to win, ignorant of real success, and considering our ages, ignorant of real life and its dangers, too.

At the time of our great Chicago escape, our blossoming, yet bosom-less bodies were pumped full of hormones the way ballplayers now pump themselves full of steroids. We hadn’t experienced sex, love, babies, divorce, or cancer yet. There was no awareness of a world beyond where our cars would take us or what we saw on the local news, which did not consist of much. In other words, life was still naïve and young.

It was the mid eighties, the last semester of our senior year, when we stole away from small town Indiana for our road trip to Wrigley field. Downtown Chicago was a temptingly quick two hour drive on a sunny day, windows rolled down, Bon Jovi playing on the stereo, singing in a lusty voice about people giving love a bad name or being wanted dead or alive.

Being alive, though, was echoed perfectly as we found our seats above the Cubbies dugout on a deliciously wicked spring day. For less than twenty bucks, we gawked as golden boy Sandberg tossed warm-up balls to Lothario Palmeiro. Cute beer boys poured cans of gold into plastic cups, all while flashing perfect suburban tans and teeth. In fact, we were surrounded by men — all different shapes and sizes and all high on anticipation, Old Milwaukee, and balls…lots of balls. For a seventeen-year-old girl, this was testosterone paradise found; the pure bliss of a glimpse into adulthood, men, and the chance to be someone different than who we were.

We settled our narrow backsides into the fold-down seats and waited. It was as if time stood still, or at least took a 15 minute break, while we watched the players perform their duties: 1st base, outfield, pitcher. The symphony of movement when a ball was launched by a stout player was intensified by the backdrop of the stillness of the city behind them. Everything seemed to be bubbly and filled with action like the beer in our cups, rushing to our heads, dizzying our sense of self and future. We had left the young, inexperienced Indiana teenagers behind. We were transformed by our surroundings into something worldly, exciting, beautiful and exotic. Indiana and her cornfields melted away. There were possibilities, cities like the one before us that we hadn’t seen. We could see the world as if we were looking across Lake Michigan to another continent, another country.

There was no algebra, no chemistry, no literature. We didn’t talk about our college applications, or the two different schools we would be attending. We didn’t complain about teachers, or gossip about friends back home. Instead, we let the baseball do the talking. Nine innings of a conversation on perpetual movement, running towards something you desperately need, being a winner or a loser, and no matter what, finding home. The message sang to me years later, thinking back to that day.

Each ball is a moment. Every pitch a future, and every swing an opportunity.

Life is that way, even now twenty years later. Back then, we knew our time would come, that we would be thrown fast balls, curves, and drives to the head. We knew some swings would make contact with a crack that would sing to the heavens, like when we both couldn’t find jobs post-college and instead took a year traveling Europe together. We knew some would come up empty and brokenhearted, like when I was diagnosed with cancer, lost my breasts, and then my husband.

I didn’t know that many years later, after the divorce and cancer, I would sit in the crowds of Wrigley Field with my son and daughters, watching their eyes grow wide at the size of the stadium, the loudness of the cheering fans, and it would be a part of my healing. Neither of us knew the extent of what was coming our way, or how each of us on our own path would lose each other, one to Hawaii and one to Illinois. Still friends in spirit, but worlds apart.

But who would want to know that? Where would be the joy in knowing the exact outcome of a game even before it’s played?

The joy, we knew, on that clear day, was in the chance, the stealing of a moment and making it ours, making our at-bat all our own.

Tricia Fox lives in Peoria, IL and teaches English at Illinois Central College. She also works as director of The Academic Support Center at Methodist College of Nursing. She received her M.A. in creative writing from Bradley University and is currently at work on her first novel. She also still a firm believer in the Cubs winning a World Series in her lifetime.

New Fiction: Los Angeles

2010-12-13T12:21:00.003-06:00

Title: Los Angeles
Author: Ryan Ridge

Category: Fiction

A Range Rover rolled slow to the curb and stopped. The window dropped and the driver said: I can’t.
    I said: don’t.
    The passenger coughed and asked where he was.
    Some distant planet, I said. You’ll come back.
    They said thanks and I walked down the street.
    Above us, a missile screamed through the sky into the sunset. I fell into a dive. It was Monday, there was football, but we didn’t have a home team. It was like the night had read us our rights.

Ryan Ridge is the author of the forthcoming story collection “Hunters & Gamblers,” due in September 2011 from Dark Sky Books. He lives in Long Beach and teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

Help Wanted (Again)

2010-12-11T21:59:00.000-06:00

Stymie is on the hunt again for some help around our non-existent offices.

Specifically, we're looking for a layout wizard, someone to manage the physical assemblage, design and layout of the bi-annual issues. Interested parties should drop us a note at stymiemag AT gmail DOT com with a subject line of "layout editor" that outlines their interest, skills and any relevant superpowers they may have -- examples of previous work wouldn't hurt either.

We'll be accepting letters of interest through January 15th and hope to finalize a decision by the beginning of February 2011.

New Poetry: Prodigal Son

2010-12-06T08:23:00.012-06:00

Title: Prodigal Son
Author: Adam Crittenden

Category: Poetry
Art: Andrzej Pobiedziński

Cross country
race dust filtered his breathing,
teeth browned and chalky.

Father clapped for him, yelled.

Later, father told son
that he used to run track
back in high school.

Son thought of the difference
between a track and open land,
and how a track is nothing more
than circular logic.

Adam Crittenden writes in the MFA program at New Mexico State University and edits for Puerto Del Sol.

Proof of Concept

2010-12-03T09:51:00.007-06:00

We've been getting a few questions about the Trading Card Fiction Contest, the most frequent one being, "What do you mean by trading card fiction?"

The simple answer is, we mean very brief fiction, a micro-flash if you will. Something that comes in at less than 100 words. It doesn't have to be about trading cards, the story just needs to fit on the back of one. But sometimes the old adage -- A picture is worth 1,000 words -- holds true.

Entries are now open, click HERE for all the details.

Slip a Story into Our Stocking

2010-12-02T08:38:00.016-06:00

It's the holiday season and everyone here at Stymie is looking forward to the New Year. We have a lot of great announcements and fun things to share with you!

Soon we are going to begin featuring short fiction here on the Stymie website, in addition to our bi-annual issues. We want fiction and nonfiction pieces between 100 and 3,000 words -- the perfect size for a stocking stuffer!

You can read the full details and submit here!

Trading Card Fiction Contest

2010-12-01T15:26:00.000-06:00

Stymie is excited to announce a call for submissions to our 1st Annual Trading Card Fiction Contest.

Submissions should be 100 words or less and related to sport or games in some form or fashion. Each entry is $5, the winning selection will be awarded $150 and have their story printed as part of Stymie's Series One Trading Card Fiction set. Full guidelines are available via our Submissions Manager.

And the Nominees Are...

2010-11-30T12:51:00.004-06:00

Stymie is ecstatic to announce our six nominees for this year's Pushcart Prize.

The decision process was a difficult one and had we the option to nominate more pieces, we most certainly would have. This year's nominees are a special group -- as part of our re-launch year, it is their work and others like it that have helped shape the new look, feel and aesthetic of our journal. Without further ado, here are the nominees:

-Ben Loory, Fiction: "The Woman Who Skied on the Rooftops of Houses," Spring & Summer '10
-Cynthia Hawkins, Nonfiction: "Smaller in Person," Spring & Summer '10
-Sean Lovelace, Fiction: "John McEnroe Visits His Musical Side," Spring & Summer '10
-David Brennan, Nonfiction: "Birdcatcher," Autumn & Winter '10
-Tamara Shores, Nonfiction: "A Bird in the Hand," Autumn & Winter '10
-Jenifer Hemphill, Nonfiction: "Born to Climb," Autumn & Winter '10

The Social (Media) Experience

2010-11-23T14:01:00.002-06:00

Stymie is excited to welcome not one, but two new additions to our editorial team.

Margaret LaFleur and Shane Solar-Doherty are taking the helms of our growing social media presence with the goal of getting the good word out about the journal, maintaining the presence we've already developed and exploring new opportunities for Stymie. Welcome Margaret and Shane, we're ecstatic to have you on board.

Help Wanted

2010-11-18T16:15:00.003-06:00

Stymie is on the lookout for someone to help us with our various social media efforts, we'd like to make that someone our Social Media Editor (a nifty title lifted from the fine folks at The Missouri Review).

Duties would include managing/maintaining our online presence at places like: Facebook, Twitter, LitList, Fictionaut, Wikipedia, GoodReads while also exploring other opportunities to get the word out about Stymie. Some of these tasks are daily sort of items, some bi-annual, some intermittent as need be. That said, as we start to push out featured fiction, nonfiction and the like here on the website in addition to the bi-annual magazine this role is going to become very important, very quickly.

Our ideal candidate is someone with a love for words, preferably have a bit of editorial experience under their belt, a writer certainly wouldn't be frowned upon. Oh, and they need to have a firm grasp of the wonderful mysteries that are the internet. Interested? Shoot us an email at stymiemag AT gmail.com, with a subject line along the lines of: Social Media Editor.

It's Alive!

2010-11-15T11:28:00.001-06:00

The Autumn & Winter 2010 issue of Stymie is live and ready for reading, sharing, and general review.

The latest issue includes work from Kevin Wilson, Greg Gerke, Fred Venturini, Rachel Furey, Louie Crews, Joey Nicoletti, Tamara Shores and so many more. This is our biggest issue yet (and we're inclined to think maybe our best as well). Stymie AW '10 is available in our archives section or by clicking HERE. Enjoy (and let us know what you think)!

The Big Transition

2010-11-11T21:06:00.006-06:00

If you've been lurking around the the site over the course of the last week or so you might have noticed a few changes and the occasional wonky look and feel.

Our apologies for any inconvenience. We hope to have all of the website housekeeping completed over the next several days. Thanks for your patience and when all is said and done, we hope you like what we've done with the place (along with what we're planning to do).

Update: ESPN & Stymie Fiction Contest

2010-11-10T22:22:00.007-06:00

We've been inundated recently with questions about the short fiction contest we co-judged/sponsored/what-have-you with ESPN The Magazine, so here are some answers to the three questions that have come up most.

Q: Has the winning story been selected/published?
A: No winner has been selected as of today (11/10/10), that said the editorial team has made their recommendations to ESPN who in turn are wrapping up their own assessment of the submissions. The plan is for the winning story to appear in a January issue of ESPN and for the other finalists (and possibly a reprint of the winning story) to appear as a special feature in the Spring/Summer '11 issue of Stymie.

Q: How many stories were submitted to the contest?
A: A lot. The contest was open to both electronic and print submissions and writers from far-and-wide sent in work for consideration. It's been a difficult task to whittle the list down to a handful of finalists and we've been blown away by the submissions in general. So, thank you and kudos to everyone that submitted.

Q: Can you provide feedback for the stories submitted to the contest?
A: Unfortunately no. Writers seeking feedback on their writing are encouraged to check out online workshop/writing focused sites like Zoetrope, Fictionaut, or their local writers guild (or similar organization). Better yet, for a fee of next to nothing, one-on-one writing assistance and mentoring is available through the Dzance Creative Writing Sessions with personal tutelage from any number of award winning short story writers and novelists.

Keep an eye out here and at the other places we roam (Facebook and Twitter) for updates and an announcement regarding the finalists and the winning story.

Call for Submissions

2010-11-09T13:23:00.001-06:00

Stymie is excited to announce the upcoming release of our Autumn/Winter '10 issue featuring work from the likes of Kevin Wilson, Tamara Shores, Ben Nickol, Joey Nicoletti, Greg Gerke and many more.

Be sure to check back on November 15th for what might be our best issue yet.

With the release of the new issue we will also be opening back up to submissions for future issues including the Spring/Summer '11 baseball themed issue which is already stacking up to be something special. Along with accepting submissions for the bi-annual magazine Stymie will begin accepting short fiction and nonfiction for our website to be published on a weekly basis. Which means more Stymie, more great sports literature, and more opportunities to publish amazing writers.

Previous Updates

2010-10-31T22:19:00.002-05:00

The following is a history of news updates from the old site, prior to the redesign in November of 2010. The information below includes issue information, awards nominations, etc.

October '10: Stymie is delighted to nominate Ben Loory, Sean Lovelace and Cynthia Hawkins for their contributions this past year to Dzanc's 2011 Best of the Web.

September '10: The recommendations for the ESPN/Stymie Short Fiction Contest finalists have been made, more information to come.

August '10: Stymie Magazine is excited to announce the promotion of Julie Webb from Assistant Editor to Fiction Editor.

May '10: The Stymie Magazine & ESPN The Magazine fiction contest is live! Entries must be received before June 1, 2010. Full contest rules are available HERE.

April '10: Stymie welcomes Julie Webb (Assistant Editor) to the editorial team!

4/26: In our haste to make the new issue available to the world, we managed to bungle a few things: 1) the cover art "Gus" was created by David Colman (not Coleman as originally printed), 2) the artist's biography page referencing Mr. Colman and his work was missing. These items have been corrected and the edition now available on our archives page (both at Issuu and the downloadable PDF) reflect the issue as it was intended. Our sincere apologies.

4/23: The new issue of Stymie is live and ready for your reading pleasure (a full week early).

This just in, the May 3rd issue of ESPN The Magazine will feature remarks from our founding editor, excerpts from upcoming stories and an exciting fiction contest co-sponsored by ESPN and Stymie.

March '10: Effective 3-26-10, Stymie is now accepting submissions through the awesome SubMishMash submission manager. Our guidelines have been modified to reflect this step forward into new and unexplored (at least for us) frontiers -- that said, we're no longer accepting email submissions.

Stymie welcomes Sara Lippmann (Nonfiction & Contributing Editor), Amandine Abraham (Poetry Editor) and Casey Clabough (Contributing Editor) to the editorial team!

Effective 3-3-10, all poetry submissions submitted will be given first consideration for our 2011 issues (as opposed to the 2010 installments, which appear to have filled their available poetry slots for the time being, though this may change as we get closer to publication dates), further, this may have an impact on related response times. We are still considering fiction and creative nonfiction for the Autumn/Winter '10 issue.

February '10: Stymie is now reading submissions for our 2010 issues!

January '10: We've relaunched and tweaked our aesthetic. And while we still love golf related submissions, we are now considering any and all submissions that have to do with sport in general. See our updated guidelines for details.

For a sneak peek of the upcoming issue's cover (still a work-in-progress) -- click here.

On the awards front, Dawn Corrigan's "What Happened When We Put the Superhero Costumes On" from issue number two has been nominated for the 2010 Million Writers Award.

December '09: Changes are coming to the look and feel of Stymie, check us out in the new year for more details.

October '09: We are delighted to nominate Dawn Corrigan and Matt Ferrence and their contributions to issue number two, for the 2009 Pushcart Prize and Dzanc's 2010 Best of the Web.

July '09: Issue number two is published, available for reading by the masses.