Volume 44, Issue 4
FRONT COVER: Cathy Osman
(in order from top to bottom) TRIANGLE; BEACH; NIGHT, 2003
OIL, MYLAR, GRAPHITE
GIVEN THE HIGH volume of submissions we receive at MR, you might suppose that we’d be cynical about the current state of writing. On the contrary, what’s frightening is how well most of it reads as it washes over the transom. Only about 15% of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry can be rejected instantly. What makes it difficult to tell the good from the excellent is that in each genre there is a prevalent style-of-the-moment that many have mastered. This style, defined broadly to allow for consider able variety, may well be the vehicle for something marvelous, or it may just sound that way. Conversely, most of the ones rejected off the top go down for lack of that basic mastery.
Rarest of all is the piece that disregards fashion and finds its own way—always a dangerous path. And so Thomas Glave lit up a rainy Sunday of rejecting when he came to the top of the pile, first with “These Blocks, Not Square,” which he subtitles “Five Movements” because here, contra the muted rhetoric of these times, is musical prose. Orthodoxy says that a beautiful surface may be an impediment to clarity, and a throwback to discredited lyricism. What if the wheel came round again, so the sounds of Woolf or Proust or Faulkner seemed dazzling, but dazzlingly clear? So we wondered about Thomas Glave when he first came to these pages nine volumes ago. Now we stop wondering.
And then we found “On the Difficulty of Confiding, With Complete Love and Trust, in Some Heterosexual ‘Friends.'” Here Glave’s music works in the service of ideas just as unconventional as his prose. For those who believe that the success of gay politics is complete, that the now-easy reference to a subject once unspeakable is enough, Glave’s essay shows how much remains to be changed, even and especially now. The emotional power of the prose may give pain, but pain, beauty, and possibility together are the stuff of prophecy. And in prophecy’s rare moments, what fool doesn’t listen?
David Lenson
for the editors
Table of Contents
These Blocks, Not Square, Non-Fiction by Thomas Glave
On the Difficulty of Confiding, with Complete Love and Trust, in Some Heterosexual “Friends”, Non-Fiction by Thomas Glave
Become Becoming; Earth Unsung, Poetry by Li-Young Lee
Interview with Li-Young Lee, Non-Fiction by Dianne Bilyak
Rudy, Poetry by Rane Arroyo
The Gracious Daughter and the Man by the River, Poetry by Colette Inez
We Are the Same People, Fiction by Micah Perks
Excavation of the John Alden House, Poetry by David Roderick
Stalking the Bumblebee: An Exploration of “Cruelty” in Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, Non-Fiction by Mike Dockins
Buffalo Boy, Fiction by James Janko
I Brake For Moose, Fiction by Geeta Kothari
Kitsch and the Art of Wildlife Painting, Non-Fiction by Glen Retief
Abandoned House Near Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Poetry by Mary Quade
Holding Cells, Fiction by Martha Marinara Hair Rules, Non-Fiction by Rebecca Emlinger Roberts
The Patriarch, Poetry by Rynn Williams
Drinks at Sonia Orwell’s, Non-Fiction by Gerald Williams
Diana Makes the Rounds, Non-Fiction by Zachary Levin
Ingmar Bergman’s Maria Stuart: A Jungian Reading, Non-Fiction by Richard Trousdell
Contributors
Rane Arroyo‘s fourth book of poetry is Home Movies of Narcissus (University of Arizona Press). After years of traveling, he has returned to his native Midwest. “Rudy” is from the manuscript-in-progress, Manfred Must Mambo.
Diane Bilyak lives and works part-time in New Haven. She would like to thank Li- Young for his graciousness and Ellen Watson for her encouragement through this process. This past summer she held the post of-Literary Programming Director for the Arts and Literature Laboratory (ALL) in New Haven. This fall, as a student in the Religion and Arts Program at Yale Divinity School, she has begun to study poetry and mysticism, and continues writing.
Mike Dockins is a native of New York but lives now in Atlanta. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is a founding editor of Redactions. His poems have appeared in the Seattle Review, Crazyhorse, the Cream City Review, and Paragraph, among others. He is also a singer-songwritier working on a third album with his band CLOP.
Thomas Glave is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories (City Lights, 2000). A Callaloo book review editor, he is an assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at SUNY-Binghamton. His work has most recently appeared in the Kenyon Review, Callaloo, and Black Renaissance.
Colette Inez‘s latest collection of poems is Clemency (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998). A book about her work, The Way Home, Poetry of Colette Inez (Word Press), is due to see print late this year. Inez teaches poetry in the undergraduate School of the Arts at Columbia University.
James Janko was a medic in the Vietnam War. His fiction has appeared in The Sun, Eureka Literary Magazine, Maryland Review, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and received an award from the Illinois Arts Council in 2001. “Buffalo Boy” is the first chapter of a novel, Beasts and Birds, forthcoming from Curbstone Press in the spring of 2005. He lives with his wife, Uong Chanpidor, in San Francisco, CA, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Geeta Kothari lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is the recipient of a 2003 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Kothari’s nonfiction and fiction have appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Toronto South Asian Review, Rampike, and Best American Essays 2000.
Li-Young Lee‘s poetry collections are Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001); The City in Which I Love You (1991), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. He has also published a memoir entided The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995). He is the recipient of many literary awards, most recently The Lannon Foundation Award. He lives with his wife and two sons in Chicago.
Zachary Levin‘s articles have been included in the anthologies Before and After: Stories From New York (Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood Books, 2002) and Jews of Brooklyn (Brandeis University Press, 2002). He is a reader/editor for the Web site, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. Along with a stint as a deckhand on a New York Harbor garbage tug he has worked variously as a high school English teacher, a tree worker, and a construction worker. He lives in New York City.
Martha Marinara lives in Orlando, Florida, with her adopted daughter, Nikki, and their two cats, Alice and Oliver. She earned an MA. in Creative Writing from Southern Connecticut State University and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from Lehigh University. She teaches writing and directs the Composition Program at the University of Central Florida. Her poetry and fiction have appeared recently in Xavier Review, FEMSPEC, Estuary, Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, and Awakenings Review and has won the 1999 Central Florida United Arts Award for Poetry.
Cathy Osman received her B.A., M.A., from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Amherst, MA, and teaches Fine Arts at Marlboro College, in Vermont.
Micah Perks is the author of a novel, We Are Gathered Here, and a memoir, Pagan Time. She’s published short stories in many literary quarterlies and is at work on another novel. She lives and teaches in Santa Cruz, CA.
Mary Quade‘s collection, Guide to Native Beasts, won the 2003 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition. She lives in rural northeastern Ohio.
Glen Retief grew up in Skukuza, South Africa, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at Florida State University. His fiction and essays have appeared in magazines and journals in both the United States and South Africa.
Rebecca Emlinger Roberts is a visual artist and writer who has had work published in various journals and anthologies, including the Georgia Review, Controlled Burn, and Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs from Michigan. This is her second appearance in the Massachusetts Review.
David Roderick is a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His work is appearing or forth coming in Crazyhorse, New England Review, Ontario Review, and Verse.
Richard Trousdell is University of Massachusetts at Amherst Professor Emeritus of Theater and a Jungian Psychotherapist in private practice in Amherst. He is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama where he was RCA NBC Fellow, and he is currently a Diploma Candidate at the OG. Jung Institute Boston. His essays have appeared in Theater Topics, The Drama Review, the Massachusetts Review, and New Theater Vistas (Studies in Modern Drama, vol. 7).
Gerald Williams served as Senior Editor of Olympia Press, Paris, during its final five years. He also served as liason editor at Olympia Press, New York City and Amsterdam, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Drinks at Sonia Orwell’s” is an excerpt from his book-in-progress, Tending Perdition’s Flame. He is a freelance translator of German, Dutch, and French at Harry B. Abrams, Publisher.
Ryan Williams‘ poems have appeared in the Nation, Field, Puerto del Sol, North American Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other magazines. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a scholarship from Bread LoafWriters’ Conference, and has been awarded residencies from the Ragdale Foundation and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She lives in Manhattan.
