What Do I Say About This Novel Except That I Really Loved It: Jamie Iredell on Nick Antosca's Fires

It is a relatively simple tale and that in itself can be the hallmark of a great novel. Deceptivity. For the book is deceptively simple. It seems that way: just a college kid, starts dating a girl, has some jealousy issues with girl and past boyfriend / weirdo, ends up as dramatic face-off with ex-boyfriend / weirdo in protagonist’s parents’ home amidst a forest fire. That protagonist is Jon Danfield — perfect suburban white American name for a perfect white suburban American boy — flushed from his Ivy League college campus to the sweltering and curling eaves of his burning suburb’s Maryland landscape. His girlfriend is Ruth, a bit of a sadist. And James Dearborn — again, very white suburban name — plays the part of weirdo / ex-boyfriend who happens to also be a somewhat acquaintance from Jon’s hometown, said hometown currently burning. The first half of the book deals with this little love triangle between Jon, Ruth, and James. Then James and Jon go to their hometown, and to say that all hell breaks loose isn’t hyperbole despite the cliché. Metapahorically, it’s like that. The mountain’s on fire. Smoke billows into the sky. The weather is appropriately hot. And authorities recently discovered a long history of child abduction and sexual abuse, perpetrated by the local high school football coach. Without spoiling too much, things get weirder than that even. This is an all-around good read and perhaps what I’m most blown away by is the fact that Antosca wrote the book when he was, like, three or four years old or something. That is hyperbole, but really, he was very young when he wrote this debut and it’s impressive.

Tango Sweet and Slow: Patrick Rosal's Boneshepherds

I jokingly refer to Patrick Rosal as my doppelgänger. I was attending the AWP Conference in Austin, TX back in 2006, when a woman walked up to me and praised me for my reading. It was clearly a great reading because she was absolutely thrilled to have spotted me idly walking up and down the book fair rows in the convention center. She kept tugging at my shirt like she was going to rip it off of me and she kept staring at my name tag. Then someone else congratulated me on a great reading. Then another person. And another. Of course, I wasn't the reader they were congratulating. Patrick Rosal had apparently given a reading for Persea Books and what I was being congratulated for was all his doing. This has happened to me many times since then.

One particularly memorable instance was when poet Jericho Brown asked me if I still danced. I had no idea what he was talking about until I recalled a video I had seen on YouTube of Patrick and Ross Gay dancing in sync during one of Patrick's visits to Bloomington, IN. Ross and Patrick kick and slide in unison, smiling, clapping, and laughing as the music plays.

Patrick Rosal is a mighty talented person -- I've seen him elicit oohs and ahhs from an attendant audience, and I've seen him make people cry during his readings. I've seen him play a guitar, play the piano, sing, and yes, dance.

Even though I'm often mistaken for Patrick, it's one of those mistakes I gratefully embrace because I think his poetic work is marvelous and such is the case for his third book and latest poetic offering, Boneshepherds (Persea Books 2011). What strikes me about this collection is how skillfully the poems navigate between despair and love, between violence and music, between loss and transcendence. Such an undertaking requires skill -- to reign in the terrible and the joyful. Boneshepherds then, performs a tango of the greatest magnitude. The book is a dance of conflicts -- where the dancer who leads and the dancer who follows embrace closely and move in graceful syncopation. Where the sum of the two create such a beautiful movement.

Indeed, Patrick Rosal is a deft dance partner, offering readers his arm as he leads. Boneshepherds is organized in five sections with poems bookending each section. Imagine each section to be an act and for each act, the poems collectively dance to an orchestration with notes similar to those of the other sections. The poems that reside outside of the sections are the musical dance numbers that serve as a transition into other sections. I understand that I'm describing the book clumsily here, but it's useful to think of this book as a compilation of five dramatic dance numbers with shorter dances serving as transitional elements. They're poems that put the reader in a position to move. The book's first poem, "Boneshepherds' Lament" offers a primer as to how Patrick moves between conflicts. The poem opens with a grim tale:

A boy who played Chopin for my parents one afternoon
led another boy to the woods and hacked him in the neck
forty-two times with a knife
hoping squirrels would run off with the skull.

In the next stanza, the poem leaps to a lesson during the speaker's childhood:

When the fat-fisted teachers of my childhood spoke,
they told us the soul's ushered finally
to some bright space beyond a grand entry
where anonymity is a kind of wealth.

And in the following stanza, the synthesis of the two ideas generates the speaker's action:

So I aspired to be nameless and eternal
until the day I got enough balls to tell
those nuns and brothers in baggy cassocks
to go to hell, and in doing so, I was really committing them
to perpetual memory, the inferno being a place
where one's name is never forgotten.

In such aspirations, such commitments, we the readers are the beneficiaries. The poems that seed the pages of Boneshepherds are filled with memories and observations of mayhem and violence, but also joyful remembrances. We follow Patrick's footsteps and are rewarded by where his dance has taken us across the ballroom floor. As the first poem, "Boneshepherd's Lament" establishes the steps and the rhythm of the book.  The interplay between the two is the space where the speaker's hope for transcendence occurs. In this particular poem, the speaker finally reconciles despair with art as he examines a painting by Goya and observes:

In the far background, on a hill, a single figure of ash
appears to raise both hands, the human pose of victory
and surrender, and maybe what Goya wants us to see
from this distance aren't arms flung up -- but wings: an angel
waiting to transport the grave bodies off the battlefield,
over the bright hill where he stands,
where no one will see them in good light.

What is recognizable in the poems that populate Boneshepherds is that each poem is part of a precarious encounter between the haunted past and a joyful present. Patrick's speaker is constantly attempting to determine which idea leads and which idea follows.

As I mentioned, there are moments of exquisite joy in the book. One of the most endearing images from Boneshepherds is found in the poem "Tamarind," where the speaker, feasting on tamarinds with his cousin, Joseph, plucks a rotten tamarind and:

. . . a mass of ants [had] hollowed out
the tamarind and left its dry, fragile husk
intact, until I crush it open and set loose a delicate
rivulet of dark red running up my trigger finger and thumb,
swarming now my wrist, splintering several swift paths
around my elbow, a thin sleeve of fire writhing
around my forearm. I stomp both feet hard
to shake the critters free. Joseph, by now, has lost his mind,
laughing, and I've lost all good sense too.

The joy of the image is deeply personal for me. I can imagine Patrick jumping up and down frantically trying to shake free of the ants. I can imagine his face, a mixture of fear and glee. Such an image fills me with gratitude for the poet's generosity and humility, allowing himself to be rendered in ridiculous terms. Yet he maintains his poetic stance as he writes ". . . Today, I'm grateful / to dance beneath a tamarind tree / beside a two-bit assassin instead of the woman I adore." Even in the presence of maddening and ecstatic joy, there's the understanding that both joy and loss are engaged in their own dance.

I've revisited Boneshepherds several times since receiving the book and I'm struck by its resonating pleasure. It is a richly attendant book -- it is present. In Patrick's musical world, the poems hold us in a spiritual, emotional, and visceral embrace. In such an embrace, we are consoled. We understand, as Patrick tells us in "A Tradition of Pianos," that "in order to make Great Art, . . . we all, / at one time or another, suffer terribly . . . , / so we have music. . . ." The music of Patrick Rosal's Boneshepherds moves us to dance. Hold the poems close to your chest. Close the space between you and his words. Allow the words to move you across the floor. You'll be thrilled with where they take you.

My Love Affair with The Great Gatsby

I tell my students, "Never read without a pen or pencil in your hand." They look at me like I'm crazy, a destroyer of books, tagging illegible praise from cover to cover. The truth is, the notes I have written in my books over the past twenty years have become sort of the yarn of my life, a spooling reminder of where I was at that time, and how much I liked being in that place.

So imagine my surprise when I opened my battered copy of The Great Gatsby, only to find it was blank. No love letters adorning its margins, no shaky thin lines sprawling out their arms under a witty turn of phrase. Nothing. Blank. Just the prose F. Scott Fitzgerald intended.

Then I remembered. The last time I read The Great Gatsby, I was twenty-two years old. I was in an unhealthy and unhappy relationship and I was stuck in a job that I absolutely despised, grinding myself down to a nub just to help the rich get richer. So what did that have to do with Gatsby? I'm not sure. Maybe I was jealous, envious of the way Jay Gatsby seemed to be so solo in this world, gliding through his adventures with only the memory of a girl he loved locked away in his mind. Maybe it was Fitzgerald's prose, maybe it ignited something inside of me: my desire to write, to string brilliant words together to create sentences that students everywhere will one day underline. I had put that dream on hold, shoved it deep down inside of myself, and for what? To pay electric bills on time?

Whatever the reason, when I revisited The Great Gatsby last month, twelve years after I had read it last, I left the pages of what some call "The Great American Novel", stained with the ink of a thousand pens. Blanketed in admiration. But why now? What has changed? Well, I'm in a better place, for one. I'm happily married, teaching literature to college students, and working on a book of my own. Also, I've had some formal training: the letters M.F.A. stamped on parchment to declare me fit to interpret these sorts of things. Or, maybe, just maybe, I've grown up a bit. I see the characters in the story as symbols, as images, as archetypes of society. The way, I believe, Fitzgerald intended.

The Great Gatsby is many things to me now, as a mother in my mid-thirties. It is a social commentary, a story about the haves (the Buchanans) and the have nots (the Wilsons, and even Gatsby himself). Nick Carraway and I both share an "unaffected scorn" for the uber rich, and I have a deep appreciation for the  way he plucks at Tom Buchanan:

"[Tom was one] of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax."

"'Tom's getting very profound,' said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. 'He reads deep books with long words in them. What was the word we — "

It is also a book of empowerment, a reaffirmation of the female influence. While the men in the story, Nick included, banter back and forth over the decisions of which they are seemingly in control, the person who holds all of the power is Daisy. Tom and Gatsby fight over her, Nick fights for her, and Jordan fights with her. Daisy is a soft light to which every man as moth flocks. And Fitzgerald paints her with the most beautiful language:

"It (Daisy's) was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again."

But I think what The Great Gatsby is at its core, what it is meant to be, is a great love story. It's a sweet, simple song about a boy who loves a girl, and what he will do to win her heart. He will go to war, travel the world, amass a fortune through whatever means possible, and risk losing it all, just for a glimpse of her.

And when I read that infamous last line —

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

— I can't help but remember that twenty-two year old version of myself, lying in a different place, in a different life, reading this same book, and feeling so scared of what would happen if I chased down my dreams.

Fitzgerald, who was ahead of his time in so many ways, was right again with this timeless image. We are constantly battling that from which we are born, and therein lies Fitzgerald's wisdom. He leaves us with a message that Gatsby himself would have been better for knowing:  We would do well to never forget where we came from, to never forget who we are, and to never forget that which makes each of us great. And the answer, the thing that exudes greatness, is seldom counted in dollars and cents.

A Conversation with Dorothea Lasky

When we asked Dorothea Lasky for five books that were similar to Black Life, her second collection of poetry from Wave Books, she immediately mentioned the late, great Biggie Smalls. As a native New Yorker and obsessive hip-hop fan, I felt like I needed to get to the bottom of this. I sat down with Dottie for a couple of minutes and asked her a couple questions about the black Frank White.

* * *

Mark Cugini: First and foremost, I think it’s worth mentioning that you said if someone liked Black Life, they’d probably like Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death. I couldn’t agree more, but I’m sort of curious — how do you think they’re similar?

Dorothea Lasky: I would say the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die is more like Black Lifethan Life After Death. Life After Death, for me, is more like my next book, Thunderbird. Nevertheless, Black Life is indebted to Biggie’s album because in both the speaker is a “Born sinner, the opposite of a winner.” And also, in both, the speakers give you the sense (I hope) that it was not a choice to be so, but more a condition thrust upon them by life itself. On a formal level, I am interested in how Biggie folds all kinds of language and voices (some so not his own that they can’t help but become so) into short, clipping lines. They have a casual air, but of course, they couldn’t be farther from casual if they tried. The essence of coolness.

MC: Oh, ok, that makes a lot more sense — especially the “born sinner” line. Not to get too liberal-arts-school here, but Biggie was raised by a single mother in a low-income neighborhood that was overrun with gang violence and drug use. I do think it’s obvious that the speaker in Black Life was thrust into situations where she lacked control, but those are instances of a different nature: it seems as if she’s addressing interpersonal relationships instead of class issues. If that’s the case, how does it end up that both speakers end up with such swagger? Does it maybe have something to do with owning their personal tragedies?

DL: Thanks for saying that about swagger! What an important word for what we are talking about. Of course, content and the socioeconomic background of poets affect how they craft their personae and what those voices say. I do think, however, that class issues and interpersonal ones are inextricable. Class is rife with everything we do and vice versa. Biggie, to me, is like any poet who takes pieces of life and weaves it into his work. He includes the people he meets and how these people affect him and what they say. I think this is where swagger comes from. It is the craft, the skill, the flow, that connects all of us as poets. The ability to take the muck of the everyday and make it beautiful.

MC: I completely share that sentiment about Biggie, and I think you’re absolutely right. Let’s talk a little bit about where your swagger is coming from: one of the threads that runs through Black Life is the deteriorating (mental?) health of the narrator’s father. Is this something that you had to were pulling from your own experiences? Do you think that makes your swagger similar or different to Biggie’s, and in which ways?

DL: A lot of the experiences in Black Life are from my own personal experience and I think this is like Biggie. But isn’t that true for all poetry? Or all writing and all art? Or all thought? Science is a set of ideas made by people. What poem isn’t at least in part based on the poet’s personal experience, even when we know that I in a poem is not always the I of the poet? I as a person haven’t done everything in the exact way the I in my poems does things, but he/she/it still comes from me. The mask is there on the face of the poet with the reading of the poem, but the eye come through however disfigured and distant the costume.  I don’t know, just yesterday I visited a friend’s poetry class and one of the wonderful students there asked if I ever felt embarrassed by the personal details I put in my poems. I told her that I wasn’t embarrassed, because for the most part there was a lot of mediation and craft there — a lot of control. Maybe the control has to do with swagger. To feel the pain or joy and hold it transfixed. To transfix a reader with the dead emotion, somehow alive and always alive with the listening/reading. That’s how I feel when I listen to Biggie. When I hear his voice, I know he is in some way still alive. Do you think this has to do with swagger, too?

MC: Oh, totally. It’s funny, I was listening to “Things Done Changed” (my favorite “first-song-on-an-album” in hip-hop history) and the last line of that song is “my momma’s got cancer on her breast / don’t ask me why I’m motherfucking stressed.” I always found that to be such a beautiful deviation: rappers are supposed to be cocky and full of bravado, yet here’s this incredible admission of weakness and self-consciousness. Do you think that’s the definitive difference between rappers and poets — that rappers are supposed to control this concept of “swagger,” while poets are taught to operate within their self-consciousness?

DL: That is probably my favorite Biggie line ever. That and “Girls used to diss me / Now they write letters ’cause they miss me.” The way he wraps the rhyme around to give us something so sweet and sad. I think that the admission of weakness and self-consciousness amidst swagger is what makes rappers and poets the same. There might be some places where we are taught to operate differently, but when we are writing poems, we operate language for exactly the same purpose. And I think that whatever places there are that make us feel as if we are not doing the same thing should be obliterated.

MC: If Black Life is Ready to Die and your next book is Life After Death, does that mean Puff Daddy is going to take all the poems you’ve cut and make a Reborn album? If so, is there anything I can do to prevent that from happening?

DL: If there is anything we can do to *make* this happen, then I would be very happy. He is a saint that Puffy.

Carry-on Baggage: A Review of Mel Bosworth's Freight

Freight I Found:

If you hang around for long enough and don't destroy yourself properly with gallons of gin or various other poisons or inhalants, you get lucky and come across those good bits that Hansel and Gretel left behind in that scary forest. A few weeks ago on my run through the woods I found a bicycle. It was abused, wounded, and abandoned there in the soil, wet and dirty and rusty (as all found things seem to be), screaming to be taken and nursed back. Shortly after that, I found Mel Bosworth's novel Freight delivered to my door. It was also just waiting there screaming to be taken, but on my porch, crisp and clean, and not at all rusty or abused; wrapped up nicely with a personalized bow. And so I took it.

Freight I Ate:

I devoured Mel Bosworth's Freight quickly (read it in one day), but not without digesting it properly. It sounds like a contradiction of terms, but believe me . . . it settled down just right in one session. I ate Freight without adding any salt or pepper or chili flakes or Tabasco. Because it didn't need any of that. It was perfect as it was served. I ate it alongside a bottle of red wine. And then alongside another bottle of wine. So it could break down properly, you see.

Freight is the elegant, sensitive story of a man who carries things with him. Within him. Around him. And sometimes even above him. Freight is the story of every man. Or . . . Everyman. Sometimes he discards things because the burden gets too heavy or because it sickens him, and sometimes he takes on too much. But he really doesn't discard all of anything. Bits of things remain for him to haul along. Things. You know these things well. They're life. Your life.

The construction of Freight is pretty interesting; it’s crafted as an homage to Edward Packard’s series of Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, in which the reader assumes the role of the protagonist and makes choices that determine the main character’s actions and the plot outcome. It only hints at Packard’s concept, however, as the plot doesn’t majorly deviate from its course, despite the cross-referencing and jumping to ideas either foreshadowed or recounted. Being the unmotivated, indolent swine that I am, I chose to not pick my own adventure, and just trusted Mel to guide me through it. For me, the novel settles to a logical construction just fine without the Packard-like literary device.  But that isn’t to say others won’t enjoy re-reading the book in different ways, jumping forward through time, and experiencing the story in a different order. Y’all drink coffee or tea; I drink benzene.

Freight I Destroyed (epilogue):

I did no such thing. Well . . . at least not Mel Bosworth’s Freight; for the book now resides quietly and comfortably on my shelf in my living room, just on top of Louis Armstrong's biography. I don't fear for its safety, though. Satchmo can carry that burden quite well.  Sometimes, but  not too often, it is a Wonderful World.

An Honest and Good Thing

Lately, I have begun teaching creative writing at Lesley University in the Writing for Young People genre — the term MFA programs seem to use to denote not actual genres, like mystery, romance, fantasy, but the basic categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry. WFYP consists of students writing for children to young adult; in other words, picture books through novels. Lesley’s is a low-residency MFA program, with a nine-day residency on campus kicking off each semester, the remainder of which is comprised of a series of manuscript submissions and critical responses conducted through email.

Now, I’ve written a lot of books for children and young adults; a career writer, I suppose I’d call myself. Although both my parents were teachers, I never thought about teaching; I was a professional. But I did always love the idea of forming one’s professional knowledge into a shape, something that could be summarized, taught, and learned. So when the opportunity came along, I took it. Because Lesley’s program is low residency, essentially requiring a short stint on campus twice a year, it’s really the only way I could have dipped my toes into the world of teaching. I have since jumped in with both feet.

The collection of hundreds of students and dozens of faculty for a week and a half twice a year has any number of real benefits; the creative energy of the residency is palpable, not least for me and the other faculty. The discussions are pointed and unique: you simply don’t talk this way at home. There are no dishwashers, pets, children, lawn mowers, or brooms in sight. There are books. Lots of books. Lots of paper. Lots of enthusiasm. Lots of imagination. Lots of workshops and seminars and readings and performances, and lots of chat with peers across the genres. Overall, there’s a sense that trying to understand the world creatively is an honest and good thing.

One aspect of it that I’m finding most congenial is the relative ease of dealing with longer work, that is: manuscripts above the usual 20-30 page limit. Because each faculty member’s load consists of anywhere from two to five students per semester, the teacher (or mentor) can devote many hours to the manuscript, covering not only those things one would deal with on a short work, but overall elements like theme, structure, story arc, and character development. Most YA students are writing novels, so this is perfect.

Certainly not every writer needs a graduate program. Some of my favorite writers — Capote, Faulkner, Hemingway, Cheever — never attended college, or if they did, didn’t stick around for the degree. It sure didn’t hurt them. On the other hand, Flannery O’Connor attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, a fact I still have trouble getting my head around.

Recently, a number of folks, both from within and without the academy, have debated the necessity of the MFA program in any genre. I like such argumentation and think it only strengthens the programs. For some writers, programs like these shape their writing lives in ways too numerous to deny. Who dares criticize another person’s intense two- or three-year fierce concentration on the basic form of human expression? To say nothing of learning one’s language in a more profound way than one gets anywhere else? Some people, and I suppose I’m one of them, live and die with the word. You can view MFA programs as a waste of time and money, and for some they undoubtedly are; but for others they are nothing less than an affirmation of the life they have chosen. Of course, the debate will continue, but what’s wrong with that?

And I Hope It Rains Forever

A phrase without context, one I've written a thousand times and will write thousands more, in every language I know, backwards, forwards, inside out. It's been in me for years and I've chased after it, even built a novel around it just so I could see it, feel it, be it. But it's still here, elusive.

i am the moon tonight

this is the last night in my body

there are better worlds than this

 Words. Phrases that haunt me and I can't place them. They may be mine, but likely they're not, though they now are. They possess me and so I must push back, bend them to me, consume and integrate them, find a whole through the neverness. And then there's the phrase I know I stole but has become so integral to me that it's neurologically deep.

i remember you

There are so many things I should be doing today, like preparing to leave this country I've called home for the last year [ten more days?], packing my life into a suitcase again. 90,000 words into editing/rewriting a novel staring at me, challenging, singing, screaming, Finish me.

Instead I've spent the day watching cartoons -- The Boondocks -- looping this and this and this, wandering the internet, where awesome things like this exist. It's been one of those days: scattered, incoherent, languid. Just me and my laptop, the mountains past my window, the rainbow of leaves, the skeletal trees. And pizza. I'll miss these bizarre Korean pizzas.

It makes me restless, knowing there are so many things to be done, like finishing the novel, writing about my travels for my friend's site, writing about ten e-mails, figuring out how to get to the national pension office, finding a place to sleep in Tokyo, but, instead, I'm living on cartoons, dropping pizza on my keyboard [which is, apparently, not terribly easy to clean], and thinking about images.

The problem of publication, even just the howevermany stories I have floating out there, is that some of my friends want to know more, and I find that awkward. But people want to know where your ideas come from, what drives you, what compels and feeds this disease. I know I do. When I read or see or hear the sublime, the desire to know grabs me. Where did this world come from? How did she ever think to use language this way? What makes a sentence into a character, a misheard song lyric into a novel?

This is where ideas come from for me: Images, visions, more than words or sounds. It's the image that floods and then the words are just the way I translate because, despite all my best efforts and years of trying, I just never was very good with my hands, drawing or painting or molding, and my mother never bought me a camera like I always wanted, so I rely on a medium of communication I find crippling, because words are made to fail. But, yeah, images. That's what today's about and what, I think, has caused me to do nothing that I'm meant to be doing, spending the day lying down, emptying myself into the air, flooded by this and this and an epicene singing her stories over a man caught forever dreaming. And it leads me to comic books or graphic novels, whichever the preferred term is, and how I'm trying to get two underway, but, because of my artistic limitations, I'm collaborating with two of my friends who will make the images, which I'll respond textually to, which is, apparently, backwards, but it's the way that makes sense to me.

I've never been one to collaborate as I'm kind of artistically controlling and probably never would've considered it, but my sister asked me to write a book for her soon to be born son, her first, my godson. I thought it would be better as a picture book and then the world sort of opened up and I realised I could do that all the time, if only I had someone to produce the images.

And then Angie Spoto's post last month solidified it for me, made it all shine a bit more, turn from an idea to a compulsion, showed me this medium I've [accidentally] largely ignored my whole life really has a unique and special quality to it. The way text and images not only exist together but the way they interact and affect one another keeps turning over and over in my head, opening possibilities that didn't exist here before. And so I contacted two of my friends about joining me on a collaborative book project.

Another problem with collaboration, however, is that one must wait.

But then I came across the work of Natsumi Hayashi, The Yowayowa Camera Woman and everything kind of clicked. All these images, the nebulae, the floating woman, and then they tied to these words I hold within me and it's all I can think about, how this could be a way for me to make the collaborative novel I want to make, driven by the language of visuals, housed by the language of english. And so I'll take what exists millions of lightyears away, the peculiar self-portraits of a japanese woman, and the ghosts of me to make something, maybe, worth holding.