A Deep Private Ocean: A Review of Joseph Riippi's Because

I want to fly to LaGuardia. From there, I want to ride a dirty bus and an empty subway train to Brooklyn and pace the wet streets glossed with streetlight until I find where Joseph Riippi lives. When I find him, I want to buy him a drink. After that, I want to punch him, and then buy him another drink. Then, before I leave, I want to become his friend. Let me explain.

Joseph Riippi’s Because is a litany of his personal desires, a catalog of his wants, and because of that, it’s deep, beautiful, disorienting. The cover says it’s a novel, but I’m not buying that. It is more of a long prayer, a meditation, a love letter to life, perhaps a cathartic self-examination or the schematic diagram of what it means to be a human being. You might even call it bipolar-memoire; the comparative overlay of a life half-lived with the life not yet lived but hoped for. Riippi didn’t write this book as much as he must have unzipped himself from chin to navel and bled it out:

I want my great-great-grandchildren to know who I was. I want them to read this. I want them to know about the wife I loved, the places I lived, the things I did. I want them to know that I had a full head of hair and that baldness does not run on my side of the family. I want them to know they should watch themselves with alcohol, because their blood was born with a craving. I want them to know they should watch themselves around knives. I want them to know how I died, if it will help them.

There is reminiscent sadness, certainly, but there is also plenty of warm hope and genuine optimism:

I want us to swim together until we’re too tired to float, and then paddle exhaustedly back to our front door. I want us to spend every weekend like this. I want us to spend our lives like this. I want us to always call out to one another. I want us to relive this over and over throughout the week. I want our children to call us on weekends and ask, How was your morning surf? as we sip our tea and espresso, dripping and exhausted in our kitchen, at our island, smelling of salt and licking our lips and smiling.

I found the read a bit hard at times, but always worthwhile. Since Riippi writes in stream-of-consciousness mode, his thoughts always swirling and eddying, doubling back upon themselves, a reader must do without the usual reference points. It’s the equivalent of being dropped in open waters. There are plenty of inspiring sights, night skies packed with stars, expansive yet dizzying as well. The endless waves of one man’s thoughts. Treading water in the middle of the Riippic Ocean. It’s rare to see such intimacy, such humanity exposed. I can say, without spoiling anything for future readers, is that he confesses deeply. Riippi writes, more than once, his expectation:

I want you to understand why I am writing this. I want you to listen to me.

And I feel like I do know him now, which is why I want to fly to New York City and find him and buy him a drink, to thank him for writing this book. I want to punch him because he wrote the book I should have written, a book that we all should write for ourselves at the coming of middle-age, when it’s time for us to reach some semblance of peace with the first half of a lifetime lived for better or worse, but more importantly, to re-evaluate our hopes for the dwindling road left to travel. I wouldn’t punch him that hard, by the way.

And then I’d buy him another drink, to apologize for my bit of writerish jealousy. And then, before I left Brooklyn, I’d make sure I was friends with Joseph Riippi. Because after you have read this book and toured the chambers of the guy’s heart, you really have no other choice.

Where Are the Brewers Buried?

Table Ale. Family Beer. Strong Ale. Extra Strong Ale. Porter. Brown Stout. Lager Beer. Bock. Maerzen. Pilzner. Kölsch. What do all of these beers have in common? They’re all brewed or have been brewed in Washington, D.C.

Not a beer fan? More a fan of Aquavit? A teetotaler eh? How about a good narrative thread then?

Picture 23-year-old Catherine Dentz, nee Winkler, who in 1874 helped her husband open and run the Dentz brewery. She was likely Washington D.C.’s first female brewery operator and operate she did.

It had been less than a decade since the end of the Civil War and the business of lager beer was booming. Two years after the opening of the Dentz brewery, Catherine became a widow. If helping her husband run a successful Georgetown brewery was hard work imagine doing it solo, with three young mouths to feed, and still another year before the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was founded.

What was a 25-year-old to do? Get busy. At this time, it was not uncommon for women to enter into the saloon business but to be a brewery operator was something unique for a woman at this time (it arguably still is today though thankfully that’s changing). Also making Catherine stand out was her status as an independent person, one competent enough to own a liquor retail license. But in the words of the Notorious B.I.G., mo’ money, mo’ problems.

In 1881 she was brought to court for operating an unlicensed bar, the case was dismissed. Later that year she was fined over $100 for selling liquor on Sunday. Not even 10 days later she was in court again, accused of stealing 5 kegs from the George Juenemann Brewery, a much larger lager producer. A year later she was back in the system for selling liquor by the glass (her license allowed her to sell packaged liquor but not by the glass).

In that same year, 1882, she was the victim of a sting operation where two African American men were sent into her establishment to each order a pint of beer. That’s when special license agent Henry Raff and his goons arrived on the scene. They entered Catherine’s saloon to be the harbingers of hairy news and when she saw the goon squad she tried to snatch the pints back. She did in fact grab one of the pints and was able to give one of her unwelcomed guests a beer shower. Hysteria ensued but miraculously no one was injured. The next year she was fined $5 for selling cigars on a Sunday.

The story of Catherine Dentz continues in Capital Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in Washington D.C. Author Garrett Peck sets out to accomplish a task unachieved in the history of DC Beer: to comprehensively cover Washington’s brewing history. Typically books with this aim turn into a dull historical narrative, recounting, or regurgitation. Peck’s book is more along the lines, and informs, the colorful narrative you’ve just read.

The book covers an immense span of time in 10 chapters. The chapters are as follows: Beer Beginnings, The Germans Are Coming! The Germans Are Coming!, Port City Suds, Christian Heurich: Washington’s Leading Brewer, The Beer War, An Open-Air City: Beer Gardens and Tied-House Saloons, The Road to Prohibition, The Fizz Falls Flat, Where Are the Brewers Buried? And finally, The Craft Revival. The book is littered with great finds from Peck’s deep archival dives, some appear in black and white but there is also a beautiful color spread that will appeal to all those with a profound love of aesthetics, archives, and history.

Peck uncovers many firsts in his book and notes, “It may come as a surprise and a disappointment to proud Washingtonians, but the first brewery in the district was not in the City of Washington, but rather across the river in Alexandria. In fact, it opened even before the American Revolution.”

As if the history wasn’t enough, you’ll learn about why Alexandria County was called “The Monte Carlo of Virginia.” You’ll learn about the casinos and brothels that existed not far from the Virginia breweries that were right over the river from the Capital. As gambling was banned in the district it made its way over the bridge to Arlington, then Alexandria County, only a few miles from the Dentz brewery.

Today, it is easier to find great beer in America’s capital then it has ever been. But due to the transient nature of the residents of Washington, most are unfamiliar with the rich brewing past that the city possesses. What Peck has done in Capital Beer is cover both Washington and DC. He chronicles the drinking habits of those who worked on Capitol Hill and those that worked down at the docks.

Peck finds many titillating sources. One stand out is a 1927 article, “Happy Days” from American Mercury. He quotes journalist Raymond Clapper who wrote about Pennsylvania Avenue during Prohibition. “It was an Appian Way of Bacchus, with forty-seven bars to its mile. Probably nowhere in America were there such superb drinking facilities in equally compact form.”

In olden times, D.C. was called “the Sodom of Suds” by teetotalers who felt beer was the work of the devil. More recently D.C. has been dubbed “Cologne by the Potomac” for the ubiquitous availability of a respectable Kölsch, a beer indigenous to Cologne, Germany.

What Peck does in Capital Beer is draw connections between the brewers of yore and those who are making beer in the District today. It’s not an easy task, one which requires many hours spent in archives and time pounding the pavement to track down the sites of breweries—some of which vanished a century (or more!) ago. The 19th century narratives, like the story of Catherine Denz, provide a beautiful backdrop to the stories of the 21st century and the women who are currently kicking ass in the land of DC beer. Peck profiles several women in brewing, notably Kristi Mathews Griner, Director of Brewing Operations at Capitol City Brewing Company.

Peck seizes on important moments in history and livens them with 21st century insight. Take fore example the Burning of Washington in 1814 “One might think that a conquering army would seize barrels of beer as a prize of war, but the British weren’t looters and were remarkably disciplined. After defeating the American militia at Bladensburg, the British occupied the city and torched only the public buildings. It may well be that the breweries escaped damage or looting during the Burning of Washington.”

This kind of historical reimagining is sure to please both lager-lover and teetotaler alike.

Vinton Rafe McCabe's Death in Venice, California

Retelling a classic novel is about fashioning the story in a way that holds true to the original, but that adds a new spin on it. Death in Venice, California by Vinton Rafe McCabe did just that. Disclosure: I received a copy of it for review from the publisher.

I’ve observed three perspectives a reader might come from when reading a retelling such as this: blind ignorance, a depth of understanding, or a vague remembrance.

In my case, I came from two of these perspectives. I didn’t remember reading Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (first published in 1912). I wanted to make sure I knew what I was reading, if, in fact it was a modern retelling of a well-known literary story. I decided to check my Goodreads account. Lo and behold, it was there. I had read it in 2011 for my mini book group (MBG por vida) where we read only novellas. I wondered why I hadn’t remembered it. After checking the book out from the library I decided to flip to the latter half of the book. Ah! I did remember this book. What I remembered most about it was a sort of comic view of the narrator hiding under a towel with a hat on his head so he could spy on a beautiful young man while on the beach.

In fact, I remembered this vividly because my book club, from time to time, will dress up as characters from the novellas we are reading. One of the members brought a beach towel and a hat to illustrate how the narrator might have looked. McCabe’s version of the story used similar tactics of comic relief to offset the overall story of the destruction of desire and obsession.

One of the more comical parts of McCabe’s story was when the main character, Jameson Frame, reluctantly goes along with getting a tattoo: “Frame looked down at his leg, expecting to sees a massive wound. Instead, he saw what looked like a short line, as if a child with a pen had drawn on his skin.” He isn’t able to withstand the pain so instead of getting the word “vinsible” he gets the letter ‘V’ which he says stands for Venice so he can remember his trip in the future. I couldn’t imagine Aschenbach, Mann’s original main character, getting such a tattoo, and this gave me a fuller perspective on the story while making me feel in on the joke. Though, it is unnecessary for one to have read the original to understand McCabe’s novel.

This present-day telling in a stream of consciousness-style narrative pulled me in much quicker than Mann’s original. I enjoyed McCabe’s modern day take on a not so modern narrator. Frame is a writer who buys his first laptop on vacation and has had some success as a poet. His well-known book of poetry gets him noticed on the airplane on his way to his destination, and again in the hotel where he is staying. Frame is a proper middle-aged man who likes order and routine. A vacation to Venice Beach disrupts that and opens up a whole new world to him. I was genuinely interested in Frame’s purported aimless vacationing and was happy to go along for the ride.

Because of this attitude he meets some interesting people. Vera and Elsa become his closest companions and, thinking they know what is best for Frame, set him up for his ultimate demise. One of their early meetings includes a tarot card reading where the card of The Hanged Man reveals some truths about Frame. Of this Vera says, “So, we begin with an enigma of sorts, a man, like the card, who does not fit the usual pattern.” Vera goes on to tell him that the card indicates great change and that he also doubles as a fool on a different card in the deck. This sets us up for the rest of the story. Elsa and Vera introduce Frame to Chase, a beautiful tattooed youth only too willing to play on Frame’s desires and vulnerabilities. The reader then sees Frame make foolish decisions based on lust and a wish to be young again.

McCabe adds a fresh touch to an old classic, in part because he was able to write about homosexuality openly, and in doing so shows how gay literature has changed for the better over the years. After all, he is retelling a story that some consider the first work of gay literature in modern, Western culture. More than that, this is a story of obsession and its destructive nature.

The Panorama of Dust Returning to Dust: A Review of Eric Shonkwiler's Above All Men

Amid stark praise for Above All Men’s uncanny breathing of life into the Midwest is the irony that in order to accomplish this, Eric Shonkwiler shows us how the Midwest finally death-rattles and dies. Eric Shonkwiler’s debut literary fiction novel, Above All Men, puts beneath a cracked magnifying glass the panorama of what dust returning to dust could really look like.

I’m not a book reviewer. I find it difficult to convey honestly how a book hits me to people who have not read and experienced the same things I have.  It’s a lot like music that way. This makes writing a book review seem like a hell of a task from the front end, and I seldom find a book that grabs me enough to warrant the time and effort it takes me to write and place a review.  In saying this, I hope it’ll serve as a preface to my maybe covering some aspects of Shonkwiler’s writing that may otherwise not be highlighted in a typical review, and it will give you an idea of how much this book reached me. Because Above All Men warrants all the time, effort, and honesty I can give it.  This guy’s writing is alive.

The book opens with a dream sequence in the mind of protagonist, David Parrish. I’m always curious about how the authors of books/stories I’ve really enjoyed go about finding a place to begin. It would make sense for Above All Men to begin inside of a dream, as the writing style carries on in this ethereal dream state for the remainder of the novel. The barren landscape of a future United States serves as a perfect stomping ground for the figurative ghosts that haunt the novel. And Shonkwiler’s streamlined approach to writing dialogue creates an unexpected accompaniment fit for a haunting; characters’ conversations bleed into their movements and actions in a way that feels, at times, more like verse than prose. Not exposition punctuated with speech, but something more ritualistic. Incantations. Hymns given to rhythm and unencumbered by grammatical tradition. Shonkwiler’s poetry background shines through most prominently in the way his characters talk to one another; they’re following a beat. It doesn’t always work for other authors. It works here.

If a line exists between spoiling surprises by giving away too much detail, and delivering a vague outline by holding back too much detail, I’m not aware of where that line falls. And if I were to have it pointed out for me, I’d more than likely err on the side of not saying enough than of blabbing too much, so I’ll keep the synopsis brief.  The story revolves around Parrish, a PTSD-stricken veteran of a future American war fought abroad. Above All Men introduces a post-war Parrish, who’s settled somewhat awkwardly into a role as a farmer struggling to make ends meet and trying to hold his family together. In the midst of scratching to survive in post-collapse rural America, and dealing with food, water, oil, and resource shortages, Parrish must also contend with changing environmental factors that have ushered in a second Dust Bowl.  When a child in town is murdered, the death rips open old wounds for Parrish, and he takes matters into his own hands to find the killer and to exact his own form of revenge-cum-justice from a skewed, yet instinctual moral compass.

What we’re given here is a look at a man’s past, how events that befell him before he became a family man come to govern how he moves himself forward after becoming a more active husband and father. We’re given a look at the ties between family, friends, and neighbors, and how quickly those ties corrode away when polite society grinds to a halt. At surface level, David Parrish is a hard-working farmer, a devoted husband, and a father who wants nothing more than to shelter his son from a world Parrish couldn’t keep from dissolving. Just beneath this veneer, however, is the soldier, the David Parrish who found himself, much like Vietnam-era G.I.’s, in a foreign landscape where the strongest currency is atrocity, and where he who possesses the greatest tolerance for taking and inflicting pain is king. The way Shonkwiler duels these two personalities against one another is brilliant. The same man who’d do anything to keep his son from attending a funeral and seeing first-hand the evidence of mortality is just a frame away from snapping into a mode where the most productive tack is violence. Watching this dichotomy unfold, fracture Parrish, and eventually resolve itself in what author Frank Bill calls “sparse and poetic” prose, is nothing short of a rollercoaster, and, for me, the book’s crowning achievement.

Above All Men puts readers front-row for a study in the difference between justice and revenge, and how that difference may exist as a much more fluid entity in a dystopian future than the run-and-gun pundit commentary that pervades our online world. By taking us to the future, Shonkwiler paints a picture, sometimes bleak, sometimes horrifying, of our frontier history. And ultimately, amidst turmoil, lawlessness, panic, fear and doubt, we’re shown that love may not conquer all, but it’s strong enough to compel us forward. That honor may not save a man, but that it can point him in the right direction.

Urgent Possibility: Talking With Lance Olsen on FC2’s 40th Birthday

Rachel Levy: What has surprised you about working with FC2?

Lance Olsen: One of FC2’s purposes has been and is to rethink the dominant publishing ecology, to try on alternative models. Perhaps one of the things that stays the same about our project with respect to this is that nothing stays the same. FC2 is always adapting to current conditions, transforming, attempting to out-think the present commercial literary engine.

With this in mind, possibly the greatest surprise for me has been the daily discovery of good-spirited collectivity among our Board members, our authors, our interns, our readers, our tribe. I’m speaking here about the idea of literary activism—the realization that writing is only one creative act among many that constitutes a writer’s textual life in the twenty-first century. While many authors, many presses, have gotten this by now in one form or another, it fills me with pleasure and pride knowing FC2 was one of the first in the U.S. to drive down that non-normative road.

In many ways, FC2 is responsible for the alternative-publishing paradigm that most small, independent, not-for-profit presses currently deploy in one iteration or another.

RL: FC2 is committed to keeping all of its books in print, and so, in a way, FC2 is committed to publishing today’s innovative fiction, while also curating (and even maybe canonizing?) a catalogue of texts that may no longer be able to bear that term. Can you speak about this?

LO: I love your idea that FC2 serves as a kind of curator for the innovative, although I would probably change out your choice of noun for another. Perhaps closer to the point for me is that FC2 serves, as I say, as a space of exploration about such perplexing and bracketed concepts as “the innovative.”

That is, FC2—perhaps by some wonderful accident—has kept in play for four decades a polyphonic discourse about that which must be considered the innovative, and can’t be, and can’t can’t be.

RL: How does FC2 operate?

We’re committed to finding new innovative work and expanding our membership even while keeping all the books we’ve published in print.

We look for new work in three ways. First, any FC2 author may submit a manuscript by her or him at any time. Second, an author already published by FC2 may sponsor a manuscript by an author unpublished by FC2. Third, an author unpublished by FC2 may submit to one of our two contests—The Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and The FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. The winner of the former, aimed at emerging writers, receives publication and $1500, while the winner of the latter, aimed at writers who have already published at least three books, receives publication and $15,000.

In the case of numbers one and two, manuscripts are sent for evaluation to authors previously published by FC2. A manuscript receiving two yes votes before receiving two no votes moves to the Board of Directors—currently comprised of Kate Bernheimer, Jeffrey DeShell, Michael Mejia, Matthew Roberson, Elisabeth Sheffield, Susan Steinberg, Dan Waterman (a non-voting representative from University of Alabama Press, of which FC2 is an imprint), and me (chair of the Board)—for a final editorial decision.

Each year one of the members of the Board of Directors serves as judge for the Sukenick contest. For the Doctorow, a non-FC2 writer of innovative fiction serves as judge; in the past, those have included such authors as Ben Marcus, Rikki Ducornet, and Sam Lipsyte.

For more about the contests and how the press works, those interested can go to our website.

RL: What is FC2’s relationship to digital writing? Does FC2 think about showcasing more digital and new media works? What are some of the challenges FC2 might face in committing to such an endeavor?

LO: I’m delighted FC2 has had the opportunity to bring out Steve Tomasula’s stunning hypermedial investigation into the nature of temporality, TOC. It was our first complexly digital work, and we all assumed many more would quickly follow. Interestingly, that hasn’t been the case. We haven’t yet found ones that capture our imaginations as fully as Tomasula’s did. But we keep looking, keep hoping that changes soon.

The biggest challenge with respect to bringing out new media work has to do with distribution, with disseminating the word, since the channels of dissemination don’t work the way those for print books do. But, as we saw with TOC, those challenges are not by any means insurmountable, given enough time and the deep understanding that such works are—unlike the codex—profoundly and profitably (in aesthetic—not economic—terms) ephemeral.

RL: FC2 author and former publisher, R.M. Berry, said in an interview: “When you get into work that’s really groundbreaking the norms aren’t established by which you can know is this good? Is it incompetent? It’s often the case with really radically challenging writing that the editorial process of making a decision to invest in this kind of work is really, really difficult.”  Do you also find this to be case? Given the radical nature of the manuscripts that come FC2’s way, how does the board negotiate the difficulty of establishing criteria for what’s “good,” or even for what’s a “good fit” for FC2 when deciding on whether to publish or to pass on a potential manuscript?

LO: I sometimes make the editorial process sound cognitively heavy, and sometimes it’s that—a long hard intellectual discussion that attempts to discover a way to talk about a crazily, excitingly heretical manuscript. Often, however, the conversation among the Board members begins much more intuitively. Something catches a Board member’s interest or passion, and the conversation tries to find a means to capture that intuition in language and logic. It’s seldom the case that the result is a unified position among Board members. Rather, as chair I’m looking for consensus while understanding the capriciousness inherent in the idea of fiction misbehaving.

RL: On fc2.org, you have an essay titled “Narratological Amphibiousness” in which you talk about innovative writing practices. That piece strikes me as both a personal manifesto and an exploration of FC2’s project. If you were to write a micro-version of it today, what would you say?

LO: Narrativity that refuses impermeable boundaries constitutes an urgent possibility space that should encourage us all to ask: How does one write the contemporary? Each of us, needless to say, will answer the question differently.

An Interview with Sara June Woods

Sara June Woods is one of what I consider to be a small group of “magic” writers – someone able to take an ordinary moment (or a line) and then transform it into something else, something desperately, beautifully tender. In case you’re unfamiliar, in the best cases of leading by example, here’s a short one (originally published in jmww):

 We Woke Up Neck Deep in Cherry Blossoms and the World

We woke up neck deep in cherry blossoms and the world
was spinning around us. You were mouthing a phrase to me,

something like I am sorry for this but the blossom smell
was in my nose and clouds began to form over us s p i l l i n g
l i t t l e  s t i c k y  d r o p s and they tasted like a sweet
vinegar on my face.

You are a bird in the crook of my arm and I want you
to have this spice rack our daughter
made in woodshop.

These clouds
have come          here to
save us.

Sara June Woods’ new book of poetry, Wolf Doctors – released by Artifice Books in March – may be her first full-length collection, but really, she’s one of those people who seems like they’ve been around forever. I had the opportunity to talk with her, below, about Wolf Doctors, revision, sweetness, and of course, the lurking specter of death.

Simon Jacobs: One of the first things I noticed upon opening up Wolf Doctors is the visual differences in how some of the poems are presented now from the form in which I originally read them – i.e., you’ve shifted a bunch of them from stanzas into prose. What inspires these kinds of decisions? Is it an aesthetic thing? How does a poem dynamically change, in your estimation, when it goes from one format to another, if at all?

Sara June Woods: I think a lot of those got switched around because I had a vague sense of “not totally happy with this” and just started trying things. I think at the time I was feeling a lot more picky about how exactly things appear on the page and was super drawn to making those rectangular blocks of words. In some of those I was still attached to the idea of line breaks, though, and that’s why the slashes ended up in a handful of them, even after I switched them to prose poem style blocks.

I think it changes the way you read the poem. On the page and in your head-voice and out loud. Generally now I know what kind of poem I’m going to write before or as I’m writing it. Usually because it’s in the style or voice of something I’ve written before. I’m usually working on projects or series now, but when I was writing Wolf Doctors I ended up doing a lot of trying to reinvent what kind of poem I thought I could write whenever I sat down to write a poem.

SJ: When I started reading your poetry a few years ago, I was enamored by the tone, which is very specific – your poems feel very intimate and sweet, borne by sort of casual and unfussy language and, I don’t know, something like wonder. What I mean to say is, sometimes I think to myself when reading your poems, “russ woods house style.” I know this is kind of a tricky thing to ask about and possibly explain, but can you talk about tone in your poetry? Is this tone something you’ve worked at crafting over time? Has this always been the way you write poetry? Let’s talk about deliberation.

SJW: I do know what you’re talking about. I think it’s a way of communicating that a) comes very naturally to me, b) is more or less consistently interesting to me and c) I’ve developed over a long period of time. Before I was writing poems I was writing and performing songs and before I was writing songs I was writing & drawing these little gag webcomics and before I was doing that I was writing poems, and I think the style I write in now is something I’ve slowly cultivated through all those different forms. I think it has something to do with my sense of humor and what I think is a fun or interesting way to say something, even if it’s a really sad thing. I think I am in wonder a lot. At least the side of myself I like the most is always in wonder. I have always been a strong believer. When I was younger I believed in God (which my phone just tried to autocorrect to Godzilla). Now I believe in the universe, in beauty, in magic, in poetry, in love. Not separately, but maybe like the thing that ties all those things together. I think things connected to that belief in some way, whether it’s reaffirming it, or wallowing in it, or questioning it, or screaming at it, are what inform all the poems I write. Or at least the ones I finish.

I think this has always been the way I’ve written poetry, but it’s gotten a lot more refined, more distilled. If you were to go back and read my song lyrics, for example, you’d probably find plenty of examples of that voice you’re talking about. Some similar “moves” to ones I do now. But you’d also find a lot of me trying to write like other people and kind of giving up halfway through and then performing this kind of half-song like it was finished. Poetry taught me how to revise, and I think that’s been really important.

SJ: Let’s take this a little further. Would you be willing to share a bit of your revisioning with us? Maybe a part of a poem and what it was tempered into, and how it got there? I am all about demystification, and this is process, process, process. Show me your seams.

SJWW: Yeah, I’d like that. Here’s one I changed a lot. I will say it’s super rare anymore for me to revise things quite to this extent, as I think I know a lot more how I want to write poems and how to make them get there than I did then. I think this is interesting though. Here’s the earliest version of the poem I can find:

SOUTH FORK

I’d like to begin this poem by giving a shout out to all my people.
Hello people who think they can make their lives better  by balancing
the amount of time they are productive, amount of time they are lazy,
amount of time they are at home, amount of time they are with friends
and amount of time they are out and the various combinations of these
states. You are my people.

When I was about seven years old one time I was walking down the
stairs to my parents house and said to myself After all these years I
have finally found a body! This might be the most important thing you
can know about me, but we are always navigating original doubt.  I
know that our parts can be fit together in a certain frantic way but
more and more I am questioning the importance of that.  Maggie Nelson
says that fucking doesn’t affect anything, that it is no foundation
and I want to be clear that I am talking about fucking here.

I want my last meal to be a live bear. I want him to be delivered to
me on a platter that is comically small for him to be sitting on, and
I want to go up to him and try to take a bite and just get mauled to
shit. This would be totally acceptable. Ideally, though, he would lay
there and let me try to eat him for a minute first. In the best case
scenario I would walk up to him, pretend to shake his hand, say I
finally found a body and then he would lay down and I would settle in.
I would even get through the fur and get a bite, get to taste what
living bear flesh tastes like before his enormous paw comes down,
crushing my skull. What a saint.

This is one of those poems that you see in an online literary magazine
and you skip, because there are too many words in a little space and
it seems like it would take a lot of effort to read. Don’t worry, I
do it too. It’s okay.

I am now talking to the people who did not read this poem.

People who did not read this poem: I want you to go outside the
building you’re currently in  I want you to smoke a cigarette. If
you do not have a cigarette, I want you to go buy a pack and smoke it.
I want you to then keep smoking them whenever you have free time. I
want you to become addicted to cigarettes so you become a little more
like me because I am addicted to cigarettes. I want you to curl your
fingers around each new one like something great is about to happen,
and to feel sad about each one you throw out your car window. Not for
the environment. NOT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. But for the sadness that
comes with seeing that little white tube go. This addiction is
something you can treasure, and I feel slightly less bad about
encouraging you in this because you are the people who did not read my
poem.

Lately I haven’t been getting enough sleep. Not because I’m busy or
doing work or whatever because I’m not. It’s just one of those things.
Either I can’t sleep or my dog can’t sleep and if my dog can’t sleep
then I can’t sleep and if I get up then my dog gets up so usually
we’re both up, with us rotating from sitting on the couch to him
peeing and me smoking to me peeing and him watching me. This is how I
spend my nights.

Yesterday you were sleeping and I tried to get back in bed and I put
the dog in bed and then I got in bed and you said No stop dusting me
and I said dusting you? and you said there’s just all this
and I said tungsten? and you said that was a joke and I didn’t get
that joke, but I kept looking for the tungsten because I realized I
didn’t really know what tungsten was and maybe it would help me get to
sleep and maybe it would be the thing that would make every damn thing
stop feeling like a circle, like I am going around and around and
around I’m the kind of person who feels like they forget everything
when their life isn’t repetitive but I’m the kind of person who gets
tired of that repetition too fast.

And here’s the version in Wolf Doctors. It retains a few things, but it’s really a whole new poem:

I AM A POLITICIAN OF LIGHT

and I know that our parts can fit together in a certain frantic way. 700 million years ago there were no eyes. This whole light dimension of seeing and being seen of me seeing you and you seeing me was exactly null. Nature seeps new inventions. Solar flares have been known to cause heartache. Our species is founded on original doubt. This is the beginning of the poem.

I want my last meal to be a live bear. I want him to be delivered to me on a platter that is comically small, and I want to go up to him and try to take a bite and just get mauled to shit. In the best case scenario I would walk up, pretend to shake his hand, and he would lay down and I would settle in and he would let me start gnawing his leg. But just for a minute. I would even get through the fur get a solid chunk of his meat get to taste what living bear flesh tastes like before his enormous paw comes down crushing my skull. What a saint, that bear. This is the poem’s middle.

This is one of those poems that you see in a literary magazine and you skip because there are too many words. Don’t worry, I do it too. It’s okay. I am now talking to the people who did not read this poem. People who did not read this poem: I want you to go outside the building you’re currently in. I want you to smoke a cigarette. If you do not have a cigarette, I want you to go buy a pack and smoke one. I want you to then keep smoking them whenever you have free time. I want you to become addicted to cigarettes so you become a little more like me because I am addicted to cigarettes. I want you to curl your fingers around each new one like they are these tiny miracles, to feel sad about each one you throw out your car window. Not for the environment. Not for the environment. But for the sadness that comes with seeing that tiny miracle disappear. This addiction is something you can treasure and I feel a little less bad about encouraging you in this direction because you are the people who did not read my poem. This is almost the end of the poem.

I made a Facebook status update that said I wanted to drive my car into the south fork of the Chicago River and jump out at the last minute. Or maybe even not jump out. I was in a bad mood. They call that part of the river bubbly creek because there are rotting pieces of dead animals from the stockyards of the industrial revolution still decaying, releasing gas that makes the water bubble. Three days later I read on the news that they found a car in the south fork of the Chicago River. There was a body inside. Part of me was afraid afraid that the police would call up my wife and start calling her ma’am and tell her the body was mine.

SJ: Fascinating – I love how “south fork” reappears in the revised version, like a gesture towards the poem that it once was that only you (and now, all of us) would know about. How long ago did you write “SOUTH FORK” vs. when you revamped it into “I AM A POLITICIAN OF LIGHT”? Do you allow a kind of “settling time” while you’re writing poems before you determine that a poem is “done,” or is it a gut thing?

SJW: It’s totally a gut thing. There was another version of that poem that was published in Ilk, much closer to the final version, but I still wasn’t totally happy with it and ended up revising it again before the book came out. I think the original “South Fork” was written a few months before the version that was published in Ilk, and then at least a year went by before I revised it again into the version that went into the book. Usually if I’m not happy with a poem I’ll either work furiously to revise it over the next couple weeks or else I’ll just set it aside indefinitely until I am putting together a chap or collection and then will see if it’s salvageable.

SJ: Do you take poems on an individual basis, or would you say you’re more project-focused? Has that changed over the years?

SJW: I think Wolf Doctors was the last time I focused mainly on working on standalone poems without having a kind of project in mind. Outside of the poems that went into the making of Wolf Doctors I’ve written a chapbook about mole men, a chapbook-length poem in eight parts, a chapbook-length poem in sixteen parts, various collaborative projects, a book about a lady named Sara and a series of letters to people and things that either do or don’t exist. So yeah, definitely more project-focused these days. Even within Wolf Doctors I sort of have mental groups all of the poems fit in, some of which are reflected in the sections divided by the writing prompts in the book. A good portion of the poems in Wolf Doctors are some of my earliest poems, or later poems I wrote when I was taking breaks from more specifically designed projects.

SJ: I’ve started going back through Wolf Doctors with a mind towards transformation – I feel like, beyond the sweetness and intimacy and playfulness of these poems, there’s a certain fear, a kind of death-theme that resurfaces. Looking at a poem we talked about earlier, “I AM A POLITICIAN OF LIGHT,” it seems to be about loss, about how tiny we are and all the things that end – the central image is of driving a car into the Chicago River, of pulling up a body that is/isn’t yours. Is it accurate to read this dread, or am I just imagining it? (Keeping in mind that we are all tremendously unhappy with our bodies.)

SJW: Hahah I love how much you get me. Yes absolutely (keeping in mind that we are all tremendously unhappy with our bodies) there is some death in here. I think it’s one of the things I think about in writing a lot because it adds perspective. When you juxtapose something with death you immediately can tell how important or silly it is. It’s terrifying in the concrete, but kind of freeing intellectually when you’re someone who tends to get wrapped up in anxious thought spirals. To remember that none of the stuff you’re worried about really has that much weight to it in the long run. There’s a kind of downer stretch of poems in the book that come after the second writing prompt that are all about this, but I like that they come so early in the book. It’s like, okay, death, yeah, but we have to keep living still. So then what. You can’t just check out mentally forever. I’ve tried and it sucks. I think more than anything I’m always trying to figure out that “so now what.”

SJ: Ah yes, the “death suite” of Part II. The death-aspects of the book I think, though, do remain “lurking” for the most part – overall, the work feels very optimistic and wrought with a love that – while occasionally crushing – is for the very best. (Your poems have always made me really happy to read; the tacit acknowledgment of their dark aspects – “hugging isn’t / even the word for what i want / to do to you i will break / your bones” – is, in my personal experience of your poetry, a part of that.) 

That wasn’t a question. What are you working on now?

SJW: Well, I finished my third book a few months back and it’s out at publishers, it’s called Careful Mountain. I’m working on some more collaborative work: doing a sequel to rootpoems with Carrie Lorig that will be called stonepoems. Writing more Love Stories/Hate Stories with Brett Elizabeth Jenkins. Other than that, I’ve started and put down a couple of new project ideas. The most recent is I’m trying to write little journal entry poems. Just to capture brief moments. I always try to plan these new projects and sometimes they gain traction and I write a ton on them and sometimes they don’t.

SJ: “the universe, beauty, magic, poetry, & love,” as it is.

SJW: Can I close this with a song? Can the song be this?

Lit Pub Announces 3rd Annual Prose Contest

We are pleased to announce our 3rd Annual Prose Contest, which is now open for entries. Submit your best prose manuscript. We’re looking for novels, novellas, memoirs, lyric essays, lyric novels, short story collections, flash fiction or prose poetry collections, and hybrid manuscripts that include prose writing. The deadline to enter is 11:59 PM EST, June 30, 2014.

Judging

Manuscripts will be judged by Lit Pub Books publisher Molly Gaudry and other Lit Pub staff members. Entries will be read blind, and at least one winner will be selected for publication.

About the Judge

Nominated for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel, We Take Me Apart, which was named second finalist for the 2011 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. She teaches at the Yale Writers’ Conference and is the founder of The Lit Pub.

Contest Results

The contest winner we be announced here no later than Sept 15, 2014.

Last Year’s Winner

The winner of last year’s contest is Lena Bertone, who submitted Letters to the Devil, which will be available for purchase in fall 2014.

Contest Guidelines:

Prepare your manuscript as a single Word document or PDF, including a cover page with the title of your manuscript but no identifying information.

Previously-published excerpts or individual pieces are acceptable as part of your entry, but the manuscript as a whole must be unpublished.

The entry fee is $25, payable through our Submissions Manager. When you have paid the entry fee, you will be given access to submit.

You may enter as many times as you like. Each separate entry requires its own entry fee of $25.

Entrant’s name, email address, and other contact information should not appear anywhere on the uploaded file.

Entries may be simultaneous submissions, but the entry fee is nonrefundable if the manuscript is accepted elsewhere. Please notify us immediately to withdraw a manuscript that is accepted for publication elsewhere.

Winners will be announced no later than September 15th, 2014, on The Lit Pub’s website.

Current employees and writers who have a strong personal or professional relationship with the editorial staff are ineligible for consideration or publication. However, past contributors to The Lit Pub’s blog may enter, as all manuscripts will be read blind.

We comply with the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Code of Ethics.

Contest Code of Ethics

CLMP’s community of independent literary publishers believe that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. Intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree (1) to conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors; (2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines—defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and (3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.

Questions?

Contact thelitpub@thelitpub.com.