I’m changing the format here a bit. I’ll have some words on the month’s contributions at the end. For now, let us celebrate the contributors.
Kerry Cohen was just on the Today Show a couple weeks ago. Yeah, that Today Show. Holy Hades!
Bud Smith is a one-man literature factory. Every time I turn around, dude got another book.
Susan Nordmark is a Kansan who studied Biological Anthropology at Harvard. There’s a Wizard of Oz mash-up in there somewhere.
Buzzy Jackson is one of the most delightfully zany people you’ll find anywhere. And she’s hilarious. And she’s an atheist. So, +10 to all ability scores.
Jordan A. Rothacker puts the “I” in IQ. When not pumping out interviews, reviews, or his own creative work, Jordan relaxes (apparently) by musing on Ovid.
David Bowles gets this month’s UTI (yes, we’re aware) Badass Award for championing a major historical figure/writer I had never heard of.
Kazuo Ishiguro
by Kerry Cohen
During graduate school, I read Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro to examine how he transgressed the meta-narrative of the love story. The novel is about a butler who is devoted to the requirements of his work, namely duty and dignity, so devoted that he sublimates all unruly feelings, such as desire and love. Ishiguro masterfully buries the love story beneath the protagonist’s devotion to duty, which is conveyed through every word, every sentence, and every scene of the book. It is, put simply, a perfect book, and it taught me how to be a writer.
Kerry Cohen is the author of 11 books, most recently Lush: A Memoir. She is a practicing psychologist and is on the faculty of the Red Earth Low-Residency MFA program. www.kerry-cohen.com
Tove Jansson
by Bud Smith
Tove Jansson lived partly on a tiny island off the coast of Finland. First she was an illustrator of children’s books, but when she turned 50, she switched to autobiographical novels for adults. Tove’s writing is mean-spited, unsentimental, and beautiful. Summer Book is great but Fair Play is better, it’s about the mundane life of an artist, plus she gets lost in Baltic Sea fog in a small boat and argues with her partner, drifting towards Estonia, fighting over lack of crispbread. I love when she rails against her fans, often children, who send letters she debates replying to.
Bud Smith works heavy construction in New Jersey building and demolishing chemical plants, refineries, and power houses. He is the author of a memoir about that called WORK (CCM, 2018), as well as a book of short stories called Double Bird (Maudlin House, 2018). In 2019, Tyrant Books will publish his next novel Teenager. He lives with his wife, a textile artist in an apartment at the corner of two loud streets, the opposite of Tove Jansson’s remote Finnish Island. Tove’s coordinates were 60.165579º N, 25.802778º E. Bud’s are 40.725513° N, -74.072922° W.
Hillary Mantel
by Susan Nordmark
Hilary Mantel’s fiction rations beauty. She’ll allow a couple sentences of loveliness, then complicate by injecting uncertainty, trepidation, ugliness. If there’s nothing edgy in-scene, she creates it. In Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell observes Anne Boleyn in a gorgeous pink and gray dress, and thinks of the intestines he’s ordered torturers to rip from the bellies of politically recalcitrant monks. This joins Cromwell’s feelings about Anne with how he may be haunted by his own realpolitik. Mantel never hyper-dramatizes or seeks solace in beautiful things. Romanticism is always false. Mantel’s images startle and cut.
Susan Nordmark‘s stories, essays and prose poetry have appeared in Entropy, Sin Fronteras: Writers Without Borders, Peacock Journal, Draft: The Journal of Process, Porter Gulch Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California.
Jorge Luis Borges
by Buzzy Jackson
The first time I read Jorge Luis Borges—the story, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941)—I knew nothing about him. I began to read the abrupt, confusing, self-contradictory story and wondered: was this a spy novel? A memoir? A joke? Yes, it was all of those.
Plus.
“At one time, Ts’ui Pen must have said; ‘I am going into seclusion to write a book,’ and at another, ‘I am retiring to construct a maze,’” Borges writes. “Everyone assumed these were separate activities. No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.”
In Borges, they always are. I still can’t find the center of the maze.
But I’ll keep trying.
Buzzy Jackson is a historian, critic, and author of three books, most recently The Inspirational Atheist: Wise Words on the Wonder and Meaning of Life (Penguin Random House). In 2018 she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount, where she worked on her current book, a historical novel set in World War II Holland. www.BuzzyJackson.com
Ovid
by Jordan A. Rothacker
Ovid looked forward by looking back. Systematic within the poetic, everything in Ovid is transformation, like his great work, Metamorphoses. An epic-making version of Hesiod plus Heraclitus; with the heart of a dissident, Ovid’s dissidence was erotic, amounting to songs of love in all its forms. He touched power and it bit back with exile. Ovid made terms with his fate and learned the language of place to compose poems forever lost to the world. Work, ever imperative, he knew his position in history. I look back to Ovid, as Shakespeare did, as we all three have looked back to the Greeks. We gaze together, points and positions connecting in varied directions.
Jordan A. Rothacker is a writer living in Athens, GA where he received an MA in Religion and a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. His work has appeared in various publications both commercial and literary. The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015), And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds, 2016), and My Shadow Book By Maawaam (Spaceboy Books, 2017) are his novels. 2019 will see a short story collection from Stalking Horse Press called Gristle. Rothacker promises it’ll be weird.
Nezahualcoyotl
by David Bowles
In college, awakening to the erasure of my Mexican heritage, I tumbled down a rabbit hole of research and discovered Nezahualcoyotl, king of the city-state of Texcoco from 1430 to 1472. A founder of the Aztec Empire, Nezahualcoyotl excelled as a statesman, engineer, and philosopher. Most importantly, he was Mesoamerica’s greatest poet. After the Conquest destroyed most of Mexico’s indigenous literature, the poet-king’s mestizo grandson, Juan Bautista Pomar, preserved 36 poems of Texcoco, titling them Ballads of the Lords of New Spain. The document includes Nezahualcoyotl’s haunting verse, poignant reflections on the fleeting nature of human life and joy.
Only flowers form our shroud.
Only with hymns
does our despair
tumble like a thousand blooms.
It is said that feasts
will fade away for me.
It is said that friends
will fade away for me
when I depart
for the Land of Songs.
A Mexican-American author from South Texas, David Bowles is an assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Recipient of awards from the American Library Association, Texas Institute of Letters and Texas Associated Press, he has written several titles, including Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Mayan Poetry, the Pura Belpré Honor Book The Smoking Mirror, and Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Mexican Myths. His work has also appeared in venues such as Journal of Children’s Literature, Nightmare, Apex, Rattle, Strange Horizons, Asymptote, Translation Review, and Metamorphoses. In 2017, he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
Outro
Sometimes I wonder whether humanity has lost more knowledge than it will ever possess. Even as technology advances—as we fly higher, compute faster, and live longer—we seem constantly to be forgetting things that should never be forgotten.
We forget love and nature until they desert us. We forget tyranny and war until it’s too late to stop them. We forget disease, famine, and genocide in a vain maze of beauty products, video games, and YouTube. Even as we seem to move forward, trouble comes in our wake, so much that sometimes history seems nothing but an exercise in making its own end plausible.
Then I remember the raw power of language. I remember language is a gift and a proof, a ward against forgetting; that as long as language survives in some form, knowledge survives with it, knowledge that may someday, if we’re fortunate, be recalled. And in knowledge there is hope.
Yes, sometimes knowledge is a straightforward mapping of the physical world: the facts, figures, names, and dates that are the province of scientists and historians. But sometimes knowledge is more. Sometimes knowledge is a dream, the sense of eternal spring conjured by the idea of a Land of Songs. Sometimes knowledge is the poetry of a master centuries gone.
