Readings to Take Into the New Year

The HFR blog will be back to full speed next week, but we wanted to pass along some good reading to take you into the new year.

This article, about buying bargain books online instead of at bookstores and the effect of that on the bookselling industry is a great read. Buying books online, according the former owner of Cody's Books is "not morally dubious, but it is tragic. It has a lot of unintended consequences for communities.”

On the brighter side of things, this article from Poets & Writers is a fascinating Q&A with four young literary agents. Get the inside scoop on query letters, what they're looking for, where the find the authors they represent, and more.

A very happy new year to all our readers, contributors and submitters! We wish you health, happiness and lots of creativity in 2009!

Call to Phoenix Poets and Artists

The Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture is looking for Arizona artists and poets to feature as part of the yearly 7th Avenue Streetscape exhibition. This is open only to Arizona artists and poets who have not received a City of Phoenix public art commission. Two-dimensional artwork from up to three artists will be selected for display in the art panels at 7th Avenue and Glenrosa Street. Poems from up to three Arizona poets will also be selected for display as part of this popular outdoor gallery. The artwork and poems will be on display for approximately one year.

Artists should submit images of original artwork for consideration. Selected works will be enlarged and displayed on three double-sided translucent Lexan panels at the 7th Avenue and Glenrosa site. The panels will display artwork on one side and poetry on the other. The panels are approximately 5’6” h x 7’10” w, and backlit for vivid nighttime display. This outdoor gallery has become a highly visible cornerstone of revitalization efforts along 7th Avenue, and a place for the community to gather and see the finest examples of works from Arizona artists. Combining visual art and poetry will turn the gallery into a “street book” worth stopping to read. The Office of Arts and Culture encourages interested artists and poets to visit the site at 7th Avenue and Glenrosa to view the art panels. For more information, see the full project description here. Deadline: January 2 & 9, 2009.

Merry Holidays!

The HFR blog will be taking a short break to observe the Christmas holiday (at least the gift-giving, egg nog-drinking, loud jingle-singing part). We wish all of you a very happy holiday, whichever one(s) you celebrate! In parting, two favorite HFR Christmas poems...

Merry Christmas! by Philip Sorenson (issue #36, 2005)

Late at night I hear a giant scorpion in my bathtub. His pincers smack the porcelain, he must be on his back, stuck. I will go and look at his thin legs waving desperately in the air. He will be helpless, and I will take pity on him. I will not crush his skull. I will calm him and pick him up, cradle him in my arms like a child. He's not too big, only about the size of a small dog. I will hold him in my lap, and dress my scorpion in children's clothes, a little woolen cap decorated with reindeer and snowflakes. I will take pictures of us together sitting on a soft red couch. I will use the best picture, the one most flattering to us both, for next year's Christmas cards. I think I'm in love with this scorpion. We could be married. I might change my name to "Philip Fairbanks Scorpion-Sorenson" and he to "Scorpion Sorenson Scorpion."

Coal or Christmas Lights by Jacob Boyd (issue #41, 2008)

This time last year, two ponies
and a horse showed up in the cold
light of my front porch. Spilling
a silver bowl of water, they
took carrots from my hands.
When I ran, they ran.
Inside, my friends kept drinking
red wine as if nothing anywhere
had ever surprised them.

Out here in the sticks,
horses disappear
between trees, leaving
dishes. Hoof prints and frost.

A goose heard late at night,
far off, then overhead, then gone,
is hardly ever only a goose.

The way a child once,
lost in a campground, pedaling
in circles, cried like a duck.
And how he rode with me
past green and red lanterns,
the shame of every fire pit
glowing in his cheeks.
At last he found his campsite
and when he felt it close, he ran.

GIVING BY THE BOOK: The First Annual Book Auction to Benefit the Association of Literary Scholars & Critics (ALSC)!

See the message below from ALSC - more holiday gift ideas!
If you share our love for literature and concern to support its flourishing—or if someone on your holiday giving list does—we invite you to browse our First Annual Book Auction and show your support of our work by loading up your personal library (or your cyber-sleigh) with some of the beautiful books on offer there.
The ALSC is a unique non-profit organization that engages literary writers, translators, editors, poets, critics, scholars, educators, and readers from across the globe (and across the ages—we celebrate the literary arts from all languages and eras, classic to modern) and draws them together into one convivial community.
While you may not be a member of ALSC, if you yourself are in sympathy with our mission and you have books of your own you would like to donate, please contact us at 617-358-1990 or tserra@thevalve.org today, or visit our auction donor page for more information.
The auction is being held on eBay. Minimum bids are set by the donors themselves. All proceeds will underwrite our programs and publications as unrestricted gifts.
Currently up for bid are first editions of Robinson Jeffers' The Double Axe and Other Poems and Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes. We also have a Speght Chaucer (1598), first editions of Laura Hillenbrand's novel Seabiscuit and Nabokov's Ada, and signed copies of the collected poems of both Allen Ginsberg and Robert Frost. Soon to be added are first editions of Dickens and Tennyson, as well as 5 signed copies of Adam Zagajewski's Without End.
To see full details of the current listings, visit our online benefit auction now!

News Around the 'Net

Poets & Writers receives $2 million for its Jackson Poetry Prize.

Poet Elizabeth Alexander will read at Obama inauguration.

Director Baz Luhrmann buys rights to Great Gatsby.

W.S. Merwin interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air.

Winners of the Times Literary Supplement 2008 Poetry Contest Announced.

More publishing layoffs: Macmillan and Random House.

Famous people tell Huffington Post readers which books to buy.

Still More Holiday Gift Suggestions!

This week, The American Booksellers Association has announced the 2008 Indie Bestsellers, this year's top-selling titles at independent bookstores across the country. The list features the 15 bestselling books in Hardcover Fiction, Hardcover Nonfiction, Trade Paperback Fiction, Trade Paperback Nonfiction, and Children's and Young Adult categories. Something for everyone on your list, no doubt.

If you're looking for more detailed feedback on some of the year's best books, NPR's Morning Edition featured this interview with select independent booksellers across the country to get some holiday suggestions. From the NPR website: "The booksellers' picks cover a territory wide and wild, from the snow-covered terrain of North Dakota in Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl, to the forests of 1929 North Carolina in Ron Rash's Serena. Oh, and for the Scrooge on your list? How about The Man Who Invented Christmas, the story of how Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol helped create the holiday spirit?"

Support your independent booksellers this season: buy books locally!

Holiday Lit Mag Offers

Looking for the perfect gift? The following literary journals are offering specials this holiday season. If you don't see your favorite here, check out their website for special offers. Even without a discount, supporting your favorite rag around the holidays not only makes you look cultured and smart, makes a great (and often very reasonable) gift, but also helps ensure these crucial forums for the work of emerging writers will keep going well into the new year...

Give the gift of Ploughshares. Order a gift subscription today at the special holiday rate of $19.95, and enjoy $4.05 off the regular subscription price.

This holiday season, a year's subscription to One Story is only $18! That's 18 great stories for less than the price of one hardcover book.To get this great rate, visit their website and use promo code H8DEC4 when you subscribe for yourself or a friend. All gifts ordered with this promotion code will receive a holiday card with their special year-end double issue, "Archangel" by National Book Award winner Andrea Barrett.

Buy an annual hard-copy subscription to Narrative and give a friend a subscription at half-price. Or, buy a two-year subscription for yourself and get half-off the price of the second year. Either way, you save almost thirty dollars, and you get Narrative delivered to you in a handsome hard-copy edition, with stories premiering far in advance of the online issue.

For the 2008 holiday season, a one-year subscription to The Kenyon Review comes with a one year subscription to The Kenyon Review archive via JSTOR—all for just $30! Check out details here.

At the Paris Review, two special holiday offers now feature The Paris Review Interviews, III, a new anthology of definitive interviews published in November by Picador. Check out all of their holiday offers here.

And, of course, here at HFR we're offering a buy-one-get-one subscription offer. A year subscription is only $14, and the next one is FREE! Email us at HFR@asu.edu to get shopping.

Also, Rain Taxi is holding a benefit auction on eBay, letting readers support Rain Taxi while simultaneously getting cool stuff. Many items were donated by authors or publishers to help Rain Taxi stay in gear: You'll find signed first editions, gorgeous broadsides, rare chapbooks, seminal graphic novels, quirky collectible books, handcrafted items, and more!

Contributor Spotlight - Roy Seeger

Coming Off as a Rube
Nothing makes me second guess my poems more than when I have to pick them for a reading, except maybe when I see one in a journal. I automatically recognize what’s wrong with it: pointless lines, odd word choice, weak transitions. That went double when my manuscript was accepted: I went through a long editing process of cutting bad lines like I was getting paid to do it (which I wasn’t). Now, I had crafted my poems and all that, but my perspective changed when the call came: “You won the Main Street Rag Poetry Contest,” the Press Editor said.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” he responded.

I suddenly saw my poems like they were children going off to the big city. I didn’t want them coming off as rubes.

I was still skeptical. You see, earlier that weekend I had just accepted an instructor position from the University of South Carolina Aiken, the only place that showed any interest in me as a teacher, and just a couple months before that I had won a chapbook contest. And now a book? I couldn’t help but think somebody somewhere was messing with me.
*
When I gathered together my manuscript as an MFA dissertation, I thought it was pretty strong, and so did my teachers. They told me so. But, I second-guessed, it’s their job to say that, right? And if they were being honest with me, why should contest judges agree with them? Regardless, I sent that mutha out to fifteen different contests that first year (at about 20 bucks a pop), and I’d feel hopeful all day if an assistant editor scribbled “thank you” on the thin rejection slip. I was looking for validation, but it was sparse. Sure, I still published individual poems in journals, but as a collection—nothing. Was it the boring title? I asked myself. The boring poems? Lack of a cohesive theme? Too many sonnets? Not enough bird poems? Too many bird poems? Did the Hogan’s Heroes dramatic monologue make it hard for editors to take me seriously? I wondered if Kmart was still hiring.

I may have despaired a little; that’s what I do, but I also remembered that my instructor advised me to keep adding the new poems; they will be the stronger ones. So I started ruthlessly cutting poems that were weaker, unfinished, or a little off thematically, and let the new ones fill in the gaps.

I sent to twenty contests that second year, and when I got my rejections, some editors wrote whole phrases on my rejections slips. Some contests invited me to submit next year (although I suspect this might have been extended that invite to all contestants). I’d set the manuscript aside and wait, write new poems. I made mixed cassettes (my 88’ Honda Accord has a state of the art cassette player and an electric sunroof but still no cup holders). Mixed CDs, I told myself, didn’t require the same sense of timing. I looked for variety in my tapes. I noticed transitions between songs like “My Funny Valentine” and “Toxic Waste Block Party.” Lots of tension can be suggested by transitions. This was important practice for reordering my manuscript, in helping me see the narrative and lyrical connections between my own poems. I reorganized poems into chapbooks. I told myself this all wasn’t a waste of time.
*
What else? There’s all that technical advice: keep accurate records of the contests and their responses, don’t lose hope, don’t take it personal, keep that day job, make the process as routine as possible—send, send, send. But there is one question each writer must consider after so many dollars worth of rejections: why would a collection flatly rejected one year manage to win the same contest the next time around? True, there is dumb luck involved, and granted, it might get a better read if you send it in a couple weeks before the deadline. There is the possibility that the first year your poems were read by an intern with a chip on her shoulder, a rushed TA, or just a reader with a completely different aesthetic. However, after three years of rejection, consider this possibility: it’s not them; it is you (and more specifically, your current manuscript). Trust me; a different guest judge is NOT going to matter unless your manuscript makes it to the semi-finals. Until then you are dealing with interns, graduate students and rushed assistant editors who are not going to be the most sympathetic of readers; I’ve been there myself: an assistant to an assistant, a stack of 40 manuscripts to read over the weekend, working for nothing more than my name on the masthead. On top of that most assistant editors also teach and take graduate classes. They’re a busy lot with divided attentions, and remember: this is a competition. It’s their job to make a judgment here. So I looked at my manuscript like an over-worked editor might. I asked myself if the first couple poems would stand out in a mess of other poems? Will they keep a stranger’s attention?

On another level, you have to submit the thing and then forget about it. Write new poems. Compile mixed tapes. Read some. Tell yourself that publishing books is for chumps (it really does help dull the pain of rejection).
*
Then I got my book. The poems in it are all off the table now, they are done, and it makes me a little sad. I’ll miss tinkering on them. But I’m told I get royalties. Maybe now I can afford to get the oil changed on my Honda? Strangely enough, I’m still comfortable with most of the poems in there. I am glad they are finished. And the world goes on.

Roy Seeger's chapbook, The Garden of Improbable Birds, is available through Gribble Press and his book, The Boy Whose Hands Were Birds, is available through Main Street Rag. He lives in Kalamazoo with his wife and small gray dog. His poem, "Heirlooms," appeared in issue #42. You can find out more about Roy on his website.

Writers Conference Special Offer for Blog Readers!

ASU's 2009 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference is now offering special discounts to select groups, including HFR blog readers! General Admission, which was $400, is being offered to blog readers for $200.

The conference takes place February 18-21, 2009 on Arizona State's campus, and includes classes, panels, readings, agent pitch meetings and Small Group Instruction from faculty members Steve Almond, Brock Clark, Martha Collins, Percival Everett, Carolyn Forche, Lee Gutkind, Kevin Prufer, Danzy Senna, Alice Sebold, Michael A. Stackpole, Natasha Trethewey and many, many more. See our complete conference faculty list here.

For more information or to register, check out the conference website. **When registering: select either Quick Registration or General Admission. Then, SCROLL DOWN & select 'Piper Partner Tier' (you'll see Hayden's Ferry Review community listed) for your discount!**

News Around the Net

In the trenches of book groups.

Sci-Fi's "biggest fan," Forrest J. Ackerman, dies at 92.

Turkish writers issue formal, public apology for Armenian genocide.

Imagine you're nine-years old and you've written a book. Now imagine that book has been published. Imagine further that you receive a 6-figure movie deal from Fox. Now imagine that it's not you but a boy named Alex Greven, from Colorado. Lucky sod.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written a new book!

The most recent Nobel Laureate uses his Nobel lecture to castigate information poverty.

Nintendo—yes, that Nintendo—is making its handheld DS system into an e-book reader with 100 titles ready at the press of a button.

Nature words (beaver, acorn, magpie, etc.) have been replaced with technology terms (blog, broadband, MP3 player, etc.) in the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

A bail-out for writers? Hm, not such a bad idea, really.

The 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (or, the Arab Booker) has announced its shortlist.

The American Library Association has inaugurated its William C. Morris Young Adult Debut Award.

Random House's Books=Gifts campaign features video of celebrities sharing their reasons why books make great gifts.

A scary time for U.S. publishers.

Is your reading list affected by the season?

Art Intermission Vol. 6

This happened a few years ago, but I would be remiss to not post about it. The artist Chris Cobb took every book in the San Francisco bookstore Adobe Books and reorganized them by color. The exhibition, entitled "There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World," was up from November 2004-January 2005. The piece makes you think about how arbitrary our current system of organizing books is. At least it would if you could get past the beauty of the whole thing. An entire bookstore redone as a rainbow of colors with no regard to subject or author, it was a wonder.

More images here and another interview here.

(images borrowed from Magpie & Cake and Superhero Journal)

Holiday Blog Contest—Poetry

And finally, the first place winner for poetry in the Holiday Blog Contest is Meghan Brinson of Lakeland, GA. Thanks, Meghan!

Row of Lamps

I.
A table of paisley fire. My mother is a scalloped mango leaf. I am a lotus with a diamond wick. My little brother is just a small pot of coconut oil. My father says, this is the light of our being, the light of our victory, and I kick my brother under the table as he reaches for a sweet.

II.
The Day of the Release of the Detainees: 52 princes escape from Fort Gwalior. by holding onto a guru’s cloak. They thank the seamstress for the 52 tassels, 52 golden bunches they can hold in the hand. On the road to the Golden Temple, the faithful line the streets with lit candles, and burn the holy city down.

III.
Men have been killing each other, have been selling their souls for calf liver. And now they exchange foil coins, the women paint themselves with joy. The spirit of the season! they say, all over the world. But the season is only a week long.

IV.
Two weeks of years in the forest, and a raven-headed demon to kill. The wife is so happy to have a husband again.

V.
Put your whisk in the mixing bowl and beat the milk and eggs. Beat it until a beautiful woman springs out and gives you a bag of gold nuggets.

VI
We get the stickers at the market, red, blue, gold and silver mangos and myrtle leaves
and peacocks and lotuses.
At home, grandmother blends her eucalyptus and her red paste. She clucks at us as we peel off our plastic backings and stick our plastic menhdis on our fingers and palm backs, shakes her head and pulls a toothpick over mother’s palm, the palm she has washed with lemon and sugar for 40 years.

VII
The cow and the calf. Why not? When the nipples bleed their seed pearls you’ll understand, nothing is merely holy.

Holiday Blog Contest—Prose

The first place winner for prose in the Holiday Blog Contest is Kathryn Kopple of Narberth, PA. Thanks, Kathryn, and congratulations! And thank you again to everyone who submitted to the contest. It was a joy to read your work!

Cousins
The cousins arrived bearing gifts. Lorraine hadn't time to remove her apron, all splattered with beef juice and burgundy, before they pushed through the front door with armloads of stuff. Sweeping aside her offering of flatbreads and puffy hors d'oeuvres, they commandeered the kitchen table with triumphant shouts: there before Lorraine, John and her two young boys appeared an enormous china bowl abounding in egg salad, along with lesser portions of liver, roe, and bagel crisps. And it just kept coming: the slabs of melon draped in prosciutto, a salmon mousse whipped into froth and cascades, a great wedge of blue-veined Roquefort, a variety of smoked fish—eyes and all—and a tall bottle of Madeira.

"You ever have Madeira? I mean real Madeira? It's the best," said Georgina. Georgina was married to Samuel—Lorraine's cousin. This was the first time she had met her but Lorraine never waited to form a first impression. As quick as a heartbeat, she decided that Georgina had been a bully as a child, that she had used her height to intimidate the smaller children, that she had learned early on to thrown her tremendous bulk around, like a Sumo wrestler—that, come to think of it, she had the jowls of a Sumo wrestler and that, now that Georgina had grown into a huge adult, she still believed that could muscle her way into any situation and expect to have her way.

But why today, thought Lorraine, in despair. It was Christmas and Lorraine wanted it to be special. She wanted the silver to sparkle, the lights on the tree to twinkle, and the house to smell of mulled cider and evergreens. It was her hope that, if she bought enough trinkets and hung enough garlands, a spirit of goodwill and gentility would prevail. Looking woefully at her cousin, she wondered if she hadn't made a mistake when she invited him; he had joined Georgina in disassembling her perfectly set table—removing the tray of miniature quiches and stashing it unceremoniously on the counter before turning his attention a container of liver pate. "Here, let me," said Georgina, tugging the plastic lid open. The pate, passing under Lorraine's nose, smelled of onions and innards. For a moment she was back in the old apartment, on Morningside Drive, with a pan of chicken livers on the stove, and her grandmother, who made jokes about "the Bishop's nose" and taught her not to waste the heart or the gizzard. But that was a long time ago. Lorraine was married now to John and they had two boys, neither of whom had met their Jewish relatives before.

"The egg salad looks great," said Samuel.

Georgiana nodded in agreement and then asked Lorraine where she kept her glasses.

"I'll get you some." She excused herself. The crystal stemware she had set out on the sideboard in the dining room wouldn't do for sherry. She kept a set of cranberry aperitif glasses that she'd inherited from her mother-in-law on the top shelf of the hall closet.
Samuel Jr. and Seth had settled on the couch in the living room. She had bought the silver and blue brocade sofa on a shopping trip with her mother. Lorraine's mother had since retired to Florida but the thousand or so miles between them had done nothing to lessen the urgency with which she let Lorraine know that she didn't think it wise to invite the cousins to Christmas dinner.

"They're Jewish," she had said.

"Stephanie and Ben are Jewish. They look forward to Christmas with us."

Her mother had sighed. "I never understood why you ask them either."

Lorraine walked past the two young men. They were busy tuning their guitars. She knew very little about them, apart from their names. Lorraine listened a moment. They play well, she thought, and then found herself staring at Seth's sandy-colored curls, which lay thickly matted around his shoulders. He didn't take after either his father or his mother, not with that hair, but he was tall and, like his mother, he had lipid blue eyes.

"This was supposed to be our brunch," Samuel was saying as Lorraine returned to the kitchen.

"Put some caviar on that." Georgina pushed a bagel crisp laden with egg salad into John's hands. "And don't forget the Madeira. John says he's never had Madeira."

"No, but my Aunt Jo used to drink bourbon before dinner. She took it straight with ice." John spoke to Georgina with the chumminess of an old comrade. Lorraine knew her husband better. She knew that he didn't like sherry.

She took the goblet of sherry out of his hand and sniffed. "Smells nice. But Georgina what were you thinking? These glasses are huge. I have the most beautiful set of cranberry sherry glasses. John's mother gave them to me."

Georgina set her Madeira on the table. "These look fine to me," she said. "Any glass is fine with us. Right Samuel?"

"Plastic. Paper. I could care less."

Lorraine took a sip of Madeira; it went down with like a hot coal dowsed in sugar. "Tastes a lot better than that bottle of Amotillado I bought last year."

"I don't know about that," said Georgina. She handed Lorraine a bagel crisp topped with salmon mousse and roe. "Try this. Honestly, I don't like caviar. It's got that briny taste. But Samuel likes it, don't you."

"We eat anything," said Samuel, surveying the table. Lorraine directed his attention to the plate of hors d'oeuvres.

"What's in them?"

"Gorgonzola, spinach and feta. Try the miniature quiches. You'll like them."

"I'm not big on quiche." He dipped a bagel crisp into the egg salad.

"Mom, mom," said Alexander. "This is the best egg salad I've ever eaten. Why don't you make egg salad like this?"

Georgina beamed. For a moment, Lorraine thought she was going to offer her nine-year old some Madeira. The doorbell rang and she went to answer it.

"We're here!" cried Stephanie.

"I'm so happy you could come." She stepped aside to let her friends in. "Ben, it's so nice to see you."

"Nice to see you too Lorraine."

"Give me your coats. Is that a bunt cake? I'm so impressed."

She led the new arrivals through the living room where she lingered a moment in order to give them an chance to admire the Douglas fur, which had been icily but tastefully decorated in plain white lights and Victorian ornaments.

"Lorraine, the place looks great. Ben, doesn't the tree look wonderful?"

"Stephanie spent all day in the kitchen baking."

"You made this? Bunt cakes are so difficult."

"I was a little worried about it. But I followed the instructions in the Holiday Masterpieces Cookbook."

"What a great series that is," Lorraine said and then introduced them to Samuel Jr. and Seth, who were sprawled out on the couch, their guitars at their feet, and bored expressions on their faces.

"You gentlemen look hungry. People are stuffing themselves in the kitchen. Feel free to join us." Lorraine relieved Stephanie of the bunt cake and led the way.

"We're not big on the holidays in our house," Georgina was saying. "Are we Samuel?"

"We celebrate at the mall."

"I'm not religious and I'm not raising my kids to be religious either. We'd all be a lot better off without some church telling us how to think and what to do."

"These are our friends, Stephanie and Ben," announced Lorraine.

"Georgina."

"Samuel."

"Georgina, what an unusual name." Stephanie held out her hand.

"She's from the former Yugoslavia," Samuel explained.

"Are you Serbian?" Lorraine asked. "Were you raised Orthodox?"

"I wasn't raised anything."

"But were you born here or in Serbia?" asked John.

"We came here when I was four," said Georgina. "My parents weren't religious, and neither am I."

Ben remarked that he wasn't particularly religious either.

"I'm not religious at all," said Georgina.

Stephanie looked at her husband and then at Georgina. "Are you an atheist?"

Lorraine intervened. "Ben, let me get you something to drink?"

"What's that you're drinking?"

Lorraine raised her glass. "Madeira." She drained her glass and then held it out to Georgina for a refill. "Happy holidays everyone."

Georgina set the Madeira down and made her way around the table. Lorraine didn't understand at first, but she could see the other woman—this large woman—coming towards her with her arms outstretched. Oh, my God, she thought. That was the moment when Lorraine could have fled the room, and not merely the room but the house, leaving her strange, mixed family behind forever. But she didn't. She knew that, no matter how uncomfortable the holidays, these people were all she had. There was nowhere else to go. "Now that's the spirit," said Georgina, as she hugged her. "That's the spirit."

Holiday Blog Contest—Prose

First runner-up for prose in the Holiday Blog Contest is Kate Petersen of Somerville, MA. Thanks, Kate! Please enjoy!

Snow Pants
The sand barrels are out on my street, which puts us near first snow, and they are saying Thanksgiving’s next week already, so that's about right. Soon the sidewalk leaves that are left will freeze over and my landlord's husband will start sprinkling the sand onto the stairs in the mornings before work like preventive birdseed. I look up and wish the city would offer municipal stars, also, just as a seasonal service. And there went out a decree from Somerville Public Works that each electoral district would be apportioned with stars, each according to its property taxes.

In Arizona, I could get winter stars just by driving ten minutes north, up to the horse farm where I used to ride. There would be so many I felt I could almost get the constellations right, like it was some multiple choice test. Out there, we did not mess with the clocks and darkness, but it was also eighty on Thanksgiving. Here I have inevitable snow, and these starless preparations for it.

Another way I know we're getting close is that the soap dispenser from my mom arrived in the mail yesterday. There is a ghost, a snowman, and now a penguin, and I line them up like dolls on the kitchen sill. She buys them for me on her morning speed walks through the mall, and my dad packs and ships them with clips of the local sports page. They all smell like vanilla. She sends seasonal outfits for my wine bottles, too, the way she used to buy us extra dresses for our Barbies. So far, I have a Dracula cape and Santa suit.

Earlier at the bar, I told a woman I didn't know that maybe I should be in Arizona again, near my folks, who are not young. Her name was Stacie-with-an-ie from Cleveland, and together we watched the Browns blow a giant lead. Two drunks came and sat down next to us, one who turned out to be The World Famous Max Weissman, at least according to his friend, Jack. We both shook their hands.

-Hey hey, Max said, hey, until I turned from the TV. Hey. His eyes worked a little to focus on me. What is the last good book you read?
-Milo and Otis, I said. Stacie screamed at the Browns offensive line coach.

Last year was the first year I'd ever paid for a tree – well, half – a pretty five-footer we put on the fruit crate we usually had the TV on. We split everything: milk, eggs, trees, a mailbox.

He had the tree stand and I bought a tree skirt on my lunch hour and when we decorated, I put the ornament she'd gotten him when they were living in Vermont toward the front, because that is what you do when you want it to be true, and over.

And a bed.

In my desk drawer at home, I have been saving all the envelopes my dad sends the news clippings in, two or three a week depending on the Suns schedule. Sometimes I go through them, comparing his block lettering to itself, how the Es are getting wobblier and the 2s are less sure now, like me, that there is any reason left to be not there, meaning here.

Max kissed my hand when he left, a little bow that reminded me I have always wanted to be the person who remembers the difference between frankincense and myrrh -- Joyous, but with facts. I am not that person. I am the person who has always known how to spell myrrh.

I walked home the way I always do. The bicycle at 38 Carver is right where it has been since the summer, a white frame with road tires chained to the black iron banister in an unraked yard. In September, I wrote it down on a receipt in my pocket, for fear it would be gone. Have I not learned by now to tell the difference between what goes and what gets left?

Christmas morning was clear. The snow had come too soon, and was already gone. The treelights were on and the shades up, which is one of those things you can forget, how nice Christmas lights look in full daylight. We had both wrapped our gifts the night before in different rooms, trading off the scotch tape.

He had circled the bike pedals in a magazine for me, and brought in the mail the day they came. They were blue and shaped like eggbeaters and came in a box that looked like it was for a tie tack or a watch. I got him a book, too, of poems, and a button-down. He had asked what I wanted. I don't know, I’d said. I like surprises. Which is not the same as saying, Surprise me, but almost.

He opened the pedals first, then the book of poems, then the shirt, which I knew was going to be too big when I bought it.
-It may be too big, I said.
-Thank you, he said, kissing me. Then I opened the soft package with my name in black marker, going slow on purpose. Snow pants, khaki, and wrapped inside them, ski gloves.
-Snow pants! he said.
-Snow pants, I said back.
-Do you like them? I hugged him. Yes, I said over his shoulder.

We packed the other gifts in the car and drove to his mom’s house an hour west. I was in charge of tolls and music, and I stacked the quarters in my palm, rubbing them each like wishcoins as I watched out the window for a Phoenix exit to suddenly appear on the Mass Pike.

-He got me snow pants, I told Julie on the first Monday back. Now what? We were in the break room kitchen, which fits one person, two when there’s news.
-Have you guys ever skied together? Julie asked, putting half a hot chocolate packet in her cup of office coffee. I don’t know why everyone does that here.
-No, I said. And ski gloves.
-Does he ski? Maybe he wants to teach you. Julie wears a ring her fiancé made her by auditing a ring-making class or something. There are at least two continents on it, she showed me once.
-I think he said he did bunny slopes a couple times in high school.
-Did you maybe talk about a ski getaway? Julie asked. Like in Vermont?
I shook my head. We had not talked about Vermont.
-But do you want to learn?
-I don't think so, I said. I've never skied in my life.
-How about a ski lift, Julie said. Have you been on one of those? I could tell she didn’t like the chocolate in the coffee.
-Do gondolas count? I said. We went back to our computers. We didn’t know.

On fog days, the Carver street bicycle reminds me of the pigeon bones I'd find in the desert as a kid, bleached white and clean, no longer having anything to do with life or death or flying, beautiful and useless as the doves in the center of a sand dollar. Perhaps it’s a rule I wasn’t taught, that everything lovely requires something to be broken first.

Some mornings I would wake and his mouth would be on my neck and through my hair I could feel that he was still sleeping, and I’d turn, and think: What else is there.

I am surprised still by how complete the dark is by five. I turn lights on in the front room before taking off my coat. My roommate’s dead parsley plant stands where our tree was last year, perky and yellow as raffia, and I have considered putting lights on it if I can find a small string. There is one green bottle in our freezer, and from it I pour myself gin that tastes like every tree I can remember. I cook stew to carols, picking out the alto line as I listen for the onions to go clear, and fiddle with the thermostat, and wonder again whether the light we are saving is meant for somewhere else, or whether, like the sand, it's just for a later here.

Holiday Blog Contest—Poetry

First runner-up for poetry in the Holiday Blog Contest is Cristian Flores Garcia for the coming-of-age poem, "Red Season." Thanks, Cristian! Enjoy!

For M

With the rain falling
between shades of midnight,
two days before Christmas,
I sway in my bed,
wanting to cry.
I hug my knees to my chest
with goosed flesh & clench my eyes,
thinking of mom & dad living
in California, working the orange groves.
I try to remember
the deep lines that groove her face,
her warm callus hands
& soothing voice. But I can’t.

My body awakening
with sharp & fierce cramps creeping
up my back & lodging in my thighs.
My stomach is on fire,
my nipples aching
& hard. The chattering of my teeth
& squeaking springs from my mattress
awake my brother sleeping in the bed
next to mine.
Asking what’s wrong, he sits next to me,
his palm on my forehead
like a healer.
My breath, still carrying the remains
of the warm milk I drank before bedtime
& his seventeen-year-old salty scent
made me nauseous.

I jump out of bed, run
& lock myself in the bathroom,
where I find spots of brown & bright,
sticky blood on my underwear.
I sit on the toilet; legs spread,
watching my body drip
& the water getting tainted
into many shades of copper red
with the heat of my piss
rising like healing vapors. I knew
the word menstruation. I know
that all women have it—
that they must bleed,
must hurt—and now
I could get pregnant. & I don’t want it.
I start to cry, not knowing
how I’m going to tell him
why I can’t come out.

After a thousand whys & his many
please come outs I confess,
in dim light,
with him on the other side of the door,
I’m bleeding. When I come out
his eyes tear up. He speaks softly,
Does your stomach hurt? He sits me on the couch
& goes into the kitchen to his hiding secret place
I know about.
After rattling pots & pans
he comes back to me with cheeks blushing
like a pomegranate. He unwraps a Kotex pad
& unfolds it onto his palm to show me how to use it.
I already knew; mom had showed me once,
but I don’t stop him.

When I crawl back into bed, he comes in the room
balancing a cup of hot chamomile tea
& two aspirins in one hand,
with mom’s letters on the other.
He kisses my forehead
& his fingertips brush my skin
when he places a warm heating pad under my pajamas
near my bellybutton.
He pulls his blanket over me
& I inhale the heat of his breath.

Holiday Blog Contest—Poetry

Second runner-up for poetry in the Holiday Blog Contest is Amalia Alvarez of Media, PA. Enjoy!

Is It Time Yet?

We still shared a room together. Luis slept on the top bunk and I slept on the bottom, but tonight, for Christmas Eve, only for tonight, we slept together. Both of us on the top. We had taken our bath together, each of us wearing our one piece pajama suit with the built in slipper feet. This was the best night of the year, the stakes and expectations were high. I was expecting a doll house from the bearded fat man who traveled by sleigh. My brother knew better about Santa and his Reindeer, but I had no idea. He preferred to maintain the magic for his baby sister. I remember laying there in the darkness on that top bunk next to my brother in 1980. The excitement buzzed me awake, but all I could do was wait. It was cold and the sun was still sleeping. “Is it time yet?” I asked him. The clock read 5:05am. “No, not yet we have to sleep some more.” “OK.” I said. Five minutes later. “Is it time yet?” I asked again. “No! If you go out now, Santa might still be out there.” Against my brother’s wishes, I defected and climbed down from the bed. I creeped out the bedroom, tip toed through the hallway into the living room to find a Christmas morning wonderland. On the coffee table before me, there sat my dream, a two story dollhouse, all lit up, beaming with rectangular rooms and tiny furniture, set and ready to play house. I began arranging the index finger beds upstairs; making big decisions about who was going to sleep where. I tested out the lite bright lamps; imagining what the family would have for dinner— steak and spaghetti? Liver? Tortillas con queso? I looked up to see Luis. Hovering over me, eyes piercing, he shook his head left to right; arms flopping down the sides of his trunk.

Holiday Blog Contest—Prose

Second runner-up for prose in the Holiday Blog Contest is Yahia Lababidi of Silver Spring, MD. Congratulations, Yahia!

The Art of Fasting: a Question of Attention
A note from the Author: I was fasting as I wrote this, observing Ramadan, one of the five pillars of Islam. During this holy month, fasting is practiced daily from dawn to sunset. The wisdom underlying the choice of this month for this sort of worship is that this was the month in which the Qur’an was revealed. I take this to mean that Ramadan offers an occasion for personal revelation or the courting of inspiration. Something about my sensibility makes this particular observance appealing to me. Perhaps, it has to do with the ascetic ideal as I see it.

A figure transfigured, seated amid implacable calm. Stillness surrounds him, emanates from him, the harvest of a lifetime passed in quiet quest of exalted pursuits. The gaze is steady, of one accustomed to looking from dizzying heights at unfathomable depths—free of ill will, guile, or self-interest. Arms and legs neatly folded, he sits, lost in thought, found in peace. Conversely, the ascetic ideal conjures an image of the desert-ravaged hermit, spewing prophecies and lusting for divine union. The first ideogram is of one who has overcome; the second is of one who has fused.

What is common to both is the suggestion of being transported, or of entering the presence of something unknown and unknowable. How else to justify the existence of intuition, intimation or inspiration other than seize upon the fallen crumbs from that ineffable table? Perhaps such mysticism transcends religion altogether, if religion is understood as an unseeing belief in the written, and mysticism as unwritten faith in the unseen. Yet, this meditative/ecstatic state is one that, I believe, can be accessed through religious practices such as fasting.

“There is only one religion, but there are a hundred versions of it” offers George Bernard Shaw, and the same may be said of the practice of fasting. Besides Muslims, Baha’is, Buddhists, Catholics, Copts, Hindus, Jews, Mormons, Pagans, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox believers all engage in some variation on the theme. The fast may take place anywhere from a day to around half a year, yet it appears to be conducted in differently similar manners, for similarly different reasons. People abstain from food and drink, or solid foods, or meat, dairy products and eggs, or fish (on some days but not others).

The reasons are as free-ranging as the human imagination: spiritual nourishment, spiritual improvement, and/or spiritual warfare. This translates into purification, freeing the mind, freeing the body, compassion, solidarity with the poor, practicing austerity, resisting gluttony, control of carnal desires tempering the power of habit or the violence of instinctive desire, sharpening the will, enhancing concentration, penance for sins, closeness to God, petition for special requests from God, to advance a political or social-justice agenda (as Gandhi made a way of life and diet) or even as a counterbalance to modern consumer culture (there is a television and entertainment fast). What emerges from this diversity is an innate human balancing system, feasting and fasting along the slippery road to moderation.

The discipline of fasting seems to express a kind of body/spirit antagonism: Fasting, which clearly serves some basic human function, is in effect a punishment of the body. How to feed a god and beast, at once? It’s a dilemma of human existence. In this light, fasting acts as an undoing of the body and a dimming of its din. The suggestion being: if you wish to have an out-of-body experience, you must deny the physical body, experience a sort of semi-martyrdom or dying to the flesh in order to feed the spiritual body. It is a reminder of our other-body selves, our spirit-body and the otherworldly food it hungers for. This is perhaps why street magician David Blaine and his ascetic spectacles capture so much attention and speculation.
No stranger to punishing practices, Blaine is a hybrid of showman and fakir, perpetually testing the limits of his powers. One of his feats of endurance (September 2003) involved starving himself in solitary confinement, suspended from a crane by the River Thames in a glass box for 44 days. The illusionist believed that living without food and human contact, he’d experience “a higher spiritual state,” which would lead to “the purest state you can be in.” At first, the public repaid him for his efforts by pelting him with insults, paint-filled balloons, tomatoes, golf balls and other forms of violent distraction; i.e. trying to cut off his water supply, and flying a remote controlled helicopter carrying a burger up to his box.

In Franz Kafka’s story The Hunger Artist, the protagonist faces the same sort of hostility as Blaine. The parallels are unmistakable: Both suffer from the mob’s suspicion, nay, outright hostility toward the exceptional. Perhaps, people are loath to be reminded of their own neglected human possibilities; but over time the public comes round, demonstrating a less complicated appreciation.

At the end of his six-week spell, witnessed by some 250,000 pilgrims, Blaine emerged from his glass box pronouncing tearfully: “I have learned more in that box than I have learned in years. I have learned how strong we are as human beings.” Nevertheless despite the triumphant tone of his parting speech, and “considering the peculiar nature of his performance” (Kafka’s words) the uncanny similarities with Kafka’s disquieting moral parable linger.

Whatever else The Hunger Artist may be, it is an allegory of spiritual dissatisfaction, opening with the line, “During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished.” The strangely affecting, self-dramatizing, contrary narrator proceeds to chart this decline from the morbid curiosity of the marveling crowds and their grotesque merriment, to their eventual revulsion, malice and crushing indifference to the “suffering martyr” who perversely fasts on and on, even after everyone, including himself, has stopped keeping track of the records he has broken. Interestingly, the longest period of fasting fixed by the hunger artist’s impresario was at forty days, the length of Christ’s fast. “Just try to explain to anyone the art of fasting! Anyone who has no feeling for it cannot be made to understand it,” exclaims the narrator in exasperation, at one point in the story.

The unhappy ending of this human experiment, mercifully unlike David Blaine’s, is the burial of the crazed old artist. And rather than leave his “perfectly good cage standing there unused,” he is replaced by his antithesis: a young panther, his “body furnished almost to bursting point with all it needed.” But, more than anything else, it is the haunting dying words of the hunger artist that best communicate the incommunicable: “I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”

With this in mind, I believe fasting to be a form of practical mysticism, or a belief in privileged moments. Perhaps this is an “artist’s metaphysics” (Friedrich Nietzsche’s words), but I do think that fasting can stir whisperings of another world or glimpses into uncharted regions of the soul. “Only something supernatural can express the supernatural,” says Ludwig Wittgenstein, which does not make it any clearer to the uninitiated. Yet fasting is this, too—a pursuit of clarity. And, just as regular baths are prescribed during longer fasts, so fasting is a hygiene of the spirit.

To put it differently, when poet Philip Larkin writes, “Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth,” he voices the bitter-sweetness of self-sufficiency. It is not deprivation per se that he is enamored with. It is having fallen in love with a pain, not for how it impoverishes but how it enriches: fortitude, profundity, insight. Likewise, Michel Foucault does not explicitly speak of redemption through sacrifice, but he does hint at the transformational process in his own terms when he writes of “a sacrifice, an actual sacrifice of life … a voluntary obliteration that does not have to be represented in books because it takes place in the very existence of the writer.”

Naturally (and unnaturally) there are other ways to willfully enter this altered state. Whether such experiences go by other names—Martin Heidegger’s “unthought” or Karl Jasper’s “boundary experience”—is immaterial. The point of the exercise is the salvaging of truths not afforded by everyday experience. For in the act of fasting, it is not merely food one renounces, but thoughtlessness. This is also evidenced in Eastern mysticism in the practice referred to as “immaculate speech.” To maintain immaculate speech, oftentimes silence is required, another renunciation. In the final equation, it is a question of attention, sustained attention—an idealistic attempt to align what is thought with what is said and done. Whether one can approach and enter this state having diligently sought it or having been mysteriously granted it, fasting offers a gradual awakening or gentle shock out of soul-deadening routine. To fast is to slow down, almost to stillness, and distill what is necessary.

Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoyed this piece! If you liked Mr. Lababidi's meditation on fasting, you might also be interested in his book Signposts to Elsewhere, available here. Happy reading!

Holiday Blog Contest—Poetry

The third runner-up for poetry in our Holiday Blog Contest is Lauren Berry of Houston, TX. Congratulations, Lauren!

In the Bitter Orange Theater, a Child Who Has Never Seen Snow

Paper snow on my swan costume, I tried not to prick the other girls

with the unhinged safety pin in my palm. Surrounded
by that desperate season, the fury of silver sequin,
the same shade as the walls

of my mother’s stainless coffin. And
I was told to dance over a frozen lake.

I pirouetted until the sweat…
It was never winter. There is no winter.

How willing, the imagination on a stage that snows children.

Where I grew up, seasons changed when a stage mother
held out a rolled-down silver leotard

and placed my hand on her shoulder— Step into it.
Right leg. Left leg. And then it was winter.

I shouldn’t have been sweating like that.

When show had ended, the serious curtain swaying exhausted, she’d unroll

my costume the same way, my hand still on her
other-mother shoulder and the floor would cover
with white octagons until I thought my little body

had its own frantic winter. It let her know,

this woman who could never be mine,
this was a season in which one could hunt.
In which one could discover me

in a cardboard forest and take me home.

Holiday Blog Contest—Prose

The third runner-up in the prose section of our Holiday Blog Contest is Wendi Berry from Richmond, VA. Thank you, Wendi!

Christmas at Ground Zero, 2001
I was visiting New York for my annual Christmas visit and my sister had asked me to help with dinner. “Will you stir the risotto for a while?” she asked after I had helped her shop and watch the kids. She was off somewhere folding towels and putting away laundry and all I could think was “Yes, but I want to see Ground Zero.”

My brother-in-law must have seen my head and neck swivel looking out the window in the direction of where the attacks had happened as I stirred risotto with a thick wooden spoon and felt the steam rise to my face. “Go check it out,” he said putting down his drink and paper.

“Are you sure?” I asked guiltily to a person who no longer worked in the building right across the street from the World Trade Center since his office had been temporarily relocated to New Jersey. On that fateful day when the towers were hit my sister had called and screamed on his office phone “Get your ass out the door, NOW!” she yelled, moments before the towers came down. He had to run for his life to escape.

He and my sister lived 15 blocks from the large gaping hole that apparently took up two whole city blocks. Two whole city blocks in New York is a lot. I needed to see for myself, that this was not just a loop of horrific images on TV that I had been watching every night on the late-night news before going to sleep. I set the burner on low and my brother in law switched places with me.

“What are you doing?” I heard my sister say to him, after I’d already snuck down the hall and pulled on my boots and coat, not bothering to affix the hood to my coat until I was outside.

The air was brisk and I had not gone but two blocks when I began to see the makeshift museums. Places usually reserved for retail stores or galleries had photos lining the walls and images were strung from the ceiling that people had taken the day of the attacks. Another glassed in store had videos taken by people and the film was being shown in a continuous loop. People seemed to be giving interviews to someone with a mic who was recording their testimonies. I was curious and wanted to stop, but I told myself that it was more important to get to the site.

This year there’d been no snow yet during my annual visit to New York, but there was something else, a grayish white soot covering everything. I’d gone about ten blocks when I began to notice the ash. Stores that still had merchandise with “clearance” signs were covered in it. There were no customers inside these stores. Neatly stacked rows of striped sweaters were steeped inches deep in the thick dust. The fine gray film covered walls, guard rails, abandoned shoes, fastfood wrappers. I breathed in the smell that reminded me of a damp basement or a fire after my father had doused the cinders with water.

I stopped and stared at a Burger King wrapper clothed in dust. There was no escaping the gray flyaway matter that looked like morbid snow. As I got closer I saw the Xeroxed flyers of people’s photos stapled to makeshift bulletin boards. The gaping prints of loved ones faces were foggy and the images were smudged from rain. All these faces would not be joining their loved ones for Christmas and as it began to rain, their hopeful looking reproduced faces—I know this sounds hokie, but this is what I thought—their pictures cried tears. I couldn’t get over the ash. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it was—people, planes, an office building now coating the ground. It made me think of Auschwitz. That was the only name of a concentration camp I could remember from my history books and I remember reading about the ash in the sky and how it coated everything after people were burned. This was the same kind of ash, the ash of cremation. People, real people, not animals as we would like to paint them to be, had planned this and intentionally flown planes into the buildings in an act of brotherly hate and this was supposed to be the holidays where brotherly love was celebrated. How did brotherly love come into play in the Christmas of 2001 I ask myself now. Seven years ago, all I could do was gape at the evidence.

I was only supposed to be gone for a while, but on my way back I went ahead and stopped at one of the makeshift memorial museums in SoHo on Prince Street with the photos hanging from clothes lines from the ceiling. Back in the Durham, North Carolina, I had been doing a little bit of writing for the local paper about people’s reactions to September 11, and my curiosity had taken hold of me. At least that was my excuse anyway. A sign inside said that anyone could submit. If a person had a camera and took a picture of the events of September 11, their photos would find a place in the exhibit. The name of the exhibit was “Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs.”

The photo I couldn’t stop staring at on a wall was a woman who was so thin in her red shirt and her black shirt, she looked like all she ever did was work and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and maybe once in a while have a salad. This emaciated looking woman had blood running down the side of her face and down and her arms and legs and there were several people holding her trying to make sure she was okay but her dazed looked suggested that she was in shock. She was not looking at any of the people or hands in the blue latex gloves holding her, unaware that she was receiving help. That was the photo that gave me the most unease. The people jumping out of the buildings I thought looked like birds. I thought if I had been one of them, I would have jumped too, and then it hit me, What I am doing? I should be back at my sister’s. My mom and dad were there as well as my 5 and 7-year-old nieces, my 2-year-old nephew. Instead I was here in a temporary museum thinking about missing people and their families. What would their holiday meals be like? Who would cook the dinners? Would they be able to the taste the meal after surviving September 11? Or would they only smoke cigarettes and think about blue gloves and ash. Only 12 weeks ago this had happened.

For the past two Christmases, my sister had made an exotic mushroom risotto that had to be stirred, and stirred. The color didn’t quite match the dust on the walls and the streets but it was close. I told myself I should not have gone to the Democracy of Photographs exhibit, that Christmas was for family, and I should have been helping out. I pressed the small button next to her apartment number and was buzzed in. I took the elevator to the 6th floor, feeling that I had wronged my sister, had turned an hour into three hours, and I had shirked my responsibility as the older sister, who never married and didn’t have children, who played around too much.

“Can I see you in the kitchen?” my sister asked, first thing as I walked in. “And leave your shoes. Don’t get the rug dirty.” I stomped my feet on the matt and removed the boots. I would be leaving the gray dust at the door, although I was sure I now carried it with me. September 11 was too huge to leave outside. I walked down the hall toward the food smells—my brother in law had made meatballs for spaghetti and they smelled good, although a cold, wet draft seemed to follow me into the kitchen. There were no walls and no place to hide in my sister’s loft. Everyone would hear when my sister chided, Where have you been? I needed your help and you were not here.

But she said nothing of the sort. She held out a glass pan and said, “You’re making the green bean casserole.”

“I can do that,” I said, relieved, thinking maybe I had gotten away with something, like the Kate Chopin story, “The Storm.” I thought the moment had passed, and my guilt had gone after gawking at photos of victims. No one from New York, I assumed, needed a reminder of their new museum, so I didn’t talk about it. The polenta, I saw, was already on the table steaming beneath its glass covering. I was reading the directions on the back of the French’s French Fried Onions can when my mother, eager to show she was still viable in her mid 60s, reached for the pan and took it out of my hands. “You’re doing it wrong,” she said.

That’s when the emotions hit me. I rushed down the hall to my nieces’ room, and I shut the door. I cried not for the families of September of 11, but for myself because I didn’t how I was supposed to do this. How was I supposed be to a part of a family that seemed so serious about making this dinner that it wasn’t even fun. I am a curious person—I’m free, single, independent. When I come to New York, I want at least a few hours of satisfying that curiosity—if no one else has time to join in, it may be necessary for me to leave and go off by myself at the risk of not pleasing people. I began to wonder, what is family? What is responsibility? Is it a perfect meal when people are angry and in tears, namely me? And how bad of an aunt was I for never planning to have a large house and be married and inviting people over to dinner? I bet the people who lost relatives, fireman, policeman, and other rescue workers, to September 11 wouldn’t worry about such blather. More than ever I wanted to be grateful for just having a family and some place to go, but instead I felt misunderstood. My niece was the one who convinced me to come sit at the dinner table.

“You’re playing, right?” she stood inside the bedroom door, tilting her head.

“No, I’m upset. I’m tired of your mother and my mother thinking they can just boss me around. I don’t like it,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “Are you coming?”

“Give me a few minutes, and I’ll be there.”

By the time I was able to wash my face and stop blowing my nose, the casserole was cold. But I had forgotten about the ash temporarily and found myself smiling at my seven-year-old niece’s flushed and happy face, who asked, “When do we get dessert?”

Holiday Blog Contest—Poetry

And now for the fourth runner-up in poetry! The winner is Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz of Astoria, NY. Enjoy the poem!

The Art of Holiday Spirit: Astoria, Queens

Beware the turkey tree, my boyfriend tells me
as we pass Astoria’s most ambitiously decorated
house. What isn’t festooned with shellacked corn,
plastic cornucopias and baleful pilgrim children
is studded with the large psychedelic turkeys.
Unnoticed, and hopefully left over from Halloween,
a skeletal hand lurches out of the unraked ground.

At our neighborhood pharmacy, the front window
showcases a tornado of construction paper leaves,
and bags of discounted candy corn, all surrounding
a large, panicked-looking paper-maché turkey,
who (in spirit of the pharmacy, I guess) downs
an entire glittering red bottle of cough syrup.
He knows what’s coming, my boyfriend says,
I hope that cough syrups helps. I really do.

Meanwhile, our corner liquor store seems
to be wishing us all a very erotic Thanksgiving,
their posters of semi-nude Indian women,
suggestively holding enormous ears of corn,
outnumber the shiny schoolroom puritans
eight-to-one, as if thick beards, wool dresses
and shiny silver buckles aren’t sexy on their own.

As for us? Our second floor apartment faces
the local beer garden and we are committed
to reminding its boozy partrons what time
of year it is. Thanksgiving yields nothing
when we drag out our holiday decoration box,
so my boyfriend improvises: puts a mouth
bubble next to the jack-o-lantern reading,
Eat Me; puts a black top hat to put a flaming
skull and calls it, Goody Small Pox; has two
of Santa fattest elves hold tiny gloved hands
and kiss a large silver can of cranberry sauce.

Holiday Blog Contest—Prose

First of all, thanks to everyone who submitted to the contest! There were a lot of really great entries and we enjoyed reading all of them! Today we will post the fourth runner-up in the contest for prose. Another post will be put up later today for the poetry section. So here we go!

The fourth runner-up prose is Jen Mickalski of Baltimore, MD! Thanks, Jen! Now, here's her story. Enjoy!

Little Helpers
When I pull up to my mother’s street in Essex they welcome me, the apple-cheeked elves and reindeer and carolers adorning Georgia Raines’ house next door. Georgia Raines has been dead for five months, since December 17th, and the inhabitants of the winter wonderland that is her enclosed porch pretend not to know, not to have heard the news. Every month I drive five hours to see my mother, from Virginia Beach to southeastern Baltimore County, dreading them, their dusty gaiety, the fallen tacks and tape and precariously hanging lights that cannot be fixed, adjusted, the way they make my mother’s neighborhood so trailer trash, as if it needed further help these days. I have taken the liberty, during my monthly visits, of removing the wooden and plastic yard signs and outdoor lights from the perimeter of Georgia Raines’ house, storing them in Mom’s shed, but everything in the enclosed porch remains, mocking me, daring me to perform special ops in the middle of the night.

“Cindy will be back in the summer, Kyle” my mother reminds me each visit. Georgia’s children, Cindy and Daryl and Leonard, live out of state and had come for Georgia’s funeral and burial. After a week, they left, leaving the house intact. It was paid for, they figured, and would render them only a modest profit when one accounted for the several weeks of work they needed to put into straightening it up and going through their mother’s things. Cindy was a teacher, and it was decided she would come back during summer vacation to do most of the work. However, some breakdown occurred during this conversation among brother, sister, and brother, and they all left last winter without any of them attending to this seasonal piece of clean-up.

“When I come back in June and they’re still up, I swear I’m going to break that lock.” I wash my hands as Mom puts some chicken salad, pickles, and potato chips on the table. The pickles are kosher dill, not the regular dill that I like, and it worries me that Mom has forgotten this. So many things worry me about Mom. “It invites thieves, the house looking like that. And if they’re going to break into Georgia’s, who’s to say they’re not going to break in here, too?”

“Honey, we never have any trouble here.” Mom sits across from me with her coffee. Her glasses are smudged, and I wish there was a way to draw her attention to them without telling her. “I’ll be fine. I’ve lived in this neighborhood all my life and nothing’s ever happened.”

“The neighborhood’s changing, Mom.” I take a generous sip of iced tea. “You know, there’s lots of…renters now.”

“What’s ‘renters’ that the Army word for, Kyle? Poor people?” She smoothes the plastic covering overtop the lace doily tablecloth. “There’s nothing wrong with the families moving in here. If they can afford to live here, well, that’s saying something, right?”

I don’t argue Mom’s skewed concept of gentrification. But I often wonder what would have happened if Dad were still alive. They lived in Essex, Maryland, all their lives to be close to Dad’s work at Martin State Airport, but he’d often talked about retiring to Florida—St. Petersburg or something. Now he’s gone, and suddenly I find myself worrying about things that, for years, were mostly his responsibly, like the cabin on the Susquehanna, his savings, but mostly Mom.
Not that I’m selfish. I mean, it’s not as if we don’t have our own things to worry about. Back when I didn’t visit so much, when Dad was still alive, I was going through my divorce from my wife Penny. Although it pains me to say it, she didn’t understand me like I thought she did. Or me her.

I can’t do it anymore, Kyle. She stuffed her shoddily folded underwear into the luggage with the ripped stitching on the side. I can’t be this perfect little neat-freak wife you want. It’s not realistic. I can’t do it.

What’s so hard about paying a little attention to yourself? I pulled the underwear away from her and folded it into thirds as an example. What’s so hard about paying a little attention to how we present ourselves?

Our house is not the barracks. She snatched the underwear back and threw it, unfolded, into the luggage case. I’m not some decoration. Why didn’t you marry a maid, Kyle? That seems like it would’ve been able to give you the big old hard on you’ve always wanted.

Well, your slovenly ways certainly aren’t arousing to me, I answered, then regretted saying it. But maybe I didn’t.

“I’m not selling the house and living with you, if that’s what you’re implying,” Mom continues, after I’ve fallen silent. “Your father and I worked hard on this house. We spent our entire lives here. Besides, I’m sure you’ve got plenty of bachelor things with the ladies down in Virginia Beach.”

“I haven’t been dating anyone, Mom,” I answer. “I’m forty-five years old. I’m not a bachelor. I’m middle-aged.”

“You’re not still hung up on Penny, are you, Kyle?” She takes my plate and heads toward the kitchen.

“I’m not hung up on anybody, Mom. I’m just worried about you, is all.”

I brush the crumbs off the plastic table cover into my hand and follow her. Everything is neat and orderly, aside from the smudge on her glasses, and I am relieved. After Dad’s Alzheimer’s, any item out of place gnaws at my stomach. I can still see his church shoes, his wing tips, sitting by the orange juice in the refrigerator. Stealthily, I crack the refrigerator door open while Mom washes my plate.

“Kyle, there’s some coconut crème pie in there,” she mentions, and I watch the thin stream of water from the faucet run into the rivulets of her gnarly, liver-spotted hands, a landscape of trees speckled with geese. I take the damp plate and buff it dry, shiny. Spotless.

“Maybe later, Mom. You said you were having trouble with the hot water heater?”

Later, I can’t sleep. The neighbors from two houses down have been having an argument for the better part of two hours. Mom pretended not to notice before she went to bed. I’m half tempted to go down there and throttle both of them myself, but instead I lie stiff in bed, flexing and relaxing all my muscles from my feet to my head. My counselor suggested it as a way to diffuse my anger, my anger at seemingly everything lately. It’s so hard to lead a simple, good life these days. So many cheaters, liars, slobs. I’ve tried to so hard, I tell him, my counselor, no saint himself, but at the end of the day what do I have? My cat Lobo and my Jeep. And Mom. But how much longer?

I creep down the stairs and stand on the porch, digging around in my backpack for the pack of Camels I keep around for emergencies such as these. I crouch down near the azalea bush by the front steps and exhale into a sock I’ve stuffed with drier sheets. I imagine I look like I’m huffing something much worse, but who would care in this neighborhood these days? The neighbors two doors down have quieted, and I walk around to the back of the house to survey my mother’s shed, garden, and the gazebo Dad and I built six or seven years ago for Mother’s Day. Everything looks in good shape, and the spring grass has begun to sprout, little tufts of hair through the damp, soft skull of earth. I follow the line of green until it meets Georgia’s lawn, which is riddled with weeds and trash.

Georgia’s yard looks so abandoned, such an eyesore, and I’m willing to bet Mom doesn’t sit out in the gazebo anymore, reading her mystery novels. I walk across the lawn Georgia’s house and open the screen door while grabbing a thin metal bookmark, a gift from the base for some milestone, from my backpack. The door opens easily, albeit noisily, but nothing compared to the racket down the street earlier. I walk through the dark staleness of Georgia’s house, its layout much like my Mom’s, until I get to the enclosed porch.

“Kyle? Kyle? Why are you in here?”

I about have a heart attack, thinking Georgia’s ghost has paid me a visit, but it’s Mom. She must have seen me outside, in the front yard, from her window, and followed my movements. I imagine her moving through her house to my old bedroom, watching me in the backyard while struggling with her robe, the hurried way she snapped into action to break up the neighborhood fights I always got tangled up in when I was smaller. And then maybe not so small.

“It’s all coming down, Mom.” I meet her in the living room. Her face in the shadows looks hollowed out, carnival-esque and skeletal, and I feel the enormity of the disarray surrounding us. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

“Kyle, what in earth is wrong with you?” She begins, and I see her mind working through years of my life, her life, wondering which of us took the exit ramp and which of us stayed on the highway. And whether we will ever meet up again in our travels. “You just can’t break into people’s houses,”

“I’m sorry, Mom.” I pull the bookmark over my palm over and over. It is dull on my calloused, thick skin. She sighs, taking in the carpet of dust covering everything, a light snowfall.
“Goodness, Georgia must be turning over in her grave,” she says finally. “People just aren’t…decent anymore.”

“I’m still decent, Mom. Aren’t I?”

“Of course you are, Kyle. I didn’t mean….” She touches my cheek before heading to the kitchen. “If Georgia was like me, I know where she keeps her cleaning supplies.”

We begin, in darkness, using the lights only as we need them, vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing. Apple-cheeked elves and reindeer and carolers go in a box I found in the attic labeled X-MAS. Old Reader’s Digests and newspapers go out for recycling. Winter curtains go in the wash. We find the summer curtains in an old cedar bureau in Georgia’s bedroom.

“I didn’t realize you were such a night owl, Mom.” We sit on the couch as she mends one of the kitchen curtains, its fringe separated from the cloth.

“It’s been hard to sleep,” she answers. “Every little noise scares me now that your father is gone. I was never such a big chicken before, but I worry. I make sure I have a clear path to the door in case there’s a fire, I have emergency numbers on speed dial by the bed…you don’t worry so much when someone else is around. I guess you just split the worry, then.”

“I worry at night, too, Mom,” I answer noncommittally, and then stand. “So, you think Cindy will even notice the house is spotless when she comes back?”

“She’ll think it was an act of God,” she laughs. It’s about five o’clock in the morning now, not light out yet. I turn on the radio for the news and weather, and we sit quietly on the sofa. We’ve left the curtains open, and its easy enough to see the patrol car that pulls up, no lights, in Georgia’s driveway.

“I guess we’re not the only ones who can’t sleep at night,” Mom murmurs, folding the used dustcloth in her lap. I stand up and glance at the young rookie getting out of the driver’s side before whipping the curtains closed. I join Mom back on the couch, and as we hear the officer knock on the door of the outer porch, neither of us moves.

From the Pop Culture Trenches: Pop-Kid-Lit

Yertle the Turtle is celebrating its 50th anniversary this holiday season, and children everywhere are wanting presents. Hmm…coincidence? Never! Although books are falling out of fashion, parents and relatives should not abandon the idea of giving any at Christmas. Otherwise something priceless would be left behind. In the case of Yertle the Turtle, it’s the burp that dethroned a power-hungry king.

But maybe it’s more. For my stepmom, Yertle the Turtle is the memory of her father reading this story at cocktail parties when she was a little girl. It was his grand voice relishing in the cadence and rhyme. It was the great smile that crept across his face when he read, “For Yertle, the King of all Sala-ma-Sond, / Fell off his high throne and fell Plunk! in the pond!” For her, this Dr. Seuss story has carried great importance even into her fifty-something adult life. And I’m sure she is not alone.

My story was The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. I understand this story so much differently now than I did, and re-reading it gives me the urge to call my mom.

Some top ranking children’s books being sold this holiday season are:
A River of Words by William Carlos Williams
We Are the Ship by Kadir Nelson
Wabi Sabi by Mark Reibstein
The Black Book of Colors by Menena Cottin
And some more here and here.

Some fabulous classics worth revisiting for the new generation:
Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business by Esphyr Slobodkina
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst
any Amelia Bedelia books by Peggy Parish
Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson
and of course you can never go wrong with Seuss or Silverstein.

We all have classic stories that made us laugh as children and cry as adults (in the best sense). These small, simple tales are worth passing on to our children, in hopes they too grow up in a world where “the turtles, of course… all the turtles are free / As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”

News Around the Net

Letters from famous serial killers/lovers for sale online.

Constance Briscoe wins the libel suit brought against her by her mother for her memoir Ugly.

Having your ashes scattered in Jane Austen's garden has now been banned.

A soon-to-be-realeased, gay-friendly Bible has angered many Christians. Surprises abound.

Obama was predicted in, you guessed it, a sci-fi story of the 1920s by a Brazilian author.

Authors for hire - please go lower!

The NYT picks the ten best books of the year.

New/original versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland go on sale.

Jan Pienkowski retells the story of the Nut Cracker with a dark twist.

South Korea has its own "bookcity."

Alex Ross has won The Guardian's First Book Award, and its hefty cash prize, for The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.

The title says it all, "The End of an Era at Random House."

Sony's Reader is now rivaling Amazon's Kindle.

Website of the Week: OneSentence.org

I hate to generalize, but this is usually true: writers love words. However, in a world of novels, essays, articles and disclaimers, sometimes all you need is one sentence to explain it all.

Onesentence.org is a forum of true stories, all told in one sentence. These range from enllightening to comical to bizarre through big ideas, small hilarities and caustic word combinations. You can post your own story and rate others with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The site is accompanied by a blog by Onesentence's author.

OneSentence provides writers both the challenge and the fun of telling a story in only one sentence.

So, What's There to Do in Phoenix? (Lit-Wise)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Phoenix may not be New York or San Francisco, but we've got our fair share of fun art and literature events. We'll keep you posted of these events (and more!) in our sporadically updated review "So, what's there to do in Phoenix?"

ArtEvent: Stray Cat Theater's "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant"

Join in the holiday spirit with this fantastic performance, described as a mixture of "avant-garde performance art and children's theater." Grade-school children portray luminary figures of the Church of Scientology movement, such as Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, John Travolta, and L. Rob Hubbard. The performance follows Hubbard's rise from struggling science fiction writer to leader of the highly successful New Age religion. Scientology teachings are "explained and dissected against the candy-colored backdrop of a traditional nativity scene."

"A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant" is directed by Gary Minyard and based on a concept by Alex Timbers. Books, music and lyrics were done by Kyle Jarrow. Show runs from December 5 - December 20, 2008. Showtimes are Thursday-Saturday at 8 PM and Sundays at 2 PM at the Tempe Performing Arts Center (132 East 6th Street). Buy tickets online here. $15/ students + military, $15/seniors, $20/adults. Thursdays are $10 Student Night and Sundays are $12 for everyone!

For more information and a photo slideshow, see this article from the East Valley Tribune.

Contributor Spotlight: Susan Hasler

Culture Shock Treatment for Writers
My mother once accused me of insisting on doing everything -- absolutely everything! -- in the most contrary way possible. My father called it assbackwardness. I didn’t tell them, but it was a deliberate strategic choice. I always knew I wanted to be a writer, and I figured that doing things the logical way, the recommended way, the tried-and-true way would not lead to anything interesting to write about. Furthermore, I was well aware that my own timidity might lead me to cloister myself away in a room somewhere if I didn’t fight it. So I resolved to shake things up in my life every once in a while.

The first shakeup involved getting away from home. I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. My father was a turkey farmer, and my mother was a school teacher in the same elementary school that I attended. It was an old red-brick building with a belfry on the top. About half the students at the time were Mennonite. The girls wore long pigtails, long, shirtwaist dresses in printed cotton, and black shoes and stockings. The boys wore printed cotton shirts, suspenders, and hats. They brought their lunch to school in tin boxes and ate openface sandwiches topped with various homemade luncheon meats. In fall, slaughtered hogs hung upside down from tripods in farmhouse yards all over the county.

After highschool, I spent one year at the local university before transferring to the University of Virginia, land of Fair Isle sweaters and hard-drinking parties, and then on to the University of California, Berkeley, where I attended rallies and let myself get dragged out of the ROTC building by police, just to see what that was like.

After Berkeley, I found a job at the Central Intelligence Agency. That might seem like another deliberate effort to jump from one cultural extreme to another, but in truth I just needed the job. The economy was in recession and my degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures did not look attractive to many potential employers. The Agency, however, was in need of Russian speakers. The initial polygraph exam took over five hours, as we covered my years in Berkeley.

I never meant to stay at the Agency as long as I did: twenty-one years. But I met my husband there, and then there were kids to put through college and mortgages to pay. After I married, my husband and I bought a weekend place in the Shenandoah Valley about three miles from my father’s farm. There, we soon got into cat rescue, because of the sheer number of strays that arrived at our farmhouse. So we bought a van and ferried cats back and forth, placing barn cats through the Agency bulletin board. Cats who grew up drinking out of manure-sullied puddles ended up in affluent Northern Virginia homes, where they drank bottled water and went to kitty dermatologists and cardiologists and holistic veterinarians. Some went abroad with their families, ending up in places as varied as Poland, Estonia, Columbia, India, and Austria. Meanwhile, I stayed put.

I wrote when I could, working on that first unpublished novel for years and years and years ... My only way of shaking things up was to switch jobs within the Agency, which I did on a regular basis. My jobs included: foreign documents officer; analyst; speechwriter to James Woolsey, John Deutsch, and briefly George Tenet; editor of a monthly publication; and, finally, counterterrorism analyst.

I took a job in the Counterterrorist Center in 2003. The whole office was on edge, because there were indications of a major terrorist attack in the offing. That attack came a year later and hit like an earthquake that permanently altered the landscape of our careers and lives. I spent three more years there, before resigning from the Agency in August of 2004, depressed, stressed out, and disillusioned by our Government’s response to 9/11. My weekend home in the Valley became my permanent home and I became a full-time writer. I wrote about cats, the Valley, religion, and -- after my stomach finally calmed down -- terrorism and the Agency. Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s bought my novel, INTELLIGENCE, in September. So, at the age of fifty, I finally achieved what I had wanted all along: to be a novelist. And I did it in the most ass-backward way imaginable.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “What is life but the angle of vision?” Changing my angle of vision -- whether viewing the Agency from my desk overlooking a soybean field or viewing the Shenandoah Valley from Sproul Plaza in Berkeley -- has enabled me to see things I wouldn’t have seen, describe things I wouldn’t have noticed, understand what truly makes a thing unique, and avoid the easy stereotype. Culture shock treatment can be painful, particularly for an introvert, but for me it was a necessary ingredient of my writing life.

Susan Hasler held many positions during her time at the CIA, including linguist, intelligence analyst, and speechwriter to three directors of central intelligence. She was serving in the CIA Counterterrorist Center on September 11, 2001, and has drawn on that experience to write a novel, Intelligence, which will be published by St. Martin's Press. Her story "Our Familiar Alien" will appear in issue #43.