25th Anniversary Giveaway Winners

Big congratulations going out to the winners of our anniversary giveaway: Megan Paonessa and Emily J. Lawrence. Thank you for joining in our celebration! We invited submissions of photographs of a significant artifact and an accompanying anecdote—true or untrue. Below are the entries that won these two amazing ladies a copy of Issue 50.

"The baby that didn't make it." – Megan Paonessa

"These flecks on my fiance's face are dried seahorses he fetched me from the Atlantic brim. The seahorses are an allusion to a story I had written at the time he whisked off to Hilton Head. They mean "you were not invited but we are not far from each other." Artifacts ferrying adoration across 4 united states of separation, with a smell of sandy mayonnaise." – Emily J. Lawrence





Thank you again for helping us celebrate, and we hope you enjoy your copies of the anniversary issue!

25th Anniversary Celebration and Giveaway!

Silver might be the traditional gift for 25th anniversaries, but we like paper too much to care. Toss that tradition out the window! That's why, in celebration of our 50th issue, we're giving the gift of paper. More precisely, we're giving away five copies of HFR's 25th anniversary issue. If you're not excited yet, you should be, because this is a thick issue, filled with hand-selected writing and artwork based on the concept of the artifact.

To enter to win a copy of Issue 50, submit a photo of an important artifact in your life, and share the item's story. We're accepting one entry per person, so choose carefully! Submit by sharing on our Facebook wall, submitting through Twitter and tagging #HFR50, or posting on your own site and sending us the link through Facebook or Twitter.

HFR's managing editor, Beth, will select the winning entries this Friday, and winners will be announced on Monday, May 21. 

Good luck to you!

Hiroshi Watanabe's "Kabuki Players"

Though most of you probably can't make it to Switzerland, we wanted to share these beautiful photographs from Hiroshi Watanabe's upcoming gallery show. 42 portrait photographs from "Kabuki Players," "Noh Masks of Naito Clan," "Suo Sarumawashi," and "Comedy of Double Meaning" series will be exhibited all around the 3 story Ad-Galerie in Switzerland.

If you like Watanabe's work as much as we do, check out his Facebook page, and find work from his "Japantown Project" in our soon-to-be-released 50th issue!

Contributor Spotlight: Hiba Krisht

At this stage in my life, I am a very confused writer. “Boxes,” as it appears in HFR #49, was a sudden breakthrough, the first whole-kernel story to flow from my fingertips. I think I have always treated stories as organisms, conglomerations of body parts fitted together with smooth grooves, smooth lines. I spent too much time building up the bone in a sole limb to remember that it should be attached to something, a something itself true, itself whole. I spent too much time thinking and back-tracking over my words instead of writing new ones. And then, with "Boxes," I forgot this whole stack-the-details obsession of figuring out cohesive plots and mapping out characters like all they were just a bunch of awkwardly connected lists. No characteristic or idiosyncrasy is sufficient to play the role of a tibia. Limbs don’t have to be shiny and perfect and buffed. Limbs don’t have to be balanced. After "Boxes," I realized I dislike pure marble perfection. I dislike Greek sculpture. I think a hunchback is more comely, or Roy the New Year Monster with his unsteady knees. There is character to a totter.

And it came through, somehow, this--in a sense--finished thing. But since “Boxes,” I have become very confused. I have written whole stories, no major organs missing (I can’t speak for things like gall bladders or spleens, and I’m not sure if the skin is thick enough). But where before I had been telescoping in to isolated parts, picking at them with unrecognizable fury and a negative hunger instead of energy, now I am nearly blinded with the motion and flux of too many glowing pictures, confusing and paralyzing me, confusing and paralyzing my writing.

Philosophy is partly to blame. My philosophical wanderings feel scant even after two years in graduate school. Still, I have been exposed to all of these strong and titillating ideas that confound my attempts at writing fiction, even as they inform them.

I am astounded and excited by post-critical theory, by the Foucauldian-Habermasian debate of agency: inescapable power relations animating every life-movement, every motion of structure, of family, of personhood, identity, and love, and then, challenging the premise that you can cancel autonomy, the strong and liberating power of inter-subjective communicative action, of reciprocally recognized claims to validity. How do you express and recognize the validity of the depth and breadth and truth of a visceral human existence? Where do you stop being pushed, pulled, animated, driven? What is more simply direct than a common human drive, and how on earth do you construct an organ that accounts for it? The questions, questions of story and character, are endless.

I don’t even want to start to talk about Nietzsche, because I will never end and come out even more confused. Every writer should read Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But I would like to say a word about Deleuze. I am entirely enamored of Deleuzian code-and-flow dynamics, bodies-without-organs, striated space, de-territorialization, by the very bare concept of a nomadology. The splendor of realization that all this can be read into, well, everything: Genesis, the makings of steak-and-kidney pie, politics, and story, story, story. And the terms themselves, never mind the chapters of philosophy behind them, excite me to the point of near exhaustion, and I find myself again mapping out organs, this time marking and color-coding bits and valves, erasing and knotting other appendages.

Philosophy aside, there is this keen and up-building social/political awareness I am starting to have, as a young Arab-American woman with Muslim roots, as a dual national, as an expat, as a citizen and a long-time resident of the Middle East. In “Boxes” I addressed many matters-of-fact about my country of origin: that mothers cannot give their citizenship to their children, that it is strange for a woman to move out of her home before marriage, that marriage is sometimes solely a vehicle for family and companionship rather than an expression of any deep true love. There is so much more than this to be written about in story about Beirut: Beirut, a part of the Levantine, a part of the larger encompassing Arabia. War-torn Beirut, the Beirut of invasion and civil war and guerilla warfare, of constant and prolonged sectarian resentment, conflict. And then the more socially constructed picture: Islam, patriarchy, oppression, regression.

I am confused because somehow, I come to write in the contexts that I know best, that I am so deeply entrenched in, and I find that these are contexts that come tagged with a host of preconceptions and labels, some of them ugly, some of them with unfriendly connotations. I am confused because I do not want to be the writer who battles stereotypes because it offends my sensibilities that I should acknowledge and take seriously the existence of these stereotypes to begin with. Because there is a dynamism and organic nature to this place. It is more relevant and simply truer that elements of each of these tags, these connotations (along with elements from a host of warm, rich, loving, sad, honest, weird, tough, and scintillating non-tags and unmentioneds) will appear in disjunction and permutation, in truly unique and versatile arrangements. In visceral arrangements.

It’s a lovely and satisfying confusion to have. A beautiful and soul-stretching project to tackle. How, how, do I take this wealth, this amassed veritable valley of ideas and truths, and clobber them together into plot, into character, into story and organism? These are very hard organs to construct and match up. But if I can manage to do it, I can make a lovely Picasso-like whole. So that’s what I’m aspiring to: Picasso. My arms are short. No wonder I’m confused. I can’t wait to keep digging in.
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Hiba Krisht is an Arab-American residing in Beirut, Lebanon, where she is finishing up her master's degree in philosophy. She is joining the Class of 2015 cohort at Indiana University's MFA program this August, where she will also be an associate instructor in creative writing. She is currently Contributing Fiction Editor of the fledgling Beirut literary and arts review, Rusted Radishes. Her loves include (in no particular order) warm weather, good food, mathematical logic, weird humor, and labneh. Her work appears or is forthcoming from Hayden's Ferry Review, The Evergreen Review, The Banyan Tree, and Rusted Radishes.

Eric Gottesman's Photography in Issue 50!

We at HFR couldn't be more excited to have Eric Gottesman's photography in the upcoming issue #50!

 For over a decade, Eric Gottesman has been working in both the Middle East and Ethiopia exploring photography’s role in shaping and documenting people’s lives. Eric Gottesman had this to say in his recent email newsletter: 


Hi all, 


 It has been unseasonably warm in New England and I've learned a lot from my residency here at Amherst College, especially from the students. With students and guest speakers and colleagues, my mind is active with new ideas. It has been a wonderful place to be for the semester. This summer, I'll be back in Ethiopia for a few weeks to work on a project for which I received a 2012 grant from the Magnum Foundation; the first time they have given it to an artist that is not a photojournalist. I will also be in Labrador finishing up work for a show at the Addison Gallery for American Art in the fall with Wendy Ewald. 


My show at Clark Gallery near Boston opens this weekend. Come if you can. Here are the details: http://www.clarkgallery.com. 


 I'm watching the movie Pina in the background as I write this and she just said, "Dance, dance... otherwise we are lost." That seems like a good note to end on. 


 -Eric 


 Pick up the upcoming issue and marvel at Eric Gottesman's photography.

Contributor Spotlight: Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Return to Image

There is something rewarding, intoxicating, liberating, and most of all, humbling, when one immerses oneself totally in a piece of art created by the masters. I find it easier to do so when it comes to a painting or a photograph than say, a novella or a play. For a long time, I tried hard to locate a “common language” shared by word and image. What was Picasso thinking of when he stenciled letters and words onto his Cubist paintings, or made collages with fragments of newspaper cuttings? The late American artist Cy Twombly once scribbled, “The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness which ideas can never claim.” An image is an act, a presence, an experience. Fraught with dialectics, logic, theory and even ideology, words often strike me as more vulnerable, abstract and at times, unreliable. I remember my past struggles of putting down in black and white the haunting experience of a photograph or a painting, only to realize that each step I put forth in writing is another step backward. None of what I have written could break through the limits of being either illustrative or derivative. Certain things are best left unsaid.

Recently, I read that one of my favorite photographers, Dorothea Lange, kept on her bulletin board for many years a wisdom from seventeenth-century thinker Francis Bacon: “The contemplation of things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confession, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.” Paintings and photographs calm my monkey mind and quiet my imagination. Stopping in front of an image, I learn to allow myself to be transported into a time and space that isn't mine, but of the image. In a way, paintings and photographs teach me how to meditate: the vita contemplativa.

 I grew up with Bonnard's breakfast table and Vermeer's windows, and as a teenager, I was absorbed by Joan Mitchell's highly emotional splatter of colors on those expansive canvases. While I was privileged to be able to see most of Bonnard and Vermeer in different museums and galleries, I never had the chance to do so with Joan Mitchell's paintings — not until two autumns ago in Giverny. I went to the exhibition on its last day, and was among the last visitors. For a while, I lingered before the twenty-six-foot-wide Edrita Fried. I wasn't thinking of anything. I just wanted to spend some time with her tumultuous blue.

I am not gifted at long emails or laconic postcards. However, I often can't resist the impulse to send my friends postcard prints of paintings or photographs I have seen in person. Just an address and a stamp, no word required. Right after the Joan Mitchell exhibition, I bought a postcard of Edrita Fried and sent it to an old friend in New York. I wrote nothing, and expected no word in return. Two months later, a postcard of Diane Arbus' Castle in Disneyland arrived in my mailbox. Just my address and a stamp. No word was required.

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Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in English, French and Chinese. She graduated from Columbia University and New York University before returning to Europe to receive her Ph.D. from Paris IV-Sorbonne. Her book of poetry, Water the Moon (Marick, 2010) is an Honorable Mention for the 2011 Eric Hoffer Book Award. Translations include Ghérasim Luca, Auxeméry, Bai Hua, Yu Xiang, Hai Zi, Lan Lan, Yi Lu, etc. Co-editor of Cerise Press, she co-directs Vif éditions, an independent French publishing house in Paris. Also a zheng concertist, she has performed worldwide.

Contributor Spotlight: Jeremy Allan Hawkins

It's a sunny morning where I live in Alsace. I'm drinking black tea, I'm listening to the French mostly not going to church, and I will say nothing about my poems (not even the one in HFR #48).

The poems do enough talking in my place. Most days, I have a strong distaste for overuse of the suffix –esque. It stands as a replacement for –like, sounding more French and therefore seeming more sophisticated. But it is neither. People add this tailpiece to names and nouns in order to make ambiguous adjectives of them and avoid using a strong verb. You might say I DISPLAY influences from the work of Carolyn Forché, but never that I am Forché-esque! The French themselves would never accept this, if for no other reason than because the sound has no natural musical rhythm; the reason arabesque works is due to the liaison between the b and the e. Vowel to vowel is horrendous, so don't use –esque as a suffix. Unless you're into ad-hoc diphthongs.

Kafkaesque is the one notable exception, as one discovers waiting in the interminable lines of the French bureaucracy—the meaning of kafkaesque fits the irritating nature of its sound.

Last winter I joked to my friend Christophe that I had discovered the secret to French philosophy: the climate encouraged people to stay indoors most of the year, thinking, analyzing, and arguing with each other. He did not think this was funny. He sought a graceful retort.

My friend David tells me that beginning with the weather is one of his poetry faux-pas. I see his point. It is no longer a sunny morning: French rain has ruined a French afternoon.

I believe in a generosity of criticism. Yes, criticism can be positive: a noting of strengths, praise of merit, and admiration where due. In another sense, it can be the free and bountiful giving of criticism in general. I think it a point of respect and admiration to engage with a person's work honestly, directly, and without pandering. I will work with your work, and that is how best I can serve you.

So I am now ready to tell you that if you need to tell me that something is in your poem, it is not there. Tell that to yourself.

The French do not want you to critique their food. If they ask how you like the food, they want you to say that you love it. You are allowed to coo. Under no circumstances should you say that while French cuisine is excellent, you sometimes miss cooking that is less limited to variations on salt and fat.

When people talk about France, they often talk about themselves. They say "the French this" and "in France that," while simply airing their personal philosophies, their joys, regrets, and manners of perversion. This is even true about the French themselves—proclaiming about their nation or their culture or history, they are usually writing an obtuse autobiography. This is very much the same as when people talk about what is poetry, or what is a poem.

It is a cold, clear evening. Here in France, people are falling out of love. You are too.
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Jeremy Allan Hawkins was born in New York City, is an alumnus of the US Fulbright program, and currently teaches at the University of Strasbourg. He has recent work appearing or forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Salamander, Tin House, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among others. He is more upset than he expected by the death of Christopher Logue. 

Contributor Spotlight: Lesley Wheeler

Dead Cats, Quince Jelly, and the Rolling Stones

All the synthesized sentiment at this time of year used to irritate me, but right now it’s too resonant, despite some intellectual resistance. That’s probably why I’m most struck, in this fall/winter issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review, by poems that riff on nostalgia. “I have this memory and it’s really poignant to me”: there’s a whole lyric subgenre that can be summed up this way. Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” for instance, or Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” and half the British Romantic canon.

Most of the poems in the new issue are not about memory; instead, there’s a lot of eros plus an assortment of meditations on apocalypse and other nightmare worlds. Joe Betz, however, is playing my song. Like Hayden, he remembers a parent. In “Portage, Indiana,” Betz describes “my mother…holding a cat and crying. / It thawed in the sink like a package of pulled pork left over from October.” I’m impressed that he’s written about a weeping mother AND someone’s dead pet without being the slightest bit mawkish. All the consonance in the second line I quoted is key—the p’s and k’s make the voice a little harsher, on the edge of wry. Betz sees how his mother’s failed resuscitation of the cryogenic kitty is nasty and crazy, and the speaker distances himself from it by emphasizing the act of remembering. He turns the temperature down without being ironic, though. If you loop back to the beginning you see his essential pose: “I want to say something profound / but have my fists deep in coat pockets and can’t make the appropriate gesture.” That is, I can’t or won’t tell you outright what this memory means but I can make you share my helpless sympathy.

The title of Taylor Mali’s memory poem tells you that his poignant recollection is more like Bishop’s: “The Moment I Looked Around the World and Realized it Was Not Me.” You are an I, / you are a Taylor, / you are one of them. The Jan Wagner poem translated by Chenxin Jiang, “Quince Pie,” is improvising on a similar tune. His emblems of memory are jars of quince jelly, still glowing in remembrance.

My “Concentric Grooves” (you knew I would get to my own memories eventually, didn’t you?) is most like the latter in its attempt to collapse time, to emphasize the persistence of what seems lost. My current writing project has me thinking about signals, communication, and reception, searching for metaphors that suggest how poems and readers interact. The sonnet in this issue is from a short series about listening to music as a teenager. Again, I suspect sound effects help, to whatever extent this poem succeeds; “Concentric Grooves” uses pararhyme but there’s lots of internal rhyme and alliteration too. I was aiming at the mind’s ear, wanting my words to catch there like a scrap of music. My memory-emblems are record albums. They work like Wagner’s quince jelly, preserving something ephemeral and then becoming delicious in their own right. Poems can be both records and talismans, too, although there’s no exact recipe for making the flavors work.

My family changed in 2011 and continues to change rapidly, which explains why I’m more vulnerable than usual to the manipulations of advertisers and bad Christmas carols. Poems such as Betz’s, though, are full of feeling, without being either heartwarming or freezer-burnt. And some bracing weather helps when you’re queasy from leftovers.
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Lesley Wheeler is the author of Heterotopia, Heathen, and other books; her poetry appears in journals such as Slate, Poetry, and 32 Poems. She recently returned from a Fulbright Fellowship in Wellington, New Zealand to Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where she is the Henry S. Fox Professor of English. She blogs on poetry and community at http://thecavethehive.wordpress.com/.

Contributor Spotlight: John A. Nieves

John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Indiana Review, Southern Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, New York Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Cincinnati Review. He won the 2011 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and the 2010 Southeast Review AWP Short Poetry contest. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing from USF in 2006. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri. His poem, “One Booth Over,” appears in HFR #49.

Culture as Curio Cabinet

I noticed shortly after having my poem, “One Booth Over,” accepted for HFR #49, that the call for submissions for HFR #50 was focused on the idea of “artifact.” I was delighted. In fact, I have been asking myself many of the questions the call for submissions asks. I am interested in the power places, objects, events and phrases have to create both personal and communal mythos. Earlier this year, I finished my first manuscript and began to shop it in earnest. This allowed me to imagine a new project. I began to think of the places I have traveled (I have been to every state and quite a few countries) and lived (New York, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri). The first thing that struck me was the many different ways people use the word work. This spawned a series of fifteen poems interrogating the different ways work works and means. From that, I found snippets of folk lore and urban legend that I found interesting to connect with. I began to retell or inhabit tales I have heard. “One Booth Over” is such a retelling. In my new project, I am essentially creating a curio cabinet of whens and wheres and the some of the things that make them distinctive. While many fine poets and theorists have written about the responsibility of travel writing, I think Cynthia Hoffman’s Sightseer handles it as well as anyone has. I tried to learn from her. I don’t populate the poems much with anyone but myself and maybe a character in a tale. That way, even the narrative moments can retain a lyric feel through unstable deixis.

In “One Booth Over,” I recount an actual incident that occurred in a truck stop. I don’t situate it because I think I am interested in being able to strike a chord with anyone who could understand this bit of lore as theirs. I attempt to create a speaker that is both peeved and captivated and a tale teller that is both insistent and incessant. The man speaking of dead birds finds his tale so important to tell, that he results to pantomime when the setting becomes too noisy to continue. His dedication, even if his telling is invasive, reaches the speaker deeply enough that he feels the need to repeat it. Here, the speaker’s dismissive tone contradicts itself in the fact of the poem itself—in his retelling. Like artifact, it is nearly impossible to detect which shreds of life will gather up meaning. We rarely know what our most meaningful memories will be until they have slithered past. I hope to fill my curio cabinet project with moments, objects and places that mean in unexpected ways, that role out like a time-space road map that interrogates historiographical, social and geographical strata—that digs for some truths about myself and hopefully the world around me. In the poems I try to invite the readers to tell the story with me instead of simply watching it be told. I believe, as Mikhail Bakhtin does, that “Every piece of literature faces out.” So does every piece of archaeology. The dug up nugget only means if some one is curios enough to consider it—to wonder what it could be trying to tell them.

Here are a few of his other poems featured around the net: Wolfpeach, Through Ends of Autumn, Three Poems, Storm Windows (Imago), and Backyard.

The Winning Photos Are...

We asked you to send us photos to go along with the story "Goodbye, My Chickens, Goodbye" by Anne Earney, and you answered. The winning photos are below. But we need more! Send us photos, music, and ideas! See here for submission details. The best photos will be turned into a loving montage for the story and displayed on YouTube, and if your photo makes the cut (chances are pretty good), you get a free copy of issue #49!

Contributor Spotlight: Andrea Gregovich and Vladimir Kozlov

Vladimir Kozlov's story “1987” appears in HFR #49. His translator Andrea Gregovich asked him some questions in hopes of shedding some light on some of the cool Soviet-era nuances in the story.

Andrea: This is one of my favorite stories of yours because the young adolescent characters do so many of the things I did when I was in junior high. Just like them, I pierced extra holes in my ears with safety pins, shaved the sides of my head, wrote band names on my denim jacket with a permanent marker, and passed around controversial music like the Sex Pistols on bootleg cassettes. Are you as surprised as I am to discover some of these childhood parallels in our two countries? The United States and the Soviet Union were so different in the eighties, and yet I wonder – what might we have actually had in common?

Vladimir: Yes, I am quite surprised. But, on the other hand, it is sort of proof to me that political systems and ideology don’t mean that much to teenagers. There are much more important things in their lives, like their favorite music, youth rebellion and defiance of authority, and those things turn out to be universal. And although a day-to-day life of an American teenager in the 1980's was inevitably much different from that of a Soviet teenager of the same era, they had much more in common than anyone could think they would. The Soviet government could try to keep people behind the “iron curtain” as long as it could, but it couldn’t control people’s desires, interests and feelings.

Andrea: “1987” opens with a brawl downtown in the Belarusian city of Mogilev, in which the local tough guys take on a bunch of visiting punks who have, oddly enough, come to town to commemorate Hitler's birthday. Where would these guys have come from? Why did they choose Mogilev for their Hitler Day gathering? Besides getting into fights, how else would these guys have celebrated Hitler?

The 1980's was a very confused period for Soviet youths when it came to subcultures and their respective ideologies. For years, we were pretty much isolated from the rest of the world, we didn’t know much about who punks or hippies were, and when some information began to arrive with Gorbachev’s “openness” policies, it was in bits and pieces. Many got quite confused. Very few people understood who punks were and what their subculture was about, including some of those who called themselves “punks.” I’m not sure those guys who came to Mogilev to commemorate Hitler’s birthday were actually punks – they must have been just confused types who thought it was cool to be “punks” and celebrate Hitler and do whatever they could to piss off the authorities. Maybe they came from Leningrad or Moscow where authorities were already prepared to crack down on such a gathering. Why Mogilev? It was relatively close, train tickets were cheap at the time, so why not go to that provincial city and march on the central street, shouting “Sieg Heil” and extending arms in a Nazi salute? There were some Nazi gatherings in Moscow in the early 1980's. Very little is known about who took part and what it was about because the Soviet authorities were very secretive about things like that, which they viewed as “anti-Soviet” rallies. Quite recently, I came across an interesting theory explaining those Nazi activities in the 1980's. Under that theory, some youths saw the Soviet system lie about so many things that they believed it lied about Hitler and the whole Nazi thing, too, and in reality Hitler could have not been that bad. That’s how confused people got.

Andrea: Lenka, a nonconformist, confrontational character in this story, is diagnosed with what I've translated as “mental deviance”, and is committed to a mental institute. Is Lenka legitimately troubled, or was this psychiatric diagnosis invented as a way to deal with troublemakers? How long would a girl like Lenka have spent institutionalized in the Soviet Union in 1987, and what would her experience have been like?

Vladimir: I don’t see any “mental” problems in her. True, she is a troublemaker, she hates school and she hates her parents but she doesn’t suffer from anything that a mental institution could cure. Under the Soviet system, lots of people, including dissidents and protesters against the regime, were committed to mental institutions under various kinds of invented diagnoses. But what is especially sad about Lenka’s case is that her own parents thought she was troubled and sent her to the institution because they were unable to deal with her. Under the bad scenario she would have spent a few weeks institutionalized and that would have been pretty horrible. Under the good scenario, the doctors would have released her after a few days of checks, finding no real mental problems – she was quite young and apparently harmless.

Andrea: You're rather critical of the Soviet school system in this and other stories, as well as in your novel USSR. Even the “good” kids are skeptical about the value of grades, brazenly copy each other's work, and often spend their time in class passing around magazines and drawing pictures rather than paying attention to their lessons. The students in your stories are also constantly reminded that conforming to the collective is far more important than their development as individuals. Was there value in your own school experience beneath all the institutional bullshit? Or did you find, like many of your characters, that life offers more meaningful education than school?

Vladimir: I can absolutely identify with my characters’ skepticism about the Soviet school system in the 1980's. By then, the system, which had never been good, was just deteriorating. There were other things that made school seem pointless. Like, in the late Soviet era, education wasn’t really valued, people with university degrees had boring and uninteresting jobs and were paid less than blue-color workers. Plus, that bullshit about the Communist ideology, which teachers were supposed to feed to their students. But it was pretty clear that they didn’t believe in it themselves, it was all hypocrisy. The Soviet-era school system was meant to be a machine aimed at suppressing individuals and turning them into obedient citizens eager to do what they are told. But it didn’t work that way – at least, in the 1980's, when the Soviet empire was already in agony. The “good” kids hated the system because it was pointless and stupid, the “bad” kids hated it because it tried to coerce them to do things they didn’t want to. One other thing was the disparity between what students were expected to learn and what they actually learned. Still, it wouldn’t be fair to say that there was no value at all in my school experience. There was some specific knowledge in individual subjects that I gained and later used to enter university. But, certainly, what I learned in real life was much more meaningful and useful.
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Andrea Gregovich is a writer and translator living in Anchorage, Alaska; Vladimir lives in Moscow and is a journalist, novelist, and cultural critic. Andrea's translation of Vladimir's story “Drill and Song Day” appeared in AGNI Review and Rasskazy: New Fiction From a New Russia, and she is almost finished translating his novel USSR.

Ralph Waldo Eggerson Stars in "Goodbye My Chickens, Goodbye."

The deadline for the photo competition is coming up fast, so we thought we'd give you all some inspiration. Ralph Waldo Eggerson agreed to model for us in an example of a photo you might come up with for the video for "Goodbye My Chickens, Goodbye" by Anne Earney. Of course, if you want to submit something other than photos (like drawings, flash images, or music clips) that would be extremely welcome.

Here's the deal. Send us any photograph that you feel relates to the story. Anything at all! We'll choose our favorites and string them together for a fabulous video worthy of killing a radio star. We'll gladly accept your photos through email (hfr@asu.edu). Be sure to include your name and address. The deadline is NOVEMBER 30th!

Photo Contest!

Hello All!

You may remember our plea from a few weeks back asking for photos for our next HFR video project. We've decided to hold a photo contest! Those whose photos are chosen for the video will receive a copy of the new HFR #49!!

For this video project, we've decided on "Goodbye, My Chickens, Goodbye" by Anne Earney, in HFR #48. Here's the deal. Send us any photograph that you feel relates to the story. Anything at all! We'll choose our favorites and string them together for a fabulous video worthy of killing a radio star. We'll gladly accept your photos through email (hfr@asu.edu). Be sure to include your name and address. The deadline is NOVEMBER 30th!

Video Project Complete

Hello all,

We've finished the first video of the blog video project. You might recall us asking for your help by sending in images, sound clips, and suggestions for a video based on the prose poem "Modern Medicine" by Michael Brooks Cryer in HFR #48. This is the result. We look forward to working on the next one. (Click here to watch the video)

Enjoy!

Modern Medicine

-for JA

To be of help to its contemporaries, an artificial heart learned to sing during the last desperate moments before a transplant operation. The heart explained, before being placed into the human's chest, why fake hearts can sing and real hearts can only pump blood. "Real hearts have trouble singing because of their muscles don't form good acoustics. Artificial hearts, like myself, made of plastic and exotic metals, nurture sound like a cathedral or the Albert Hall. I think all fake organs should sing, especially the shy ones." A beautifully crafted pseudo-kidney sat at the back of the operating room listening to this. It had heard earlier that day a chorus of hearts practicing "America the Beautiful" in a utility closet. The kidney turned to the organ at its left and said, "This is ridiculous. I can sing. Listen to this." The testicle was astounded the kidney could talk, let alone carry a tune, so it threw itself into a bedpan and took a nap. "Will somebody shut that heart up," an anonymous organ pleaded. "Good god!" a small intestine exclaimed as a large one clapped. "I heard the eyes are learning to juggle," whispered a pancreas. "America, America..." sang the hearts.

For our next project, we've decided on "Goodbye, My Chickens, Goodbye" by Anne Earney, also in HFR #48. It came down to either "Surfer Girl," or "Goodbye, My Chickens, Goodbye," and we decided that chickens are easier to find and photograph than oceans are. However, if anyone has any other suggestions as to which story or poem we should turn into a video next, we'll gladly accept your ideas through email (hfr@asu.edu).

Thanks to The Review Review for This Write-Up!

We're happy to accept "often odd, but always interesting" and--from their weekly newsletter-- "ever-surprising, ever-delightful" from the folks at The Review Review. Check out the full interview of issue #48 here.

And, if you don't already, follow Becky Tuch and the gang through their various social media outlets. In addition to publishing fine lit journal reviews (cough, cough) they're a great resource for publishing tips, interviews, and other things lit journal.

Contributor Spotlight: Tara L. Masih

How a Long Story Became a Short One

I’m often asked if I know—when I am ready to write a story—if it will be a flash fiction piece or a longer one. The answer is, in general, I do know ahead of time. I know that I have just enough of an idea to fill a page, or much more to say that will take up many pages. But that’s not always the case, as in the writing of “The Strongest Man in the World,” my flash piece that appeared in HFR #48.

I can never anticipate what will grab me and hold my attention enough to make me find time in my hectic life to explore it in story form. But news headlines often inspire me. When I saw the online headline about the death of Joseph Rollino, dubbed The Strongest Man in the World by some, I read on. And was intrigued. The setting, his hometown of Brooklyn. The accident, caused by a woman whose car horn malfunctioned. I loved the poignancy of the piece, and imagined the neighborhood congregating around the tragic scene in the middle of the road that day. And the irony of the century-old Strong Man being felled, not by poor health, but by technology, so to speak, and human error.

So, I delved into the research on this project. I read many books as background history, rented videos about Coney Island, and took copious notes, with every intention of having the piece be a long one.
Then I sat down to write it. And nothing happened. That’s one of the pitfalls of being a writer. You just never know if you have the story in you, in reality; if it will come out, after all, on the page. I just sat there with all these notes surrounding me, and got nothing. So, I walked away from it for a few days, and gradually, I began to realize I wanted to tell the point of view of the woman who caused the accident, as that seemed to me to be a second tragedy. And I am always conscious of the caregivers who have to come in on an accident scene, and experience on a daily basis what many of us may experience only once or twice in our lives.

And I came to the sad conclusion that I had to throw out most of my research. And that for me the story, as in many of the flashes I write, was contained within just a few intense moments. Another writer could choose to stretch out those moments into 20 pages, but my instinct is to condense.

So, condense I did. And condensed again. And again.

And in the end, I didn’t miss what I left out, but all the research I did made its way into the characters and into the tiny, unique, informed details that make a flash stand out. And I was happy with what remained. My tiny tribute to the legend of Mighty Joe, and an era long gone.

"We Show What We Have Learned" in Best American Nonrequired Reading

Our wait is over! Behold The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, the new home for Clare Beams' story "We Show What We Have Learned," which first appeared in HFR #46. We're so happy for Clare, who found a copy of the book with her name inside in her local Barnes and Noble, celebrity-like. I like to picture her falling to her knees and weeping, but I can't confirm that actually happened. Something close happened to me when I first read her amazing story, though. Go out and get it. It'll blow you away.

Place in Poetry I

Herein lies the first of a short series of conversations on the notion of place and its affair with writing. I will be talking with a different poet about their relationship to place in each post. My name is Anthony Cinquepalmi, and I will be your host. This is post one—

with Beckian Fritz Goldberg

This summer I visited California after two months of days of watching Netflix and intentionally slothing around my house. I wrote a few sonnets in June. I watched full seasons of five TV shows. I'm not sure if that's disparity or if those activities make sense together. Either way, I had hoped a relatively thoughtless trip to some other place would fix the congestion I felt hiding inside from the desert. Well, in terms of writing, the trip made me feel useless. I had nothing to say about the shore, the smell of the shore's air, etc. Nor the trees, the sand, the people under the trees in the sand. Nothing.

I have wondered why travelling to a 'new' place did not inspire me. My first thought: "Surely, inspiration takes more time! You are spoiled and should have more patience!" That may be true, but I believe this account points to the strange idea of PLACE and its relationship to writing. Well, how does it figure into writing? Are we talking about place as something physical: the landscape, the front porch, the hallowed writing desk in front of the sunned window, the shade under the favorite big tree? Or, more importantly, the place in the mind a poet goes to each time they write, the images a poem lives in—that quiet fever of translation from within the mind to the outside, the page? Or there’s a poet's place in society and how that informs their writing Even further, what about a poet's place in something like POETRY?

I'm not going to be able to answer these questions—I do not want to. Though I do want to talk about their importance in being questions at all, and as Rainer Maria Rilke might have done, live in them.

I want to go about this by talking to poets who have been poets longer than I have, who have lived in & traveled to & written from various places. With that in mind, I began the first discussion.

§

I spoke to Beckian Fritz Goldberg the other day, and I'd say the conversation surprised us both—how sweeping and huge the idea of place is, and how little it's talked about in terms of poetry. Here are some locus-related facts: Beckian spent the first five years of her life in the Midwest before moving to the desert. Her first three books were "written from childhood," specifically those formative five years in Wisconsin. Maybe that is a testament to how spongy the infant mind is—or a testament to the impact of Midwestern landscape, its images, its snow…. Having grown up in Illinois, I felt a kinship in our discussion of that landscape. I realized that as of late I had also been writing from childhood, reproducing images of snow around the shed in my backyard. I don't usually think about why certain images enter the poem. They find their way in. It’s something that just happens. But I want to ask why am I returning to my childhood landscape when I've spent eight years in another place? The desert is a different animal.

"The desert is not a nurturing landscape. You have to earn it…You have to coax it out—it doesn't happen to you like New York happens to you."

Beckian has coaxed it out. She spoke to me about the two acres of desert her house sits on in Carefree, AZ, and about sitting in her backyard around dusk this summer. The heat creates a "vacuum" that quiets down as the sun sets, a sense of solitude in the landscape—Black Mountain, Sentinel Rock, stacks of boulders, coyotes, and jumping cholla cactus. It's quiet out there. Stars are visible. It's a landscape that informs more and more when treated with patience. And it's one Beckian has gravitated towards over time—her sense of place has changed, "It's fluid." In that regard, there's a sort of 'living' element involved in this. After a while a place might imprint upon a poet, and therein begins the sort of relationship Beckian has come to know with the desert: "I don't like it that much, that's just the way it is."

She has this great poem in the upcoming 49th issue of HFR, "Birds of Darkness Inhabit the Night, Stars on Their Foreheads," which plays into this place conversation and reminds me of how I spent most of the summer:—complete indolence—“I pissed the day away." The poem throws the reader a sense of scale with which one can size up their place on this earth while looking at images of the earth on a screen. It's fun. It’s a poem that was born from Beckian's perpetual courtship of the desert.

I can draw from our conversation that poets construct different relationships with place, not by choice, but by something outside of choice, a gravity. Some are nomadic: they can travel and write books rooted in one place before moving on to another. Still others are like Beckian. They like to nest, to wait and coax the landscape out, or relish awhile in its silence. And still, there are probably variants within this simple division. I'm wondering whether or not these orientations become fixed, ingrained within the writer to the extent that wherever a poet is physically, he or she writes from one place (the idea of a place in the mind). Or if one's relationship to place changes over a life, with some landscapes & images holding on stronger than others. Because they want to talk to us. Because we need them to.

"As a writer you have to be able to divorce yourself from where you are."

I think this is the most salient point in our conversation. A poet's task is one of communication, regardless of the particular variant of place-relationship to which a poet subscribes. We agreed that instead of trying to reach some conclusive point in this dialogue, it would be better to say I don't know and talk about dystopia films, Bobbie the bobcat (who makes a cameo in her poem), and physics:

A —Physics is so weird.

B —Yeah. If I had a brain I'd be a physicist. But I don't so I'm a poet.

A —(laughs) You know I'm going to have to quote that when I write this up.

B —(laughs) Yeah, that's okay, the poets will like that one.

Many Thanks For LitStack's Review of HFR Issue 48 Spring/Summer

HFR is very proud to thank Jennifer M. Kaufman, of LitStack, for her kind review of the latest HFR issue. In looking at the beautiful, but desolate and alien, cover of the issue, Jennifer writes that: "the journal itself (published twice-yearly by The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University) is densely and vibrantly packed with fiction, poetry, and photographs from a remarkably international list of contributors."

When it came to the review of individual works Jennifer writes: "with so many excellent pieces it would be impossible to do justice to each and every one, and of course with such a range, they will each resonate differently for different readers. There were a few – particularly from the women contributors – that I found especially exciting."

Some of the women contributors showcased within the review were: S.E. Smith, Anne Valente, Naomi Benaron, Chidelia Edochie, Anna Piwkowska and Diya Chaudhuri.

The full review can be found here.

A Most Remarkable Video Project: We Need Your Help!

A new project is afoot at HFR, and we need your participation! We're determined to bring the latest issue to life in a new and exciting way. You've perhaps heard of music videos? You've heard—from us—about Motion Poems, and now we've got it into our heads to make our own kind of music-video-poetry, inspired by work in our current issue and with your help.

Here's the first poem chosen for the project, "Modern Medicine" by Michael Brooks Cryer:

Modern Medicine
-for JA

To be of help to its contemporaries, an artificial heart learned to sing during the last desperate moments before a transplant operation. The heart explained, before being placed into the human's chest, why fake hearts can sing and real hearts can only pump blood. "Real hearts have trouble singing because their muscles don't form good acoustics. Artificial hearts, like myself, made of plastic and exotic metals, nurture sound like a cathedral or the Albert Hall. I think all fake organs should sing, especially the shy ones." A beautifully crafted pseudo-kidney sat at the back of the operating room listening to this. It had heard earlier that day a chorus of hearts practicing "America the Beautiful" in a utility closet. The kidney turned to the organ at its left and said, "This is ridiculous. I can sing. Listen to this." The testicle was astounded the kidney could talk, let alone carry a tune, so it threw itself into a bedpan and took a nap. "Will somebody shut that heart up," an anonymous organ pleaded. "Good god!" a small intestine exclaimed as a large on clapped. "I heard the eyes are learning to juggle," whispered a pancreas. "America, America..." sang the hearts.

We'd like YOU to send photographs, sound bites, drawings, or music either inspired by this poem or that somehow speaks to the poem. Your favorite bedpan? Awesome. Your patriot rendition of "America, America"? Yes, please. Grab your camera, and get snapping! Think you know what a signing heart sounds like? Sing it!

Send these as mp3, jpg or tif files to HFR@asu.edu or through Twitter to @haydensferryrev. Sound bites should be under a minute, and images should be saved for the web (72 dpi). The deadline for your submissions is September 16, and we can't wait!

We'll choose our favorite images and sounds and create a lovingly curated mini-movie for you to view. We're certain many more hearts will be singing by the end of this.