Donhiser, Fiona
Hourglass by Clare Beams
Found in Willow Springs 68
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A TRANSFORMATIONAL EDUCATION, the newspaper ad had promised, so we'd come to the Gilchrist School, which looked like a 19th century invalids' home. With its damp-streaked stone and clinging pine trees, it seemed ideal for transformations, a place where a person could go romantically, molderingly mad. Here no one would find me until I was done. For the first twenty minutes of my interview, Mr. Pax, the headmaster, poured words upon our heads and seemed to require none from me. I had only to sit while he spoke of the crimes of modern education, the importance of avoiding the craze of the moment and what he called "the great, all-too-often meaningless noise of exhibition," how he thought of teaching as a process of shaping, honing, turning each young woman into the best possible version of herself. My mother, who had never been anything but her own best version, smiled winsomely and told him, "We would just lost to see Melody blossom, that's all." Yes, yes, Mr. Pax said.
But then he inclined his great shining white-ringed head toward me and said, "Well, Melody! You've been quiet, for a person whose name heralds such mellifluousness! Please, tell me something about yourself. What activities do you most enjoy?"
A pause. Then, "Go on, Melly," my mother said, for all the world as if she expected me to rise to the occasion, except there was a little too much brightness in her voice. Had she really expected it, of course—had I ever shown any signs of such a capacity—we would not have been here.
I dropped my eyes to the carpet and scoured my days for things I could speak of safely. School, which I hated. Television, which I knew better than to talk about here. Sleeping, which I liked, except when it ended. Drawing, a loose word for what I did sometimes, tattooing pages of computer paper in rhythmic, soothing swirls of ink. Reading Nancy Drew mysteries, sticking and unsticking the pads of my fingers to their bright yellow, plasticky covers until I knew they were tapestried in whole invisible galaxies of my fingerprints. I never had anything to say about them when I finished them.
"Reading," I told Mr. Pax. The word came out scratchy and prematurely old. I hadn't talked much in the car.
"Superb!" He clapped, actually clapped, his hands. "And what are some of your favorite books?"
Somehow I had failed to foresee this, though the floor-to-ceiling shelves on the wall behind Mr. Pax were lined and lined and lined with books like dull, uneven teeth. If I pretended to have read something impressive, Mr. Pax would certainly roll his chair over to the shelf and pull it out, set it right down on the desk between us for discussion. I could see myself sputtering and flecking the dusty damning rectangle of the book with spittle while my parents sagged.
"Mysteries," I said. "Mostly."
I waited for Mr. Pax's face to fall or flush with anger, for him to throw up his hands and cry, This! This I cannot transform! Instead he gave me a wide, warm illustration of a smile. "Ah, the pleasures of the whodunnit," he said. "The neatness of the ending, a satisfaction that all too frequently evades us in life. You know what I've found to be true, Melody? A taste for mysteries is often the sign of a truly orderly mind."
My mind is truly orderly, I thought, cheeks reddening with a hope and gratitude that dizzied me because I had been so unprepared for them. And next: If this man wants to try to change me, I will let him.
WE HAD DRIVEN to Gilchrist intending only to have a prospective-student visit, but after the interview my parents decided to leave me there that very afternoon, before I had a chance to lose something or fail to follow through on some simple instruction and force Mr. Pax to reconsider his assessment of me.
"You don't have to stay forever, of course. Let's just see how things work out," my mother told me at the school's front doors, where my father had already collected his umbrella. "We'll send your clothes and things straight away," she said. She leaned in to kiss me, leaving behind a crisp little cloud of her perfume. I wanted them to go—I wanted Gilchrist to begin on me—but there was something about the idea of my mother sorting through my clothes and boxing them up, my father driving to the post office with them in the trunk of his car, that made me feel as if I had died somewhere alone the way without noticing and would now be expunged. My throat began to close with tears. I told myself that the next time they saw me, I would be so polished I would hurt their eyes.
"I have tons of clothes she can borrow until her stuff gets here," said my new roommate, a girl named Molly Briggs, in a cheerful defiance of the fact that nothing she would own could possibly fit me.
"Well thank you, Molly, that's very nice," my mother said. My father gripped my shoulder. I knew he tried to put things he couldn't say into that grip.
And then the door banged shut behind them and they were gone.
"It's amazing here," Molly said as she led me to the dormitory wing. "You'll see." She swung a door open into a small square of a room, kindly pretending not to notice that I was crying. "I'm super excited," she said. "I figured I'd get a roommate eventually. I was the only one with nobody. Odd number." I went in a sat on one of the desk chairs, trying to whisk my eyes dry with soggy fingertips. "Let's find you a dress for dinner," Molly said.
"That's okay," I said thickly.
Molly surveyed me. "We all wear dresses here, though."
"All the time?"
"Mr. Pax says how you look is the first impression you make on the world." She was in the closet now, pushing hangers aside with a brisk metal sound like the opening of a shower curtain. "And the easiest part to control."
I glanced down at my lumpish, besweatered form. My experience held no support for that idea.
"Here's the one I was looking for," Molly said.
The dress was black and had a forgiving enough stretch to contain me. I sweated through it almost immediately at the armpits, but the color didn't show. Dresses, I thought, as I pulled at its hem. We all wear dresses here.
THE HATS I LEARNED ABOUT a few days later, when I tried to take my copy of The Mystery of the Lilac Inn outside for lunch. This was allowed: lunch and dinner were served on gray metal trays that you could take wherever you wanted to go. At lunch you just had to be back at the tables by half past twelve for Assembly. Routine was sacred at Gilchrist—the days were shaped to run in a smooth way that made your level of contentment mostly irrelevant—and so I felt unfairly accused when I looked up from the tricky balancing project of my tray and book and found Miss Caper in my path.
"Where are you off too? Outside?" she asked. tugging on the hat string tied beneath her chin, gazing at me from beneath the brim. The rapid fumbling of her fingers made her look even younger than usual, and always she looked young enough that the first time I'd seen her, standing before her blackboard full of notes on Tess of the D'Urbervilles on my first morning at Gilchrist, I thought she was a student.
"There's time still," I said. "Right?"
"Oh yes. Just—it's bright out there. Why don't you borrow this?" She'd succeeded in working the knot free and before I could respond she settled her hat on my head. It shaded my view of her. She was already moving off toward the faculty table, but I saw her stop and lean briefly over Molly, who looked in my direction and hurried toward me with a tube in her hand.
"Here," Molly said, squeezing something onto her fingers, and then she rubbed it—cold, cold—onto my face. Holding my tray the way I was, my hands couldn't stop her. "Sunscreen," she said. "We wear it when we got out in the daytime. Hats, too."
"Why?"
"The skin," Molly said, "should be like a beautiful blank page."
Outside, I sat under a tree. Nancy was about to figure out what was going on with the ghost, but I was having trouble paying attention. The paper of the book itself was distracting me, its even , frictionless fell beneath my skimming fingers. A caterpillar fell onto my lunch tray, into my salad dressing. I watched it writhe.
At twelve twenty-five I closed the book and carried everything back in to rejoin the thirteen other girls in my year at our table. I banged my knees as I took my seat, and they all turned in my direction, no particular expression on their faces, before settling again into elegant disinterest. I sat there feeling, as always in such moments, my mother's eyes on me.
Mr. Pax rose. Every day he made a speech to start Assembly. I had been listening as closely as I could to each of them, filing away as much as possible in the hopes that it would teach me how to become what everyone was trying to make me. I think that even without the effort I would have remembered whole sentences—he had that kind of voice, those kinds of words. To unlearn an old habit, I believe, takes more diligence than to learn a new one, he'd said to us yesterday. The day before: Remember that the true intellect requires so much energy to sustain that it has none left over to devote to display. It would not have occurred to any of us to equate his speeches themselves with the display of which he spoke. Though Mr. Pax strutted daily before us, shone, dripped words like syrup, everyone knew that this was not artifice. The artifice would have been to prevent himself from doing these things.
Mr. Pax centered himself at the front of the room, and turned to us. "Today, girls, I thought I might share with you a brief history of Assembly itself."
He waited while small conversations quieted. Molly swiveled toward him in her seat.
"When I came to Gilchrist, more years ago than I would care to disclose"—the faculty, lined behind him at their table, tittered softly—"I came armed with the belief that education is nothing less than the shaping of the soul. Thus, upon my arrival, I had to ask myself: These souls entrusted to me, what form ought they assume? What shape would best suit them? It was question neither asked nor answered lightly, but eventually, an answer did come. I realized that I wished to mold not future citizens of the world as it was, but of the world as it should be. For it is my belief that the world around us has lost the grace and purity it had in earlier times, girls. That does not, however, mean that you need to do so. It was—is—my deepest wish to prepare you to stand in loveliness before eyes that no longer see as they ought, to answer with eloquence the questions of those who may or may not be capable of appreciating what they hear. I believe this sort of deportment has value no matter how it is perceived. At the end of the day the world is not my concern. You are."
The skin on my arms prickled. I ran my fingertips lightly over the bumps, trying to settle them into blankness.
"In light of all of this, I consider Assembly a sort of training ground, if you will, for your lives to come. When you stand and make announcements—even if you are simply questing after lost items or marking the anniversaries of one another's birth—you are practicing being seen and heard. And it is my most cherished hope that you are also considering, deeply, how you wish to appear and to sound in those moments."
I scanned the two lines of girls at my table, the willowy form and smooth smooth faces, behind each of which was fluid voice at the ready. I knew just how I wished to appear and to sound. Any minute now I would understand how it was done.
ON A CRISP TUESDAY near the beginning of November, Miss Caper stood in a patch of sun at the front of the classroom and talked to us about Keats and negative capability. We watched her form our desks, which were arranged in a circle and which were the same as the desks at my old school, chairs barred to the tabletops to prevent the tiltings-back of unruly boys. Not a one of us, of course, would have been inclined to tip. Miss Caper wrote, "'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' 1819" on the board, rounding the letters prettily. Then she put down the calk and began to read to us in a low, thrilled voice: "Thou still unravished bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time. . ."
She read the whole thing, though we had also read it for homework, while we clicked our pens or wrote the title and date we already knew in our notebooks. When she finished she looked up and breathed deeply. "He was twenty-four when he wrote that," she said. I had been thinking for a couple days now that Miss Caper might be a little in love with Keats.
She asked us what we though the poem meant. I never volunteered at these time, since the potential cost of a wrong answer matter much more to me than the potential benefits of a right one. The other girls were not cruel—we were kept too busy for cruelty—but I didn't trust them. They mostly ignored me, even Molly, who often seemed oblivious of my presence, in a friendly way, while were actually speaking. I had not become the way they were. I tied my hair back into the right modest knot, and I wore the right things, the hats and the sunscreen, the dresses. But my skin had stayed freckled instead of going paper-blank. No new smooth voice had blossomed in my throat. And the dresses did nothing to make me look like the others, who filled their own with foreign undulating shapes.
Miss Caper called on Lila, who was talking about the imagery of the poem, which she really thought was just so powerful, when the bell ran. Lila stopped talking instantly. "'Eve of St. Agnes' for tomorrow!" Miss Caper told us, as we closed our books and began to file away from her. "Answer the questions at the end of the poem please."
"Melody," she said then, shocking me to stillness, "a moment?"
She leaned against the edge of her desk. I walked back and stopped, leaving a safe berth between us.
"Have a seat," she said, pulling one of the desks out of its circle, closer to her. I sat. "I've been asked to speak to you. You've been here over a month now."
Words rose within me, tasting of panic, please for more time and promises of improvement—but I knew that if I tried to release them they would only clog in my throat. I waited. Miss Caper's eyes flicked back and forth between mine, as if the right and left were delivering different messages to her and she were trying to decide which truly reflected my feelings.
"We think you're fitting in nicely. Really we do. You do remember what Mr. Pax says about the outside and the inside, though?"
I tried to call up the words, which I recognized from one of his recent speeches, maybe even yesterday's. Miss Caper gave me only a few seconds before filling in the answer herself. "He says that the outside should as nearly as possible match the quality of what's within. That way, we do everything in our power to give those whom we encounter the right expectations. So a beautiful person, like you, should do her best to look beautiful."
She paused again. "Melody," she said, and her voice suddenly had the same low thrum it had taken on when she'd recited the Keats poem, "how would you like to look a little more like a Gilchrist girl?"
Without waiting for an answer, she walked over and opened a closet I had never noticed in the corner of the room. From within it, she produced a hollow stiff shell, trailing long tentacular laces: a corset. There was flourish in her wrists as she held it out to me. A new form, right in her hands, ready for handing over.
AFTERWARD, I SWISHED MY WAY up the stairs, pausing every two to breathe, and into our room.
Molly had been reading on her bed. "Oh thank God," she said when she saw me. "I was getting so sick of having to get dressed in the bathroom. I don't know why they didn't just let me tell you. Miss Caper laced you up?"
I nodded. Miss Caper had, after turning away discreetly while I closed the front of the thing around myself. The pulling of the stays had hurt. I had not made any sound, though. I told myself I was having every faulty disappointing breath I had ever breathed squeezed out of me.
"Let me see." Molly stood and slid a hand down the back of my dress. She tested the stays with a practiced finger. "Not very tight," she said. "I'll do it better tomorrow. We can lace each other now. All year I've been having to knock on Marjorie and Kate's door and get of them to do me."
The next day at Assembly, as I ate with my back straight under the force of the lacing, which seemed to be pulling me together in entirely new ways, Mr. Pax stood and said, "Miss Caper tells me that the ninth grade has just completed its study of Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' A wonderful and wise poem: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty. . .'" He let his voice linger, "One of the truest, most beautiful lines ever written, perhaps. For our surroundings are so often ugly, girls. Why should we not strive for beauty and bettering where they are within our reach?"
His eyes brushed lovingly over us, then. I could have sworn that they paused for a special instant on me.
IT DID FEEL, AT FIRST, as if I were moving within a body I had strapped on. My torso was suddenly unbendable: a stiff column that I had to swivel my hips to move when I walked. I couldn't quite breathe in fully, either. But it's surprising how rarely a person needs to breathe to the very bottom of her lungs in a day. Everything they asked of us at Gilchrist—the essay writing, the graphing of functions, the discussing of literature, the announcing of one another's achievements at Assembly—could be accomplished while talking no more than refined sips of air. It was only when somebody worked herself up that there was trouble: the time that Marjorie had a tantrum over her essay grade in English, for instance, and went very red and then slumped to the floor. Miss Caper produced smelling salts from her desk drawer and stroked Marjorie's forehead while she came around. I watched from my own desk and breathed evenly through the whole thing.
There was some pain: a compressed feeling and a periodic but deep ache in the ribs. I took satisfaction in this. It seemed to me proof of payment. Quickly I came to feel, when I took my corset off to sleep at night, a disbelief that I had once walked around in that state, so unsharpened and unsupported, so greedy in my consumption of air and space. Our lacing-up in the mornings became a companionable thing between Molly and me. She was determined, much more determined than Miss Caper, hampered by gentleness, had been. One morning, after a couple of weeks, she finished pulling at me and then tugged me over, back first, to the full-length mirror on the inside of our door. "Look," she said. I peeked over my shoulder. "See that bump in the laces there? That's as tight as I used to be able to get them." I did see it, a rut of a place like where the lace of an often-worn shoe hits the bracket, easily an inch below where the know was now. Visible proof of what was being accomplished.
I turned back to her. "Tighter," I said.
"Tighter? Mel, it's already—"
"I want it tighter," I said. While she pulled, I closed my eyes to imagine the moment in which my mother would first see me again. Her face before me, her eyes widening at my new swell-dip-swell, her smile knocked out of carefulness.
Other changes came as my shape shifted. The other girls were still not exactly my friends, but I could feel the distinction between us blurring. Sometimes they would call me over in the dining room even if Molly wasn't with me. I wrote letters to my parents (we were big on old-fashioned letter writing at Gilchrist) in a chatty voice I honed with pride. "Math will never be my forte," I told them, "but we all have our limitations! Hope you enjoyed the weekend with the Bermans!" In classes, I now spoke occasionally. I had realized that the teachers were so generous that they would mostly spin a wrong answer right for you. Miss Caper seemed to have taken a particular shine to my reading voice. She called don me more than anyone else in the rotation. I read the Brownings, Tennyson:
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
"The Lady of Shalott's death," Miss Caper said, "is inescapable once she sees Lancelot, and then rises from her loom and looks to Camelot. Why is this, do you think?" she asks me. "What is the nature of the curse?"
"I guess," I said, "it's like she's supposed to be separate? Because of the weaving? So when she leaves she wrecks it?"
"Good," Miss Caper said.
Then she called on Melissa Clearwater to read "The Kraken." I let my hands drift for a moment to my waist, my habitual test, the patting-down of my dimensions. They were changed, they were definitely changed, and sometimes this brought comfort. Other times, the curve in my waist would feel too gradual beneath my palms, and I would press myself tight in fear. I was not yet changed enough. I would have to do better.
I found, with time, that the harder I tried to resist these tests—the more I tried to reassure myself that they weren't necessary, that of course my waist was becoming smaller and smaller with each day—the greater was my need for them.
One afternoon, a few months into my wearing of the corset, Mr. Pax almost ran into me in the hall. He had his head down, bulleting forth to something important. I sidestepped him at the last instant and wobbled, my balance threatened. He looked up in surprise, then smiled. "Excellent save!" he said, reaching out to steady my slipping books. "My apologies!" He leaned back to look at me more closely. "I must say, Melody," he told me, "that I hear wonderful things about you. I am very pleased."
He moved off down the hall and left me filled with such raucous joy that my heart rocketed and dappled my vision in shimmery patches, and I had to take very deliberate, measured breaths to steady it. For a moment, I felt sure of how far I had come.
THREE WEEKS BEFORE the beginning of spring recess, our poetry reading in English took a sudden turn. Miss Caper arrived bearing two stacks of brand new, slim volumes, which she passed around the room.
"Page thirty, please," she said. "This poem is by Su Tung P'o. It is called 'On a Painting by Wang the Clerk of Yen Ling.'"
She began to read: "The slender bamboo is like a hermit. / The simple flower is like a maiden. / The sparrow tilts on the branch. / A gust of rain sprinkles the flowers. . ." Her voice was still hesitant on the new stripped-down rhythms.
When she'd finished, we were quiet for a minute, trying to decide what to make of what had just happened. Finally, Molly raised her hand. "How is that a real poem, though?" she said. "Where's all the description? And the rhyme and everything?"
Miss Caper signed. "There is a very deep, modest kind of beauty in the poem we have just read, girls. It is a beauty that stems from rendering a thing precisely and quietly in words." All of this sounded all right, but she looked somehow off-balance with such a small book in her hands. "This poem is made of a series of perfectly captured moments. I think you will come to understand as we continue to read. You'll be working with pages 32-38 of the anthology for your assignment this evening."
I stared down at the book before me. I lifted it, and its lightness made me anxious.
"But I though we were reading 'Aurora Leigh' next," Marjorie said.
"As did I," Miss Caper told us. "But the headmaster wishes to make a change."
Around this time, one of the sixth graders—Lizzie Lewis, a pixie of a girl with a great mass of black shining hair down her back—stopped showing up for meals, even Assembly. The sixth grade at large reported that Lizzie no longer came to classes, either. Our curious whispers gathered momentum as the days passed until finally Miss Ellison, our math teacher, had no choice but to address them, if she wanted us to focus on the quadratic equations she had written on the board. "Lizzie is receiving special lessons from Mr. Pax," she told us, "for which she requires focused alone time." We could tell from the falsely confident way she said this that Miss Ellison didn't know what was happening, either. Still, Lizzie's continued absence gradually became old news; we stopped talking about it because there was nothing new to add and mostly forgot her.
I spent spring recess at Gilchrist, where I had also spent Christmas vacation. My parents seemed always to be traveling during the times when I could have come home: Bora Bora, an Alaskan cruise. My guess was that they were unwilling to trade the newly poised girl they glimpsed through my letters a flesh-and-blood me who might disappoint them in familiar ways. Time seemed to soften and stretch long in those two weeks. I missed Molly and her lacing. I couldn't get Kate, the only other girl from our year who had stayed at school for the break, to pull as hard. I knew for a fact that the ground I had gained was receding, because I could reach back and feel the from the lacing that I had eased back into the ruts I thought I'd abandoned for a good week, two weeks earlier. When I touched this proof, this record of my spill back over the lines that had been drawn, I was filled with a sense of powerlessness that made me bit my tongue until I tasted metal. At night, I got out my old Nancy Drew books and ruffled their pages, the furred soft sound of the paper like another person's breathing in the empty room, but even they did not let me sleep.
I would feel better once the others were back, I told myself. And anyways I had changed. I knew it. Yet it seemed to me, that in the dark, that nay progress that could be undone in this way was not real progress at all. A nightmare vision haunted me of the first day of summer vacation, being driven home in my parents' car, its smell of leather and bits of food I had dropped over the years as familiar to me as the smell of my own body. I would see in my parents' faces, each time they snuck looks at me from the front seat, the brief flight and then the dead plunge of hope—teaching me over and over that I would always be the same as I had ever been.
ON OUR SECOND DAY back in session after the break, Mr. Pax stood up at Assembly and said, "I am sure you have all noticed that Lizzie Lewis has been gone from your midst for some time."
None of us had thought about Lizzie in weeks, but we nodded solemnly.
"Lizzie has undertaken a special project for me," Mr. Pax told us. "This project has regrettably required her temporary absence from your company. But she is, at last, ready to rejoin you, and ready to show you the fruits of our labor. And what fruits they are, girls!" Or will be, when they have ripened fully."
He paused and smiled at us. "You see, Lizzie is on her way to attaining a very ancient form of grace. One that will soon be made available to the rest of you, though it will be a bit more complicated for those who are older and have already grown more than Lizzie. Her initial break has been made, but that is really only the beginning, of course. The binding process itself will take some time, indeed, to achieve the desired result."
We gasped in a united breath, straining our laces.
Miss Caper stared at Mr. Pax, her face rigid. Sweeping the room with his eyes, Mr. Pax found hers; he help them as if this were a matter of will, though he was still smiling. Finally, Miss Caper looked away.
"Recovery is still in the early stages," Mr. Pax said. "There are no shortcuts in a process like this, girls. Walking remains for the future. So you'll pardon our rolling entrance. Lizzie, my brave butterfly!"
He stretched his hand out in a summons. My eyes flew, with everyone else's, to where he pointed. But in the pause before Lizzie appeared, I saw others in the empty doorway, others I knew I was the only one to see. Each came in turn, without hurrying, to take her place in the line. I knew them all instantly. The Lady of Shalott, bent from her loom and yet graceful, one of her ivory arms banded in bright thread. The simple flower maiden, petal-cheeked, lilting as if in a breeze. Nancy, with her blond, metal-gleaming hair and the pressed slacks that fit her like her rightful skin. And my mother, my ever-lovely mother. My mother with perfection itself in her face. She moved, with the others, to the side, and then turned back toward the doorway.
Then came Lizzie, the real Lizzie, in a wheelchair pushed by Miss Ellison. Lizzie bore her abbreviated feet before her, propped on the rests: time hoofs of feet in child-sized slippers of a vivid emerald silk.
It was a slow entrance, a grand one. There was pride in Lizzie's smile. Also pain, but that was the price, as all of us at Gilchrist had already learned. And if her pain was greater than anything we had yet experienced, what she had bought with that pain was proportionately greater, too, I though: a change that was not reversible. Lizzie would never have to sit in her room and tilt her folded feet this way, that way, wondering if a slow slide had begun that would carry them back to their previous dimensions. She would know that this was impossible. Here at last was certainty. Lizzie would feel the proof of her new and more beautiful self with each step she took after this, each hair's breadth of a footprint she left behind her, the way all that had anchored her to ordinariness had been whittled down to a fine, sharp point.
I caught the sight of Miss Caper's face. It had gone very white; her eyes were wide. She saw only the pain, I thought, and not that the pain was for something. I knew there had been agony for Lizzie in getting to this point, but I also knew that nothing could hurt her after this, in any important way.
My mother and the others who had preceded Lizzie into the room were still there, but they were watching me instead of Lizzie now. Their gazes were steady, approving. I turned to look at Mr. Pax, our great shaper, whose face was red with triumph. I though that I was ready to feel my bones break between his hands.
“Blue on Blue” by Susan Maeder
Found in Willow Springs 68
There were tables of shining blond wood
in the restaurant in my neighborhood
where I took him on a dare.
Stiff white napkins,
too many glasses, too many forks
HIs chair had one short leg.
He splayed his fingers wide on
the white wall beside him. They appeared
more deep-sea blue than black.
He grinned. "See? That's you and me."
I laughed. The room hushed.
He held his hand there and pressed,
as if he might leave a mark like a bruise
when he withdrew.
I watched his eyes jump from this to that—
the lacquered card in his other hand,
the silver, the door, my lips,
the recessed corners of the room.
I felt the pressure of his knee against mine.
We never ate. We left that place.
We walked through streets of pumpkin orange—
it was Halloween—fastidious
red brick; one zigzag of neon
yellow. Victorian blue on blue.
This was my house. We went in.
This is the part where it all silks down
and the candles melt and the space
heater groan the phone rings twice
the fridge hums and stops and
hums again
there's probably music—saxophone
(grover washington jr—it 1976) it's raining
the neighbor's dog is barking it's raining
I'm counting
one two three why am I counting?
my eyes are closed
there's no silk no melting
there's one word that cuts like a knife
four five six
and this is the part
where the rain this is the zigzag
yellow part the blue on blue with the rain
coming down everywhere all at once
as if he drummed it down comes slushing
through the gutters down ruining
the perfect ripe the sweet round pumpkins
with their cockeyed grins when
the moon suddenly pops out
and I see everything
I can see everything now
even the rain itself
because there's both the moon and the rain
the moon lighting up the rain
and the moon is calling out commands
it's about the pills it's about
the tiny liquid
the phone rings twice and twice
and now he's pointing at me
—is this how a knife looks?—
to cut triangle eyes and the jigsaw teeth
In that case I get to shine inside
I get to glow I really want that light to stream
from where he carves me
But no—
It's just a pencil or a pen or
a wand or a stick and it has nothing to do with me
it's part of the Dream Time,
Aboriginal Magic, where you pinch
your own arm and your brother flinches
or you point the stick and your enemy drops
to the desert floor.
Now he's an owl
I care for the feathers, the hard-shell beak,
the elegant clawed feet,
draw out the long slow whooo of surrender
then
thunder then something like dawn.
When he comes scratching
again and again on my blue door
I'm gone
I've leaked out
I'm the panther
the mutant
the stain on the bedroom floor
Four Poems by Nance Van Winckel
Found in Willow Springs 68
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"Outlaw Mentality"
—that's what the coroner says caught you up,
brought you down. A life of that fuck-that
stalled on the track. Hat on one side,
broken noggin with its go-
your-own-way dream
bled out on the other.
I catch your drift. To wake and stuff it
down. To sleep as it opens out. Me
and my wire cutters; widening
the fence hole. I know exactly
how few snips will
get me through.
*
White-hot, black-hard, the rails return
for mister you and mister not-you—there
on the path that leads to the path. Once
it fit your shoe. Blood-crust and blue-fly hum,
the one who's caught your whiff
slinks through the hole, stands
in the meadow. So like a wave,
the track goes out and comes back. REAL
ON STEEL claims the freight car
clanging into the by and bye.
Alive at the End of the World
(Gnome with Ax)
Sand and the glue from dead horses
made me. . .so you'd know me. Thirteen
seconds in a store window—you see
I'm you rowing away in a rogue dream.
Give me the full brunt of sun
on your door stoop. Make me
|the stopper atop the lower city
with its brute animal wails
I'll hear for you, loudly so.
One day you won't have a mind
to change anymore
about where I'll live on, or how,
without you.
Because B
Your arrival, admit it, was up
and out of the mud. So what,
here you are. One four o'clock
you walk across the lake.
Its ice creaks: gut syllables,
lingo between fish and fowl.
You'd refused the skates because
A) surely then you'd have to
perform a spin, and B) they could
hurt the ice. You its executioner,
you the handle turning the blade.
Last Address
What gold flitter has made of your ear
a hive? Clouds tug loose a last dream
and now the rainfall bears down
your secrets. The question's not
if the river had its way with you,
spit you out as a small inquiry
unfit for the big answer. No,
the question won't pertain to tattoos
or unmatchable DNA, but to what
world, under what sun, in what situ
we go on finding each you, each you,
the not-missed, the never missing.
*
We stand at the foot of you.
Bees and swallows rustle the grass
around half flesh, half bone, half
here, half gone. Dot of earth: nothing
owed or owned. Once you were a bud
in someone's belly. A swim, a sleep,
then to crown your way out. Keep
mum. Keep it to yourself, Little Prince
of the Reigning Question,
the would-you-do-it-all-again
there there, now now.
Found on the bank of the
Spokane River at approximately
2200 W. Falls Street. Adult
Caucasian male. This male was 5
feet 11 inches in height and
weighed approximately 161
pounds. His hair was dark brown
or possibly black. Clothing
worn: a pair of black lace up
boots with a brand name listed
as "CORCORAN," a pair of black
socks, a pair of light blue
denim pants with a brand name
listed as "RUSTLER," a pair of
red slightly meshed under
shorts, a dark colored T-Shirt
with the size listed as
medium and a name brand of
"EDDIE BAUER." Dental
Identification information
obtained, no match found.
Fingerprints unobtainable.
#10042 Spokane County
Medical Examiner's Records
Congratulations Pushcart Prize Nominees
Poetry
"Mississippi Snow" by Kerry James Evans
"The Future of Nostalgia" by Randall Watson
"War Poem" by Anzhelina Polonskaya, translated by Andrew Wachtel
Fiction
"A Tour of the Mural at the Merari Public Library" by Madison Jozefiak
WTAW will be at AWP
WTAW will be at AWPJanuary has been flying by, and AWP is now only two short weeks away. If you plan to be at AWP in Kansas City from February 7th–10th, you can connect with WTAW in two ways. You can find us every day at the bookfair, at T1422, where copies of our latest titles will be on sale, seeking to fill your warm hands, hearts, and minds. We’ll have info on our publishing programs and other opportunities, including our new imprint Betty. We’re excited that publishing assistant Shirley Dees will be with us for her first-ever AWP conference. Shirley is a writer like the rest of the WTAW crew, so come by and greet her, even if only with a simple wave—a language any writer can understand and appreciate! Book signings Two of our authors will be with us at the bookfair on Friday, 2/9 to sign copies of their books: 11:00AM – 12:00pm: Stephanie Austin, Something I Might Say 1:30 – 2:30pm: Joanna Acevedo, Outtakes Our off-site reading Wine and Words on Thursday, 2/8, 5:30–7:00 pm at The Pairing is another great way to connect with us—while reconnecting with words and why to write and read. WTAW will be pairing with Willow Springs magazine to present prose and poetry from eight featured writers who are not to be missed. A cash bar will be available and door prizes served alongside our writers’ words. Readers include Alyse Knorr, Andrew Farkas, *Azaria Brown, *Joanna Acevedo, John Hodgen, *Liz Green, *Polly Buckingham, and Sara Burge. (*WTAW authors) WTAW’s Hal King will be on hand to emcee and hand out prizes. Scroll down for short bios of each reader. The AWP conference and bookfair is the largest gathering of publishers, authors, and academics in the nation, and we’d love to see you at WTAW’s small yet big warm space in the heart of America. —The crew at WTAW Press |
|
Words and Wine readers’ bios: Alyse Knorr is an associate professor of English at Regis University, co-editor of Switchback Books, and co-producer of the Sweetbitter podcast. She is the author of four collections of poetry (most recently Ardor from Gasher Press), and two nonfiction books about video games (most recently GoldenEye from Boss Fight Books). Andrew Farkas is the author of The Great Indoorsman: Essays, The Big Red Herring, Sunsphere, Self-Titled Debut, and the forthcoming Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been? He is an editor for Always Crashing and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Washburn University. Azaria Brown* is a writer from coastal Virginia. She writes about Black folk, for Black folk and currently attends the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she also teaches freshman English. Azaria writes magical realism and speculative stories about family and relationship dynamics, spirituality, religion, death, oblivion, and dance battles [sometimes]. She is the author of her debut chapbook The Smiths of 115th Street, forthcoming from WTAW Alcove Chapbooks. Joanna Acevedo* is a writer, editor, and educator from New York City. She is the author of two books and two chapbooks. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021, and also holds degrees from Bard College and The New School. Joanna’s chapbook Outtakes, was published by WTAW Alcove Chapbooks September 2023. Liz Green* was raised in New Jersey. In 2024, she’ll receive a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her recent nonfiction was featured in The Woolf and The Opiate, and her chapbook The Haunt won the WTAW Alcove Chapbook Competition for 2024 and is forthcoming from WTAW Press. A psychotherapist, she lives in New Orleans. Author of The River People (Lost Horse Press), The Expense of a View (UNT Press), and The Stolen Child and Other Stories (forthcoming from Betty Books), Polly Buckingham* is editor of Willow Springs magazine, series editor for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and teaches at Eastern Washington University. Sara Burge is the author of Apocalypse Ranch (C & R Press, 2010), and her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, the minnesota review, CALYX Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, Atticus Review, Louisville Review, River Styx, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of Moon City Review. John Hodgen is the Writer-in-Residence at Assumption University in Worcester, MA, and Advisory Editor for New Letters at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. Hodgen won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). His fifth book, The Lord of Everywhere, is out from Lynx House/University of Washington Press, and his new book, What We May Be, is forthcoming also from Lynx House. He has won the Grolier Prize for Poetry, an Arvon Foundation Award, the Yankee Magazine Award for Poetry, the Bluestem Award, the Balcones Prize, the Foley Prize, the Chad Walsh Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal, the Collins Prize from Birmingham Poetry Review, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Award in Poetry. |
Jennifer Pullen’s New Textbook
Congratulations to Eastern Washington University Alum Jennifer Pullen for receiving tenure at Ohio Northern University! Her textbook Fantasy Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology is out from Bloomsbury Academic.
“The Bridge” by Kerry Muir
Found in Willow Springs 66
Back to Author Profile
CAMMY TUTTLE IS THE SMARTEST, toughest girl in our whole fifth grade. She has red hair, straw-straight, and wears boys' clothes. Her trademark is a tweed Englishman's cap she got at Hinks department store in downtown Berkeley. She rode the BART train there all by herself, an adventure to Berkeley, to Hinks, and this is what she picked out as a treat—this hat, this Englishman's cap. She wears vests, too. It's 1973 and vests are in, especially corduroy ones with buckles, in earth tones like rust and olive green, colors that look good on Cammy Tuttle—but then, everything does, it seems.
On the playground when we play dodge ball, Cammy slings the ball at whoever's in the middle, hard, with gusto, with glee. But she's good at being in the middle, too. To watch her, you'd think being in the middle is a fabulous place to be. Cammy dances, leaps, and flies in the air. She skids sideways on worn-out tennis shoes. She sings at the ones who try to whack her with the ball: Missed me, missed me, now you have to kiss me. She teases and taunts them, actually tries to make them mad. If they throw the ball at me, I cover my face with both hands. I don't want to see that thing hurtling through the air at me.
Sometimes Cammy's mom subs at the school. Mrs. Tuttle. Her hair is firebird red, whereas Cammy's is more like a fox's. Mrs. Tuttle's hair is not straw-straight, but curly, bushy, and cut in a chic afro. She has spidery, spindly, white-as-moonlight legs, with just the lightest smattering of varicose veins that look like someone drew them there with a toothpick. On her feet, Mrs. Tuttle wears strappy high-heeled red sandals that make her long legs even longer. She wears them in wintertime even when it's cold, wears them with sheer white stockings and a big woolly fur coat.
Mom says Mrs. Tuttle is very ill—that she won't live more than a year. She tells me this because she wants me to be friends with Cammy Tuttle, to play with her, spend time. I think, Cammy is perfect, popular, wins at dodge ball—what does she need me for? But Mom says we should reach out to Cammy Tuttle. Our next door neighbot Mrs. Papini told Mom that Cammy is having a hard time, needs to have fun, needs friends. So Cammy has been invited to my house to play.
I see her in the distance from our kitchen window, crossing the old bridge. The bridge is long—about a quarter mile across. It's wide enough that an automobile could cross it, and probably did, many years ago. But now our house sits at the end of the bridge; if you drove across it now, you'd just end up in our backyard.
I am not allowed to walk on that bridge. Actually, no. one is. The bridge has DO NOT ENTER signs on the chicken-wire fence blocking it off at each end. In the spring, hundreds of ladybugs hatch and spread themselves all over that fence, covering it entirely in red. It's gorgeous. The bridge has holes in its asphalt surface big enough for even an adult to fall clear through. You can look down into those gaping holes and see the brown creek trickling, and rocks, like stepping stones in the water, hundreds of feet below. In bad weather, the bridge swings and creaks, sways on its feeble foundation of long, wobbly wooden stilts clamped to an ancient brace. The brace is corroded and tarnished, rusty and weak—oozing with thick, wet, green pads of moss. I've climbed down the steep slope into the creek many times, sometimes alone. It's a favorite place, of mine. There's a rotting one-room shack down there, just about the water, with the Devil's head painted in red on one side. Long, sloppy drips of paint leak out, dribble down from one of the Devil's horns. In pencil, scrawled along the walls of the shack: Asshole. Fuck. Fuck you. There's wildlife down there, too. My dog Ginger once came home without her collar, wet and muddy, covered in blood and shaking. Puncture wounds from claws covered her neck and throat. Hornets' nests hide in the tall weeds. Once, me and Joanne and Susan Papini happened to step on one; we all got stung in the most terrible way. The bridge used to be painted white, but now only flecks and chips remain. Parts of the railing have crumbled away, so you could fall off the bridge if you aren't careful—or if you had a mind to fall, like Mr. Koshland did.
Back in early October, just about a month ago, Scott Koshland's dad, Mr. Koshland, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. It was in all the papers. Our parents told us to be nice to Scott Koshland because his dad had jumped off a bridge. This haunts me because Scott Koshland's father is like my father—they both have bad legs from polio. Both walk with metal braces on one leg. Both use long metal canes. I saw Dad talking to Mr. Koshland once, on the playground at the school spring fair. They both stood balancing their metal canes, hips jutting out, shifting their weight every now and then—two asymmetrical bookends in loose-fitting khakis and blue plaid. Not even a year ago. Mr. Koshland had seemed normal then—fine. Just like my dad: Normal. Fine.
These days, my normal, fine dad is glued to the Watergate hearings on our black-and-white TV. When the hearings are on, you are not allowed to talk. He sits close to the box, holding the antenna, fiddling with the brown contrast dial. He mumbles things to the TV: Oh for crying in a beer. Good question, Sam. You numbskull. You knucklehead! He turns the volume up loud. You can hear Watergate blaring through every room in the house. You can hear it in the kitchen, where I'm standing, watching Cammy come closer and closer, as she crosses the old bridge.
Cammy walks like an athlete, half skip, half normal walk. She kicks things—dead walnuts, dried-up branches, broken twigs—kicks them like she's kicking a soccer ball. Using two fingers in her mouth, she whistles a boy's sharp whistle that cuts into the air above the creek. She does funny little elfin moves on the bridge—a shuffle hop, a grapevine step, a juggling move, a twirl. A bow to the uppermost branches of a giant walnut tree. She walks up to a pothole and sways over the lip, looking down to see below. With her toes touching the edge, she lifts one leg, balances for a moment, and stretches out both arms. Eventually, she hops over the hole—a hopscotch-type hop—landing on the same leg. When she gets to the end of the bridge, she reads the DO NOT ENTER sign, then flicks it like a booger or a fly.
I open the sliding glass door of the kitchen and walk out. Behind me, the sounds of Watergate: men's voices, tapping on microphones, throats clearing, papers shuffling, southern drawls. It's summer, and my dad, a teacher, is mostly home these days. My mom and sister are out somewhere.
What to do now? Cammy Tuttle is here. What to say? We wander around the backyard, kicking walnuts and twigs, looking at the ground.
You wanna take a walk?
Cammie shrugs. Suits me.
I've had two bad secret habits for a while that nobody knows about. One is shoplifting from grocery store. The other is breaking into people's houses and taking a poo or a pee. I don't flush. That's my criminal trademark, not flushing, so they'll know I was there. I never steal from the houses—I just like to look around, see their things, what stuff they have, see their secret lives.
I take Cammy to Craig Wingett's house. An older boy, Craig goes to Alcalanes, the big high school. After knocking on the door a couple times to make sure that no one's home, we enter the Wingetts' through the side door and step into the kitchen. I've never been here before. My face, my arms, the hair on my head feel coated with electricity. My legs are prickly, bursting with energy. I feel wiry, capable, sharp, alive. Things look vivid, dangerous, frightening, bright: the gleam of pots and pans on the wall, the glint of knives in the rack. An old-fashioned was tub sits in the sink, filled with water and suds. Bras dry on a string in the air about the sink. Two plastic angels stand next to a row of containers that say: Sugar, Flour, Salt, Rice, Tea. Cammy finds a round blue tin of butter cookies, takes one for herself and tosses one to me. It's good. We look around, touching everything: the bowl of red apples on the kitchen table, the two place settings on rubber olive-green place mats. I go down the hall—the carpet is gold shag—past photos of Craig at age five, six, seven, eight, nine, until he's about sixteen. I can tell they're school photos because they all have that same swirly blue wall behind his head. There's Craig—or someone—as a baby. Mr. Wingett in Buddy Holly glasses with Mrs. Wingett, beehive hairdo, rays of light beaming behind their heads. A smooth golden Jesus nailed to a smooth golden cross, with a smooth golden crown of thorns upon his head. To my right, a bedroom door is the tiniest bit ajar. I peek in and see a long glass-topped dresser, silver hand mirror, silver brush, comb, perfume bottle with round rubber squirter, golden-cased lipstick. I walk in with my eye on the perfume, give myself a squirt, look at myself in the mirror. I decide I hate my overalls and short hair, wish I'd never let Mom cut off my braids. In the bathroom, I don't turn on the light when I pee.
Back in the kitchen, Cammy's twirling her Englishman's cap on one finger. She throws it up in the air, lets it land back on her finger, keeps it spinning round and round. Says to me, Hey. Come here.
What?
You have to see the masterpiece.
Like Carol Merrill on Let's Make a Deal, Cammy points to the center of the kitchen table, between the place mats. The tin wash tub, still full of suds, now has Mrs. Wingett's laciest, blackest bra stretched around it, fastened in the back. There's a big red apple in each cup. Cammy takes suds from the washtub, dots bubbles on the places where nipples would be. We crack up, take bites from the apples, put them, bitten, back in the bra, and crack up all over again.
It takes about five minutes to find Craig Wingett's stash of Playboys, a stack under his bed. We sit on the floor, we crouch, we kneel, we curl up. We open to the centerfold, Miss Whatever-month, an oiled-up blonde on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire. From what I can tell, she's in a cabin in Alaska somewhere. She's wearing a diamond choker, black spike heels, and nothing else. Her boobs are bigger than her head. We read the blurb about her in the bubblegum-pink box: her name is Kimberly. She likes warm smiles, riding horses bareback, swimming naked at the beach. Dislikes negativity. l look at Cammy. She is staring at Kimberly the way my dad stares at the Watergate hearings on our black-and-white TV. Leaning forward a little. Not blinking.
There's the sound of a car pulling into the driveway outside, and the squeak of brakes. The electricity in my body wakes up again, shocking me down to my toes. There's a scramble of Cammy and me pushing, stumbling, knocking into Craig's doorway, bumping each other, getting tangled, grabbing, clawing at walls.
Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! God! Go!
We shove each other down the narrow hall, losing our balance, hitting every photograph and tchotchke on the wall: Craig as a baby, Craig as a teen, Craig at eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, and five, the golden Jesus, the kitchen table, kitchen door. Just as we're almost free and clear, Cammy stops, turns on her heel, and runs back in the house again.
Cammy! Cammy! Cammy! Cam!
I dance back and forth on my toes, pounding the frame of the doorway. In a flash, Cammy is back, now clutching her Englishman's cap.
Go! Go! Go!
Sound of car doors slamming. The trunk door opening. Paper bags. Words.
We fly out the back door, clutching each other's sleeves, each other's hands. Cammy shoves me into a hedge, skids down next to me on the ground. I'm on my butt in the dirt, squashed in the space between house and hedge, hand over my face. I want to laugh so bad. I peek out through two fingers at Cammy, who stares straight through the leaves of the hedge. Whenever I start to lose it, she digs her fingernails into my knee. I bite my knuckle, twist my hand. I try to think of something serious and sad, to keep from laughing out loud. I think of Watergate and southern drawls, throats clearing, papers shuffling, microphones tapping. I think of Scott Koshland's dad, the air rushing fast and hard against his face; I think of a wish he might have had, just moments too late, to fly back upward, as if he had wings, to the place he'd stood only seconds before, there on the Golden Gate Bridge. I think of Mrs. Tuttle's high-heeled strappy sandals, her black coat, red hair, long legs, varicose veins, of Scott Koshland at the desk next to me, staring straight ahead. I think of anything, anything to keep from exploding and laughing and screaming and blowing it, getting caught, getting punished, getting put away. Meanwhile, goddamned Mrs. Wingett and Craig are taking about four hours to get the groceries out of their silver-blue Chevrolet. Finally, finally there's the sound of a screen door slamming shut, banging twice. Then silence, a few seconds—and Mrs. Wingett's high-pitched, wailing shriek.
That does it, we're gone, Cammy and me, running wild down Nordstrom Lane, screaming, laughing, crying, panting, sprinting through backyards. In a vacant lot where someone's starting construction, cement mixers and cinder blocks scattered everywhere, we bend over, grab our knees, hit the ground, roll, laugh, pound the dried-up earth, hold our stomachs, scream and scream and howl and cry and scream all over again.
We lie in the dirt, breathing hard in the sun. Cammy presses her forehead into the earth. Laugher bubbles up, recedes. I make a snow angel in some loose dirt. Cammy stands up, walks around. Takes off her Englishman's cap. Stares at it. Puts it back on.
I feel like an excursions, she says. I feel like going to Hinks.
Right now?
Yes, now.
By yourself?
No, stupid. With you.
And so, less than an hour later, I follow Cammy across the old bridge, away from my house, toward the road that leads to the BART. The bridge sways and creaks, a great gray elephant's back under our feet. We look into potholes and see clear down to the bottom of the creek. I see the roof of the Devil's fuck-you shack, the muddy curve of the creek, water barely moving. I see the tall, tangled weeds, plants with red berries, thorns. Giant trees loom around us, their branches waving in the wind, forming a lacy veil of leaves over our heads like a canopy.
I follow Cammy across the bridge.
And for one moment it occurs to me, It's possible we might die.
Our odds could be that bad, our timing so crappy, our luck so slim that today might be the very day the bridge collapses and crumbles, the day the bridge falls.
But it's only fear.
Soon Cammy and I will be on the other side of the bridge, walking down Happy Valley Road. We'll ride BART to Berkeley, get off at Shattuck Avenue, go into Hinks and look around at the tall, pale walls. Cammy will get to buy one thing (a gift from her mother, perhaps?). She will choose her one thing from the men's department: a bright red paisley bow tie. I will go next door and shoplift a halter top for JCPenney's, with pale blue and white checks, its neckline a plunging V. We will ride BART back home, her wearing her new bow tie, me fidgeting with the halter top, looping it round and round the knuckles of one hand. The station in suburban Lafayette will be almost empty, the sky yellow, getting ready to turn dark.
Walking home along Happy Valley Road, Cammy will let me wear her tweed Englishman's cap. I'll let her wear the halter top, which she'll pull on over her olive-green sweater. She'll wiggle her hips as she walks and fills the cups of the halter with her thumbs, pretending to have boobs like Kimberly in Craig Wingett's Playboy magazine. By the time we get to the bridge there will be no light in the sky at all. I'll stick very close to Cammy when we walk back across. I will ask Cammy, Don't you feel cold? And she'll say, Nope, not me. I will feel tired, trying my best to keep up. Sometimes Cammy will be a step or two ahead of me, but other times I'll catch up with her and walk next to her, side by side. Every once in a while she'll say Look out. . . or Watch it there. . . , pointing to a gaping pothole. I'll tell her if I see one, too—I'll say Cammy, there's one over there. Over here, Cam. It will take us a long time to cross, but eventually, we'll get to the other side. We'll pick our way carefully, deliberately, down the bridge's pockmarked asphalt center, tiptoeing around all those potholes, so many potholes, floating in the dark.
Issue 92: Suphil Lee Park
About Suphil Lee Park
Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆 李 朴) is the author of Present Tense Complex, winner of Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera 2021), and a poetry chapbook, Still Life (Factory Hollow Press 2023), winner of the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She's also the translator of If You're Going to Live to One Hundred, You Might As Well Be Happy by Rhee Kun Hoo, forthcoming from Union Square Books and Ebury, U.K.
Find more about her on her website.
A Profile of the Author
Notes on "Love Song", "Already Noon", and "Wino's Song"
This small suite of poems–two by Kim and one by Hoe–sings, among other things, of love. Yes, Heo’s poem blatantly brings up the word 郞心 (lover’s heart), centering the whole verse on the speaker’s internal, romantic struggle. Kim’s explore this sentiment in more implicit, albeit sexually more explicit, ways.
What captivates me about so-called love poems from these two vastly different Korean poets is their different approaches to moments of hardship where their love is challenged. Each of the poems presents a different conflict. “Already Noon,” the poet’s financial ruin and subsequent life on the farm; “Wino’s Song,” a playful verbal jousting with a seemingly reserved addressee; “Love Song,” the lover’s fickle heart.
While Heo expertly molds her conflict into a verse rich with metaphors, classical imagery, and puns—for which she is famous—Kim takes a more lighthearted approach. I'm as much in awe of Heo's ability to pack so much into such a concise form as I am delighted by the irresistible sense of life that Kim's poems exude. Where Heo offers a timeless, elliptical landscape, Kim plainly depicts and embraces her pains or mocks and seduces her husband, defying social norms. But who's to say which one does it better, or is superior?
Whether about love for family–sharing in moments of literal sweat–or romantic temptation and frustrations, their poems equally provide indispensable insights into the lives of Korean women poets. Their fate was, more often than not, dictated by the reciprocity of their various kinds of love, and that always leaves me with much to ponder.
Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.
I have a single tattoo–an infinity sign crossed with a zero–on my left ring finger. Among other meanings, this tattoo primarily alludes to the famed line from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.” And yes, it’s that line: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.” It has come to carry an important reminder that a poet’s mind never fails to find a microcosm of reality and truth in just about anything she stumbles upon. Instead of the palm of my hand, I chose the more forefront–admittedly less painful–place for my tattoo. The placing itself serves to signify how I uphold what this tattoo embodies above all other promises I have made or might make in the future.On a largely irrelevant side note, I have a beautiful gray cat that I like to address in many ridiculous ways other than his actual name, such as “crown jewel of my heart,” “my guardian angel,” or “gyeongookjisaek (경국지색, meaning a beauty so fatal that it might destroy a nation).” I’d say, speaking from experience, affection justifiably defies all conventions of designation and role definition, and invalidates shame (as my translations of the poems, specifically "Wino's Song," might also hint at).Nowadays, I’m also into pottery–or carving shapes into wet clay–probably for no deeper reason than the one that drove me to pick at my scars as a little kid. Just a slight alphabetical variation from poetry, it's a wholly different craft that helps me take my mind off the kind of things I delve into when engaging with poetry.
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Issue 92: Molly Giles
Found in Willow Springs 92
APRIL 8, 2023
ISADORA ANDERSON, POLLY BUCKINGHAM, BLAIR JENNINGS, SHRAYA SINGH, & ALISON WAITE
A TALK WITH MOLLY GILES
MOLLY GILES' WRY AND QUICK-WITTED, observational voice has given life to female characters disenchanted with their circumstances and the underwhelming men that surround them. She is a master of the short form; her language is tight, precise, and caustic and her stories darkly comic. Her endings tum on a heartbeat, often surprising and always resonant as if they couldn't have possibly ended with any other configuration of words and emotions.
Giles is the author of five short story collections, the first of which, Rough Translations, was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, the Boston Globe Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award. The stories were described by the Houston Post as "tiny gems, carved from real American life, precise and identifiable." Giles' other collections include Creek Walk and Other Stories, winner of the Small Press Best Fiction Award, the California Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book, originally published by Papier-Mâché Press, reissued by Simon & Schuster in 1998; All the Wrong Places, winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction (Willow Springs Books, 2015); and Wife with Knife, winner of the Leap Frog Global Fiction Prize Contest, 2020. She has also published two novels, Iron Shoes (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and The Home for Unwed Husbands (Leapfrog Press, 2023). Her autobiography, Life Span: A Memoir, is due out through WTAW Press in 2024.
Giles' work has been included in the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marin Arts Council, and the Arkansas Arts Council. She has taught fiction writing at San Francisco State University, University of Hawaiʻi in Manoa, San Jose State University, the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at writing conferences, including The Community of Writers and Naropa. Molly has also worked as an independent editor for many authors, including Amy Tan.
We met with Molly Giles on Zoom on Saturday, April 8th to discuss how her shift from poetry to short fiction, the unlikely circumstances that started her teaching career, seances, and the inspiration behind her work—including which stories were overheard, divulged, or completely fabricated. In a serendipitous turn of events, several of us had the pleasure of a second meeting with Molly Giles at the Community of Writers conference in Olympic Valley, California where Giles was on staff. This time, Giles was the one asking the questions. Giles was exceedingly thorough and generous with her feedback. Her command of story structure, pacing, and knowledge of exactly when to include a humorous quip was sincerely appreciated. Some of her signature zingers you'll find throughout our conversation.
POLLY BUCKINGHAM
How are you doing? I know you had hip surgery recently.
MOLLY GILES
Yes, both hips are full of hardware now, but they're getting me where I need to go. I do walk with a cane, and I'm trying not to point with it. One of my friends said, "It makes you look like an old lady," and I thought, well yeah. I like my cane. I would like to have a little stiletto on the end of it.
BUCKINGHAM
Like Ida's wooden leg.
BLAIR JENNINGS
Ida in Iron Shoes and The Home for Unwed Husbands has leg issues. I was wondering if your leg issues might have inspired that.
GILES
No, not mine. But my mother was a double amputee; she was very brave about it, though she did sometimes take her prothesis off and wave it at the grandchildren.
BUCKINGHAM
That leg up in the top of the closet after Ida dies—I couldn't help but think of Flannery O'Connor.
GILES
Yes, "Good Country People." That is a great story.
SHRAYA SINGH
What's your favorite piece of your own work that's been published so far, and why do you like it?
GILES
Probably the very last story in Wife with Knife, "My Ex." It's about how you feel after divorce—that combination of fond nostalgia and absolute fury and continued incomprehension. I've been divorced twice, and I wish I could divorce both exes again. Once wasn't enough. So the enigma of the relationship continues long after the relationship itself. That story is two pages long and and took me two months to write. I was very happy with the end.
BUCKINGHAM
I'm so impressed with your endings. Even in Iron Shoes, there's that turn where she discovers what a louse her husband really is. In the writing process, where do those turns come from? Do they come late? Do they come early?
GILES
I think they come late. That's a good question, Polly, because it's so hard to answer. My main trouble is with beginnings. I think there were about fifteen first chapters to Iron Shoes. By the time I got into the world of it, I could see my way better. When I start a novel. I have to ask, is this going to be a tragedy or a comedy? ls there going to be a wedding at the end or a funeral? I know what direction I'm going in, but I never know where I'm going to end. And in novels the big pressure is to have somebody end with some form of acceptance or redemption, even though that's not often true in real life.
BUCKINGHAM
Before you came in, we had a long discussion because I had read Iron Shoes and they read The Home for Unwed Husbands.
SINGH
We were wondering about the overlap of characters and whether it was going to be declared as an official sequel.
GILES
I think The Home for Unwed Husbands can stand alone, and, to tell the truth, when I wrote it, I never had the guts to reread Iron Shoes. Iron Shoes is a dark book, and I wanted this one to be a comedy. It started off as a comedy, and then my ex-husband moved downstairs, and it didn't stay funny. He lived with me, in the basement, but I worried about him all the time, and a light-hearted romp it was not.
BUCKINGHAM
The beginning of Iron Shoes, Ida with her legs cut off, is just so gruesome. It really brings you in. And there's that piece at the end where Kay remembers the games she played with Francis—it's a tender memory but the games are terrible, really mean. So it's not one-hundred percent redemptive. It's still pretty dark. You know she's not done.
GILES
That's why I felt Kay needed another book. She's still under her parents' thumbs; she still hasn't grown up. I felt Ida needed more time too. She has a lot of my mother's characteristics, but my mother was so much nicer. And the Kay character is sort of based on me, but I'm not half as nice. I have never been as generous nor as thoughtful, no. Most of the characters I made worse, and Kay I made better. I think that's an author's prerogative, right? I hope that The Home for Unwed Husbands can stand alone but I would love it if it leads anyone back to Iron Shoes.
SINGH
You said that divorcing someone once wasn't enough, and I think I remember reading that exact line in The Home for Unwed Husbands. I remember underlining it and thinking, this is pretty funny. I wanted to know why you write about so many unsuccessful romantic relationships and marriages.
GILES
Revenge.
SINGH
That's a great answer.
GILES
I have a little candle that says lucky in love, and in many ways, I have been. I stress the bad parts because I was raised to believe that only trouble is interesting. That's what we used to be taught when we were writing. And I find it's pretty true. So I do stress the negative. I do no accent the positive. My present partner could not be sweeter or lovelier, but I can't write about him—there's nothing to say. He's perfect. So no, it's hard. Don't ever be too happy. It's not good for writers to be too happy.
JENNINGS
That's good new for all of us, I think.
GILES
Are any of you poets? I mean, poets make a career out of being unhappy.
ISADORA ANDERSON
We know you used to write a lot more poetry. What impact did that have on writing fiction?
GILES
I never published a poem until maybe ten years ago. I love poetry. I read it constantly as a child. But the poets I was drawn to were telling a narrative. I loved T. S. Elliot, not because of "The Wasteland," which I still don't understand, but because of J. Alfred Prufrock, a character I related to. As a child, I loved Tennyson. I think if I went back, I would still love Tennyson. I loved Edna St. Vincent Millay—I'm not ashamed of that. I think "The Ballad of the Harp Weaver" is gorgeous. And later on, I loved Dylan Thomas and William Blake. A poet I still love and read is D. H. Lawrence. I love his poems about animals. But I recently took an online course about W. S. Merwin. The course was taught by two other poets. And what they loved about Merwin is that they didn't understand him, and they went on and on about how great it was not to understand things. I think Kevin Mcllvoy said the same thing [in a previous Willow Springs interview], how he loves chaos. Not me. I am the sort of person who, if I start a book and get anxious about what's going to happen, I have no qualms turning to the last page just to find out if they live or if they die because, otherwise, I will not be able to continue. After I know, I don't give up the book unless it's badly written. But I do like to have all my anxieties soothed. I still love W. S. Merwin, even after six weeks of failing to enjoy not understanding him.
BUCKINGHAM
I do think poets, in general, are happier in uncertainty than fiction writers are.
GILES
Definitely. The one poem I did publish, about ten years ago, is the last piece in Bothered, "Young Wife on the Arc." I rewrote it as prose, dropping the line breaks but keeping the rhymes. I didn't start writing short stories until my late twenties. I was married, I had two children, and I was living in Sacramento. I didn't know any other women who wrote or read. I felt isolated and depressed. I took a correspondence course through UC Berkeley, which was wonderful training. I wrote my first short story through that correspondence course and sold it to a magazine that promptly went out of business the same month my story was slated to come out. But I was able to submit that story to the Community of Writers, and they gave me a scholarship. So I was thirty by the time I was around other fiction writers—it was heaven.
BUCKINGHAM
Can you talk about the shift in your work from short stories to micro-fiction?
GILES
In that correspondence course, the teacher made me count my words. One piece had to be five-hundred words, another could only be twenty-five words. It felt a little artificial, but I was amazed by how much I liked compression compared to expansion. I'm drawn to the shorter forms of prose. My pieces tend to be narratives. I want them to be understood. When I read somebody like Lydia Davis, I am impressed by the intelligence but often puzzled by the story.
The first flash piece that really worked for me was 'The Poet's Husband," which was written maybe thirty years ago. It was based on going to a poetry reading and watching this beautiful young woman get up and talk about everything that her husband and she shared. And he just sat there nodding and smiling, and l thought, my God. I don't know about you. but if somebody I'm close to gets up, for instance, and starts to sing. I blush. I'm terribly embarrassed for them. But this woman was very self-confident, and she was talking about her affair, her suicide attempts, her unhappiness. And he just sat there smiling. That's what inspired the story.
BUCKINGHAM
I want to ask about the title story in Wife with Knife. There's this adage in writing, you have to write four hours a day, or however long, every day. But "Wife with Knife" suggests that this is perhaps a male perspective. Some writers I love, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley, have small but mighty bodies of work. They never had a time in their lives where they could write all day every day. They couldn't afford that. One thing I heard your story saying was that this is kind of a myth; it's not that people don't do it, but it's kind of a selfish thing. The life we live is important enough that we have to live it, and that doesn't necessarily give us long writing periods. But it does give us the writing. In an interview you said something like, "I've raised kids alone, I've had a gazillion jobs, I've taught, I've edited, I didn't have time to write every day. That isn't my process." Could you speak to this?
GILES
I've never been able to write every day. I mean, I got married at nineteen. I had children right away. I've always had to work. I didn't go back to school until I was in my thirties. I was working different jobs all the time. I only started teaching at forty because my professor was an alcoholic and couldn't finish the course. The chair of the department didn't know who to ask and he just tapped me. I stepped in and was there for the next thirty-three years. As a teacher, I wrote mainly in July. As a young mother, when the children were little, I wrote during their naps. I have scraps of ideas on the back of utility bills that I'll find stuck in my purse. I'm talking to you now from a cottage on my property that I used to rent out. I recently took it over as a writing room, and I feel guilty about it. I don't come out here very often. I'm retired now, the children are middle-aged, I've got what I always longed for, a room of my own, and I'm still scattered.
I do better with deadlines. Rough Translations, my first book, is my MA thesis. It was done because the stories were due in workshop. In our real lives, nobody's standing over you saying, "We have to have this." Nobody cares. Unless you're Stephen King. Well, Stephen King writes every day, even on Christmas, so he doesn't count. I've always had a lot on my plate until now. And now, I have everything I've ever wanted, which is part of my philosophy in life—you get everything you need, just never when you need it. I finally have this great space. And I'm coming to the end of my career. I doubt I will ever write another novel. I want to get my memoir out. And I'm still writing short stories. But the energy for a novel is not there. There is irony in almost everything, I'm afraid.
When the University of Georgia press nominated Rough Translations for a Pulitzer Prize, they wanted to interview me. I got a phone call from a guy with this lovely southern drawl: "Now," he says, "I've noticed that you started college in 1960. And I noticed that you finished in 1980. That's a lot of unaccounted-for time." And I thought, yeah. But unaccounted-for time is often a woman's world. Often a man's, too, but I think more of a woman's. Now that I have nothing but time, I find I'm addicted to the New York Times spelling bee. That takes at least a half hour every day. And then I garden, I putter, I cook; I'm enjoying myself. I love life. But no, I'm not sitting down and writing four hours a day. I never have.
I think it was Grace Paley who said her best advice to writers was "love your life." And I think Keven said the same thing in his interview. He said to look at what's around you and pay attention and be mindful to what's actually going on in your life. All of us here could write a Russian novel just about what's happening since we got up. If you think about all the stuff that's been going through your head and the people who flit in and out of your consciousness and what you see on the street, it's all material. It's just hard to pay attention to all of it—you'd go nuts. But it is there.
ALISYN WAITE
You mentioned your memoir. To what extent do you draw from your own life in your writing? I know some authors like to keep things very separate, where others prefer to be open about the fact that the story is based on their lives. Do you have your own balance?
GILES
Yeah, and it's a balance. "Wife with Knife" was literally me listening to a friend talk. I listen hard to my friends. A lot of my stories are stolen from people who are naïve enough to trust me with their stories. I don't think you can edit yourself out of every story—I'm in about half, I think. The memoir is all me. I'm trying to be as true to my life as possible. I was born in San Francisco, and the book is based on crossing and re-crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It is titled Life Span and is comprised of flash pieces—none of them are longer than three pages—every year from 1945 to the present. It will come out with WTAW in 2024. It's amazing to me the things that have happened on that bridge and the relationships I've had. One thing I still have to do is go through and soften some of the portraits of the people I've known. I don't want to hurt any-body. I know I don't like looking at myself depicted in other people's writing, especially not my own. As I said earlier, the character Kay is based on a really nice Molly—I was never that good to my parents. I've always been snippy, and I've always been lazy.
BUCKINGHAM
We all have a hard time believing that.
GILES
Don't. I can think of specific stories in Wife with Knife where I could say, "Yes I'm in there" or "No I'm not." "Accident," that happened to me. I was rear-ended in Arkansas, and I had such mixed feelings about living in the South. I was dating a guy at the time who was a musician. He was ranting about the Yankees, and I said, "Do you think I'm a Yankee?" And he said, "Oh no. You're a foreigner." Because the South was foreign to somebody who'd grown up in the Bay Area. I made the character much younger than I was and gave her a different life. But the incident happened. "Church News"—I do apologize. A friend told me that story, and I went and wrote it. And then I tried to get her to say, is this ok? And she wasn't sure. Still isn't. "Deluded" is cruelly based on a friend of mine who doesn't read. "Assumption" is sort of a rural myth about a body tied to the top of a van. I nabbed it. "Dumped," I didn't even change the names. I just used my friends. "Life Cycle of a Tick" is very much about a relationship I had. "Not a Cupid"? I was once on a bus in Mexico, and I saw a woman, an American woman, petting this sullen little boy who looked trapped. "Just Looking" was about doing all this weird shopping but never buying anything. "Eskimo Diet" is a fairy story. "Married to the Mop" was about a time I cleaned houses but the character isn't me. "Banyan" is me. "Ears," me. "Paradise," a friend of mine who talks to spirits all the time. "Rinse, Swish, Spit"—I live in terror that my dental hygienist will read it. "Two Words" was based on a tenant I had. I was sitting here in the cottage—I would come back in summer and stay in the cottage and rent my main house out when I was teaching in Arkansas—wondering what on earth to write about, and I saw this little, fat, naked man run out to the garden. He wore a pink feather boa around his neck, and he picked up a garbage can lid and started fighting the deer in my yard and I thought, Okay. "Underage" is totally autobiographical. "Hopeless" I made up because I liked the little kid in it.
JENNINGS
I'm curious now. What inspired "Talking to Strangers"?
GILES
I live at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. A few years ago, a serial killer was on the loose, violating women hikers and murdering them on the trails up there. I loved hiking that mountain alone. When I realized I couldn't do that anymore, I felt angry. I was sitting at my desk, trying to finish a grad school assignment, and the first lines, it was scary, came to me. It was like somebody was speaking directly to me. It was the only channeling experience I've ever had. It's something writers pray for. I heard this voice, and I just followed it. "I know you don't know me," the voice said. And I knew it was a dead girl speaking. I don't read that story at conferences because it's triggering. There are too many women who have been assaulted.
The only other time I've ever had a visitation, if you will, was at the end of my most anthologized story, "Pie Dance." I had no idea how I was going to end it, and it just came to me. You write forty different ends, and you think, I can't I can't I can't. And then it just comes. You had asked earlier about ends; that end was a gift of grace. It's not going happen if you're not there. You have to be with your story; you have to sit with it. Sometimes, magic happens. And sometimes it's black magic. I'm not a spiritual person, but those were two times where I just didn't know what to say except, "Thanks."
JENNINGS
I've been known to write some dark things. It can affect my mood and throw me into a very deep depression while writing and a couple weeks after. I'm wondering how you get through that and still edit it enough to make it turn out well-crafted.
GILES
I think I'm shallower than you; I don't stay depressed long enough. When I am depressed, I write. If I can't create, I journal. I have journal after journal, and they're all full of crap. The self-pity is incredible. Pages and pages and pages of it, since I was nine. I think of my journals as my puke bags. My daughter has promised me she'll burn them all when I pass. I'm always horrified when someone like Hemingway dies, a beautiful writer who chose one beautiful word after another, and then when they aren't there to revise, their journals or their rough drafts are published. You know, it's just not fair. It does a real disservice to the writer.
I've only had a real depression once in my life, and that was because I wasn't writing, wasn't reading, wasn't going to school. The children were little, and I couldn't take care of them. I cried a lot, and I thought about getting rid of myself. I was in my late twenties—I think the twenties are a terrible time. People in their twenties need to know that things get better. You lose your looks, you lose your hips, but things get better.
BUCKINGHAM
I've been thinking about John Cheever as you've been talking and how some of your perspectives are kind of opposite. I love John Cheever, but he had the writing cabin and the ability to go, "Well, I'm off to the cabin and Mary and the kids can fend for themselves." And also, he wrote his journals to be published, and then they were.
GILES
Well, they're wonderful. I love those journals. They break your heart. And I love his stories. He does something I admire—he'll leave the here and now, and slip sideways into fantasy. He does it effortlessly. I've tried that a few times. I don't always get away with it, but I do admire the way he did it.
BUCKINGHAM
Yeah, I saw that in Iron Shoes with the fairy tale and with the blue horse. Like Cheever, you're also writing about a time period in which the cocktail party is really big, and these casual cruelties to children are part of the culture. I wonder about those casual cruelties younger people might be appalled by, and whether the world has changed.
GILES
My three daughters all have children, and I'm looking at the way they have parented; they're so good at it. My parents came out of the Depression and out of the war, and they wanted their own lives. I think they felt they never had a chance. I was writing more about my parents' generation than my own generation, which is a generation of dopers and maybe inept parents but not cruel parents. I don't think we really took parenting seriously. I had my first daughter when I'd just turned twenty; there's a picture of me holding her on my hip like she's a football I'm about to dropkick.
Somehow, all three of my daughters turned out great. All are professionals. One is a geneticist in Amsterdam, another a cannabis publicist, another is an attorney. They are wonderful parents: tolerant, loving, interested in their children. The granddaughter who's living with me now, twenty-one, is going to go home and continue to live with her mother and father in the Netherlands when she goes to college. I would no more have lived with my parents after the age of eighteen than I would have flown; it was unthinkable to me. I grew up in the forties and fifties and my parents had better things to do than parent. It was like that Philip Larkin poem, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." And it all goes back to the mom and dad's mom and dad, so you can't assign blame. You just try not to repeat the same patterns with your own children.
JENNINGS
As I read your stories, I thought, all these men are so horrible. I'm wondering whether you've seen a change in men as well. Are they any better, or are they still the same?
GILES
I think men get better as they get older, and the testosterone dies down. If we could get rid of testosterone for a week, you know how easy the world would be? The Middle East would come together, the Ukraine war would end, the population explosion would slow. It's a terrible, terrible hormone. I found that I at least can talk to men more after the age of fifty-five; they'll talk to you about what they're cooking, what their shopping list is like, their aches and pains. They'll open up. The men of my generation were singularly silent. I remember reading Saul Bellow to find out what men thought. It wasn't clear to me that men did actually think because the men in my acquaintance were charming in many ways, but mute. It was very frustrating. I remember thinking, especially in the D. H. Lawrence novels, florid as they are, oh, this guy's thinking about something that I'm thinking about. It was new to me. I think men are chattier now. I hope so.
One of my early stories is "A Jar of Emeralds." I was married to this beautiful guy, he was just lovely, but he never talked. And one morning he woke up and turned to me and said, "I feel like a jar of emeralds," and I thought, wait a minute, who is this guy? I want to know him. He's a treasure chest I don't have access to. I do apologize to the male characters I write about because many are one-dimensional cartoons. I'm very aware of that, especially in the last book; I meant it to be a comedy, and I wasn't looking for rounded and deep characters.
ANDERSON
Regarding the unwed husbands, I found myself so frustrated with all the men anytime they spoke to Kay, Neal constantly calling her "Babe," Victor being religiously judgmental, Francis disapproving, and Fenton just not saying anything. How did you ensure that each unwed husband sounded different and interacted with Kay in a different way, and what was your process for writing the dialogue for each one?
GILES
Fenton was easy because, as you say, he doesn't speak. I deliberately gave Francis the best lines because he's just plain mean. He's a terrible human being, but he cracked me up. With my own dad, if you'd hurt yourself—say you'd fallen down and scraped your elbow—he'd stomp on your foot and say, "Now how does your elbow feel?" It was that kind of Irish "humor'" I grew up with. Neal was the easiest because of the irritating oh Babes. I'm really embarrassed about Victor.
Biff was easy. I really liked the guy Kay met in Greece. He was nobody I had ever met, and I liked it when he talked. But I got rid of him fast because he was going to take over.
SINGH
You mentioned that all the characters from the most recent novel are like cartoons or caricatures, and they're meant to be really unlikeable. Do you have any advice on how to write unlikable characters but still have your reader engaged with the material?
GILES
I guess the best advice would be to try and be that person. Every character in a story has his or her own motivation, their own sense of justice, of who they are. To try and actually be your antagonist and try to see things from their point of view takes a real leap of faith, but I do think that listening hard helps, and knowing your character's background. For each of those characters, I wrote a couple of pages on where they were born, what foods they liked, what they wanted to be. I tried to understand who they were. It didn't make me like them, but it did help me see where they were coming from.
JENNINGS
The short story "The Writers' Model" has the fascinating concept of women being physically examined and questioned by male writers who want to write authentic women yet never overcome their false impressions of them despite their interrogations. This reminds me of a discussion among liberal creatives right now. Do we only write our own gender identity, sexual orientation, disability vs. ability, or race so we don't accidentally write something offensive because we can never truly understand another lived experience, or should we become as educated as possible about what each type of lived experience is like and write as many inclusive characters as possible with the guidance of one of those who've lived similar lives?
GILES
You guys are really walking on eggshells in your generation with this stricture you're under, to be authentic, to only write your own gender, to only write your own sexual preference, to only write your own nationality. It seems so unfair. You want to be careful, yes, but the imagination was given to us. It's a great gift. I just can't imagine having to stick with yourself all the time—who wants to? It's wrong. I think that's one of the great delights of slipping away from reality and writing fantasy because if you write fantasy, you can have green people and pink people and purple people, and you're not offending anybody. You can actually say what you want to say about the world. I don't write it myself. But I think of a writer I adore, Ursula LeGuin; through fantasy she can say things about the world she couldn't say otherwise. My feeling is, thumb your nose at the authorities and write what you want to write. I don't know what workshops are like now, but I'm sure they're scary as shit because everybody is saying, "You can't say that" or "You can't say this." I find it very Soviet. I don't like it. Be mindful of others in your speech, and to hell with them when you're writing. I am delighted that it's opened the door to trans writers, and I'm really glad that I'm reading things that weren't available to read even ten years ago. There's so much new, fascinating stuff coming out.
ANDERSON
How do you balance withholding information to keep the suspense while at the same time establishing trust with your reader so that they are along for the ride no matter where you're taking them in the story?
GILES
Wonderful question. That's part of the reason why we can't teach writing. You'll know when you get into a story yourself what to do, but it's really hard to come up with a rule for anything. I love workshops, mainly for the comradery and the deadlines, but there are some things I don't think I've ever been able to talk about or teach, like tempo in a piece of fiction. You can look at the way other people do it. I love Alice Munro, and I've been looking at the way she withholds information, and I thought, I'll take one of her stories apart and study it; that's easy. But you can't really diagnose her; she's too sly. It's up to you as a writer to feel your way towards what you need to do. And cover your ears—try not to listen to what other people tell you. To deliberately withhold and then put it in there later is very mechanical, and that's not the way we work. I taught for thirty-three years saying, "Show don't tell." I don't believe that anymore; I like to be told. We used to diagram things on the blackboard about how a story arc should go. That's a bunch of hogwash; I never did like that.
I don't envy anybody teaching creative writing now, but I love creative writing classes. I love the community that comes together; I love the way people push each other and inspire each other and give each other heart and hope. I'm in a writing group now. Almost every writing group I've ever been in or every class has a certain undefinable magic just as writing itself does.
WAITE
Can you talk more about your own experience teaching?
GILES
I stepped in scared to death. I was so conscientious the first three years that I would write single spaced typed pages of my critiques of the stories. Students would just throw them out the window as they went, and I don't blame them. I don't have a good speaking voice. I was often told to speak up. I had been reading more than I had been talking, so I couldn't pronounce words. Oaxaca, I couldn't pronounce it. I couldn't pronounce quaaludes. Students would help me a lot. What I loved, and still do, is the fact that when you're teaching a creative writing class, you're getting to know people in an intimate way that you couldn't if you were teaching history or chemistry. That is a real gift, that willingness to be open. Most of us are pretty shy in person, but in writing, you can access each other. I always liked giving prompts. The prompt that has always worked in class is to write for twenty minutes with just the phrase "My mother always" and then follow with "My father never." The responses are amazing.
By the time I retired, I was developing an allergic reaction to student papers so I knew it was time to quit. I know I could never have mastered remembering who's they, who's them, and I would never want to be insulting to anyone in the class. I call my children by the wrong name; I'm sure I would get everybody's gender mixed up. And I didn't want to be that politically aware because I'm not. I was tired of teaching. I had said everything I had to say. So, time to quit. But I still love looking at individual stories and telling people what's wrong with them, especially if there's a way to fix it.
BUCKINGHAM
Have you done work with other writers like you did with Amy Tan?
GILES
I worked with Amy for a long time and it was a joy. I've worked off and on with Susanne Pari, whose wonderful second novel just came out, In the History of Our Time. I read my friends' manuscripts all the time. I'm still getting letters from students I taught twenty years ago who are now just getting published, and that gives me so much hope. They might be in their late thirties, early forties because it takes a long time. They make me proud.
BUCKINGHAM
You've published with both smaller and bigger presses, and Amy Tan is with really big presses. What is your sense of the contemporary publishing landscape and where we're headed?
GILES
I don't know what's going on in publishing today. I do think books are vastly overpriced. Amy Tan is a phenomenon. Few writers hit the big time so fast—she's an excellent writer and has earned every accolade, but she should not be taken as the norm. Many excellent writers fail to succeed in publishing. They may never get used to rejections but they do have to live with them. I've had more rejections than I can count. After an especially bad siege of them, I'll just stay in bed for an afternoon and then get up, rewrite, resend. They never feel good, rejections.
It seems to me it's women my age who buy books. Bookstore readings are filled with middle aged and elderly women. I go to a lot of readings, and I look around and everybody has gray hair. That's not true of the less formal open mic and coffee and dive bar readings I like to go to; they are buzzing with energetic youth. I want to support writers, so I buy. I get to take it off my taxes. I probably buy $3,000 worth of books every year. I'm trying to think of what I've just bought. Solito by Javier Zamora. It's nonfiction. There seems to be a trend towards nonfiction. And there's a real trend, of course, for émigré stories. This is about a nine-year-old boy from San Salvador who gets to America on his own. It's very moving. Are any of you writing for television? I would urge that, or movies. There's a market for writing games. Writing short stories is great, but it's no way to make money.
BUCKINGHAM
There's some really brilliant writing on TV right now.
GILES
Yes, The Wire is beyond brilliant. Sopranos, of course. I think when everybody's out of the house later today, I'm going to watch Succession, but I'm not going to tell anybody.
SINGH
Succession is so painful to watch.
GILES
Because they're horrible people. They make my characters look like angels.
BUCKINGHAM
What's the difference in the process for you between a novel and a short story?
GILES
I love reading novels. But I like writing short stories. Both of my novels have been written like a series of short stories where one, hopefully, flows into the next. I'm trying to think of a novel that I've loved that has that flow in it. Oh, I know. A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul. Oh my gosh, it's so good. I recently read a short book by a black writer, she's gorgeous. Gayle Jones. The Bird Catcher. It was like reading jazz. And Claire Keegan's Foster. Perfect. I like all the Irish writers. I love Sebastian Barry. Niall Williams' This Is Happiness is a wonderful book. I can't get enough of them. I just think they're onto something. I listen to novels a lot when I walk. I'm listening to The Rabbit Hutch now. But in answer to your question, the difference between short and long. I don't have the vision, really, for a long novel. I'm not a long-distance runner. I like to go a block, sit down, have a cup of coffee.
WAITE
In an interview with Emily Wiser, you mentioned that the voices in Rough Translations are "pretty naïve, self-conscious, and smartass." How has your narrative voice changed throughout the years? How would you describe the voices of the characters in your more current works?
GILES
I do think the voices are smartass in Rough Translations. Then in Creek Walk, I was mainly writing about death, divorce, and depression so it's a darker book. I think what I've done as I've continued to write is experiment with other people's voices, rather than with my own. If you hear your own voice on your answering machine, don't you just hate it? I think it's still probably smartass, but older. I've always doodled. And I've always doodled the same woman's face. The woman's face has aged. I think I do have a distinctive voice. But I don't want to know what it is. I don't want to be told, either.
JENNINGS
The Home for Unwed Husbands has gothic horror elements, even though it's definitely not gothic horror—castles, ghosts, mental health issues, toxic relationships, and unresolved trauma. What inspired you to use these things?
GILES
I don't know if people are still reading fairy tales, but I definitely grew up on fairy tales. And I do believe in ghosts. So it was natural to me.
BUCKINGHAM
I want to hear more about '"I do believe in ghosts."
GILES
Oh, don't you?
BUCKINGHAM
I totally do. I see that a little bit in your work. I'd love to hear more.
GILES
Well, I've lived in an old house for over forty years. It's in a little rural community off the highway. l was told it was a bordello. And then I was told that it was a train station. I've always had this feeling of people passing through it. Years ago my youngest daughter came to the door and said, "Mom"—it was about three in the morning—and I realized the temperature dropped maybe forty degrees; it was freezing. I said, "I know. Get in bed." And we sat there and huddled. We felt whish whish whish going through the room, and then it disappeared. I think it was a traveler, either that or a prostitute, and it was on its way out. When I was three or four I woke up in the middle of the night, and there was a goblin sitting on my feet. I went to grab it, and I could feel it twisting out of my hands. I believed far too much in fairies as a child. I know I did. At eleven I was still looking under creek beds. That's one reason I loved teaching in Ireland. They actually have little fairy wells in the hills. Probably for tourists and children, but they worked for me.
I'm writing a short story now about a writers' séance. A poet sitting next to me had brought a photograph of this pretty woman in a fur coat. The medium was a frazzled blonde who warned us that we might be contacted by the dead via a physical sensation, our hearts might catch or we might feel a pain in our lungs. Then she closed her eyes, said we were surrounded by spirits, and began to say things like she saw a windmill over the head of a certain famous writer whose upcoming trip to the Netherlands had just been written up in the society pages or she heard someone calling out a message in Spanish to the writer from Latin America. I thought, what a crock. And then suddenly, the poet next to me with the photograph, myself, and the woman to my left all felt like we couldn't breathe. Our throats filled with acid. Tears were running down our cheeks. And we were all coughing. We didn't know each other but we felt as if we were being gassed. The poet's photograph was of a relative who had been killed in Auschwitz. I ended up thinking, no, couldn't be, yeah, it could be, no, it couldn't. But, yeah. it could. Why not be open to it?
JENNINGS
In Three for the Road, all three protagonists leave their current homes in hopes of finding new lives or because they feel like they have no other options, and in The Home for Unwed Husbands Kay is changed by her trip to Greece. Why are you drawn to this type of story arc?
GILES
I don't know; when it comes to fight or flight, I flee. Don't you think it's so much more fun to just get out of there? I'm horrified in my own stories to see how many of them end with someone in a car getting the hell out. I don't know what's wrong with me. I want to pinpoint it before some critic comes in and says, "Hey, she uses a lot of cars." I adore the end of Huck Finn. Lighting out for the territory? What could be better?
ANDERSON
Just for fun, what's on your writing desk when you do get down to business and find the time to write? And are there any tools or habits you feel you can't write without?
GILES
I used to smoke. I'm so glad I quit, but I used to think that if I did, I wouldn't be able to write. Then I found that I wrote just as badly when I wasn't smoking as when I had and it was a relief. It's amazing how when you come to a part in your story that's really going to open it up or push it forward, you suddenly wonder if there's anything in the refrigerator. Or you have to pee. There's some instinct that makes you push back from the computer just when you're about to nail it. I'm restless. I get up and come back and get up again. One thing that's always in my writing room is a couch. I like to crash, and sometimes just meditating or dosing your eyes for a few minutes will help refocus you. I also have a little green Buddha on the desk. So how about you? Do you have any superstitions?
SINGH
It's not my habit, but I was listening to a podcast with Ocean Vuong. He apparently wears boots every single time he writes.
GILES
That's interesting. I love Isabel Allende's process. She starts a new novel on the Epiphany, January 6th, every year. Bharati Mukherjee, who grew up in a crowded house in Calcutta, kept a TV blaring in every room when she moved to Berkeley. We all have different needs. I like having a crossword puzzle book when I get stuck, especially one with the answers in the back.
BUCKINGHAM
The title story in Rough Translations is about a dying woman. Did she have anything to do with the creation of Ida?
GILES
No. She was just a dearly loved friend. Ida was loosely based on my mother. Have any of you tried to write about your mother? The first story that I published was "Old Souls," from Rough Translations. It came out in a magazine at that time called Playgirl. It had a naked man in the centerfold. You couldn't get it at the regular magazine stand. You had to ask for it. My story was sandwiched in between ads for something called Sta-Hard Cream that looked like Elmer's glue. I wanted to show this story to my mother because I was proud of it, and it had been published, so xeroxed it and cut it out column by column between the ads, but I worried she would recognize herself as one of the characters. She read the story, and then she looked up all starry-eyed and said, "Darling? Who's the bitch?" "Diane's mother," I peeped, and she nodded and said, "I thought so." So that was my first published story, and it was an introduction to shame. I don't think dignity is a word that writers can claim. We submit. When your work does come out, you can be proud for the moment. But if you're in a magazine, you may be read on a toilet and thrown away. You just learn to walk tall. And wear boots! No wonder Ocean Vuong wears boots. Good idea. These boots were made for writing, and that's just what I'll do .
