ISSUES | summer 2010

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33.2 (Summer 2010): "Crash"

Featuring work by M.C. Armstrong, John W. Evans, Benjamin S. Grossberg, Becky Adnot Haynes, Nathan Hogan, Jonathan Johnson, Devin Murphy, Wade Ostrowski, Sharon Solwitz… and an interview with Natasha Trethewey.

CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE

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Fiction

Jun 01 2010

I Think You Think I'm Still Funny

On that Friday Carl Timm had done nothing, just surfed the web at work hunting down torque specifications for luxury sedans he would never, ever have true interest in or means for purchasing-specifications that would embed themselves in his memory, as if to be kept handy for manly conversation among man-friends in some faraway world. At five to five he’d driven home in his used-looking Saturn wagon, muddy maroon, and butted it up against the thawing grass in his backyard. His house was wedged in on a forgotten corner in northeast Minneapolis, across the street from a foundry; the siding had been hammered by thick specks of black dust for years.

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Nonfiction

Jun 01 2010

Days and Nights with MS: The Witness Complains

My husband isn’t crazy. He teaches, he writes, with some renown. At a forthcoming writing conference, a panel will meet to discuss his life and work. Moreover, as a personality generally, he’s easygoing, charming. He has multiple sclerosis; he needs a wheelchair, and for the past three or four years he has needed someone to lift him from his bed onto the chair. But he has maintained till recently a clear-minded, unresentful, wry, even amused posture in a situation that would demoralize most people: I’m still alive. Seth and Sharon are alive. In the end we all have to die anyway. Our friends, his mother, my parents marvel. He handles it so well.

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Foreword

Jun 01 2010

Crash

The differences between generations-the Lost Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generations X, Y and Z (where do we go next?)-is a popular subject full of questionable simplifications. Sweeping statements about age groups in different eras are at best elusive, due to both sudden changes in history and the diversity at any given time among locales, classes, ethnicities and personalities. Lately one of the often discussed issues concerning the Millennial Generation is whether they suffer from hyper-parenting, with their perennially in-touch parents not giving them enough freedom to develop independence. They need to actually be allowed to make a few mistakes, the argument goes, in order to be inoculated against what to avoid.

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Found Text

Jun 01 2010

Pulling Pranks: James Stern's Reminiscences of an Edwardian Childhood

James Stern never achieved literary celebrity. His books were few, his letters many and his memoir unfinished, yet what he wrote was the stuff of life-the beauty and tragedy of humanity. His memoir, “the problem book,” was not fashioned into a comprehensive work; what we show you from the Stern collection of the British Library are recollections that capture the adventure of childhood set against the backdrop of a mythical time and rarefied place.

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Nonfiction

Jun 01 2010

Between the Sailor and the Sail: The Faith of Ken Kesey

In his own community, Ken Kesey wasn’t a stranger. One can see his influence everywhere in Eugene and Pleasant Hill, whether it’s yogurt from the family creamery in a local store, a statue of the writer reading to children on Willamette Street, or a farmer in a tie-dyed shirt ploughing his fields. In the Willamette Valley that winter, there was vast sympathy for the man who had disappeared from the rest of the country. The family received hundreds of letters, and reading through local newspapers, one finds commiseration and indignation from the most unlikely of sources.

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Fiction

Jun 01 2010

The Year of Perfect Happiness

Soon, though, he discovers an underside to Amanda’s personality, the way you do when you spend your nights and mornings and weekends with a person. Amanda’s underside is hard, gritty, sharpened. She becomes increasingly competitive, at first only in athletics, pushing him to accompany her on advanced hikes, and then eventually in everything, like whose childhood was more fraught or who lost more weight on the glycemic-index diet that they decided to try or who has a more neutralized carbon footprint, blah, blah, blah.