ISSUES | winter 1991

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14.3 (Winter 1991)

Featuring work by Will Baker, Bruce Bond, Paul S. Brownfield, Anthony Caputi, Kim Edwards, Steve Kaplan, Norman Lavers, Walter McDonald, Greg Michaelson, Mary Lee Settle, C.W. Smith, Tricia Tunstall, Liz Rosenberg… and a History as Literature feature by Peter Pitchlynn and an interview with Tim O’Brien.

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CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE

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Fiction

Dec 01 1991

Knock, Knock, Leave Me Alone

“There was a time in my life when I was addicted to non-profit orgainizations,” Evie confessed, gazing at her audience. There were plates of nachos at some of the tables, people digging in. It made her feel like the exhibitionist in the family, or TV, something you watched while you ate. “I canvassed for everybody–Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Earth First, Pluto Second. I can tell you about my problem now, but that’s only because I’m better. I can say, ‘Hello, my name is Evelyn Singer and I…I…I want you to sign my petition.’ I’m not fully recovered, I still collect signatures. Not for any specific cause, I just collect them. I still protest against things, but little things. Like the other day, I saw my boyfriend Ray throwing out half a banana and I screamed, ‘Save the fruit! Save the Fruit!'”

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Interviews

Dec 01 1991

An Interview with Tim O'Brien

Everything I’ve written has come partly out of my own concerns as a human being, and often directly out of those concerns, but the story lines themselves, the events of the stories, and the characters in the stories, the places in the stories, are almost all invented, even the Vietnam stuff. If I don’t know it I just make it up, trying not to violate the world as I know it. Ninety percent or more of the material in the book is invented, and I invented 90 percent of a new Tim O’Brien, maybe even more than that.

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Fiction

Dec 01 1991

Taming Monsters

There is a sign, hand lettered on red construction paper, on her son’s bedroom door. It says: NO MONSTERS CAN COME HERE. THAT’S THE LAW. Her son dictated the words to her at bedtime one night. He watched, his wet lips parted, as she wrote the sign and taped it up. Later, getting into bed, he clung to her. “Mommy,” he whispered, “can monsters read?” She reads, these days, books on child development, combing the indexes for FEARS, NIGHTTIME or MONSTERS, FEAR OF. She knows from these books that four year olds are commonly afraid of imaginary beings. She understands that the fears are normal and will pass. “Yes,” she tells her son, “monsters can read.” Her husband does not approve of this. He says that by going along with the fantasies she is reinforcing them. “Robbie,” he says to his son, “there are no monsters. Right?”

“Right,” says Robbie.

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Fiction

Dec 01 1991

The Telegraph Relay Station

Three days beyond the fort on the stage, following the line of telegraph poles like a spider slowly clambering its web. The dry grass prairie is sere and burned looking, like brown skin with a worn ghost of hair on it, the buffalo far to the south at this time of year, Thanksgiven day, but packs of white wolves standing and looking at us curiously. What can they find to eat? All morning long we look forward to seeing the telegraph relay station, mainly beacuse there is utterly nothing else to see. That is the place where I will depart from my two fellow passengers and wait for the stage that comes through from the north, and will take me south to my destination.

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Fiction

Dec 01 1991

No Permanent Bad Thing

One thing I know for true: I want to touch him. I push my hands into my pockets, fists against my hipbones, so they do not move to feel his arm, his back, rub the nape of his neck. I look at him for too long, and when he sees me, I look away, but not before I see him smile.

We are standing under the bridge at Damascus. This is not the bridge whispered about by the grade nine cheerleaders in third period biology, where they come to rumple their clothes and moan and frustrate themselves and their boyfriends. This is the other bridge, the bridge by the old train bridge, the bridge where he comes with my brother and their crew, and they light fires and talk and act stupidly and take off their clothes and sail out onto the river in the rowboat that they dock in the bushes when they leave.

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Fiction

Dec 01 1991

Letter From the Horse Latitudes

Dad, your visit and our agonized parting have stirred up things I’d long since hoped were still for good. Your every gesture spoke a need to ask how I came to be who and where I am. Yet I can remember you as a fugitive. Garner State Park, Texas. We heard on the car radio the police were after you. I was eleven, thrilled to be in the company of a criminal. You who obey all laws great and small, you were deaf to the voice of Authority, fleeing the scene while Mother urged you to turn yourself in. You were (are) a lean man gnawed with American worry, quenching the fire in your gut with buttermilk and Bach, a virtuoso on your major talent, joking your way clear of painful situations.

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Fiction

Dec 01 1991

Luck Be A Lady!

He could never decide if he was a gambler pretending to be an accountant or an accountant pretending to be a gambler. To be a gambler you had to make your living by betting, and he didn’t. To be an accountant you were supposed to be a model of pecuniary conservatism, and he wasn’t. Most of his friends thought the scale tipped in favor of accountant. Unlike most gamblers he had never had great swings of fortune, from storybook winnings to losses taking you over your head into debt, and like an accountant he was careful, cautious even too cautious, some might say, to be a gambler. But he didn’t agree. In fact, he was no great distance between the two, particularly if you excluded from gambling the games of pure chance.

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Nonfiction

Dec 01 1991

Shared Voices

Perhaps the most private experiences are the most universal. I wonder about this. I know that for talented, dreaming children growing up in the South, there is a common shadow line of isolation that is crossed, and that we cannot know for years how strongly it has affected us. It is that moment when, after seeking, we find someone to share a private language, a private hope, not taste, but true pitch, not an accepted “artistic” experience, but a friend who, in a desert, speaks the language we thought was alien and private.