ISSUES | spring 1993
16.1 (Spring 1993): "Comedy"
Featuring the winners of the 1993 Editors’ Prize and work by Mary Brave Bird, David Clewell, Glenn W. Erickson, Kurt Hochenauer, Tim Johnston, Robert Garner McBrearty, Kent Nelson, Abigail Thomas, Michael Waters, Tom Whalen, Mark Wisniewski, an interview with Amy Hempel, and history as literature from Amy Wingreen.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE
Fiction
Sep 01 1992
Birdie
First day of practice my senior year, I walk out of the locker room and see what looks like a sixth-grade white dude whooshing in a jumper from way past the free throw line.
Fiction
Sep 01 1992
Back in Town
Before I drive the wagon into town, my wife makes me promise that I will not go into the saloon where No-Nose Ed and the other bad men hang out.
Nonfiction
Sep 01 1992
The Spectral University
To be away, separate, distinct, to distinguish yourself in your separateness — this, in part, is why you have come. Others, perhaps, have otherreasons — that is not your concern. There is, yes, a war on, and surely some of the students are here to avoid being sent to Vietnam, but 1968 is still two years away, Kent State and the bombing of Cambodia four. You have been told at the Orientation to look around you, to gaze for a moment at your fellow freshmen — “Look closely,” the man at the front of the auditorium says (is he a Dean? the Dean of Men? but exactly is a Dean?), “look closely, because sixty percent of your classmates won’t be here when the second semester rolls around.”
History as Literature
Sep 01 1992
The Spanish American War Journal of Amy Wingreen
I have come to care for the sick on the transport and also have in my charge a very sick nurse. She was ill on the boat going to Cuba and has been ever since, and if she ever gets home alive she will do well. I have not been on deck at all, and not a tinge of seasickness, though the boat has tossed a good deal. The things in our state room slip and slide around, and I after them. I look out now and then and catch a glimpse of the sweeping sea and smell the ocean air and long for a billow to spray me. My prayer was, when I was so ill at Siboney, that I might rather be buried at sea, but better still, that I might be privileged to land on American soil again.
Poetry
Sep 01 1992
Poetry Feature: Michael Waters
“Stoning the Birds”
“The ’66 Mets”
“Christ at the Apollo, 1962”
“First Lesson: Winter Trees”
“First Mile “
Fiction
Sep 01 1992
That One Particular Game
In the summer of 1974, my father rewarded me for graduating from sixth grade by giving me to my mother. He and his new girlfriend — a woman whose age could be derived, I’d determined, by substracting my age from my father’s — were bound for the Virgin Islands. When on the day of their departure I impetuously inquired, “Why Virgin Islands?” Linda giggled and said, “Honey, you got me!”
Poetry
Sep 01 1992
Poetry Feature: Jeff Friedman
“The Talker”
“Beyond the Rain”
“Desire”
“Scattering the Ashes”
Fiction
Sep 01 1992
The Invisible
The man craned his large head over the salads in the glass display case — potato, macaroni, lettuce-cucumber — while Orchard was making his pastrami sandwich. She was aware of him — something odd. He was smallish, maybe in his early thirties, curly hair, blue eyes fairly intense. She had noticed him a couple of days earler, too
Interviews
Sep 01 1992
An Interview with Amy Hempel
It doesn’t work to just say what happened. Even though the thing that happened presumably is this huge thrilling terrifying thing, you have to be mindful of the point where it stops being your story and becomes the story’ story. If you’re intent on holding it to the facts, you will miss that point. I recently contributed an essay to a book in which twenty-some fiction writers and critics were asked to write about a movie that had changed their lives. In this essay we were instructed to be very personal, so for the first time I wrote about things I’d written about in my short stories as true autobiography: this is what happened. I found it really unnerving and not as interesting as the bits that had formed composites in the stories.
Foreword
Sep 01 1992
Foreword
Great comedy is like a fine magic act. A magician turns commonplace things like eggs or scarves into items of wonder and amazement. The egg is wonderful because he has made it appear. How did he do that? Great comedy turns the most ordinary materials — humble characters, banal motives — into something sublimely other. The basis of comedy lies in the transformation itself.
Nonfiction
Sep 01 1992
Life in Paradise
Sometime after Wounded Knee little Pedro and I moved in with Leonard Crow Dog on his father’s place. I married Leonard in the Indian way, with a blanket wrapped around us, holding on to the Pipe, while being “cedared” and fanned off with an eagle feather. This was not considered a legal marriage in a white priest’s sense but it was good enough for us.
Fiction
Sep 01 1992
Seeing Things
It is the terrible summer we all go crazy. Uncle peach has offed himself and I now sleep in my clothes. Maybe we hardly knew him, but his blood runs in our veins. There is lunacy in this family and I feel too peculiar in my floaty nightgown. I know I am a child, but I am a tall child, and children can go crazy too.
Fiction
Sep 01 1992
Epilogue
What am I to say about two brothers whose wives have argued, who are thus forced by their immediate loyalties not to speak to one another? Or the surgeon in love with the deftness of his hands, the choreography of his fingers, and who has been forced by illness to set his scalpel aside? Or the woman who refuses to act on her own desires because she is attracted to a married man, one who represents moral integrity and uprightness of heart? What can I do but repeat the usual cliches: that life is indeed a garden of pain, that men and women are born for trouble and heartache. That the world which seems to lie before us like a land so various, so beautiful, so new, etc., etc., is in reality a smoking landfill?
Fiction
Sep 01 1992
Pap's Story
Once upon a time the old man — I say old man but he’s a boy at heart — that old man went down to the river near his place to play at ducks and drakes. I said river but it was more like a stream, unless there was a flood and how often does that happen these days, anyhow?
Poetry
Sep 01 1992
Poetry Feature: David Clewell
“Goodbye to Debbie Fuller: Pass It On”
“Lessons in Another Language”
“In Case of Rapture”
Fiction
Sep 01 1992
Route Coyote
I sat in the recliner watching the video tape from last Thanksgiving as my brother Sean taped me. It was Thanksgiving. There aren’t many older brothers on this planet like Sean who would let a kid brother do something like this, even after the coyote thing in 1987. I love him and everyone in the family. On the video, I saw myself sit in the same recliner watching a video from the previous Thanksgiving. I’ve been doing this every year since 1985. It’s a Thanksgiving ritual I do, a personal and now a family thing