ISSUES | spring 1993

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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

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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