ISSUES | fall 1996

19.2 (Fall 1996): "Comic Fiction"
Featuring work by Daniel Akst, Dwight Allen, David Baker, Robert Olen Butler, Daniel Halpern, Jesse Kercheval, Gerald Shapiro, Ned Stuckey-French, David Wojahn, and Nancy Zafris… an interview with William Maxwell… and a special feature history-as-literature by Arvarh Strickland.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE

Fiction
Sep 01 1996
The Green Suit
Once upon a time — September of 1976, to be exact — I went to New York. I was twenty-three. I had a diploma from a college in the hills of eastern Tennessee, a school that until my junior year had not admitted women.

Poetry
Sep 01 1996
Poetry Feature: David Baker
“Still-Hildreth Sanatorium, 1936”
“For the Others”
“A Recessional”
“The Art of Poetry”

Interviews
Sep 01 1996
A Conversation with William Maxwell
Interviewer: You’ve said you learned from E.B. White that the “I” should always be a real character in any piece that you’ve written. Have you ever had a sense in your writing life that you were flying in the face of current convention, or being old-fashioned, by adhering to that principle?
Maxwell: I never worried about being old-fashioned because the books I’ve continued to read all my life have been the Russians. I wanted to write about people, men and women. What’s old-fashioned about men and women?

Fiction
Sep 01 1996
The Twelve Plagues
When the phone rang, Rosenthal was kicking a canvas to shreds in the middle of his studio. He’d already thrown a can of wet brushes against the far wall and had kicked a tray of paint across the room, leaving an attractive boat-shaped smear of burnt sienna sailing along the whitewashed floorboards. The place should have been condemned, and so should Rosenthal: trapped inside another night of failure in a season of failure, locked in a listless, drifting orbit around a failing sun.

Fiction
Sep 01 1996
Swimming In The Dark
Life is strange, isn’t it? A hotel pool in Rome, the china plate of blue water, fifteen other girls in the company-issue swimsuit. We’re stewardesses from Japan. Yesterday we went shopping. Tomorrow, Singapore.

Nonfiction
Sep 01 1996
Generations "I": The Future of Autobiographical Poetry
Robert Lowell, circa 1962 or ’63, is looking at the camera with the sort of fixed intensity that’s displayed in so many of his photos. He’s wearing the black owlish hornrims which were the uniform of the myopic early sixties, a time when the rose-colored granny glasses of the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and John Lennon’s oval wirerims, shading acid-dilated pupils, were still unknown.

Foreword
Sep 01 1996
Foreword: "Comic Fiction"
This foreword is not currently available online.

Poetry
Sep 01 1996
Poetry Feature: Daniel Halpern
“Family Reunion”
“Art”
“The Loneliness of Beautiful Women”
“Thaw”
“The Planes”
“Midnight: Triadic Ghazal”

History as Literature
Sep 01 1996
The Diary Of Lorenzo Greene
At the end of May (1930) Woodson suggested that I take a two-week vacation, then come in and talk with him upon my return. Having completed the study of Negro Employment in the District of Columbia, I aws happy to leave for New York.

Nonfiction
Sep 01 1996
Termites
The summer before ninth grade, the summer of 1964, we collected insects. During most of the summer we assumed termites would be easy to find so we didn’t look very hard for them. Lepidoptera — butterflies and moths — were not only bigger, flashier and more interesting, they were more fun to catch.

Fiction
Sep 01 1996
Life With The Easter Bunny
The first person to answer our ad wasn’t suitable at all. Under “last residence” on the form we made up for these prospective roommates she put down a place with “Manor” in its name, and during the interview Mother seemed airily indulgent, almost humoring. She didn’t even take any notes, which told me the woman had no chance.

Poetry
Sep 01 1996
Poetry Feature: Jesse Lee Kercheval
“Love, a Dark, Untitled Comedy”
“Death, a Second Trip by Sea”
“August in My Neighbor’s Garden”
“World as Dictionary”
“Singing for Uncertain Singers”
“In the Garden with Green Chairs”

Fiction
Sep 01 1996
Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed
This is a bit of a puzzle, really. A certain thrashing about overhead. Swimmers with nowhere to go, I fear, though I don’t recognize this body of water. I’ve grown quite used to this existence I now have. I’m fully conscious that I’m dead. And yet not so, somehow. I drift and drift, and I am that in which I drift, though what that is now, precisely, is unclear to me.