ISSUES | summer 2009

Includes discussion of Corpus Christmas by Margaret Maron, Howards End by E.M. Forster, Emma by Jane Austen, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.

Before falling for photography, Clarence Laughlin had wanted to be a poet. As a young man he immersed himself in the French symbolists, particularly Baudelaire. Unable to sell his prose poems and wanting to quit his job as a bank teller, he bought an inexpensive camera, built a homemade darkroom and taught himself the fundamentals of photography. His goal was to be the Baudelaire of the camera. He called his early results “visual poems” and meant for the images to be explicated like poetry. For Laughlin, objects possessed an intricate web of psychological associations and a multitude of meanings.

A shaky, sickening glee washed through me and then drained away almost immediately, replaced by a daffy disbelief: Alice Munro had written to me. Alice! Munro! Those two words were a kind of Holy Grail to me then: the lilting rise and fall of Alice, the double-barreled thunk of Munro. Together they seemed less like a name than an object I could hold in my hands-a stoneware bowl, perhaps, or a pewter platter, equal parts generous and unforgiving. They bore the weight of everything I loved, admired and understood about the art and craft of fiction, everything I ached to master myself.

Could it be that Twain wanted Huck Finn to be a serious book about children? And could it be that the book about race was, to put it politely, the farce? What was Twain telling us about America’s children, and what was he really telling us about blacks and whites in America, if he was telling us anything at all?

Believability is in minutiae, those small details that rise up. If you’re referencing a sunset-Chekov points this out-it’s often a waste of language to talk about things generally: the way the sunlight filters through the sky and over the forest. Instead focus on a bunch of broken glass on the ground. . .

Featuring the poems: In the future, the future will be the past (featured as Poem of the Week, July 14, 2009) BRCA1 Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down Meditations…    read more

Featuring the Poems: Surrender Jazz (featured as Poem of the Week, July 30, 2008) Dyeing Her Hair Ode to Boredom   Jazz Today I’m thinking about this child’s life —…    read more

Featuring the poems: Bravo Charlie (featured as Poem of the Week, Aug. 11, 2009) Foxtrot November Tango Zulu   Charlie A new song.  A carol, say, to constancy — not…    read more

“That was Matthew,” he says. “He’s in jail. He said last night-whoever he was with, somebody new, I didn’t recognize the name-I don’t know. He doesn’t remember much. He said they were drinking and then they were fighting and now he’s in jail.” We’re facing each other across our cluttered kitchen, Joe with the phone and me with a wooden spoon, silent-two people who are rarely silent together. Hot oil spatters the back of my hand, and I move the pan off the heat.

“Did he-”

“I don’t know,” Joe says. “All I know is what he told me. I assume she called the cops and they took him in.”

I tried to open my eyes on the operating table. I tried to see what I could see. I saw blood, cracked bones, bloody gloves, something with machinery, oxygen, lightning from the heavens and Frankenstein crying, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

I will never forget, no matter how long I live, the feeling I experienced when I landed a jab to the base of Mansour’s nose, the sudden blossom of blood that issued forth, the disbelieving look on his face that totally eclipsed that first look of surprise on discovering me with his wife.

The eight weeks of basic training at Fort Ord were just about what he’d expected. Then he got his orders. Waited, in a set of starched khakis that felt too stiff, too thin in the October wind, with a dozen other soldiers for the bus to the Army Language School in Monterey. It was already an hour late. Another private behind him griped, “Hurry up and wait,” and he turned to see who, but it wasn’t anyone he recognized. When they finally boarded, the hurry-up soldier sat down beside him, stuck out his hand and said, “Roscoe Drummond.”

Several of the pieces in this issue reflect directly or indirectly on artists and their potential influence on us. Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Munro Country” tells of her own amazement as…    read more