Celebrating 15 YearsIt’s a small boat with no ladder and so we board by wading into the water, grabbing hold of the edge and pulling ourselves up. Passengers help each other heave themselves forward; a couple older women get lifted like children. Unlike the boat that brought us here, there is no manifest, no recording of passport numbers, no printed tickets—but there is space—kind of—and life jackets, and the men who work on this boat have agreed to take us back to the main port for a reasonable price. The other boats—the one that brought us here and the larger, shinier ones that look more like the ones that brought us here—are full, and it is three thirty, a half hour past the time we have been told all of the boats will be gone.
Outer Space as Utopia: Wendy S. Walters on the American Real and Surreal
September 5, 2015
Interviews
MELODY NIXON interviews WENDY S. WALTERS
Wendy S. Walters’ work blends poetry, nonfiction cultural commentary, and playful lyric essay to excavate deeply rooted themes of race, identity, and belonging in America. She has published two books of poems: Troy, Michigan (2014) and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009), and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005). Walters is active in the literary world, as a founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem, New York, a contributing editor at The Iowa Review, and an Associate Professor of creative writing and literature at the Eugene Lang College of The New School University in the city of New York.
Notes on Crises
September 4, 2015
Essays
I walked to my apartment in Kathmandu the day after the earthquake. From the news on my iPhone, I had seen that the palace squares had fallen. But when I left the tents where I had slept the night before, I found the flowerpots were still poised upright on the third-story windowsills and on the roof walls at the shop across the lane. The sidewalk had cracked along the water line. The garden walls had collapsed, and it was hot. But those flowers had not moved; they were as they had been. They caught the light. I had envied the plants. In the months I lived in Kathmandu, I had developed the impulse to notice them behind the dust I kicked up in the road as I passed them. That afternoon, there was not any dust because there was no traffic, not even a motorbike, although my landlord had taken her scooter out; she must have been buying emergency rice.
Ask a Local: Elizabeth Enslin, Wallowa County, OR
September 3, 2015
Interviews
With ELIZABETH ENSLIN
Your name: Elizabeth Enslin
Current town: I live in Wallowa County, Oregon, five miles from the near ghost town of Flora and 45 miles from a town with amenities: Enterprise.
How long have you lived here: I’m a fourth generation Oregonian and have lived full-time in this northeastern corner of the state for about two years now.
August Reads: Pacific Coast Highway
August 29, 2015
Dispatches
I was not allowed to walk or ride my bike along the highway without an adult. “Blonde hair and blue eyes,” my grandma would tell me. “Just the kind they’d want to steal.” As though at any moment, I could be taken and sold for profit like a chunk of copper wire.
“They’re not gonna steal me, Grandma,” I would tell her. “I’m too mouthy.”
August 2015 Poetry Feature
August 28, 2015
Poetry
This month we are welcoming newcomer Maurice Emerson Decaul (whose work will also appear in Issue 10 this fall) and welcoming back Tess Taylor, Luisa A. Igloria, Cliff Forshaw, and Valerie Duff.
August Reads: Ask a Local: Kent Wascom, Covington, LA
August 27, 2015
Interviews
With KENT WASCOM
For the month of August we are revisiting some of our favorite content from the past year. Publication of new work will resume September 1.
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Your name: Kent Wascom
Current city or town: Covington, Louisiana.
How long have you lived here? My parents grew up here: I drew my first breath across the lake in New Orleans and spent my first six years down the interstate in Slidell before spending the majority of my youth in Pensacola, Florida. So in many ways Covington and the area have existed for me as a sort of imaginative heritage for all my life. Boots on the ground, though, 1.4 years.
August Reads: Trespassing in Leechburg
We drive on a gray day in October, a scenic four-hour drive from my new home in Baltimore to my old home in Leechburg, a small steel town in the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, where I lived from ages 8 through 15—the longest stretch of childhood I spent in one location. Though it’s a place I’ve often gone back to in my fiction, I haven’t returned in person in over 15 years. The trip is reconnaissance and romance: scene gathering for a novel and a chance to explore my memory with M.
August Reads: I Believe New Yorkers
For the month of August we are revisiting some of our favorite content from the past year. Publication of new work will resume on September 1.
“I believe New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question.”
– Dylan Thomas
In my first months in New York City I rode in the back of taxicabs through Central Park thinking, “When will this sink in? When will it feel like I know where I am.” I didn’t think I was dreaming – rather, I felt the whole city was dreaming with me inside of it, a poppy-field illusion, a drug trip induced by hidden valves releasing an experimental hallucinogen. The city needed to pinch itself awake, collectively, and climb out of the hollow to find out what was really going on.
“I stopped at Lexington Avenue,” wrote Joan Didion of her arrival in the city, “and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.” You arrive, you reach the mirage, and you wait for it to clear.
August Reads: If You Open a Window and Make Love to the World: An Interview with A.L. Kennedy
August 22, 2015
Interviews
MARNI BERGER interviews A.L. KENNEDY
For the month of August we are revisiting some of our favorite content from the past year. Publication of new work will resume on September 1.
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A.L. Kennedy was born in Dundee, Scotland. She is the author of 15 books: six novels, six short story collections, and three works of nonfiction. She is a fellow of both theRoyal Society of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature. She writes for publications in the UK and overseas and has a blog with The Guardian Online. In addition to author, she is a dramatist for the stage, radio, TV, and film, and a standup comedian. Her All The Rage—a collection of short stories—was published by Little A Books in spring 2014. Marni Berger and A.L. spoke about the culture of humor, constructing the landscapes of characters’ minds, and what it means to “write to please.”
