The Prairie Schooner Blog

Alberta Clipper: 03/15/16: “Horror Story” by Agnes Lam

Prairie Schooner — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 20:55:46 +0000

“Beware, beware, the Ides of March.”

Famously dramatized by William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, these are the words that were declared to Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. The Ides of March was the first full moon of the new year according to the Roman calendar, and though Julius Caesar was warned of his fate, he refused to pay heed. Historians have denied for decades that these words were spoken to Caesar, instead favoring the theory that Shakespeare’s play influenced the world to romanticize the brutish murder of a man by his colleagues who sought to save Rome from his tyrannical rule.

According to most historians, the soothsayer who predicted the terrible day never existed, and the sixty or so members of the Senate who tore Caesar apart were not welcomed as heroes by the newly-declared Roman Empire, because they never sought to save its people in the first place. They wanted to take Caesar’s power for themselves, not give it back to the citizens. The majority of those who have studied the Ides refute the theory that Caesar did not fight; he was a soldier after all, and would not be the kind of man to cover his face and accept his fate. Caesar’s famous last lines—“Et tu, Brute?”, meaning “And you, Brutus?” were never uttered from the dying dictator’s lips, though the phrase penned by Shakespeare hundreds of years later may be the most notorious and heartbreaking response to a betrayal that history has ever seen.

History, in the end, however, is written by a biased hand. Perhaps Julius Caesar was not murdered in a cavernous room underneath the full moon, and maybe the legendary soldier, leader, and dictator didn’t accept his death without putting up a fight. It is likely that the soothsayer—identified by Roman historian Suetonius as a priest named Spurrina—never even met Caesar, much less warned him of his inevitable fate.

There is, however, at least one aspect of the Ides of March that historians and romantics alike can agree on: Brutus, once a close friend and ally of the great king, was ultimately responsible for the sudden and violent demise of Julius Caesar. Joined by the Senate and motivated by a thirst for power, Brutus did not hesitate to tear Julius apart in what would be considered the betrayal of several millennia.

Fast forward approximately 2,057 years, to the Spring of 2013 in Lincoln, Nebraska, when Prairie Schooner was readying the summer issue in which Agnes Lam’s poem “Horror Story” would appear. During the Spring of 2013, March 15 saw weather as dismal as ever, without any military coups being staged in this sleepy city to keep things exciting (thank goodness). While the Ides of March in 44 BC saw a full moon under a clear night, Nebraska in 2013 saw only a “waxing gibbous” in dreary 48-degree weather, a quiet juxtaposition to the bloody night that gave the Ides of March its infamy. In “Horror Story,” by Agnes Lam, the author examines the betrayal of a friend, which echoes the ultimate treachery seen between Brutus and Julius on the notorious Ides of March. Using the juxtaposition of a young girl whose pet snake is preparing to swallow her whole and a woman whose seemingly perfect husband shows no regret for forsaking their marriage, Lam explores two different kinds of betrayal—the kind that you expect, and the kind that you don’t. —Callista Accardi

Agnes Lam

Horror Story

My niece’s classmate kept a pet
snake coiled next to her in bed.

One night, the girl found the snake
stretched out straight along her side.

She thought it was sick and took it
to a vet who said, “It’s not ill.

It’s trying to measure when it’s
long enough to swallow you up.”

My friend married the man of her dreams—
handsome, romantic, a home of his own.

One year into their marriage, she found
him with another woman in their bed.

Before the counsellor, the man said,
“It’s what I am. Didn’t mean to hurt you.”

One night, my friend woke up and saw
the man curled up, breathing in his sleep.

She walked away without a sound.

21 January 2011, Hong Kong Jockey Club

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Winter 2013)

The Alberta Clipper is a biweekly gust of history—brushing the dust off of a poem from our archives and situating it in the current events and local Nebraskan weather reports of days gone by. Explore the Alberta Clipper archives here.

'More moon, more roses, more silence!': an Interview with Valzhyna Mort

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 19:34:34 +0000

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize is entering its final week! This week, Katie interviews Valzhyna Mort, author of "Factory of Tears" and "Collected Body" about writing toward the body and whether or not triteness in language can be said to exist.

How many books have you published, and where?

I have two books, Factory of Tears and Collected Body, published in the US by Copper Canyon Press. My very first book was published in Minsk when I was in my early twenties, and it's still being reprinted. It's called I'm as Thin as Your Eyelashes. Factory of Tears also came out in Sweden, and both American books were published in Germany. Foreshadowing some of the questions, I'd add that the translated versions slightly differ from the original in the order of the poems.

Describe the process of constructing your first manuscript. How did you conceive of ordering the collection?

The books I read growing up were mostly Collected Poems of various dead poets. In these books poems were organized chronologically, by date, so that reading them from beginning to end gave you a picture of daily poetic life, life in poetry. Most of these lives were punctuated by a poem a day, though often there were daily series of shorter poems, and later, in a poet's mid-career, you could see periods of silence often followed by longer poems or sequences of poems without one exact date, but a stretch of months and sometimes even years.

Such chronological organization of a book still holds most interest to me. I enjoy the dialogue between poems that's not conjured up artificially (even if this artificiality is inspired and forms a poem of its own), but bares the day-to-day thinking, vocabulary, and images. A thin sixty-eighty page book that we are talking about here is, to this date, a new and somewhat foreign object for me.

Thus, shamefully, I admit that the process of "constructing a manuscript" held neither enigma nor particular appeal. For convenience, I wrote the titles of the poems on scraps of paper and moved them around the table hoping for some divine intervention to shine on me and show me what should follow what. I'm being somewhat disingenuous perhaps…since there's the other hand to this.

So, on the other hand, I like thinking of a book as a garden. A garden is green architecture, the art of planning, combining, and diversifying. We walk into a book the way we walk into a garden. There are several paths we can follow on our walk, we can smell things before we even see them, we can hear things without ever seeing them, colors and textures complement each other. In a great garden there's something to see and smell no matter what season it is.

Did you notice poetic tics once you’d put the poems together? (I spent the year 2007 trying to break myself of the verbs “bloom” and “ache,” for instance, once I realized everything I wrote was blooming or aching.) How did you decide which tics were fruitful (interesting in that they accrued throughout the collection in a meaningful way) and which were not?

What's wrong with blooming and aching? Is it that these words are repeated? Or is it the triteness?

Repeating can be wonderful. It's unimaginable that somebody would say to Paul Celan: "you repeat the word "silence" too often," or to Osip Mandelstam: "Why do you always compare everything to a rose?" It's a kind of "criticism" that belongs only in a MFA workshop, if it has to belong anywhere at all. Venus Khoury-Ghata mentions a moon or/and a tree every other line. These images are tortoises that hold her poetic universe. So, I say, more moon, more roses, more silence! Triteness, however, results from the boring use of language, and can be cured by lots of reading of wonderful books.

To make this clear, I don't think that these words themselves are trite, for there are no trite words. Some of most beautiful lines of poetry are simple in their vocabulary and imagery. It's a matter of the relationships between the words on the level of a line, a sentence, a stanza.

The words that I repeat often (I discovered that during poetry reading) are "breast" and "nipples."

How did you decide which poems to include in the collection?

I've never had this problem. If you don't know which poems to include, then maybe you shouldn't be putting a collection together? Poems come first, and then, Inshallah, they form a collection. Not the other way around. When I write, I don't think about putting a book together. Eventually, when I've written enough poems, I hope to have a book.

How did you decide where to submit the collection? How many places did you submit? Did this publication process change between the first and second book?

I submitted Factory of Tears to two wonderful places, and published it with Copper Canyon. When I was putting Collected Body together, I already had "a home."

What does current-you wish you could have tell past-you about the whole process?

Sleep on the manuscript for two-three (four?!) years before deciding to publish it!!

Has publication changed your writing or manuscript construction processes?

Not a single bit. I don't write books, don't work on projects.

What did you do when you heard your first book was accepted?

I was very glad and grateful. I was spending a summer in Berlin, and the acceptance gave me a sense of "returning home."

What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?

My editor and I remember the publication process in drastically different light. He remembers me being stubborn as a goat. I remember being a total push-over.

What is your favorite part of your first book?

That one misprint...

The bodies in your poetry refuse borders—they bleed and unfurl into the world unabashedly. The bodies are also playful and deadly serious—they are decorative and wounded, both. Can you talk about your poetics of the body a little bit? What about the body remains a fruitful place from which to write?

Thank you for saying "playful" because humor is very important to me, it renders everything ambiguous.

Perhaps, a body cannot help but be implicated in a poem through a sense of mortality (who was it that defined poetry as a ceaseless conversation between mortality and futility?). But then, Goethe's "overwhelmed heart" has nothing to do with a body, at least I don't think it does. I don't think I write from the body, but rather towards it (them!) at least in the poems in Collected Body, since those poems address ancestry, family ties, bloodlines. We leave our mothers' bodies but they, on their turn, never really leave us. It's a book of facing the bodies the poet carries inside her.

I've never quite gotten the poem "crossword" out of my head, partially because it has one of my favorite first stanzas in literature, and partly because I am enthralled by the way the village and the natural world seem to bow before the body in that poem. Can you talk about that poem a little bit? How did you write it, what was it like to write it?

Thank you. I don't think I can add much to your thoughtful question because the question is truer than any answer I can give. "Crossword" is a poem about Chernobyl, in the landscape and in the body.

Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears (2008) and Collected Body (2011), published by Copper Canyon Press. Her honors include Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, Burda Prize for Eastern European authors, and a fellowship from the Amy Clampitt Residency. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she currently teaches at Cornell University.

3:33 Sports Short #15 // Talisman by Justin Carter

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 21:56:58 +0000

after Robert Rauschenberg

In the dining room,
my father—tanned
from climbing pipelines
& still young—
clutches a signed ball,
listens to the radio
& the announcer,
each strike bringing him
farther & farther
from his dream—
until it’s over,
so suddenly he doesn’t
know what comes next.
In Houston, there
are tears. What to do
with that sadness?
& nineteen years later,
my own self clutching
a different signed ball,
I watch a small screen
while we go down
four straight games.
Why do we place
such faith in this tradition?
Even now, I wear
the same jersey each night
& blame losing on
how I forgot to wear it,
like my body communes
directly with a spirit
that determines these things.

Justin Carter co-edits _____ On Sports & is a PhD student at the University of North Texas. His poems appear in The Collagist, cream city review, The Journal, Redivider, & Passages North.

'We are so tough': Porochista Khakpour on Writing the Body

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 20:10:18 +0000

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize is now open! In honor of the 2016 Book Prize season, Book Prize Coordinator Katie Schmid Henson will interview authors about the process of constructing a manuscript and bringing it to publication. This week, Katie interviews highly acclaimed NEA-winning writer Porochista Khakpour about her two critically lauded novels, Sons & Other Flammable Objects, and The Last Illusion, as well as her forthcoming memoir about Lyme disease.

How many books have you published, and where?

Two. Grove/Atlantic and Bloomsbury (and I have a third that was bought on proposal to HarperPerennial on the way.)

Describe the process of constructing your first manuscript. Did you plot organically? Did you outline? How did the story come together?

I had no idea what I was doing. It was in my fellowship year after a one-year MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars (they did not have an MFA then). On my most depressed day--many things were going wrong in my life--I tried a chapter of a novel based on a short story I wrote there the year before. I showed it to my old wonderful adviser, the great Alice McDermott, and she said to keep going. Then I did another. Same comment. And another. (It was so liberating to just waste time, because I didn't think it could get published). I hit a problem in the middle and Alice said it was "Middle of the Book Syndrome." Who knew what that was? (Or if she made it up to console me, I wondered then.) So I wrote a "stalling chapter" imagining I would cut it later, and it helped me get to the next part. I just kept problem-solving a chunk at a time and got so lost in the performance of it and figuring out how to complete the arc, that it suddenly got done. Of course, that was a draft in those seven or eight months but I spent many years later editing it. Interesting—structurally it did not change much and that middle stalling chapter ended up being many people's (as well as reviewers’!) favorite.

Did you notice any writing tics or themes once you’d gotten through a first draft? (For instance, I spent the year 2007 trying to break myself of the verbs “bloom” and “ache,” once I realized everything I wrote was blooming or aching.) How did you decide which tics were fruitful (interesting in that they accrued throughout the story in a meaningful way) and which were not?

I did not notice much after the first draft but some things were brought to my attention later! I was 28 when we sold it (most of it was written between 25-27) and I was so green in those fundamentals of MFA 101, that I did not realize tags were best left to "said." A reviewer noted I tagged dialogue with "snapped" hundreds of times. Oops. I would change that now. Also, I used (and still use) quite a lot of em-dashes but I enjoy them and find them useful and interesting. I am at peace with most irregularities in my syntax and diction and I don't really regret them, but now after a decade-plus of teaching and so much reviewing, "snapped" and its repetition feels both lazy (let the dialogue handle it) and insecure (not trusting the reader to hear it).

What was the editing process like? How did you get from draft to draft? Did you find yourself excising large portions? Adding?

My greatest concern is always on a sentence level. I write out loud and I read and reread out loud. So I would go over a sentence many, many times. I had to because in Sons and Other Flammable Objects, I have this very maximalist acrobatic prose and it's easy even for me stumble through it. So while I did not do too much throwing away of huge parts I did constant rewriting of sentences and tweaked them to no end. One thing that did change a lot was the ending--my agent thought it should have a different end and I was going crazy trying to think of a new one, for many months. Eventually a call to an ex on a depressing Christmas Eve night got me to a new solution, much by accident. And I had this new ending that required some addition and subtraction of sections of the final chapters. But that was it.

How did you decide where to submit the finished manuscript?

My whole origin story with the agent and publishers and all that is pretty complicated. Back in 2005, an old friend from college had reached out--he was someone I didn't know that well from my freshman year creative writing workshop (my first one!)--through Friendster of all things. He was working at Grove but about to leave, and he left a very early version it in their break room slush pile on his last day of work there. By some miracle, a wonderful iconic editor there, Elisabeth Schmitz, happened to read it and read it and read it. I got a call from her one early morning, as I was sweeping the floors of a Rodeo Drive boutique where I rather miserably worked. She said she'd been laughing and crying about it all week and wanted to go forward and wondered if I had an agent. What a thrill it was--it feels very Cinderella and dreamlike still to me now. Well, I decided, after talking to friends, to get an agent and ended up sending to some listed in one of those "Guide to Literary Agents" books. I went through a huge struggle to get the manuscripts printed and mailed (there was not much email submission then) and in the end, three agents wanted to meet with me. I had to pretend I was already coming to New York and so I did that, cobbled the money together, and got over there. I ended up with a very big deal agent and that felt like a great triumph, but he ended up being very unresponsive and MIA--and when a big editor saw my first personal essay in print, and wanted to see the manuscript and Mr Agent had no response, well, I knew he was not the right agent. And he got it too--we parted ways. Many months later, I ended up with the agent who sold my first novel (to Grove--Schmitz was no longer taking manuscripts then, but it hit a chord with Amy Hundley, who became my wonderful editor.) That second agent was fantastic, though now I'm on my third agent, as she finally retired. I have another fantastic agent, but agents aren't fix-alls--it took over two years to sell my second novel.

What does current-you wish you could have tell past-you about the whole process?

I wish I had not been so stressed out and more in touch with the fact that i was so incredibly young and that life was long, if I'd only let it be. I wish I'd waited a bit before I hurled myself into publishing, though a part of me thinks so much was easier in the industry then, so maybe it was for the best. Plus, I'd wanted to be an author since I was four so it felt like ages, those two decades or so later. I just wish I'd known how painful aspects of publishing would be and prepared myself even better.

What did you do when you heard it was accepted?

Oh, I remember I was in Brooklyn, on the way to subway in Park Slope, and I had just had this awful fight with a partner at the time and I was feeling so hopeless. It had been a couple months of rejections that were very close to acceptances. Anyway, I remember that it was a hot late spring day and I got this call suddenly from my agent and it was just like my whole DNA had become transformed in an instant and I was the person I’d always wanted to be! I was beyond happy. I was thrilled in a way that nearly killed me in the months to come, to be honest. A big change that really rattled me.

What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?

How crazy you will go during it, even when things are seemingly ideal.

What is your favorite part of your first book?

The Stalling Chapter! (It's called "Hells")

You're fairly open about dealing with chronic illness on Twitter, and are writing a memoir about your experience with late-stage Lyme disease. What led you to want to write about chronic illness? How has your experience with the disease changed through the process of writing about it?

I never thought I'd write about it but after years of sharing health issues of mine on social media, people became very interested and started requesting that I write about it. I was corresponding with so many people around the world that it made sense. I imagined I'd create a little chapbook with just information to pass around to people in hospitals but that wasn't right either--i never felt I was an expert and qualified to tell anyone what to do or how to live, even with my same illness. So an editor who became my friend and saw me go through some of the worst parts, Cal Morgan, was the one editor my agent and I sold it to. He's now left publishing but put me in some other good hands at HarperPerennial, and I think it's been a good decision to tell my story, simply and humbly and honestly, as my third book. As for what's changed, well, it is the disease that challenged my writing; I did not expect to go through a major relapse this year, while I was writing it. But writing about it has given me some ways of dealing with it that I did not expect--narrativizing can offer a sort of way of seeing the thing outside of yourself. For me, being my own "character" has allowed me to imagine a way out, while the sick-me who is going through it feels like a mouse on a glue-trap. Obviously I can only do so much--I can't cure this--but I can imagine the happiest ending and work towards it. I don't know how I'd be surviving the pain I'm currently in without the ability to write, and thus this book, which has sheltered me the way old childhood journals used to.

The effects of Lyme disease on sufferers is still, I think, fairly shrouded in mystery in terms of public knowledge. My own (limited) understanding of it came from watching the documentary about Kathleen Hanna, "The Punk Singer," and I was struck by the gendered ways that Hanna's illness is (mis)treated and misdiagnosed throughout. Chronic sufferers, I think, tend to be overwhelmingly women. Can you speak to the ways that gender informs your understanding of Lyme disease's place in public imagination?

I love that documentary and I have been interent-friends with Sini Anderson, the filmmaker, for a while--I think she did an amazing job. What Kathleen goes through is very much what most my fellow "Lymie" women have gone through too. It is very hard to be taken seriously as a woman, period, and imagine winning that battle in the hospitals of America where they are supposed to make quick judgments on your very person. There needs to be a world of training for doctors and nurses in this area, but so much of the sexism is so built in. I'm always too thin or not thin enough, too young or not young enough, why am I single, where are my partners, why did I not have kids, and it goes on and on. It takes women ages to get treated because they get labeled psychiatric cases and that's it. I've said over and over and over, "...but I know my body, I know how I am when I am anxious and depressed," and yet. I thought this would be over years ago, during my first Lyme crisis, but it happened again this year when I ended up in so many ERs. Women end up being sick a lot longer than men because people don't believe them or hear them and it ends up getting worse and worse and they second-guess themselves in their journey--this all happened to me, and my friends. And we are what you'd call "Strong Women," like Kathleen and Sini and so many others. It takes mammoth courage and a really tough spirit to survive it. Luckily, I believe women are made of that--we are so tough--and so we handle it. I laugh imagining what it would be like in a world where men were consistently actually underdogged.

Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran, raised in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. She the author of the forthcoming memoir SICK (HarperPerennial, 2017), and the novels THE LAST ILLUSION (Bloomsbury, 2014)—a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and more— and SONS AND OTHER FLAMMABLE OBJECTS (Grove, 2007)—the 2007 California Book Award winner in “First Fiction,” one of the Chicago Tribune’s “Fall’s Best,” and a New York Times “Editor’s Choice.” Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, Bookforum, Slate, Salon, Spin, The Daily Beast, Elle,and many other publications around the world. She is currently writer-in-residence at Bard College.

3:33 Sports Short #14 // Snatch and Drop

Prairie Schooner — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 21:48:17 +0000

by Catherine A. Brereton

The house shudders when Evan lifts. He lifts upwards of 300lbs, maybe even 350lbs, he told me, when he apologized in advance for the noise. I told him it was fine because, really, how do you tell a man of his size, of his strength, that it isn’t fine, that the house trembles and the cats are anxious and you can’t sleep. He lifts at night, always at night, and although he’s promised that he’ll be finished by nine, he never is.

The thuds come ten minutes apart. In-between, when the house is quiet, the bass of his music thumps in the background. It’s almost soothing. Then, he lifts—snatches, I think, is the correct term—then, he drops, onto the concrete floor of the garage, and the whole house quakes.

He practices the Olympic sport of weightlifting, he told me, not powerlifting, which is different, or strength training, which is different again; what he does, he said, is superior, harder, more demanding. It requires ultimate strength and fitness.

I wonder what he eats. Greek yoghurt, I know, because I’ve seen him carry it into the house by the box. I imagine it’s the protein he needs. He drinks six shots of espresso over ice, gulps it down in an instant. He drives a Jeep with out-of-state plates, a wider than usual chassis, thick tyres. He’s ex-military.

In between drops, the cats curl together in nervous balls. I wonder about the state of the foundations, wonder if there are cracks, yet, in the garage floor. He won’t see; he has rubber mats supposedly to break the fall.

Tonight, he has been lifting for three hours. He films himself while he lifts, his iPhone propped on a strategically positioned shelf. Between lifts, while his muscles recover, he studies his form in miniscule detail, scrutinizing the position of a foot, the angle of an arm, the placement of his fingers around the barbell.

I count the minutes between drops, and wait for it to be over.

Catherine A. Brereton is from England, but moved to America in 2008, where she is now an MFA candidate at the University of Kentucky. Her essay, "Trance," published by SLICE magazine, was selected by Ariel Levy and Robert Atwan as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, 2015. She is the 2015 winner of theFlounce’s Nonfiction Writer of the Year award. Her more recent work can be found in Crack the Spine, The Rain, Party, and Disaster Society, The Watershed Review, The Indianola Review, Literary Orphans, and The Spectacle, and is forthcoming in GTK Creative Journal, and Burning Down the House anthology. Catherine is the current Editor-in-Chief of Limestone, the University of Kentucky's literary journal. She lives in Lexington with her wife and their teenage daughters, and can be found online at catherinebrereton.com.

3:33 Sports Short #13 // Heroes

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 21:35:59 +0000

by Benjamin Blickle

In the cement tunnel to the parking lot, David Bowie’s “Heroes” piped in through the stadium speakers. Even at seventeen, I didn’t think we’d have been heroes if we’d won the state soccer championship. But an oblique bolt of clarity struck through the cumulus of loss. I remembered how much I liked that song, how the lyrics went deeper and weirder than the title or the chorus would let on. Dolphins, royalty, love, ramparts, alcoholism. All the beautiful strangeness would forever be overshadowed by our 4-0 defeat. Why couldn’t they have just played Queen like they always do?

A couple decades later I still cannot hear that song without smelling shin guards and wet grass, without a stone growing in my throat. We could be heroes. If not heroic, we could have done something permanent. They would have flown a maroon-and-gold banner from the rafters of our gymnasium. All the items in that last sentence sound impossibly corny and I still want them. Skidding on cleats down the cool concrete exit, realizing I’d played my last meaningful game, I knew Bowie would haunt me forever and at seventeen, I was right. Just for one day.

When that song started playing on a morning TV show a few weeks ago, I felt the emotions of a gutted teenage goalkeeper as instinctively as mouthwatering, saw the soccer balls painted on my girlfriend’s cheek, smudged with tears. Then the caption informed us that Bowie had died and I refused to believe the boldface. Bowie’s personas had made the endurance of banners look threadbare. The people crying on television knew nothing about my game, but for a moment we were in sync and I’d highjacked the outpouring. I still couldn’t listen to “Heroes” without a jab of loss. Sometimes, with age, we poke old wounds with a melancholy thrill.

Alberta Clipper: 3/01/16: "The Girls They Burned" by Adrienne Celt

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 16:40:36 +0000

March 1, 1692, was the start of one of the darkest and gloomiest times for the early United States. It was the date that the infamous Salem Witch Trials began. In a historical event made famous by Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, three women (Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba) were brought before the local magistrates in Salem Village after three young girls accused them of witchcraft. Those girls claimed that Good, Osborne, and Tituba afflicted them, afflictions that resulted in bodily injury. Interestingly, the three women singled out were social outcasts. Good was a beggar whose impoverished state was caused by the loss of her inherence and her first husband’s debt, for which she and her second husband were held responsible. Osborne was likely accused because she had not attended church for almost three years (although she had the excuse of a long-standing sickness). She also had a legal issue with the Putnam family, one of most prominent Puritan families during that time. Osborne’s sister-in-law married into the Putnam family, one of the most prominent Puritan families during that time. Perhaps they were the ones who suggested that she be accused. Tituba, the first among the three women to be accused, was a West Indies slave woman likely accused because of her race. Even though she denied being a witch at first, she confessed after she was beaten over and over by her owner, Samuel Parris, who was the uncle of one of her accusers. Tituba finally admitted to practicing witchcraft and she implicated Good and Osborne, who were all convicted and sentenced to burn. The trials continued until May 1693, many people beside Good, Osborne, and Tituba, were sentence to death.

These witch trials are reimagined in Adrienne Celt’s Short story “The Girls They Burned” which was published in Prairie Schooner’s 2015 summer issue. On March 1, 2015, (323 years after the start of the Salem Witch Trials), as Prairie Schooner finished arranging and readied the summer issue for publication, the weather in Lincoln, NE, was sunny and pleasant with a high temperature in the 40s and a low temperature of 18. Celt’s story isn't quite as bright in its sly depiction of fifteen girls sentenced to burn at the stake after being accused of being witches. They girls seek escape through various means of transformation, with varying degrees of success.—Esther Sloh

Adrienne Celt

from “The Girls They Burned”

The first girl they tried to burn turned into a doe and leapt away from her pile of sticks, feet wobbling beneath her as she landed. After catching her balance, the doe slipped through the crowd and disappeared around a corner, her tail a white flick. The crowd could hear her hoofs clicking down the street long after she was out of sight.

...

The seventh girl they tried to burn caught fire and burned, and this heartened everyone. Her hair gave up with a gasp, and her clothes flamed and turned to cinder. Her skin bubbled—first on the smooth expanse of her calves, her thin arms. But then, too, in the places that held more moisture, little blisters in the corners of her lips, circling her eyes like dots of henna. The layers of her peeled with exquisite slowness, revealing the red rope of her muscles, then the arch of her cheekbones, the cup of her pelvis. The heat was so high that even her bones steamed and then succumbed, crumbling into a black ash that caught the wind and hung in the air

...

The fourteenth girl turned into bricks and crumbled.

The fifteenth girl baked like bread on a hearth.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Summer, 2015)

'You will lose yourself': the rituals of grief in the poetry of Ashaki M. Jackson

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 26 Feb 2016 19:35:28 +0000

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize is now open! In honor of the 2016 Book Prize season, Book Prize Coordinator Katie Schmid Henson will interview authors about the process of constructing a manuscript and bringing it to publication. This week, Katie interviews brilliant poet and Prairie Schooner contributor Ashaki M. Jackson about grief rituals, submission rituals, and her two forthcoming chapbooks.

I Write Sad Things

Colleagues tell me that I am too well adjusted to be fixated on death and mortuary rites. They also say that they feel the work, suggesting that I have a good handle on opening grief for participation. Grappling with endocannibalism, Shiva, and the reasoning of it all requires stability on my part to write into and not be consumed by the sadness. If I had to articulate my work’s goals, they would be to expand readers’ acceptance of grief in all varieties as a process by which we 1) ease the pain of remembering, 2) allow our bodies absolute surrender to our feelings, and maybe 3) seek and receive security in others, familiar or not. Not all poetry will meet these goals by virtue of authors’ manias – we each like what we like. But, I want to relay grief so that the reader receives and mourns with that speaker (who is usually me). This is communing. When I read the work aloud to a captive audience, they hear this grief and mourn. This is also communing. And I don’t find this communication to be artificial, but very basic, like when you see a person scrape his/her/their knee and you instinctively say “ouch.” Do I think that poetry is unique in carrying feeling from one person to another or bringing people together in their vulnerabilities? To an extent—in a way that is concise and visual and quickly transported. Prose does this. Oral storytelling does this. A remarkable image does this, too. I use what I have, and that is poetry.

Grief as a Choreographer

Grief marionettes the body, which is compelling to me. You will lose yourself. It might not be immediate, and it might not look traditional. I see no difference in the Sufi spinning, the mother folding into herself or, in my case, crying myself weak at the scent of coffee, which reminds me of my late grandmother. (Coffee shops are difficult spaces for me.) I find the body to be the most honest character in grief as there is no suitable language for this process. Mark Doty remarks on this in his introduction of Alex Lemon’s Mosquito (Tin House New Voice) – a treasured book. Doty posits that language exists for emotions that are social and that pain is experienced singularly, so there are few to no words. He says, “Our poverty of terms for pain may indicate that we’ve given up on creating a lexicon, understanding that the solitary, suffering subject remains solitary. When we are wordless, we tend to be world-less as well.” Doty and I part ways a bit as I think that grief can be quietly communal; we may choose to be near others in our sadness or we might make space for someone to join us in our rituals because loneliness can be hard. In this we are building that world. Too, I feel that body has a demonstrative vernacular—all the triggers and switches you haven’t yet logged in yourself are activated in loss. I’m learning this more and more about myself. The eye twitches. The mind brings you gifts. The stomach seizes. The hands hold ghosts. The body calls out and, sometimes, receives a response from others. Even the ways that we simply do not seem ourselves because the body is mourning draws others’ attentions, company or rescue. But the response is not my focus at this moment; neither is the communality of it. I want to start here: What does the body experience during loss? This is a language that I try to capture.

Take the Breaks (or That Damn Debut)

This year, two small presses will publish my first chapbook collections. It has been a long journey, largely because the content in each is thick. The first collection, Surveillance (Writ Large Press) is a reflection on police killing civilians and how the public receives these images. The second, Language Lesson (MIEL), is an examination of grief following my grandmother’s death. I am unable to sit in those feelings for too long without the sadness becoming harmful. Thus, I stopped after the first 25 pages to recuperate. I’ll get back into the work later this year to complete the collections.

Submission #SquadGoals

I’ve developed some savvy in submissions, particularly as a writer who is very comfortable in the sad spaces. It took about a year to get into the submission rhythm, and I do encourage writers to create a habit. I am no longer at the point of needing thick skin because I know which journals will accommodate my type of work. I’ve done my research, and I’ve followed writers who explore similar topics. Their publications gave me my first blueprint of where to send my work.

I have a regular submission schedule thanks to a community of women writers called Women Who Submit. The organization is a response to the VIDA count that revealed comparatively scant representation of women in top tier literary publications than men. The local (Los Angeles) Women Who Submit chapter hosts submission parties every second Saturday of the month. These parties are several-hours worth of information sharing, organizing manuscripts, articulating individual submission goals (publications, contests, grants, etc.) and submitting work live in a room of supportive peers. We have elevated our submission strategies and outcomes as a community. PEN Center USA also has a craft series on submissions that is not limited to women-identified persons. If you don’t have access to formal groups, then create one – a submission brigade that will hold you accountable.

Each quarter, I gather and submit pieces that deserve some air—those that don’t require any background for the reader to experience—and I place them where they seem most at home or where they respond to a well-articulated, themed issue. The last two years have been good; I increased my presence in Tier 2 journals and graduated to Tier 1. This means that my exposure to a much larger readership has increased exponentially. Poets rarely have agents, so tiers help disseminate the work and build your brand. I recommend keeping TheReviewReview.net and Clifford Garstang’s site bookmarked. My next challenge: submitting the full manuscript. I have my eyes on a few presses that make really lovely books that feel like portable art. My favorite bookstores carry these books. I’m not the only one who has noticed these presses, so the competition will be stiff. Light a candle for me.

Publishing for Clarity

Having publications accept over 50% of my viable work makes me panic. This is what I need—to feel as if I’m out of words and need to replenish my well with fresh sadness. I must say that seeing my work in the world, in print, allows me to approach those words as a stranger might. I get to judge the speaker. The poem is successful if, when reading it in the publication, I begin to mourn. This is my gauge and, very likely, a form of narcissism. I read the poem as an outsider, not as the author. My best (most effective) poems upset me. This feels selfish and true because my body responds to the work’s agony; I am reaching the body’s demonstrative vernacular. Sometimes – very rarely – my printed work surprises me in this way. In addition to this type of body check, presenting poems to an audience of strangers clears my vision for new angles with which to approach my work. Will the grieving ease or transform? Then what? Let’s write that.

Ashaki M. Jackson is a social psychologist and poet who works with youth through research, evaluation and creative writing mentoring. She is a Cave Canem alumna, co-founder of Women Who Submit and a regional curator for #BlackPoetsSpeakOut. Her work appears in Pluck!, CURA and Prairie Schooner among other publications. She earned her MFA (creative writing) from Antioch University Los Angeles and her doctorate (social psychology) from Claremont Graduate University. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

3:33 Sports Short #12 // Young & Scrappy

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 22:56:15 +0000

by Judy Sobeloff

I accidentally joined the cross country team on my first day of high school, having never run a mile. My new art teacher was the coach, and I happened to be in his office when he was passing out permission slips, which I thought were for art.

My father had died on the last day of school two and a half months before, and I would cry during practice when we did fartlek, or any drills with a funny name. I came in last in one of our first big meets when the other girls I was running with toward the back all cheated by cutting across a field, and I kept going on the course. About half the people who came out for the team quit, a point of pride for those of us who stayed.

My friends and I made t-shirts that said “young and scrappy,” a phrase used to describe our team in the local paper. I got faster and stronger and stopped crying. “See how her body has changed!” my art teacher announced to the class.

We rarely took a day off. By junior year I had chronic running injuries, and by senior year my only option for continuing was surgery on both hips and knees. My biggest lesson had been about determination, but heartbroken, I stopped running.

This past fall my eighth-grade daughter decided to run cross country, completely of her own accord. A wave of feelings washed over me at every meet, seeing those kids working so hard, especially the ones at the back.

She loved being on the team, but suddenly she was having asthma, every single day. Her doctor prescribed a steroid inhaler in addition to a rescue inhaler—and still, nothing helped. In a meet everyone feels like they can’t breathe—but what about the kid who really can’t breathe? How to navigate the determination question then, especially since cross country means being out in the woods on your own?

Watching my daughter run with her rescue inhaler in a pouch on her arm or in her hand, I wasn’t so sure. Every meet I was relieved when she made it to the finish—and every meet she said there’d been a time when she hadn’t been able to breathe. Even so, we were both enthusiastic for her to figure out how to deal with the breathing question and keep running.

After the season she was diagnosed with not asthma, but something we’d never heard of: Paradoxical Vocal Fold Movement, a condition in which the vocal cords close over the windpipe. It responds well to some simple breathing techniques, and while it can make someone pass out, unlike asthma it can’t kill them.

Around this same time, I was in an exercise class when a friend tore off her shirt and bra, suddenly unable to breathe. I was so grateful to have one of my daughter’s rescue inhalers with me, and be able to hand it to her.

3:33 Sports Short #11 // Safe

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 22:38:23 +0000

by Jessica Roeder

The stillness of right field. Bees in the clover, your mitt giving off its companionable calf scent. Talk it up out there. It’s a known fact that you don’t have to talk it up from right field. If you talk it up, no one will hear, or you will seem ambitious, and you would rather do your time in right field than become embroiled anywhere more active. Your knees lock. Your elbows knock. Left-handed batter, and Mr. Gleason gleams an eye, talks it up to you, Look lively, Rowder. One, two, three, she’s out. Mr. Gleason’s daughter is on the mound. You knew you didn’t have to look lively, but you looked it, anyhow.

So much stillness in girls’ little league, socially mandatory in your suburb, so much eye-on-the-ball, so much shouting, so little time learning to do anything. Four years will pass before you walk into the storefront Academy of Movement and Music for your first ballet class and jeté yourself out of right field forever.

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