The Prairie Schooner Blog

Alberta Clipper: 3/31/15: “The Sweetest Journeys Home Are in the Mind” by Dan Jaffe

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 16:13:23 +0000

In the spring of 1959, the Dalai Lama fled the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, beginning a trying journey over the treacherous terrain of the Himalayas in search of safety. On March 31^st, he crossed the border into India, where he was welcomed with refuge and asylum. Meanwhile, on that same day in 1959, Lincoln, NE, was hit with strong thunderstorms and high winds topping out at 20 mph while the editors at Prairie Schooner worked tirelessly on the Spring Issue, which included work by one of Nebraska’s own, Dan Jaffe. Jaffe has been a notable poet in the literary world for more than thirty years, but Jaffe made this Prairie Schooner appearance fifty-six years ago while working as a professor in the UNL English Department, with a poem titled “The Sweetest Journeys Home Are in the Mind.” This sentiment rings especially true in the case of the Dalai Lama, who ventured for fifteen days before finally arriving safely in India—not, perhaps, his home, but at least, a place to rest. — Mariah Reicks

Dan Jaffe
The Sweetest Journeys Home Are in the Mind

The sweetest journeys home are in the mind,
Travels full and restful as they wind
Flowing to the moment of return
By banks that seem more green around each turn.

Those upstream days all curve in a long grin
That widens with each story to begin,
And rough-edged rocks embedded once in grit
Have become polished stone conglomerate.

Still, I remember wishing it be soon,
The impatience of a Sunday afternoon,
The station thick with travelers, soot, and flies,
I fled my fussing family’s goodbyes.

But now, in another city, days still drone,
A stir of bees around an empty comb.
So once again I settle in a train,
Reflections mingling in the windowpane.

Hello’s, goodbye’s, are only rituals.
They mist the shrinking summer into fall.
Sweep past the moist green fields, the structured stone,
Measure the miles that wither quickly home.

After the tears, the kisses, the shaking hands,
The recitations of unfamiliar plans.
All the forgotten hurts and dreams played back,
Upstairs in my room, finally I unpack.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 1959)

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.

Contributor Spotlight on Emily Schultz

Prairie Schooner — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 14:21:27 +0000

by Dan Froid

Emily Schultz’s first novel, Joyland was published in 2006 by a small press (ECW). In 2013, Stephen King also published a novel called Joyland. Because his book was initially published in paperback only—not as an ebook—several readers bought Schultz’s book by mistake. As a result, Schultz received a few negative Amazon reviews but, on the plus side, a spike in sales and a sweet royalty check. Schultz chronicles how she spent the royalty money at Spending the Stephen King Money. Schultz got car repairs, a Macbook Air, and some new books out of the deal. As for King, he called Emily Schultz his new hero and told Entertainment Weekly he was going to buy her book.

Emily Schultz is not only not the author of a Stephen King book, she is the author of three novels and the co-founder of Joyland Magazine. Her latest novel, The Blondes, is forthcoming in April from St. Martin’s Press. It’s received a starred review from both Booklist and Kirkus, which called it a “nail-biter that is equal parts suspense, science fiction, and a funny, dark sendup of the stranglehold of gender.” In this fascinating interview at Words without Borders, Schultz interviews Éric Fontaine, who translated The Blondes into French. They talk about translating jokes, editing for translation, and more.

Schultz’s long poem “Noah’s Wife” appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of Prairie Schooner:

The rain sang now like an old woman weeping
over the dead. Go get the coyotes, you said. I balked.
The coyotes, really? I wanted you to leave behind the mice
and the snakes too, but you said: One will feed the other.
I cocked my head. Who will feed on the snakes though?
But I brought them. All of them. Do you think it is easy
to tether two wild red coyotes with a leash of twine?
Before we finished loading, all the animals bellowing
couldn’t cover the din of the thickening, driving rain.
My hair streamed and my clothes sailed like ghosts.

Purchase the issue to read more.

To learn more about Schultz, visit her website or follow her on Twitter.

Listen to This, Listen to That: Family Matters

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 15:43:39 +0000

by Dan Froid

“I’ve had this sort of ongoing romance with the subjunctive . . . to imagine this possible future that didn’t look like anything you’d seen in the world around you.” That’s how Julie Marie Wade describes her interest in memoir in “Family Matters,” Episode 18 of Air Schooner. I like that: the romance of the subjunctive. That’s a real pleasure of the imagination, or a real nightmare, to set up a scenario and follow it to its furthest conclusion. Family matters present surely the biggest daydreaming minefield: it’s so easy to go back to petty conflicts, or strained relationships, or whatever, and conjecture other possibilities. In the episode, we hear Sharon Olds do this, too, in “I Go Back to May 1937,” which for me is essentially an episode of The Twilight Zone. Olds imagines telling her parents not to marry, but at the end

I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Like The Twilight Zone, the final image of paper dolls mashed together is vaguely threatening, but fascinating. It’s strange, but it has an eerie aptness to it. Maybe what I’m thinking of is that one episode where five characters—there’s a clown, a ballet dancer—wander around in a tiny room trying to figure out where they could be. As it turns out, they’re dolls in an orphanage collection bin. The poem envisions the past like a toy-chest, in which one can play—but it’s only ever play. There’s a sense of fatalism here, too: No, it has to be that way, it couldn’t go otherwise. I’m humming Marianne Faithfull’s “No Child of Mine” to myself. Faithfull repeats again and again, “Go home, find your own way.” Its mood is similar to the Olds poem, as if both of them are looking at the collection bin, wondering what they could play with, and deciding against playing too much. At the very end the song changes tack—the hazy music vaporizes into a simple guitar, handclaps, and the voices of Faithfull and PJ Harvey:

I have no time for hate or love
Hey child, you’re so full of woe
I have no time for hate or lying
Hey child, you’re no child of mine

Here, perhaps, the romance of the subjunctive goes wildly awry. The subjunctive itself stops allowing itself to be played with. At first pensive, Faithfull now sounds frustrated, tired.

A somewhat similar mood pervades Natalie Diaz’s poem “Black Magic Brother”:

My brother’s shadow flutters from his shoulders, a magician’s cape.
My personal charlatan glittering in woofle dust and loaded
With gimmicks and gaffs.

A train of dirty cabooses, of once-beautiful girls,
Follows my magus man like a chewed tail
helping him perform his tricks.

I love the constant refiguring of Diaz’s brother: a magician, a charlatan, a magus—all terms conveying a slightly different image. Is he a trickster, a phony, a dark mystery? Diaz also talks about her family’s response following the release of When My Brother Was an Aztec. As Diaz says, her mom disagreed with Diaz’s interpretation of events: “That’s just not how it happened. The things you wrote in there, that’s just not how they happened,” she said. Her sister, on the other hand, insisted that Diaz was right. Martha Wainwright’s “BMFA” also suggests the problem of conflicting interpretations. (I’ll leave it up to you to discover what the thoroughly-NSFW title acronym stands for.) It addresses Wainwright’s relationship with her father. If you figure out what the acronym stands for, that might give you the gist. It features a truly wonderful opening—Wainwright’s lovely croak of a voice bursts in and sings:

Poetry is no place for a heart that’s a whore
And I’m young and I’m strong
But I feel old and tired
Overfired

And I’ve been poked and stoked
It’s all smoke, there’s no more fire
Only desire
For you, whoever you are

I love that opening line. This song is angsty, yes, but forceful. I’m compelled to sing along every time I hear it. As Diaz and Wade do, Wainwright raises serious questions about family and art. To what extent is her father at fault for her feeling tired and cowed? “You say my time here has been some sort of joke,” she says later, “and you have no idea how it feels to be on your own / in your own home.” It’s an indictment, of course, but she insists that she desires “you, whoever you are.” So like Olds, she seems dissatisfied with the shape the present has taken, the line the past has taken to become it, and yet she doesn’t seem to want to change it. The romance with the subjunctive ends up in the same way every time: focusing on what has actually happened and fashioning it into art. Do what you are going to do, all these poets and singers suggest, and they will tell about it.

Contributor Spotlight on Chantel Acevedo

Prairie Schooner — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 15:34:19 +0000

by Dan Froid

Like the narrator of her newest novel—like Chantel Acevedo herself—Acevedo’s grandmother was a storyteller. Acevedo explains in a feature from the Latin Post that her grandmother inspired Acevedo to tell her own stories and showed her how to use the language of narrative. The Distant Marvels (Europa Editions), Acevedo’s newest novel, comes out in April. It follows Maria Sirena, a storyteller by trade: she tells stories aloud as her fellow workers labor in a cigar factory. After becoming sequestered with seven other women following Hurricane Flora, one of the deadliest hurricanes in history, Sirena threads the story of her own life with the tale of Cuba’s history in an effort to entertain her fellow survivors. The Distant Marvels has already received acclaim, including a starred review from Kirkus. It’s also received praise in Italy, where it was published last year: La Repubblica calls Maria Sirena the “Scheherazade of the Tropics.”

Acevedo is the author of three other novels, most recently A Falling Star (Carolina Wren Press, 2014). Her first novel, Love and Ghost Letters (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), won the Latino International Book Award. She also edits the Southern Humanities Review. Earlier in her career, Acevedo contributed to Prairie Schooner. Her story “The Tourist’s Gift” appeared in our Fall 2003 issue:

I think of my sister at sunrise, as I always do. But today the thought of her brings a thousand winters into my heart. The light breaks through the makeshift curtain - sewn remnants of satin and flannel bought at costly black-market prices. I watch the rays tether their grip on my arm. The tiny hairs stand on end, and my skin blooms pink and shines with sweat, as it does at every dawning. The bundle of clothes and photographs wrapped in canvas and rope lay at my feet, a dented old milk jug filled with water at its side. The bundle has sat there for weeks now, and the day of departure has finally arrived.

Read the rest here (with access/subscription to Project MUSE).

For more with Acevedo, check out her website, or follow her on Twitter @chantelacevedo. And if you’re going to AWP, you can catch her at the panel “Europa Editions Turns Ten—An Indie Publishing Success Story.”

Listen to This, Listen to That: Stranger Fiction

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 18:56:43 +0000

by Dan Froid

Yesterday I ate some chocolate, Dove-brand dark chocolate with almonds. I opened the purple foil and popped it into my mouth; beneath the chocolate lay a secret inscription. “Feed your sense of anticipation,” it read. What? Feed my what? Feed my sense of anticipation. Presumably the chocolate wrapper urges me to give myself something exciting, or, better, something both exciting and vaguely luxurious to which to look forward, like, presumably, more Dove chocolate. Or feed, indeed, my already anxiety-prone mind with…more anxiety? Sounds terrific. I’ll accidentally send a gossipy message to the subject of the gossip. I’ll delay working on a paper until the night before it’s due. I’ll take the wrong exit off the highway a half-hour before I’m due to arrive somewhere. And then I’ll think: How do I get out of this mess? I’ll certainly anticipate something.

I was musing over Dove’s deeply silly message when I listened to Aubrey Hirsch’s story “Pinocchio” on episode 38 of Air Schooner, “Stranger Fiction”. Hirsch’s story what she calls a counterfactual biography. It picks up where the original left off: “Now that Pinocchio is finally a real boy, he understands that what he really wants to be is a woman. He knows he has to tell his father, Geppetto, who spent his whole life longing for a son.”

Now that Pinocchio’s a real boy, he may join the ranks of the anxious living. He may feed his sense of anticipation by agonizing over the imminent talk. He says

“Dad, I need to tell you something . . . You know what you always say about making the puppets? That you can tell what’s inside the chunk of pine even before you start carving it? That you just know?” . . . He tells Gepetto that although he gave him the features of a boy and a boy’s name, he guessed wrong when he picked up this particular piece of pine.

As co-host Stacey Waite points out, “The story itself highlights what’s actually weird: that there’s such a thing as a real boy or a real girl in the first place.” Waite and Hirsch are right. It’s the world that’s weird, not Pinocchio. The world accepts, in the words of John Cale, “hanky panky nohow.” Hanky panky in a broad sense: misbehavior, anything considered a little too strange. He sings, “I never answer panic knocking, falling / Down the stairs upon the law / What law?” What law indeed. For all that the song defies sense—for all its weirdness—it’s strangely moving, and a little cathartic. So too is Hirsch’s story: the underlying assumptions in the world of Pinocchio were always there, and Hirsch simply, effectively, draws them out.

Listening to Hirsch’s tale, thinking about Pinocchio and his anxieties and my anxieties and how I got some slight satisfaction from crumpling up the purple chocolate foil and throwing it away—not to be flippant about Pinocchio’s plight, rather, to be as flippant as possible about Dove’s cloying and deeply annoying imperatives—I thought then of St. Vincent’s “Just the Same but Brand New.” It opens dreamily and synth-ily. I’ve read that this song’s album was partly inspired by Disney movies, and it shows: as with many of her songs, St. Vincent tries to lull you with a sense of sonic drowsiness. But then, you might say, she feeds your sense of anticipation with a somewhat threatening bass-drum undertone. The somewhat cryptic lyrics likewise penetrate the dreaminess:

And anything you wrote I checked for codes and clues
The letters stopped unceremoniously in June

So I changed my I’s
And A’s to yours
I'm just the same
But brand new

And I do my best impression of weightlessness, now too
And I might be wrong, I might be wrong, I might be wrong
But honey I believed I could

Float away
Dangling
I’m just the same
But brand new to you

At this point the song explodes, and St. Vincent herself does float away—she disappears as the instrumentation takes over. Those drums!

Look at little Pinocchio himself, who is indeed just the same but brand new: he’s a real boy. And if he wants to please Gepetto, he wants also to please himself—how to decide which path to take? Better to float off and away, if you could.

Apropos of nothing, it seemed, I turned to Buffy Sainte-Marie’s very weird “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot.” This comes from one of the first albums to experiment with electronics—in 1969. The song opens with Sainte-Marie’s echoing, staccato repetitions of the title before shifting into what sounds like a spell or a prayer. Magic has vanished from the world, we’re told, and yet—

The naked God did live
This I mean to whisper to my mind
This I mean to laugh within my mind
This I mean my mind to serve
Til’ service is but magic
Moving through the world
And mind itself is magic
Coursing through the flesh
And flesh itself is magic
Dancing on a clock
And time itself
The magic length of God

Sainte-Marie’s voice is strange, its vibrato a sort of churning, robotic pulse. As we get to this point she gets ever more urgent, forcefully chanting the words. I love this witchy incantation. And it’s perhaps as good an introduction as any to another bizarre and magical tale: “a queer epic about a little girl who accidentally feeds [that word again!] her mother to an albino tiger and grows up to become a domestic terrorist.” Chavisa Woods talks to Stacey Waite about her novel in verse, The Albino Album. Woods thinks her work is “batshit crazy . . . it’s definitely weird, and I’m proud of that.” Own your weirdness! That’s the imperative. I think if I must feed myself any “sense” at all I would do well to feed my sense of weirdness: I could do so by listening to Woods, who reads from her novel. Like Hirsch’s “Pinocchio,” The Albino Album deals with the discomforts of gender conformity. The hero encounters a repugnant character who snidely refers to her as a princess. She thinks, “The word ‘princess’ cut me to the core. The muscles in my face went invisibly to war with each other. I did not turn to look at her for fear of giving something away that I could not afford to give.” Maybe the idea of giving something up made me think of “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot.” What I enjoy about all of these songs, and about the passages we hear in this episode of Air Schooner, is the undercurrent of disquiet. The writers as well as the musicians develop some pretty weird art, and that weirdness often involves exploring various anxieties. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I guess I can explain my ceaseless mockery of the Dove chocolate foil by suggesting two options. I can accept Dove’s platitudes at face value (does anybody really do that?), or I can find art that would, figuratively speaking—as I literally destroyed my little purple wrapper—rip those platitudes in half.

Women and the Global Imagination: Our Imaginary Sisters and Daughters

Prairie Schooner — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 18:58:27 +0000

by Viola Allo

This post is part of an ongoing series of blog posts on the theme of Women and the Global Imagination. In our Winter 2014 issue Alicia Ostriker curated a poetry portfolio on this theme, and we were so struck by its contents that we wanted to keep the dialog surronding this theme going on our blog. Viola Allo's essay considers the power of a global imagination, our collective ability to better care for women, to build a world where women and girls matter. We hope her words resonate with you.

The Chibok Girls as Our Imaginary Sisters and Daughters

On the night of April 14th of 2014, a government boarding school in the town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria was attacked by members of the Islamic fundamentalist (terrorist) group Boko Haram.

The school, an all-girl boarding school, had been vacated because of other Boko Haram attacks on schools in Borno State, a state in Nigeria whose towns and villages are routinely attacked by Boko Haram. The girls were senior students, and they had returned to school temporarily to take their exams. The girls were between the age of 16 and 18, young women about to achieve the culmination of years of secondary schooling. But their studies--and their futures--were violently halted.

Almost 300 girls, taken in one night. Some were able to escape. But over 200 girls remained unaccounted for. As if they vanished into thin air. No one knew (or was brave enough to say) where the girls were. But someone must have known where they were. Right?

How could so many girls just disappear? And for a group that large, why so hard to find them? They were taken in trucks. The trucks were seen entering Chibok. Someone must have seen the trucks leave. Someone must have seen something.

One had to imagine that Nigeria is so vast a place that so many young women could be easily hidden and live for months on end without the possibility of being found.

But couldn’t something be done? Why couldn’t someone go after those terrorists and get those girls back? Could the terrain be that rugged, that intimidating, that inaccessible? And could the terrorists be that powerful, that numerous, that invincible?

Then one had to imagine that maybe--just maybe--the terrorists were that strong, that careful and crafty, that resourceful, and that capable of mysteriously making grown women disappear without killing those women outright.

Soon after the Chibok kidnappings, a Boko Haram leader informed the world that the girls were being sold as slaves and being married off, after being forced to convert to Islam. And so the collective of kidnapped women was being broken up, being dissolved, becoming impossible to locate and reassemble. And all the while, more girls were being kidnapped and appropriated for the terrorists’ maniacal horror machine.

One had to feel the helplessness of it all. Could the Nigerian armed forces have been so weak and incapacitated in some way that they couldn’t rescue those vulnerable and defenseless students, their own country’s young female citizens? One had to imagine this powerlessness of the Nigeria’s leaders and its military.

What happened to the international offers of help, galvanized by Obiageli Ezekwesili and her promotion of the massive social media movement called #BringBackOurGirls, as well as the many marches orchestrated in Nigeria and across the globe?

The hashtag #BringBackOurGirls catapulted the Chibok girls not only into our minds, our imaginations, but also into our hearts, our homes, our fears. These girls became a symbol of how women enter the global imagination--our collective awareness or consciousness of the lives (and immeasurable value) of women. The movement marked by #BringBackOurGirls highlighted that what happens to women and girls matters to so many of us, and revealed that we can relate to women everywhere when we think of them as kin, as beloved members of our own families.

The Chibok girls were not just any girls. They were not nameless and faceless strangers. They were “our” girls. They could have been our sisters, our daughters, our very own children. They were our family. Our loved ones. And we all wanted them back. And we kept asking for them. We asked and asked, until we got tired of waiting, got tired of receiving no good news, or got overwhelmed by other bad news flooding the media--news like Gaza being bombed, or Syria with the garish atrocities there, or the growing scourge called Isis. Soon, it seemed, the girls were forgotten.

It’s almost been a year since the girls were kidnapped and they still have not been rescued, been brought home, or been able to escape and free themselves. Well, one has to now imagine that those girls are gone for good, are never coming home, will never be free again.

It’s easy to give up and sink into utter hopelessness. Especially in light of the more recent Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria and in neighboring Cameroon. And because Boko Haram has been bold in Cameroon, venturing into my home country to unleash its cruelty there, I am often gripped with panic, worried that they might one day reach my own cherished homeland and hometown in southern Cameroon.

But I cannot allow myself to lose hope. It’s too dark of a place to journey to. And I do go to that very dark place sometimes. I go there because I can imagine the Chibok girls. I can see them so clearly in my mind’s eye.

I once was a girl in Cameroon. I was a girl at a boarding school. An all-girl school. I know what that world of scholarship is like, how vulnerable it is to be so exposed and unprepared. And how painful it is to come so close to a dream of academic self-realization after many gruelling years of schooling and have that dream be so ruthlessly disrupted and viciously destroyed. How devastating this is to families who work hard, barely scraping by, to send their children to school and support them through the boarding school system. Many families’ hopes and dreams of a bright future vanished with those girls.

I can imagine that loss. I can imagine, too, the loss of one’s family, one’s home, one’s life. The horror to know one might never go home again and see one’s parents or siblings. There is the despair felt by the families whose daughters and sisters and nieces were taken from them. The layered and multiplied losses and heartbreak that weigh on families with parents who have died from the grief of losing a child.

I can imagine all of this. However, I try my best to pull together my shattered hopes for the Chibok girls. And I take some comfort in the fact that, for however long we can remember those girls, we can keep them alive in our imaginations. And I draw a great deal of comfort from the show of support and solidarity by people around the world, who accepted these girls into their hearts. Who agreed that these young African women-- these Nigerian girls, these children of Nigeria and of Africa--were so much more than mere strangers to us. They were ours. They are ours. The are and will always be our girls. And as long as we claim them--love them in our own ways, even if only in our thoughts and imaginations--we will continue to miss them, wait for them, search for them, hope for them, remember them, and stand for a world where women and girls always matter to us.

Viola Allo is a Cameroonian-born poet and essayist based in the United States. Raised in Cameroon by her Cameroonian father and American mother, she migrated to America at nineteen. She holds a BA and MA in psychology and anthropology, respectively, from the Universities of California (Davis) and Michigan (Ann Arbor). Her poems and essays have been published in the American River Review. In 2010, she received an Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation fellowship to attend the UC Davis Tomales Bay Workshops. Allo was short-listed for the Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2013 and again in 2014. Her first chapbook of poems, Bird From Africa, is included in the Eight New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set published in 2015 by Akashic Books and the African Poetry Book Fund. Viola resides in California and writes at her blog, Letters to Cameroon. Connect with her on Twitter @ViolaAllo.

Brave New Reading List: Oryx and Crake

Brita Thielen — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 01:40:30 +0000

by Brita Thielen

The novel featured this week, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003; McClelland and Stewart), is unique in that it is part of a trilogy: the MaddAddam Trilogy. The sequels are The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). I have not yet had a chance to read these sequels, but Oryx and Crake definitely left me hungry for more, and I can’t wait to devote time to them over the summer. Also, rumor has it that the books are being adapted into an HBO television series by Darren Aronofsky.

In Oryx and Crake we meet Snowman, a lost soul still reeling from the recent collapse of world civilization as we know it. The novel shifts from following Snowman in the present to exploring Snowman’s memories of the time before, when he was a boy named Jimmy who loved a girl named Oryx and admired (envied?) a brilliant friend named Crake. Jimmy was the son of a “genographer” and a microbiologist, living a privileged life in a secure Compound community protected from the “pleeblands” – or all the cities not directly supported by large corporations. Jimmy’s world is largely privatized and protected from the pleebland citizens by the CorpSeCorps (aka the men with guns). Science is definitely King in Jimmy’s society, and genetic splicing and modification has developed everything from “pigoons,” extra-large pig-like creatures used to grow human organs for transplants, to various animal hybrids like “rakunks” (raccoon-skunks) and “snats” (rattlesnake-rats), to new diseases and their cures.

Jimmy does not have the desired aptitude for the sciences like his parents, or his best friend Crake. While Crake goes on to a top-notch college and becomes the head of an “immortality project” at one of the world’s most powerful companies, Jimmy goes to a second-rate school for fine arts and humanities and falls into an unfulfilling job in advertising. Fortunately for Jimmy, Crake intervenes and gets Jimmy a job on his team helping to care for the “Crakers” – GM pseudo-humans designed by Crake to survive on the overly-polluted planet Earth in a far more peaceful way than homo sapiens ever have. And it is at this point that Jimmy finally meets Oryx.

Jimmy/Snowman is besotted with Oryx, and her character haunts the pages of the novel. She is a young, beautiful, resilient woman of uncertain origins – she was sold into the sex industry as a young girl in another part of the world and eventually winds up working for Crake. Jimmy obsesses over Oryx’s past, as if knowing every detail of her history will allow him to save her from some hurt she’s never really felt. Though of the two, Oryx definitely has a more troubled past, it’s easy to see that she is the one holding Jimmy together. Of course, Oryx and Jimmy have no idea what Crake is really up to, and of course it is this secret that threatens the entire human race.

Unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, the other Atwood novel in this blog series, Oryx and Crake dwells primarily on the damaging effect humans have had on the planet. Earth has become nearly uninhabitable without technological assistance like air purifiers and ultra-processed food (let’s just say, McDonald’s chicken nuggets have nothing on ChickieNobs), and endless inoculations against disease. The environmental damage spurs the drive for scientific and technological developments, and these developments in turn play a role in the story’s apocalypse. While I wouldn’t say that Atwood is making a comment about humans “playing God,” there does seem to be a critique of human nature’s tendency towards short-term solutions.

Atwood also gives a painful, but fascinating, depiction of Snowman’s mental and emotional deterioration as the “last true human.” Not only does Snowman feel completely isolated, but all of the intangible things that he once valued – literature, art, any sort of culture, really – no longer serve any purpose, especially as he has no one to share them with. It’s like he’s in solitary confinement, but his prison cell is the entire planet. The absence of other humans means Snowman has lost any chance of real communication or of getting out of his own head. As Snowman bleakly puts it, “. . . he couldn’t stand to be nothing, to know himself to be nothing. He needs to be listened to, he needs to be heard. He needs at least the illusion of being understood.” In some ways, I think Snowman/Jimmy has always been searching for someone who understands him, and his despair is now all the greater because he finds himself totally and completely alone.

Recommended if: You are interested in dystopian novels dealing with environmental disaster (see The Ice People) and bioengineering. You also might want to check out this novel if you have strong feelings (pro or con) about vaccines and/or the pharmaceutical industry. There are also population management and control aspects of this novel that are reminiscent of Brave New World. And finally, recommended if you’ve read anything else by Margaret Atwood and are hungry for more.

Women and the Global Imagination: Sweet Time

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 19:32:13 +0000

by Allison Williams

In our Winter 2014 issue Alicia Ostriker curated a poetry portfolio on Women and the Global Imagination, and we were so struck by its contents that we wanted to keep the dialog surronding this theme going on our blog. In her essay, Allison Williams explores cross-cultural difference and its effects on both creativity and productivity. We hope you enjoy reading. To read more on this theme, visit our store and buy or Winter 2014 issue (print or ebook), or become a subscriber to Prairie Schooner today. To take part in the dialog, follow and interact with us on Twitter.

Sweet Time

The auto-rickshaw driver is lost. He circles the college until I find a student who will let me use his phone. Sonia pulls up in another rickshaw, two little engines buzzing in concert while she settles up with my driver. I bundle in next to her and we go around the corner to the apartment building. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t dark glossy tile, a gold tromp l’oeil accent wall, and a modernist painting of Ganesha playing a flute. Eleven women look expectantly at me when we walk in. They are Writers’ Wing and they have been meeting monthly for ten years. I am here to teach a workshop.

Most of the two hours, we focus on how to get an idea and how to make it into a story or a novel. We talk about structure, we do a couple of exercises, I read one of my essays. Near the end, before snack time, I ask, “What is the biggest challenge you face when writing?” I’m expecting to hear something about dialogue or plot, or how to get published as an Indian writer in an English-dominated literary world.

“Well, my husband’s parents live with us. Dinner has to be something they will like, so always something cooked. By the time dinner is eaten and cleaned up, it’s almost time to go to bed.”

The ladies nod. Another one speaks up.

“After I look after my son’s homework and set my daughter’s clothes out, my mother-in-law needs me. Then the morning is gone and it’s time to cook lunch.”

Our hostess adds, “I can get time to write on the weekend, but when I come back the next week I forget my place in the story!”

I look around the circle of ladies in designer jeans, flowing salwar khameez suits, one has come from her job at the nearby temple, still in her saree. They have smartphones, maids, Twitter accounts, and a thousand years of tradition telling them to have children, a set of live-in parents, and to cook three hot meals a day for the whole lot.

* * *

Around the table at Kenyon Writers’ Workshop, three academics, two grad students, a guy from an ad agency, a California Superior Court judge and me. Sure, we have parents and in-laws. We put them in assisted living, or they move to Arizona. Even the able ones don’t live with us. Even our bitchiest mother-in-laws don’t demand deference in our houses, and if they did, we might humor them or resentfully comply, but we wouldn’t believe them entitled to it. None of us cook three times a day, with or without a maid.

Our teacher passes out oversize index cards. “Think of a particular age, between about five and fifteen,” he says. “Write everything from that same age or close to it. And write like you’re there, not looking at yourself from now.”

We write flash essays of five or six sentences from his prompts.

A smell from that time.

Your favorite item of clothing.

When you realized an adult close to you was imperfect.

In another exercise, he passes out maraschino cherries on napkins, and we write about associations with the cherries’ smell, taste and color. Each time, we shuffle the index cards and write some joining sentences.

Out of these little scraps—“crots”—we build short personal essays, then expand them. Several of us end up with sellable pieces. All of us love the workshop, we love having a week out of time, away from our jobs and homes to focus on writing, around other people focused on writing. A week of cafeteria breakfasts and dinners and social lunches at the little town deli, half of us staying in B&Bs or hotels that make our beds.

* * *

Back to Mumbai, in the beautiful upper-middle-class apartment, Writers’ Wing now having met for eleven years. Maraschino cherries aren’t a thing here, so I have asked the hostess if she can please provide something that is a small, sweet food that all the ladies would recognize from childhood.

“Well, I made ladoos, but I’m vegan now so they are beet ladoos.” The ball-shaped sweets are normally molded from graham flour and sugar held together with ghee. These are dark purple, but still sweet and textured, like a very dense donut.

“OK,” I say. “Let’s freewrite a little bit about the ladoos. You can write as yourself, or as the character you’re writing in your latest story. Start with looking, and write a few sentences about what that color reminds you of.”

We write about smell, and pinch them with our fingers for texture, and taste them carefully, trying not to get purple crumbs on the white leather sofa.

“Next step. Shuffle your papers into any order. Then take a look at what you wrote. Clean it up a little, not major editing. Then write a couple of sentences that connect the four short sections to each other.”

We go around the circle and read our miniature essays.

“I remember my grandmother brushing my hair. Her skin was brown like a regular ladoo and she had a purple saree like this ladoo.”

“We took ladoos to school, maybe Mom would have a box of them from a wedding, and she’d put them in my lunch. After lunch, we all smelled each other’s hands to see what we had eaten.”

I am totally bemused by the thought of schoolchildren politely smelling each other, but it’s a thing, they all did it, they say. There are stories about a favorite pair of shoes, about a dog that followed a girl to school, about growing up female and Indian and in Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore. They remember their mother’s hands and their father’s anger, the same things I remember. They are surprised at how easily some of the pieces become whole.

“You could publish that!” one lady says to another. Then her face lights up. “I could write one of these while I’m waiting for the pot to boil!”

The room dissolves into chatter about short breaks—when I’m waiting for my son to come out of school, when my daughter is at her music lesson. I eat another ladoo and it tastes of time, the sweetness of scraps salvaged and pressed into something whole.

Allison Williams's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, The Drum, The New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor. She is the Social Media Editor for Brevity and a two-time winner of The Moth StorySLAM. Connect with her on Twitter and Instagram or visit her website idowords.net.

Alberta Clipper 3/17/15: "Dream: Catching the Air" by Carolyn Kreiter-Kurylo

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 18:47:49 +0000

On March 17, 1988—a fairly warm day for Lincoln, NE reaching a high of 43 degrees—Carolyn Kreiter-Kurylo published her first poem in the Prairie Schooner Spring issue titled “Dream: Catching the Air.” In a poem of memories revived while dreaming, Kreiter-Kurylo fondly recalls how “Always before bed, / you read Light In August/ or Les Miserables.”

It was on this same day over in Europe that the world-renowned Les Miserables premiered its first full West End/ Broadway production at the Det Norske Teatret in Oslo, Norway. A production based on the novel written by French poet and novelist Victor Hugo, the play focuses on several characters’ lives, including Jean Valijean, a man working for redemption.

What a stirring, haunting bed-time story!—Alexandria Douglas

Carolyn Kreiter-Kurylo
Dream: Catching the Air

I watch them lower you.
Each time in the night’s
thin hour, you tremble.
Your face, its gaze
once cold under lamplight,
struggles out of a seizure.
You raise your mouth
and breathe back.

Staying long in my dream,
you breathe air
into the mouth laboring
over yours.
Out of a tremor,
you move, catching
air on your tongue
as if you might fill
your lungs.

This morning I place iris
on the bedstand, watch
them turn velvet
as first light floods
your room. Our summers
were life this: opening
windows to mountains,
honeysuckle reaching us
through mist. Afternoons
we wrote on the porch
swing. Always before bed,
you read Light in August
or Les Miserables.
“What one man wont do
to another,” you said resting
your head on the bedpost,
your voice steady.
Now each time you speak
To me in a dream, I wake,
my heart opening, and write
down your words.

For years I go on recoding.
This evening shadows
around me flicker, the house
dark. A candle illumines
your picture as a young
girl lying in a bed
of clover. Were you
dreaming, keeping
your mother alive
in sleep? I lean
my head against a chair’s
back and doze off.
In a dream you rise
from the clover. Running
toward you, I extend
my arms, taking you in.
Again a seizure pulls
you down. You struggle
for air while moonlight
pours across the floor.
I wake wondering,
How long can we keep
the dead alive this way?
Until the skies darken,
The stars seem to say.
All these years you have
done it so well.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Spring 1988)

Contributor Spotlight on Cortney Davis

Prairie Schooner — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:56:45 +0000

by Dan Froid

This year’s Book Prize closed at midnight yesterday. Did you submit your manuscript? In this week’s Contributor Spotlight, we take a look at another of our past winners.

What does Cortney Davis have in common with Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Renault, and Theresa Brown? All of these writers have, like Davis, also worked as nurses. Davis is a nurse-practitioner and the winner, in 2003, of the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for her collection Leopold’s Maneuvers.

Davis has published four other collections of poetry, a novel, and two works of nonfiction. She is also the coeditor of Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses and Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses. Mostly, Davis writes from her nurse’s perspective: that of the caregiver. This month, however, Kent State University Press released When the Nurse Becomes a Patient: A Story in Words and Images. The paintings, which Davis undertook after a series of medical complications and during a lengthy recovery, form a different way for Davis to respond to illness and care. It’s both a different medium and a different perspective. In the introduction to the book, quoted on Davis’s website, poet Jeanne Bryner describes the project:

In twelve amazing paintings and commentaries we see a woman’s dependency unveiled, how the body becomes faceless, sexless and totally exposed from the husking of our layered selves to be remade by the many hands, words and deeds of caregivers. This is a civil war, and Davis is the nurse who strayed outside the fort. She was captured in the country of illness. If you are not afraid of the mouth’s bear of terror, then take her hand, be brave enough to travel with her.

Davis has written elsewhere of the way harrowing experiences shift her understanding as a nurse and as a person. There’s only so much the job prepares you for, she suggests; sometimes it’s only changes within her life that have shifted her approach in her work. She writes in a story for NPR’s “This I Believe” series very frankly about grief. “I believe in grief,” she says. She continues:

I no longer comfort others with false cheer. In the hospital, where my encounters with patients are ever more distanced by sterile gloves, computer protocols and the pressures of time, one way I can still be present is during their moments of grief. I don't encourage anyone to move on, to replace, to remarry or put the photos or the memories away. Grief must be given its time.

Read the full story here. It’s a compelling piece, one that illustrates Davis’s candor, her willingness to discuss events in a place most of us shun on the face of it: the hospital. Maybe it’s partly because I’m the child of two nurses that I became interested in Davis’s poetry, but for anyone her work provides a valuable take on subjects we often prefer to ignore.

For more, check out Flavorwire’s list of the top ten literary nurses—a list that includes both real writers and fictional characters. Also check out Cortney Davis’s website, where you can read interviews and reflections on writing and nursing. And for more about the book prize, visit our website.

The Prairie Schooner Blog

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Sweet Time

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Alberta Clipper 3/17/15: "Dream: Catching the Air" by Carolyn Kreiter-Kurylo

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Contributor Spotlight on Cortney Davis

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