Author: litmag_admin

Tragedies like the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton bring everything to a stop. As we read the details and look at the pictures, we all pause, look around, and take stock of our priorities and what we hold dear. Writers are no different, except for the work we do. We’re often in the middle of describing a particular part of the world—when another part is suddenly falling apart. Jon Roemer and David Winner polled a handful of active writers and asked how public tragedies impact their current and future work—projects that may or may not portray mass shootings. We aimed to gauge how writers deal with such landmark events in practical ways and how, if at all, their writing engages with violence in America.

QUESTION 1

In The New Yorker last year, Masha Gessen described the difficulty of defending the values and institutions currently under attack, because it requires “preserving meanings” and is “the opposite of imagination.” She aspired to “find a way to describe a world in which… imagination is not only operant but prized and nurtured.” On Facebook the Monday after the shootings in Dayton and El Paso, a different writer, Grant Faulkner, simply posted two words—“another killing”—over and over, hundreds of times. Gessen described traditionally crafted work, while the Facebook post is visceral and immediate. Where do you think your next work will land?

ANSWERS:

Jon Roemer The Facebook post reflects what I was feeling the Monday after the shootings. But the fiction I’m writing now probably won’t be read for a year or more. So I think hard about its relevance, especially if we keep rushing toward more violence. Part of the job is to be forward-thinking. Just wish I could write and publish faster.

Zachary Lazar I’m writing the most traditional novel of my life right now (though that isn’t saying much). I simultaneously have no faith in the power of novels and total commitment to the novel as a thing, an art form, something I like. Mass shootings seem to me to be one symptom among many of our culture’s failure to address meaninglessness, to create meaning, and even though I don’t believe there is such a thing as meaning, the active pursuit of it is essential to sanity. I just don’t give a shit about social media. I guess it did good work during the Arab Spring, but I think the role it plays in the U.S. right now is more or less comparable to the crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s. It makes TV look nourishing.

Alice Stephens: While Masha Gessen talks about a literature of the future, I think Americans must still contend with the past. From Plymouth Rock to George Washington to Donald Trump, the history of America has been a narrative of white supremacy. I write to give voice to those people who have been erased from popular history, who have been sacrificed to the myth of Manifest Destiny and The World’s Greatest Superpower. Even before Dayton and El Paso, I knew it was important to dismantle the white supremacist version of American history and to tell the real story. My current project is a historical fiction novel about the six months that Japanese American artist and visionary, Isamu Noguchi, spent in an internment camp in Arizona. By rewriting the past to give voice to the marginalized, we can take the future back.

David Winner: What inspires us as fiction writers can be confusing, incoherent, and often unrelated to what goes on around us, but after 9/11, when the skyline changed and the smell of burnt electrical equipment and corpses was in the air, the line kind of disappeared. After Trump’s blatant racism, a massacre of mostly Latinos/Latinas (which has a long history, I’m just learning), and another massacre in Dayton, I don’t know that I can have anything to say except to yell in a pain that feels a little like bullshit because apparently white people like me aren’t getting targeted or told to go back to our country, which for me, like so many fellow mongrels, would involve hacking myself to bits and shipping myself off to different places. To answer the question, my dream is to find some sort of story to tell about all this that would be visceral and immediate, but my only writing about it so far has been shrill, foolish, and on that tool of Russia and Cambridge Analytica known as Facebook.

Christopher Brown: I try to use the tools of speculative fiction to tell truths that realism cannot. Or at least put a mirror up to the world that alters it enough that people can see those truths unmoored from the easy anchors of established partisan identity and biases. I think it’s an important part of the literary toolkit, especially in politically charged times. If you can write the alien, you might be able to hack the mind of the shooter—or imagine a real change in the system.

Phong Nguyen: In my own writing, I tend to do as Robert Olen Butler suggests and to write “from that white hot center,” utilizing the subconscious and manifesting it rather than overtly tackling issues (although I respect how well it works for others).

Grant Faulkner: I can’t remember who said it, but he/she said that creating/writing is a political act unto itself. I haven’t viewed my writing, and especially my fiction, as political in a long time, but since the primary way we connect with others, understand them, and understand ourselves is through stories, then I think that stories become more important than ever in divisive times. The “another killing” “poem” that Jon mentioned, which I posted on Facebook, could be viewed as overtly political. It could also be viewed as a jaded response to another killing. A deadening repetition that wasn’t making a political statement at all.

Andrea Scrima: This is an issue I’ve thought a good deal about in my work. Every country harbors its own particular brand of craziness, and seen from the outside, it’s easy to detect irrational, potentially psychotic phenomena when they belong to someone else. I haven’t resided consistently in the U.S. in many decades, but where I live, in Europe, the fact that America has suffered under and will continue to suffer under a shocking and relentless onslaught of preventable mass shootings by assault weapons manufactured for military purposes is one of those oddly “American” things, in other words, one of those many phenomena that defies reason. Surely there are steps that can be taken to prevent mass shootings; other countries, for instance Australia, have introduced strict gun regulation and seen violent crime drop dramatically. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the so-called Port Arthur massacre of 1996, in which a man with a semi-automatic weapon mowed down 35 people in minutes. Overwhelmingly, Australia decided it had seen enough carnage and deemed the event intolerable enough to change its gun laws, and did so pretty much immediately; after the Christchurch mosque shootings earlier this year, New Zealand followed suit. So why haven’t we?

As an American living in Berlin, I’m not only seeing an increase of racism and bigotry in the U.S., but a rise in right-wing populist movements across Europe. I’m currently finishing a second book in which each of the young characters is traumatized in a different way. These are very personal, psychological stories, set against the oppression of the East German communist state, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the misguided policies put in place after German Reunification. The social and political realities of contemporary America, however, are never very far away. You can shed new light on things when you deflect attention to another time and place. And so I’m using a diptych structure, fragmented narrative, and interwoven timelines to reflect both the larger dire realities that determine our lives and the interiorities these give rise to, the places we escape to in our minds.

QUESTION 2

On what level does the epidemic of American public violence affect you as a writer? Is your writing engaging more with public violence and its consequences or the social divisions around them? Or is it more important to you to explore less public realms?

ANSWERS:

Jon Roemer: Evoking less public realms feels more important than ever. I think the trick is imbuing them with the horrible new normals without being ham-handed or narrowly dated.

Alice Stephens: In a very quotidian way, the epidemic of public violence has made me feel more vulnerable. I was at the Asian American Literary Festival the day of the Dayton shooting. Even before I heard the news of this second mass shooting a day after El Paso, I remember thinking that the festival was the perfect target for a high body-count hate crime: a large gathering promoting diversity, celebrating ethnic identity, and dedicated to intellectual thought. All things white supremacists hate.

It’s not hard to see how mass shootings have become epidemic in a country that has long fetishized guns and vigilante justice. The American—and indeed the human—story is essentially a narrative of violence, with the victor typically depicted as the hero. As a writer, I am interested in telling the victim’s side of the story. I find much more power and beauty in the narratives of everyday resistance than those of glorious conquest.

Zachary Lazar: Violence (and public violence) have been main themes in my work for a long time. I think one of the things I’ve been trying to do in my writing is to remind people that America is actually a violent place, whether it’s people killing each other for money or alienated white men shooting people for no reason at all. But violence is fundamental to ancient stories like Greek epics and tragedies, Shakespeare, the Bible, etc. Central. We experience violence in a way specific to our culture, our time and place, and I think one of the problems we face is that mass shooters are using automatic weapons in an irrational, maybe even erotic way, while people who use guns as hunters or hobbyists might not really even understand what I mean by that. I mean that a gun is a tool for most people who use guns, while for a mass shooter a gun is a fetish. They don’t use shotguns or grenades. They use the most phallic weapon available.

David Winner: Well, the violence in El Paso and in Charleston several years ago was about social divisions involving race, and, as a white writer, I’ve tried to sort of turn the volume up on the white racial conversation that I sometimes hear around me so more people can tune in. In my last novel, Patricia Highsmith appears as a character along with a version of Ripley, and I tried to expose their imbedded racism. In our weirdly bifurcated era, some get away easily with sexual abuse, violence, and extreme racism, whereas books and speakers get “cancelled” for relatively minor offenses. Writers like Highsmith are still widely read, largely without comment or criticism from their readership, and I don’t want us to forget that emblematically in one Highsmith book, a “sympathetic” character bemoans 70s New York City being somehow destroyed by the same people of color now being driven out of historically black neighborhoods by real estate speculation.

Christopher Brown: My writing has always engaged with public violence, through a dystopian lens. I think that lurking behind the Second Amendment debate is the third rail of our politics—the way our national creation myths founded on armed revolt infiltrate our heads at an early age and pollute how we think about our politics and our communities. Exploring those themes through fictional laboratories is a healthy thing. But I don’t know if it offers much of a fix for the immediate insanity.

Phong Nguyen: I think my engagement with the epidemic of public violence in America is more evident from my editorial work than my fiction-writing. I am working on an anthology tentatively titled “Best Peace Fiction” that compiles literary responses to acts of war and violence (forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press), and I have put together features on Morality and Fiction, as well as Fiction in War, for Pleiades. Anne Valente or Wendy Rawlings or Rebecca Makkai are good writers to check out. They have written explicitly about mass shootings in their fiction.

Grant Faulkner: In my fiction, if violence or commentary on divisiveness enters into the story, it’s via the subconscious and in a somewhat random fashion. I remember an era, way back in 1989 or 1990, when Thomas Wolf wrote his big piece on the need for great social/political/realistic novels in The Atlantic and Harper’s, and it seemed like novels could and should be part of a contemporary political conversation in the way they were in the time of Zola. But Wolf was wrong. Times are different and novels serve a different purpose. Violence and the need for violence, the celebration for violence, are all great topics, but they have to be told slant.

I recently heard someone say that what made The Godfather great was that it told the story of America as a gangster story. We are a nation of gangsters in many ways. I can’t write novels like that, but they provide a better lens on American history than most novels.

Andrea Scrima: Yes, the United States has always been violent; violence is what we, in effect, hail from: violence against the Native American population, violence against slaves, the violence of Manifest Destiny, violence against the working poor, violence against people of color. We glorify our outlaws, all our Bonnie and Clydes, Billy the Kids, and Jesse Jameses; our culture celebrates those who go out in style. The epidemic of mass shootings is a part of our heritage. The man who carried out the mass shooting in El Paso admitted he was targeting Mexicans; he sees himself as a patriot, a lone hero, and whether he denies it or not, he is a vigilante in the service of Trumpism willing to pay the price of incarceration or death to fight for what he believes in. And in this he is no different from the fundamentalist militant, the terrorist jihadi.

In my first book, A Lesser Day, one of the leitmotifs is the narrator sitting at a desk and cutting photos out of the newspaper. It’s the ’90s: the photos are of Bosnian refugees unearthing their dead to take them with them as they flee; Indonesian riots against the ethnic Chinese population; a group of young Palestinian boys holding up a sea of identical posters of Arafat. The narrator is an artist; she describes the photographs painstakingly in words. The implication throughout the book is that a nearly unrelenting human history of violence determines the essential context in which our psyches form and in which any art is conceived or made; the only thing that’s changed is our immediate electronic access to it at all times, and the danger that we will eventually become so numb to atrocity that we’ll no longer recognize ourselves.

QUESTION 3

Do you think violence in headlines impact readers’ sensitivities in fiction? Are you trying out different modes or styles as a result?

ANSWERS:

Jon Roemer: Not sure at all about readers’ sensitivities. I always think my assumptions are old-fashioned. But I like the idea of experimenting with styles, especially if it brings a different contour to assumptions. I might not be the right guy for that, but I might try anyway.

Alice Stephens: It’s amazing to me how people who enjoy a good evisceration in a superhero action movie can be so deeply offended by real-life violence: the people who write in to the paper to protest the photo of Alan Kurdi’s tiny, lifeless body washed up on the shore; the parents who want to ban I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from school reading lists; the readers who complain that a description of plastic surgery in my book Famous Adopted People was gratuitously violent (ok, that’s not real life but the depiction of rhinoplasty was accurate—I did the research!).

I’m fascinated by the self-serving lies people tell themselves as they go about their daily lives. Of all the species on this teeming planet, human beings are the only ones endowed with the capacity for introspection, and yet most people prefer to look everywhere but inside themselves. In these turbulent times, when humanity seems to have lost its collective mind and the dire effects of climate change haven’t even started to kick in, it is more urgent than ever for writers to hold a mirror up to society and ask that people take a good, hard look. Of course, you can’t force people to read your work. But at least you know that you weren’t silent. You’ve broadcast your truth, and it’s out there for readers to find it.

Zachary Lazar: Along the lines of my last answer, I think my writing has often been an attempt to render violence in language that reminds people that it is shocking and ugly, not romantic, as in the movies. I also try to explore the psychology of people who commit violence, so that the reader has to see the perpetrator of violence as a recognizably complex human, not a “monster.” I’ve spent a lot of time with incarcerated people, some of whom are close friends, and it has taught me how little choice some people have when it comes to perpetrating violence, as well as how unusual it actually is for someone to become a mass shooter. On the latter subject, I want to just give a shout-out to Deb Olin Unferth, whose short story “The First Full Thought of Her Life” is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read about the alienated young men who find themselves pointing a rifle at strangers.

David Winner: A recent Hollywood shoot-me-up got delayed in part (I would imagine) because the violence has reached so many people that many of us are probably only one or two steps removed. (A dear friend’s mother taught a child murdered in Newtown.) In a work I’m just finishing, one of the characters enjoys gun ranges. Having never shot, I went to one in Manhattan. The really unpleasant place with NRA stickers everywhere implied to me that the large-seeming gulf between shooting your BB gun at some cans out back and mass murder at the mall may be smaller than we think. Affected by the Trump administration and the shooting, my already dim view of guns is growing ever more vitriolic, and my character is changing along with me.

Christopher Brown: I think we all hunger for more hopeful futures, in fiction and in real life. The novel I am working on now is my attempt at an American utopia—a compromised and imperfect one, built from the ruins of a nation torn apart by fights over diminishing resources. And part of the key to making a world like that work is bridging the gaps in understanding between members of feuding factions. Writing stories about peace is challenging in a narrative form driven by conflict. I suspect that at the heart of these incidents of real-world violence one would find a more internal kind of conflict, problems of profound alienation. That’s something contemporary fiction is uniquely well-suited to explore. But that territory is a scary place to go, kind of the dark web of human empathy, and I’m not sure any of us really want to visit it, when we can fight it in real life. And perhaps the real place to start would be a literary takeover of the first-person shooter video games that are the training grounds for everyday American evil—hack those narratives, and you might really be onto something.

Grant Faulkner: Yes, I think violence in the headlines affects many people’s sensitivity to violence. One of the best books I ever read about violence in art was a critical theory book on violent dialogues. Can’t remember the title of it, but it analyzed the strains of violence in the dialogue of playwrights like Mamet and other contemporary playwrights. The speeches in Glengary Glen Rossare as violent as any mass shooting. The words are meant to humiliate and kill in a way bullets can’t. I love how stories like that take a cultural emotion and dramatize it without having to name the catalyst for it all. Any of those washed-up salesmen could grab a gun and go into a mall because they’ve become so helpless and without recourse.

Andrea Scrima: I don’t think any of these events or anything we say or write about them will affect readers in the thrall of guns and what they represent in our culture; while literature can do an enormous amount to shed light on the darkness of the what and why, our books are simply not read by the kind of minds we’re talking about here. Indeed, modern America’s quasi-religious adherence to the firearms provisions of a Constitution written in the immediate aftermath of the colonies’ liberation from British rule is reminiscent of the Christian fundamentalist belief that every word in the Bible is literal truth. We are a country not of rational thinkers, but of believers. And given the divisiveness of the current political climate, we have far more to fear than the inevitable and miserable continuation of assault-weapon massacres in America’s shopping malls, clubs, schools, and other public spaces. If the day arrives when lone white disaffected—and poorly informed—young men feel the call to unite and form militias in a more organized, disciplined, and concerted effort to “serve” their homeland—and if the violent undertones of the current administration’s Delphic utterances persist—I fear we will witness even more extreme consequences of what it means to adhere to the provisions of a document for whose periodic updating its authors made explicit provisions to meet the challenges of a future they could not, in their wildest dreams, imagine. Because while the US Constitution is a marvel of political and revolutionary will to create a democratic, more just society—these were, after all, minds honed on the principles of the Enlightenment—the political geniuses of the thirteen colonies could hardly have foreseen present-day America: its gigantic wealth, gigantic waste, or its deep, and possibly incurable, psychic wounds. The authors of the Constitution did not envision young men purchasing war-grade weapons at their local Walmart; nor, for that matter, did they envision Walmart. Yet while Article Five provides for altering the Constitution, given the power of the gun lobby and the NRA in the U.S. today, it is unlikely that an amendment proposal would receive the two-thirds majority it requires to be ratified. Thus, while it’s theoretically possible to alter the Second Amendment to reflect the reality of 21st-century America, in practical terms, at least in the current political climate, the country will have to look for other, legislative means to amend a political system in stalemate and to dig its wheels out of the bipartisan muck it’s stuck in and restore the government’s ability to serve a deeply divided country in the way its founders envisioned.

And I, an everburning pilot, 
Lead forth the exhausted people, 
And neither peace nor battle 
Can I foresee ahead.

~~~

I started this review before the Russian invasion, so in avoidance of tone-deafness, I’d like to suggest you seek out humanitarian anti-war efforts.

I first came across Leonid Schwab’s poetry on the Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation site, wherein his first line is “I’m made out of cheese my head is that of an old man.” I immediately knew I was dealing with something special. Although the rest didn’t prove to be so surreal, I embraced the themes of the weary travelers and forgotten details. Schwab’s work embodies the open lens state while travelling, how we notice more as we journey through new territories.

When I heard Cicada Press was putting out a book of Leonid Schwab’s work as the collection Everburning Pilot, I quickly followed the trail. I can already say this is a great achievement, triumphant klaxons for all involved. The translator’s list is a long one, nearly 20 translators are credited here, for about 75 poems. From the translator’s note, these translations have been refined and discussed with great care during the Chicago Translation Workshop as well as the Your Language, My Ear workshop. I love reading about the path these translations took, the culmination of individual and group efforts. We can be sure that Schwab is in good hands.

The introduction to this book is a treat all by itself, In Memory of Memory’s Maria Stepanova (here translated by Sibelan Forrester) offers us “CELESTIAL ARCHAEOLOGY: On Leonid Schwab’s Poetry.” I have always enjoyed poetry intros, with their framing of frames, and Stepanova’s is no exception. Stepanova gives us poetry about poetry: “the powers of language, all its smart machines work to establish a particular temporal state on their own territory, to condense each line into a radiant amber concentrate of that very happiness.” The intro is a loving summary of Schwab and his milieu. Stepanova explains how Schwab’s work is emblematic of his group, the “new epos” poets, while being mechanically singular.

From a bird’s eye view, Schwab’s poetry concerns the traveler, locations, destination, and the moments of rest along the way. Schwab’s narrative moves along an undisclosed journey, noticing people, buildings and landscape, how they all form to create the voyage. This is a 20^th century Bashō moving through Bobruisk, Jerusalem, Russia, Mongolia, Pakistan and Manchuria. Zooming in on the lines themselves gives us brushstrokes of moments, modernist jump-cuts and all manner of temporal shifts. Some characters are zipping around, some are steady movers, and another is stuck at the airport.

These translations are finely wrought and attentive, with syllabic care throughout: “And supper, like the surf, comes over them” or “Dinners afield are no big deal”. I want to quote this whole book to you; every other line could be its own poem. Having this many translators on one collection gives us a full toolbox of techniques and diction. For example, I learned the word “violaceous” from this line:

Суп фиолетов, сельдь поет на блюде, 
Мужчина вилкой трогает укроп,
The fish is singing, and the soup – violaceous, 
The man pokes at the dill weed with his fork,

The above quote shows one of Schwab’s brainteasers, I find myself drawing crisscrossing lines between each noun. The many relationships of objects action and people create a blooming flourish in my mind: fish-pokes, dill-soup, man-fork. The temporal quality of Schwab’s work is also worth mentioning. At moments, a piece will feel timeless and then a cola will appear. Or a modern jet, helicopter, or cosmonaut pilot becomes the eponymous everburning pilot who is the eternal warrior defending the people.

Most people in this collection are named by their occupation; these are poems of house painters, wood workers, station clerks, subcontractors, and builders. As every object is in use, so are the humans. Schwab shows motion through the interconnectedness of action and movement, even locations are action-oriented: fenceposts, cellars, reservoirs, and a museum bench. There are no useless vistas, flora, or virtues; everything is employed. I’m also impressed that this collection spans from 1987 to 2016; Schwab has been putting out amazing work for four decades. Despite this, the collection is cohesive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me they were written all in the same year.

The spheres of poetry, translation, and contemporary Russian literature can rejoice in the arrival of Leonid Schwab in English. If Stepanova says that Schwab’s influence is now permanent on contemporary Russian poetry, I hope that we see that influence on more poets. Schwab, like Osip Mandelstam, writes poems that are both contemporary and timeless. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and look forward to returning to it for years to come.

Thank you to KGB Bar, Anastasiya Osipova at Cicada, and Olena Jennings for being ever supportive.

These remarks were written for a memorial service for Kevin Killian, which took place on August 19, 2019, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. — Robert Glück

I suppose I have known Kevin longer than anyone here except for his siblings.  But 40 years turns out not to be such a long time.  I am older than Kevin by five years, and it was fully my plan for Kevin to speak at my memorial, rather than my speaking at his, which still is shocking and unreal to me.  Like most of us, I have been rereading Kevin’s work in the light of his death, amazed that a consciousness of such splendor and exuberance has been stilled.  The death of a loved one strips us of the notion that our present life is a dress rehearsal rather than the one and only performance, though I think Kevin was always aware of the shape of his own life in his grand gestures and also in his scrupulousness, like his attention to archives.  

I spent the most time with Kevin during the era of my workshops at Small Press Traffic, where he met Dodie.  He says he joined them in 1982.  Of course he must be right, though it seems a little late to me.  In his vast generosity, he proposed other projects through the years.  He offered to edit my collected essays for example, and he offered to work on my archives.  He did come to help me with it just three weeks before he died.  We went to Office Max.  I had to say Enough, he would have worked on them forever.  Another time he said Bob, I have an idea—let’s write a story together, both of us completely naked in a room.  The most pressing of the insecurities that proposition called forth was the awareness of how slowly I write.  It seemed like a very long time to be without any clothes.  

Through the years, Kevin would sometimes say with a wave of his hand, “Bob taught me everything I know about writing!”  It created in me—as it does in this moment—the feeling of anxious hilarity.  “God bless you for your enormous, skilled, intuitive intervention into my life.”

Did I ever teach him anything?  Or, more to the point, what did he mean?  In the workshops, I would make a few comments and suggestions about some brilliant poem or story.  (For Kevin, pleasure and safety were opposites, and his work turned on the moment when our hero sees the broader perspective of someone who wants to damage him.  Then he gains, not value, but lack of value.  Sexual invasion and danger are accepted and the little that remains is ready to be entertained by death or romance.)  The next week, Kevin would exclaim, Bob I followed your advice exactly, but the improved piece, equally brilliant, would be totally different from the one he’d read a week before, unrecognizable.  Was this sincerity, ridicule?  Where is Kevin coming from?—I often asked myself.  In fact, I used to say Kevin was the only person I ever knew who possibly could have come from a different planet—an enigma who possessed superhuman knowledge, baffling productivity, and later, super-human kindness.  He seemed to possess the secret of happiness—maybe that’s the meaning of his work: that meaning is not in short supply—there’s meaning everywhere, everything is somehow connected to everything else, and you must surrender without restraint to the matter at hand.  Even that is too prescriptive—because Kevin delighted in possibility and the penetration of all kinds of barriers, including the body itself, the mind itself, and our culture itself.  

A few sentences from “Santa,” my favorite story.  “I’m content enough, like a bubble envelope.  I lie down on my back and my hands are taped with black stickum gum, “relax now.”  I tell them where I live and how I used to watch Santa Barbara every day.  On the ceiling there’s some famous stars or windows of the far night.  I’m breathing in, not breathing out.  The air’s a faint blue, the color of speed and peace.  I did not write this, this was my life, or vice versa.”

An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. – Henry Miller 

Ella is sitting on her couch with her iPhone, researching venues for her show before finishing more than one painting for it. There’s no excuse why she can’t do more. Work has been light at the boutique media agency in Soho where she acts as Head of Sales. She’s in her living room taking up space, “working” from home. The blank canvases are right over there, leaning against the modern glass coffee table with an abstractly shaped oak base. There were lines of coke on it last night, which could’ve been used to fuel her creativity. Instead she opted for the routine paranoia trip: staring through the peephole in the front door every ten minutes to check if someone was outside—cops or some sort of sexual predator. With sweat-soaked straight black hair and bulging eyes, she sustained her manic watch till the wee hours of the a.m., which resulted in zero home invaders, per usual.

This has been going on for months, dare one say years. The Boyfriend learned long ago to refrain from protesting his girlfriend’s temporary schizophrenic actions, let alone trying to comfort her physically. Like he did on countless other weekend nights, he simply sat on the couch thumbing through Instagram (and, occasionally, secretly sexting a coworker, having once been too loyal to act on it in person) till daybreak when the coke was gone and Ella had no other choice but to come down and eventually fall asleep beside him.

Ella, now in her late thirties, realizes she can no longer blame anyone but herself for her bad habits and creative block. When she was in her twenties, she covered the familial inspiration in her raw, visceral paintings. The uncomfortably personal themes of her shows (with decent reviews and nonexistent sales) came from stories about her alcoholic dad who’d been imprisoned for murdering her mom and her older brother who’d been killed attempting to break up a drunken brawl, as well as the escorting years, an endless string of bad relationships and an assortment of mostly self-inflicted abuses. Nothing in her present life is inspiring her, but she still feels compelled to paint… something, anything.

During weeknights after work and every weekend, she can only focus her tired and/or hungover body on the couch, what’s new on the good ol’ Fire TV Stick and which Grubhub meal to complement it. Or when the next cycling class is scheduled at Flywheel, offsetting the overeating and keeping her body lean and toned. Or whether she has enough funds left to buy yet another pair of shoes from Vetements or Off-White (her favorite designers) after paying her quarterly dues to Soho House and the monthly fee for an all-access membership to Equinox, among other bills and whistles. And cocaine. She loves cocaine more than she cares to admit to herself and others.

FRIDAY

The Boyfriend already left for work, and Ella is waking up again from another micro-nap. Moseying into the kitchen, she pours herself a hot cup of coffee—he makes six cups: four to fill his to-go mug and two for her—cooling it with a healthy splash of almond milk. Holding the cup in her left hand, she sips the lukewarm drink while perusing Instagram on her phone with her right. She fingers the profiles of gorgeous male models William McLarnon and Matthew Noszka and influencers into extreme sports such as Dylan Efron and Jay Alvarrez, wondering if she’d be happier with a man like one of them: otherworldly sexy, superhero strong and Insta-famous. I’m still beautiful, she tells herself in the mirror, checking to see whether the Botox that’s been hiding the wrinkles in her forehead is wearing off (not yet, thankfully). If I were in some sort of social setting with these guys, I’m sure I’d catch their eye. She considers the fantasy for a few more seconds, an even mix of the familiar guilt for superficial, adulterous thinking, an always-on ache for what she can’t have and the growing unsurety of her love for The Boyfriend (very good-looking, much younger than she and great in bed when she’s in the mood) overwhelming her physically like the freezing Peconic River on Shelter Island in early June—their first vacation nearly three years ago (they stayed at the very chic Sunset Beach Hotel).

On the kitchen counter lie a bunch of bananas spooning each other inside a clear plastic bag with the Chiquita logo. Dressed in perishable goods, Miss Chiquita smiles festively, ready to perform the calypso dance leap. Once vibrant yellow, the fruits’ skin is now dull and freckled, foretelling their rot. But The Boyfriend’s ask via text remains unfulfilled: Would you do me a big favor and peel the bananas I left on the counter and put them in the freezer? That way they’ll keep for his weekday (and semi-weekend) smoothies. The making of which are an ongoing, unwelcome wakeup call for Ella prior to one of Amazon Echo’s more appealing alarm sounds. That unnerving jackhammer noise of a “Magic” Bullet Blender pureeing assorted fruit, ice and almond milk is anything but enchanting to her ears.

They live together in Williamsburg in a two-floor loft with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The luxury building includes amenities such as a state-of-the-art gym with indoor rock climbing, simulated golf rooms (plus a mini-golf course on the roof), a bowling alley, two pools, three hot tubs and much more unlisted here. Some of their neighbors have children and dogs, both of which The Boyfriend wants too. Ella doesn’t think of herself as motherly and has never been a big fan of animals. This isn’t to say she’s a bad person, just selfish, and at least she knows it.

But lately she’s been struggling with her somewhat lavish, arguably heretical lifestyle, thinking she should be spending her money and time with The Boyfriend in healthier ways. Perhaps it’s biological; her birthday is around the corner, as is her body’s inability to make babies. Despite The Boyfriend’s smoothies and other behaviors that only annoy her because she’s irritable from the coke comedowns, he’s kind and understanding of her idiosyncratic, addictive and neurotic personality. Lovers of the past provided an obsession and coinciding rush similar to the drugs (a TV actor, a banker, and a lawyer, all of whom were a year or two older and a zero or two richer than she), while never showing her love, which is what she thought she wanted for oh so many years. But when The Boyfriend came into her life unexpectedly and gave her just that (after hitting her with his bike as she ran into the bike lane rushing to the office one sultry afternoon), she accepted it begrudgingly and has been battling herself from rejecting him ever since.

She finds herself more preoccupied with the fear of his imminent departure now that she’s hungover again, nearing old age and getting crazier by the nanosecond. Moreover, her name is the one and only on the lease and other legal agreements tying her to this time and place financially. He could just get up and go anytime. A slice of her, the demon inside, craves this, as it’ll allow her to fully revert to the life of the manic art slut: hard-working by day; partying with a different “date” every night; painting her lonely paintings during tear-soaked, suicidal in-betweens. But the rest of her is well familiar with how that old song and dance eventually ends. Peeling and slicing The Boyfriend’s bananas, she prays un-denominationally that she can sustain her current commitment to him. She stores the mushy fruit in a plastic container and tosses it in the freezer.

SATURDAY

The Boyfriend keeps three tabs of acid in an empty dental floss case on the bottom shelf of his gunmetal nightstand. Each piece is the size of Ella’s pinky nail and advertised by the dealer as extra strength. Flashbacks of her goth-girl-teens arise whenever The Boyfriend tries convincing her to trip with him; while hallucinating, she’d learned her life’s vocation is to paint, accepted the deaths of her immediate family, fallen in love for the first time and realized her best friend was anything but (swiftly thereafter ending their toxic relationship). Consequently, she’s fearful of an LSD-laced epiphany that their relationship isn’t for the long haul. But her intensifying self-reflection is prompting her to finally discover the truth her own way.

She rises early on this sun-drenched Saturday morning, slipping out of bed softly to avoid rousing her recovering lover. He spent last night drinking with old college friends till the wee hours of the a.m. anyway, so it’s unlikely he’ll wake easily. These circumstances are usually flipped: traditionally she’s the one sleeping off a night of indiscretions while he’s already up and at ‘em, starting the day right with a smoothie and two-mile run to the waterfront and back, then gently nudging her conscious at about 3:00 p.m. with three Advils, a tall glass of ice water and no questions asked (her last time out was less than two weeks ago). But lately he’s been gradually assuming her behavior. Seems the end may have begun, and she needs to act now to ensure their best possible future, whether that’s together or not.

Once soft, the bananas are hardened when she pulls them from their cryo-slumber along with a bag of generic-brand frozen berries and two handfuls of ice, placing them on the crowded, coffee-stained kitchen counter. A collection of half-eaten takeout and countless empty beer bottles dominate its marble surface. Shaking a near-empty gallon of refrigerated almond milk, she’s pleased there’s enough left for two smoothies. She tosses everything into an oversized blender cup and switches on the “Magic” Bullet Blender with its familiar, unnerving jackhammer noise that’s anything but enchanting to her ears.

As she pours the mixture in two glasses and tops off each with one-and-a half tabs of acid, she hears sheets rustling, a snorty mumbling and the creaking bedframe. The door to the bedroom slowly opens, The Boyfriend emerging naked with a yawn (he overheats at night, no matter how high the AC), his average body exposed and dirty blond hair disheveled. Hey hon, he greets her in a throaty voice. Whoa, you made us breakfast?! Thanks, sexy. Just what I needed. He gives her an alcohol-and-rotten-fish-smelling kiss on the cheek. She stirs each glass with a bent spoon (they’re in dire need of new silverware), allowing the secret ingredient to fully envelop their healthy meal. Yeah, well, I didn’t break up the fruit enough in the blender, she white lies, handing over one of the glasses. Drink up! It’ll help with the hangover. Take these Advils too. He chucks the pills down his throat and chugs the smoothie. A burp, then he’s off to the bathroom for a shit.

Quickly slurping down her serving with a stainless-steel straw (plastic ones are hard to come by nowadays, and the cardboard kind on her lips gives her the chills), she uses her pointer finger to pull out the soggy tabs stuck on the side of the glass. Sucks them off and swallows. The only thing left to do is wait, so she flops down on the couch and ignites the good ol’ Fire TV Stick and the latest episode of Euphoria.

The faint sound of a toilet paper roll rattling around the holder means he’s finishing his business. Materializing again, he lets out a deep sigh, dragging his body next to where she lies, bringing with him a waft of Febreze and the stench of a hangover shit. He burps again and chuckles. There was this homeless dude inside the bar begging everyone for money, so weird, he shares randomly. Oh, I’ve been thinking we should go to Portugal…

SUNDAY

An impressive Sunday sunrise. Life has already moved on from yesterday’s trip, but Ella’s certain she never will (not completely, anyway). Via the bedroom window blinds (she desperately needs to buy blackout curtains), the 6:00 a.m. daylight bleeds into her eyes like a vampire’s worst nightmare. Sleep is always brief for her the night after taking LSD; the overwhelming visual effects she experiences while high never disappear when it’s time for shut-eye. Instead they’re more intense. For an hour or two before dozing off half-conscious till the a.m., she’s stuck watching a cartoon of Dante’s Inferno on her eyelids, starring characters from The Simpsons.

She rises unconcerned with the sound of sheets rustling and the creaking bedframe. The reason to keep quiet has been eliminated with her relationship; The Boyfriend left her yesterday. He didn’t take too kindly to her dosing him. At first, he found it arousing, achieving perhaps the biggest erection she’d ever seen him have. He was giggling uncontrollably at the second episode of Euphoria, during which Nate (played by the gorg Jacob Elordi) beats a guy to a pulp and rapes him. As the visuals kicked in, so did her libido and the realization of how much she loved this man, how passionately generous and unconditionally accepting he’d been with her for years. All her bad habits and emotional baggage, the bold selfishness, ignored. While he looked the other way on countless occasions, she was searching for fulfillment in every direction but his. How insanely mistaken you were! she scolded herself. Rushing to her knees, she yanked down his sweatpants and devoured him. The howls he made as she orally coaxed him to completion were magnificent.

Holy shit, hon, oh my god. That was so wild. What’s going on, everything is vibrating. Barely pulling on his sweatpants, he darted for the bathroom and knelt over the toilet puking. She walked to the sink beside him and rinsed her mouth. Checked herself in the mirror. Watched as the wrinkles in her forehead became white worms, slithered off her face and flew away. Feeling beautiful and perfect, she finally divulged she’d dosed him.

We’re on the acid, hon! I put it in our smoothies. I’ve just been so horrible lately, pushing you away. You know I’ve been scared to take it because of the revelations I have on it. But it was worth the risk! I now know I love you so much and I’m so sorry. I’m going to be better to you, to us. He looked into her with incredulous eyes. You did fucking what?! Are you kidding me, Ella! My parents are coming to the city today for my dad’s birthday. What the fuck is wrong with you?! 

And that… was that. A few more harsh sentences (one of which was We’re done for good, you crazy bitch!), a packed bag, his snubbing her pleas not to go out in public high or leave her there alone and on drugs, an exit with a slammed front door. Sobbing and hallucinating, she texted him nonstop for hours (but never called for some reason). Eventually the blue iMessages turned green, which meant he’d blocked her or shut off his new iPhone (he’d just gotten the 11).

Ella enters the living room overcome with sadness and regret. She glances at the blank canvases leaning against the modern glass coffee table with an abstractly shaped oak base, then texts her coke dealer.

THE END

The KGB Bar and Reading Room was my home away from home in college—you could even say I grew up there. Which is why, years later, this opportunity to guest edit the journal is all the more special to me.

In some ways, the theme of the issue felt a bit like cheating. The dilemma lay in trying to produce something that involved writers I’ve read and long admired along with what I believe is the role of any good journal: to give platform to new voices. So, to ask the writers I admire, who are established in the craft, to share with us the works of new voices that they have been mesmerized by, whom they feel the world should know, felt like the most logical thing in the world. It also left little work to do on my part.

I was somewhat surprised to see the diversity of writers in Voice, because it wasn’t something I was conscious about when making the selections. Living in New York, I’ve always been fortunate enough to be able to forget where I come from, what my gender is. I still believe, in my utopia, that should be the case. My aim here was to showcase hidden jewels, irrespective of everything else. As luck would have it, when you look for something different and special, you, by default, look everywhere—under every pillow.

I am humbled and taken aback by the work we have published here. Putting this issue together reminded me of how much talent and incredible work there is out there, outside our radar. Beauty never ceases.

So here is an issue that brings you voices you have possibly never heard of but should know about—beautiful, melancholic, brutal and strong.

Excerpt from OFF THE YOGA MAT © by Cheryl J. Fish

Forthcoming from Livingston Press/University of West Alabama, pub date Oct. 20, 2022

January, 1999

Chapter One “Inflexible”

Nate

“When others achieve success, how does that diminish you?” Nathaniel Dart didn’t care to consider this question from a talk-radio host. He was about to leave the apartment with a spasm in his back. His friend Gil, and his girlfriend Nora, had finally convinced him to take a trial yoga class in a studio a few blocks away. As he walked down Second Avenue with a slight shuffle, twinges running upward from his ass, the success of others gnawed away at him. A cash bonus Nora received at the end-of-the-year—she deserved the money for a job well done—but he hadn’t grabbed her around the waist or smiled in a swell of support. Nor had he taken her out to celebrate. And when Gil won a lottery for affordable housing nearby which meant more space and rent stabilization, of course Gil had the gall to rub it in his face, mentioning Nate’s dark studio apartment with moths burrowing in the closet. Nate had no choice but to resent him. One other victory throbbed against his bony vertebrate.  

His old study-group mate Monica Portman landed a teaching job in Boston, a position that Nate should have applied for, could have applied for, if only he’d finished his thesis. He struggled to accept Ralph Waldo Emerson’s credo that “envy is ignorance.”

He stopped suddenly on his walk to watch dumpster divers pick through garbage bins outside the supermarket. They’d cook what was still edible, and someone shouted through a megaphone about the futility of waste in New York City. Determined to find freshness in what had been declared foul, the freegans sorted through packages past expiration dates, found perfectly decent bags of bagels and cookies and cut-up carrots. He heard them complain about tossing food with hungry and homeless folks everywhere. Nate felt disgusted by the vast inequalities in society; they mattered more than revising his thesis on jealousy as an evolutionary trait in humans.

Nate’s research combined a trifecta of disciplines: science, literature, psychology. It sounded loopy when he claimed the existence of a jealousy hormone. Not only did it benefit species studied by Charles Darwin, like those blue-footed boobies on Galapagos, but Homo sapiens as well. Envious rage might motivate men and women to loosen their desire for control. The result could turn out for the better. Yet jealousy was no walk in the park—it caused primitive rage and destruction which Nate witnessed everywhere. In his thesis, he proved his point by examining jealous characters in Shakespeare’s Othello and King Lear.

How does their success diminish me? He wished he could put that thought out of his mind. Nate spent countless hours in his swivel chair; one could say he lived where he sat.

In the yoga class, a tingling numbness ran down his legs, pain and trembling too. He stood in a darkish room with a yoga teacher asking them to bend from their core towards the floor. He couldn’t reach past his knees, his whole upper body as stiff at age 39 as if he were 50-something. I am not a yoga guy, he thought—I have more in common with the freegans. I should have never set foot in this dusty old hovel. He felt others staring at him.

Nate contemplated his future on all fours doing cow and cat, rounding his back like a feline, or should he flatten it like a bovine? Who named these postures? The students stood in unison, placing a bent leg along their thigh for tree pose. He grabbed a beam.

“Focus on one point on the wall,” said the teacher, a strikingly fit woman named Lulu Betancourt, who welcomed them warmly and insisted they obey their own bodies. “Take a three-part breath and be mindful. Let air seep out like a leaky balloon.”

Nate smirked. He visualized a giant balloon emptying with farting sounds. He filled his lungs then exhaled as told. Relaxation could wash over him.

She soon introduced them to the series “salute to the sun.” A set of flowing movements that started with standing, progressed to rolling to the floor, then rising into the cobra and plank positions with a rhythmic grace, ending with an upward curl, palms pressed together in gratitude. A subtle choreography he punctured with jerking motions. If Nate could reach an inch nearer to his toes and roll down without collapsing, he felt like he would celebrate. His version might be called parody, not salute. He was determined to modify his moves, like the barnacles, finches and beetles Darwin observed.

“Melt into the earth with a rushing sensation, rain drenching fields,” Lulu said in a soft yet determined voice. She leaned against the wall, bowed her head.

Nate tried to experience rain. Instead, he thought about money. He benefitted neither from the loopholes in capitalism that let the richest prosper, nor from a critique of its corruption. I am an academic serf living on rice and beans, he thought, and no one could care less. He was deep in debt from loans. He should apply for another fellowship or take an adjunct position at a City University campus. He wondered about the job referred to by his advisor Offendorf in his recent nasty note. Offendorf had scribbled dismissive comments on the pages it took Nate many months to write, and even more months to find the courage to mail to the university down in Maryland, with Nora’s goading. Offendorf had the nerve to reply:

WAY TOO MUCH time spent on Darwin. It may be trendy to consider evolutionary theory, but I don’t care for that approach. Take out feminism and limit psychoanalysis. You’ve inserted too many footnotes. Let’s put this baby to bed. When are you coming to campus? Bring the revision−we’ll talk defense date. Oh, and I might know of a teaching position.”

As Nate considered whether the job was real or just another one of Oppendorf’s bluffs, he was instructed to twist his torso, knee cutting across his folded leg. That evoked the twists and turns of Nora’s desire.

“Let’s conceive a millennial child,” she said. Nineteen-ninety-nine high stepped like a marching band through her ovaries. Fear of her upcoming, their upcoming, fortieth birthdays felt like annihilation.

“Nora. I can’t give you a baby now.”

“I knew you’d say that,” Nora said. “There’s never going to be a perfect time.”

 “I’m not in the position to be a dad.”

“You’d be very loving.” She stroked his hand. “My salary can tide us over.”

His inability to care for a child felt like a character deficiency. He must finish his degree before procreating, not focus on the milestone of age forty. When his mom visited from Long Island the other day, she slipped him a wad of cash.

 “Don’t say anything to your father.”

“You don’t have to keep doing this,” he said, feeling sheepish and small. 

**

Nate’s spine cracked. Lulu headed over to his side during dandasana, a forward bend that segued into a seated wide-angle pose. She crouched. “Breathe into your stretch.” He noticed a beady-eyed frog tattoo near her shoulder—green and black, sinister. Lulu smelled of rose-oil.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“I can’t concentrate.” What made her want to ink a frog into her skin?

“Observe your thoughts. They’ll dissipate.” She touched his head. “Probably.”

How should he respond to Offendorf’s reign of terror? Say “I need Darwin like Shakespeare needed Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,” the source material for some of the Bard’s plays?

While Nate rested in child’s pose, head on mat, arms and legs compressed like a floating fetus, a surge of energy ran from the tips of his toes into his calves. So, what if Offendorf demanded he cut one-third of all he had written? How did their success diminish his? Disappointments acquired territory. One negative experience attracted others, expanding into new fiefdoms.

His old study group mate Monica Portman applied for everything. “I invented personal literary criticism,” she said, convinced of her pioneering role. Wasn’t she coming to town? As Nate struggled to pick himself off the floor for the next posture, it occurred to him: send her the very same pages Offendorf trashed and ask for a second opinion. Monica’s instincts resembled a baby sea turtle’s—born in sand, hurdling towards the ocean. He should trust her to guide him to safety.

Then yogi Lulu announced to the room “return to downward-facing dog.” He bent over, and placing his hands flat, stuck his butt in the air.

Dale is in a cult. He is a cult member. Dale is seventeen. He is the fourth-youngest member of the cult.

Dale was born into the cult. It is all he’s ever known.

The cult is a religious cult. They worship their own god. The god that the cult worships is the 1984 film The Karate Kid, directed by John G. Avildsen.

The cult was started in 1986 by Dale’s uncle, Steve. Steve started the cult shortly after the film The Karate Kid became available on videocassette.

At first, Dale’s parents joined Steve’s cult because a few months earlier they had given Steve a large amount of money to get him back on his feet. They were worried Steve would do something stupid with the money.

But, eventually, Dale’s parents started to worship the film The Karate Kid, too, just like Steve.

Over the years, the cult grew and grew. Steve was a good cult leader, and the members of the cult were happy with the cult.

The cult met two nights a week. They watched The Karate Kid. They had pot-lucks and talked about The Karate Kid and prayed about The Karate Kid. They had Karate Kid costume parties. At the costume parties, everyone dressed up as a character from the Karate Kid, and the characters danced to music from the movie.

This part of the story has been the ground situation. The inciting incident follows.

In 2010, when Dale was seventeen years old, Steve got sick, and Steve later died. The cult got a new leader. The new leader was Steve’s oldest son, Harry.

Harry was a fanatic. He wore his facial hair in a way that made him look scary. Harry hadn’t liked the way that his father had run the cult. Harry thought that the cult should do more than just have parties.

Harry started to question whether or not the members of the cult really did worship the film The Karate Kid. Harry suspected that at least some of the members just liked the movie a lot, and liked going to the parties. 

Harry declared that there would be trials. All cult members would take part in the trials. The first trial was answering trivia questions about The Karate Kid. Harry had found the trivia questions on the internet.

Most of the cult members did fine on the trivia questions. They had seen the movie a lot. Two members did poorly, and Harry asked them to leave the cult. The remaining cult members were fine with this. They hadn’t liked those two, anyway. Those two never brought anything good to the potlucks.

Later that year, the remake of The Karate Kid came out in theaters, and then on DVD.

Harry declared that the remake of The Karate Kid was a false god that should be destroyed. Harry bought a bunch of copies of the DVD and gave the cult members hammers and lighter fluid and matches with which to destroy the DVD’s.

Several of the cult members thought that this was a bit much. They thought the remake was alright. They had gotten together, without Harry knowing, to go see it.

Those several cult members thought that the cult wasn’t fun anymore like when Steve was around. So they decided to leave the cult.

Harry declared good riddance to the non-believers.

Next Harry declared that all cult members should get tattoos. Must get tattoos. Big ones. But several of the remaining cult members didn’t want big tattoos, so several more left the cult.

Good riddance, Harry declared again.

There were only about a half-dozen cult members left. Harry insisted that these half-dozen were the true believers. Harry was right: the half-dozen cult members that were still around really did worship the film The Karate Kid.

Except for Dale. Dale had a secret.

Dale no longer worshipped the film The Karate Kid. Over the years, while in the cult, Dale had come to worship the actress Elisabeth Shue, instead.

The actress Elisabeth Shue played the character Ali-with-an-i in the film The Karate Kid. Dale was in love with Elisabeth Shue. Madly. Head over heels.

So when the fanatic Harry declared, in his biggest, boldest declaration yet, that the cult would be kidnapping all of the directors and producers and crewmembers and actors (other than Pat Morita, who had played Mister Miyagi and who had since passed away) and actresses and extras and everyone—EVERYONE!—who had been involved in creating the cult’s one true god for a grand, ceremonial reenactment, and then, when, through a series of events, Dale discovered that Harry’s true intentions, Harry being a fanatic, were not to kidnap everyone for a grand, ceremonial reenactment but instead to kidnap everyone for a grand, ceremonial sacrifice—a human sacrifice to the one true god—Dale decided that he must flee the cult and must himself kidnap Elisabeth Shue before Harry could get to her.

But when Harry discovers that Dale has fled the cult and, through another series of events, also discovers that Dale has discovered Harry’s true intentions, Harry sends his cult members in pursuit of Dale. To stop Dale, at any cost.

The inciting incident having concluded, the story now has a protagonist (Dale) and a conflict (Dale wants to save Elisabeth Shue, whom he loves and worships, from Harry) and an antagonist (Harry the fanatic).

Dale found Elisabeth Shue before the cult members found him. It wasn’t hard; he knew where she lived. He worshipped her and all.

Dale didn’t break into Elisabeth Shue’s house, at first. He waited for her to come out of her house to go somewhere.

Because Dale loved her so much, he couldn’t help but be honest with Elisabeth Shue. He told her her life was in danger. She walked faster. He told her to come with him. That he could save her. She told him to eff off.

So Dale broke into Elisabeth Shue’s house.

When Elisabeth Shue found Dale in her house, she told him to go away. Then she said she’d call the police. The she said she’d shoot him.

Dale tried to explain the situation. The danger she was in. But Elisabeth Shue wouldn’t listen.

But then some of the cult members arrived. They knew where Elisabeth Shue lived, too. Harry had made a big list.

The cult members made a lot of noise and broke a lot of glass when they broke into Elisabeth Shue’s house. They scared Elisabeth Shue, so she went with Dale. She brought the gun she had threatened to shoot Dale with. 

If a gun, etc.

Dale and Elisabeth Shue escaped in Elisabeth Shue’s car. Elisabeth Shue drove. Despite being seventeen, Dale did not have a driver’s license. He had grown up in a cult. Dale had gotten to Elisabeth Shue’s house by bus. Elisabeth Shue really didn’t live that far from where Dale lived.

Elisabeth Shue drove into the desert. Elisabeth Shue didn’t live that far from the desert, either.

She stopped the car. She and Dale got out. They were in the middle of nowhere. It had been nighttime when they had escaped from Elisabeth Shue’s house, but now it was daytime. 

Elisabeth Shue pulled out the gun and pointed it at Dale. Dale hadn’t known that Elisabeth Shue had brought the gun. She demanded to know who the eff Dale was and what the eff was going on.

Dale told her everything.

He told her about the cult: his uncle, the potlucks, Harry, the tattoos. And he told her about Harry’s plan. The real plan. And he told her how much he loved her. And worshipped her. So much so that he just couldn’t let that happen to her.

In a long, dramatic scene, Elisabeth Shue points her pistol at Dale and demands that Dale tell her what he loves so much about her. Dale then launches into a dramatic monologue about three tiny moments in the film Karate Kid—little moments that no one ever probably noticed ever but that Dale had watched and rewatched over and over and over again that had made Dale fall in love with her. By the time Dale finished his monologue, Elisabeth Shue had lowered the pistol.

Elisabeth Shue had been twenty-one years old when she played the female lead in the 1984 film, The Karate Kid. In the desert, with Dale, she was fifty-four. 

Despite the age difference between Dale and Elisabeth Shue, at the end of Dale’s monologue there was a moment where it was possible that they might have kissed.

But then they saw a line of cars coming quickly down the road. Dust flying.

This has been the Act One climax, which has ended on a positive charge in relation to Dale’s object of desire (to rescue Elisabeth Shue).

This has also been the Inciting Incident of Subplot A, a star-crossed love story starring Dale, 17, and Elisabeth Shue, 54.

Elisabeth Shue has a husband. She is married. When Elisabeth Shue’s husband got home from work and his wife was missing and there was broken glass on the floor, he called the police. This is the Inciting Incident of Subplot B.

The police came and did what they do, but it was all moving too slowly for Elisabeth Shue’s husband, who was frantic. He decided to take matters into his own hands. He got into his car and went looking for his wife. 

Before leaving, though, Elisabeth Shue’s husband went around back to put food out for the dog. Outside one of the broken windows, he found a wallet. A cult member had dropped it.

Elisabeth Shue’s husband’s discovery of the cult member’s wallet, which contained the cult member’s driver’s license indicating the cult member’s home address, is Subplot B’s Act One climax (a positive charge).

Subplot A’s Act One climax occurs in the very next scene when, with the cult members in hot pursuit, Elisabeth Shue has the opportunity to escape on her own, without Dale. But she hesitates. And, in an action indicating feelings for Dale (the indication of those feelings further indicated by appropriate facial expression), she goes back for him (positive charge).

In Act Two of this story the Central Plot is complicated by seven scenes, Subplot A by five, and Subplot B by three, all culminating in the Act Two climax. 

Act Two, therefore, consists of fifteen scenes, the three scenes complicating Subplot B nestled within the five scenes complicating Subplot A, those five scenes likewise nestled within the seven scenes complicating the central plot, the series of fifteen scenes ending on a one two three causal sequence of scenes from, in particular order, Subplot B, Subplot A, and Central Plot, those three scenes amounting to the Subplot B Act Two climax (Elisabeth Shue’s husband’s sleuthing leads him directly to Harry himself who then kidnaps Elisabeth Shue’s husband and ties him up [negative charge], the reader learning at that point that Harry has also kidnapped and tied up Dale’s parents) causing simultaneously the Subplot A and Central Plot climaxes (Elisabeth Shue learns that Harry has abducted her husband whom despite this new love for Dale she cares for very much so Elisabeth Shue abandons Dale to go save her husband [negative charge, Subplot A] sending Elisabeth Shue straight into the clutches of fanatic Harry [negative charge, likewise, Central Plot]), all setting up the subsequent Act III climax and resolution. 

In the Act Three climax, in which all characters and all Subplots are brought together in a single scene in a single location, said scene in said location orchestrated in Bond-villain-fashion by the fanatic Harry, Harry forces Dale to choose between his Object of Desire, Elisabeth Shue, whom, as a result of her attempt to free her husband, Harry has also captured and tied up, or Dale’s own parents. Dale ultimately decides to release Elisabeth Shue back to her husband (positive charge: Central Plot and Subplot B; negative charge: Subplot A). Elisabeth Shue and husband depart, setting off a showdown between Dale and Harry resulting in Dale’s parents being saved and Harry being defeated.

Somewhere in all that, the gun introduced in Act One is fired.

BH James, 39, writing this story three-and-a-half weeks after he was told by his wife Liz that, despite his not remembering them as such, the first four months of the year preceding by four years this year had been the worst, most perilous months of his and her marriage, BH James, over the course of those three-and-a-half months, questions wife Liz about those earlier four months, Liz generously obliging and thereby, despite the bitterness for both parties of the revisitation, helps BH reconstruct/reorchestrate the story. 

The Inciting Incident of the worst, most perilous months of BH’s marriage occurs in January, on moving day. His wife, Liz, tells him to be careful when mounting the TV. But he doesn’t listen. And he breaks it. And she cries, not about the TV, and she leaves and doesn’t come back for a long time. Negative charge.

BH writes this scene into a story titled Wiff and then swears to Liz that it’s not them.

The Act One Climax occurs in February. Liz, having put baby to bed, stations herself, as she does every night, alone in bedroom, where she will spend the next several hours, alone, while BH writes, Liz careful not to disturb BH, who frequently complains that he never has time to write anymore.

This night, though, BH comes and stands in the doorway. He has just learned that his first novel, Parnucklian for Chocolate, published one year earlier and having failed to meet any and all expectations, is a finalist for an award. A PEN award, he tells her, which is misleadingly vague but true.

Liz exclaims! emotes! attempts a hug that BH shies from. It’s not a big deal, he tells her. Don’t tell anyone.

He leaves, goes back to his desk, and she is again alone. Negative charge.

The Act Two Climax occurs in March, when BH insists to Liz—BH and Liz having just purchased a house after recently having a child and therefore having little expendable income—that he has to has to has to go to AWP in Seattle—that he’s a writer and he has to, BH however, in contrast to the previous year, in Boston, when he signed books at his publisher’s booth each of the three days he was there [his wife at home with their fever-sick six-month-old son], BH was participating in no signings, no readings, no offsite events, nothing at all in particular.

But he had to go, because he was a writer.

And when BH went (for four days) he hardly called home, barely spoke to his wife, to his son not at all.

Upon returning, BH, 36, finished the first draft of a long short story titled The Anti-Story and set at a fictional version of AWP Seattle. The protagonist of the story is a writer. Unmarried, with no kids.

Negative Charge.

BH James, 39, writing this story four years later with the help of his wife Liz, has read in a book about stories that scenes in a series should alternate in charge (positive, negative, positive, etc.). But that is not how this story goes.

The Act Three Climax occurs in April, when BH’s wife Liz makes an appointment for marriage counseling because her husband for months now has been a cold distant self-absorbed prick, clearly wishing at all times to be anywhere but in his own home, lamenting frequently that he’s not even a writer, anymore, not even a writer.

Liz tells BH about the appointment. BH, teacher, responds that he’s chaperoning a field trip in Sacramento that day. He’s doing it to help out another teacher. Liz stresses the importance of not going on the field trip. BH goes anyway, misses the appointment.

Liz makes plans to leave. Negative charge.

The Resolution occurs in June. BH, 36, teacher, is at a three-day training in Florida. On the first day, his cell phone breaks. It turns off and won’t turn back on, and it won’t charge. He tries calling from the hotel, several times. Leaves messages. Sends emails from a computer in the lobby. He walks to several stores to buy several devices that might make his phone turn on, but none of them work.

BH spends most of the three days alone in his room, reading. By the time BH arrives at the airport to fly home, he has not spoken to his wife or son for three days. He searches for the payphones, but can’t find any. People don’t really use them anymore, so they’d been removed. BH asks someone. He never asks. There is one payphone left.

When Liz answers, BH tells her the story of his three days without a phone. Then he tells her he loves her, and misses her. He asks to talk to his son. When Liz is back on, BH tells her he is coming home. BH intends BH’s statement that he is coming home to have both literal and figurative meaning.

BH tells Liz they should have another baby. By August she is pregnant, and the following April their second-born is born. Positive charge.

Four years later, Liz will tell BH, who is writing this story, that, as bad as it was, from that point on, it’s all been pretty good.

By the end of the Act III climax, Dale has achieved his external Object of Desire: Elisabeth Shue is safe. Harry is in jail. But Dale is not happy. Dale did not achieve his internal Object of Desire: the love of Elisabeth Shue.

But, in the end, Elisabeth Shue comes back to Dale (positive charge). She hugs her husband, pets her dogs, and leaves them. And in the story’s final scene, Dale comes home to find her standing, waiting, at the stairs.

At BH, 39’s, and Liz, 34’s son’s preschool graduation, as they wait for the ceremony to begin, BH and Liz have a lively debate about the location of the climax of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. BH contends that what they had written about the 5-act structure in the book they had co-authored (Method to the Madness: A Common Core Guide to Creating Critical Thinkers through the Study of English) was all wrong. That the whole play progresses toward the duel, after which there is only the unraveling. Liz, who knows the play better, retorts that the uncertainty is resolved in the closet scene, and the certainty is what matters.

BH cites Aristotle. Liz cites another author, who said that Aristotle got most of it wrong. BH tries to respond, but the ceremony begins.

BH tells the same anecdote in a blog post titled Rethinking Shakespeare’s 5-Act Structure, later published as an article in a magazine for teachers.

The next morning, BH James will finish this story. And the day after that, BH will be 40. 

He picks up his pen, then puts it back down.

When he picks it up again, he writes…

THE END