Student Picks: Offill, Rushdie

Jemiscoe Chambers-Black-- Have you ever had something remind you of your toddler years and make you not want to share? That’s what Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation did to me. It’s the book that I clutch to my chest and scream, “Mine.” However, it’s so beautifully written, I have to share.

Dept. of Speculation’s structure is written in short paragraphs of randomness that become gorgeous prose. The novel follows a writer who vows never to get married because she is too busy becoming an “Art Monster.” But she ends up falling in love, getting married, and eventually having a baby, and in her confliction and honesty, I’m moved. There are many delicious moments in this book that spill off the page when the inner thoughts of this career woman turned stay-at-home-mom pour out:

“What did you today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.”

Eventually, her husband has an affair, and the reader is taken on a journey filled with love, family, sacrifice, and eventually forgiveness. So, while I’ve shared this gem, know that no one can borrow my copy. I really recommend this book, but get your own.

Kirah Brouillette-- On a whim, I re-read Salman Rushdie’s infamous novel The Satanic Verses, the magically real story of two morally bankrupt Bollywood actors, Gibreel and Saladin, who die in a terrorist plot and are later reborn as an angel and Satan. With an embedded storyline around the prophet Mohammed that offended some Muslims enough that violent protests followed and the author himself was put under a fatwa by the Ayahtollah Komeni in 1989, it can be a tall order to finish.

What gets you by though, is the purity of Rushdie’s prose; the way he uses cadence and free punctuation to draw you into this foggily familiar world – a world where realism meets the magic of literary allusion, all bound by rising emotion shared between all characters, in both worlds at once.

“Is there a Devil. After that the glass – baprebap! – began to shake ... slowslow at first, then faster-faster ...  until it jumped ... fell down on its side and ... into a thousand ... pieces, smashed. Believe, don’t believe ... but thenandthere I learned my lesson: don’t meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend.”

Sunflower

by Todd Richardson

As a devout atheist, I don’t believe in the supernatural. But when my friend offered a free tarot card reading, I thought I’d entertain the idea, just for fun. I met her in a square room filled with photographs yellowed with age. A circular table stood in the center. I took a seat across from her.

She looked me in the eye as she unboxed the cards. “Are you open to this?”

I shrugged, “Sure.”

She held my gaze as she spilled the cards face-down on the table. She swirled them, her hands gently floating over their surfaces as she churned the deck. “Is there some paperwork that you need to finish?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Something for work?” she asked.

“I’m still waiting for a teaching contract.”

“It’s coming on Thursday.”

“Sweet,” I said. Lucky guess, I thought.

She told me to pick five cards and place them in order on the table without turning them over. I chose from the pile at random. She flipped them over one at a time. A woman. Swords. Cups. The moon. A sunflower.

She pulled the first card—a man surrounded by cups—toward her.

“You have a financial opportunity coming,” she said.

“Great,” I said. How cliché, I thought.

“Three months, maybe. Watch for it.”

“Sure.”

She tapped on the card with a picture of the moon on it. “The moon means you have someone watching over you. Was there someone important to you who passed away?”

“Not really,” I said. My thoughts drifted toward my grandpa, who died when I was fourteen.

“I’m getting a grandfather?”

I nodded in confirmation. C’mon, I thought, who doesn’t have a beloved grandparent they hope watches over them?

“He’s sending me an image of boots,” she said.

“What?”

“A pair of old, leather boots.”

“Nope,” I said.

She paused. “No, it’s definitely boots.”

Don’t make me put my boot in your ass, I heard his voice echo in my head. I smiled. “That used to be his brand of heartfelt motivation,” I told her. “He used to say he’d put a boot in my ass if he thought I needed it.”

“He’s telling me that he’s there for you, to give you that boot in your ass when you need it,” she said.

I chuckled. Ok, that was pretty good, I thought.

She dragged the three remaining cards closer to her: the sunflower, the swords, and the woman. There was a pause before she spoke again.

“The sunflower means fertility,” she said. She looked up and my throat tightened. My wife and I had a miscarriage, but my friend knew that. I’d told her about it weeks ago.

“You’ve been through something horrible,” my friend said. She reached across the table and placed a gentle hand on my forearm. What did she see? I thought. Could she see the toilet bowl full of blood, the frantic drive to the ER, me wringing my hands like a damp wash cloth as the nurse pressed an IV into my wife’s vein? I swallowed hard.

“Something good will happen.” She gave me a knowing look. “I see a seven. Seven weeks, maybe. Seven months. I’m not sure. Just be strong.” She pointed to the card with swords on it, looked at me, and smiled.

“Whenever the good news comes, your wife will become a warrior.”

“She’s already fierce.”

“She’ll be even stronger. Just wait. You’ll see.”

I thanked my friend and left. I spent the rest of the day full of equal parts doubt and hope. I wanted to believe my grandfather was beaming down at me. More than anything, I needed to be a father again, to feel whole in a way that only the baby had made me feel. But I was skeptical. Mystic cards held no sway over the forces of the universe; life was determined by choice and chance, not fate.

I woke up the next morning. It was Thursday. My teaching contract sat in my inbox awaiting my signature. Son of a bitch, I thought and began praying. I don’t know about God, or the cards, but I prayed for seven—seven days or weeks or months—prayed for the day my sunflower will come.

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Todd Richardson is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Black Belt or Novel?

by Margaret McNellis

“Don’t hurt me!”

That’s typically the first response I get when people find out I have a third-degree black belt.

“Do you have to register your hands as a lethal weapon?”

That’s usually the other question someone asks. In case you’re wondering, I don’t go around hurting people and it’s a myth that martial artists have to register their hands as weapons. I’m pretty sure a police department would just laugh at me if I called up asking to register my hands. The other response I commonly get is wide eyes and dropped jaws. This, I think, is based on the fact that not many people get black belts.

Can I let you in on a secret? Black belts aren’t so elusive. If you put in enough time and practice, and you want something enough, then you too can have a black belt. In that way, the martial arts is a lot like creative writing.

I wrote my first novel in 2008. I’d been studying with the Long Ridge Writers Group, which offered one-on-one mentorship for both fiction and nonfiction study. All of my original stories (I used to write a decent amount of fan fiction) hovered around the one-thousand-word mark, and I didn’t think I had it in me to tell a longer story—at least not until another Long Ridge student told me about National Novel Writing Month. I signed up, and thirty days later, I had a 50,000-word fantasy story about disillusionment with organized religion.

I’d like to take a moment to emphasize that writing at that pace didn’t produce anything publishable. I don’t want to give the impression that pumping out a book that fast is really all it takes, because it takes so much more.

I kept participating in NaNoWriMo, and even served as the municipal liaison for my region for four years, but in 2014, I wanted something more. I enrolled in SNHU’s MA – English & Creative Writing program with a specialization in fiction. More than any workshop, that program started to teach me how to write well. It was, for me, the equivalent of getting my green belt.

I earned my green belt after a three-hour test next to a marshland that produced a never-ending supply of biting green flies. I survived the test—and the pests—and beamed at my instructor-friend when he told me getting my green belt meant I was a serious martial artist (green belt was considered the first of the advanced ranks at my dojo). Earning my MA in 2015 felt the same, but I craved more.

Now, as a second-semester student in SNHU’s Mountainview MFA program, I feel like I’m approaching black belt again, except instead of a six-hour test of physical strength, knowledge, reflexes, and the ability to resist mind games, I’ll be submitting my thesis, a historical novel set in the seventeenth century, in just over one year.

On those days when I find it hard to write, when the blinking cursor mocks me, or when I feel like the ending of my story is completely predictable and therefore foolish, I think back to all of the martial arts tests I’ve taken and I write. One word after the other, just like one kick after the other until I’ve reached one thousand kicks, one thousand words, then another thousand, then ten thousand, until I have chapters upon chapters and a finally a novel.

If you put in the time and practice, and want it enough, then you too can write a novel. And you can make a good one, one that says something about what it means to be human, one that makes readers question their world…but it won’t come easy. It won’t be like getting your white belt when you sign up for martial arts lessons. It’s going to take a sacrifice, it’s going to take something from you, and you have to be okay with giving into the process.

Perhaps the best part about telling someone I’ve written a novel is that they don’t cringe or ask me if I’ve had to register my LAMY fountain pen with some government agency. I’m kidding—the best part is knowing I’ve breathed life into characters, into a world, into art, into something that will hopefully leave a positive mark on the world someday.

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Margaret McNellis is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Student Picks: Doerr and Mitchell

Arun Chittur-- I’m a longtime skeptic of historical fiction because of its reputation for overworked description, academic focus on timeline, and characters concerned more with events than their own lives. Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See corrected my long-time drought. 

Doerr introduces readers to Marie-Laure, a young, blind French girl, stranded after her father falls into Nazi captivity, and Werner, a German orphan who finds friendship and structure in Hitler’s army; the book relies on the unlikely thread between these two ostensible enemies.

Doerr’s structure invests readers in each character just long enough, making use of short, single scene-based chapters to bring us in personally. The book is then broken into multiple parts, each a different time period around or during World War II. The timeline slides backward and forward, leading one to believe the plot too difficult to follow and to assume the book will return to the shelf half-read. Alas, you’re left with more questions and no choice but to press on, hoping for answers.

The chapters show one moment, one place, one emotion. Then as soon as your heart subsumes the character’s, perspective changes, and you begin again, always longing to understand the world around you still cannot see.

K. A. Hamilton-- "This book does not contain a misprint on page 39," Amazon warns, a foreshadowing of the form-bending journey to come. On its surface, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a collection of found documents, torn apart at their middles and nestled within one another. Going deeper into the journals, films, and manuscripts, it’s a story of karma that follows a chorus of souls over six different lifetimes.

Belief in reincarnation is not a prerequisite for the audience, as the cyclical themes of subjugation and justice are universally human. In fact, the premise is never explicitly stated; it only exists as a mounting sense of connectedness between the people of each era. In this novel that spans period and genre, Mitchell demonstrates the subtle power of what’s left unsaid. There is an electric urgency to the message, and a call to action that is impossible to set aside when the book is done.

Finding Ourselves on Amazon

by K. A. Hamilton

A rock salt lamp. Fibonacci earrings. A triceratops-shaped taco holder. It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself with a cart full of merchandise that would never make it past the threshold of: “proceed to checkout.” But as I cleared the items out of my cart, it was the first time I asked myself: “how did I get here?”

It seems like every modern artist has their own cautionary tale about screen time. I don’t mind indulging in a little daily distraction, but the near-manifestation of it, the possibility that my procrastination could show up in a corrugated cardboard box was frightening to me. So I hit the “back” button to retrace my footsteps.

I found myself on Amazon’s “Interesting Finds” page, a shopping-meets-Pinterest-style collection of curated goods. I must have lost myself in the spinning of the mouse wheel, because the scroll bar was the size of a pea. As I ascended the page, a stream of material goods flowed by without description, even defying description. It struck me that this wasn't stuff that a person could ever truly need, like a pack of underwear or a replacement cutting board. This was the stuff you bought for your quirky co-worker, or the family member who already has it all.

When I reached the top of the page, a friendly dialog box invited me to “heart the things you love.” A scatter of gray, heart-shaped icons served as evidence that I had indeed made my own affectionate marks. But in my defense, in a stock white world with zero sense of scale, anything seems possible. Including the idea that you might love a plastic taco holder shaped like an extinct ornithischian.

That was where I ended my investigation, closing the tab and getting up to do anything that I could deem more wholesome than “being on the internet.” And yet, I felt a lingering connection to my hearted stuff. The great retailers are collectors of behavioral data. Sales motivations aside, they know something about each of us, and about all of us. When you think about it, what more is this collection of “stuff” than a photomontage of our Ids?

Here is what Amazon seems to make of me: I like cats, and to a slightly lesser degree, dogs. I like plants, but I really like tiny plants that come with minimal dirt. I seek the kind of Zen that I can put on display, preferably with an infusion of technology. I like to think I have time to knit. I enjoy irony with my coffee. I’m nostalgic for my horse/dinosaur/fantasy days. And I still dream of space.

I'm proud to say that I haven't caved to any of these purchases… yet (except for the cat mug I bought for my quirky co-worker). But there is a sense of inevitability about it all. The things that I’ve “loved” continue to dog my online travels, targeting me from places where ad blockers have no sway. I know the internet is shaping me even as I’m shaping it back, nourishing its needs with indicators of my own. It’s harmless and it’s not. Like pennies dropped into a well, you never really shake the wish.

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K. A. Hamilton is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Christmas on the Spanish Steps

by Mojgan Ghazirad

Fifteen years ago when I came to Canada as a student, I remember one of my Iranian friends who had come a few years earlier asked, “Are you going to put up a Christmas tree in your house?” We were walking together in Vancouver’s Broadway Street, ornate wreaths were attached to every light post we passed. Crimson little globes glittered in between the glabrous leaves of holly that embellished the glass vitrines of stores and coffee shops. The Christmas celebration, golden and glamorous, kept me in a state of wonderment and awe. I was new to North America and the festivities around the New Year in the Western world. And so was my daughter, age seven, who kept asking me if we were going to get her a Christmas tree where she could hang the tiny ornaments she’d received from her friends in school. “No, we will continue to enjoy from afar,” I said to my friend as we entered a cozy coffee shop to have hot cider and a cinnamon roll. He laughed out loud at my resistance and said, “Well, I’m sure you will, just like us. After a few years you’ll surrender to your kids.”

A week ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Rome for the first time in my life. Rome, with the magnificent Vatican City, seemed the most desirable city on earth to be in at Christmas time. I strolled along the narrow cobblestoned alleys flanked by hundreds of little pizzerias and pasta houses and coveted the spirit of celebration wafting its way in those tiny shops and restaurants: a waiter erecting a tall branch of spruce at the corner of a pizza house, a young girl with a red and white checkered apron placing gingerbread Babbo Natale in the display window of a gelato bar, a rosy-cheeked little girl pulling her mama’s hand for a red rain boot with a snowman on its vamp.

I remembered my kids asking about Santa and Christmas, and their questions about exchanging gifts. Every time, I came up with an answer explaining that we, as Muslims in America, do not share the same beliefs as Christians, trying to persuade them to turn their eyes away from the glittering gifts. As an Iranian, I told them about Yalda when we get together with friends on the night of December 21st, the winter solstice, and celebrate the victory of light over darkness on the longest night of the year. I clung to the celebration, arranging a colorful table with bowls of nuts, watermelon, pomegranate seeds and sweets and I let them stay awake until late at night. We read the poems of Hafiz and, most importantly, I offered them gifts that were not part of the celebration. I struggled to compensate for the presents they never received under a Christmas tree.     

Last year on Christmas Eve, I was invited to a feast hosted by a friend of mine from high school who I serendipitously found after thirty-some years.  When I arrived, her twin boys were playing with a remote controlled electric train that chugged under the Christmas tree and emerged clickety-clacking and whistling from the other side. They couldn’t speak Farsi and greeted me in English with perfect American accents. My friend had made fesenjoon, an Iranian dish made with walnuts and pomegranate molasses, to celebrate Christmas ‘Iranian style.’ As she ladled fesenjoon on my plate of basmati rice, she asked the same question I’d encountered fifteen years ago. “Do you put up a Christmas tree in your house?” I smiled and praised her artfulness in making such a delicacy with ingredients so scarce in America, trying to divert the conversation to the tasty side of the evening. My friend talked about a visit they had paid to the Washington National Cathedral a few days before. In St. Mary’s chapel, one of the twins had approached her and asked about the figure of Christ on the cross. “Who’s this man on the cross?” he’d simply asked. My friend had given some information about Jesus, which of course, didn’t sound exciting for a five-year-old with no religious upbringings.

After dinner, the twins gathered around the Christmas tree to play with the rattling train. As I helped to stow the remaining food in the fridge, my friend said, “Even if we were brought up in secular families, we were taught the foundations of Islam in school. At least we knew how to pray when we were in dire straits. We had something to hold on to. But my kids, they don’t even know the concept of god.”   

In Rome, I saved the visit to St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City for the last day. There in the Basilica, I melted in front of the Pieta by Michelangelo. There was a peculiar gaze in Mary’s face that seemed different from all the statues that embellished every corner of that magnificent Basilica. “Ecce Homo,” she whispered in my ears. “Behold this unblemished, paragon phoenix of life.” People posed in front of the Pieta, took selfies with their mobile holders jutting out, smiling, craning their heads toward each other, hugging, pointing to Mary and Jesus in her hands. I wondered if they’d heard the words she whispered in the silence of the Basilica. The agony that was etched in Mary’s eyes was a mere reflection of the beholder’s own knowledge and past experience. Only those who knew her aching story could fathom the anguish that was carved in her outstretched arms as she held her son on her lap. I wondered if my kids would have realized what it meant to hold the weight of a complete human being in one’s hands.

At night, I walked all the way from St. Peter’s Basilica to the Spanish Steps to see Rome in her nightly beauty. On one of the landings between the flights of low steps, the city workers were erecting a grand Christmas tree. They had barred the landing with florescent warning tapes, only permitting people to pass through a narrow rim. Tourists glanced at the giant tree as they trudged up the one hundred and thirty-five steps toward the top of the hill. Rome glittered with her shiny cathedral domes and bejeweled streets. Fifteen years and I still revered Christmas from afar. I still wouldn’t erect a Christmas tree in my house, believing there should be a meaning bound to any ritual we add to our lives. What role does an emblem play for us if it’s hollowed out of the historic connotation it has? What will my children learn from me if I put up a Christmas tree in our living room? Wouldn’t their festivities be a mélange of Christmas and Yalda, amalgamated together, inane and empty of a spirit that can redeem their souls when they are lost?

Fifteen years have passed and I moved from Canada to the United States more than a decade ago. Every year, I take my kids to the Ellipse in front of the White House to show them the National Christmas Tree and the fifty decorated trees that represent each state in the country. The mirth of Christmas has seeped into our lives in a subtle, inappreciable way. We share the joy with the Christians of America at the end of the year. There is so much to learn and admire about the essence that flows through the rituals of this holy celebration. But to strip the meaning from the Christmas tree and adorn the barren branches with gilded ornaments, just to be the same as our neighbors, this is what I refuse to do. Our identity is highlighted by the differences we recognize in one another, by appreciating the agony of Mary marveling at the magnitude of her Son’s sacrifice for humanity, and by realizing the glory of a culture that celebrates the triumph of light over darkness on the longest of nights. The luminous candles on the Christmas tree remind us of the birth of a star and the ruby seeds of the pomegranate we savor at Yalda resemble the glow of life. These symbols convey a lore we believe can walk us out of darkness and lead us to the eternal bliss.

I looked down the Spanish steps at the newly erected Christmas tree and admired its halo of light. A fine snow dusted the emerald pine needles and made it glow. The Christmas tree looked beautiful from afar.

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Mojgan Ghazirad is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  

Student Picks: Bowden, Machado, Egan

Zak Podmore-- As someone who's spent a decade actively seeking out Southwestern authors, I was surprised to find a new writer at the top of a list that rattles around in my sunbaked Utah brainpan this year, a list I like to call "The Best Desert Writers Ever." Even more surprising was that the author, Charles Bowden, was only new to me. He died in 2014 at the age of 69 after a prolific career. I've devoured six of his books so far, all of which deal in varying degrees with violence along the U.S.-Mexico border (think Cormac McCarthy turned journalist).

Easily my favorite is Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America, Bowden's amorphous, genre-defying 1995 masterpiece that slides between reportage, memoir, history, and natural history. In a grinding, lusty tour that takes us from the age of Red Cloud and Sitting Bull to 1960s Tijuana whorehouses, from Argentina’s U.S.-backed Dirty War to the five-day wedding bender of a Mexican drug lord, Bowden explores the concept of “soul-death” with moral outrage, trenchant wit, and plenty of dark humor. It’s a hell of a ride but Bowden is a more than capable guide, whether through skid-row nights or the vast Sonoran wilderness.

K. A. Hamilton-- Released this October, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Machado could not have been more aptly-timed. If 2017 was the year of the “silence breakers,” Machado’s book is about the silence. Her collection of stories exposes the consequences of having a female body so delicately as to leave the experience wholly intact.

In addition to an expert storyteller, Machado is also a weaver of form. One piece is told in the format of an episode guide to Law & Order: SVU, while another instructs the reader on how to adapt the tale into an oral telling, complete with recommendations on voices to use and actions to be taken in front of the audience. At one point she advises: “give a paring knife to the listeners and ask them to cut the tender flap of skin between your index finger and thumb. Afterward, thank them.”

It’s difficult not to feel a visceral connection to the experiences of Machado’s characters. To read Her Body as an open-minded outsider is an act of empathy; from the inside, one of catharsis.

Shawna-Lee Perrin-- I’ve been a little obsessed with Jennifer Egan’s writing this year. Most recently, I read her debut novel, The Invisible Circus, and the most accurate word I have for its effect on me is haunting.

The older sister, Faith, spent her short life chasing and creating magic, but ultimately ended her own life under mysterious circumstances. Her little sister Phoebe has spent the almost-decade between then and where the novel begins being cautious, sad, and socially isolated. Phoebe’s drive to understand her sister’s tragic end propels her to travel Europe solo, going where Faith went, seeking out her final journeys.

Egan depicts two very different experiences of coming-of-age: Faith’s insatiable lust for adventure and dramatic change couldn’t survive adulthood, while Phoebe’s extreme caution and nostalgia for her own past threatened to lock her away from the world forever. As Phoebe discovers truths about her sister and the people who loved her, the romanticism is yanked away; at first, this unfiltered view of her past is blinding, but as her vision adjusts, she can finally clearly see her way forward. Both paths toward adulthood are painful and dangerous, and Egan depicts both in vivid color.

Looking

by Ashley Bales

I was at my least constrained on the subway. My mother would drop me at the Wonderland Blue Line stop and my high school’s van picked me up at the end of the Red Line. In between, I was as physically and socially liberated as I’d ever been. I was 14 and getting my first taste of the freedoms that would come with adulthood.

It was that critical moment of early adolescence when you begin to see yourself as socially independent from the nurturing institutions of family and school that up to that point have allowed you to move through the world without being aware of it.  And thus the conflicts of adolescence are born. These same social institutions are not ready to give up their control, while the adolescent’s burgeoning independence stretches their limits.

I would put on my headphones—riled by the anger and energy of early aughts metal and grunge—and stare at people. I thought I was challenging them, judging their meek adult choices. They wouldn’t even return my glance, or would look away. I cherished those averted eyes like victories; sure I’d won something in the exchange. Now, if I picture myself then, my stares would have looked only like a child’s: unselfconscious and ignorant of social norms. I was challenging no one, except perhaps myself—to engage with the world in the meekest way I could, by looking. 

But at some point between 14 and 15, something changed. Sometimes, not always, perhaps not even often, but often enough, men looked back. When they did, my vulnerability was unquestionable, even to myself. I stopped looking.

I was a late bloomer. Apply that as broadly as you like. At 15 I’d only just gotten my first period and was not yet sufficiently endowed to understand the benefit of bras. What changed my stares from being a child’s to an adolescent’s was all in the styling. I’d made timid inquiries into my peer’s social graces and begun putting mascara in my eyebrows, along with anywhere else that seemed appropriate.

The first time a stranger told me to smile I was transferring at South Station. I smiled, surprised to feel seen. The same man would tell me to smile repeatedly over the next year and I learned not to look at him.

The only thing unique about this story is perhaps the degree of social freedom I felt possible at 14. A more socially adept 14 year old, one better enculturated into the expectations of girlhood, would not have been so surprised at the attention. And even for me, it was a lesson quickly learned--my desire to stand out tempered by a growing understanding of what it meant to be seen. 

That same year I had my first kiss, my first boyfriend, had sex for the first time and none of it was as empowering as riding the subway and looking freely at the world around me.

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Ashley Bales is a current student of The Mountainview low-residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.

Running to Trauma

by Eddie Dzialo

When I first appeared at the Officer Selection Office in Durham, NH, I told them that I wanted to be a Marine officer and that I would do whatever they needed me to do. Had it been an option, I would have left that day. 

I went down to the Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, but three weeks before graduation I broke the second metatarsal in my right foot. The intensity of the physical fitness requirements literally broke me.

In the mornings, before the Sergeant Instructors tore through the barracks, I got up and wrapped my foot with duct tape. The top of my foot had swollen so badly that I wouldn’t have been able to get it in my boot without taping it down. My rack mate, the nephew of a legendary NFL coach, said that my foot looked like it had swallowed a purple grapefruit. One of the Corpsmen—the Navy’s version of an EMT—caught me doing my morning duct tape routine. When he told me that I would have to go see a doctor and be dropped due to injury, I told him that I must have pulled something and nothing was broken. To prove this, I hopped up and down on one foot—the shattered one. Either he was foolish enough to believe me, or he saw how badly I wanted to stay.

During the timed runs, the endurance courses, the conditioning hikes and fitness tests, I ran on the outside of my foot—until that bone broke too. Before graduation, I ran three miles in 19:02 with a foot that looked like an infected circle. When I got home, I went to get X-rays. After getting the results, the doctor refused to let me get off the examination table; he wanted to get me into surgery. Even then, I pleaded for a cast because getting surgery would have prevented me from being sworn in as a Marine officer when I graduated college the following spring.

Three years later, I was in Iraq.

Both of my parents were Marines, as were two of my uncles, my aunt, and my cousin. Despite my background, no one in my family told me to become a Marine. Before I left, my father tried to talk me out of it. It’s not that he wasn’t proud of me or that he wasn’t being supportive, but he told me that if I was going to risk my life doing something, then the decision to do so had to come from me alone.

I am not the same person I used to be. Before I left for the Marines, I had friends; I had been the president of a fraternity; when I smiled, I meant it. I am guilty of making choices that impact not only me but everyone in my life. Relationships of all varieties become strained, but unlike many survivors of trauma, I was an eager participant. I volunteered for something, and I accept the consequences of that decision, but the people around me, the people who see me struggle, did not.

After my second deployment, life morphed into a dull fog. The aftermath was the loss of emotions, the feelings of isolation and confusion that evolve into anxiety. And I became this way because I wanted it. A draft notice never appeared in the mail, an economic hardship hadn’t made me consider the military as a means for a better life. I didn’t stumble into my current state, I ran into it, willingly. I wanted to become a Marine and I ended up exactly where I had set out to go. 

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Eddie Dzialo is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Student Picks: Wuxia, Murray, Tartt

C. A. Cooke-- The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants is one of China’s oldest and greatest masterpieces of literature, and one of the founding works of thewuxia (WOO-shee-A) genre. Wuxia translates to “martial hero” and is applied to the genre of literature and cinema concerning the adventures of wandering martial artists in ancient China. A typical wuxia story follows honorable martial heroes through their dealings with bandits, evil warlords, and even demons.

A perfect example of how this story formed this genre can be found within the section “Sleek Rat Helps an Old Man.” A young warrior known as Sleek Rat discovers a landlord has kidnapped his tenant’s daughter to ransom more money from him. Sleek Rat pays the ransom, then waits; under the cover of darkness, Sleek Rat rescues the daughter and punishes the landlord. Thus, he has proven both his gallantry and his skill.

Throughout the centuries, wuxia became popular and crept into cinema. The current Ip Man films about a Kung Fu master righting wrongs through the Japanese and British occupations of Hong Kong owe their beginnings to novels like The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants. The novel, and the genre, have both withstood the test of time.

Margaret McNellis-- Breaking Night by Liz Murray is a memoir about forgiveness and finding one’s own drive and personal power. It’s a story of homelessness and isolation, of family, friendship, and hardship. I recently had to read this book for work, and it was one of the most heart-wrenching, beautiful memoirs I’ve ever had the pleasure (and at times, displeasure) to read. The writing is clear and captivating, and Murray’s voice jumps off the page to surround the reader in stereo from the start of the prologue.

The obstacles that Murray had to overcome—even as a young child—seem insurmountable, yet she inspires with her determination and love for her family, particularly her mother. Her relationship with her mother, and with herself, are central, though Murray expertly demonstrates how those two relationships define all the others in her formative and teenage years.

Fair warning: If you’re going to read this book, I recommend a box of tissues... Or at least a break every now and then. Yet, it’s worth the strained—or even snapped—heartstrings.

Michael Allen-- Pardon my lack of macho manliness, but I don’t think I’ve ever cried as hard at the end of a novel as I did when I finished reading The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. For me, this book was a mountain of woman-made words like nothing I’ve ever read, or seen, or hiked before, nor will I ever again.

The power and sway of the writing makes the story feel plotless throughout, yet still completely captivating. The love of art and craftsmanship is brilliantly sewn into a weighty coming-of-age story, a bildungsroman, that cruises the line between this stinking, sinking, cluster-truck of a world; and the invisible, unknowable, un-improvable space between, behind, and in front of the ciphers I’m punching in now. Jaw dropping description. Irreverently religious. Un-piously holy.  A masterpiece of a story derived from an obscure masterpiece painting that miraculously survived destruction in the 1600s, which gets stolen by an unwilling hero who also miraculously survives destruction.

Not for those who like a simple hero’s journey tale. Some critics don’t like it. But for me it was unpredictable and sprinkled with untethered brilliance. Oh, and I guess it won some kind of an award, or something.

Rollie’s Farm

by David Moloney

For the last eighteen years, on the day after Thanksgiving, while still digesting and  dehydrated, I sell Christmas trees at a local fresh cut tree farm: Rollie’s Farm. Owned and named after Roland “Rollie” Perron, it is the only farm left in Lowell, MA.  Lowell, a former mill town turned college city, has the fourth highest population in the state. So, Rollie’s Farm is a welcomed small business. He owns fifteen acres of land and has stuffed fifteen thousand trees onto it. Rollie’s is a true throwback. The tractor ride to the fields is an old converted, pop-up camper with custom benches that serves as a wagon. Trees are sawed down by hand. We shake the trees in the rumbling Lit’l Shakee tree shaker, and rid them of pine needles, cones, abandoned bird’s nests, and papery beehives.  There’s wildlife not found anywhere else in the city: a rafter of turkeys, a bald eagle, woodchucks, and evidence of a bear (scat near the tall firewood pile). The rustic farm and its bearded owner are the real draw for the thousand or so customers that return each year. They pretend, for an afternoon, they live in Vermont or upstate New Hampshire, some other part of New England not overwhelmed and tired from endless traffic and long grocery lines. City dwellers, for the most part, love being in the city, but there’s a reason why we escape north for vacations.

The extra money during holiday season is welcomed, but isn’t the sole reason we get almost the same crew back each season. We have a small twelve-man team of engineers, welders, teachers, IT salesmen and cooks. We get to dust off the long johns and escape our enclosed workspaces for frosty New England mornings, saws and sap; the hard work of hoisting big trunked trees out of wagon campers, ripping them through too-small bailers, tossing them on cars. We welcome the soreness. Infrequent contact with physical work isn’t a bad problem to have. I wouldn’t tell a person who does stone work for a living that they don’t realize how good they have it, that each morning they should prepare for a moment of enlightenment during the strenuous work, when your body performs like it was meant to.

I only see many of the guys I work with once a year for three weekends. We don’t communicate much otherwise. But there’s also something intimate in our distance.  That Friday after Thanksgiving we return to the farm as if we’d been working together year round. Inside jokes carry over, hugs, ribbing, stories from workers who came and left, eccentric customers who we may banter and wonder about in years they didn’t show up for their tree. After the long day, Rollie has beers ready inside the farmhouse. We pile in, needles and all, and warm our cheeks. Over beers, we tell stories of the farm, the people we’ve lost, and the ones who are still kicking.

Rollie is going gray and there are always rumors that he plans on selling the farm so developers can cram sixty houses in place of Balsam firs. I don’t know what they’ve offered him, but I can imagine it’d be enough to cover anything he’ll make from selling Christmas trees for the rest of his life. But he values hard work, and I don’t think he can leave it.

When I first started working for him at fifteen years old, I wanted to prove I could make it on the farm. I picked corn with him at 5:30 am and then worked my shift at the vegetable stand later in the day. For a week, I took the city bus to the outer edge of Lowell, changed in the barn, and built a greenhouse. I mowed in the fields to make room for seedlings, and then planted rows of Corkbark Firs with Rollie. He wasn’t talkative, the money wasn’t great, and the work was repetitive and strenuous, but I kept coming back. I hadn’t grown up with knowledge of tools or how to work with my hands. Rollie offered a different kind of place for me. There was openness, dirt under my nails, and certain rigidness in his criticism. He wouldn’t get angry or yell. He would just tell me I was tying tomato plants wrong. Then he’d show me. Then he’d make me tie them right. It was what a fifteen-year-old boy needed, or at least what I needed. Boys won’t listen to their fathers the same way they will a coach or boss or teacher.

If I had to poll the work crew, I imagine they’d all have a similar reason for working for Rollie. Even as we age, we still yearn for rusty tractors, cut-your-own tree farms, cash only payments, offline friends,a place where you don’t feel the connected weight of the world. And there’s promising news: Rollie just ordered a thousand more seedlings.

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David Moloney is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  He currently teaches writing at UMASS Lowell and Southern New Hampshire University.

Memories of Used Books

by Terri Alexander

There’s a bookstore in Scotland that I still think about. I was traveling alone by train across the Scottish Highlands, headed west toward the coast. I was searching for clues about ancestors from my mother’s side of the family. Outside the window, a patchwork of amber, purple, greens and browns rolled out like the quilt of an unmade bed. It was spring, and the grasses and flowers of Cairngorms National Park were showing their stuff.

That morning, I had left the tiny village of Insch with some regret. I wanted to stay longer so I could go back to the church where my great great grandmother had been baptized, so that I could sit on the mossy grass of the old cemetery and commune with the silence, so that I could climb Dunnideer Hill one more time to touch the stone of the ruined castle.

 I was headed for Inverness, which I’d been anticipating ever since I saw it on the map at home. The city’s geographic location caused a sudden intake of breath every time I looked at it. It was as if someone had taken a sharp knife to the United Kingdom and slashed it diagonally at its skinniest point. Inverness sat in the middle of this slice, land that connected the waters of Moray Firth and Loch Ness. I had no known ancestors in this part of Scotland. I was here for the geography alone.

I stepped off the train, and the city assaulted my senses. I’d grown accustomed to breathing air with hints of sheep and grass, hearing the lonely wind as the loudest sound. Gravity helped me down the hill to the Greig Street Bridge, which crossed the River Ness. Everything was cold and gray – the buildings, the sky, the water. I stood along the rail and watched the water flow beneath me. I was at the exact point on the map that took my breath away, and yet I felt … nothing special. I waited, certain that some significance would come along. I waited until the damp, cold wind drove me away.

Gravity was my enemy as I trudged up Friar’s Lane, frozen to the bone, free of epiphany. I took a left on Church Street and found Leakey’s, the bookstore that I still think about. It’s housed in a former Gaelic church built in 1793. I opened the door and was met with a wall of warmth that smelled of wood smoke and aged paper and dark roasted coffee. A slender stovepipe rose bravely through the middle of the vast space to the second story ceiling. The pot-bellied stove held a position of authority in the center of the charmingly disorganized customer service island. A spiral staircase along the far side of the store gracefully connected the two floors. Leakey’s is Scotland’s largest secondhand bookshop, and as I surveyed the chaotic layout, I decided it was a place in which I could gladly become lost.

I can’t remember which book I purchased at Leakey’s that day, or if I read it on the train to Glasgow that evening. I’ll often tuck a bookstore’s free bookmark into my purchase just in case I forget, like Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness that I bought at Myopic Books in Chicago or W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants that I found at the Abbey Bookshop in the Latin Quarter of Paris. I haven’t read The Emigrants yet, but when I paged through it, I found a phone number written in pencil on the inside back cover and the inscription, “Do people who dine alone enjoy their food?”  This makes me wonder who before me has pressed the ridges of their fingerprints into the book’s worn cover, and who will do so after I. 

One day, perhaps I’ll select a book from the shelf at home and find a Leakey’s bookmark tucked inside. Perhaps I’ll never find out which book I chose that day. I’ll probably even forget the name of the store. But I’ll never forget what it felt like to walk through the door that cold, gray day with no expectation of feeling anything significant.

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Terri Alexander is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Student Picks: Currie, Gray, Padian

Danielle Service-- I dated a guy back in 2011 that told me to read Everything Matters! by Ron Currie. I bought it instantly but didn’t read it until this year, when that cat texted, asking for sex. 

Junior – the protagonist in Everything Matters! – grows up in Maine with one caveat: he knows from the moment of his conception when and how the world will end (36 years and 168 days following his conception, Earth is hit by a comet). Initially, an omniscient second-person narrator tells the story; then, Currie strikes an irreverent tone by splicing in alternating limited-third-person narration in the perspectives of Junior’s brother, a teenage cocaine addict who later becomes a professional baseball player; their father, a Vietnam veteran with a meaningful secret and a New England work ethic; and their mother, a secretive alcoholic. 

There’s a plot to destroy a social security building, a deportation to a Bulgarian gulag, suicide bombers and life-saving irrigation systems involved prior to the world’s end in Currie’s thoughtful work – but most important is Junior’s alteration of his own destiny. I followed the protagonist’s lead: I texted the guy back saying I’d read the book and wished him well, but was deleting his number.

Heather Lynn Horvat-- Isadora by Amelia Gray is an enthralling, relentless portrayal of the stunning but eccentric dancer Isadora Duncan in her darkest time. The novel is a dance of its own with short segments that begin like stage directions before entering the scene, and is told from alternating viewpoints between Isadora, her lover Paris Singer (of Singer sewing machines), her sister Elizabeth, and Max, who dwells too much on the fame he doesn't have.

The story opens moments after Isadora's children drown in a car that suffered mechanical issues and drove off a cliff. Grief is ever-present, but it is how the characters deal with the grief that makes this story memorable. Isadora, over time, consumes the ashes of both of her children. Elizabeth gorges on extra butter and eggs while no one watches. Paris stares for days at a painting, studying individual faces only to find that each resembles his lover or his child. Once, Isadora writes to her former lover with a request to take the child's clothing to water's edge and dunk it, then report back the weight of the soaked clothes. 

Isadora examines grief and the mind's ability to overcome tragedy with lyrical prose.

Katie Fenton-- Recently, I took the opportunity to read Wrecked by Maria Padian. This Young Adult novel follows the lives of two college students, Haley and Richard, who find themselves having a difficult year after Haley’s roommate accuses Richard’s friend of raping her at a party. The plot continually twists and turns as the reader learns about the traumatic event alongside the characters as they piece together the puzzle of that horrible night. In true Young Adult fashion, Haley and Richard try to grow together in their own relationship. 

I was rather blown away by Wrecked. The storyline seemed like it might be simple and overdone, but in reality, it offered a unique take. Through well-placed foreshadowing, the reader is given a reliable narrator whose god-like view of the night slowly offers the answers they’re looking for. This novel’s unique style and storyline was not only something I thoroughly enjoyed reading, but as a writer, it encouraged me to look at my own work in a different way.

From the Kingdom of Nigh

by Garrett Zecker

When I was sixteen, companionship came from the high desert. I never believed in the paranormal, the cryptozoological, or the conspiratorial, but between the hours of one and four in the morning, Art Bell and his program Coast to Coast AM quieted my manic mind. My brain ate it like junk food. Drifting in and out of sleep, I found order in the voices discussing nonsense. I never told anyone about my 'Scientific Method Comedy Hour' in the same way I never introduced my girlfriends to my family. 

It was September 9, 1997, my sister's thirteenth birthday, twenty years ago. Bill Clinton was president. I navigated high school. The world trade center stood. I wasn't married, didn’t have children, made copies, did my homework, and wrote. College was coming, and I was escaping. In hindsight, everything felt so optimistic amid the fear.  Mom had a stable of unemployed, listless, flighty dudes that needed saving. Her kids needed a father figure. There was irony in everything those days. Comfort was elusive in our dark house. Men, food, warmth, mom's sobriety. I built a terrified, helpless dread around family that carried through to today, and has made me aspire to be the reliable father my sister and I didn't have. It's probably why strangers have always felt more like family to me. 

I felt like I had to do everything I could to make it. I'd get home from working retail after school, enter my cold and lonely room to read and write into the late hours. I became an owl. I became skeptical. Alone in the dark with the computer off and my notebook finally closed, I turned on my radio and scanned the thin, crackling AM airwaves for familiar voices. Art Bell talking to a Phoenix city council member named Francis Barwood. He wanted answers about the "Lights Incident." I lay in the dark, listening strange. 

The next day, I got home from school and Mom's then boyfriend Frank was above the garage. I heard Howie Carr's tinny AM baritone droning aggressive right-wing political conspiracies. Legions of New England listeners tuned in for his vitriolic sermons. A man like Frank rattled off the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh like Polonius, so it was strange for Carr's contrary words to drift around his head. He stood in the middle of the unfinished room lit by bare-bulbs. His hands moved slowly, practicing Tai Chi. A cigarette hung from his mouth, a steaming cup of chamomile rested on the chair. The chatter from WRKO absorbed into the exposed fiberglass insulation, and he paused between poses to hit redial on the speakerphone hooked up to his private landline.  

On my way out the door to my retail job, he asked for a ride to the train station next to the Kinko's where I worked. He didn't drive. He offered me five bucks. He got into my red K-Car, the only car I ever loved, and we drove. A Better Than Ezra CD played in my discman, running through one of those tape-deck converters. Five minutes into the ride, he pointed to a turnoff underneath the overpass.

"Pull over here, for a second," he said.

"I'm running a bit late."

"I'm having a seizure. It'll be safer."

We stopped. His left thumb started. His hand started bouncing next to me on the bench seat along to the music. It bounced closer to my leg, my goddamn crotch. Was this a pathetic attempt at molesting me? I'd let a peer down gently, but my mom's fortysomething boyfriend wouldn't leave with anything less than a bloody mouth. Five minutes went by. Ten. The tremors abated. He said I could get back on the road. I asked if he needed anything. He was fine, and I was fifteen minutes late for work.

Twenty years later, Frank is dead. Surprisingly it wasn't the cherry-sized aneurysm they found in his brain. I don’t worry about the same things. I have control. I am certainly loved. But my past fears whisper at me with every decision. No matter how irrational, I am learning how conditioned, how inescapable they are. No matter how good things are, the gnawing paranoia of starvation nibbles away, the neuroses, anxiety, only obsessive work quiets my mind. So when it's time for bed, I find I can still quiet my mind by streaming Art Bell's old programs over Wi-Fi from a little pair of headphones in the dark.

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Garrett Zecker is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview low-residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Thank You, Carrie

by Josh Zinn

Last Christmas I kicked my seventy-year-old father out of my house for doing drugs in my bathroom. The next day Carrie Fisher died. Bah humbug.

Truth be told, though I did my fair share of Scrooging over my stoner dad the remainder of that holiday season, it was nothing compared to the Jacob Marley-esque chains of grief cast upon me by the sudden passing of the first person who made me believe someone like me could be a writer. Not to diminish my drug-addled pops and the role he played in bringing me into this world, but I can say with all certainty it was discovering the prose of the drug-addled Ms. Fisher which gave this awkward, manic-depressive gay kid life. Immaculate conception, indeed.

"Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares?" The first sentence from Fisher’s debut novel, Postcards from the Edge, is seared in my brain like an instruction manual for the self-destructive narcissist. I can still remember reading it in Waldenbooks, all of thirteen, and audibly gasping upon my realization not only did Princess Leia have talents which extended far beyond aluminum swimwear and hair masquerading as Cinnabon advertisements, but she was emotional kindred as well. “Fiction,” she called her story of a washed-up actress coping with addiction and a domineering showbiz mother, but anyone without a life (me) and possessing even a smidgen of Hollywood history (me, again) was aware that excuse was so thinly veiled the book may as well have been written on tissue paper. This was autobiography and I was in awe.

Finding Fisher was like stumbling upon a funhouse mirror, reflecting everything I’d ever dreamt and dreaded for myself. Neither steeped in literary pretension nor pandering to the cheap seats her sci-fi pedigree guaranteed, her work was raw, hilarious, and self-aware enough to know the silver spoon she’d been born with had given her a ready-made audience for her silver tongue. Like me, she endured mental illness and persistent pessimism, never sure which days the black hand of self-hate would completely blind her from objectivity. At the same time––again, like me––she reveled in the magic of the world, whether it be film, art, or a perfectly dirty double entendre, using those respites of joy as fuel to rocket past her head’s omnipresent gloom.

When you’re diagnosed as bipolar, doctors will describe your life and mood swings as a rollercoaster you can’t get off. What no one wants to tell you, however, is how addicting those highs can be; that, most of the time––even when you’re in the throes of the most fucking awful “I’m-listening-to-Celine-on-repeat!” depression you could imagine––you won’t want off. Carrie Fisher told me; she told anyone who would listen. Her writing was unashamed and unapologetic as it recounted the damage done. It never took glee in pain, but never shied away from its ugliness, either. If there was ever a lesson to learn, it was simply to quit crying, accept the mess, and find a way to make crazy work for you––hopefully, by laughing in its face.

I’m forty-one now and a writer myself, but it is still to Fisher whom I turn when I need to a jolt of the truth I’m constantly searching for. I’ve never read to “escape” my troubles. I read to learn how to escape, to survive, to see past the moments when my unstable mind takes myself or the world too seriously. When my Mom died five days after I graduated college; when my Dad wanted a stocking full of weed and painkillers; or when Donald Trump was elected and it truly felt like the apocalypse was nigh, I snuck off somewhere and listened to Carrie tell me, yes, life really is as shitty as I think it is, but nowhere near as shitty as it probably could be. Every single time, she was the calm inside my storm.

Now, she’s gone. And my mom is still dead, my father still thinks I’m a narc, and Trump is still doing whatever it is he thinks being President entails. For twenty-seven years Carrie Fisher’s voice saved me, but, ultimately, it wasn’t enough to save herself. This Christmas, even without her and the world (and my mind) still on fire, I’ll be returning to her well for comfort once again. As Fisher herself said, “If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.”

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Josh Zinn is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.