Student Picks: Beatty and Evans

Phil Lemos-- The first-person narrator of Paul Beatty’s hilariously uncomfortable novel The Sellout, referred to only by his last name of “Me,” has made some awkward decisions.

Me is a black man who owns a slave. He’s the de facto caretaker of his hometown, an “agrarian ghetto” on the outskirts of Los Angeles by the name of Dickens. He runs a profitable business growing square watermelons and lots of weed. And he’s ridiculed by Foy Cheshire, leader of a group known as The Dum Dum Intellectuals. He calls Me a sellout, and Cheshire extols the virtues of his own watered-down edition of an American classic, titled “The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, the White Brother Huckleberry Finn, As They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.” Things come to a head when Me tries to reintroduce segregation to Dickens, culminating in the Supreme Court case “Me vs. The United States of America.”

The Sellout is full of moments both cringe-worthy and laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes simultaneously. It’s a sharp satire of race relations in a supposedly post-racial America, and of how we try to simultaneously rewrite and bury the past.    

Tara Ridell-- Danielle Evans’ collection of short stories, in a word, is sharp. The 8 parts that make up the book are saturated with humility and strength. Each story is devised of original characters that are connected by a precise design to trudge beyond their own mess.

In “Virgins,” Evans explores the nuance of sexuality through Erica, an already-jaded young girl. The author’s delicate prose cradles the deflated self-value of her character, illuminating an issue of confidence most young women contend with regarding their own bodies.

Evans’ writing is infused with compassion and benevolence, which is refreshing, as it is not always the sentiment put forth to characters of color. The piece “Snakes,” is a tale of a young girl of mixed race sent to live with her white grandmother while her parents are traveling. The battle that ensues over the child’s image via her natural hair is uncomfortable to read and counsels the reader to admit what is truly going on.

Whether writing about a veteran fixed in his own psychological purgatory (“Someone Ought to Tell Her There’s Nowhere to Go”), or a youth entrenched in tragedy (“King of a Vast Empire”), Evans’ fluid use of prose gives one breath to the many heartbeats in this work.

Special Dark

by Mickey Fisher

I went home to visit my parents last February. My mom was the only one around. Their woodstove was cooking; I felt as though I was being baked by a heat lamp. In the heat, I knew the cracks in the skin between my knuckles would open up again.

I sat with Mom at her kitchen table, a little dish of Valentine’s Day candy between us. “How’s Mary?” she asked, finding a Crackle in the dish, her favorite.

“She’s good,” I said. Mary had seen how my skin split and had cradled my hands in hers, asking if I wanted hand cream. It wouldn’t have been of any use, and I told her that, but she got some for me anyway. I set the green tin of cream next to my sink in an effort to force myself to apply it after I washed my hands. I would end up putting it on and washing it off ten minutes later.

“When are you two coming back to visit?” Mom asked, before unwrapping the Crackle and taking a bite.

“Am I not enough?” I asked. I knew that I was. I found a Hershey’s Special Dark in the dish.

“Of course you’re enough, you’re more than enough. But we never get to see her.”

I felt the flesh between my knuckles stretching thin as I unwrapped the candy. They were riverbeds caked dry through the combination of my excessive washing and the cold weather. I used to wash my hands for a count of about eight seconds. I’d heard somewhere that you were supposed to wash for the length of the ‘Happy Birthday’ song, so I would sing it rapidly in my head while I was at the sink. When the anxiety came back, I started dragging the song out, making it last longer and longer, closer to an actual rendition than a sped-up one. Soon, the song wasn’t enough. I would count to one eight times, then two eight times, until I counted to sixteen eight times. It seemed like a number that was thorough enough for me, satisfying in an obsessive way. For every number I counted, I rubbed my palms together while interlocking my fingers, to spread the soap and water. I was rubbing my hands together one hundred and twenty-eight times per trip to the sink. If my hands touched the inside of the sink at any point during the process, that was another one hundred and twenty-eight times, because you never knew who was spitting into that porcelain. If my hands touched anything other than a dry, clean towel after a wash, that was another one hundred and twenty-eight times.

I dropped the Special Dark. It landed on the kitchen linoleum. Careful to not touch the floor with my fingers, I picked the candy up by pinching a corner of the wrapper that was pointing upwards. Mom must’ve seen how I was holding it, like it was a snake that could bite me, because she was up and between me and the waste bin before I could stand up. She crossed her arms over her chest. She knew where this was going.

“You’re not going to throw that away,” she said.

“I don’t want it.”

“Mickey, it’s fine. It’s still in the wrapper. You can still eat it.”

She didn’t see it the same way that I did, all the potential diseases lurking on the linoleum that would then be transferred to the wrapper of the Special Dark; from the wrapper to my fingertips, from my fingertips to the chocolate, from the chocolate to my mouth. “I’m not going to, though,” I said. I stood up and held the candy out to her. I knew she wouldn’t throw it away, but I didn’t want to keep holding it.

She took it from me and held it in her hands, keeping eye contact. When I sat back down, she put the candy in front of me. Whatever germs had been on the floor were now on an eating surface.

“You can eat it, if you want to,” I told her.

I got up and left the kitchen, walked past that baking stove to get to the bathroom sink. I left the door open.

Mom followed me and leaned against the doorframe, watching me, looking at the slight redness of my raw skin. “I thought you were past all of this.”

“Comes back around when I don’t have anything else to worry about,” I told her. I just wanted to wash up for my peace of mind, and there was only Dawn at the kitchen sink. My parents had a ceramic liquid soap dispenser, colored with a mix of Easter pastels, that they used year-round. The soap inside was a watery, cream-yellow liquid that was too runny to convince me that it would be effective. It stung as it leaked into the cracks in my hands.

 “It’s up to your wrists,” she said. “It hurts my feelings.”

“Why?” I asked, knowing that the answer was going to hurt.

“Because I feel like I’m responsible.”

---

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

The Zen Curmudgeon

by Zak Podmore

All day he walks ahead of me, his body lithe and his feet sure as he skirts the canyon’s edge. At times juniper branches grab onto my pack, but they never seem to touch his. After five decades in the desert, his bag is as much a part of him as the top of his head or the width of his shoulders.

Anywhere that can be hiked in a day is merely training, he tells me; anywhere that can be reached by a trail is for the tourists. The goal is to find a place where you can ask this question: How many centuries have passed since someone else stood here?

This landscape is alive with ancient traces--pictographs, cliff dwellings, arrowheads. He points to a crack running down a boulder like a lightning bolt and says, there’s a painted pot in there.

I believe him. He is seventy-one. Together we’ve lived exactly one hundred years.

The first day we hike for nine hours straight and in that time he never stops talking. Wild, ranging conversations and soliloquies and rants. He speaks of his past, local politics, the battles for Utah wilderness. He reads the fortune of our doomed town and our doomed state and our doomed planet, and explains that nothing is ever truly doomed. Tales flow from the years he has spent camping and hiking alone. Snooping, he calls it.

Again and again he takes a stand--controversial, untenable--and holds it against all my objections until I relent and he is free to walk out the line of his own reasoning. He then lets his argument guide him in a great arcing loop until everything he’d first claimed is knocked on its side. When he finally returns to where he started, he is holding some new view with as much conviction as the first. In the morning I pointed this out, but I soon realized to talk oneself in circles was exercise. Koans stretched across miles of slickrock. The point of a walk is to return to your door transformed, not hardened in your habits.

In nine hours, we pause only to down a fistful of peanuts and to refill our water jugs in a hidden spring.

He was once a poet and he recites lines to the moment. Upon crossing an ATV track and seeing the melted hunks of bottles and cans in an old campfire it is Richard Shelton:

This is the desert

It is all we have left to destroy

Years ago, he walked away from career after career to come here and walk. And eventually he left a marriage in the city to live closer to the canyons. The daughters he helped raise will hardly talk to him anymore. Now it’s feet to the ground every day.

What can the old hope for? he asks, quoting a question once posed to an Australian aboriginal elder. Strong legs, the man had answered.

Then he recites a few lines he wrote thirty years before:

I am learning to be an old man

It is slow work

I am taking my time

Every winter, he goes south to spend months among the saguaros, and he hikes both sides of the border fence. Once he came across two bales of marijuana laying in the American cactus--packed into tight green blocks and dropped on the run. He buried them for later.

This year he found a skull, a human skull, clean and white as paper in the moonlight. Two dark caverns of eye sockets guarded a little shade where a man’s memories once rode. Teeth lined the jaw. There were no ribs or femurs or vertebrae, just the skull. The ranger he notified told him this was not the thirst-driven death of a migrant; this was a message, a marking of territory. Like a dog pissing on a telephone pole. He shows me a picture on his phone.

In nine hours, his pace never slows, but as the winter light sinks into the afternoon rock, I notice how his boots began to scrape across ledges as we move uphill. It is as if he has to pause for them to catch up as one might pause for an old hound scrambling up a steep slope behind.

We walk through the sunset while he searches for the perfect campsite. He wants it to face east toward the rising sun. He insists it have a sandstone wall so he can wake up in his sleeping bag and lean against the wall while he drinks coffee in the first warm light. We never find the right spot. He worries we’ll run out of water tomorrow.

There are more days like this, but a week later, I’m in the canyons alone. I return and find the painted pot tucked in its hiding place. It is a seed jar, orange with red paint, and it’s at least eight hundred years old. I think of the thousands of artifacts that have already disappeared from this mesa. I sense the destruction creeping across the land even as I crouch in the quiet sunlight before the patient pot.

Leaving the jar where it belongs, I sit with a notebook. Koans, desert, doomed. Pen touches page and twenty words pour out for my friend with the strong legs:

Still walking ahead

The zen curmudgeon

Offers slickrock syllogisms

To the fading light--

We're fucked, he says,

Isn't it beautiful?

---

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

Student Picks: Moshfegh and Kuusisto

Terri Alexander-- Ottessa Moshfegh creates characters that make her readers uncomfortable. In the short story collection Homesick for Another World, Moshfegh’s characters are flawed, broken, even cruel. The stories are littered with illicit drug use, anonymous sex, and a gamut of bodily functions. But Moshfegh pairs low with high; she takes low characters and applies the high of her literary prowess. She’s wickedly smart, and funny too.

The dramatic tension takes place primarily in characters’ minds. Take, for example, the protagonist in “Nothing Ever Happens Here;” a handsome teen leaves his emotionally abusive mother in rural Utah to become an actor in Los Angeles. He develops a close relationship with his elderly landlord. Moshfegh writes, “After our fourth dinner together, I found myself missing her as I lay on my bed, digesting the mound of schnitzel and boxed mashed potatoes and JELL-O she’d prepared herself.” Uncomfortable yet? How about this:  “She made me feel very special. I wasn’t attracted to her the way I’d been to the girls back in Gunnison, of course.” The reader roots for the protagonist to become aware of his blind spots. 

Moshfegh tends to go to those places with her characters that most writers avoid. The result is utterly original work that is both raw and refined. 

Heather Lynn Horvath-- I first heard Stephen Kuusisto's poetic words when he read excerpts from various works at a writers conference this past February. To say I was hooked is an understatement. 

When I began reading Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, I was once again drawn into a poetic space few books possess. A collection of essays, Eavesdropping is more than a simple memoir. Kuusisto's observations and his mastery of both poetry and prose offers the reader a glimpse of how he listens and processes sounds, so much so that I now find myself hearing deeper. He writes of certain music: "The sound has a thickness, like the fatness of certain flowers, and the sadness is redolent, you swear it has a fragrance."

Kuusisto writes of what it's like to be blind and lost in an airport, relying on the whims of generous strangers while feeling stares and hearing no-so-quiet whispers. He writes of traveling to Iceland and Venice to sight-see. The reader is given moments of rawness and vulnerability that offer ways in which to view everyday life differently. Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening is a book to savor and reread. 

Touching Betelgeuse

by Mike Helsher

I was waiting for Bella, my blenheim-colored Cavalier King Charles spaniel, to find the perfect place to poop. She circled one way, then the other, walked to another corner of the yard and circled again. Most nights, especially if it was cold, I’d get pissed at her for taking twenty minutes to do something that in the end, takes about ten seconds. I’d yell at her even though I knew she was deaf.

But on this October night in 2010, it wasn’t cold. I waited with unusual patience in the front yard of what I liked to call of my Thoreau shack, a tiny house I was renting in Flagstaff, AZ. White aspens had speckled the driveway with yellow leaves. The air was cool and crisp.

I’d just come home from an astronomy class at the local community college, where I learned that if Betelgeuse, a red-giant in the constellation of Orion, were to replace our sun, it would fill out to the orbit of Jupiter. My mind was in overdrive, looking up, trying to fathom the size of the universe, and my tiny place in it.

On a clear night in Flagstaff you can count on being able to see the Milky Way, thanks to the “Flagstaff Dark Sky Coalition” and the near 7,000-foot altitude. I marveled at the dim glow from the cloud of stars spread across the black sky, the endless distance. I thought about how an apple would be as big as the earth, if each of its atoms were the size of a grain of sand. “The sun is but a morning star,” the last words in Walden came to mind. I reached my pointer finger up, stretched my imagination across 645.5 million light years, and gently touched Betelgeuse.

I felt the twinkling of a star in my chest. It spread to the outer layers of my skin. And I felt connected.

The day my son was born the nurse placed his swaddled body in my arms. Tears streamed down my face and I said, “I love you,” before I could think, like I’d never said it, of felt it before.

This moment wasn’t like that. In fact, it was the antithesis of it, just a quiet sense of myself, connected, in an enormous universe.

I’ve tried all sorts of paths to enlightenment over the years and never gotten there. But there I was, outside my Thoreau shack in Flagstaff, AZ, on a cool fall evening in 2010, touching Betelgeuse, while my dog was taking a dump, and there it happened.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Is it that it?” I said to myself, as Bella did her end-of-the-ritual dance, proudly tearing up the grass with all four paws.

Nothing much has changed, but I don’t yell at Bella nearly as much.

---

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

Hands

by Margaret McNellis

I always thought my father had great hands. I think I judge people by their hands more than their eyes or smiles. I knew someone whose fingers turned up at the tips and made me think of a spider’s legs; as it happened, trust was never solid between us.

My dad had great hands with strong but slender fingers. His nail beds cradled perfectly trimmed nails—evidence of his fastidious nature. They were short but never cut to the quick. His knuckles were strong, though never bulged, despite years of cracking them. He was capable of the multi-knuckle crack. He would lace his fingers together, turn his palms away from his body, and straighten his arms. The resulting chorus of pops was a can-do-symphony, a sign of strength. Frailty could never withstand that.

Veins and tendons lined the backs of his hands. As a child, I wondered why my hands did not have those veins. Our hands were so alike in almost every way, including the unfeminine hairs between my first and second knuckles. In my early thirties, when I first saw definition of tendons and veins in my own hands while typing, I welcomed them. They signaled a transformation to adult hands, my father’s hands.

We shared other physical attributes as well. My hair has the same wave on my forehead. Not even straighteners can train that wave, and though it results in my feeling like I have an antenna on my head if I let my bangs get too long, I finally accepted it. We have the same eyebrows, which is unfortunate in a society that demands women have perfectly shaped brows. Unable to wax them due to allergies, and unwilling to pluck them because the tweezer makes me sneeze—and it’s never a good idea to sneeze while holding sharp metal near your eyeball—I keep my unibrow at bay with a tiny electric face razor.

We had the same facial structure too, wide at the eyes but not quite heart-shaped. The only difference? My father’s eyes were hazel; mine a chestnut-brown. We both received the McNellis nose, with a significant bump on the bridge that can be minimized only by wearing glasses.

When I was fifteen years old, my doctor determined that I did not have asthma, as previously assumed. Inhalers were doing nothing for my breathing difficulties. The problem wasn’t in my lungs or bronchial tubes, but rather, in my nose. Like most babies not born C-Section, I had a deviated septum, except it was deviated so badly that the left side of my nose didn’t work at all. Add to that seasonal allergies and any kind of sport that involved a good deal of running was out of the question. My parents elected that I should have surgery. I remember at the pre-op appointment, the surgeon asked if I wanted him to straighten my nose. I never believed in plastic surgery except for restorative purposes, so I vehemently refused. I still have the bump, and now, I’m glad for it. I’m glad that whenever I look in the mirror, I see my father. It doesn’t matter that I’m a female and he was not.

The night he died, in the hospice parking lot, my sister said she was sorry I was the local kid, who had to spend her summer at the hospital or beside our father’s sick bed. “But you were always little Jim,” she added. The bump on my nose. The unibrow. The wave in my hair that I can never tame. All of these things annoyed me at one time, but the similarities between my father’s hands and mine never did. After watching him fight and lose his battle with stage IV lung cancer, none of these resemblances cause me discomfort—quite the opposite, I treasure them.

---

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

Faculty Picks: Thrasher and Silber

Richard Adams Carey-- Sometimes a book comes way out of nowhere to knock you breathless. This is what I wrote in the annotated bibliography accompanying my first book, Raven’s Children: “A harrowing memoir by an Inupiaq Eskimo who is an alcoholic is to be found in Anthony Apakark Thrasher’s Thrasher: Skid Row Eskimo (Toronto: Griffin House, 1976).”

I found it somewhere on a bookstore’s table of publishers’ remainders. I was then still in the process of writing about a Yupik Eskimo family under siege from alcoholism, and I took a four-dollar chance on this obscure memoir of a solitary life eclipsed by the bottle.

But what a life and what a story. One of 21 children raised in a caribou-skin tent in the Canadian Arctic village of Tuktoyaktuk, and taken in 1943 at age six to a distant Catholic boarding school, Tony Thrasher was among those generations of Native American children whose original sin was their language, their culture, their parentage, their skin color.

No, this is not the inspirational story of someone who finds a way to rise above abuse and mistreatment. Instead Thrasher wanders through Canada from job to job, from woman to woman, frequently drunk. He was convicted of murdering a man in an alcoholic blackout and imprisoned for seven years. The story ends with Thrasher heading back to prison, this one for the criminally insane. There he disappears from history.

But his memoir crackles with storytelling verve, its byways lit by dream sequences, folktales, childhood memories, ancestral myths, as befits a man fathered by a shaman.

The two white reporters who helped assemble this manuscript were skeptical of some of Thrasher’s personal stories. But the tales and their evocative details all could be verified. “Right down to the name of the aircraft which is in Thrasher’s script but not in Jane’s ‘All the World’s Aircraft,’” they wrote. “De Havilland said there had been such a plane, just one, and that it had operated where and when Thrasher had specified.”

This really is Thrasher’s story, not theirs, dredged honestly from hell, and it’s both terrible and beautiful.

Katherine Towler-- Joan Silber’s Improvement, her eighth book, won the 2018 Pen/Faulkner Award in Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. The fact that these accolades have come when Silber is 72, after years of steadily working and publishing and being known by a small band of followers, many of them fellow writers, is something to celebrate.

Silber has created a unique hybrid in this book that is equal parts novel and linked story collection. Her focus moves from a single mother living with her young son in Harlem to the woman's ex-boyfriend and his involvement in a scheme to make money by smuggling cigarettes across state lines. Improvement initially appears to be a composite portrait of a close circle of characters living in Harlem, but then it moves farther afield, to Turkey and Europe, and jumps back in time forty years. Only a thin thread at first connects these narratives. As the chapters unfold, however, a large canvas becomes apparent, with a series of startling links revealed. Silber creates a sweeping narrative that is rooted in small moments and a close rendering of character. She accomplishes this feat of storytelling by allowing one character’s story to rest beside another’s without commentary or overt nods to their connections.

Her natural, easy style makes a highly plotted book feel completely unforced. Silber renders her characters with a light but deft touch and a bemused distance. Her quick insights into their inner states come as moments of divine revelation, but just as quickly, she’s back to the business of daily life. Silber’s nimble handling of both structure and character, and her wonderfully wry and effortless voice, make this book a pleasure to read and one to study for its masterful technique.

The Magic Wand

By K. A. Hamilton

Please note that the names and details have been changed to protect the silly.

Twelve kids gather around my 3D printer. Their fingers and noses are pressed against the plexiglass. From a distance, it looks like a blue fish is being conjured out of nothing. Up close, the nozzle deposits hair-thin layers of molten plastic. This is happening at about the speed of drying paint, but they’re transfixed nonetheless. When the kids ask what they can print, I say anything they want.

A few light up; the object of their desire is instantly visualized. Others let their jaws drop, too stunned by the rush of power to think clearly. And then, of course, there are the limit-testers.

“Anything?” “What about a million dollars?” “Can I make something bigger than the earth?” “No… bigger than the GALAXY?”

I say sure, why not? The class pauses, furrowing their brows and looking at me for the first time. A couple of them even believe me for a moment. But then they start to grapple with the physics of it and realize I’m just letting them think it through. I’m going to be one of those adults and this is going to be one of those classes where the teacher keeps them on their toes. They sulk briefly at the lack of resistance, but quickly recalibrate their requests.

They think I’m just doing it to keep them in check, but wish-fulfillment is a powerful thought experiment. Hypothesizing about what could go wrong takes paranoia, but imagining best-case scenarios takes vision. As a kid, I had a teacher who called it “the magic wand.” The power is yours: what would you do with it?

In the classroom, the kids create 3D designs. They all face away from me, working on standard-issue black laptops. From where I stand, I can see their dreams take form… for the most part. I spot Solitaire on one of the screens, which is instantly alt-tabbed when I approach.

Solitaire Boy is on the small side for fourth grade, and all business. I ask him how it’s going. He says fine, he’s just not sure what to make yet. There’s an obvious subtext to our conversation: he’s promising to pretend to work if I promise to look the other way. I suggest he take a break to look around at what the other kids are doing for inspiration, and then I let him be.

I help out some of the other children with the topography of their dream-things, giving Solitaire Boy a few minutes to himself. When I come back, he’s not at his chair, but leaning over the shoulder of one of the other children. There’s a small galaxy taking shape on his screen.

“What’s he making?” Solitaire Boy asks me.

“What are you making?” I ask Galaxy Boy.

He grins at us. “I dunno!”

Solitaire looks downright offended. He asks how you can make something you want without even knowing what you’re making. Galaxy just giggles. He presses a few keys and all the objects vanish.

“Look – I made everything so big you can’t see the edges anymore!”

Solitaire’s had enough. He returns to his seat and starts arranging shapes on his screen. He declares that he’s going to “at least make something that’s realistic.”

By the end of class there is a menagerie of animals, videogame characters, and abstract art. When I come to Solitaire’s screen, I see he’s built a tiny ladder. I ask him if it’s what he’d like to print, and he says yes, it’ll be useful for his pet hamster.

Solitaire listens with glee as I explain to Galaxy that he cannot, in fact, print something that’s 9.99x10⁹ centimeters tall and also invisible. But Galaxy just smirks, deletes everything he’s made so far, and calls up a plain, simple sphere. He hovers over the radius number entry and looks up at me.

“What are the maximum dimensions again?”

---

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

Dear Davey

by Colleen McCarthy

My computer speakers are pumping out the sounds of loud angry music: heavy pop punk, post hardcore, metal. I tend to measure time in concerts; or rather, between concerts. The last show was four months ago, the next is two weeks out. Concerts are a beacon of hope, it’s a way to connect to the scene, to reach out and have someone reach back.

My room is a visual representation of the clutter within my head. There are books strewn about, DVDs outside of their cases, perching precariously off the shelf, a bag of trash hangs from the knob on the dresser. Three hampers sit looming against the wall, overflowing with the laundry I’ve been avoiding for the past three weeks, and the closet is brimming with bags and boxes of junk that I’ve neglected to sort. My nightstand has a glass of water sitting in a puddle of its own condensation, and the drawer is pulled open exposing old iPods and cameras that haven’t worked since high school. I’m sitting in my bed cross-legged staring down a bottle of Lorazepam 1MG tablets, prescribed to me for my severe anxiety attacks.

Music is the only constant in my life. Davey Muise’s voice floats out of the speakers, surrounding me. The song is Lead Balloon, by his old band, Vanna who has recently been laid to rest. The last time I saw Vanna was in New Jersey, I’d driven up from New Hampshire with a friend. We stood in the small venue with concrete floors and a tiny wooden stage with chipped black paint, barely large enough for the bands to move. The speakers were stacked high and with every stroke of the guitar, every beat of the kick drum, you could feel the music pulsing through you.

We stood at the back of the crowd, this wasn’t exactly my friend’s scene. She’d joined only so I wouldn’t have to go alone. I could see the kids who made up the crowd, people clinging to the walls, people with their knees pressed up against the stage their heads bobbing, people flailing around like whirligigs made of flannel and denim and leather. As we watched the crowd moshing and singing, my friend leaned over and shouted over the music to me, “I get it now, these are your people.” I nodded and smiled, because they were my people.

With each song Vanna played I tried to step closer, without bringing my friend too close to the moshers. I’m not much of a crowd participator, but I bobbed my head along to the beat. When Davey sang Lead Balloon he made his way into the crowd and the whirligig of flannel and denim and leather became a bouquet as they all huddled together, and I fought tears while I stood at the back of the crowd.

I’ve learned that when you want to die, you spend a lot of time alone. My room is closing in on me, getting smaller and smaller with each day that goes by. Music is the reason that, even though I’m having a staring contest with a bottle of pills, I know I’m going to make it through the night. Because I know that there’s another concert two weeks out, where I’ll walk into the venue, into the pit, and have all of these powerful people standing with me, people who feel just like me.

---

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

Student Picks: Danielewski and Price

K.A. Hamilton-- If point of view is the frame of a story, House of Leaves is a kaleidoscopic masterpiece. There is no central hero, but a chorus of multiple candidates vying for the role in a dark and shifting world. The effect is a book that will haunt you well after you've put it down. 

At its core, House of Leaves blends the unlikely bedfellows of horror and romance, as a couple attempts to repair their marriage under increasingly terrifying circumstances. This is wrapped in layers of metafiction, footnotes, and secret codes.

Of course, no review of this book would be complete without mention of its layout. Central to the story is a terrible, endless labyrinth and an intangible monster that are reflected in the chaotic spread of words across the page. Danielewski engages not just the five senses, but a sense of time and space as well. House of Leaves is ergodic literature at its finest: genuine, heartbreaking, and infectious. In an age of ebooks, there are few novels I own a physical copy of, much less two. But I keep an extra around for lending, should anyone else want to lose themselves inside the House.

Jemiscoe Chambers-Black-- I have been looking for books that contained similar themes to my writing in hopes that it might improve my craft, and stumbled upon Richard Price’s Samaritan by accident.

In the vein of episodic police procedurals, Samaritan encompasses characters from all walks of life crammed together on the page, surrounding an amplified criminal case. The novel follows Ray Mitchel, an ex-English high school teacher, ex-cab driver, and ex-screenwriter, who has returned to the Dempsey, New Jersey projects where he grew up. But Ray returns as a wealthy man, and his altruism leads him to the hospital’s intensive care unit with a massive brain injury after being “tuned-up.” As his childhood friend, Detective Nerese “Tweetie” Ammons, tries to solve Ray’s case on the "who did it" and "why," past secrets are revealed.

What’s most intriguing about this novel is that the most painful moments, and the most insightful pieces of these characters’ pasts, are all done through dialogue. Samaritan has a magical quality, mixing poetic figurative language with an urban tongue that I got sucked into immediately.

Time for the Short Story

by Terri Alexander

I used to write travel articles for local and regional magazines and newspapers. My goal was to eventually be published in a national glossy, like Travel + Leisure or Conde Nast Traveler. At the same time that I was sending what felt like hundreds of query letters, the publishing industry was undergoing a dramatic sea change in the transition from print to digital. Some magazines folded and others adopted paid articles with tiny print centered on the top margin that read “advertisement.” The quality of the writing plummeted. Despite my love of travel and travel writing, I eventually tired of reading nationally published authors (a club to which I did not belong) who demanded, via listicle, that I go to some “eponymous” restaurant that “boasts” fresh Kumamoto oysters.

It’s not news that the Internet has changed creative writing. One aspect of it that I find interesting is the ascent of the short story within the context of the Internet. It makes sense – short stories are easily digested on mobile phones and tablets and can be consumed in small doses, such as during a commute or wait. Short stories fit in with the rapid-fire lifestyle of popular culture, as manifested in short attention spans and the premium placed on leisure time. Recently, authors of short story collections have been winning prestigious awards, which bolster the format’s presence alongside the novel and drive sales. Further, the proliferation of literary journals makes short stories increasingly accessible.

When I started my fiction track at the Mountainview Grand MFA program, I believed that my thesis would be a novel. At my first residency, I heard the testimony of several students who started out that way and then switched their thesis to a short story collection. I vowed that wouldn’t be me, but midway through my second semester, that’s exactly what happened. My initial avoidance of the format has evolved into a love affair. Short stories have become a place for me to hone craft elements in approachable, bite-sized pieces, and it’s something that writing programs across the country are emphasizing.

According to Rust Hills in the book Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, as recommended by my instructor Mitch Wieland, there are two aspects of the short story that differ from the novel. First, a short story tells of something that happened to someone. This is straightforward and can be applied to any successful short story that comes to mind. The second aspect Hills describes is more daunting: the short story shows a “more harmonious relationship of part to whole, and part to part,” than a novel. In other words, all of the story’s elements must work in concert with one another and do so in a compact space. Accomplishing such a feat makes me think of a gymnast performing a floor exercise – back handspring, twisting somersault, splits, front layout, and then stick the landing in that tiny corner without going outside the lines. Such is the prescription for a successful short story.

In an interview with the Star Tribune, Charles Baxter describes the short story form like this: “The intensity level is higher. These landscapes are more like ones lit by lightning than by candles or incandescent lamps.” This simile makes it easy to see the appeal of the short story in today’s world. The Internet has primed readers’ desire for a certain level of stimulation that cannot be attained within the long stretch of a novel. With the short story, a reader generally does not have the luxury of meeting a character and walking with them over the course of the character’s life. Rather, the reader meets a character for a much shorter time span and knows little of their backstory or future. This echoes the increased mobility that some people adopt through options like telecommuting and earning money online, which in turn translates to truncated relationships. The short story’s aspect of “something happens to someone” fits right in with this phenomenon.

The Internet, relatively new in our culture, has been widely credited with the surge in the popularity and recognition of short stories. When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, she said, “I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.” Now that I’m halfway through my third semester at the Mountainview Grand MFA program, I’m glad to have made the switch.

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

Needles

by Danielle Service

This past week the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, flew into Manchester, NH, less than three miles from my apartment. He blamed Lawrence, Massachusetts for my state’s opioid epidemic and called for the death penalty for traffickers and he did not speak of recovery but I could have told him about hope had he driven to my 650-square foot apartment. Maybe he would have cared. Probably not. Last night on my way home I drove down Pettingill Avenue where the planes come in near the airport, and one flew in literally dozens of feet over the top of my car, scaring the crap out of me. For a moment I imagined it was Donald Trump in the plane and that my car really was a Batmobile (I call it that) and that I ejected the driver’s seat from the roof and clung to the plane and defeated his evil empire but obviously nothing happened.

Hope is essential for recovery: I know this, because I’ve been in recovery from addiction myself for almost ten years. I try new things in this realm – in my spiritual program of action – all the time. Case in point: a recent visit to an acupuncture clinic with my friend Liz.

 “What the fuck, Liz,” I mouthed, glaring at my seated friend who’d brought me to the community establishment. A man ushered me past her and through a dark room. Filled with pastel, blanket-covered chairs, a weird hum enveloped the area. Open-mouthed, closed-eyed people lolled their heads toward the ceiling. Needles stuck out of their arms, collarbones, and heads.

It is worth noting I watch too many horror movies. This place looked exactly like one.

It is worth noting I watch too many horror movies because I find it an excellent way to escape fear in real life. I figure if I can channel my fear – cultivate it like a well-nourished vegetable in a garden, contained in fertile soil for two solid hours – then I will never have to experience it in actuality. Life managed via art.

But here in the clinic where Liz had brought me it was too real. I was paralyzed by fear. I hate needles. It’s so common it’s a cliché – I hate needles – but I’ve never understood them.

Four of the people I love and trust with my life are recovered heroin addicts. They tout their love of the needle as one of the hardest things to shake.

Andy, the man who’d been leading me through the acupuncture treatment room, sat me in a chair next to Liz (who already had needles poking in her body and seemed more than content) and talked to me as I trembled. Andy looked at my intake sheet: “You say your anxiety is nine on a scale of ten? We can fix that.” He touched my arm. I closed my eyes. Prick. Prick. Prick. Prick. I flinched each time in terror. Finally he put a soft hand on my shoulder and told me to rest for at least twenty minutes.

Fifteen minutes in: a soft balloon of love floats from my chest and drifts toward the seahorse mobile at the center of the room. I turned my head to Liz, slumbering peacefully. Prick. The anxiety in my chest deflated from nine to three and the voices in my head, the ones that like to jabber-jabber-jabber, muted to a soft murmur. I could see and feel the universe again.

My former heroin addict friends have told me how they used to shoot water when they couldn’t get smack solely for the needle’s relief. I have always appreciated the seeming honesty of heroin addiction: addiction is so dark and awful that an outward needle jammed into skin appears more honest than my own former, sneaky addictive behavior. For the first time in the acupuncture chair I understood what my junkie friends were talking about. When I left I was on Cloud Nine for the rest of the day, anxiety abated, fear dead.

That was March 1. I have been back to acupuncture eleven more times since then, and March is not yet over. Every time I feel a needle prick my skin, knowing the relief I’ll feel later, I want to scream more more more at my acupuncturist. I know it is just a balancing of energy within and not a destructive habit but it does make me feel closer to my four friends, who have all recovered and have been sober for many years at this point. People who go far down often come back up high.

Trump is back in D.C. today. There are plenty of people still addicted to heroin; in recovery circles, we meet lots of them. A lot of them die. But a lot of them recover. Me, today, I might see The Strangers sequel. Go to acupuncture, feel the needle enter; balance my energy. Close my eyes. Imagine hands joining, unscarred, without fear.

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Danielle Service is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. She currently teaches seventh grade Language Arts and yoga in New Hampshire. 

Student Picks: Bachelder and Henderson

Phil Lemos-- Aficionados of male ritual, 2 ½-star hotels and mangled legs will love Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special. It’s the story of 22 men who converge at a hotel annually to re-enact the infamous play from a 1980s Monday Night Football game in which Lawrence Taylor gruesomely shattered Joe Theismann’s leg on national television, ending his career. A lottery system, aided by a complex addendum of rules – you can’t be LT more than once in an eight-year span, the last person selected is Theismann, among others – determines which character portrays which player. 

Casting a virtual makeshift football team in such a short (213 pages) novel yields confusing results, both in mid-life crises and in name — there’s a Chad, a Charles and a Carl; a Randy and an Andy; a Dennis and a Derek.  

But the men, in a way, are one singular character, whose personal strife is their common bond outside of football. These men suffer from fully involved mid-life crises, whether it be failing careers, questioning of their own manhood, crumbling marriages, or a combination thereof, and they manifest themselves in the most bizarre and random situations, such as during the hotel’s continental breakfast and “stage fright” during trips to the bathroom stall.

Shawna-Lee Perrin-- Details reveal a writer’s willingness to linger in a scene and highlight the parts with exceptional emotional weight. Smith Henderson’s Fourth of July Creek is stuffed with multi-faceted characters and weighty topics, but it’s his attention to detail that makes certain scenes exceptionally haunting.

On Pete the narrator’s cabin: “...a front room with his bed, a leather chair, a kerosene lamp and an electric lantern, two shelves of books, and a bureau... a hatch in the floor led into a root cellar where he kept his milk, beer, and vegetables.” That beer is one of three things he keeps in the cellar is a subtle hint at Pete’s goals of living a simple, but not dour or monastic, life. 

After Pete’s father dies, the relics of his last day reveal Pete’s reluctant affection, despite the complicated, distant relationship they’d had: “An odor of leather, sawdust, and lilac... A half cup of coffee where he’d left it... an unpromising game of solitaire. His father had gotten up when he saw he wouldn’t win.”

I find myself reflecting on this book when I realize I’ve rushed through writing something; it’s a priceless study in slowing way down and really looking around.

Last Resort

by Eddie Dzialo

During my deployment to Afghanistan, I carried an M4 rifle and a 9mm Berretta pistol should I need to use on myself. Due to the dust and sandstorms, cleaning our weapons was a daily ritual. I changed clothes less than once a week and showered every other month. Each time I cleaned my pistol, I was reminded of what it was for. I’d take it apart, line it with lubricant, coat it with my issued brush to ensure that it was reliably crisp. I became so comfortable with the weapon that I could pull the slide back and catch the ejected bullet with my hand.

Each time I had to clean the pistol, my 9mm Beretta, I was reminded of what it was for. Because it is only effective inside of 50 meters, it’s a last-resort weapon. With all the machine guns and mortars we carried, there would be little use in it. One step below pistol is a bayonet, and then it’s fists.

Prior to deploying, the officers routinely stayed late and met in the boardroom. We listened to intelligence reports, went over tactical scenarios, and drank beers. Before one of the meetings began, people sat around the table and talked. No one looked unhappy or worried. Though I can’t remember what prompted it, my superior said that if anyone felt like they were about to be captured during our deployment, then we should do the right thing and eat a bullet. The comment was made casually, but it was sincere and loud enough for the whole room to hear. If captured, we would be killed, likely beheaded. The act would be recorded and disseminated on the internet. The people we left behind would have to live knowing that our final moments were being permanently broadcast. Killing ourselves was an act of kindness, a selfless way of protecting our families.

When I deployed, I became suicidal without wanting to be. I’d believed what I’d been told.  Sometimes I fought back by not cleaning my pistol, allowing the powdery dust to build up around the barrel and trigger guard. Maybe it would jam. At some point, I stopped fighting. I even worried about the scenarios where I wouldn’t be able to get to my pistol. What if I was in an explosion and someone grabbed me when I was unconscious, or that I was so badly injured that I wouldn’t be able to physically do it? I even knew how to chamber a round if one of my arms was broken or missing.

People become reckless after surviving a deployment because there’s a certain hint of invincibility that comes with it. But I returned home feeling fragile. The myth of immortality gets disproven when someone you know gets killed overseas.

Our unit returned home, and we were obligated to attend classes intended to help us reintegrate back into our old lives. The Marine who gave one of the classes talked about the increased risk of suicide and the mental steps that someone undergoes prior to it. First someone has the idea and then there’s an intent to carry out the act. During that class, I realized that I had done both. Though I wasn’t suicidal then, and I am not now, not only had I risked my life, I had grown comfortable with taking it.

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

Jack and Soda

by Zachary Scott

When I was a little kid I had this horrible habit of waltzing up to someone else’s glass and just taking a swig. The world – including your drink – was mine for the taking and I was more than willing to take. That ended when I was around five. My memory of the event that sent my drink stealing days into retirement is as hazy as that late humid summer evening. The inconsequential details are blurred around the edges, the way that all ‘90s film and TV flashback scenes start, becoming clearer as the main event comes into scene. Summer in upstate New York gets sticky, and gross. Few things relieve that as sweetly as a cold soda – yeah, it’s soda in this part of upstate, not pop. This is where the scene gets clearer. Me with blond curls springing out from my head in whichever frizzy direction they chose, acid-washed shorts and a bad school-photo-day patterned shirt, sleeves cut off, and Dad’s soda. The glass sweating a bit, beckoned me, so I did what I did then. I snuck over to the end-stand and grabbed his drink. He was caught up in conversation about which wrestler was better, or something like that, with a friend or older cousin, or whoever was there. Glass in hand, still undetected, I took a nice long gulp of that soda, grossly watered down by melted ice, and tainted by the Jack that, looking back now, occupied most of the space inside. I don’t think I recoiled in disgust. I was five, my flare for melodramatics not quite fine-tuned as it is now. The hairball sound that belched out of me was enough to get his attention. As he took the glass away, my face contorted into that puckered lip, horse eye expression I still make to this day when booze is too strong or we’re mashing with kettle bells at the gym. Lesson learned. No more stealing drinks from people.

My father was the kind of low-key alcoholic who laughed it off with comments like “alcoholics go to meetings, and I don’t so…” You know the genre of humor. I didn’t know – not until I was like thirteen; not until I saw that there was something more to occasional fits of rage, sleeping through the day and staying up through the night. I didn’t realize that my normal wasn’t at all normal until I was carrying him up the stairs to our second-floor apartment because I realized the real chance that he might stumble into the river a football field away. He eventually stopped drinking and talks openly about the addiction, but he’s never really talked about why he drank. I never asked. I tried to be a model son and brother; tearfully came out of the closet; fought to prove to the world that we were just like them – by the way, we’re not and that’s okay. I got a degree, a job, a husband, another degree, a nice car, a third degree. I became an elder at my church. Yet happiness still evades me. I made the promise that I wouldn’t abuse alcohol, but still never bothered to care about why he had. Until recently.

I was sitting at a red light the other morning. I was in the nice car, wearing an overpriced topcoat and chinos, made in the developing world, on my way to the job where I am a respected leader, even if I can barely stomach the fortyish hours a week I spend there. I had been spiraling for weeks, maybe longer. Sometimes, when I’m in those states it’s hard to keep track of the passing of time. Just a few weeks earlier I had entertained the thought of closing my eyes and letting go of the wheel. I honestly thought that maybe it’d be easier to just let the car drift off the very same road, sixty miles an hour into the darkness, into the woods. That night I had a breakdown. A snotty nosed, bleary eyed, can’t stand the terrified look in my husband’s eyes, breakdown.

Our dear friend and his wife own a CrossFit gym in town. He is also our pastor. On Friday nights they run a fusion between CrossFit workout and worship. My husband made me go. Somewhere between the theological conversations and the back squats, my pain eased up.

At the red light, every ache, every sorrow, every ounce of failure and frustration I’ve ever felt suffocated me. Staring at that light, harsh against the blue sky behind it, I fell apart. I tried talking myself down. I reminded myself of my blessings – a roof, a job, food in my belly, clothes to keep me warm, a husband who would walk to the ends of the earth to ease my pain, and a community of people who love me. That. Doesn’t. Work. And it sure as hell didn’t at that never ending fucking red light. I felt like an asshole. So many people have so much more to deal with, such bigger pain, and here I was, a privileged, if not gay, white man with seemingly nothing to worry about, and I couldn’t break away from the sadness, the terror, the stress, the anxiety. Then, in a moment as fleeting as ever, I found empathy. That’s when I knew, even before I texted my father, asking why, that he was trying to numb his pain just as I wanted to.

He called them demons - moments from his past that he would never be able to return to and change. He’s sober now, and has been for more years of my life than he was drunk. He manages his demons, rather than numbing them.

I live with mental illness. Depression and anxiety are my demons. Sometimes I’m in control, and sometimes they have me backed against a wall, cowering in the dark. Even as I write this, even as you read it, I am struggling. I have moments here and there where they almost knock me down, but those moments are decreasing in frequency and severity. In one of my darkest moments the Divine reached into me and forced me to turn to the one person I am most like, despite either of our efforts to the contrary, and taught me true empathy. That’s how I know that, Dad and I, we’ll manage.

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Zachary Scott is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  He is currently completing revisions of his manuscript, Finding Rhoda.