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.

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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.

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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?”

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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.

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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.

---

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. 

Student Picks: Cusk and Gyasi

Ashley Bales-- I started Outline, by Rachel Cusk while on a plane headed towards spring break destinations, which is appropriate given Cusk’s book opens with her headed to the airport. On her flight to Athens where she’s teaching at a writing workshop, Cusk’s narrator hears her neighbor’s life story. I too, I suppose, hear that story on my flight. Our respective flights land, we both head into unfamiliar apartments. She proceeds to collect stories from her fellow instructors, friends, writers, we hear from each of her students. These stories are told for the length of a conversation and then abandoned. As a reader, I learn more about these acquaintances than the narrator, or at least any details of her life. You get to know her through her questions and her empathy, but most importantly through her criticisms. The care given to each new character in Outline makes it a case study in the diversity of experience, in perception and characterization.  There is a delicacy to the prose that makes the narrator’s sharp criticism’s feel personal. They sting a bit more than expected, breaking expectations and challenging the reader to assess their assumptions. Outline is cultural critique with a thesis centered on the power of storytelling and assembled with a craftsmanship that shows you the stitching without revealing how it was made. When I got back to the states, I bought the sequel, Transit.

Margaret McNellis-- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is a rare and beautiful novel. Not only does Gyasi work magic with the task of telling a cohesive story over the course of nine generations in just 300 pages, but she works magic with her language and application of themes. There were moments—throughout the book—when I was physically choked up for the suffering endured by the various characters. This brings up yet another success of Gyasi’s—her masterful creation of more than a dozen point-of-view characters without creating confusion for the reader.

How does she do this? Without spoiling any surprises, Gyasi writes a story from the point of view of each of these dynamic characters in moments of great personal change. She connects these experiences to those of each character’s ancestors in a way that reminds every reader of what it really means to have the events of history touch one’s life, sometimes in unforeseeable ways.

Timshel

by Garrett Zecker

I got my first and second tattoo two days ago. I'm thirty-six. Almost everyone's got an unremarkable tattoo story like mine. We go under the needle against the lifelong instructions of our mothers, our religious institutions, our adolescent philosophies. My rationale to refrain until middle age wasn't interesting. I simply couldn't commit to something permanently inscribed in my flesh. I lacked that critical something that makes others care for something so deeply permanent. 

I entered the anonymous New Hampshire storefront with my best friend Catherine. She asked if I knew what I was getting. Absolutely. Her eyes sparkled. On my wrist, I envisioned a waning gibbous moon at eighty-eight percent illumination. On my left forearm, the word תמשל. Steinbeck roughly translated 'timshel' to 'thou mayest' in his novel East of Eden. They both represented my moment of illumination and liberation. Catherine knew they were a permanent commentary on stepping into my new life.  

We filled out paperwork, exchanged identification, and went through a short interview with the artist. Catherine and I talked on a black leather couch while we waited. We flipped through a heavy iron-framed art catalog. A demonic smoking skull under a robe grabbed our attention, full breasts saluting the naked air. I suggested a last-minute change to this new artwork, and we laughed. I went to the bathroom. She was gone when I came back. I waited on the couch, and when she returned it was my time to get a tattoo. 

The artist was interested in תמשל. She scratched the ink into my dermis, concerned that I didn't know the meaning of the Hebrew word. "You'd be surprised how often they think it's our fault," she joked. "A guy came in and brought George the Mandarin character for 'sword.' He did the tattoo. An actual Chinese speaker came in later and told us the character said 'person.'"  

The artist's beautiful illustrations decorated her station on little pieces of paper taped to the wall. The simple text design she was inscribing on my arm made it feel more like I was getting paperwork stamped by a municipal clerk. The needles didn't hurt. My attention bounced between Catherine and small talk with the artist. She finished by applying ointment and a bandage to my new tattoos. I paid, tipped her, and we left. 

"I know you wouldn't have admitted it in the chair, but were you scared?" Catherine asked as we walked back to the car. 

"It wasn't as bad as I expected. Like striking a match against my skin." 

"Can I see what she did? I didn't get a good look from where I was sitting." 

I lifted the bandage to show her the 'timshel' on my left arm. She smiled. I lifted my bandage over my right wrist to show the dime-sized moon. 

"Want to see mine?" 

She pulled her sleeve up. A bandage over her right wrist. She lifted the little white pillow and revealed a dime-sized moon, a sliver of shadow on the right-hand side. While I was in the bathroom, a copy of the same moon was tattooed in the same place as mine. 

"That's –" 

"Yes." She said. I was quiet. "The night you became you. Your best self, along with my best self. This is us." 

"Us," I said. The us seemed so immediate, like it was always whispering to both of us and pulling us toward one another. 

We drove away in the windy January day, a disorienting diagonal sun low in the evening sky. 

The next morning, we made coffee together. The Mortified podcast played while we brushed our teeth and fixed our hair. We laughed as people read from their adolescent journals. This was our new selves, together. Laughing. We looked at our wrists side by side and kissed the moons together like closing a book. We kissed our lips together. 

Many people don't experience the most precious things getting under their skin. That sort of thing can take a lifetime...or thirty-six years, anyway. "

---

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

Brother Jeb

by Todd Richardson

“We don’t need prostitutes in San Marcos,” the man said, “because we’ve got sorority girls!” He stood at the base of a statue in the Free Speech Zone of the quad, his index finger raised at a young woman in a tank top. He wore a brightly colored stole draped down his shoulders. He clutched a bible in one hand and a staff mounted with a crucifix in the other. The passing woman looked up at him, horrified that she’d been singled out, and hid her face behind one hand like a horse blinder as she shuffled through the crowded forum.

The preacher went by “Brother Jeb,” and was a campus celebrity. I recognized him from last fall when he’d put on a similar show, berating students from the protection of the Free Speech Zone, proclaiming hellfire and doom on passersby. Brother Jeb had drawn a herd of spectators that semester, many there to oppose him and others there just to watch. Later, a friend showed me a video on his phone shot from just over Brother Jeb’s shoulder. The camera focused on the students yelling and cursing the reverend. Red lettering flashed at the bottom of the screen: HATE, GODLESS, BLASPHEMY.

Now that Brother Jeb was back, I wanted to see what would happen. It was a sunny Friday afternoon after a fresh rain, and a cool breeze whispered overhead between the oak leaves and carried a scent of earth into my nostrils. The good weather had brought several university organizations to the quad hoping to recruit students trekking from one end of the university to the other. Fraternities, sororities, the LGBTQ Student Union, the Anime Club, the Quidditch Club, the Universal Unitarian Student Organization, the Hispanic Business Student Organization, The Black Student Alliance, and unaffiliated groups of hippies playing ukuleles and bongos lined the quad, choking the narrow walkway through the Free Speech Zone marked by a large Grecian statue. It was at the base of the statue that Brother Jeb set up shop, yelling down at students as they passed.

“The Lord will punish all sodomites!” Brother Jeb directed his voice toward the LGBTQ Student Union. “You will burn in hell for your disgusting sins!” The group of students behind the LGBTQ booth ignored the taunts, but his comments drew boos and jeers from other students.

“You’re sick!”

“You’re not a Christian!”

A knot of students formed in front of the statue. A few began debating scripture with Brother Jeb, but for every verse they quoted he replied in kind with something hateful. Each shout drew another spectator from the passing students, who decided that the hate-spewing preacher was reason enough to skip class. Brother Jeb began whipping the growing audience into a frenzy as he lashed out with his fiery tongue.

“Those scuffed knees are badges of your sin!”

“Fuck you!”

“Oh Lord, help these wayward women keep their legs together and find good husbands, as was your intention.”

“Someone ought to slap you!”

Brother Jeb spread his arms and lifted his head toward the heavens. A woman pushed forward to confront him, her hands clinched in rage, but her friend pulled her back. Behind the preacher, I saw a man and a woman emerge from the corner of the quad and set up video cameras pointed at the students. I wondered if I might find their videos online later.

I turned my head and saw that the Universal Unitarians hung a sign in front of their booth that read, “We’re not with this guy.” The Catholic Student Union hung a similar sign that said, “Forgiveness, Love, Charity.” Somewhere at the back of the crowd, students began to clap in unison and sing “This Little Light of Mine.” A few of the hippies in the quad joined in with their ukuleles, and the song spread from student to student in the crowd.

Brother Jeb tried to shout over the singing, but it washed his voice away. I could see him, red in the face, mouth open with his bible and staff raised, quaking. But nobody could hear him anymore; the only sounds were of clapping and singing and rejoicing.

Finally, Brother Jeb gave up. He dropped his arms, turned, and motioned to the man and the women with video cameras. They picked up their equipment and walked away. The quad erupted in applause as Brother Jeb left.

That day in the quad, I saw hope. I witnessed its power. I cling to its promise.

---

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

Faculty Picks: Abbey, Tharp

Amy Irvine-- It's the 50th anniversary of the first printing of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire—the book that etched indelibly into the American imagination the fathomless ocean of red raw lands in southern Utah. For the occasion, I have been commissioned to write a work that takes measure of Abbey’s near-prophetic concerns. Writing in the early sixties as a backcountry ranger in Arches National Monument (it’s now a full-blown national park), the Pennsylvania-born anarchist already believed that population, industry, and tourism were unsustainable. In his words: “growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.” But even Cactus Ed could not have imagined just how aggressive and malignant that cancer would become—that the latest presidential administration would eviscerate two of the nation’s newest national monuments (also in Utah), and turn the Department of Interior, which is mandated to preserve the wilderness character of such lands, into the Department of Industry.

It’s easy then, to don the shroud of Abbey’s misanthropy (“I’m a humanist; I’d rather kill a man than a snake.”), to embrace his privileged solitude in the wilderness. Indeed, a more acute case of Ivory Cabin Syndrome there never was. For Abbey writes about his solitude as if he didn’t have a wife and kids in the wings. And the name he coined for Arches? “Abbey’s Country.” As if he had forgotten that the whole place had been stolen once from the region’s Native Americans, and then again from Mexico.

But we live in a far more crowded world now, and we cannot afford to hate the whole of us. So I’m trying to write the thing that takes on Abbey’s sneering, bigoted individualism with a more inclusive and communal approach to defending public wildlands. Which isn’t easy, when you’re the kind of person who prefers scorpions and quicksand to family reunions and neighborhood potlucks.

But I’m trying.

Lydia Peelle-- Many years ago, a friend recommended The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. Actually, that's not quite an accurate statement. When she heard I hadn't read it, said friend immediately put me in her car, drove me to the nearest bookstore, bought the book (in hardcover!), and handed it to me, saying, "I'm not going to tell you anything about it. Just, read it." How's that for a book recommendation? And I am forever grateful to my friend for literally putting this book in my hands, because it is one I turn to all the time.

Creative thinking, as Tharp reminds us, is no magical mystery. It is in fact a habit to be cultivated and sustained, and in this book Tharp shares the techniques, exercises, and rituals for creative work that she has developed in her long and successful career as a choreographer - techniques than any artist, working in any genre, can practice and benefit from. The ideas in this book are a wonderful reminder of mind-body oneness. And, they're fun!  Here's one: get up out of your chair, step away from the writing desk, start moving your body and, and, as Tharp puts it, "Do a Verb." What will happen? Who knows! I love this book for the way it shakes up my "writer" brain, and I love to recommend it to other writers.