Student Picks: Ware and Sheffield

Shawna-Lee Perrin-- I heard about this book nearly two years ago on NPR, and immediately wanted to read it. But two years fly by when one’s having fun in one’s MFA program, and I couldn’t fit it in amongst each semester’s reading lists and essays, let alone during the frenzy of my final semester. Finally, with my full thesis completed and mailed, it was time to wait. I got this book on a Wednesday evening and finished it less than 48 hours later.

In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware begins with Nora, an introverted, reclusive writer living in a small flat in London, getting invited to a bachelorette/hen party weekend for her best friend from primary and secondary school. But she hasn’t seen the friend in about ten years and doesn’t understand why she’s been invited. She’s persuaded to go, and ends up in the middle of a mystery – a mystery she can’t remember as she recovers from a head wound in the hospital.

Ware weaves the tale in first person, alternating between Nora in the hospital and (via memory flashes as she pieces things together) an ominous glass house in the middle of a forest. I was hoping this book would last a little longer, but the characters and suspense propelled me through the 308 pages faster than I anticipated. It’s a thoughtful, brutal study in how to write a smart, well-crafted story with mystery and intrigue that keeps those pages turning.

Dominique Heuermann-- “Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I’m a mix tape, a cassette that’s been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.”

Music is an essential part of the human experience. In my lifetime I have made countless mixed tapes and CDs, all labeled for specific moods and events, boyfriends, and road trips. Reading Sheffield’s ode to his wife through music,  Love is a Mixed Tape, is a heartbreaking trip, but one you will thoroughly enjoy.

Sheffield’s take on music memory and the way in which we all reach back in one way or another when confronted with a song from our past is masterfully done. By running through the playlists of the mixed tapes left behind by his late wife, we get glimpses of quiet moments, explosive memories, and the painful parts of letting go and moving on.

Sheffield’s profound musical wisdom and lyric application to life’s dilemmas and routine problems, such as his wondering why no one writes about the men that turn into husbands except for Carly Simon, or how Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” defined for him what it meant to have the responsibility of “the kind of love you can’t leave until you die.” I have always connected to music in this way, where the message outweighs the melodies. What instantly pulled me into Sheffield’s storyline was the fact that each chapter is a mixed tape. A time capsule of events centered around music and the choice to feel. Perhaps in my own memoirs I’ll discuss why I can’t stand listening to Alice in Chains, the reason ‘80s love song radio shows make me break out in a sweat, or why hearing Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman’s version of “Time to Say Goodbye” will always make me weep. Musical muscle memory, what a bitch.  

A Curiosity

by Eric Beebe

My girlfriend brought me back a spell book from Iceland. She’d asked if I wanted a drinking horn, but I already had two or three. A decorative belt pouch for my Ren Faire Viking garb? Nah, I could get that at a Ren Faire. So a six-pack of Einstök and The Sorcerer’s Screed it was.

The book was pretty austere for something containing spells for summoning ghost-horses and killing people’s livestock. It was just a red paperback with a serif font and some staves—magical symbols—printed in white on each cover, none of that skin-bound Necronomicon kind of stuff. But it was written by a guy who called himself Skuggi (“shadow”) and scorned Christianity’s self-proclaimed monopoly on communing with the powers that be.

This wasn’t my first book of Scandinavian spells. I’d bought Dr. Stephen E. Flowers’s second edition of the Galdrabók months earlier. Skimming through his foreword (read: thesis) on my way to the juicy stuff, I read how spells and incantations of the late- and post-Viking-Age North show evidence of a unique dynamic between Christianity and Norse Paganism, one of more compromise than the mutual resentment I thought had persisted until one old, bearded man in the sky won out over the other. Even Skuggi wrote that sorcery was an attempt to understand a single creator and his works versus a pantheon, although he lived from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.

Neither should have come as a total surprise. The Norse were as much traders as raiders, and it’s only fitting that there would be aspects of cultural exchange noted in a people known for traveling as far from their home as the Middle East and even Newfoundland. So finding spells calling on equal parts God, Satan, Thor, and Loki, among others, to curse someone with explosive bowels was just ye olde multiculturalism at work.

That last bit of info might make it sound like this is all a joke to me, but that couldn’t be further from true. The occult has always been the source of my greatest fears. Reading any of these texts after sundown leads to me alternating between a bedsheet cocoon and switching my bedside light on at the slightest hint of movement through the night. I regard the supernatural with equal parts wonder and fear.

I still have yet to test any spells from the Screed. The most I’ve done is to leaf through its pages, jotting down which ones require minimal animal sacrifice or law-breaking to cast, which could be feasibly integrated into trinkets without upsetting the associated ritual. Some simply require the reader to carve a stave into a specific wood and carry it with them. Years before I acquired either book, I drew a stave I’d found online for luck in romantic pursuits onto a scrap of paper, nicked my finger with a pocket knife to trace the stave in my blood, then ate the paper. This bore no measurable results. Maybe that’s why I hesitate to try any of these new spells. Whether I botched that old stave or just helped cement science’s superiority, I have reason to be skeptical I’d find any luck with fresh ones.

Still, curiosity draws me in. If not for some attainable result, why were these rites and symbols recorded? The Norse believed love poems were a type of sorcery, the words themselves bearing magical significance. Today we usually just call that art. I’d like to think all the mammary blood and raven bile connects to something we might understand today too, as if mysticism was just some ancient method of manipulating physics in minor ways that became lost to the ages. Wishful thinking, I know, but speculation is part of the fun with such things. I think we all want to believe there’s some untapped potential for the extraordinary in ourselves, in this world, in a book—something we’re one good push away from obtaining to liven up the status quo. Maybe there is, or maybe I’ve just had a harder time letting go of the fantastical than others my age. I’ll probably never feel sure of either.

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Eric Beebe is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He currently works as a substitute teacher for grades K–12 in New Hampshire.

Three Words

by Mike Helsher

"Honey… my water broke."

I’m floating, dreaming, I think.  Something heavy seeps into my nose, sinks down into my stomach. The words swim between my ears, come together behind my eyes—they snap open. I slide my hand over toward my wife. The sheets are damp. There's a smell of roots and early springtime in the bedroom.

“I'm having a contraction," Karen says.

I turn the bedside light on. She’s sitting up, holding her bulbous belly. Her face is twisted. But before I can freak out, she recovers, smiles wide-eyed. She’s glowing. I blink my eyes. I’m not fully awake yet.

"Can you make it to the hospital?" I ask, imagining myself delivering a baby in the car on the side of the road.

"I think so, but we should go," Karen says.

I wake up Jessie. Technically, she’s my step-daughter, but I’m the only father she knows, and she’s my only daughter. She’s four. I tell her she’s about to be a big sister. Karen gets her dressed. I pack bags, put everything in the car.

Karen calls the Portsmouth hospital. They tell her to come right in. She calls her mother to ask if she can watch Jessie. She’ll meet us at the hospital. It’s is a forty-minute drive from Barrington, an eternity that tugs on my innards like a pending hurricane.

I’m doing 75-mph in a 40-mph zone, imagining I get pulled over for speeding and then escorted by the police, sirens wailing, as they should be.

We arrive safely at the emergency room. Karen gets wheeled into the maternity ward. Jessie goes with her grandmother. An eerie calm, the eye of the storm, passes through me. I hope I can remember all the coaching I practiced in the months prior.

The last few minutes take longer than the previous four hours of labor. My coaching skills are worn out. Contractions are only minutes apart, but there’s no progress. The nurse asks Karen to try squatting. I help her into position. She arches her sweaty head over, pushes, screams, squeezes my hand so hard it hurt.

“We’re having a baby!” the nurse who had been with us all night yells over the intercom. I look down to see my son’s head crowning. It looks deformed. There’s some blood. I look away, help Karen lay on her back.

Another nurse enters the room. “The doctor is asleep downstairs, she’ll be right up,” she says. I want to murder them both.

The doctor rushes into the room a few minutes later. “Oh boy,” she says, after surveying my son’s head. “Hold on. I’m going to have to make an incision.” A nurse hands her a scalpel. I close my eyes, lean over and try to say some encouraging words to Karen. I’m crying. My hand hurts.

Another big push and… "Oh, my God!" exclaims one of the nurses, as Jakob makes his entry into the world, with a screech that rattles me to the marrow. The doctor lays him on Karen’s chest. He’s squirming, bloody, and slimy. His head seems normal. I think I might be dreaming again.

The doctor asks me to cut the umbilical cord. I’m squeamish, but I do it. She holds up the dripping placenta, gives me a lecture on the wonders of the embryonic sac.

Another nurse comes into the room. “Oh My God!” she says. Now I think he’s deformed again, because of the bug-eyed look on her face. “I’m just going to clean him up.” She wraps our son up, whisks him off to another room, where I hear gasps and shrieks.

"Is there something wrong with him?" I ask the doctor.

"Oh no," she says, “he looks fine. They’re all placing bets on his weight, is all."

While the doctor is tending to Karen, a nurse comes in and hands me a brand-new baby boy. "Nine pounds, fourteen ounces,” she says. “Everything looks good. Congratulations!"

It’s 6:30 AM, September 19, 1997. He’s ten minutes old. The sun is coming up outside, shining through the cracks in the window blinds. I pull him close to my heart. Three words well up in me in a way they never had before.

"I love you."

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

Student Picks: Burg, Mann, and Robbins

Arun Chittur-- I train technical instructors and study teams large and small, so lately I’ve strayed from my regular selections of fiction and narrative nonfiction in favor of books that illuminate some part of the puzzle that is humanity. My wife recommended The Go-Giver; we were waiting to board a plane from the East to West Coast when I started reading the Foreword. I finished the powerful, yet concise story before we landed four hours later.

The Go-Giver is advertised as a parable, 150 pages written by two businessmen-turned-writers inspired to craft a story from decades spent observing the world. They rely on a diverse cast of characters but focus on two: Joe, a salesman struggling to meet his upcoming quarterly quota, and Pindar, an otherwise hard-to-describe “Old Man” who acts as mentor and coach to many in town. Desperate for counsel on how to meet his numbers, Joe meets with Pindar and is soon absorbed in a week-long lesson on the “Five Laws of Stratospheric Success.” And so ensues an adventure of sorts, a story that follows Joe’s rapid evolution from stereotypical salesman to someone who adds value to others’ lives.

It’s easy to get lost in the narrative, and to forget that it’s mainly fiction designed to make accessible one of life’s simplest but often overlooked principles. I’d recommend this book to anyone, not just for its ability to help provide focus and direction, but for the example it provides in the instructive power of story.

Phil Lemos-- Good Friday is known for its executions. But Gwendolyn Mati, squeaky-voiced stockbroker and protagonist of the Tom Robbins novel Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas, wishes she had already been sentenced to death when the stock market crashes the day before.

It’s bad enough Gwen is sweating out whether she’ll have any clients left when the market re-opens the following Monday. But she also has to spend the weekend searching the streets of Seattle for her missing 300-pound psychic and her slacker boyfriend’s missing pet monkey, while also avoiding a creepy stranger with mind-altering substances who wants to rock her world and take her to Africa with him.

Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas is notable not only for Robbins’ signature irreverent humor and bold use of metaphor, but also for being written in second-person. The use of second-person in fiction is always a gamble, as it can backfire spectacularly. It works here, though, as we’re dropped into an immediate crisis - the stock market crash - and the subversion lends itself well to taking chances with characterization and style. Robbins is known more for other novels, but Half-Asleep is a hidden jewel any fan of comedy in fiction would enjoy.

Coffee Season

by Amy Jarvis

I recently started using a coffee cup that I found at a yard sale. Using previously owned items appeals to me. Perhaps it’s because the coffee cup, with its textured clear glass, etched tulip, and chipped handle, has experience. Regardless of whether or not the item shows signs of age, it was loved once before I found it. I’m drawn to things that have rough edges, things I might be able to fix.

I once dated a recovering heroin addict. I fell for Robin in between the lines and espresso steam of the coffee shop where we both worked. After our first date, I found myself in crowded dive bars every weekend, sitting in front of the stage while his band played. He told me about his past one night in December a couple of months into our relationship. I had parked in his neighbor’s driveway, the car still running, windshield wipers and heat up as high as they could go as they both struggled against a winter storm. He sat back against his seat and stared through the window as told me that he’d used too many times a day to count, anywhere he could find a viable vein; that he had been clean for a year and went to a methadone clinic daily; that he understood if I left. I went inside his mother’s townhouse, dry-heaved over the toilet, wiped the mascara from underneath my eyes, and decided I would stay. Months later, he became distant. He stopped answering calls, became paranoid. After our relationship ended, I realized that I wouldn’t have been able to help him recover.

I purchase my beans from a local coffee shop, River Roasters, which is decorated in rustic-chic barrels and crates, metal high-top tables, and bags of coffee. The shop features a slotted container beside a coffee bar with a sign that invites customers to pay on good faith. Even though River Roasters is in a small, southern town, sometimes I wonder how many people have gotten away with pouring themselves a to-go cup without paying. Almost everyone in town goes to church; it’s possible that someone who would consider walking out could always justify their decision by asking for forgiveness during Sunday service.

After the recovering heroin addict, I met a pastor’s son in my first graduate program, and I believed we had plenty in common. Dave and I would grab a table in the upstairs section of a college bar after classes, sit across from each other and smoke, drink too much, and have the same conversations about the program and our peers. We were lying on his bed one night, and he had opened a collection to one of his favorite poems. He read it softly, his voice deep, serious. He looked at me when he finished, with his dark eyes narrowed, as though he expected me to interpret the work in his words. When I couldn’t, he closed the book and placed it back on his nightstand. He began insulting me every chance he could get. If he didn’t agree with my opinion, I was wrong. If I didn’t want to have sex, I was wrong.  Being with him wasn’t like poetry. It’s easy for someone to change their expression, their tone, to make you feel like everything is your fault.

After I make my purchase, I shove $1.75 into the slotted container and choose between the two coffee options on the bar. I fill my coffee cup to the brim, usually with dark roast, and cover the steaming, murky-black liquid with a plastic cover. I have to make a conscious effort to remember to slip on the cardboard sleeve to avoid being burned. I’ve worked at several coffee shops in the past. I find it interesting that something as simple as placing a sleeve over a steaming hot cup of coffee, had become second nature when I was serving customers, but not for myself.

When the last guy I dated called and asked me on our first date, he told me he always thought I was beautiful. Marlon was someone I had been interested in for months, but it was a former friend who gave him my number. He planned dates to fancy restaurants and rooftop bars where we would sit at wrought iron tables overlooking the ocean, and talk about our childhoods and future goals until three in the morning. One night at a hookah lounge on the boulevard, we ordered bottles of white wine and lounged around on the couches that lined the sidewalk outside. I leaned into him, listened to his breathing while he taught me lines of Portuguese. I never asked how to tell him how much I liked him in his native language. Then he took his ex-girlfriend out for her birthday, and wouldn’t meet my eyes when I asked if he slept with her. His admission came a week afterward at a bar we frequented. I sat across from him and ran my fingers over his arm, memorized his skin as he explained that he needed time.

Even though it’s been almost a year, Marlon called me about a week ago. Said it had been a long time and that he wanted to take me out for a drink. I agreed. I wanted to spend time with him again. He asked me to call him so we could make plans. I did, but he never answered.

I read recently that there’s not necessarily a coffee season, that harvesting is a constant process. As months pass, coffee crops lose what distinguishes one from another, and they fade. But another season means change, and different types of coffee to discover.  But maybe what I need for now is to grow before another season starts.

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

Student Picks: Drown and Atwood

Derrick Craigie-- Merle Drown’s Lighting the World tells the story of Wade Rule, a trailer park kid with a toxic mother and disinterested father. He becomes fixated on the idea of escaping to Vermont to live with his wheelchair-bound uncle, the one family member to show him untempered kindness. 

A fictionalized account of real events that played out in a mid-1980s Concord, NH high school, Wade Rule is a well-intentioned kid that blends into the background. In scheming how he will make his way to Vermont, he plans to bring his assumed girlfriend, Maria, with him. Maria pities him, nothing else. With a pocketful of cash, an arranged ride, and his hunting shotgun, Wade goes into school to “rescue” Maria.  It doesn’t go as planned.

I’m from the North Country of New Hampshire. I knew kids just like Wade, and Drown’s sharp prose and world-weary voice captures the desperation of the kids that grow up in New Hampshire’s hidden poverty. My heart broke for Wade and Maria, even more so when I learned Wade’s story was lost in the news after Christa McAuliffe, a Concord High School teacher, was killed one month later in the Challenger tragedy.  

Drown resurrects Wade’s story with care and authenticity, and for the sake of all the lost kids, it should be experienced.   

K. A. Hamilton-- Unbaby. Prayvaganza. Particicution. This is the ilk of words Margaret Atwood invented to describe the dystopic, patriarchal future of The Handmaid’s Tale.

As I read this book, I was keenly aware of its publication date of 1985. Although the story has recently re-entered the collective consciousness due to the Hulu mini-series, I remember seeing the hardcover on library shelves as a kid. The act of reading futurist fiction from the past is a little like discovering a message in a bottle, or long-lost graffiti on the wall. There’s a sense of shared space, but lost time; parallel lines that never quite intersect. But this particular world evokes a feeling that the not-too-distant future may have not yet been avoided, only delayed.

Although it is a speculative work, The Handmaid’s Tale reads like historical fiction that touches a nerve. Atwood achieves a level of uncanny realism in what is revealed or implied in the protagonist’s world. It’s almost real enough to reach out and touch, as the struggles of her characters hit so close to the ideological debates of today. Atwood reminds us of the timeless truth that “there is more than one kind of freedom ... freedom to and freedom from.” It is up to us to choose which one.

67 North Main Street

by Dominique Heuermann

There’s this house, actually, it's more like a mini-mansion with five bedrooms and four bathrooms. Each bathroom has a vintage clawfoot tub with Victorian brass feet. I know, I’m drooling too. It’s located in upstate New York, a place I have never been, but a place that I wouldn’t mind living. It has four seasons a year. That’s right, four. That is three more seasons than I get to experience on Hawaii, my island in the sun. Not one or two with intermittent cold spells that make people reach for a light sweater, but four whole entire seasons! Glorious falls and winters in all the spectacular, color changing and snow blanketing glory anyone could ever imagine. And the house? It was built in 1865, the former house of business tycoons by the name of Hale, who made their money in the dry goods market and coal mines. Having no children, the brothers then left the house to their widowed, childless sister. It’s literally known as the Hale House. There’s no tragic history associated with it as far as I can tell, so no danger of weeping spirits haunting the hallways after midnight, but who knows? Family secrets have a way of peeking out behind doors when you least expect them.

I really want it. I don’t know what appeals to me more; The large wrap around porch, the original wood fire burning stoves, or the acres of land behind it. Did I mention the inlaid all-wood flooring dating from circa 1900? Oh yeah, it’s the real deal. I want it…and yet it’s been sitting unsold for over 800 days. Should that worry me? Should it also worry me that there are only 1600 people that live in the town where the house is located? I don’t think I care about that to be honest, as long as there’s a Target or Walmart within driving distance. I’d be too busy working the three acres surrounding the property to care that I had no one stopping by my door to evangelize me or sell me the latest vacuum. I would plant my vegetable garden and fruit trees next to my chicken coop and watch the sun set while I drank a glass of sweet tea.

 My springs would be spent planting tomatoes and cucumbers for my summer harvests. My summers would be spent planting pumpkins for the fall and canning tomato sauces, salsas, and pickles. I wouldn’t care about the lack of neighbors because I’d have too many treasures from my trees to can and make into jams, jellies, and sauces. The house would become a sanctuary and a haven. With five bedrooms I’m sure it could house others who feel the need to run away as well.

It’s a bargain, too! Only $199,999! Hell, that’s less than half what we paid for our 3-bedroom townhouse which barely fits our family of five. Did I mention our housing association that likes to fine people for things as ridiculous as having tint on your garage windows, growing unauthorized flowers, or keeping a pair of shoes on your porch? They’re the gestapo of housing authorities all for the low, low price of $350 a month. That’s on top of your pricey mortgage or rent. The Hale House has no housing association. It has breezes through tall grass which bend the wild flowers allowed to flourish around fences. It has no authority to answer to except me and Mother Nature, and I’m sure she’d agree shoes belong on the porch.

The winters would be cold and isolating. I could revel in quiet solitude next to a roaring blaze in my wood burning fire places. I’d even take up drinking tea, or bourbon, whatever one drinks on cold winter mornings to shake the chill out of your bones. The Hales wouldn’t judge me, in fact, I’m sure they would toast to my good health as long as I keep the fires burning, the wood flooring intact, and the claw footed bath tubs clean. What a small price to pay for seasons, solitude, and sanctuary.

I’ve been stalking the online listing for this house for months now, plotting my escape from my citified existence to plant sunflowers and pumpkins, o feed chickens at dawn and tuck them in at sunset. I’m packed and ready, the Hale’s are waiting to welcome me home.

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

One Rock at a Time

by Heather Lynn Horvat

When my husband and I moved to Arizona several years ago, he suggested we hike the Grand Canyon. I laughed. "Experience that without me," I said. I wasn't an outdoors person.

As a teen living in central Pennsylvania, I had dabbled in the outdoors, mostly as a means to escape adult eyes. Once, I hiked near a dam in the woods and black snakes slithered across the trail so the ground itself looked like black ocean waves. My boyfriend carried me on his back. I heard the squeak of a tree branch bending and opened my eyes to see a snake dangling above me. There were so many snakes that day that I still question if it was a bad dream. Nightmare or reality, the memory lingered and I stopped seeking nature.

About a year ago, the panic attacks started. Somehow I had become fearful of more than just nature. I now feared crowds, but also feared being alone. I feared my own Self, and the fear paralyzed me. I refused to admit to anyone that I needed help. The attacks worsened in severity and intensity. I stopped writing. Or, the words stopped coming.

"You need to get out of your head," my husband said. "Make new friends. Find a new hobby."

2018 began the year of new: new friends, new freelance work, new hairdresser, new workout routines. I went on a girls' weekend to Vegas barely knowing the girls but embracing the opportunity that presented itself. The freelance work I submitted earned praise and a check. My body boasted muscle definition in places I didn't know could be toned. On the outside, I looked like I had my shit together.

Since my husband is an outdoors person, I agreed to go on a short hike with him to Wave Cave. Like the name implies, there is a cave with a jutting rock in the shape of a large surf wave. A touristy destination per Google and rated at moderate difficulty, I figured it wouldn't be as bad as Camelback, the mountain that left me with three scarred gashes on my left knee two years ago.

Arizona hiking is much different than Pennsylvania hiking. Here, the desert mountains are rocky at best, boulderous with little shade and breathtaking views at high elevations. Wave Cave possessed all the qualities of desert: gravelly, gradual incline to lull you into mental safety until the final elevation gain that's steep enough to make you wonder why you agreed to this.

Finding my footing in the rocks, my thighs screamed while I thought, What the hell I am doing? My husband didn't ask if we should turn around; I'm sure he knew that I might have said yes.

Once we reached the cave and I heaved, trying to catch my breath, I looked back from where we came. The trail was obscure between the jutting rocks and boulders. The desert beyond was serene. Houses and cityscape were further away and didn't seem as claustrophobic as it sometimes feels when you live in a cookie-cutter neighborhood. For the first time in a long time I could breathe.

Ten people shared the cave space with us. I kept to myself huddled against the back wall and ate a snack. A woman about my age, but more fit, more hiker ready, posed on the wave while her partner snapped pictures with his phone. Her laugh made me want to laugh.

When it was my turn to pose on the wave, she offered to take our picture. No judgment in her eyes that I didn't belong, because at this moment, on top of this section of mountain, everyone belonged.

It could've been hunger and thirst or aching muscles, but I felt a euphoric rush.

"Will you hike again?" My husband asked.

I've completed eight hikes since Wave Cave, some of them without my husband. As soon as I finish one, whether three miles or seven miles, rocky or boulder hopping, I begin planning the next. The panic attacks haven't stopped completely, but words are coming back to me.

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Heather Lynn Horvat is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. She currently freelances while writing her next novel. 

Student Picks: Thomas and Gibbons

Jemiscoe Chambers-Black-- The Hate U Give, written by Angie Thomas, follows the novel’s protagonist, sixteen-year-old Starr Carter, as she toggles between two worlds: the black impoverished neighborhood where she lives with her parents and brothers, and the wealthy private school in the suburbs.

Starr leaves a party with her childhood friend, Khalil Harris. Starr and Khalil get pulled over by One-Fifteen (nicknamed by Starr from the police officer’s badge number), Brian Cruise, Jr., for a busted taillight. Khalil is manhandled out of his car and then shot three times in the back. Starr becomes the sole witness to his murder and deals with the pressure of having to testify against the police officer to a grand jury.

The truth casts a shadow… people like us in situations like this become hashtags, but they rarely get justice. I think we all wait for that one time… when it ends right.

Maybe this can be it.

These stories are all too familiar, and Angie Thomas doesn’t suddenly decide to give this story the justice that is deserved, tying Khalil’s case with an indictment. That would too easy and not at all realistic. Instead, she stays authentic within the confines of social realism, shining a light on the festering divide of American society and police brutality. The Hate U Give is a young adult book that I recommend for everyone.

Katie Fenton-- I was in search of the perfect piece to read and analyze for the third semester close reading essay, and Kaye Gibbons’ novel Ellen Foster was the recommendation. The story follows the childhood of the narrator herself, Ellen, as she bluntly deals with multitudinous experiences of loss, pain, and torture, as well as the responsibility of raising herself in a world of adults who choose not to.

As a child, Ellen lives with an alcoholic, abusive father and a sick mother who takes her own life in order to relieve herself from her pain and her awful husband. Ellen is bounced from house to house and rejected by her own family time and time again.

Eventually, Ellen finds her escape from this fate, and is able to find out what it is like to truly be part of a family. By no means is Ellen Foster a feel-good novel. However, it is one that profoundly fits into the childhood rhetoric of many of today’s youth. This novel is a worthwhile read and an intense reminder that we’re all just trying to find a place to call ours.

Shopping Carts and Good Feelings

by Phil Lemos

I have this part-time job where I change ads on supermarket shopping carts.  The company assigned me a route of 15 stores in the Worcester area.  Every month they send boxes of ads and an email spelling out which ads go in which stores.  I spend a couple of hours at each store swapping out the old ads for new ones. 

I’ll be working on a carriage in the shopping cart vestibule when a customer asks me what aisle the quinoa is in.  I tell them that I work for a third-party vendor, not the supermarket, so I really don’t know but I’m sure the customer service desk can point them in the right direction; and they call me an unhelpful jerk and tell me they’ll be sure to speak to my supervisor about me; which they won’t because, as previously mentioned, I don’t work for the supermarket.

Today, I’m ad-changing the Stop & Shop around the corner from my place.  Near the store entrance is a guy at a desk with pamphlets and a clipboard.  I avoid eye contact to discourage him from talking to me and start working on carts.  A few minutes later, a woman comes in looking for a carriage.

“What’s that guy hitting people up for?” she asks me.

“He’s trying to get people to sign a petition to get a candidate on the ballot this fall,” I say.

“Jesus.  For what?”

“I dunno.  I was trying to avoid him.”  I slide another ad into a cart frame, thinking she’s on her way to the deli.  I’d grab another cart but she’s in my way.

“People better wake up.  This country’s going to hell in a handbasket,” she says.

“For sure.”  I really thought she’d be inside by now.

“I mean aren’t you disgusted with all that’s going on?”

Maximizing efficiency in this job is an art form.  If you go early in the morning or late at night, the store is less busy and there are more empty carts.  The downside to that, though, is that it means about 300 carts are jammed into a tiny vestibule and that gives you no room to maneuver and you end up doing cart gymnastics to get to the way-back carriages.  That’s no fun, and who the hell wants to get up at 5am to slide ads into shopping-cart frames?  It’s easier to go in the afternoon.  A lot of the carts are in use, but there’s more room to move the others around.

This lady is messing with my process.  She’s beginning to gain a following.  Four or five other customers are now listening to her rant and getting similarly fired up.

“This has gotta stop.”

“Are you registered to vote?”

“Damn right I am.”

“We need to get organized.”

I’m trapped.  I try to gesture toward the other carts a couple of times but they’re not paying any attention because this woman is on a roll.  All she’s missing is a bullhorn.  While I’m an hourly employee, it’d be a tough sell to my bosses that it took me 9 hours to ad-change this store because some woman started a political rally in the cart vestibule.

The demonstration is now up to about seven or eight people.  The guy outside definitely struck a nerve.  Meanwhile, the store manager has also walked over to see what’s going on.  I’ve had enough.  I’d like to be home in time to watch the Celtics playoff game that starts in about 90 minutes.

“Excuse me!” I say.  “I’m kinda wedged in between everybody here, and I have to swap out the ads on all these carts.  Is there any way I could get you to scooch over just a bit?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were another customer,” the first lady says. 

She and her posse head inside to change the world.  The rally in front of me dissolves.  I remember a simpler time when politics didn’t interfere with part-time jobs.  An era of good feelings.  This is why we need to get James Monroe back in the White House.

---

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

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

By Margaret McNellis

I first joined Facebook right after the site was made available outside of Harvard. Users still needed a valid school email to register, but I was an undergrad student at Southern Connecticut State University at the time, so joining was easy. For the most part, I connected with classmates and we griped about which teachers we didn’t like.

Then it was opened to the general public. Cue the kitten videos! They were enjoyable for a while, but now I feel like I’ve seen them all. I’ve seen the one with the cat jumping and landing on its feet (hint: I knew it would do that) and I’ve seen the one where the cat gives its owner a do-you-dare-me glance before pushing a glass off the counter (hint: I knew it would do that). Basically, cat videos are cute but plot wise, they’re pretty predictable.

Then came the “Share this if you love Jesus” posts. My personal beliefs aside, I had trouble picturing Jesus in heaven on Facebook checking to see how many people liked and shared posts about him. So I left Facebook.

That lasted about four days. One of my friends got me hooked on Candy Crush. I returned to Facebook, sheepish but eager to prove I could “win” Candy Crush without spending a dime. I played for a whole summer and got to level one-hundred-something. I broke up with Candy Crush when I realized just how much time it ate up. Shortly after, I broke up with Facebook again.

Wouldn’t you know it, a game lured me back in! Words with Friends. I convinced myself that because it’s like Scrabble, it’s intellectual, so it was okay to get hooked. I bet you can see where this is going. The whole cycle repeated with Trivia Crack. Yes, I know there are apps for these, but sometimes I was at work at a 9-5 that left me feeling like my brains were about to ooze out of my ears. The distraction on a PC when I couldn’t take out my phone was helpful.

Eventually, I stopped playing freemium games and games like Words with Friends. The truth is, I’d much rather sit down and play some Scrabble, in the same room as friends. I don’t need those games to last for weeks and I enjoy the human-to-human element of real board games. So, bored with predictable cat videos and done forever with Facebook games, what was left to hold my interest?

Groups. I participated in and/or ran over forty groups on Facebook, some more successful than others. However, something happened in mid-April. I read an article about Mark Zuckerberg that turned me off to both Facebook and Instagram. I downloaded my activity—because I don’t want to lose that picture where my friend and I are making funny faces with fake glowing crowns on our heads in a Facebook video chat—and I sent a message to my Facebook friends whose offsite contact information I didn’t already have.

I shut down my Facebook on April 13, 2018. I don’t miss the cat videos. I don’t miss the games. I do miss the groups, but they required so much time that I felt stressed trying to freelance part-time, TA, and write for my MFA submissions. I made time for those things, but at the expense of extra reading time or sleep.

Life without Facebook is way less stressful, and after Zuckerberg announced that he’s launching a Facebook dating service, I feel like I jumped ship at the right moment.

Incidentally, since closing my Facebook account, I’ve stopped watching as much television. I’ve started playing piano again and writing short stories again. Facebook sucked me in almost 13 years ago, but this time, I’ve come up for more than one breath of fresh air and I know I’ve kicked it for good. I’d rather write stories than updates any day.

---

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

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.