"Sapphire" is a Nickname for a Hands-On-Her Hips, In-Charge Black Woman

When I moved to New York City in 2004, I decided to take a poetry class through the New School’s Continuing Education Program. On the first night of workshop with Marie Ponsot, a spitfire formalist poet who turned ninety in April, we went around the room and introduced ourselves. One of my classmates was named Sapphire.

This isn’t one of those I knew-her-when-stories. By 2004, Push had been a best-seller for almost a decade. But I kept my cool and acted as if it was nothing to be in a poetry workshop with Sapphire.

Why was Sapphire, who also by that time had published three books of poetry and was a professor of poetry herself, taking a poetry workshop with the likes of me? The same reason the rest of it were: because Marie Ponsot was teaching it.

I loved Sapphire. She was a generous, curious, and insightful classmate, a careful and caring reader. I’m thinking about her now because I saw Precious this weekend.

I didn’t really want to watch the film. I read the book soon after it came out and the story is really upsetting. I feared the film would be graphic, too disturbing. But I didn’t find it so. It represents the characters humanly, stays true to the book, and shows the tragedy of systems in our culture that many of us may prefer to believe are not part of our culture: government social work systems, education systems, incestuous family systems, racist social systems. Read more »

A year after my graduation, I’m still in Michigan, still working for the State government, still espousing my big dreams: of working for a literary journal, or becoming a literary agent, of working at an independent press, of getting another advanced degree and teaching. (I think part of my problem is indecision. Another is massive student loan debt.) These are all paths I can take (hypothetically), and with which I would be most pleased.

At first I put this all on hold because it just wasn’t realistic (so said I) to move to a new city with a low-paying job and an unspeakable monthly loan payment. Plus, Michigan came with free rent, a nearby literary community that was easy to break into (hi, Ann Arbor!), and tickets to Spartan football games. A year, I said, then I’ll do something new.

And I am planning something new—it’s just not anything that was already on my list. Instead, I’ve decided to spend a year in France* teaching English. Well, technically it’s nine months, but my visa will be for a year. If my application is accepted, I’ll leave a year from this September. I’m young, I thought. If I don’t do something like this now, while my entire life is pretty much unattached, when will I do it?

Of course, I don’t know that much about teaching English to non-native speakers. I’ve done some tutoring to very advanced speakers before, but never to kids (8 to 18 years). But I figure an interest in language, in saying things, can only help. Plus, I’ll only be working 12 hours per week while there, so hypothetically I could come home with a finished book, or at least a bunch of new stories. And then I’ll get on to that list of mine.

* For anyone who is now saying, “How awesome!” a working knowledge of French is required for this program. But there are similar programs in (I think) Italy, Spain, and Austria, for Italian, Spanish, and German speakers. Also, Finland offers a program where you don’t need any language knowledge. Just English.

In the car:

• “It was a good little car, except that you had to push it everywhere.”
• A neighbor in patched overalls and a purple cap approaches the car with a couple of newspapers in his hand, says, “Now, I know you can’t start your day without your Wall Street Journal,” and sticks around to chat for a few minutes before we’re on our way to the aquarium.

At the aquarium:

• “Where were you?” – “A kid was asking me questions.” – “And you knew the answers?” – “I read them off the wall.”
• A boy, maybe as old as twelve, is the oldest kid there, too big to push between people and press his nose against the glass the way the smaller kids do. Instead, he crosses his arms and sighs when adults are in his way, says “excuse me” like he’s reciting it, and generally makes his presence known.
• A baby with more hair than seems humanly possible watches everyone from the safety of his mother’s shoulder. Read more »

James Frey once again makes regrettable comments about memoir, to Oprah.  Knock it off, Frey.  Memoirists are allowed leniency in interpretation of events–a subjective view of the objective–but they are not allowed to falsify facts.  All right?  Watch him wax whatever on Oprah online.

Noreen Malone has a hypnotically rhythmic piece over at Slate on the overuse of the em dash.  By not-so-subtly employing an em dash in sentence after sentence, she builds a humorous cadence to the essay while making her argument.  Very meta.

The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that’s not yet complete?

And very funny.  I’ve always used the em dash mostly because–as Malone points out–it’s almost impossible to use incorrectly.  It’s also extremely addicting–like tapping into one’s inner DFW–to pause a thought, add something related, and then finish the sentence.  Okay–since it’s her joke–I’ll stop.

it’s friday.  and fridays should be fun.  that’s why god invented the internet.  and why i’m going to share it with you.  so i’d like to start a little series of “things i like online” if for no other reason than i’ll never again have a reason to not post something weekly to this fine, fine blog we call bark.  so now you can look forward to occasional (but complete!) works of fiction, poetry, and music, but probably not pornography—all conveniently linked to from your favorite place on the whole wide web.  you’re welcome.

today we start things off with “the hamburger story,” a bit of excellent flash fiction that i heard the author, lauren becker, read in washington dc this past winter as part of the AWP conference.  it was originally published by wigleaf, but you can also read the entire piece on fictionaut (with a note from the writer and links to four more of her stories).  here’s an excerpt:

All you seem to remember is that I was mean.  You even made me ugly.  I like that you made them way different sizes.  You know I always thought one was bigger.  I like that you gave me a tiny nose and big feet, and that I always wore the same green coat.  I like that I didn’t sing in the car, or eat oatmeal with blueberries or take baths instead of showers.

 

Laura likes that shirt so much she's taking the original and a painting of it.

The rapture took a rain check last week. And either I’ve been left behind or I just didn’t notice the collapse of society, the disappearance of the Good People, which is totally possible given my preference for the Complicated People.

So the rapture didn’t come, but things have still been fairly Biblical in the South—the sky turns a muted purple and green, the sirens start, a tornado comes, the river/country/downtown floods, repeat. It’s the time of the year when people lock themselves in the bathroom with a mattress (for protection), a cat and laptop (for company), and a bottle of Maker’s Mark (for redemption).

To the tune of warning sirens, I’ve been sucked into the dramas of these photographs from the Burning House website. Users submit photos that answer the following question: “If your house was burning, what would you take with you? It’s a conflict between what’s practical, valuable and sentimental. What you would take reflects your interests, background and priorities. Think of it as an interview condensed into one question.”

The photos create these neat visual character sketches. They also remind me of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and a mentor I once had who was a Columbian political exile. Read more »

If you didn’t have a chance to see Laura Read during Get Lit!, there are other ways to experience her wonderful poetry. She’s published in Poet Lore, The Spook River Poetry Review, The New Ohio Review, and Prank. As the winner of the 2010 Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award, she also has a brand new book out called The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You. 

I know Laura as one of the advisors for Spokane Falls Community College creative arts magazine Wire Harp, and as cohost of Spokane’s Beacon Hill Reading Series. Even if I wasn’t familiar with her name though, the title of her book would make me want to read her work.

I’m a poetry reader newbie, but have been reaching for that shorter prose form lately because of how it influences my own writing. Sometimes when I read longer works of fiction or non-fiction, I find that the voice or style of whatever work I’m currently perusing creeps into my own writing. Poetry doesn’t have the same effect, but what does happen is that I pay a lot more attention to my own line-level stuff. Poets spend much time choosing each word on a line and balancing it perfectly against what came before and after it. Reading their carefully crafted cadence of words automatically makes me write my own sentences with more care.

What I like most about Read’s work is that in her beautiful balance of words, there is something whimsical that attracts me to the page, but underneath that deceptive lightness I find a weight of meaning and sometimes a dark twist. The poem Paper Clothes is an example of this: Read more »

When Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story came out last year, it was introduced to the people of the Interwebs with what was pretty much the book trailer to end all book trailers. Said trailer – which can be found after the jump – is charming, hilarious and has James Franco in it (as all good book trailers should, duh) as well cameos from a lot of real writers who I guess are sort of famous too.

Now in honor of the release of the paperback edition of Super Sad True Love Story, we get the trailer’s sequel, staring Shteyngart, Paul Giamatti, and a wiener dog in a bow tie. As is often the case with sequels, this one doesn’t quite live up to first trailer (no James Franco), but it’s still pretty funny. And with a nice message at the end.

Read more »

Kenneth Calhoun has one of those resumes that’s so wide-ranging it’s hard to summarize – graphic designer, professor, writer, interactive storyteller, filmmaker. His short stories are how I came to him, most recently the story “Then” in the new Tin House, which is a spooky, elliptical tale about parenting anxiety and sleeplessness.

Kenneth Calhoun

His story “Nightblooming,” which was originally published in The Paris Review, was selected for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011. He has created an interactive online story, “Big Swing,” based on one of his short-shorts. And he’s an assistant professor of graphic design at Lasell College in Newton, Mass.

Calhoun graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

Your story, “Then,” draws me back, in part, because I’m trying to sort it out, and can’t fully or exactly do that. How do you find a balance between maintaining mystery and telling the story? How do you suggest or signal what lies behind what’s on the page?

The design of the story, which was inspired by the insomnia theme, is meant to suggest that it was a whole, linear thing that has been cut up and re-arranged out of sequence, with parts left out. This is the impression it hopes to give, though it’s an illusion. That is, it never was a whole thing that was cut up and re-arranged. Instead, I just wrote flashes and glimpses—sometimes in chronological order, sometimes not—knowing that the gaps and all the connective tissue would be added by the reader’s mind. The reader’s mind would also try to organize the story and struggle to make sense of it, if the reader cared enough about the situation and the characters.

Read more »