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The Exploits of Nicole “Nick” Doughty

Guest Post by Lynn Levin

What a thrill it is to read Nola Schiff’s magical, vivid, fast-paced novel A Whistling Girl. Set in Southern Rhodesia in the early 1950s, the story follows the exploits and coming-of-age struggles of a young girl named Nicole “Nick” Doughty.

Smart, daring, and serious, Nick, who hates dresses, is the leader of her gang of kids and eggs them on to all sorts of misadventures. More than that, Nick dreams of befriending the intrepid journalist Sarah J. Bridgeworthy, then journeying through Africa on a dangerous mission to interview members of the Mau Mau. Nick follows S. J. through news reports and her own imaginings to the journalist’s final tragic end, which Nick takes harder than any trauma that befalls her, including being raped by the brother of one of her gang members.

Setting and society play key roles in this novel. Schiff weaves a tapestry rich with the flowers, trees, birds, and other wildlife of the region. Her young heroine never fails to notice the social inequality among the races, and her world intersects with those from many different walks of life and ethnic backgrounds. Young Nick is part Peter Pan, Huck Finn, and Tom Sawyer. I feared for her, but more than anything I cheered for her in this page-turner of a book.

A Whistling Girl by Nola Schiff. BookBaby, July 2020.

Reviewer bio: Lynn Levin’s most recent book is the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020).

Life & Death in Sharp Focus

Guest Post by M.G. Noles

Sunita Puri’s memoir That Good Night: Life And Medicine in the Eleventh Hour is poetic, beautiful, and insightful.

The book traces Dr. Puri’s journey into the world of palliative care. Offering a collection of wisdom stories taken from her work with the dying, she gives us a view of death as a moment of dignity and grace.

Dr. Puri is the doctor whom hospitals call when a patient enters the terminal phase of illness. Some patients are antagonistic toward her presence and despise her, thinking she is encouraging them to give up. Yet, she is actually there to give dying patients and their loved ones the strength to know when it is time to let go. It is a fine distinction to make, but she does it beautifully.

In this memoir, Puri shares spiritual and philosophical insights into the dying process. She demystifies and unfolds the process of death as a journey we must all make. In so doing, she teaches lessons about the ways to embrace life until we must release it. And in that release can come great peace.

As she writes, “For we will each age and die, as my father told me years ago. We will lose the people we love. No matter our ethnicity, place of residence, income, religion, or skin color, our human lives are united by brevity and finitude, and the certainty of loss. Just as we strive for dignity and purpose throughout our lives, well before the light fades, we can bring this same dignity and purpose to our deaths, as we each journey into our own good night.”

As we all struggle to make sense of death and dying during this long and arduous road of the pandemic, Dr. Sunita Puri’s memoir shines a light in the darkness.

That Good Night: Life And Medicine in the Eleventh Hour by Sunita Puri. Penguin Random House, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: M.G. Noles is a freelance writer. whose work appears on Medium’s The Pine Wood Review (https://medium.com/@writinglife). She also reviews books for GoodReads.com (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/118714169-mg-noles).

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Tyranny from Good Intensions

Guest Post by Claudia Gollini

Animal Farm by George Orwell was first published in 1945 and will be celebrating its seventieth birthday next year.

One of Orwell’s finest works, it is a political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin.

Parents need to know that Animal Farm is a biting satire of totalitarianism, written in the wake of World War II and published amid the rise of Soviet Russia. Although it tells a fairly simple story of barnyard animals trying to manage themselves after rebelling against their masters, the novel demonstrates how easily good intentions can be subverted into tyranny.

The fable is alive with brilliant touches. At first the victorious pigs write out a set of revolutionary rules, the seventh and most important is of which is “All animals are equal.” It was a brilliant idea to have the clever pigs simplify this for the dimmer animals (the sheep, hens and ducks) into the motto “Four legs good, two legs bad.” But it was a real stroke of genius for Orwell to later have the pigs amending these rules, most notoriously amending rule seven to become “All animals are equal—but some are more equal than others.“ This says something so profound about human beings and our laws and rules that it can be applied anywhere where laws are corrupted and distorted by the powerful.

The book seems relatively simple on the first read but there are several layers of complexity to represent the Soviet government. The novel contains a fair amount of satire and humor, which personally is one of the main reasons why I recommend reading it.

Animal Farm by George Orwell. 1945.

Reviewer bio: Claudia Gollini is a makeup artist, fashion/beauty blogger and journalist, editor and writer, and body painter of events and TV show (Make-up Deborah-Gucci and Castrocaro TV talent show, body painter to Art gallery ‘Spazio l’altrove’ and TV show Sky 869 Village festival and another fairs & exhibition on Italy).

Escape from Reality with Classic Fantasy

Guest Post by Chang Shih Yen

Perhaps you need a little bit of an escape from reality at the moment. This is a good book to do that. The Princess and the Goblin is a classic fantasy novel written by Scottish writer George MacDonald (1824-1905). It first appeared in 1871, before being published in book form in 1872.

The Princess and the Goblin tells the story of Princess Irene who is rescued from a goblin attack by a miner boy called Curdie. The book tells of a battle between goblins who live underground and humans. With her new friend Curdie and some magical help, Princess Irene must find a way to defeat the goblins and save her father’s kingdom.

Despite being written in the Victorian era, the language in this book is very easy to follow. You can’t tell that it was written almost 150 years ago. This was a very enjoyable book. It’s the type of book where illustrations are not necessary because it’s better to use your own imagination to picture all the goblins and other creatures. This classic fantasy novel inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. George MacDonald wrote at least 50 books, but most of his work is not remembered now, which is a shame. George MacDonald deserves more recognition.

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. 1872.

Reviewer bio: Chang Shih Yen is a writer from Malaysia, seeing through the pandemic in New Zealand. She writes a blog at https://shihyenshoes.wordpress.com/.

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Finding Relief in Anne Kilfoyle’s Fiction

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

In the early days of lockdown, I had friends comment to me that they felt almost a sense of relief. Despite the tragedies reported in the news and the uncertainty of the new world we found ourselves in, they felt like they were able to breathe for the first time—to spend days resting or creating or getting personal work done or fully focusing on their families, none of which they were able to accomplish during the busyness of everyday life.

In the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of Salamander, Anne Kilfoyle’s story “Double-Yolked” reminded me of those conversations and feelings. As narrator Keera and her husband Jesse prepare for an emergency evacuation following an unnamed global threat, she reflects:

The last three days have been good days, some of the best. We have been holding our breath but also our problems got smaller. [ . . . ] Our biggest fear wasn’t mass annihilation, it was that we’d have to go back to how things were, back to our jobs and our lives [ . . . ].

Despite their lack of preparation, she feels okay with what’s coming to them, feels capable knowing they have each other, now somehow stronger together, as they move forward.

The short piece is relatable and timely: empty store shelves, last minute orders from Amazon in an attempt to ease the new worries, the uncertainty that surrounds them, and that strange relief of being released from normal life. It can be difficult to read disaster-themed writing while living through a similar situation, but Kilfoyle manages to cover the topic in a way that’s casual and comforting without adding to the current, similar stresses.

A Dose of Fantastic

Guest Post by Christopher Linforth

In her debut collection Collective Gravities, Chloe N. Clark offers a dose of the fantastic into the ordinary, and sometimes humdrum, lives of her characters. Twenty-five aesthetically similar stories make up the book, which dilutes the power of the collection as a whole, but shows the range of Clark’s fascination with parallel universes, zombies, and the breakdown of relationships. The strongest stories reveal Clark’s gift as a storyteller and as a purveyor of the weird.

In the collection’s opener “Balancing Beams,” the astronaut narrator Ava struggles with an unknown, debilitating ailment in a futuristic America. In a beautifully written flash of insight, she tells us:

I couldn’t speak for a moment. The weight of words on my tongue. In the Out, there had been so many times I fumbled words, slurred them. They don’t tell you that zero-gravity even affects your tongue. Your mouth can feel so heavy when you try to say something.

Other stories seem to take their cues from B-movies and horror stories and the world of science fiction. Throughout the collection, Clark remakes these historically male-dominated forms to center her stories on women and the deleterious effects of culture on their bodies.

Clark’s debut is a mixed collection, yet it shines so brightly in spots that it’s clear she is destined to wow us with her next book.

Collective Gravities by Chloe N. Clark, Word West Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Christopher Linforth is the author of three story collections, The Distortions (Orison Books, 2021), winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize, Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020), and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014).

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Narrative Pattern & Design

Guest Post by Anthony DiAntonio

Jane Alison’s Mender, Spiral, Explode, is a nonfiction, creative writing guidebook for both writers and avid readers alike. Alison argues that there are multiple ways to craft a narrative, other than the Aristotelian “masculo-sexual arc” we have all come to know and love. Narratives can follow many patterns that we see in nature, like the spiral, the fractal, or even the meandering trail of snails. Alison provides examples from multiple contemporary works of fiction to prove her premise, including Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, and Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. Starting each part with a personal reflection, Alison connects her own experience with these patterns to further validate their influence on human life. Through exquisite vocabulary that fuels a powerful, humorous, and direct work, Jane Alison’s Mender, Spiral, Explode is a must-read for those who admire pattern and design in any narrative.

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison. Catapult, April 2019.

Reviewer bio: Anthony DiAntonio is a high school English teacher at Cumberland County Technical Education Center in New Jersey. He is also currently studying for his Masters in Writing Arts at Rowan University. To achieve his Masters, he will be completing a novel focused on mindfulness, positivity, and moving forward from emotional trauma.

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They the Mothers

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

From Issue 38 of Bellevue Literary Review, Kathi Hansen’s “We the Mothers” (honorable mention in the 2020 BLR Prize) imagines the mothers of boys who have been accused of sexual assault. They meet together in book-club-like fashion, able to speak freely with one another when no one else understands.

Hansen writes of them in a collective. They speak of their sons as one being as they look back to their childhoods, their teenage years, and the ways their boys were raised in their homes. Only when one woman begins to question her son’s innocence does the story diverge, separating her from the rest of the group, finally naming her apart from the others. I found this to be a cool, well done device for this piece, and a unique point of view to have on these now familiar stories.

Despite focusing on this side of the story, Hansen does a good job of avoiding too much sentimentality. The mothers tell their collective story without demanding understanding or sympathy from the reader. After all, as they point out, only those in their group can truly understand.

Witness. Vulnerable. Mystery.

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Witness.

Fred Marchant views the inexplicable and gives us the air it breathed in his poems in Said Not Said. I have been looking at this book, reading it, studying with Marchant, and looking at it again for the past three years. Most of that time I worked as a graveyard-shift custodian cleaning university buildings. Now, I live at my parents’ and take care of the both of them during the days of the pandemic. What Marchant sees in his life is revealed in this book. He sees what is not fair. He sees reality but events he cannot control. Here we are in 2020: sitting ducks. Marchant’s poems get into the feeling of this but also access the profound stability of peace and understanding. In “Fennel” he writes:

At the end maybe you were thinking
of Whitman and his claim that dying
was luckier than we had supposed.
Or not. Or not. Here is the bee . . .

Marchant shows us that nature with a capital N intercedes, maybe not to change the course of events he witnesses, but to carry an event to another place, a different emotion. Continue reading “Witness. Vulnerable. Mystery.”

What Is Real?

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Rereading The Intangibles by Elaine Equi, during the pandemic, it suddenly reads like a meditation, yet it was published “before” in 2019. Well, it matches the feeling of ennui of the pandemic, police brutality, and the more overarching panic of the climate crisis. This is also true of a lot of poetry I read now, Because of my state of mind, and I am sure others would agree (desperate/bored/searching/hopeful/raw/terrorized), we are also mesmerized by poetry and what poets have to say.

What Equi has to say in The Intangibles is as straightforward as she’s always been. From her titular poem: “Prove you’re not a robot / Answer the question: / What color is the silver basket?”

Her poems are directed outwards but also fold endlessly in on themselves. They are playful in their sense of what it feels like to be confined, in quarantine, yes, and even before the quarantine period we are currently in even happened. From her poem “Faces” we see ourselves and others in a bleak, yet hopeful way: “I love to watch / the dough of faces / flower.”

This book slays with amazing titles. Here are some:  “Deep In The Rectangular Forest,” “Ode To Weird,” “Ghosts and Fashion,” “Home On The Range” (okay, not such a weird title, but a very exquisite and wonderful poem), “Granular Time/Granular Distance,” and “Looking Out The Window In A Novel.”

Each of these poems blossoms into a novel (and not a virus).

The Intangibles by Elaine Equi. Coffee House Press, 2019.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson’s first book of poems is Mezzanine, from Finishing Line Press, 2019. She also has work forthcoming in Sleet, and another book from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Oregon.

Weaponized Information

Guest Post by Eron Henry

Information and news are increasingly weaponized. While not new, the weaponization of news and information has been set on steroids by the rise of social media. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and their counterparts in other countries, such as in Russia and China, have become the main source of news for citizens.

It is in and through social media that propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation thrive. The first, propaganda, is a way to tell one’s own story and can be used for good or ill. Advertising, for instance, is a form of propaganda. The second, misinformation, is false and faulty news that need not be deliberately false but can be harmful. The last, disinformation, is the deliberate spreading of false and misleading news and information with the intention to create confusion and cause harm.

Because social media is now the most widely used source of news and information, persons become easily misled and fooled because social media is a fertile breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation.

In Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It, Richard Stengel tells how false and faulty news is now normalized. The former editor of Time Magazine, Stengel was recruited by the State Department during the Obama Administration to counter misinformation and disinformation, especially those put out by Russia and ISIS, the terrorist group.

It was a Byzantine experience. An admixture of outdated technology, ill-prepared and ill-informed government officials and workers, turf wars, career ambitions, ego, and more, got in the way of countering the coordinated and concerted attack on truth and facts, both within the United States and globally.

Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It by Richard Stengel. Atlantic Books, October 2019

Reviewer bio: Eron Henry is a communications consultant. He blogs at https://oletimesumting.com.

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Eerie Reflections: Lacrimore

Guest Post by Laura Kincaid

Lacrimore by SJ Costello explores our relationship with grief and tragedy through a speculative lens. The gothic novel draws readers in with beautifully dark prose that builds a haunting world. While the story unfolds slowly, the flawed characters and mystery compel readers to turn the page.

The novel opens with Sivre Sen, a faithless medium journeying across a stormy lake to a small island. There sits Lacrimore, a crumbling labyrinth of a mansion shrouded by legends. During a vision, a ghost called her there to complete his funeral rites. In Costello’s Victorian-inspired world, mediums are revered and influential, especially after a recent epidemic. However, Sen has never before experienced visions of the dead. After arriving, she meets the dead man (who is still alive), a staff trapped by circumstances, and a dubious doctor in exile. As Sivre searches the house for answers and closure, she discovers dark secrets in its rotting walls. The book is like Lacrimore itself—a quiet, mysterious tale standing alone in a much larger world.

Though in development before the COVID-19, the novel was a poignant and refreshing take on pandemic literature. Instead of focusing on dystopian survival, the story centers on what happens after survival. How do we process our grief? How do we reflect on the societal failures that came to light? What change is required to be better? Lacrimore doesn’t claim to answers all these questions. It remains a spooky story that is fun to read, but opens the door for those who want to ponder its deeper themes.

Lacrimore by SJ Costello. June 2020.

Reviewer bio: Laura Kincaid is a writer, editor, and lover of the fantastical. Find her work in Twist in Time and at laurakincaidmusings.wordpress.com.

Literature that Rattles the Soul

Guest Post by Brian Phillip Whalen

I’m rereading Peter Orner’s collection of essays, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live. (What a title! I’m also rereading Jonathan Franzen’s How to Be Alone.) Orner’s essays are ideal stay-at-home reading—easy-to-digest, elegantly composed—and his sparing prose is second-to-none at conveying depths of feeling in few words. The result is a perfectly-paced, heartfelt, sad, funny, and breathtaking book.

Orner seamlessly blends craft analysis (examinations of Chekhov, Welty, Malamud, Hurston, Wideman, Kafka, and scores of other writers) with memoir (stories of fathers, children, love, loss, joys, regrets, the pleasures—and solitude—of reading). Each essay is inspired by an act of reading, prompting explorations into the ways in which the books we read inform, intersect with, and sometimes mirror our lives:

It gets me every time. The way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own, the people who do exist, who do walk the earth.”

It’s Orner’s voice, however, that draws me in. Though I’ve never met him, the feeling I get reading his essays is akin to sharing stories of hurt and redemption with an old friend over a cold beer, sitting on lawn chairs in the yard at sunset.

We have all done things we wish we could erase, forever, from the record. No matter how we airbrush our histories, the hurt we have caused will, always, reach out for us—like for me today—out of the December rain.”

Orner’s objective was to write about literature that “rattles the soul,” and in so doing, he amassed a collection of essays that continues to rattle mine. This is my go-to recommendation for readers wanting bite-size, ruminative literary essays—and these days, for anyone looking, as the title beckons, for some company in isolation.

Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner. Catapult, 2016.

Reviewer bio: Brian Phillip Whalen’s debut collection of fiction, Semiotic Love [Stories], will be released in 2021 (Awst Press). Find him here: www.brianphillipwhalen.com.

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Vulnerability Is Strength

Guest Post by Joshua Lindenbaum

When one thinks of courage, they usually think about someone going into a burning building to save a person’s life; however, Dr. Brené Brown provides a unique, much-needed lens in which to view bravery in a broader sense in her book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. The writing is a beautiful concert of personal anecdotes alongside empirically-based research. Furthermore, Dr. Brown reveals not-so-flattering details about herself, and therefore lives the practices in which she details in her book. It is a lovely trident of logos, pathos, and ethos designed to pierce into the stubbornness of convention and tradition, especially amongst men who have been taught to not show emotions.

This incredibly organized text uproots widely-held beliefs, such as “vulnerability is weakness.” On the contrary, in her previous book The Gifts of Imperfection, Dr. Brown declares, “vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.” She defines ” . . .  vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure,” which comprises everyday life, especially during this pandemic. That’s what I think many readers will appreciate about her work: Brown manages to quantify concepts like vulnerability, shame, and even joy. She includes accounts from her own qualitative research alongside a panoply of reliable sources. In addition to providing background, there are also practical steps in, for example, fostering trust. For instance, there’s a section on “the marble jar,” a metaphor used to help us in assessing whether an individual is trustworthy or not based upon specific criteria. This approach allows one the ability to express themselves while also creating boundaries against those that don’t deserve our trust.

I know what you’re thinking: this sounds like a corny self-help book. You are wrong. It is a humanity book. Step into its pages!

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown. Avery/Penguin Random House, April 2015.

Reviewer bio: Joshua Lindenbaum’s poetry has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Breadcrumbs, Yes Poetry, The Bangalore Review, Five:2:One, 3Elements Review, Typishly, and elsewhere.

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It’s Always the Person You Least Expect

Guest Post by Caroline V.D.

As a first timer being introduced into the world of Rizzoli and Isles’s grisly world, I found myself left exposed to the intensity and intricately woven plot in Tess Gerritsen’s addition.

In I Know a Secret, we are pushed straight into the unfortunate murder of Cassandra Coyle, an indie filmmaker and are soon greeted with Rizzoli and Isles. For those like me who are meeting the two strong women quite late into the series, Gerritsen does a wonderful job in establishing familiarity and understanding of their characters as the murder investigation goes on. The characters throughout the book all contribute to the tension and suspense in deducing the culprit’s motives and next actions, as the number of bodies pile up and pasts uncovered. There are no moments that are wasted and no conversations that do not provide a twist to the story, as Coyle’s colleague says “Horror 101 . . . it’s always the person you least expect.”

The symbolism and messages throughout the story are consistent and well placed by Tess Gerritsen who had impressively created an impression of a web laid out by a culprit who could not be traced yet by the end of the book; the web could be followed into a single string as the culprit’s motives are laid out to the reader. It is an amazing feat done by Gerritsen who I commend for roping in another reader into her series!

I Know a Secret: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel by Tess Gerritsen. Penguin Random House, April 2018.

Reviewer bio: Hey all, it’s Caroline, and I am an aspiring book reviewer. Currently I’m working on a personal project where you’ll be seeing me and a lot more books in the future. Check it out at: https://theladywithinkstainedhair.tumblr.com/.

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Take a Walk “In the Woods” with Emily Steinberg

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

Emily Steinberg takes a walk “In the Woods” with her dog, Gus, in her visual narrative found in the Midsummer 2020 issue of Cleaver. During her walk, she focuses on Gus and her surroundings, reflecting on the way the real world and its real problems seem far away. In the woods, “All human makings disappear . . .” and there is only the sounds of the wind in the trees and the creek and Gus’s paws around her. This moment doesn’t last forever, though. She has to cross the threshold back into the real world where everything “comes sweeping back. Crowding my brain. Not letting me breathe.” But for a moment there is peace.

This short visual narrative gives readers a moment of peace as well as we soak in the quiet moment of respite along with Steinberg. Each panel features only Gus, a fluffy scribble of a dog padding through the woods, a dog always good comfort when it’s needed. The piece works as a good reminder to take a moment to find calm and quiet in the midst of the tragedies and turmoil swirling around us. By taking these moments, we’re able to recharge as we head back into the real world to face everything once more.

Seeing Dead People

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

Say, “I see dead people,” to just about anyone, and they’ll likely be able to name the movie it came from. But unlike Haley Joel Osment’s character in The Sixth Sense, attempting to help the dead find peace, Jasmine, the narrator in Catherine Stansfield’s “I See Dead People and Other Gags” uses the concept to help herself.

Jasmine tells people she can speak to their dead loved ones, and uses social media to glean information that she later uses in her sessions. Having lost her own mother at a young age and never really speaking about it again gives her a detachment from death and the sentimental feelings surrounding it, so she profits off other people’s pain and grief. However, at the end of the story, she’s hit with a surprise that may make her change her mind about her career path.

I would’ve enjoyed reading more about Jasmine and her work, getting to know more about her clients and her grandmother who casts a shadow over her mother’s death. Stansfield’s writing style is matter of fact and straight forward, fitting for Jasmine’s no-nonsense character. But what we are given is a fun read, a peak behind the medium’s curtain.

Moran Remembers

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

March and the beginning of lockdowns in the United States somehow seems like it was years ago and just days ago. Time continues to slip by in strange ways. Emma Moran touches upon this in her nonfiction piece “What I Will Say” found in the Summer 2020 issue of Sky Island Journal: “Times had changed.  The quality of time had changed.  Hours extended and compressed.  Two hours talking to your sister passed in ten minutes.  Ten minutes extended into days, as you listened to the clock counting out the seconds you couldn’t sleep through.”

In this piece, she reflects on her dad’s instruction to “Remember this. One day your grandchildren will ask what it was like, living through this. Remember it all, so you can tell them.” In the following four paragraphs she explains the way life changed during the first few months of the pandemic, and she does so poetically and eloquently: “People built fortresses out of plans.  I will write those letters, I will train the dog, I will learn to speak French, I will learn to knit, I will learn, I will learn.  We would try to learn.”

Time continues to pass and the push to return to the normal life we used to know is insistent, but Moran remembers and gives a reminder of what we did for others and how we “learned; how we changed” during those first few weeks and months, writing with a thoughtful and sympathetic voice.

Permission to Be Creative Granted

Guest Post by Jaimie Hanson

Creativity. Merriam-Webster defines creativity as “the ability to create.” In Called to Be Creative, author Mary Potter Kenyon not only writes about creativity, what it is, what it means, how it affects and benefits us mentally, physically, emotionally, and even spiritually, but she does so by graciously giving the reader a glimpse into her own life throughout the book. This book will grant the permission we often feel we need to be a little (or a lot) creative, and you will be inspired and encouraged, for yourself, and I dare say for others in your circle, as you read through the pages. The chapters, each with their own creative focus, are supported by research and resources throughout the book and the easy-to-do exercises at the end of each chapter allow for the very guidance and reference we seek. Write in the margins, underline the ah-ha moments that speak to you, and get your creative self active.

Called to Be Creative, whether read individually or with a group (yes, even a Zoom group), belongs in everyone’s hands. It’s a book club book, a girlfriends group book, a book for those who are single or married, it’s even a book for guys (and dare I say it would be a fun challenge to create a space and opportunity for that to happen!). It’s perfect for families, for creative minds and those who don’t see themselves that way. A teaching tool for young moms, homeschool moms, and moms looking for a way to cure summer boredom. Add this book to your reading list, discover or uncover the creativity within you, embrace the creative opportunities, and be ready to be amazed as you laugh and smile, enjoying the creative moments within your everyday journey.

Called to be Creative by Mary Potter Kenyon. Workman, August 2020.

Reviewer bio: Jaimie Hanson lives in the Midwest with her family. She enjoys writing and photography. You can find her sharing both on her blog at jelizabethhanson.com.

A Woman’s Experience in the Gold Rush

Guest Post by Christina Francine

Is making a living worth risking life and reputation? For Au Toy during the American Gold Rush, it was. There isn’t another way. When her abusive husband dies from consumption on the journey by ship from China in 1849, Au is left with her freedom, but without a way to support herself.

The price women pay for independence and safety historically is high. Many women used the only resource they had – their body. For Au Toy, her choices are even more limited due to her bound feet. Not wanting to subject herself to sex work, Au opens a “Lookee shop” instead. The San Francisco bay held unspeakable danger though, especially when Au is “fragile” and “dainty,” twenty years-old, and “varmints” and “ruffians” fill the streets. Her loyal servant, Chen, is big and strong, yet the two need safer accommodations. Mining camps spring up and more men than women roam the area. Au has to be careful with who she allows inside her shanty to look at, but not touch her naked body. When one of her observing customers is a policeman from New York assigned to protect the area, he unnerves her. Ever careful, she works to not encourage him or any of her clients. And yet, John Clark’s gentle nature and soft voice give her pause. He tells her “You are so very lovely, Mrs. Toy. Your skin is like alabaster, your hair like spun silk.” He agrees to pass by regularly on his round for her safety. John Clark warms Au and yet she’s not sure exposing her heart is a good idea. She may never recover.

Grossenbacher’s Madam in Silk is a suspenseful romance to be sure, but also a treat for those longing to travel through history. She captures the essence of people, time-period, setting, and historical events perfectly. Her dedicated research is obvious. She also captures the dangers and stigma women face in order to make a living no matter the time in history. Though a historical account, the situation unfortunately exists present day. Grossenbacher reminds readers of humankind’s ability for cruelty and evil, but also for kindness and love. A heartwarming novel intricately plotted with historical data. A valuable exploration too of how women, especially foreign women, fit into the larger scheme of Gold-Rush history.

Madam in Silk by Gini Grossenbacher. Jgks Press, July 2019.

Reviewer bio: Christina Francine is an enthusiastic author for all ages. She is the author of Special Memory (picture book) and the Mr. Inker series (leveled readers). Journal of Literary Innovation published her analysis on students’ writing across the nation Spring 2016. She believes individual learning style may solve world problems.

A Treat for Duras Fans

Guest Post by M.G. Noles

Published in English in 1993, Practicalities is a rare peek inside the mind of the elusive French author, Marguerite Duras. As the author of some of the greatest French novels of the twentieth century (The Lover, Hiroshima, Mon Amour), Duras’ work has a spellbinding effect on the reader. With a hypnotic prose style unlike any other, she is at once strikingly realistic and dreamily meditative. As a lifelong fan of Duras, I was trepidatious about what to expect from this lesser known work.

But now, after having spent the day reading Practicalities, I have to say that it is stunning! The book is in fact a brief series of transcribed discussions the author had with interviewer Jerome Beaujour, and these discussions were compiled into the present book and translated by Barbara Bray.

In free-form, avant-garde style, Duras discusses everything from her love affair with alcohol to her life in French Indochina. She speaks about her approach to writing and her hatred for being often misinterpreted by critics and “fans.” She talks brilliantly about everything from surviving the war to the details of housekeeping.

Practicalities is a real treat for Duras fans and for anyone who wants an incisive mind’s perspective on the art of writing.

Practicalities by Marguerite Duras. Grove Atlantic, August 1992.

Reviewer bio: M.G. Noles is a freelance writer and history buff.

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Comic & Disturbing

Guest Post by Lynn Levin

Poet and writer Chris Bullard is blessed, or maybe tormented, with a brilliant and surrealistic muse. In his new chapbook Continued, Bullard graces us with a comedy of lost souls and a range of humorously morbid imaginings.

The poet delivers his meditations and perturbations in a range of quirky and hybridized forms perfectly paired to the content. The prose poem “Cartoon” satirizes a New Yorker-type cartoon of a person stranded on a desert island. And if being shipwrecked were not bad enough, the cartoonist draws himself a hole and plummets through it into the sea. In the flash fiction piece “Miracle,” a man runs over a herd of migrating abalones as he drives to a job interview. He hides this awful secret from his wife who is sympathetic to the mollusks and later turns into an abalone himself, much to his delight. Bullard’s humor is so desperate that it becomes hilarious. I laughed aloud at his crossword puzzle poem “Down,” the word “down” evoking both the direction of the crossword clues and the speaker’s mood. Sample clues include “4. A slipping away of consciousness” and “9. The phenomenon of chaos.”

The list form is one of Bullard’s favorites. “More Prompts for the Writer” is a send-up of workshop exercises, and each evokes the tormented mindset of the instructor. Number 13 invites the writers to “Imagine a car, a ship, a flying saucer, anything for chrissakes, taking you away from here forever.” Some of the pieces in Continued are more morbid, some more hilariously absurd. I often found myself laughing aloud at the author’s deconstructions of normalcy and the self. I could go on tantalizing you with snippets of Bullard’s work, but I think you should explore these comic and disturbing poems for yourself.

Continued by Chris Bullard. Grey Book Press, July 2020.

Reviewer bio: Lynn Levin’s most recent book is the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020).

Revisiting Childhood Favorites

Guest Post by Chang Shih Yen

Lockdown gives you more free time to reread classics and revisit things you love as a child. The Little Prince is a book by French writer and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was originally written in French and first published in 1943. Since then, it has been translated into hundreds of languages and has sold many millions of copies.

In The Little Prince, the narrator is a pilot who has crash landed in the Sahara Desert. In the middle of the desert, the pilot meets a little prince who comes from a different planet. The little prince has decided to travel and visit different planets, including Earth. The little prince asks the pilot many questions about the world. In this book, readers meet many characters like the little prince, his rose, his lamb in a box, and the fox. The book is also illustrated with charming illustrations by the author.

The Little Prince may be a children’s book, but it should be recommended reading for all ages. This book reveals the truths about life and the essential secret to understanding life. This book can be read at any stage in life, and each time that you read it, you will discover new truths and connect with your inner child.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943.

Reviewer bio: Chang Shih Yen is a writer from Malaysia, seeing through the pandemic in New Zealand. She writes a blog at https://shihyenshoes.wordpress.com/

Childhood Crushes & Dentist Fanfiction

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

Who didn’t have an embarrassing crush growing up? For thirteen-year-old Chava in “I Love You, Dr. Rudnitsky” by Avigayl Sharp, her new crush is her titular dentist.

Chava, deep in the throes of the brutality of puberty, falls in love with her dentist one day. Her newfound crush with its accompanying fantasies serves as a respite from her real life: being Jewish and bullied at her Catholic school, a disconnect with her distant mother, and disgust at her own body—her weight, her body hair, her budding sexuality.

Sharp gives Chava a voice that’s somehow both humorous and tragic, bringing me back to those awkward days of adolescence and the torturous process of puberty. She’s upfront and honest, telling us truths she doesn’t admit to others, while simultaneously wrapping us up in one lie after the other. By the end of the story, it feels like we’re reading her Dr. Rudnitsky fanfiction she’s posting on some secret blog. One can’t help feeling sympathy for Chava, for wanting to sit her down and give her a hug and some advice, and we can thank Sharp for creating such a cringe-worthy yet completely loveable character.

“Tacos Callejeros” by Kenneth Hinegardner

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

There’s a fine selection of short fiction in the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of Concho River Review. Among them is the five-page “Tacos Callejeros” by Kenneth Hinegardner.

In this story, Steven observes a mother and her two children at a restaurant. The children misbehave as he eats and watches their behavior, and he ends up taking a liking to their mother, Melanie. Between these observations are passages about watching a dog fight on a past trip to Tijuana. As we read, it becomes clear Steven is not a caring and concerned individual, but is closer to a dog, its teeth around another dog’s throat.

Hinegardner writes with a slow build to the end, writing with precision and subtlety. The final character in this story, Ruben, acts the reader’s place, recognizing this part of Steven that is slowly revealed across the pages in this chilling, short piece.

The Power of Translation in The Return

Guest Post by Christy O’Callaghan

Last summer, when we could still travel, I had the honor of attending the Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon. As part of that fantastic two weeks, we were treated to panels of local authors and discussions about the history of Portugal. Had I not had that experience, I may never have learned about the western world’s longest dictatorship. The panelists possessed so much history as people who lived those times or grew up in the wake of them. One such panelist was Dulce Maria Cardoso. Before I left Portugal, I’d already ordered her book The Return.

Her novel, which is translated into English by Angel Gurria-Quintana, mirrors her experience of being a Portuguese citizen but raised in Angola, one of Portugal’s colonies at the time. When Portugal had its revolution, so did their colonies. This book follows a family exiled back to Portugal, returning to a country many had never set foot in and where they weren’t welcomed with open arms. The main character Rui is a teenage boy trying to wrap his head around what’s happening, why, and how to live in this foreign Motherland.

Books like The Return exemplify why good translations are valuable. This dictatorship, let alone that colonies still existed, weren’t discussed when I was in school. And these events took place only 45 years ago. Being able to hear Dulce tell her story was a gift I shall treasure forever, but not everyone has that privilege. Access to books written in other languages then translated means more people can share in that information, those cultures, and experiences. Learning about our own society and history is essential. So too is knowing what has happened in the larger world—allowing us to glean from other’s experiences in hopes of not repeating them.

The Return by Dulce Marie Cardoso. MacLehose Press, 2016.

Reviewer bio: Christy O’Callaghan lives in Upstate, New York. Her favorite pastimes include anything in the fresh air. For her blog and writing, go to christyflutterby.com.

Discover and Rediscover with Megan Fernandes

Guest Post by Emily Cinquemani

Megan Fernandes’ collection Good Boys takes a fresh and brilliant look at the anxieties and violence of our world, as well as the stories we create to accept them. These poems are both vast and personal. In them, I ran in the suburbs, visited Paris, and imagined what I would miss about the earth. Fernandes’ speaker is both vulnerable and bold. She gleans revelation from each new experience, including tarot readings, goat miscarriages, and knocking on the metal of an airplane before taking flight.

In this collection, mythology is an intimate part of the present moment. The speaker imagines herself stuck between Scylla and Charybdis and hears Virgil sing in her ribcage. We are asked to look at our own stories critically: what narratives do we have of our reality, and which of them are true? Which of them are harmful? Fernandes recognizes the stories we condone while unweaving them, and she does so with precision. She writes, “Only white people // can imagine a past / that was better // than now.” In the poem “Regret is a Blue Dive,” the speaker insists, “Things that are brave are often painful,” and wrestles with the possibility of being alone. These poems have an insistent, challenging, and beautiful honesty. They ask us to face uncertainty and let it linger, rather than running away.

Fernandes’ work also gives language to experiences I have previously been unable to name. For example, in her poem “Fabric in Tribeca,” her speaker refers to her sadness as “very adult” because it “will not make a scene” and asks, “Who makes curtains to give their sadness a perimeter?” Fernandes writes that, on earth, “everything is a portrait of gravity.” In every poem, I discovered something new or rediscovered something familiar. I am grateful for Fernandes’ voice and for the company these poems afford me as I move through the world.

Good Boys by Megan Fernandes. Tin House, February 2020.

Reviewer bio: Emily Cinquemani’s poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, 32 Poems, and Indiana Review. She is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal. 

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Image, Music, and Language

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

I love when a poem has visual components, so I was happy to see a couple pieces by Ryan Mihaly in the Summer 2020 issue of The Massachusetts Review with visual accompaniment.

“[B]” and “[A♯/B♭]” are paired with clarinet fingering charts. In “[B],” the speaker looks back at “a catalogue of embarrassments,” which are broken down and pointed out on the chart as “Wrong name,” “Loss of language,” and “Failed elegance.” “[A♯/B♭]” explores language and communication, finishing, “Music is not a language because it cannot be translated into anything. It can only be described. A♯, then, is the word ‘handiwork’ mispronounced ‘hand-eye-work.’” The chart above shows a corresponding “Hand,” “Eye,” and “Work.”

While both poems would work just fine without the visual aspect, their presence is still welcome and enhances each piece, the text almost working as a footnote to guide the reader through the charts.

Jesus & Disney Princesses Have Much in Common

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

I may be an atheist, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying Liz Bruno’s poem in the latest issue of The Cape Rock. “Jesus, The Original Disney Princess” compares the religious figure to the familiar cartoon girls of our youth. I found the comparison to be lighthearted and sweet, the connections between Jesus and the girls clear. They’re all “Westernized beauty queen[s],” with “endless magic.” They teach “girls and boys to dream big and look pretty” and are friends with animals, are critics of the bourgeois, and rise above their humble beginnings.

A new and different take on the familiar religious figure, Bruno creates an endearing poem with an eye-catching title.

Find Happiness with Ginny Sassaman

Guest Post by John de Graaf

Ginny Sassaman knows happiness! As a co-founder of Gross National Happiness USA and a participant in the national Happiness Walk, she’s been studying the subject for many years.

Her approach in these marvelous sermons is both personal and social—she knows we need to change both our behaviors and some of the policies that wreak havoc on our planet, which is actually making us less happy. She doesn’t shy away from the tougher questions. I especially like her sermon on beauty, an issue of quality of life that has been too often ignored in happiness research, surveys, and action.

In chapter fourteen, “The Extraordinary Value of Everyday Beauty,” Sassaman writes about a friend who took her own life; how that friend had collected objects of beauty as a way of mitigating her pain:

“Mandy may have carried more pain than most, but, just as all flowers need the sun, all humans need beauty. Piero Ferrucci, whose book on kindness is like a happiness bible for me, has written another invaluable text: Beauty and the Soul: The Extraordinary Power of Everyday Beauty to Heal Your Life. Ferrucci insists that beauty, far from being frivolous, is a primal need. ‘Beauty,’ he writes, ‘is not like a distant satellite, but like a sun that gives life and light to all areas of our life.’”

This is just one example of how Sassaman combines thoughtful stories and research in her sermons. I found great value in all of them and I think you, dear reader, will too. Don’t miss this book!

Preaching Happiness: Creating a Just and Joyful World by Ginny Sassaman. Rootstock Publishing, May 2020.

Reviewer Bio: John de Graaf is an author, filmmaker, speaker and activist. He is a co-founder of The Happiness Alliance and co-author of the bestselling book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic.

Past Fiction Shapes Our Present

Guest Post by Leland Davidson

You are not a politician, but self-made through hard work. You are not political and don’t fancy politics and prefer a life of content over luxury. Then the president of the United States himself has asked you to become the head of a government subcommittee, which is supposed to help the nation’s safety and better the country that you live in.

However, through digging and fact-finding, you discover this committee is sponsored by a giant and powerful company that is buying off politicians and absorbing other markets such as the media and weapon manufacturing. Trevayne was written in 1973 by Robert Ludlum on the heels of the Watergate scandal. But in a way, this book is more relevant in our modern-day situation involving the privatization of the United States of America. Companies and powerful families such as Koch and DeVos. Add on corporations like Facebook, Amazon, and Raytheon, which have since majorly impacted our democracy, and we see a cautionary tale in this book written nearly 50 years ago.

In this book Andrew Trevayne has a choice to stop this corporation from completely taking over the country and influencing all its decisions, or assimilate with it, thus shaping the future United States in the same manner we are seeing today. Trevayne can be seen as a fictional and nonfictional example as the United States is more of a business and money opportunity for the rich than for the working class who truly shape the nation.

Trevayne by Robert Ludlum. Delacorte Press, 1973.

Reviewer bio: Leland Davidson, a native of East Tennessee, holds an M.A. in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence from Heller School at Brandeis University, 2020.

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Think Better to Feel Better

Guest Post by Chang Shih Yen

The global pandemic and associated lockdown is an extremely stressful time for everyone. During this difficult period, I found this book helpful. The Book of Knowing is written by Gwendoline Smith, a New Zealand-based clinical psychologist. It provides strategies on how to change your thinking to change the way you’re feeling.

This book is aimed at teenagers and young people who are feeling overwhelmed and anxious, but it is suitable for anyone going through difficult situations. Smith makes the point that you cannot change reality. As Smith says, “Reality just is and shit happens!” You may not be able to change reality, but you can change how you feel about reality and change the way you think. Smith gives tips and strategies on how to do this, including firstly how to identify thought viruses, or negative ways of thinking, which go on to affect how we feel. Your feelings towards any situation are based on your beliefs and the way you think. So if you can change your thinking, it will help you feel better.

Smith’s writing is based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Her writing is straightforward and also funny. It is an easy read with illustrations that make the content accessible to everyone. Overall, it was a helpful book during a stressful time.

The Book of Knowing by Gwendoline Smith. Allen & Unwin Book Publishing, February 2019.

Reviewer bio: Chang Shih Yen is a writer from Malaysia, seeing through the pandemic in New Zealand. She writes a blog at https://shihyenshoes.wordpress.com/

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Hirt Finds Her Way Home

Guest Post by Shannon Frystak

Jen Hirt is first and foremost a nature writer. Having grown up in her family’s greenhouse in Ohio, her latest essay collection, Hear Me Ohio takes us on a journey from Iowa to Idaho to Pennsylvania and Maine, as she grapples with the meaning of her varied and often mundane experiences traversing the country through multiple job searches, to a “reality house” church, a man and his ball of string, the views from her front porch where she muses on the lives of spiders and befriends a stray cat, to the forest where she and her dog encounter dead deer, and on the waterfront at her home in Harrisburg, where she grapples with a premonition about a dead body.

Jen Hirt’s gift is her attentive and detailed descriptions of the natural landscape—both flora and fauna—allowing us to travel alongside her, revealing herself and, sometimes, her family, through her peripatetic life seemingly searching for meaning and magic in all things, not the least of which include bats, one-eyed deer, and unicorns. Hirt always finds her way home, to Ohio—in a hundreds-year old horseradish bottle, her family’s history, and her mother’s death. Insightful and contemplative, this collection of short meditations is a beautiful and thought-provoking compilation of memoir essays.

Hear Me Ohio by Jen Hirt. The University of Akron Press, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Shannon Frystak, Ph.D. is a Professor of History at East Stroudsburg University where she specializes in Black, Women, and Civil Rights History. She is the author of Our Minds on Freedom: Women and the Struggle for Black Equality in Louisiana, 1924-1967, and is currently working on a collection of essays Confessions of an Academic Bartender: Essays on Life Inside and Outside of the Guild.

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“Shelter in Place” with Bishakh Som

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

In the Summer 2020 issue of The Georgia Review, Bishakh Som finds a creative way to process feelings of longing and isolation in “Shelter in Place.” This graphic poem spans days in May, the images taking readers into a futuristic, sci-fi setting. Calendar dates guide the piece along, moving us from one day to the next as the speaker writes of what and who she misses in this strange state of life. At the end of the piece, we’re met with that now familiar feeling of time becoming unreal and immeasurable as the calendar page reads “May 32.”

While we all process our feelings about sheltering in place, living in a time of a global pandemic, and missing the physical connection with people we were once allotted, I appreciated this different and creative take. The change in setting and the beautiful language make “Shelter in Place” a stand-out among other pieces of writing that are responding to current life in COVID-19.

Ancestry: Where We’re From and Where We’re Going

Book Review by Katy Haas

Readers can look forward to Eileen O’Leary’s Ancestry, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, forthcoming this fall. The characters in this collection’s short stories look back at where and who they’ve come from as they try to discover who they can possibly become.

In “Adam,” the titular character reconnects with his father whom he has never met and finds that the man in front of him is not quite how he imagined. Living together in a dilapidated building, he’s suddenly faced with a change in expectations. Cecile from “Michigan Would Get Beautiful,” is finally getting what she wants as an interior designer, just as the lives of her first clients implode, leaving her to look at where she is and where she’ll end up. In “The Flying Boat,” Vera leaves her family behind to start a new life overseas. On the cusp of war, she returns to her family to find that everything has unexpectedly changed in her absence.

Family ties and inner tensions propel these stories, the characters grappling with the changes happening within them and around them. Even in the small space of short stories, we’re able to see the characters grow and adapt as they learn more about themselves and the people in their lives. A quick read, each story grabs the reader’s attention and holds on tightly until the end.

Ancestry by Eileen O’Leary. University of Iowa Press, October 2020.

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Powerful Piece on Self-Reflection

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

The latest issue of the Missouri Review features the winners of the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. The nonfiction winner, “The Trailer” by Jennifer Anderson is a powerful piece on self-reflection.

In “The Trailer,” a trailer appears on land Anderson owns. For awhile, it stays empty, and then one day a man and woman appear inside. Anderson then works on getting the inhabitants removed, and the trailer towed from the property.

In doing this, though, she ends up looking inside herself and examining her response to the two people that have begun squatting on her property. As a teen, she drank, did drugs, and engaged in risky behavior and she realizes she easily could have ended up just like the woman she evicts from her property. Later, when one of the women she delivers food to on her Meals on Wheels route must move out from her care facility and is essentially homeless, Anderson is filled with compassion and the desire to help, a response that is much different than her response to the woman in the trailer. After the woman leaves the trailer and the trailer is hauled away, Anderson continues to see her around town, each time having to face her past actions and feeling shame.

The piece is introspective and honest, a good reminder to examine our own actions. Anderson’s writing is compelling and hard to look away from, well-deserving of its placement as the nonfiction Editors’ Prize winner.

Scared in the Air

Guest Post by Chang Shih Yen

Flight or Fright is an anthology with one theme: scary things that can happen while flying. This anthology is edited by the king of horror writing, Stephen King. This seemed like a good book to read in lockdown when international air travel is almost impossible.

There are 16 short stories and one poem in this anthology. There are old stories by Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) written before air travel even became a thing. There are two new stories written specifically for this anthology. One by Stephen King is a story about air turbulence. The second new story is by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King) whose story is about passengers in a plane while a nuclear war starts on earth mid-flight. There are also classic short stories by the likes of Ray Bradbury and Roald Dahl. Dahl draws on his own experience as a fighter pilot in World War II. Some stories tell the reader its content in the title, like “Zombies on a Plane” by Bev Vincent and “Murder in the air” by Peter Tremayne. There are all sorts of terrifying tales in this collection, with topics ranging from monsters, time travel, war, and murder, to falling out of the sky.

This was a satisfying read if you’re looking for something scary. There are stories like “The Fifth Category” by Tom Bissell, which haunts you and gets in your head and stays with you long after the last page is turned.

Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent. Cemetery Dance Publications, September 2018.

Reviewer bio: Chang Shih Yen is a writer from Malaysia, seeing through the pandemic in New Zealand. She writes a blog at https://shihyenshoes.wordpress.com/

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Hope-Giving Horror

Guest Post by Lauren Mead

ST is concerned about his owner Big Jim when his eyeball falls out and lands in the grass. He should be, considering that Big Jim has just turned into a zombie thanks to a mysterious virus that travels through screens. When it becomes clear that cheering Big Jim up with his favourite beer and a bag of Cheetos isn’t going to help, ST (a domesticated crow) and Dennis (a dog) set out across the wilds of post-apocalyptic Seattle to find a cure.

On his journey, ST encounters hordes of vicious humans who are suffering from the same malady as Big Jim. He braves a deadly market (for doughnuts), the aquarium (for answers) and follows cryptic rumours of the one remaining human who can save them all. ST must set aside his fears to find a way forward in this new, and often frightening world.

I read Hollow Kingdom before COVID-19 was a phrase in my everyday life. I can remember thinking that I was glad there wasn’t some deadly virus on the loose, because gosh, wouldn’t that be awful? At the time, it kind of felt like it would be the end of the world. I’m a germaphobe, so I don’t handle sickness very well on a good day. Throw in a worldwide pandemic and you’ve got a recipe for this girl to never leave her house again. I didn’t, for awhile.

But if ST can face his fears in a zombie-infested world, I can sure as heck set foot outside. It’s funny how horror stories can have the opposite effect of real fear. Instead of making us want to hide, it makes us bolder to know that even if the worst, most terrifying thing were to happen, there would be a way forward. Horror gives us hope.

Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton. Grand Central Publishing, August 2019.

Reviewer bio: Lauren Mead has been published in The Danforth Review, The MacGuffin, Soliloquies and Forest for the Trees. She also writes for her blog, www.novelshrink.com.

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Dip Your Fingers in a Faraway World

Guest Post by Karabi Mitra

Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth opens on the shores of a sea lapping at the edges of the Siberian Peninsula. Two young sisters are playing on the beach. It’s a simple enough setting. The older one is trying to get the younger one to come home. You don’t yet know why, but you’re starting to feel unsettled and you can almost feel the oncoming danger. By the end of the chapter, the girls have disappeared.

The chapters that follow are not an investigation into the disappearance. Instead they are stories of various inhabitants located in and around the Kamchatka Peninsula. The disappearance of the girls hangs over each of them, but the stories are about their own lives. A new mother struggling to come to terms with staying at home and giving up her career. A mother whose child similarly disappeared three years ago. And that’s when the patterns start emerging. The complexity of relationships, the underlying beliefs and mistrust towards certain groups of people. Natives are treated in a slightly different way. There is a distrust towards the so-called new people who have migrated to the region. There are superstitions and practices. And you realize that ultimately people are the same, no matter where they are. We’re all dealing with the same issues.

The setting of Disappearing Earth makes you feel as though you’ve dipped your fingers into a faraway world. The descriptions of the volcanoes and open tundras and thermal springs and open fields add an allure to the overall story. You sometimes feel as though you really are at the end of the world. The ending is stunning, and Julia Phillips ties up at the loose ends in a way that makes you close the book with a satisfied hush.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Penguin Random House, April 2020.

Reviewer bio: Karabi Mitra is an avid reader, based in Toronto. She also enjoys writing and has been published in various literary magazines such as Litro Magazine and Volney Road Review.

Maggie Smith Writes to America

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

In Cave Wall Number 16, Maggie Smith writes a poem to America. “Tender Age” focuses on the reality of the country, which is decidedly “not what I learned / in grade school.” Instead, this America “caged / even the babies.”

She questions who our laws serve, questions where the country’s conscience lives, or where it’s been removed from. Reminiscing on the past, Smith writes of the street she grew up on and the church she attended, as well as the handbells played there. These memories are unburied again as she wonders whether there will be “neighborhoods / named for this undeclared war” like we’ve named ones “Lexington, / Bunker Hill, Valley Forge.” Finally, the piece ends on the images of the handbells again ins sobering stanza:

America, when we want to silence
the bells, we extinguish
their open mouths
on our chests.

This poem is unfortunately continuously timely and relevant with the continued practice of caging migrant children and following the recent news that another 1,500 have been “lost.” Smith’s poem encourages readers to join in as she speaks to America and against the horrific, harmful systems we’ve created.

Natasha Reads ‘The Jane Austen Society’ by Natalie Jenner

Guest Post by Natasha Djordjevic

Natalie Jenner’s debut novel, The Jane Austen Society, is a delightful, insightful tribute to the author who brought us so many memorable characters. The story is set at the end of WWII in Chawton, where Jane Austen spent the last part of her life and where she wrote her final three novels. A group of unlikely people become friends and form a society that has a mutual love for Jane Austen. They want to use their love to save her home and make it a museum with items of the era she resided in.

We’re introduced to Adam Berwick, a farmer who is the character we meet first, upon meeting with a stranger looking for Austen, develops an affection of Austen’s works; Dr. Gray, who is grieving over the loss of his wife; Mimi Harrison a Hollywood actress with a soft spot for Austen; Frances Knight, a descendant of Jane Austen’s brother; Evie Snow a housemaid working at the estate and who secretly catalogs the library; Adeline Lewis, an English teacher who has experienced a series of losses; Andrew Forrester, a lawyer handling the estate’s affairs; and Yardley Sinclair, an estate sales expert of Sotheby’s in London.

With an easy pace, a well-executed plot, and its ability to explore themes of grief, loss, identity, love, this is a novel that is sure to delight both Austen fans and newcomers to the author.

The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner. St. Martin’s Press, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: My name is Natasha Djordjevic. My favorite genre to read is Historical Fiction, especially books set in the Tudor times. You can find my blog at poetryofreading.blogspot.com.

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Jessica Hertz Examines Five Fictional Women

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

In the latest issue of Pembroke Magazine, Jessica Hertz writes of the “Fictional Women I Have Known.” This five-part piece focuses on Alice from Alice in Wonderland, the mermaid from Hans Christian Andersen’s or Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Persephone, the sister from “The Six Swans” fairy tale, and Eve.

Each section explores the complexities of their feelings, their desires, and their realities. They’re not flat women on a page but are thought-out and developed even in the small space provided. I enjoyed Hertz’s take on each of them, and my favorites were the mermaid and Eve. The mermaid is faced with having to choose between a voice or the ability to dance, a choice she wishes she did not have to make. Eve is faced with a choice—eat the offered fruit or don’t—and Hertz asserts she knew exactly what she was doing when she accepted, a take I appreciated.

Peer into the inner thoughts and feelings of these five fictional women with Hertz as your guide.

Merging Memory with Storytelling

Guest Post by Kate Gaskin

In Wider than the Sky, Nancy Chen Long’s second book of poetry, the biological constraints of memory merge with the practice of storytelling to show how families create intimate legacies and private lexicons that both heal and stifle.

Long uses the language of science to meditate on the power of stories to determine—or even rewrite—reality. In “Interstice,” she writes “Our memory is flooded with holes, pocked like cotton eyelet.” To participate in narrative, then, is to admit its fallibility: “There are gaps in our stories / and in our history. People are missing.” “In the Family of Erasure” shows a daughter and mother engaged in a complicated dance through each other’s individual memories in order to arrive at a shared history they can both tolerate.

Throughout this collection, Long mines both the personal and the general to show how memory is a mutable and ever-evolving force that steers migrating butterflies around long-gone mountains and compels a daughter to clean “off the family’s stains . . . to keep her memory-rooms blameless.” In the closing poem “Wordlust,” Long writes of the bittersweet futility of determining shared history: “The world is filled / with words. We are a seaward-bound people, / chasing a flood / of sorrows our stories cannot explain.” These are tender and insightful poems that probe the fallibility of memory, asking which parts of our legacy we can control and which parts are inherited by complex forces that stretch back into our DNA.

Wider than the Sky by Nancy Chen Long. Diode Editions, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War (YesYes Books 2020). She is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal. 

A Time of Hope: Hatchet

Guest Post by Zizheng William Liu

Hatchet is the depiction of a world gone wrong. The book details the life of Brian Robeson, the son of divorced parents, and victim of a horrific plane crash. Left alone in the midst of the Canadian wilderness with nothing but a windbreaker and hatchet, Brian must tame himself to survive.

The story begins in the city, where 13-year-old Brian boards a bush plane to see his father for the summer. Miles up into the air, the plane pilot suffer from a heart attack, rendering the plane flying aimlessly above the Canadian landscape. But Brian had always been under tough situations. Ever since he had witnessed the dreaded secret that led to his parent’s divorce, Brian’s life had spiraled out of control. No, literally. The Cessna 406 bush plane that Brian was riding to see his father crashes, and Brian is forced to live his life in the wild. All the luxuries from the city are gone. Food needs to be hunted, shelter needs to be built, and the pesky mosquitoes need to be repelled. Over a month passes since the initial plane crash, and Brian finally finds a solution. He scavenges a transmitter from the plane ruins and that ultimately leads to his rescue. A fur buyer had been alerted to Brian, but the 54 days that Brian spent in the wilderness had still taken its toll.

A thrilling and powerful piece, Hatchet shows that any problem can be solved, even when life is on the line. In a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has swept through our nation, this book is an insight into the true potential that we all have. When utilized, no problem is too big to be solved.

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. Scholastic Press, 1986.

Reviewer bio: Zizheng William Liu is an avid writer. His works have been published in multiple literary journals and he is an editor for Polyphony Lit Magazines.

A Thought-Changing Read

Guest Post by Mia Willardson 

On May 19th, 2020, Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins released the novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. This dystopian piece is a prequel to Collins’s bestselling series. The Ballad Of Songbirds and Snakes takes place during the tenth annual Hunger Games and centers around young Coriolanus Snow. Snow is chosen to mentor in the Hunger Games and feels mortified when he is assigned the tribute from district twelve, Lucy Gray Baird. In the capital, district citizens were inferiors—less than people. Coriolanus felt disgraced to be assigned a girl from district twelve. However, Snow begins to learn that Lucy Gray isn’t just a girl from district twelve. She’s a very smart young woman who likes to wear rainbow dresses, sing, dance, and make a scene. She begins to become a hit in the capitol and Snow begins to see her in a new light. He begins to believe that she has a shot at winning the Hunger Games.

This story helps Hunger Games fans understand how Katniss and Peeta’s world came to be. The reader is taught the history of the dystopian country, and the hardships Snow and his family faced.

The reader learns how certain events and traditions came to place in the Hunger Games universe. Readers will fall in love with the bold characters in the novel, and will definitely find themselves audibly gasping and laughing along with the story. Collins’s use of striking imagery will make the reader feel as though they are apart of the journey. Collins shocks readers with how much the story can compare to our world and our real-world issues. The story revolves around power, control, and how people will react to it on larger scales. You’d be surprised how children fighting for their lives in an arena would compare to what is happening now. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a must-read and is the thought-changing tale of the year.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins. Scholastic Press, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: Mia is a fifteen-year-old upcoming high school sophomore who adores creative writing and dystopian literary pieces.

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A Meditation on Friendship

Guest Post by Leah Browning

I Refuse is a novel by Per Petterson about two childhood friends. Tommy and Jim are now adults and have been estranged for many years when they unexpectedly cross paths on a bridge outside Oslo.

Per Petterson, who also grew up in Norway, is a thoughtful and moving writer. Overall, I see this book is a meditation on friendship, not only between the two main characters, but between others as well. There are several instances where a spontaneous act of kindness reverberates through another person’s day or even, in at least one case, an entire lifetime.

The book also focuses on something slipperier: the role of persistence or determination in a person’s life. One of the boys has a harsh, even brutal home life; the other has, in many ways, been luckier. Either could be destroyed by his circumstances.

At the beginning of the book, one of the men has been fishing, but it could have been either one: “As a rule I drove home before the first cars came down the hill towards the bridge, but today I had frittered my time away. I hadn’t even started to pack my bag, and the cars that were coming were classy cars, expensive cars. I turned my back to the road, my frayed navy blue reefer jacket wrapped tightly round me. I’d had that jacket ever since I was a boy in Mørk, and only one of the old brass buttons was still intact, and I had a woollen cap on as blue as the jacket, pulled down over my ears, so from behind I could have been anyone.”

Ambition has pushed one of the men in a strange, sometimes cruel direction. In this time of social distancing, reading about the powerful impact of friends and family members feels especially relevant.

I Refuse by Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett). Graywolf Press, 2015.

Reviewer bio: Leah Browning edits the Apple Valley Review, which publishes short fiction, personal essays, and poetry in spring and fall issues. She occasionally blogs at https://leahbrowning.blogspot.com/.

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If Borges is a Writer’s Writer Then Calveyra is a Writer’s Writer’s Writer

Guest Post by Jason Gordy Walker

Reading the prose poems of Calveyra, one feels the guiding presence of an enthusiastic genius, a soft-spoken bard, an artist of nature and deep emotional impression. With his subtle touch, the poet paints miniature landscapes of the mind and the natural world it experiences: “I came looking through loose autumn and slowed to a thistle beside the slide piled high with dead leaves. Wild! recently bloomed and gone into the raw milk.” These poems, all untitled, have a cumulative, epiphanic effect. His common tropes, such as chickens, the wind, the moon, the horizon, and the expanse of the countryside, shimmer with meaningfulness.

Calveyra’s verse pays respect and close attention to the local language of the region he grew up in, Entre Ríos. In translation, the result is occasionally clipped syntax and/or off-beat slices of language thrown into the midst of clear sentences, which leads the reader into a dreamlike state of consciousness: “Oh, the chicken’s already come in clucking with huge umbrella wings and this cheep-cheep will pass will pass and the last one will stay!” He has a talent for switching tones in a single poem. One moment the mood may be ecstatic, the next sorrowful or contemplative, the next whimsical, curious.

Elizabeth Zuba’s breezy translations do the poems justice. Perhaps the best way to absorb the book is to read the Spanish aloud first, refining a taste for Calveyra’s internal rhymes and rhythms. Next, with the originals in mind, read the English translations; the effect is often mesmerizing. During the pandemic, with all of the stress, worry, and panic that comes with it, reading Calveyra prompts one to think, as the poet opens the final piece in his collection, “Please don’t be worried, I’m not.” Calveyra, who fled Perón’s Argentina for Paris in 1961, deserves a wider audience.

Letters So That Happiness by Arnaldo Calveyra. Ugly Duckling Presse, May 2018.

Reviewer bio: Jason Gordy Walker, a student at MFA@FLA, has published poetry in Confrontation, fiction in Monkeybicycle, and criticism in Birmingham Poetry Review and Alabama Writers’ Forum. He is against American Fascism.

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A Study in the Miraculous: The Only Dance There Is

Guest Post by MG Noles

 The Only Dance There Is is the story of Dr. Richard Alpert, the man who had it all. He had attained the pinnacle of success as a tenured professor of psychology at Harvard University. He had the cars, the girls, the motorcycles, and the friends. He was regarded as a genius by colleagues and students. He was the cool professor all the kids wanted to study with.

It was the 1960s, baby, and Dr. Alpert was riding the wave of social evolution. He wanted to change the world and yearned to break free of the post-1950s zipped-up norms that continued into the early ‘60s. Continue reading “A Study in the Miraculous: The Only Dance There Is”

Fresh First Poetry Collection Draws on Women of Myth

Guest Post by Rebecca Moon Ruark

“Eve, / How often do you think of me? / the house now, the kids, and / Everyone needs to eat, I know how tired / You are to mother the world”— “Oh” from The Desperate Measure of Undoing: Poems by Jessica Fischoff

Poetry is meant to be read aloud, preferably to an in-person audience. Luckily, one of the last live poetry readings I attended pre-pandemic featured Jessica Fischoff reading from her poetry chapbook.

The Desperate Measure of Undoing: Poems is a little book with big impact. Fischoff’s poems borrow from women of myth but are their own unique creations. The poet plays with persona, writing her poem, “Oh,” quoted above, not from Eve’s perspective but from that of the serpent. In a recent interview, Fischoff told me that “Oh” came from a prompt to write from the perspective of a villain. The poem reads as a letter from the serpent, who has been abandoned in the garden by Eve, and grants age-old Eve new agency and power.

There is a lot to admire in this chapbook that explores the feminine through the ages and through fresh takes. Original cover art and flower-illustrated front and back pages complement the poems and provide the reader a garden-like respite from our world’s current situation.

Read more about Fischoff and her debut poetry chapbook in a new interview at Parhelion Literary Magazine.

The Desperate Measure of Undoing by Jessica Fischoff. Across the Margin, 2019.

Reviewer bio: Rebecca Moon Ruark is features editor for Parhelion Literary Magazine, which publishes features, along with fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in winter, summer, and fall issues.

Challenging “Supposed To”

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

If you’re using pride month as a time to become more familiar with LGBTQIA+ writers, I recommend grabbing a copy of the Spring 2020 issue of Hiram Poetry Review. Inside is the four-page poem “I Didn’t Know You Were Transgender” by Mercury Marvin Sunderland. This poem is a response to the observation cisgender people have made: “I didn’t know you were transgender / they tell me / I thought you were a cis man.”

Sunderland spends the poem speaking to these people, asserting his place in the gender spectrum. At one point he declares:

if you knew
even a scrap
of trans culture
you’d know i
already do look
like a trans man
because we are a diverse multitude all over the earth.

With this poem, he challenges the idea of what someone is “supposed” to or expected to look like, challenges the argument that using “they” as singular “destroy[s] the english language,” challenges the idea that “stick[ing] medicine in me” means “i want to be cisgender.”

Throughout the four pages, Sunderland provides a better understanding of what it means to be a trans man, and what it means to be Sunderland himself.