This week’s mail brought the new issue of NANO Fiction, a special anniversary issue which includes both work from brand-new NF authors and works by a writer chosen from each previous issue. I was thrilled that the editors chose me to represent issue 5.1.
The piece they published here is a piece about the farm, and about my last real summer there. It was a complicated time. If you’ve been to the farm with me, the piece might surprise you. The place is pastoral; the piece isn’t.
****
It’s been a bustling few weeks here, as summer sneaks up on us….the job I’d spent several months preparing to exit actually didn’t wind down the way I thought. My boss approached me about ten days prior to my exit date with a new proposal…there’s a lot of blahblahblah in between, but the short version is that I’m still doing the same work, only with a new title & some new logistics. This is really wonderful news—I love the work & my coworkers—but I had never imagined it might happen, so I’m still getting resettled. (And my summer of leisure is quickly fading away!) But it’s welcome news.
We’re growing very invested in the idea of changing our decorating color scheme when we move later this summer, and I’m looking forward to embracing more neutrals and soothing colors—more blues, fewer reds.
There’s more to come, so I’ll be in touch soon. Until then, be well. Eat something delicious—silver queen corn when its season arrives, or berries, or basil. Here, we’re saving our appetites for our favorite food event in town: the local Greek Orthodox Church’s Greek Festival. Pastichio! Dolmades! Loukoumades! This weekend, if you catch me at the right moment, you’ll see a great big, honey-smeared grin. Yay delicious.
(xo)
Y’all, I’m super thrilled to announce that my piece “Prognosis,” originally published in Corium Magazine, has been named to Wigleaf’s top 50 list, a compendium of the best short fiction pieces published in 2012. I love this piece, and I admire Wigleaf a ton (I submit there regularly), so I’m really honored by this news. (Click the link above to see the rest of the top 50 [the short list], and go to Wigleaf’s site to see the long list.)
Here in the ‘burg it’s been a rough semester, though I’ve refrained from speaking much about that. I will say, though, that now I’m focused on moving forward: grading papers, wrapping up another semester and preparing for my last week in the editing job I’ve had for the last seven years. (NB: the editing job was lovely and wonderful and not part of the roughness; my exit date was pre-determined long ago.) We’re also looking for a new place to live (new housing only, though—we’ll still be here teaching in the fall). So it’s a season of moving forward, looking ahead.
A year ago, I refused to paint my kitchen, although we’d purchased the paint a good six months earlier, because I didn’t want to change anything, to make it other than what my brother had known of my life. Now, I’m ready to move into something new—not past him, exactly, but still forward. I think this is good.
Given that, I was a little scared to revisit this piece, though I remembered being very attached to it when I wrote it last year. But rereading it, I see that it’s a piece that prefigured this moment, these changes and possibilities. Make way, it instructs, and I have. I am.
I’ll write soon, as there’s news on the horizon. Until then, loves, be well. Love big. And do things that delight you.
(xo)
Do you know Dear Sugar? You should know Dear Sugar. She’s the advice columnist for The Rumpus, (therumpus.net) and I adore her. Tonight, she’s revealing her identity at a party in San Francisco. When she announced this plan, the editors of 300 Reviews (300reviews.com) asked me and Brian Oliu (BrianOliu.com) to write something to commemorate the event. We each wrote a review. Mine is up today, and his (which is stunning, by the way) will be live tomorrow.
I sort of laughed when I got this request, because I had written to Sugar once and told her I really didn’t care who she was. It’s not that I’m indifferent, but that I don’t think knowing will affect my reading of her column in any way. I think this shows up in my review. Other folks I know and admire disagree with me, and I think that’s just fine. We might all react differently. Or maybe I’ll discover I was wrong. That’s what keeps life interesting.
****
Tonight at the university where I teach, there’s a panel on the Lovings, the Virginia couple who challenged marriage laws back in the 1950s. Their case made it to the Supreme Court (yes, it was titled Loving v. the State of Virginia), which declared that interracial marriage could no longer be outlawed. So C & I will be at that panel, and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
Love big, y’all. Be well.
(xo)
Happy New Year, loves! I’ve been remiss about blogging, but I have had a few new publications come out since my last post.
I’ve got several pieces in Apropos Literary Journal, which you can get to through the above link. This journal was started by UMW students, and I was pleased they asked me to share some work with them.
While I was off galavanting about, my copy of NANOFICTION arrived. I’m so excited to have two prose poems in this issue, and I’m very honored that one of them, “Pleurisy,” has been nominated by the journal’s editors for a Pushcart Prize. I really like this journal and the folks behind it.
*****
So. The galavanting. (NB: I’ve realized I treat these posts sort of as Stephen Elliot does the Daily Rumpus—-as a catch all, a place to ruminate and mull. Feel free not to keep reading.) It was good—exotic places, familiar places, new friends & folks I’ve known for decades. Some dear folks had babies. I danced with the toddler and rang in (somewhat disbelievingly, I must confess) a national championship with people I love. I got hurt, took a deep breath, and remembered the value of staying and negotiating and working through. I was met more than halfway, a reminder that I’ve got great people in my life.
My route home takes me from the landscape of my childhood, through the town of my adolescence, to a town where a person who was once significant to me now lives a life I have no part of. As I drove, my husband slept, and I thought a lot about R words: redemption, revelation, running.
One of the dearest people in my life is a marker of redemption; it’s the word I always use to characterize our friendship. We were friends. Then we weren’t. Now we are again. And that’s good—for us personally, but also, I think, as a reminder that things are never static. There’s always possibility for growth, for change, for, well, love. (As a sidenote, I think over the past few years I’ve been on a personal mission to rehabilitate the word love. We’re so scared of acknowledging it or uttering it—and so limited in our understanding of it, in aligning it with the romantic—that it’s become loaded. So I’m trying to be much more intentional about telling the people I love that I love them. They are many, and I’m not as attentive as I should be, but I’m working on it. Join me?)
Over the break I read Roxane Gay’s AYITI, and I’m still thinking about some of the characters in it. This is a marker of a stellar work. If you haven’t read this book, you should. I admire it—-and Roxane—immensely. Hopefully I’ll have more to say (and will say it more eloquently) about this text in time, but for now, know that it’s a work that deserves your time and attention.
I’ve been writing about revelation, so on the chance those words see daylight someday, I’ll hold off from saying more about that here. But I will say that I’m not a person who has to know everything. Sometimes I trust the idea of reticence. It’s backfired on me before, but I think there’s a place for it.
I have been running lately, which is something I usually do only when I’m miserable—-it’s a tell, for me, normally, that if I say I’ve gone running, things are deeply bad. But this time around, something’s different. It started that way—the hurt I mentioned earlier—but stuck. I’ve found myself almost enjoying it. I don’t consider myself—or aim to become—-a runner, but I’m acknowledging for now that it’s something I’m doing. I told an acquaintance that I’m having a fling with running, and she reminded me that flings can be fun. She’s right. We’ll see how long it lasts, then.
So. This is disjointed, but that might seem right for this time of year. I’ll use the next few days to settle back into the routine of a new semester (I start teaching on Wed), and trust that with that routine, my thoughts will become a bit less jumbled. Until then, loves, be well. Love big. Oh! And send me poems—-I’m the Poetry Editor for Peripheral Surveys now, and I’d love to read (and publish!) your work. Hit me up at elizabethwwade(at)peripeheralsurveys(dot)com.
xo.
My latest piece, “Burning the Negatives,” appears over at Housefire today, which makes me very happy. If you don’t know Housefire, check it out—-it’s a collective that does great work to promote innovative writing. They routinely publish prompts for folks who’d like to write their way into the group. (That’s how I got in, way back in the spring.)
Often, when you write about things that have happened to you, it takes some time. It’s usually necessary to wait and reflect, to sit on your work for a while so you may revise at a time that’s more distant from the time of writing. So there’s often a long time that passes between the event and the writing about the event and the publication of the writing about the event. I’m always happy to see my work published, but sometimes when I get a journal, revisiting my poems is similar looking at land as I fly away from it in an airplane: it seems so small, so quaint.
That’s not the case here. I had a birthday. December came. Advent started. I wrote a poem. It feels very immediate still, and that’s fun.
I should add two things: the line “the man with the gun is satin” comes from a typo I encountered last spring. Thanks, H, for letting me steal the line. (If you want me to name you fully, just let me know!)
And the bio is my very favorite ever. The one who brings the most joy wins: of course she does.
Bring on the joy, y’all.
(xo)
“Vertigo” (AGNI)
My poem “Vertigo” appears in the latest print issue of AGNI, which makes me very happy.
****
Last year I started taking a yoga class, and I enjoyed it a lot, even though I found it challenging. I’m not good at being single-minded——I tend to multi-task on many things. So the idea of meditation was difficult for me. I liked it, but it took a while to master. The poem arose from one of those pre-mastery moments.
****
In the same fall, my brother started doing yoga, too. He did it at the rehab facility he was at, as a way to learn coping and stress management and relaxation. We laughed every now and then about the incongruity of it—-he wasn’t prone to meditation or introspection.
After he died, I went back to my yoga class. I cried through the first one—the first thing I did by myself after he died—but I got through it. I quit going eventually, for a number of reasons (someone very loud joined the class, and I just found it not very restful any more), but I do it on my own sometimes.
This summer, at the start of a long road trip, I found myself at the family farm. We were in the den, watching the tribute to “Big Man” Clarence Clemmons. I moved into a pose, steadying my gaze on something in front of me. At some point, I realized that one of my friends had turned around to watch me rather than the television, but I couldn’t meet his gaze—I knew that moving my eyes would make me lose my balance.
There’s a metaphor here somewhere, but I’m not going to reach too far for it.
Or maybe the point of the story is that I’d learned the value of focus.
Or maybe morals are myths and O’Brien is right: there’s no moral, no true way to tell a story of war or any sort of battle.
But we keep going, keep reaching, keep telling. And ultimately, I think that’s good.
(xo)
“Pleurisy” (Nano Fiction)
Last night, in the midst of a 13 hour trip back from Thanksgiving break, I learned that the editors of the fabulous journal Nano Fiction have nominated my forthcoming piece “Pleurisy” for a Pushcart Prize. I was stunned and honored and thrilled. I’ll post about the prose poem itself when I have the issue in hand (any day, I hear), but I figure this deserved its own mention.
Many thanks to editors Kirby Johnson & Glenn Shaheen—-not just for the nomination, but for believing in the work and giving it a home.
And check out Nano Fiction! I submitted to them because I like the work they’re doing, and I’m honored to be among their authors.
Before I became an editor of Peripheral Surveys, they accepted one of my essays. It’s live now (click the link above). It’s about dragons & grief & the way we understand other creatures and ourselves.
It’s Thanksgiving week, and we’ve been in my Alabama hometown since the weekend. I wasn’t sure how this one would go—first birthday & Thanksgiving since my brother’s death—but I knew I wanted to be here for them. It hasn’t been without tears—-(I boo-hooed my way through the bama game last week, not realizing when I went that my first trip back to Bryant Denny without my brother would bring up a whole slew of emotions.) But mostly, it’s been lovely. I’ve eaten ridiculously, and been with people I love. I’ve hung out with my niece and my friends. I’ve slept really well. Bama is, miraculously, back in the BCS hunt, and somewhat impulsively a few nights ago, while I was on the phone with my BFF, I booked a hotel room in New Orleans for the championship. I don’t know if I’ll go. But it’s fun to think about being there with my husband & sister & brother-in-law.
Today, I’ve been making the components of buttered popcorn ice cream sundaes, which we’ll eat soon to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Last night we ate gingerbread and caramel sauce. And before that, we ate carrot cake (my most favorite cake of all time). I think that’s what I’ve needed—-maybe what we’ve all needed this year: to be together, to feed each other delicious things, just to be grateful we’re all here, all together. This has, unequivocally, been the worst year of my life. But it’s also held some of the best moments of my life, and I’m grateful for that, for the people who’ve walked this road with me. The world can be brutal sometimes, but it’s pretty delicious, too.
So love big, y’all. Hold each other close. Share something sweet.
(xo)
My poem “Cultivar” appears in the latest issue of elimae; click on the link above to read it.
Formally or thematically this poem doesn’t really have anything in common with my piece “Self-Portrait as List of Figures,” but I think of them as related—poetic fraternal twins, perhaps—because they were both inspired by a trip I took last fall. We went to Phoenix to visit a friend and see Brent Green’s stunning film GRAVITY WAS EVERYWHERE BACK THEN. (I’ve written about that trip on this blog, under the post for the poem “Self-Portrait…”) It was a trip marked by chiaroscuro, by the oh-so-light-and-lovely and by the darkness on the horizon.
“Cultivar” differs from my normal tone, and I both like that and remain surprised by it. Its allusion to Penelope’s bed has me thinking this morning of what it means to build something, to construct it with your own hands & labor. Behind me as I write is furniture my great grandfather built—an end table, a bourbon barrel turned into a wet bar. The latter is one of my prized possessions.
This weekend I will return to my hometown and sleep in a bed that belonged to my ancestors. I do not know how I feel about this—this first time I will have stayed in my parents’ house since my brother’s death. They have lived in this house for nearly 20 years, but this will be the first time I am not sleeping in my childhood bedroom, because my brother had moved into it before he died, and his things are still on the bed. I am not allowed to sleep in my room, and I do not know how I feel about that. (To be fair, I should say that my mother and I had a pretty healthy conversation about all this a few weeks ago, and I think that the room is not always going to be a shrine to Austin. That surprised me. It was good.)
***
I think it’s important to build things sometimes. It’s good to know how things work. At one point in my life, I had a favorite kind of sander (bumblebee). I’ve been known to teach myself things just on principle—the idea that this is something you should be able to do.
Over the weekend, my husband was frustrated with something I’d asked him to do (confer with mechanics) and said, “I mean, I don’t know what a carburetor does. Do you?”” I did know (it regulates fuel & air flow into the engine), but I also knew that most cars don’t even have carburetors anymore (they’ve been phased out in favor of fuel injectors).
I should say that my husband is a good man. And I should say that he could have picked a thousand things that I wouldn’t have known about; he just happened onto one of the things I did know. This is the only time in my entire life that it’s been useful for me to know what a carburetor does. But even though it’s not knowledge I needed, I think it’s important to have.
So maybe here’s what I’m trying to say, loves: get out there. Sleep in a different bedroom. Learn something that seems superfluous. Roll Tide.
(xo)
I’m thrilled to report that I’m the new Poetry Editor of the online journal Peripheral Surveys. The journal also has a new managing Editor, Ashley Bethard, who I’m very excited to work with. You can check out the journal’s tumblr page at the link above, or visit the journal itself at peripheralsurveys.com.
Most importantly, I’d love to read your work, and I hope you’ll consider submitting. Our submission guidelines are online, so please check them out. I want to publish you!
(xo)
