The Voina Group

The other day, I came across photographs of the audacious Russian street-art group Voina. What struck me most was how ordinary the members looked. They could have easily been any undergrads from any American campus. Yet, the Russian government has brought more than a dozen criminal cases against them. The same government that also saw fit to grant them the Ministry of Culture Innovation 2011 award for modern visual arts. Though perhaps not precisely for the giant phallus that they had painted on the Liteyny drawbridge leading to the Bolshoy Dom headquarters of the Federal Security Service in Saint Petersburg.

I took these photos as further evidence for a hypothesis first formed at my father’s knee: that there is no necessary correlation between audacious appearance and audacious acts. The seemingly unremarkable people sitting around my family’s kitchen table, all war refugees, had routinely done things that you and I wouldn’t dream of doing. The others that I later encountered, either directly or indirectly. Rosa Parks, the small woman with the rimless glasses whose singular act sparked the US civil rights movement. The girls in shirtwaist dresses and guys in plaid shirts who adopted the Port Huron Statement, written by the curly-haired Tom Hayden, that launched 50 years of student protest and mass action for a more democratic society. The controversial authors that I read–James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, George Orwell, JD Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut– who, on looks alone, would have been welcomed at any of the libraries where their books had been banned. The more flamboyant forming the remainder of my world–the Hippies and their successors–seemed to be mere eiphenomena, not the driving force of audacity.

But what about visual artists, who are–well–more visually oriented? Is it easier to spot the most audacious of that sort? Look at a list of the 10 most controversial artists of our time that I located online and judge for yourself. They’re presented below by birth order, together with a brief description, and shown in a slide show with a representative work:

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Picasso repeatedly outraged the public as well as his associates, but no more so than with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. At that time, the work was deemed crude, unfinished and unusually unsettling. Today, it is considered to be seminal in the development of both cubism and modern art.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). In Paris, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2  raised a ruckus. Among the objections was that nudes never descend stairs: they recline. In New York, reactions were no more favorable. It was called “an explosion in a shingle factory” and spawned satirizations for decades. Today, Duchamp is seen as a key player in the surrealist, futurist and Dada movements.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986). The abstract imagery of O’Keeffe’s oversized, sensual flowers and similar depictions such as Blue and Green Music caused a stir because they called to mind female genitalia. Even as she was celebrated by feminists, she denied painting private parts. Today, she is credited with revolutionizing modern art through her portrayal of the emotional impact of nature and man-made entities.

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). With his huge Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), Pollock abandoned the convention of central motif and established process as paramount. The resulting action painting genre caused considerable disagreement among critics. His wife, Lee Krasner, may well have been the real innovator. Her Cobalt Night is larger than Lavender Mist and exhibits the same heroic ambition.

Christo Javachev (1935-present). Javachev and his late wife were at the forefront of environmental art. The first version of Valley Curtain, a 400 meter length of vivid orange material stretched across Rifle Gap, was torn to shreds by wind and rock while being hung. A second version was successfully erected, only to be torn apart by gale-force winds 28 hours later. While critics searched for meaning in such massive, temporary installations, the two expanded the definition of what constitutes art.

Ai Weiwei (1957-present). Ai was the artistic consultant for the Beijing National Stadium and a dissident arrested by the Chinese government. His 10 tons of hand-painted porcelain sculptures, Sunflower Seeds, reference a staple of the Cultural Revolution and the resulting homogenization. Placing Ai first in the 2011 Power 100, ArtReview noted that his “activities have allowed artists to move away from the idea that they work within a privileged zone limited by the walls of a gallery or museum.”

Damien Hirst (1965-present). Hirst is famous for formaldehyde-fixed animals displayed in glass tanks. His Virgin Mother, a 35 foot tall statue recalling Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, reveals the insides of a pregnant woman. Critics have variously called him one of few late 20th Century artists who will remain more than a footnote and someone responsible for the decline of contemporary art.

David Černý (1967-present). Černý gained international recognition by getting arrested for painting a Soviet tank pink. While he claims that he merely creates art for his friends and to piss people off, he doubtless has something more serious in mind. His Brownnosers allows visitors to climb a 20-foot ladder and peer into a white rear end to view a video of impersonators of President Václav Klaus and art critic Milan Knížák feeding each other slop while “We Are the Champions” plays.

Chris Ofili (1968-present). Ofili gained notoriety when questions were raised regarding his The Holy Virgin Mary and Tate Gallery’s purchase of The Upper Room containing his 13 paintings of macaques. No Woman No Cry, referencing his Nigerian heritage and the Bob Marley song, has been called a modern Pietà but has also raised hackles since it stands on two dried, varnished lumps of elephant dung–a material favored by Ofili–and a third serves as the Virgin’s pendant.

Banksy (1974?-present). “Banksy” is the pseudonym of an anonymous street artist, painter and political activist who may or may not be Robin Gunningham. Known for his contempt of the government in labelling graffiti as vandalism, he displays his art on public surfaces such as walls and sometimes goes as far as building prop pieces. His stencil of the image of Death on the waterline of an entertainment boat in Bristol is based on a 19th Century etching illustrating the pestilence of the Great Stink.

When I consider these artists, I see nothing that makes me think that there is any way to identify the truly audacious other than through their work. So more power to those who don’t want to look bland or boring. But if they want to be genuinely daring, they’ll have to come up with more than a startling appearance. And put more of themselves on the line. Personally, I’d place my money on one of those inconspicuous commuters sitting near me on the subway. Chances are better that the makings of the next fearless [literary, artistic, social, cultural, political] work is stashed in his or her plain portfolio or briefcase.

Note: For more on audacity, see the “Audacious Ideas” series on this site. And join us for the launch of the Summer 2012 Audacity print issue in late June.

Audacity defines the best and worst within us. It is boldness or daring, accompanied by confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought or other restrictions. It is also effrontery, insolence or shamelessness. The “Audacious Ideas” essay series celebrates this theme, which serves as the basis of our Summer 2012 print issue.

The original cover of Charles Dickens' The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, 1836

In 1878, Scribner’s Monthly claimed that it is only the “second and third rate novelist who could not get published in a magazine and is obliged to publish in a volume, and it is in a magazine that the best novelists always appear first.” If that sounds outlandish these days, author Rafael Alvarez, who once served as an LPR fiction editor but is better known as a screenwriter for the acclaimed HBO series Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire, has the audacity to envision a not too distant future where that might ring true again.

Since the surge of serialized literature in the Victorian Era that supported this claim seems to have been spurred by technological advances in printing and improved economics of distribution and similar factors are in play with the increasing role of the Internet and devices like Kindle and the iPad in reading, conditions are favorable for a renaissance of serialization. All we lack is a modern-day Dickens, whose phenomenally successful sequence of loosely related stories, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, enticed the public to embrace the format. Perhaps Rafael, the penultimate storyteller of our time, will assume that role with the publication of The Long Vietnam of My Soul in the NorthBaltimorePatch.

Unlike the smattering of other digital-age authors who have given it a go–Stephen King with the The Plant,  Michel Faber with The Crimson Petal and the White, Orson Scott Card with Hot Sleep and InterGalactic Medicine Show, Tracy and Laura Hickman with Dragon’s Bard and Lawrence Watt-Evans with his Ethshar series–Rafael positioned his serialized novel in Patch Media, which exemplifies “curated citizen journalism” or “hyperlocal journalism.” In doing so, he took his place amid everyday people who had something to say and, thereby, opened up access to quality literature for entire new classes of readers, just as Dickens did in his day.

Since I’m one of those who has been giving away her print library and gone entirely digital for new acquisitions, I was delighted when Rafael allowed me to introduce his online heroine Nieves to you and offered to provide a bit of background on how it all came about. Here’s some of what he had to say:

Rafael Alvarez, offering readers tasty tidbits: empanadas, which trace their origins to Galacia, an ancestral home of the author and his heroine Nieves. (Photo: Billy Driscoll)

Nieves is not Nell Trent, not by a long shot. A heroin addict from my grandfather’s region of Spain, a village outside the port of Vigo in Galicia, Nieves alights in Baltimore during the summer of 1988 in flight from the sources of her destruction. Like so many of us, she does not realize that she has brought the problem with her as surely as she has landed in the New World in boots of Spanish leather.

In this bicentennial of the birth of Charles Dickens, whose David Copperfield taught me the fundamentals of crumbs-in-the-forest storytelling when I worked as an ordinary seaman after high school, I am publishing a serialized novel on the Internet. Though the characters were established some 20 years ago in The Fountain of Highlandtown, even I am not sure where the tale is headed from week to week. And that’s the joy of it.

Just before Catholic Easter, I walked through the Hebrew Friendship Cemetery in the 3600 block of East Baltimore Street with the poet Tony Hayes. I glimpsed, for the first time, tombstones in the shape of tree trunks and the place where the names Harry & Jeanette Weinberg may have the most meaning: their graves. And somehow it occurred to me that this old burying ground, purchased in 1849 and extending from Baltimore Street to Pulaski Highway, would be the spot where Nieves shoots dope for the last time before leaving for Crabtown for good.

My publisher is the NorthBaltimorePatch, an AOL company, and the opportunity was realized through the literary sensibility and sympathies of former Baltimore Sun City Hall correspondent Doug Donovan, now a Maryland editor for Patch. Donovan puts up the story with a provocative photo–a bottle of Fundador brandy, a rosebush next to a trash can, Grandpop’s cuff links–and I blast the link to the new chapter through Facebook to the 2,000 or so people who call me “friend.” AOL tabulates the hits the chapters get. Though the novel has hardly gone viral, so far so good.

I file a chapter or two a month, pushing the story forward by increments sometimes too meager to be detected. The story begins on Memorial Day, and by Part 12, where the story stands today, it is still June. Sometimes I go back in time and, like a mason slipping thin, smooth stones between rows of brick, fill holes between chapters already published. Sometimes I jump ahead, hinting at events for which there is no probability on the established record. Eventually, news of Nieves’ uncertain fate will reach a highly distracted reading public in cyberspace.

In 1841, three years before the invention of the telephone, word of Little Nell’s destiny was delivered to America by ships landing from Britain. The faithful waited on the docks of New York City for the outcome, shedding tears and cursing Dickens when they learned that Nell Trent had succumbed to her many and arduous journeys. “She was dead,” wrote Dickens. “Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead.”

Wither Nieves? Will the seductive Spaniard survive–not just her addictions but herself? Will Basilio survive Nieves? Go down to the docks along Pratt Street when the ship arrives and find out.

One day, Rafael’s entire tale will be pressed between hard covers and given away out of the back of his truck as he drives between Baltimore and Los Angeles. If you haven’t already come across the online version in your wanderings, here’s an excerpt from Part 8:

Call it sex, call it sick, call it sleep—call it anything but love when Nieves and Basilio finally lay together for the first and last time, rolling beneath the hole in the rafters he’d made to paint by moonlight. The marks left–lines on Basilio’s face and hands, lines on the left and right–were indelible. It was over by Labor Day and never ended.

If you still entertain doubts about this format’s validity, consider some of the other works that were originally serialized. There was One Thousand and One Nights way back when and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in the Nineteenth Century. And more recently but still not electronically, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road.

Note: If you’re discarding part of your print library, do what I did: give it to Rafael. He makes donated books available to his Highlandtown neighbors and visitors. And while you’re there, take advantage of the Greektown Reading Series he recently started. This month’s will be held at 7:00 pm on Thursday, April 26 at the Habanero Grill. There will be free Greek appetizers and accordion music as well as presenters Ann LoLord0, Christopher Corbett, Michael Hill and Gail Rosen.

Over 300 entries were submitted in the blind contest. In addition to myself, three other poets reviewed the 35 finalists: LPR Social Justice Issue Guest Editor Truth Thomas, LPR Secretary Linda Joy Burke and LPR Contributing Editor Susan Thornton Hobby.

Joseph Ross (Photo: Jeremy Bigwood)

Although we chose five finalists, four of whom will appear in the Summer 2012 Audacity issue, “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God” was the poem that each reviewer listed in his or her top three. Clearly, Joseph Ross’s poem had universal appeal. It spoke to each of us even though our poetic styles differed.

I asked the other judges to share their thoughts on the poem. Linda Joy said:

It reminds me of Lucille Clifton’s work in its elegant simplicity. This poem speaks to the brutality proliferated from an economy of riches built on the backs of enslaved people and the consequent inhumanity of the Jim Crow laws that were sanctioned by many of the so-called righteous. As we have seen since the election a black president, the prejudices and ideologies born of the era when the young boy Till was so horribly murdered still remain in the minds of many today. Instead of raging against God, the poet gives us an alternative: that God’s mother wouldn’t want to see this kind of damage done to any son–not her son, not any other mother’s son–and that the true nature of our souls should not be hidden by any means.

Truth added:

Clever counterfactual theorists tend to have a universal appeal. Joe assumes the posture of such a theorist in his poem in order to document racism and the horrific murder of a child. Its timeless quality comes as a result of the longstanding “killing black children business” that is the unresolved legacy of slavery in the United States.

At the time that we were reading the final poems, the Trayvon Martin case and its parallels to the Till murder had not yet entered public discussion. Now that they have, I cannot think of better poem to grace the windows of Enoch Pratt Free Library than “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God.”

I heard from Joe, who lives in Silver Spring, MD, soon after his poem was announced as the winner. Joe wanted to know if he was allowed to make a revision. The title and refrain are not grammatically correct. Having taught high school English as Joe does, I understood why one word didn’t sit right with him. However, I wasn’t sure that strict adherence to grammar was right for the poem. “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God” has a musicality that would be lost in the edit: “If Mamie Till Were the Mother of God.” The voice in the poem speaks from the heart in an almost spiritual way.

When Joe and I discussed the poem on the phone, we talked about the call-and-response feel that the repeated line “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God” creates. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Joe had been thinking of Catholic traditions and the pacing of a litany when he wrote the poem. Joe said:

I spent a lot of time reading about the whole Emmett Till, Mamie Till mess, and I’m just fascinated by her story–not an activist, a mother. I’m very much interested in the idea of the common person making a decision that has extraordinary consequences (“every coffin lid would be / glass”). Mamie Till ties into the image of Mary, a very common person to whom something very extraordinary happens.

The research meant that Joe’s early drafts were lengthy. Revising the poem was a process of deciding which facts of the Till case were most pertinent in a poem that simply communicates both anger and grace in response to the murder of a black teenaged boy.

Joe and I consulted with Truth about the proposed edit. Truth’s response was spot on: “The poem loses its power pinned to the wall of perfect grammar. What Joseph has captured is the language people really speak.”

“If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God” will be unveiled in Enoch Pratt Free Library’s front windows on Saturday, April 14 during the CityLit Festival. Please join us there. Stop by our table and attend the Little Patuxent Review Presents session (11:30 am to 12:20 pm). In addition to LPR Social Justice issue contributors Kathleen Hellen, Jill-Ann Stolley, Michael Salcman, Clarinda Harriss, Alan King and Susan Gabrielle, Joe will read “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God.” It is serendipitous that this particular poem, which speaks to Social Justice so audaciously, marks the transition between our Social Justice and Audacity issues.

Enoch Pratt Free Library Poetry Contest Winner:
If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God
Joseph Ross

If Mamie Till was the mother
of God

one of the ten commandments
would forbid whistling.

No one would wear cotton
clothing, every cotton field

would be burned in praise
of fourteen

year-old boys
and their teeth.

If Mamie Till was the mother
of God

every river would be still
so nothing thrown in

could travel downstream;
barbed wire could only be

worn as a necklace
by senators.

If Mamie Till was the mother
of God

every coffin lid would be
glass, so even God could see

how baptisms are done
in Mississippi.

Online Editor’s Note: To learn more about Lisa and the Pratt, read “Meet the Neighbors: Enoch Pratt Free Library.”

Audacity defines the best and worst within us. It is boldness or daring, accompanied by confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought or other restrictions. It is also effrontery, insolence or shamelessness. The “Audacious Ideas” essay series celebrates this theme, which serves as the basis of our Summer 2012 print issue.

Set design for Act 1 of La bohème, Reginald Gray, 2010

Housing artists in decrepit garrets is all well and good when you’re, say, designing sets for La bohème. But I’m here to tell you that there’s nothing romantic about a place that gives you pneumonia merely because you decide to gain more living space by situating your mattress directly on the freezing floor of what had heretofore been an enclosed second-story porch or where you find your resident rat has gnawed on each of a basketful of root vegetables right before you’re ready to make some sweet potato pie.

I was, therefore, delighted to learn that a local group had not only had the audacity to imagine that artists might be more creative and productive if they had pleasant places to live but also to do whatever it took to implement that vision. “We shamelessly stole the idea from a group called Artspace in Minneapolis,” Charlie Duff, president of Jubilee Baltimore, told Urbanite in 2010 just prior to the opening of City Arts Apartments in Baltimore’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District.

Decidedly intrigued, I contacted Talya Constable, Director of Resource Development at Jubilee Baltimore, to learn more. Here’s what Talya sent me:

Baltimore’s first building designed specifically for artists began with a collaboration between a local foundation, Baltimore Neighborhood Collaborative, and a national nonprofit specializing in artist housing, Artspace. BNC asked Artspace to assess whether Baltimore could support the creation of such a building and, if so, where the building should be located. Artspace determined that the vacant city-owned lot at the corner of Oliver Street and Greenmount Avenue in Station North would be ideal because more than 300 artists already lived or worked within a two-block radius. The downside was that Oliver Street contained several vacant lots, a row of vacant houses and a factory building that had been vacant for more than 25 years.

For years, Station North struggled from disinvestment and an alarming number of vacancies. Prior to the recession, many artists there had lived in two large buildings on Greenmount West, the residential portion of Station North, that were now slated for redevelopment. Knowing that they were at risk of displacement, Jubilee set out to ensure that affordable housing opportunities for artists would be preserved. Jubilee and partners TRF Development Partners Baltimore and Homes for America were selected by Baltimore City through a competitive bid process to develop the vacant lot that had been identified by Artspace as the future site of City Arts Apartments.

The City Arts team was awarded approximately $13.5 million in low-income housing tax credits to develop the building, which contained 69 residential units situated above a ground-floor gallery where residents could display their own work and that of other local artists. It incorporated the findings of a market study where over 700 self-described artists were interviewed and included sustainable design elements such as low-VOC  paints, urea-formaldehyde-free composite woods and Green-Label-certified floor coverings. The result was a building designed with artists in mind that was also healthy and had minimal impact on the surroundings.

City Arts was the first new residential building of any kind to be built in this neighborhood since the 19th Century. Once completed, it was fully leased within four months–seven months ahead of the anticipated leasing schedule–and now has a long waiting list. By creating affordable housing for artists, City Arts strengthened the Station North Arts and Entertainment District and served as a catalyst for additional neighborhood investment such as the following:

• Adjacent to City Arts, TRF Development Partners recently purchased an entire row of vacant houses and renovated them fully.
• TRF plans to build eight new row houses next to City Arts, which should be under construction within months and offered for sale by the end of the year.
• A block from City Arts, a former clothing factory vacant for more than 25 years is now being redeveloped and will be the home of the Baltimore Design School.
• The Maryland Institute College of Art–MICA–completed the first phase of a $19 million renovation of Studio Center on North Avenue.
• North Avenue Market owners are about to begin a $1 million restoration of the historic façade that stretches more than 200 feet along North Avenue.
• The former Chesapeake Restaurant at the gateway to Station North, vacant for more than 20 years, is under construction. By year’s end, it will house two restaurants and a second Milk & Honey market.
• In February, Jubilee Baltimore purchased the largest vacant building in Station North, 10 E North Avenue, for a multi-tenant arts facility containing artist studios, galleries, theaters and arts-related venues.

All this sounded far better than I’d anticipated, so–just to make sure–I contacted an artist actually living there to get her take. Conveniently, Ashby Foote also happened to be the marketing coordinator at City Arts and had recently completed a piece on what it was like to live there. Here’s some of what she sent me, together with a photo of her in her apartment with her mother Suzie Foote assembling jewelry to sell at a local event:

LPR editors Laura Shovan and Jen Grow (second row, far right) with Centennial High School Advanced Composition students (Photo: Jon Kolp)

It takes audacity and faith in yourself to begin sending work out to publications. We received several submissions from local teens, all for our upcoming Audacity issue. I tracked down these young writers to Corey O’Brien’s Advanced Composition class at Centennial High School in Ellicott City, Maryland. A few weeks ago, LPR Fiction Editor Jen Grow and I visited the class.

Here’s what two of the students in the class, Jennifer Swiger and Lucy Font, had to say about that day:

Every other day at 10:15 am, we write. Members of our class settle into seats, open daybooks and write. The girl near the door could be inventing a fantasy world between the lines of her notebook, while the boy in the back of the room could be filling his pages with a mouth-watering description of what he ate for lunch yesterday. Whatever the case may be, we write.

On Friday, however, we listened. Privileged with the presence of two editors from the acclaimed publication Little Patuxent Review, we learned that writing is about more than pen and paper. Seated before us were Editor Laura Shovan and Fiction Editor Jen Grow. A few minutes into their presentation, we began to scribble furiously, jotting down words of inspiration. As any class would, we had questions. Giancarlo Albano paved the way by asking, “How important is the title of a piece?”

From there, Shovan and Grow elaborated on countless aspects of the writing process, from revision to formatting. Their shared experience as editors and their words of wisdom as well as the diverse publications that they brought, ranging from Shovan’s high school literary magazine to the latest issue of LPR, proved to be invaluable.

Shovan and Grow emphasized a key piece of advice: do not give up. They made it clear that rejection is inevitable and, more importantly, that each rejection should strengthen the desire to persevere. An anecdote that made an impact on us involved a class of art students that had been painting diligently only to be instructed by the teacher to flip their canvases and paint over their work. Why not think of writing as a blank canvas, a clean slate? As Jackie Minehart said, “[the story] touches on the point that we have to have confidence in our writing skills and continue to progress in order to get better. If we realize one idea isn’t working, we must move forward.”

The generosity with which Shovan and Grow offered us their time and expertise was appreciated beyond words. As writers, we gained insight into both the process of publishing and the art of writing. We were taught to be fearless, honest with ourselves and, most importantly, true to our craft. We must write and continue to do so. Thank you, LPR!

Three Centennial High School poets with teacher Corey O'Brien at LPR's Wisdomwell reading. From left to right, Jen Swiger, Poulomi Banerjee, Corey and Jackie Minehart. (Photo: Eva Quintos Tennant)

We invited Corey and his students to the following Friday’s Wisdomwell reading and were delighted that they took us up on it. The subsequent Monday, the three students who had read their own poems there–Jen Swiger, Poulomi Banerjee and Jackie Minehart–shared their experiences with the rest of the class. From what Corey later told us, it was clear that the evening had made a lasting impression on the students who had accompanied him. Jen Swiger, he said, had summed it up by saying that the Friday night poetry reading was the first time that she felt like a writer. As a both writer and an educator, I have to love that.

Online Editor’s Note: If you’re a teacher, you might be interested in our LPR in the Classroom Program, which offers our print publication at a discounted price. You might also want to read two pieces on how LPR was used in creative writing classes at Howard Community College: “LPR in the Classroom” and “An ‘Excellent’ Experiment.” In addition, our “Concerning Craft” series, particularly the one with input from a young poet (“Concerning Craft: Dylan Bargteil”), could be useful for classroom discussions.

Audacity defines the best and worst within us. It is boldness or daring, accompanied by confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought or other restrictions. It is also effrontery, insolence or shamelessness. The “Audacious Ideas” essay series celebrates this theme, which serves as the basis of our Summer 2012 print issue.

Conventional wisdom says that you need to write volumes before you can adequately address the complexity of someone’s life. A biography, a novel. At least 50,000 words, maybe as many as 175,000. Even a short story requires somewhere between 1000 and 20,000 words, but the scope is proportionately narrowed. “Something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing,” people tell you, mouthing what short story writer Raymond Carver said that short story writer and critic VS Pritchett was said to have said.

Michael Kimball, looking for life stories

Since people have told me, wagging their invisible fingers, that my short stories read more like novels, imagine my delight when I came upon Michael Kimball’s 500-word stories–well within the range of flash fiction–that had the audacity to attempt to encompass a person’s entire lifespan to date, whether that be one year or 100. Never mind that Michael’s stories were intended to be entirely true. I’d never found the distinction between “truth” and “fiction” particularly useful. We all become “unreliable narrators” once we start to tell a story, and “fictional truth,” therefore, can be found in all forms of writing.

Right after I completed my first “Audacious Ideas” essay, which featured “outsider” art, I started to look for examples of what could be considered literary equivalents. This led me back to Michael. So I asked if he could write up something–in approximately 500 words–about how his Postcard Life Stories Project came about. Here’s some of what he was kind enough to send me:

My friend Adam Robinson was curating a performance art festival, the Transmodern in Baltimore and asked if I wanted to participate. We joked about what a writer could do as performance, and I suggested writing people’s life stories for them while they wait. It is, after all, the thing that many strangers say (and more think) when meeting a writer, that the writer should write their life story. The idea was absurd but also fascinating and seemed oddly possible if constrained to a postcard. Adam insisted that I give it a try, and that’s how the Postcard Life Stories project started.

I thought that it would be fun and funny, that I would ask a few questions and write on the backs of a few postcards and that would be it. The first story I wrote was for artist Bart O’Reilly. When I finished the postcard and looked up, a line had formed. For the rest of the night, I interviewed people and wrote their stories for them as fast as I could. It was a true performance. Those first few dozen postcard life stories were pretty brief. I interviewed people for 5-10 minutes and then wrote as they waited. It was intense and intimate. I remember being struck by how earnest and forthcoming most people were, how eager they were to share their life stories, how grateful they were for their postcard. Here’s the one I wrote for “C” (#5):

C was born in 1976 in California. At 4, she moved to Utah with her family, which led to some problems. At 12, she realized music would be her life’s calling. At 14, she realized there were problems with being a Mormon. At 17, this led her to stop walking, leaving the Mormon Church, and then begin walking again. This kind of movement took her away from her family in Utah to Colorado Springs, Colorado. Then she kept going—Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Los Angeles again, and Baltimore. She likes Baltimore and has finally moved far enough away from home to stop moving. C will eventually find somebody to play great music with and to tell that she secretly loves romantic comedies.

A few days later, “C” sent me a note that said, in part: “You took a dark and difficult time in my life and made it manageable for me. It was a kind of postcard therapy.” That note—and the feeling that I was somehow meant to do this thing—was a primary reason that the Postcard Life Story Project continued after that first night.

Eventually, I set up a blog, posted a few of the life stories and invited people to get in touch with me if they wanted their story written. I started doing interviews over the telephone and by email. I used a special micro-tipped pen that let me write smaller so that I could fit more words onto each postcard. I asked more questions, and the text got longer and included a lot more detail. It was after I wrote Adam’s story (#45), one of the first that I wrote at home, in private, giving myself as much time and as many words as needed, that the project began to take the form it has today.

Michael also included material on where the project went from there, which I share here:

I never expected that strangers would tell me so much about themselves, so many things that they have never told anybody else. But I found an unexpected intimacy in the Postcard Life Story Project. It taps into something human and humane, and I continue to be amazed by what people tell me. I write one for anybody who wants one. I don’t want anybody to feel as though their life story isn’t interesting enough. In fact, I’ve found that everybody’s life story is interesting if you ask the right questions.

I have learned that there are life stories everywhere. Most of the postcards have been for people from the United States, but I have also written these stories for people from the UK, Canada, South Africa, Portugal, Russia, Finland, Uganda, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Greece, China and Italy. And one for a man who claims to be an alien. I have written postcards for two sets of married people and for two sets of people who married after I wrote their postcards. And two participants whose stories appeared in close proximity on the blog dated each other for a short time, but it didn’t work out. I’ve written postcard life stories for two babies and for four people who claimed to be miracle babies. Besides people, I have written postcard life stories for four cats, two dogs, a rooster, an apple, a bar of soap, a T-shirt, a chair, an umbrella cover, a fictional character, a pseudonym and a literary magazine.

Jenny-Anne Dexter's story (#214)

The longest interview was over 10,000 words, and that material was condensed to 531 words for the postcard life story (#195 Kaya Larsen). Six hundred and sixty-seven words were the most I ever fit onto a postcard (#210 Erik Larson). Erik was only 28 years old when I wrote his postcard life story, but he had already lived so much life. And one of the postcards, #240 Monte Riek, is what I call a “double,” 1362 words. It was condensed from 20 single-spaced pages—the life story that he wrote for himself as he came to terms with his lifelong addiction to drugs and alcohol.

So far, I have condensed 9821 years of life into 301 postcards. The youngest participant is one-year-old Kaya Larsen (#195); the oldest is 65-year-old Effie Gross (#221). Author Blake Butler (#66) said, “The scope of the thing is just kind of flabbergasting: Kimball as a filter for all these people’s years. I can’t imagine anyone else capable of such an undertaking.”

Given that Steven King, among others, has characterized the contemporary short story as “airless” and “self-referring,” not only written but also read primarily by lit majors and lit mag submitters, and that editors such as the infamous Ted Genoways have anticipated the death of fiction if young writers don’t “swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers,” we would do well to return to the roots of storytelling, as Michael has done. A story, Salman Rushdie reminds us in a New York Times video, is a great thing, and its greatness far exceeds professional writing. Storytelling is something we all do all the time with each other. It’s our way of understanding ourselves and others. As Michael has shown, it doesn’t require all that many words. After all, Ernest Hemingway famously managed to do it in six: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

As for myself, Michael’s postcards have motivated me–despite what others will say–to continue cramming three generations worth of events into 5777 words, as I did in “Making Soup,” or a mere 3000, as I did in “Winter Wonderland,” depending on the style that I elect to use. And to tell those stories from whatever perspective works best, be it that a one-month old infant, as I did in my soup story–over much objection; a sperm, as Jeffrey Eugenides did in Middlesex; or even a bar of soap, as Michael did on a postcard.

Michael Kimball has authored four books, including Dear Everybody and Us, which have been translated into a dozen languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean and Greek. His new novel, Big Ray, will be out this September, and the postcard stories will be available in book form sometime in the spring of 2013. Other work has appeared in The Guardian, Bomb and New York Tyrant and been broadcast on All Things Considered. He is also responsible for several documentaries, the 510 Reading Series and the conceptual pseudonym Andy Devine. 

If you’d like to try something that could start you off in an unanticipated direction the way that Michael did, check out the various 2012 Transmodern Performance Festival calls for proposals. Or attend the event, which will be held May 17-20.

This essay is part of a series inspired by our Winter 2012 Social Justice issue. The first one was posted September 2011, and all feature people who have helped make marginalized segments of our world more visible to mainstream America through poetry, prose and visual art.

In the Sixties, nearly everyone I knew was–directly or indirectly–touched by the Vietnam War. Even my then husband, who carried a British passport and had an educational deferment, received the letter with the chilling salutation “Greetings” from the Selective Service System. These days, although we only pulled out of Iraq a few months ago and are still fighting in Afghanistan, I don’t know a single soul who has recently served or is likely to serve in a combat zone. With the end of the draft and the ensuing all-volunteer armed forces, only 0.75 percent of Americans are in uniform and–despite our being constantly bombarded with combat footage–remain mainly unseen by most of the rest of our nation.

Moreover, our service members are more likely than ever to remain invisible once they return home. There simply aren’t the number of funerals there once were. Advances in a range of areas have ensured that nearly 90 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan casualties survive their injuries, far more than in previous wars. And while limbs are still lost and faces disfigured by burns, traumatic brain injury is now the “signature injury” and post-traumatic stress disorder is on the rise, along with suicide attempts and prescription drug abuse. All far harder to detect for those who don’t have to deal with them directly.

Ret. Lt. Col. Ron Capps (Photo: Becky Crowder)

So, if ever we needed to hear what those who put themselves in harm’s way have to say and if ever our “wounded warriors” needed to express themselves more, it is now. Fortunately, efforts are underway to help service personnel tell their own stories in their own way. One of those is the Veterans Writing Project, started by Ron Capps. I asked Ron to share this thoughts on how his own combat experience led to his developing the Project. Here’s what he had to say:

I was a soldier for 25 years. In those days, my uniform could speak for me. Anyone who had learned the visual patois of the badges and patches and ribbons and pins would have known that I was a paratrooper who had seen combat in Afghanistan, that I had been decorated for valor, that I had served on humanitarian aid and peacekeeping missions. But by simply looking at my uniform no one would have known that I was a combat casualty, that I was medevaced from a combat zone.

Most combat casualties are entitled to wear the Purple Heart medal; I am not. In some ways, I’m exceptionally lucky. I wasn’t shot or blown up. I don’t have a prosthetic leg or hand or scars that you can see. I’m a combat-disabled veteran, but my wounds are invisible. I was in five wars in 12 years: Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Darfur. I was evacuated from Darfur because one evening at sundown I drove into the desert alone, intent on killing myself, but was interrupted in the act.

Though I never put that bullet into my brain, I’m still a casualty. I’ve seen and participated in too much violence, too much death, too much war. Post-traumatic stress disorder is an invisible wound. Maybe 25 percent of the 2.3 million returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have or will develop it. Some of us will eventually be fine. We’ll get the treatment we need and take our meds. We’ll cope. But others will not. Possibly because no one will reach out to provide the skills needed to survive.

My coping mechanism was writing. I started writing about what happened to me each day in the war. There were things I wanted to remember. After a while, there were things I wanted to forget. But that’s not how it works. You can’t pick and choose. In time, what I didn’t want came uninvited and stayed. I was obviously in a bad place.

The second edition of Ron's guide is now available.

Writing helped me get control of my mind and my memories. In a very real way, I wrote my way home. About a year ago, I decided to try to reach a few other returning veterans and offer them a hand. I founded the Veterans Writing Project. We provide no-cost writing seminars and workshops for veterans, active and reserve service members and military family members in an effort to give participants the skills and confidence they need to tell their own stories. This might be just the help they need to cope. I hope so.

Like most soldiers, I suppose, when I left the military, I hung my uniforms in the closet upstairs. Cocooned into plastic zipper bags, our uniforms can no longer speak for us. Even intact, adorned with all the qualification badges, unit patches and colored ribbons, they no longer have the ability to communicate. Since our uniforms can’t speak, we have to speak for ourselves or else become invisible. There is too much is at stake to remain silent. There are too many stories that need to be told.

This month, the Veterans Writing Project formed a partnership with the University Writing Program at The George Washington University. “The [Veterans Writing] Project is different in several ways from other writing programs because the writing we do helps us shape the memory of the project participants,” Ron said in a GW Hatchet article. “It’s hugely gratifying to see the men and women we’ve taught, coached and encouraged share their stories.” GW boasts a large veteran population, with more than 700 receiving financial aid through the Yellow Ribbon Program.

Operation Homecoming, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, has similar aims. With help from Ron and The Writer’s Center, writing workshops start this year as part of a formal medical protocol at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The NEA previously funded a book, Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, and a PBS documentary, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

Ron Capps enlisted in the National Guard in 1983, received a commission in 1985 and served on active duty for nine years before returning to the Army Reserve. As a reservist, he was recalled to active service for work with special operations forces in central Africa, a combat tour in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003 and work as an international peacekeeper in Darfur. He served as a foreign service officer from 1994-2008, with postings in Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq and Sudan. He is currently a freelance writer whose work has appeared in peer-reviewed policy journals, popular foreign policy websites and literary journals. His essays and commentary have been broadcast on the BBC, NPR’s All Things Considered, NBC and Pacifica Radio. His Writing War: A Guide to Telling Your Own Story is now out in a second edition.

Note: “Crafting a Bridge to Healing” by Ann Bracken, which addresses a disturbing issue for women in the military, appears in our current Social Justice issue. Regina Vasquez, whom Ann interviewed for the piece, will be participating in an upcoming veteran’s art show, “Overlooked/Looked Over,” in Chicago. 

Rebecca Alban Hoffberger

Hoffberger was born in 1952 in a pleasant middle-class suburb of Baltimore. At 15, she was accepted to college but opted to travel to Paris, where she had been invited to become Marcel Marceau’s first American apprentice. By 19, she had co-founded a ballet company. By 21, served as a consultant to a wide range of nonprofits. At 25, she was appointed a dame, the female equivalent of knighthood in the British honors system, for her work in establishing field hospitals in Nigeria. Subsequently, she studied alternative and folk medicine in Mexico.

Back in Baltimore as Development Director at Sinai Hospital for People Encouraging People, a nonprofit helping psychiatric patients return to the community, she was drawn to the imaginative artwork some of the patients there produced. Her interest increased with a visit to the Musée de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the art of insane asylum inmates was displayed. Such influences eventually coalesced into a coherent concept for a national visionary art museum and education center.

Visionary art, according to a piece on Hoffberger in The New York Times, is regarded as one of the last uncharted fields for contemporary dealers and collectors. It “celebrates the work of self-taught artists whose primitive, naïve style, often studded with found objects, springs from a personal rather than a commercial vision. L’art brut, as the French artist Jean Dubuffet coined it: raw art.” How the AVAM concept of visionary art was realized is best described by Hoffberger herself. So, here’s what she has to say:

As Dervish philosopher and poet Rumi put it, “Conventional thinking is the ruin of our souls, something borrowed we mistake as our own.” There is actually very little fresh thinking in this whole, wide world, and what does exist may not necessarily be tied to blessing, real need or even viability. Audacity for its own sake isn’t enough.

In the effort to birth something bold and new, one must be coupled to meeting real need, to a vision for evolutionary innovation, not just making change for change’s sake. One must also be willing to be thought the fool. Really. Let us invoke Voltaire, who rightly observed, “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which established authorities are wrong.” Oscar Wilde, an audacious guy who paid dearly, cautioned, “If you are going to tell people the truth, make them laugh or else they will kill you.”

When I thought up the American Visionary Art Museum back in 1984, a new Baltimore City cultural “major” had not emerged in over 60 years. There were fears that establishing “The Visionary” would only serve to further divide the small “cultural pie” of available funding. So I sought out nontraditional arts funders and even went as far as bringing over $1.5 million in new funds from a truly audacious London-based source, Body Shop founder Dame Anita Roddick.

Birthing is easy; sustaining is a bitch. One must be faithful to the clear vision of founding essence while remaining audacious in the constant invigoration and endless creative enfoldment of that vision. I find that I like most of the “‘cious” words: precious, delicious, luscious, bodacious, tenacious, judicious and even conscious–but never vicious. May we be more audacious in generating the myriad ideas and actions needed to transform and delight ourselves, others and our swiftly depleting world.

American Visionary Art Museum’s Seven Educational Goals

1. Expand the definition of a worthwhile human life.

2. Engender respect for and delight in the gifts of others.

3. Increase awareness of the wide variety of choices available in life for all, particularly students.

4. Encourage each individual to build upon his or her special knowledge and inner strengths.

5. Promote the use of innate intelligence, intuition, self-exploration and creative self-reliance.

6. Confirm the great hunger for finding out just what each of us can do best, in our own voice, at any age.

7. Empower the individual to choose to do that something really, really well.

The AVAM opened on November 24, 1995 with a budget of  $1.1 million, operated by a staff of seven with a collection of 1500 objects, most of which Hoffberger had donated. These days, it boasts a collection of 4000 objects–including works by Ho Baron, Nek Chand, Ted Gordon, Clyde Jones, Leo Sewell, Vollis Simpson and Ben Wilson–as well as over 40 pieces from the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre of London, runs with a staff of 18, operates on a budget of $2.3 million and attracts some 70,000 visitors annually.

When the AVAM received the 1998 Urban Land Institute Award of Excellence, A. Eugene Kohn, a member of the selection committee, said, “The whole place speaks of creativity and excitement, but it also speaks of her [Hoffberger’s] passion. It’s one of those rare times when you’re not only impressed with the place but the person behind it.”

If you haven’t had the pleasure of visiting the AVAM to see what he means, here’s a little preview. Just click on the image to activate and control the slide show. And enjoy!

Note: Hoffberger and staff are currently busy preparing for the 2012 AVAM gala FUNdraiser and afterparty. If previous years are any indication, you won’t be bored.

The “Concerning Craft” series introduces Little Patuxent Review contributors, showcases their work and draws back the curtain to reveal a little of what went into producing it.

Dylan Bargteil, engaging his senses

Please meet Dylan Bargteil. Dylan is an undergraduate physics and math major at University of Maryland. He is Editor-in-Chief of the University’s literary journal Stylus and also an avid musician. He is interested in exploring community building, alternative methods of art distribution and display and motives for creativity and learning.

Here’s the poem by Dylan we published in the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue:

A Brown Spot

My best friend was a mortar man. Now he’s a machine gunner.
The United States Marine Corps killed 1,400 pigs this year.
They shoot the pigs with shotguns and rifles
to train infantry in triage. I imagine that means
trying to hold the pig’s guts in, trying to stop the blood
like plugging a hole in a dam with your finger.
My friend said maybe he learned something from it, he doesn’t know.

I had a dream that he was out on patrol and was shot
in the belly by a sniper. I dreamed his skin—
a plastic bag from a grocer, broken open
from the weight of the fruit inside. The plums tumbling
out. My hand instinctively reaches for them falling through
the air. They bruise so easily.

And here’s what Dylan shared with us about writing that poem:

My work is driven by sensory obsession. My primary approach to writing poetry is to engage as much as I can with how sounds and pacing work on my organs. I test out words by mouthing them to measure the contact between my tongue and hard palate, comparing “scratch” with “rake,” because I want the reader to experience an accurate tactile sensation. Pungencies like the smell of a pickle, the feel of greasy soot on the fingers and the burn of ice ground into a cheek occupy my head until I pull them out with the right transcription. I try for line breaks that move readers from expectation to realization with the subtle surprise of  their own dreams or the exact, skipping precision of cooking breakfast in the 15 minutes before they are late to work.

“A Brown Spot” came about as the result of an obsession with the slow elastic rip of plastic grocery bags. It sickened me. I kept thinking about my skin ripping the same way, as it sometimes does around my fingernails. The whole second strophe came together in my mind once I decided what I was actually going to write about, but I hadn’t yet determined the language. I was very particular with the words.

Shooting my character in the stomach was chosen because of the stomach’s vulnerability and tenderness, but the word that best reflects those attributes is “belly.” I “dreamed his skin” rather than imagined it to avoid resonance with the imagining in the first strophe and lend my character sympathy through the positive connotation of dreams or dreaming. Another sympathetic measure comes with the bag being “broken open,” which tempers the violence possible with ripping and tearing. The plum, with its deeply red interior and ripe softness, and the muted sound of the word is the appropriate symbol. The pairing with “tumbling” serves to further mute the plum, since the “um” sound is relatively louder in the second occurrence. In addition, the formation of the “t” in the mouth mirrors an ejection, creating the necessity for the plums to move “out[ward].”

The line break before “out” helps visually create the space that the plums traverse. The line break at “falling through” serves not only to further create space but also to open other possibilities on the next line for the reader (e.g., “the bag,” “my mind”) before they are closed by the quiet shock of settling on one, which I associate with dreams. Similarly, the break at “broken open” fits with the stutters, skips and slowdowns of a dream by delaying the realization of what comes next.

I do not make these careful choices with the goal of the reader recognizing them and thinking that I made the right choices but rather with the goal of the reader never seeing these seams. I want readers to have as natural an experience as possible so that they can feel as though the poem really happened to them in its fullness.

Note: If you missed hearing Dylan read at our recent launch event, you can still catch him on March 3 in Bethesda, MD at our Writer’s Center Social Justice presentation.

Tara Hart's poem, first published in the LPR Spirituality issue, appears in the current Pushcart Prize anthology

As a young publication, Little Patuxent Review is more about publishing emerging writers and artists than about winning prizes. Still, toward the end of 2010, one of our contributing editors, Susan Thornton Hobby, nominated Tara Hart’s poem “Patronized,” which appeared in our Summer 2010 Spirituality issue, for a Pushcart Prize and--saints alive!–it won one. Tara’s 20-line poem consequently took its place in the 600-page tome, The Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses (2012 Edition).

Emboldened by our success, outgoing editor, Michael R. Clark, and our new editor, Laura Shovan, each nominated three pieces from our Winter and Summer 2011 issues, respectively. We are thus represented by Casey Cooke’s short story “Without,” Ann Eichler Kolakowski’s poem “Unmaking” and Gabriel Welsch’s poem “The Story of a River” from the Winter 2011 Water issue as well as Erin Christian’s short story “God Bless You With Rainbows,” Derrick Weston Brown’s poem “Touched” and Susan Thornton Hobby’s poem “Girl Queen of the Animals” from the Summer 2011 Make Believe issue.

Each year, most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Therefore, we believe that each LPR-nominated piece has a good chance to win a prize and make its way into the next anthology. That each author has a good chance to follow in the footsteps of Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus, Susan Minot, Mona Simpson, John Irving and Rick Moody, each of whom first gained notice through the Pushcart series. And that Little Patuxent Review can again join the hundreds of outstanding presses represented in each annual Pushcart publication.

Note: If you’d like a look at some of the contributors eligible for future LPR Pushcart nominations, join us this Saturday, January 28, at 2:00 pm at Oliver’s Carriage House in Columbia, MD for the launch reading of the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue.