This is what I wanted to do with my own stories: line up the right words, the precise images, as well as the exact and correct punctuation so that the reader got pulled in and involved in the story and wouldn’t be able to turn away his eyes from the text unless the house caught fire.

–Raymond Carver, author’s 1991 forward to Where I’m Calling From

Raymond Carver in 1984 (Photo: Bob Adelman)

I’m not always comfortable writing about writing. For me, it’s sort of like talking about what I want to write instead of actually doing it. However, since May is National Short Story Month, I decided (at the urging of a friend) to jot down a few words about fiction in general and the short story in particular.

There’s talk about short stories being out of favor, short story collections being hard to sell and so on. I’m not too worried about that. The market is both fickle and cyclical. I believe that short fiction will make a comeback any day now. Even if it doesn’t capture the public’s attention the way it once did, the form is significant and merits reading and writing and perpetuating through literary journals.

Stumbling upon Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? ignited my interest in the short story. Before that, I’d viewed short stories and novels as being basically the same except for the length. Then, I was set alight by Chekhov. After that, I fell in love with the landscapes that short stories create, the way that they exalt small, imperceptible moments. I’m still awed by the way that really good writers capture those specks of time, emotion and insight. That’s what’s kept me interested me in the form so completely.

On my first day of grad school years ago, one of the professors, Abby Frucht, asked why I wanted to write. Did I have a love affair with words? Or with plot and storytelling? “I like ideas,” I replied. “I really like teasing out ideas and emotions.” Abby cocked her head and looked at me as if I’d misunderstood her question. Surely I must love words too?

The truth is that words have always given me trouble. I like them and find them useful. Knowing a lot of them certainly helps. But I don’t love them the way that so many other writers do. Nor am I an exceptional grammarian. No, what I love about writing is the same thing that I love about the short story: that an idea—an emotion, an awareness, a loss or regret or joy—can be explored through words to illuminate a moment. Sometimes the idea is so small that it cannot be fully described except by what surrounds it, so subtle that it would be lost or made dull if sustained for 200 pages.

And what is life but a series of moments? Not many of us live novels. Sure, a novel is a great way to escape to another universe, delve into a topic or become enamored with characters. Anna Karenina is not a short story. We need all those pages to plumb Anna’s depths. Short stories offer a different depth: the crystallized moment. And while novels might be expected to leave no loose ends, short stories are allowed to remain ambiguous, something I loved about those Carver stories. Intellectually, I didn’t understand a lick of what I read; viscerally, I knew he was telling the truth—an uncertain, enigmatic truth.

Fortunately, I’ve found what Richard Ford told The Paris Review to be true: “Forms of literature don’t compete. They don’t have to compete. We can have it all.”

Online Editor’s Note: Dan Wickett,  founder of Dzanc Books and Emerging Writers Network, started National Short Story Month in 2007. Commemorating the month last year, NPR posted links to favorite interviews with short story writers together with suggested collections. Some of those would make a nice follow-on to Jen’s piece: 

• Lorrie Moore: Self-Help, Birds of America, Like Life
• Tobias Wolff: Our Story Begins
• John Updike: The Early Stories, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
• Alice Munro: Too Much Happiness; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
• Lydia Davis: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
• Deborah Eisenberg: The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
• William Trevor: Selected Stories, After Rain
• Mavis Gallant: Paris Stories, The Cost of Living
• Aimee Bender: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
• Mary Gaitskill: Don’t Cry, Bad Behavior
• Jhumpa Lahiri: The Interpreter of Maladies
• Nam Le: The Boat
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Thing Around Your Neck
• Junot Diaz: Drown
• Flannery O’Connor: Everything That Rises Must Converge

And just this year, May 16 was declared National Flash Fiction Day in the UK. Submissions were solicited on the official site. Take a quick look at the winning ones.

If you have the time, take a more extensive look at ambiguity, which Jen references. It’s relevant to a range of writing, and William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis.

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.

A journal like Little Patuxent Review requires a vibrant literary and artistic community to thrive–and even survive. In appreciation of the cultural entities around us, we present “Meet the Neighbors,” where we provide you with some personal introductions.

At the start of 2010, Mother Jones published a piece that asked whether it was time to write off literary magazines and answered mainly in the affirmative. The author, the infamous Ted Genoways of the Virginia Quarterly Review, then called not only for a few bold university presidents to make necessary changes but also for writers to venture out from under the protective wing of academia and to put themselves and their work on the line. “Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ’s sake, write something we might want to read,” he said.

By the end of 2010, The Guardian had published a piece on the renaissance of the literary magazine. It wasn’t that the author disagreed with Genoways. In fact, he cited the editor of Five Dials, the digital journal put out by one of London’s oldest publishing houses, as saying, “Some literary magazines have grown precious to the point where the humour and liveliness has long since evaporated.” Rather, he simply believed that the impact of information technology on literary magazines had come full circle: what once may have contributed to their decline was now facilitating their resurgence.

Around that time, I was taking online journals seriously enough to want to submit my own work. First to Narrative Magazine, founded in 2003 by former Esquire editor Tom Jenks and author Carol Edgarian. But Narrative seemed to favor established authors, and I was hardly that, having come to writing late in life. Still, I was willing to wait for some quality electronic publication to take on some of my short stories. I tried TriQuarterly, which the The New York Times had called “perhaps the preeminent journal for literary fiction.” TriQuarterly had transitioned from a print to an online publication in 2010 amid some critics’ cries of dismay. Atticus Review, started in 2011, also caught my eye. It had an attractive layout, posted new material weekly and featured fiction I wanted to read.

TriQuarterly picked up my “Making Soup”, and Atticus Review gave my “Winter Wonderland” a home. Since the former was located in Chicago but the latter was just a piece down the road from me in Kensington, MD, I contacted the publisher there and asked him to write a few words for LPR about how his journal got started. He graciously agreed, so it is my pleasure to introduce Dan Cafaro to you and share what he sent:

Dan Cafaro (Photo: Marjean Murray)

Like many a literary journal, Atticus Review started in the hazy atmosphere of indie lit debauchery. That’s only true, however, if you and I see debauchery in the same light, i.e., as an orgy of contemporary literature. Let me rephrase this and say instead that Atticus Review first spilled onto the virtual page following a predestined union of fancifully spirited minds and warped spirits at the February 2011 AWP Conference in Washington, DC.

The first concept meeting of our weekly online journal took place in front of the Atticus Books table on a dreamy residue of a Saturday morning at the AWP book fair. The impromptu gathering was attended by a trio of relatively hung over AWP marauders, as I remember:  John Minichillo and Matt Mullins, two fine professors with doctorate degrees in literature, and yours truly, a self-educated hack like no other. I had become acquainted with John when he approached me some months earlier with his debut novel, The Snow Whale, an imaginative recasting of Moby-Dick, and was so taken by the sheer inventiveness of the storyline that I signed him to a book contract.

In our initial conversation, John had mentioned Matt, his friend and writing peer, with whom he was collaborating on a screenplay of The Snow Whale. [i]  Matt soon thereafter approached Atticus with a story collection, Three Ways of the Saw. I was immediately smitten with the potency of Matt’s writing: the title story grabbed me by the shirt collar and cold cocked me. Against my better business judgment–story collections are as tough to market as Jesus statuettes at an atheist convention–and over a nightcap of mid-shelf bourbon after our startup publishing house’s inaugural AWP reading, Matt and I shook hands on a book deal. I could have wiggled out of our gentlemen’s agreement, but as Hemingway famously said, “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” [ii]

The following morning, this unlikely trio discussed how best to go about shaping a literary magazine and what that would entail. I asked for suggestions on the person to put at the helm. My informal criteria required a someone who:

• Could deal with my half-baked ideas and wildly ambitious vision for the press.
• Wasn’t afraid of making a jackass of himself or herself or making a stool pigeon out of me as long as poking fun at ourselves moved the conversation forward.
• Dug the idea of flipping the current notion of a literary journal over onto its overripe, bulbous melon.

John mentioned his wife, writer Katrina Gray, as a possibility. I didn’t know Katrina other than through her outstanding fiction but admired her spunk and figured we could make a go of it if she could deal with the workload and my whimsical nature. Ever since taking the bull by the horns, Katrina has far outshone my outlandishness and it has been a magical hayride since Day One, thanks in large part to AR conspirators and editors Libby O’Neill, Jamie Iredell and Michael Meyerhofer.

In short, Atticus Review is a moonchild conceived out of wedlock in an orgasmic storm of Tasmanian proportions, otherwise known as the whirlwind of AWP. [iii]

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.”

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.

Paul Lamb

Please meet Paul Lamb. His stories have appeared in Bartleby Snopes, Danse Macabre, Midwest Literary Magazine, Crossed Genres and Platte Valley Review. “The Respite Room” was published in our Winter 2012 Social Justice issue. (You can read it here by clicking on the link.) Here’s what Paul said led him to the final draft:

I consider it unhealthy to know too much about my creative process. Just as excessive training can take the dog out of a dog, too much understanding of the snarling ferment in my addled brain may over-tame that wooly beast as well. Better, I think, not to know how it happens but merely that it happens. Having said this, I can speak a little about the genesis of my story.

For more than a decade, I volunteered at a respite room much like the one in my story. Through our doors came the full pageant of humanity. Every color and every language. The hale and the hearty. The halt and the lame. The hopeful. The bereft. The generous. The grasping. Yet there was one thing that they all shared: we served them at the worst moments of their lives.

It is thus tempting to think that we are seen at the best moments of our lives, but I don’t think that’s always the case. I cannot divine my fellow volunteers’ motives, but I can observe their actions and comments. These sometimes leave me puzzled.

One woman’s attitude startled me. She saw our guests as greedy, as being wholly and solely responsible for their misfortunes. Her words suggested that they were only interested in what they could plunder from the respite room–what was, in fact, freely offered–and needed to be watched lest they clean us out. Moreover, she seemed motivated to manage their lives, to point out the errors of their ways and expect both humility and gratitude in return. Beneficence with strings attached.

Her sanctimony was not unique. I’ve seen some degree of predatory charity in others, and I suppose I am myself an unwitting perpetrator in small ways. But her words betrayed an intense sentiment that left me puzzled. When I am puzzled by such vagaries, I write about them so that I can understand them.

I had intended the story to be a microcosm of society, with representatives of various cultural roles coming together in a place where a paper cut might be more than a paper cut. But I began it before I had learned of my fellow volunteer’s attitude toward our guests, and my piece was the poorer for it. All I had were vignettes about a day in the life of such a service. There was, in actuality, no story.

Though many observations survived in the final draft, I struggled with it for years. Only after I added an antagonist who crystallized the predatory charity attitude did a workable story emerge. She gave my protagonist something to react to. This caused him to reach the decision in the last line, to which all the preceding words had led.

The previous “Concerning Craft” piece by poet Greg McBride also involves a medical setting, as does another by novelist and short fiction writer Madeleine Mysko. You might also want to take a look at others in the series.

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:

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.

Greg McBride at The Writer's Center (Photo: Ilse Munro)

Last I saw Greg McBride, he was giving a poetry reading at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. Afterward, I asked him to take a head shot of me in the Center’s lobby. All I had with me was my first-generation iPhone, but I needed something fast for the Internet and he had, after all, been a war photographer accustomed to operating under adverse conditions. I’ve used the resulting image online ever since (see below). To return the favor, I snapped a photo of him that I’ve now posted here.

A Vietnam veteran and retired attorney, Greg turned to writing late in life. He authored Porthole, the winner of the 2012 Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry due out this spring, and the chapbook Back of the Envelope. He received a Boulevard emerging poet prize and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in poetry. His work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review Online, River Styx, Salmagundi and Southern Poetry Review. He is the founder and editor of The Innisfree Poetry Journal.

When I heard that one of his poems had been accepted for our Social Justice issue, I assumed that it was based on his Vietnam experience. Then I remembered that his work, in the words of one Back of the Envelope reviewer, addresses both military and domestic battlegrounds. So here is the poem and what he was kind enough to send me about how it came to be written:

All Went Well

A drainage hose snakes from the gaping hole
in his neck. A nurse steers his gurney.
Wincing, he waves, flashes a grin.
Everybody’s friend, always ready for a game,
he loves puns and kids, he’s liberal with clichés.
Even on his back, he’s combustible.
He goes well into the maw of 50-
50. I am unfazed: I have mastered
my father’s lessons in denial.

Hours trickle by.

Then the doctor’s in the corridor,
green scrub cap, surgical mask tendrilled
onto his chest.

All went well…
we began to suture, but
couldn’t stop the bleeding,
and we lost him.

The floor gives way. Light dust mattes its waxy sheen.
The doctor wears brown shoes. A broom bristles
toward me. A custodian, smooth dancer
on linoleum, keeps time pushing the push broom,
which chants and we lost him, and we lost him.

“All Went Well,” about my father’s sudden death at 66, was published the year that I arrived at that same age. A small man, though not as small as I, he had the large personality of the happy extrovert who was a lifelong player of games and lover of friends, American cars and home-improvement projects. And the US Army, where he entered a life unlikely for a high school graduate and WWII draftee from a tiny town in rural Idaho. He filled every room with energy, stories, good humor. His relentless optimism battled to a draw those forces determined to crush him over his last 25 years. And despite our mutual efforts, his death left unfinished business between us.

My records indicate that I began to work on the poem in 2007. When asked to write about its writing for LPR, I scrolled through the drafts and found that it had labored under five different titles; that it had acquired and discarded various epigraphs; that related events and characters appeared in early drafts, reappeared in others and were finally discarded; that the writing was discontinuous over the five-year period but persisted through 63 drafts. Here are the titles, from first to last:

News of My Father (1)

And We Lost Him (2)

Nectar (1)

Emigration (3)

All Went Well (56)

As with most of my poems, I tried to cleanse myself of intentionality–a particular form or even particular content. I wanted to open myself to whatever emerged from the complex of regret, anger and longing that welled within me.

What came was the consciousness of having, in the moment of his death, entered emotional territory quite distinct from that of quotidian life. My entire sensorium seemed adrift, more than slightly askew. Minor elements of the visual field—a glove on the floor, the doctor’s shoes–seemed somehow significant. As in Vietnam, I was a survivor dealing with the death of another. But upon my father’s death, I was shattered into shock beyond anything that I experienced there. I now see that my poem “Imperfect Metaphor,” which grapples with my mother’s death and appears in the current issue of River Styx, also dwells on immediate impact.

Where a poem takes the writer often depends on how it starts. Here are the opening lines used in drafting this poem, from first to last:

The surgeon led me to a hall

Family tourists, my sister / and I

We flew south again— / my sister and I

We fly south, again, my small son / and I

An old colonel, Dad sold new cars / in Florida

At the airport, a family friend:  Your dad / is sick.

A disorienting heat undulates / from the runway

Heat disorients the air, which weaves

Your father’s in the hospital.  I am / unfazed

Your father’s in the hospital, his friend says.

Nurses steer gurneys through the hallways.

He waves and wheels away, going well

A nurse steering his gurney, he waves

A drainage hose snaking from his neck

A drainage hose snakes from the gaping hole / in his neck

As you can see, I abandoned the past tense early on, realizing that immediacy was of the essence and demanded the present tense even though the event had occurred more than 20 years ago. Not an unusual decision but one that pressed itself with more force than usual. Early drafts were relatively long; over time, I felt the need to pare away as much scene-setting as possible. Although the world continues on around us in the wake of death, it is a world forever altered for the survivor and, in that moment, can be altered into unrecognizability.

Note: To learn more about how a poet presents the aging and death of parents, you might want to read one of the essays in my “On Being Invisible” series: “On Being Invisible: Our Elderly,” which features Christopher Kennedy. To learn more about how early drafts of poems evolve into final ones, you might want to take a look at one of my other “Concerning Craft” pieces, “Concerning Craft: Clarinda Harris.”

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.

Tony and I met to discuss social justice, the theme of the 12th LPR issue. What is captured in these clips is the gift that is his beautiful mind, his wit and piercing social commentary and certainly his passion for political activism. I thank him for taking the time to meet with me and for his mountains of warmth, also Ilse Munro for introducing me to the beauty of the Banneker site and Steven X Lee, the park and museum director, for welcoming us. And thanks again to my brother Daniel for making this video discussion possible and to Danuta Hinc for on-site support. On behalf of my LPR family, I offer you this interview in the interest of ushering in a better world for all people.

Note: Tony Medina also participated in our panel Poets for Social Change at the Baltimore Book Festival. You can view videos of the discussion here as well as read a follow-up interview, “Poets for Social Justice,” with another participant, Kathleen Hellen, conducted by Editor Laura Shovan.

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