Victoria Garza

Victoria received her Master of Arts degree in Film and Media Theory, History, & Criticism and her M.F.A. in Film Production at NYU. She received the Tisch School of the Arts Fellowship and was nominated for both the Directors Guild of America Scholarship and the Women in Film Scholarship for her documentary Claribel. She has twice been awarded the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts Entertainment Industry Scholarship. Victoria just finished production of a documentary on immigrant street food vendors in New York City. She resides in Los Angeles, where she writes and develops projects for her production company, clearthoughtmedia.

Left behind

and drenched as the grass,

with drops of dew.

--Kobayashi Issa

For twenty-three days I am terrified of dying. I am terrified that I or my parents or my grandparents or the dog across the street will die. Having decided I was barely surviving, I decide I am a Jew and hiding in Ohio. When I suggest this to my mother, she gently asked me how I can manage to be a Catholic and a Jew at the same time. I remind her that the early Christians were Jews and so was Jesus Christ. “Yes, that’s true,” she says, while patting my hand to keep me from pulling a loose thread from her brown and orange flowered bedspread. I tell my mother all about Anne Frank and remind her that people can be hiding for years and everyone thinks they are dead—but they are not, they’re just hiding. My mother says that my sister is not hiding.

I know she’s dead Mom,” I say. But I also think my sister is bound to show up at any moment, and so I should therefore be prepared. Thus began my love of lists. As long as I could list my thoughts, I felt a degree of control over them, as if listing was slapping them into submission. My most important list was a series of questions I was going to ask my sister upon her return home. The relief I feel from performing the exercise is so profound that it consistently overshadows the knowledge that she is not coming back.

Rather than add to my list, I always change it. I choose eleven, one number shy of my favorite number. There was some logic to this, but I can’t remember what it is. Maybe it’s the same logic my cousin Rachel (whose pajama party my sister and cousin never arrived at) uses when she decides to skip her 7th birthday. We find out a year later when she announces to everyone’s surprise that she is a year younger than she actually is. She says, matter of factly, “I skipped a year.” I skipped weeks and months after Gina’s death. I just wiped them off the map of time. And then I skipped time altogether when I took to daydreaming without realizing it. Anything could set me off. I fell into a trance once while looking at a beetle behind the garage. When I finally hear my mother calling , I have no way of explaining to her what I was doing. I can’t say, “I was looking at a beetle,” because that would sound stupid. So I say, “Nothing,” which my mother, like all mothers, takes to mean that I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing.

Death does that to time, compresses it, slows it down until it doesn’t exist. A year feels like a week, three years, like three weeks. Carlos Casteneda’s Don Juan says that death lives behind you on your left, an arm's stretch away—ready to tap you on the shoulder. Lorca calls it duende, death as friend, death as companion. But Grace resides to my right, and she is louder and far more beautiful and more powerful than death. She is capable of coaxing death to do whatever she wants. She can make death shut up. Death whispers, “Certainly, if it can happen to you, it can happen to anyone, or worse yet, it can happen to you again.” Then Grace would whisper, “Yes, my girl, it is not only true but it is The Truth, so why worry about it?” So after twenty-three days, I decide I want to die. I imagine my death in hundreds of ways. I die riding my bike, smashed to a pulp by a reckless teenager who only has his driver’s permit. I die by drowning in dirty Lake Erie after jumping off the jetty. I freeze to death outside my bedroom window eating too much snow. I get struck by lightning. I die when I fall out of a tree and crack my head open, and instead of blood pouring out there are just dead thoughts that trickle out and collect in a puddle, which I then stomp on and watch scatter in the wind. However, finally thinking I understand what an attack of the heart means, I decide to die of a heart attack. Except in the case of my heart, it will not give me any warning—it will just beat slower and slower until it stops, like melting an ice cube under my armpit in the middle of summer—slowly or quickly my heart would start shrinking until it is the size of a pin head beating tiny beats, like a lighthouse beam flowing through my bloodstream, working its way out through my eyeball and then flying away. My heart would wave to myself, dead down there in the yard.

The Radical Art of Sowing Seeds and the "Net Win"

Deborah Fisher is a sculptor and critic whose work focuses on the structural meaning of climate change, or the relationship between the built world and the earth. She recently completed a large-scale public sculpture entitled Solid State Change for Middlebury College’s Environmental Studies building, for which she received a Puffin Foundation grant. She is an artist in residence at Sculpture Space in Utica, NY. Fisher contributes regularly to two online magazines: ArtCal Zine and A Gathering of the Tribes. She earned a BFA in studio art from the University of Arizona in 1997, and an MFA in visual art from UC San Diego in 2003, where she was a Regents scholar and recipient of the Center for Humanities Research Fellowship.

For more than a decade, I made sculpture. It feels good, viscerally, to take a concept in, chew on it, and either shit or regurgitate a third thing that is now neither you nor the original idea, but is a record of the journey from outside to inside and back again.

My motives have always been personal and deeply vulgar. That's art for you. Making meaning is a grabby activity. You see something and want to take it and make it yours. And while I deeply enjoy this arrogant, aggressive part, I also think that gratuitous creative license is boring. If there's going to be nastiness, I want some kind of redemption. I want a net win.

I'll make this real by telling a true story. I worked until recently for Socrates Sculpture Park, which Mark diSuvero founded and where he still keeps a studio for his work on giant I-beam sculptures.

The original goal was to create an art petting zoo: an alternate universe where you can stand right in front of someone making a sculpture, even if they're welding or using a crane, while your baby plays at your feet, with no thoughts about liability or mishap. That part of Socrates does kind of work. But the genius part of Socrates is the ecosystem of people who actually do this, and what they bring. Doug the Taoist has been doing tai chi in Socrates forever, and he introduces himself to every artist he meets and tells stories about past artists. In doing so, he creates a running narrative, handed from artist to artist. Frank is an eighty-year old man who comes to the park every day and talks about how he's waiting to die, how beautiful his wife was, and his WWII exploits. He sits in full lotus on the work tables, smoking Misty cigarettes, and fixes the tools. The unemployed Dominican men that fish in the nearby east river every day are the sharpest art critics I have ever met.

Socrates was a particularly aggressive grab. DiSuvero made plenty of enemies by insisting that this vacant lot, full of tires, junk cars and concrete block, was his to clean up and use to build his career. The relationship to the surrounding community wasn't always perfect, but the park still thrives because it is so much more than one artist’s playground.

Mark would never call Socrates art, and neither would I, but it is a successful act of meaning creation. And Mark would be disappointed to hear this, but I actually find it more meaningful than his sculpture. It's got the parts I like: the creative violence and its overcoming. It's got the Net Win.

So, I come to you in this essay from the middle of a substantial transition. My strong bias toward sculpture as the "right" way to make meaning is giving out. In fact, this bias has been so powerful that the first one hundred drafts descended quickly into tedious explanation about how I am not some loser who was forced to stop making art because I couldn't hack it, or because my art wasn't good. And right now I am going to catch myself at the edge of this particular cliff one last time and just say that I am not making art right now because when I look at the scale and scope of my sculpture and compare it to something that is truly giving, like Socrates, I think that it pales in comparison. Most art does. Even my all-time favorite pieces do less than the park .

Art’s primary job, in New York City, anyway, is to prove the wealth of very rich people to other very rich people. It can be wasteful. And it's all about one individual's devouring and excreting vision. We all love the image of the asshole artist chewing through the world in service of his vision. We cling to this idea of art even as it dawns on us that the rest of modernism has hateful side effects. We are rejecting the radical consumption-based individualism of buying a McMansion in a distant suburb, and rolling around in a really big vehicle willy nilly, and feeding at the more-cheaper-is-better trough of agribusiness. We are collectively deciding that the diseases of modernism, from diabetes and climate change to existential angst, are worth addressing. Why not subject the impulse to create and all its products to the same scrutiny? Is it so crazy to suggest that, just as there are transportation alternatives to the Hummer, there are ways to live and work creatively that reorganize redemption, consumption and destruction?

As you know, times are tough. We need to problem solve, to find new ways of doing just about everything. Last winter, as I stood alone in my studio, I realized that if I thought the most important thing I could be doing is make an abstract sculpture out of my junk mail while the financial system collapses and the climate becomes increasingly unlivable and this poor Obama fellow keeps his chin up as he recites his impressive litany of deeds left to do, then I am not firing on all cylinders.

I decided that what I care about is the environment, and the culture of environmentalism. I decided that I hate calling myself an environmentalist because the movement is decidedly puritanical, and that even as I reject the label, I struggle with my own infinite capacity to eco-ritualize on a daily basis. I started wondering why I feel like I have to fish other people's compostables out of the garbage and bring them home in a wet sack. I got really angry that Earth Hour, an hour of sitting in the dark, is the worldwide environmental action. I decided that it would be much more beautiful if everyone went and sowed wildflower seeds instead.

This germ of irritation evolved into Bed Stuy Meadow, which happened April 11, 2009. I got two hundred and fifty people to give me either money or a promise of time, and even though the 11th was pouring rain, almost one hundred people turned up to sow wildflower seeds on every single square inch of untended land in Bed Stuy in Brooklyn, where I live. The seed sowing day was a great success: more than 90% of the territory got covered, and the volunteers were on fire. But if I thought I was getting away from the arrogance and grabbiness of making meaning, I would have been very disappointed. A lot of people were angry because they thought it was a white idea in a historically black neighborhood. Or that it was about newcomers in a neighborhood with a fiercely protective old guard. The press coverage focused overwhelmingly on gentrification. And at this writing, in mid June, with zero flowers on the scene because they seem to have been choked out by weeds, I am finding myself getting intimate with a whole new class of people that I've pissed off: disappointed volunteers who feel like they got soaked in April for nothing.

I am sitting here at the most vulnerable point of a selfish, impulsive, problematic and totally redeemable project that could really explode into exactly the kind of thing I want... if it gets enormous enough. I am wrestling with the fact that I wanted a simple Wildflower Love Gesture and got Race War and Real Estate Anger and Disappointed Volunteers, but I know that this is a function of misunderstanding the scope of what I wanted to do. It's not a manifest destiny thing, it's a call and response. And I am just getting the first responses back.

A quick list of what I have, and what the Meadow yielded:

1. I have the original grabby gesture: seeing all this available untended land, lying fallow behind busted chain link fences, my neighborhood's greatest liability, begging to be turned into its greatest asset.

2. And I have a big handful of new neighbor friends who have even more ideas than I have, and more real-world knowledge, and backgrounds that are, I must admit, a little more practical than mine.

3. I also have, at this point, a responsibility not to run away. My role here is to make meaning, and I already said that much of that work is a matter of follow through. Pulling back now would make the meaning of Bed Stuy Meadow something that I can't bear, like the perverted inverse of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, or the same old things we already know about how frightening it is for white people like myself to be called racist.

In other words, I am in this up to my neck, and the stakes are much higher than they ever were when I was screwing tires together. Thankfully, I am working with a handful of folks to get to that net win that this project requires. We are talking about making an Urban Farm Syndicate that takes actual responsibility of as many vacant lots as possible instead of just casting seed, and uses them to feed and employ people and conduct large-scale urban farming research. Right now it's just talk. But it could evolve into a lot of dignified, living-wage jobs for local people; tasty local produce in a neighborhood formerly known as a food desert; beautiful trees and shrubs that sequester CO2 and provide shade in perpetuity; a venue for trying out new ways to remediate contaminated soil; a library of urban farming knowledge; a seed bank; a project that improves Bed Stuy by delivering value to all the people who live here: rich and poor, black and white, new and old.

The vision is grand, and even more grabby than the original idea, but much less dependent on one artist's work. I am in total freefall, with nothing to cling to but my belief that freefall is how the best creative work happens. I have never been happier or more frightened in my life.

More about Deb's project:
http://www.21stcenturyplowshare.com/

Press coverage:
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2009/04/09/2009-04-09_bedstuy_wildflower_mission_draws_oppostion.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/nyregion/12flowers.html?_r=2
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robyn-hillmanharrigan/think-global-act-local--b_b_186317.html
http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/128527

How To Treat Your Minority Student

Sophia Licona is a high school student in Tucson, AZ. She is a long-time participant in the Kore Press Grrls Literary Activism Project.

Do you have trouble interacting with minority students? Does it seem like they are overrunning the schools? They just keep coming, year after year, lowering test scores, and speaking their foreign jibber jabber. Fortunately, the Minority Student Instruction Manual (MSIM) has now been written. What follows are solutions to all of your minority student problems.

The safest way to learn your minority student’s ability is to assume they don’t speak English. If they have a last name that can’t be pronounced, like Garcia, they probably won’t understand your course content. If they come in and try to declare that English is their first language, don’t be fooled. Insist they at least take an English fluency test, but it is best if they go through several weeks of ESL. Start out the ESL class with a picture of a dog. Point at the picture and clearly state, “dog, D-O-G, dog.” Have the student repeat the word several times. If your student complains that they “already know how to speak English,” they may be moved to a regular English class, but not before you comment on “how fast” they learn and “how well” you taught them.

Now, if you aren’t quite sure what your minority student’s heritage is, there are two (two, T-W-O, two) options. Option numero uno is to ask, after having an unrelated conversation, if your student has “recently been on vacation,” or if they are “just not Caucasian.” It is best to do this when the student is about to leave and must answer quickly. Option two is best if you have a vague idea of where your student may come from. If you think the student is from India, ask “Are you from India?” When your student says, “No, my family is Mexican,” respond with, “Sweetheart, you must be mistaken. Are you sure your parents aren’t from India?” Thirty minutes of arguing is acceptable. After, remind the student that it is important to not be ashamed of where they come from. It may be in the student’s best interest if you recommend that they try to reconnect with their cultural heritage. Perhaps suggest watching the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

When grading a minority student’s work, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, make sure they aren’t writing in clichés that they learned in those first few weeks of ESL. Suggest alternatives they might relate to culturally. For example, if a student compares something to “a knife through butter,” say, “Why don’t YOU write, like a knife through guacamole?” Any ethnic food will do. Also ask if there are any common sayings where they come from.

If your student has trouble picking a topic for a project, suggest an issue meaningful to them. If they are from Japan, suggest they study communism in China. They will already have a wide knowledge base because China is a big country in their part of the world. Finally, when having a class discussion, don’t hesitate to ask your minority student for the Black community’s perspective, or the Hispanic perspective, or the Asian perspective, or the Indian perspective (it is important to separate India from Asia because Indians look more like Middle-Eastern terrorists than like Chinese). However, don’t let these guidelines limit you; get creative with your suggestions.

If a Black or Hispanic student ever approaches you about college, the advice you should offer is clear. If they have anything to say, listen patiently. Then, if they are smart, tell them how lucky they are to be Black or Hispanic. If they are remotely intelligent they need not worry about silly things like SAT scores; they will get into the school of their choice because of affirmative action. Well, maybe they won’t get into Harvard, or Stanford, or Yale, or [insert school here]. It is then acceptable to go off on a tangent about how soon all of our universities will be overrun by Black and Hispanic students with mediocre SAT scores and on financial aid scholarships.

This will segue nicely to your next point. There are many scholarships out there for kids of color. In fact, almost all scholarships are for kids of color. Remind the kids of color to be grateful to white kids who have it so hard. If you feel your minority student isn’t bright, tell them to join the military, as this will be their only opportunity to be a contributing and productive member of society.

Remember, when dealing with minority students, it can be hard to know what to say. However, parent-teacher conferences are easy to prep for. When your student’s parent arrives, speak loudly and slowly. If you can’t enunciate, just yell. Start by asking how to say hello where they come from, then use your newfound linguistic skills to say hello. Ask how they like AMERICA. If they look confused, it’s fine. They probably don’t know what you’re saying. It’s not like they have a PhD in Rhetoric through the English department in AMERICA. Next, say what you need to say, and, if the student is getting good grades, state how well they represent Mexicans, or Indians, or whatever.

If you can’t remember any of this, just tell your student how beautiful you think their culture is. Let the student know you understand them and their “minority-ness.” Remember: you are doing the best you can with these people.

When You Catch Writer's Block on the Side of the Road, Kill It

Laraine Herring is an author, teacher, and counselor. Her first book, Monsoons, was published in 1999 by Duality Press. Her novel, Lay My Sorrows Down, won the Barbara Deming Award for Women in 2000. Lost Fathers: How Women Can Heal From Adolescent Father Loss, was released in May, 2005 from Hazelden Press. The audiobook is also available on itunes and audible.com. Her latest book, Writing Begins with the Breath: Embodying Your Authentic Voice was released in September, 2007, from Shambhala Publications. She is at work on a third novel and a memoir. Find out more at www.laraineherring.com.

This semester, my students have been resistant to practice. Perhaps because it's spring and they want to be dancing in fields of poppies. Perhaps because they are worried about their futures. Perhaps because they are simply not ready to commit to writing. Writing, after all, is serious business.

I've had students complain to me that they aren't writing enough, and when I ask them if they're writing, they say, "Well, no..." To this I respond: writing begets writing. There is no way to write but to write. There are no tricks, though there are plenty of diversions. One of the points I make in my book The Writing Warrior is that any structure someone provides for your writing, or any structure you create yourself, is only as useful as your ability to work freely within it and to stay centered and focused. The structure or the concept doesn't make the writing work. Your discipline, practice and flexibility make it work. When structure of any kind (relationship, job, religion, writing, city) becomes a prison, it's time to move on.

Now, what writing practice does is illuminate. It yanks out into the open everything that the writer has been trying not to look at. And so the writer goes away. This is normal, but a book about writing, or a class about writing, can't address the nuts and bolts without addressing the real reason writing is hard. It holds up a mirror to your own demons. It dares you to look, dares you further to write about it, then dares you even further to share it publicly. Yeah, is it too late to change majors to something safer like Pyrotechnics in the Middle East?

Writing practice brings up your limitations. This is a gift, not a problem. The more you know about what you do and why, the more room you have to make authentic decisions. Writing practice shows you your belief systems about yourself, your family, your world. It shows you where you need to be right and where you feel invisible.

One of my favorite books is If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him by Sheldon Kopp. What he means, of course, is on your quest to self-knowledge, anything that gets in the way of true self-intimacy needs to go—even if that thing is a revered deity. It’s a symbol, it's the finger pointing at the moon, it's representative of an endless search. You don't need it. Ben Yagoda’s recent title expresses a similarly radical sentiment: When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It.

(Lest you think I hate all adjectives and manifestations of God/dess, let me reassure you that I don't. I have been known to use an adjective or two, and right now my office displays a statue of Buddha, Ganesh, Kali, the Venus of Willendorf, a yin/yang symbol and a cross.)

As an exercise, I ask my first year creative writing students to describe a person they know without using any adjectives or adverbs. The intent is not to wipe adjectives and adverbs off the face of the earth, but rather to show the student that they often cloud what’s really there. As Ben Yagoda says, adjectives are often used by lazy writers "who don't stop to think that the concept is already in the noun."

Writers get in the way of their own writing because they don't yet know that the writing is where they are. There is nowhere to go. Writing will not unlock the secret code to fame and fortune. Writing will not bring about world peace. But what writing will do is bring forth her sorrows and her joys, her secrets and her lies. It will bring these out, and once in daylight, they will vanish and she will find she has space in her body, in her mind, and in her heart. And as one writer opens to herself, she brings that changed being into the world and into her contact with others. She has no attachment to whether others change or not, no attachment to whether they write or don't; she simply is, and in that 'is-ness' she is the noun, nothing in the way of all that beauty.

Assuming it Matters

Susan Baller-Shepard is the co-founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Spirituality Book Club.

When I was very little, I loved to write in my room, on long skinny strips of paper given to me by my great aunt the librarian. In seventh grade, I won an essay contest and a big chicken dinner for my whole family. In eighth grade, my essay about a local candy company was published in a state history journal, and my mom and I got to have lunch with the governor. The message to me: words feed people.

But in college, writing become uncomfortable, so I abandoned it. I worked at a church, left the country, returned, got married, went to grad school in a dual competency program, and got two masters: divinity and social work. I took one writing class, along with my other graduate classes, and the instructor told me I had “verb tense problems.” I got ordained, worked at churches, eventually had two sons and adopted a daughter. I did the things women do that get repeatedly undone: laundry, dishes, meals, house cleaning.

I felt an urge to write again. I thought no one would take me; I hadn’t written or published in years. Still, I kept feeling this need to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. I submitted a manuscript to Dr. Lucia Cordell Getsi, editor of Spoon River Poetry Review, asking to get into her graduate poetry writing class. I was convinced it wouldn’t happen. I got an email back from Lucia saying I was welcome to come and try out the course. She wrote, “I can tell from your manuscript that you are a serious writer.”

Lucia helped me think again. She was not as I had conjured her in my brain. She was short, attractive, worldly, wordy, scientific, mathematical, poetic. I tell her she is surgical in her editing. She cuts away what doesn’t belong, and sees what is healthy and connective. Mostly, though, she helped me to think through poems, learn the skeletal frames of the poems, consider their sinewy tissues. Now I have a book length poetry manuscript which Lucia edited, a children’s book manuscript, and I am presently writing a collection of essays.

I am forty-five and grateful to have age on my side, to be a woman writing the truth of my life, as a minister, web site editor, wife, mother, writer. They are mutually inclusive roles. My brother Jim says I should be glad my roles feed each other. That’s the beauty I see in the over-forty writing women and men I know well. They speak the truth about their lives: the good, the bad, the less-than-perfect. I value this. It’s less about publication now than it is about giving voice to what needs to be said, what can finally be said at this side of forty. If we don’t say it now, maybe it won’t get said.

On TV recently, I saw Jessica Lange give the commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College. She urged the young women,

“Remember who you are. Because, right now, you have it all: the power of your imagination, the velocity of your dreams, the language of innocence, and the passion of a beginner. Don't lose it. Don't let it evaporate or get stripped away or worn away. And, as time passes, if you find you've come far away from yourself, allow the breeze of humility to remind you of who you were—who you really are.”

Persephone lived in circles, cycling between worlds, going away, coming home. I am thankful to Lucia, and others, who reminded me of my writing self.I have circled back around to the child I was, the child who shut herself in her room because she loved to write.


Spoon River Poetry Review
http://www.litline.org/Spoon/index.html

Jessica Lange’s Commencement Address
http://www.slc.edu/news-events/Jessica_Lange_Commencement_Address.php

In Search of a) Literary Activism; and b) Happiness

Shannon Cain was the Executive Director of Kore Press from April 2004 to July 2008, and has served since then as its Sales & Marketing Director. Shannon’s short fiction has received the Pushcart Prize, the O. Henry Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches creative writing at the Gotham Writer’s Workshop and as a private coach. She continues her work with Kore Press as its new Fiction Editor.

1986: As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona I took a fiction writing workshop with Mr. Monkeywrench himself, Edward Abbey. He was stoic and closemouthed. I wrote horrible stuff. I had no idea a) what a workshop was; and b) that I was sitting across the table from a famed literary activist.

1988: I moved to New York and began working in nonprofit administration and fundraising. Someone gave me a job directing a small women’s organization in East Harlem. I fell in with a group of fierce feminist activists and learned how to make social change by a) community organizing; and b) yelling at the top of my lungs.

1994: I gave birth to a baby girl and realized a) this was happiness; and b) I needed to start writing again.

2000: I started writing again. I dragged myself to a night class in fiction writing at Pima Community College. The ground started to feel slippery under my feet, yet a) everything started to make sense; and b) there was no going back.

2002: I had a bright and shiny career in nonprofit management, with a lucrative specialization in raising money for social service and social change organizations. But I had grown to despise the work. I distracted myself with writing fiction, which was going well. I was in my first year of a prestigious MFA program. This education was blowing my mind and releasing a passion I’d kept in hibernation since childhood. I wrote a long paper on political fiction. Suddenly the philanthropic foundation I was working for shut its doors, creating in me a) panic; and b) despair.

2003: I turned 39. Unemployed for the first time in my life and resisting the urge to accept any number of jobs I knew I’d hate, I spent a year a) writing; and b) crying.

2004: I came to work for Kore Press. I learned what is meant by literary activism. Here I could feel good again about fundraising. I combined the fancy- schmancy nonprofit management training I’d accumulated with the rich, round fullness of literature. I got elbow deep in the business of publishing. My paychecks were small and irregular but I felt neither panic nor despair. I converted a backyard storage shed into a writing studio. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and won a prize or two. From my colleague Lisa Bowden I learned volumes about fine publishing, about editing, about standards of quality, and about perseverance.

2009: This year I take a deeper plunge into the literary life, evolving from writer/arts administrator to writer/teacher/editor. Soon I will be part-time fiction editor for Kore Press, part-time teacher and full-time writer. For five years at Kore Press I have been surrounded by women who honor the act of writing. They have shown me by example that it is possible to accommodate one’s passions. My partner and I have rearranged our lives. We live in a little brick house and worry about the mortgage. I am writing a political novel, flying headlong into a career as a literary activist. Writing a novel is the hardest work I’ve done so far, because it causes me a) despair; and b) happiness.

The Largest Locomotive on Earth

Holly Iglesias is the winner of the 2008 Kore Press First Book Award. She is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Prose Poem, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Margie, Crab Orchard Review, Massachusetts Review and Spoon River Poetry Review. She has been awarded fellowships by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Edward Albee Foundation. She is the author of two chapbooks, Hands-on Saint and Good Long Enough, winner of Thorngate Road’s Frank O’Hara Prize. A critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women's Prose Poetry, was published by Quale Press. She teaches at University of North Carolina-Asheville and at Warren Wilson College.

Souvenirs of a Shrunken World is being taught in poet Kim Garcia’s Core Lit class at Boston College this semester, and it appears that her students connected with the poems right from the start. As the instructor, Kim passed along their first set of questions, curiosities and comments to me and invited me to respond. I was shocked at the amount of questions they generated about the first poem alone, “Running for the Fair: a Stereoscope.” Now I eagerly await their response to the book as a whole, as well as their reaction to footnotes posted on the Kore Press website that enhance understanding of the Fair and its historical context.

It goes without saying that it’s an honor and a rare opportunity to have such a chance to engage with engaged readers, and I share my response to them below.

##

You've brought in a great deal of curiosity, energy and insight to the reading of the first poem of Souvenirs of a Shrunken World. It's an incredible thrill to think of you reading my work and an honor to consider your questions. I trust you know that you as readers take part in making meaning of any poem by bringing your own associations to the words and experiences. This way the poem has a life of its own and continues to grow even after the author has let it go.

A few responses to the issues and ideas you raised:

A stereoscope is an image that you see in a three-dimensional way by looking at it on a special holder, which presents two of the same photograph but from a left-eye and a right-eye point of view, which provides depth. Stereoscopes were very popular around the turn of the 20th century.

My book is very much concerned with point of view, framing and the power of images, both still and moving pictures (thus the strobe). Around this time (1904) Kodak cameras became affordable so regular people could take snapshots pretty easily; also motion pictures had begun to be viewed by a general audience. In a WiFi, You-Tube world, we take such things for granted, but at that time such innovations were mind-boggling and really effected people's attitudes.

Another thing: the Fair took four years to build and then it was demolished, razed to the ground in a few months. People knew this would happen from the start and so were nostalgic about it even before the buildings were gone. Thus, the importance of souvenirs, particularly photographs--the only mementos, or traces, of an awe-inspiring, life-changing experience.

So, back to the boy and girl, whose poem comes before all the rest. I wanted to set up the importance of young people--young country, young people, young century--and how impressionable they are and what kind of influence something as enormous and thrilling as the Fair would have on them. These young people would live out their lives in the 20th century and would take these influences and ideas forward, so we need to keep an eye on the impressions being made on them. They could easily have been my grandfather or grandmother, who were in their teens at the time and who, as recent immigrants, were new Americans and trying to learn how to be a Real American, which the Fair tried to demonstrate.

So: yes, young people in the country, lots of chores, remnants of old-fashioned life soon to be extinct (slop pot, cheese cloth, home-made sausage, etc.) due to rapid population shifts and technological advances. These are kids who have no experience with electricity, radios, automobiles, or telephones!

There were many hoboes wandering the country, riding the trains and living in shanty towns. While the notion of hoboes was also romanticized, the ugly truth of it was that they were part of the huge upheaval and displacement that came about as industry and commerce became centralized in large cities and people left small-town and rural life. A time of economic boom and bust, and thus insecurity and crime and labor unrest. So, that rumbling train doesn't merely symbolize an escape to the bright lights of the city (where the Fair is held), but also offers a foreboding of things being run down, of the danger inherent in too much "progress" too fast.

The past and future at this cusp-y time were neck and neck; we as a nation could've stayed as we'd been, or been more deliberative and patient, or barreled ahead and worried about the consequences later. You know which way it went. That's part of the over-arching metaphor of the Fair--it celebrates a century of progress since the Louisiana Purchase, but that progress and that hugeness and that speed came at a price. Hopefully by the end of the book, you'll be able to see some of the cost of that progress, not just to its "victims" but to the perpetrators as well. Treating humans inhumanely or with disdain injures both the giver and receiver of disrespect. Plus it's dangerous, planting seeds of future divisions.

Boy and girl: traditional roles: he's gets to indulge his adventures, she watches the train pass by. And the cars rolling by, strobing the cornfields, suggests not only the flickering images of movies, but also the fragmentation of families, communities, fields of vision, the human family that is coming down the tracks.

The largest locomotive on earth was on display at the Palace of Transportation at the Fair. It was on a turnstile; the wheels spun in place; and its enormous headlight slashed the walls of the enormous building. The name of the locomotive? It was called the Twentieth Century, I kid you not. So, there's nothing subtle in my mind about the image of a huge iron behemoth barreling down the tracks and the dangers of getting in its path.

Warning! Here comes the 20th Century! This caution lies beneath the entire collection of poems. Everything—and I mean every single thing—that came to characterize the 20th century, in all its glory and all its atrocity, is evident at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. And these two young people are racing to see it, yearning to take it all in, running to catch the train that will take them there. Young people, a relatively young nation—each full of energy and optimism, as well as ignorance and naiveté.

Why We Published Powder

Lisa Bowden is the Publisher of Kore Press and the poetry editor of Powder.








Shannon Cain is the Fiction Editor of Kore Press and the prose editor of Powder.





PREFACE
Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq

At a writers’ conference in Georgia in the summer of 2005, an American veteran of the war in Iraq stood at the podium and read a personal essay about his time as a soldier. Overcome with emotion and using language both beautiful and stark, he told about the mutilations he’d seen, the bloody losses, his struggle with self-hatred upon returning home, and the profound mistrust he now harbored for his commander in chief. The room went silent with respect for his service and horror for his pain.

That day in Georgia, a thought arose: what about the women who have served? Where is their perspective? Who will publish their words? Thus the idea for this anthology was born.

We put out a call. We asked women in the ranks, especially those who had served after September 11, 2001, to send us their writing. We waited for the flood of responses. Only a few pieces arrived. They were excellent, but not enough to assemble a book-length collection. Then, an email from a soldier who told us of the repercussions, formal and informal, that the military imposes upon those who speak their minds while on active duty.

We reissued our call to military women, farther and wider, and expanded the scope. We asked women who had served anywhere, at any time, to tell their stories. And now the essays and poetry arrived. The writing blew our minds, broke our hearts and gave us hope. And suddenly we found ourselves putting forth a new rendering of American history.

Here was writing that gave us the full scope of the military experience, including a range of ideas about what it means to be a patriot. As advocates for peace and justice, we went into the project determined to publish a book that would somehow help end the war in Iraq. In the process we found ourselves expanded, and in awe. We saw immediately the necessity of setting aside any agenda. We offer this poetry and this memoir edited but not manipulated, selected but not filtered. In so doing we amplify these voices, and we insist upon their place in a long and nuanced literature of war and peace.

Former Navy Sonar Technician Khadijah Queen understands poetry as “a necessary reaction” to the death of her colleagues. Army Reserve officer Victoria Hudson, who has been mobilized five times in her thirty years of service, says she wrote about what she saw in Bosnia and Iraq in order to “integrate those experiences into memory.” Air Force jet engine mechanic K.G. Schneider says she writes to express her gratitude, “so that they who served with me can be remembered.”

The writers here are divided on the question of whether they would re-enlist. Marine Corps Officer Charlotte Brock has “never regretted joining,” but notes “if you asked me that question at various times over the last six years, I would have given a different answer.” Former Army Communications Officer Terry Hurley would not hesitate to join again, and is especially drawn to the idea of training new recruits. Arabic linguist Rachel Vigil has “no desire to serve the current administration’s objectives,” and says “nothing would talk me into joining again.”

Former Air Force medic Deborah Fries looks back at her service during the Vietnam era and realizes if she had it to do over, she “would have marched for peace rather than for a base commander.” Bobbie Dykema Katsanis, who served in the Army National Guard Band, finds the culture of the military “anti-intellectual, sexist, and subliminally violent,” and has had to work hard to leave it behind. Former Air Force traffic controller Christy Clothier discovered that the military demanded “silent passivity” and is still in the process of rediscovering her voice. Navy administrative officer Donna Dean reports she endured “denigration and open hostility throughout her active duty career” and more than 25 years after her discharge still struggles every day with the effects of post traumatic stress disorder.

But Ohio National Guardsman Sharon Allen, who served as a petroleum supply specialist in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that the military gave her a “confidence unrivaled by civilian training.” R.O.T.C. student Cameron Beattie reports that her experience in Airborne School has changed her forever: “If I can jump out of an airplane, I can do anything.” Navy Religious Programs Specialist Dhana Marie Branton believes she wouldn’t be the writer she is today without her military background. “I became myself,” she says, “rather than the person others expected me to be. I learned to own my mind.”

“The military is a group of diverse human beings like any other,” Dykema Katsanis wrote to us in an email. “Some of us are politically liberal or progressive; many of us are against the war and oppose the current administration’s foreign policy. Often these voices are squelched in American public discourse.”

Regardless of our contributors’ divergent views on the war and on the necessity of service, every one of them comes together on one point: it’s damn tough to be a woman in the military. Brock, whose essay “Hymn” appears in these pages, says “why is there no national debate on the fact that women are subject to institutional discrimination in the military? Nowhere else in this country are women so blatantly prohibited from certain jobs solely on the basis of gender. The American public should know what military women have achieved.”

*

In the science fiction movie Contact, an astronomer/astronaut played by Jodie Foster is launched into space at the invitation of a benign race of extraterrestrial beings. Wide-eyed at what she encounters, she says, “We should have sent a poet.”

Indeed we must send poets and writers to places both heavenly and hellish so they can return to describe what the rest of us are incapable of seeing. When we send women to war, they bear witness in ways that men cannot. The memoirists and poets in this volume have stood wide-eyed at the border between war and peace, and in these pages they gift us with a record of what really happened there.

Why I Write

Kimi Eisele, co-director of The Invisible City project, is a writer, dancer/choreographer, and educator. She serves as the Special Projects Director for NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre where she directed “RE:Configurations: an evening of dance and stories about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender relationships” in 2007 and “We Are What We Eat: Dance and Stories about the Food We Eat and the Systems that Feed Us” in collaboration with the Community Food Bank in 2008. She is currently trying to finish a novel about America in the post-apocalypse before the economy really does collapse.

1. Proclamation

I went once with a friend to a wildlife refuge on the Delaware Bay. It was one of those beautiful Mid-Atlantic winter days before the snow falls. The ground was brown and brittle, the trees nude, the sky interminably gray. We got out of the car and pointed the binoculars toward the edge of a tidal pool to look at snow geese. Thousands of them. Roused from their roost, they lifted into the air like a cloth billowed by a wind. On the ground again, they squawked incessantly, the sound hovering above them like a shadow of their flight. What were the geese saying? I wondered. “They’re just checking in with each other,” my friend said. Are you still there? Yes, I’m still here. And again: Are you still there? Yup, I’m here. And on and on.

I understand the snow geese. I understand the squawked question and its response. Both comprise the foundation of why I write. I write to announce my place in the world. One bird among millions. I am here. Are you there?

2. The Thrill of Words

When I was growing up, my parents were close friends with a couple from New York who invited us to visit them at their New Jersey beach house every summer. She was a teacher, he was a writer, and both of them loved words. Every night after dinner, we’d play a game called anagrams. Each player tried to spell six words using the small, wooden letters (much like Scrabble pieces) placed on the table. We could steal someone else’s words by adding letters and anagramming it (“bird” could become “bride,” or “over” could become “hover”). On those summer evenings, as the sea air sputtered against the screens and Billie Holiday’s blues spilled from the tape player, I would sit sandwiched between the adults, transfixed by the letters in front of me. Amidst the laughter and exclamation, I learned that words were fun. They created connection, experiences, and memories.

I still believe words are fun. Whether I’m writing email messages, letters, poems, essays, or stories, I like the sounds and the spellings. I like stringing words together to form sentences. I like using words as tools to say what I want to say. I like, too, that words have roots and histories and lives contained within them, and that they can be re-arranged and borrowed and re-invented. And that all of that magic can happen in silence, but for the sound of breathing, or somewhere perhaps, the distant churn of the surf.

3. Possibility

I wrote my first story when I was five. It was based on a prompt—“But oh, how she wished she had green curls…” In it a blond, straight-haired girl (not unlike myself at the time) wishes desperately for new hair. She finds a magic wand, gets her wish, and lives the rest of her life with green curls. I remember the story for its silliness and for what it reveals about my earliest desire as a writer—to make the impossible possible.

Common advice to new writers says, “Write what you know.” I say also, “Write what you don’t know.” Because that means summoning the imagination. With imagination, the unknown becomes knowable, the unattainable slides closer into reach. It’s not necessarily magic, just a practice. Pretty soon I’m granting wishes, conversing with quirky strangers, traveling across continents, and dreaming up new societies much kinder than my own.

But my imagination is not simply a way for me to escape reality. By strengthening my powers of observation, my imagination helps place me more firmly in reality. As Salman Rushdie recently said in a June 2006 interview with Bill Moyers, “What writers can offer better than journalists, better than philosophers, is that they can use their imaginations to look at the world and what's happening in it.” Imagination allows us “to get into the skin of the other,” Rushdie said, which can then lead to greater understanding and acceptance. I believe this is a critical message for our times. It is also what has long propelled me to the page.

In nonfiction, I have written about 19^th century pioneer women on the overland trails, fishing communities on the coast of Ecuador, Cubans at the end of the 20^th century, children and families on the U.S.-Mexico border, and asthmatic children living in U.S. cities. This writing has helped me understand and honor those whose lives are different from my own. More recently, I have been “getting into the skin” of the characters in my novel in order to move them through a future where the current economic and technological luxuries we know today no longer exist. The work has given me the opportunity to ask “What if?” The answers I have come up with have given me new ways to think about my everyday life, my family, my community, and the world.

When I write, I hold hands with possibility. I stumble upon magic wands. I hone in on my senses. I wake up to the world and observe things I hadn’t noticed before. Several weeks ago, I walked into a diner and ordered a slice of pie, for instance. There was something odd about my waitress. When she brought me my pie, I looked again. She had bright green curls.

4. Coherence

A few years ago, at age 33, I began asking the question, should I or shouldn’t I have a child? Behind my question lingered the belief that as a woman I am supposed to give birth, that my body was designed for it. But I didn’t want to simply fall into a prescribed biological role. I wanted make a conscious choice. First, however, I had make sense of my options. So I went to my desk. I wrote about my college years when I was belligerent about a woman’s right to choose. I wrote about the “mother club” some of my friends have been joining. I wrote about the ridiculous mountains of plastic baby gear piled up in their living rooms. I wrote about the “body snatcher” that had invaded my body, making me ogle at babies and want to have sex. I wrote about the ticking sound. I wrote and re-wrote. I turned the questions over and over. Eventually, an answer began to emerge.

Writing helps me collect and order my thoughts and clarify the workings of my mind. I write to make sense of complicated issues—motherhood, U.S.-Mexico border policy, being an American in a time of global conflict. My current project is helping me wrestle with a set of questions and confusions about what it might mean to live in a country that is no longer the richest, most powerful in the world. I write to know where I stand. I write for coherence. I do not always achieve it, but in my attempt, I understand more fully myself and how I live in the world.

5. Connection

Nearly 15 years ago, when my college roommate and I moved out of the shoebox-sized dorm room we called home, we conducted the self-important act of writing letters to its future residents. We pasted the letters inside the dressers, imagining that two women like us would someday find them, brittle and yellowed, and read our words with reverent interest. Of course, it’s possible that our letters didn’t survive at all, that they were tossed out following week when the custodial staff cleared out the rooms. Nonetheless, we wrote because we wanted to connect.

I am not the same person I was when I was 20 but I still write out of a longing to connect. There are things that I see or hear or feel that I must share—either because they explode with beauty or because the horror of them would be immoral to keep secret. When I write, I am calling out across the tidal pool, checking in with my flock. I am thinking about what connects me to humanity. I am thinking about my readers. Who are you? I ask, adding my own stories, ideas, and interpretations to the formation of the fleet.

By writing them, my exclamations and ideas do not dissipate on the wind; they become immutable. This might be the greatest quality of the written word—it endures. Because of that, I can have relationships with writers long gone—Zora Neale Hurston, Leo Tolstoy, Willa Cather, Italo Calvino. I can also know something of the lives and imaginations of Wislawa Szymborska, Eduardo Galeano, and Orhan Pamuk, writers whose thoughts can reach me across the oceans.

This passage of words forward or backward or laterally in time or place seems to me an extraordinary leap of faith, the most insistent form of silence. It is a correspondence that makes me feel connected to the past, hopeful for the future, and completely alive in the present.

6. Redemption

Some days the thought of going to my desk gives me a stomachache. I’ll wish instead that I worked for an insurance broker in some cramped, carpeted office. At least then I’d know what to do. Because sometimes I arrive at my desk and sit there in the doldrums, nowhere to go and no way to get there. If I scream for help, my voice comes out tiny and insignificant; no one at all hears it. When this happens, I can stay away for a few days, a few weeks, months even. Thinking of my work makes my stomach tighten, my heart rate accelerate. Nothing moves. I sigh a lot.

But then I’ll see something—the edge of light behind a cactus, a grapefruit on a park bench, a forgotten dog on a chain. Or I’ll hear something—the bees in the pepper tree, the slap of rain on the desert pavement, a news story about yet another Mexican migrant dead of overexposure. And a split-second of breeze will blow over me. It will nudge me closer to the horrific or the beautiful and remind me that there are things that must be said. I will recall the elegant swoop and curve of the letters, the gentle rock of sentences in a paragraph. The images and the sounds and their urgency will lift me up and carry me back to my desk.

Are you there? I’ll ask, settling in. The answer might flutter up right away. Or maybe it will drift in slowly: I. Am. Here. Either way, I’ll hang on the words as if my life depended on it.

Because it does.