March 16th, 2007
The Showcase
Creative Non-Fiction
In “Spectacular Mistakes,” Wendy Rawlings explores religion and whether or not she believes in God. “Home and Away,” by Ecotone’s editor David Gessner, is technically an introductory note to Volume 2, Number 1, but it’s so brilliant, I had to include it anyway. If you’ve never encountered a kid like the one in Jonathan Chopan’s “Other Lives,” you haven’t lived enough. Or you’ve been lucky. But I, for one, know exactly what this feels like. In “Broken in Beijing,” Kay Sexton takes us inside a city that defies “encapsulation.” And in “Hey Joe—The Jimi Hendrix Experience/ A Riff” by Perry Glasser, the descriptions are so keen, you can’t say no.
Spectacular Mistakes by Wendy Rawlings
published by Agni
When you are raised without religion, all religions become occult. Everything shoulders its way in: St. Peter and the harps and angels smote the bad and raised the good to heaven (I would have had to guess at the meaning of “smote,” never having heard it in The Wizard of Oz or Harriet the Spy); Jesus was bloody and more famous than Prince Charles but had not been eaten in the ground by worms like a regular person. For not worshiping him and the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost I would suffocate like the Jews did in the fake showers at Auschwitz. None of it made sense. I couldn’t hold the story in my mind and couldn’t connect it to life or death or my fate.
Home and Away by David Gessner
The editor’s note introducing Volume 2, Number 1 of Ecotone: Reimagining Place
I’d like to see a softball game between two factions in American literature: Home versus Away. The Away team, the exiles and movers, would be captained by Kerouac, Hemingway, and Henry James, the Home team by Thoreau, Dickinson, and Faulkner. While the Homers might be more patient at the plate, the Aways would have the edge in sheer aggression and ambition. No doubt Thomas Wolfe, all six foot seven of him, would bat cleanup for the Aways, having both strip-mined his own hometown for material and coined the phrase that defined the split. He would likely, in the style of his squad, swing mightily for the fences.
Other Lives by Jonathan Chopan
published by flashquake
Again, in your basement, you told me, your father had been married five or six times, he’d had fifteen kids, and you didn’t think, not for one second, that either of you would be here much longer.
You were right. By sixth grade, you were gone. I hung out with you only one time after that. We were fourteen and I spent the night at your father’s apartment downtown. When I got there you told me he was in his bedroom with his girlfriend, and that the living room, which doubled as your bedroom, was where we’d be sleeping. We were bored and looking for trouble to occupy us.
So we drank. We wandered Rochester’s streets, and you told me one day you’d be just like your daddy. “Just like him,” you said.
Broken in Beijing by Kay Sexton
published in Per Contra
Writers are supposed to interpret reality—it’s our job description; but Beijing was like reading the future in chicken entrails, it was probably all there, but I couldn’t see it. Although I learned to fit in: to eat street food; to sing along with whatever pop tune was on the taxi radio so the driver could ‘learn’ the Western words by ear; and to smoke like a native—I never found a sense of balance. I experienced the city with one foot on the pavement and the other in the gutter, always stumbling over my own preconceptions and fighting for clarity through the pall of cigarette smoke and pollution. It was the first city to defeat me, defy encapsulation, and destroy all attempts to create a “sense” of itself.
Hey Joe - The Jimi Hendrix Experience / A Riff by Perry Glasser
published by Portland Review
In the crawlspace behind Eloise’s two leather bucket seats, as if she were in her own warm bed, sleeps my girlfriend, Helena. Helena looks like a geometry problem that has been folded up and put away to be solved at some future date. She is not hung over. She is not drunk. Except for a mild buzz no greater than mine, she’s far from stoned. It has just been a long day beneath the sun, she is tired, and she is not one to squander a chance to cop a few Z’s.
Filed Under: The Showcase |
In “Spectacular Mistakes,” Wendy Rawlings explores religion and whether or not she believes in God. “Home and Away,” by Ecotone’s editor David Gessner, is technically an introductory note to Volume 2, Number 1, but it’s so brilliant, I had to include it anyway. If you’ve never encountered a kid like the one in Jonathan Chopan’s “Other Lives,” you haven’t lived enough. Or you’ve been lucky. But I, for one, know exactly what this feels like. In “Broken in Beijing,” Kay Sexton takes us inside a city that defies “encapsulation.” And in “Hey Joe—The Jimi Hendrix Experience/ A Riff” by Perry Glasser, the descriptions are so keen, you can’t say no.
Spectacular Mistakes by Wendy Rawlings
published by Agni
When you are raised without religion, all religions become occult. Everything shoulders its way in: St. Peter and the harps and angels smote the bad and raised the good to heaven (I would have had to guess at the meaning of “smote,” never having heard it in The Wizard of Oz or Harriet the Spy); Jesus was bloody and more famous than Prince Charles but had not been eaten in the ground by worms like a regular person. For not worshiping him and the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost I would suffocate like the Jews did in the fake showers at Auschwitz. None of it made sense. I couldn’t hold the story in my mind and couldn’t connect it to life or death or my fate.
Home and Away by David Gessner
The editor’s note introducing Volume 2, Number 1 of Ecotone: Reimagining Place
I’d like to see a softball game between two factions in American literature: Home versus Away. The Away team, the exiles and movers, would be captained by Kerouac, Hemingway, and Henry James, the Home team by Thoreau, Dickinson, and Faulkner. While the Homers might be more patient at the plate, the Aways would have the edge in sheer aggression and ambition. No doubt Thomas Wolfe, all six foot seven of him, would bat cleanup for the Aways, having both strip-mined his own hometown for material and coined the phrase that defined the split. He would likely, in the style of his squad, swing mightily for the fences.
Other Lives by Jonathan Chopan
published by flashquake
Again, in your basement, you told me, your father had been married five or six times, he’d had fifteen kids, and you didn’t think, not for one second, that either of you would be here much longer.
You were right. By sixth grade, you were gone. I hung out with you only one time after that. We were fourteen and I spent the night at your father’s apartment downtown. When I got there you told me he was in his bedroom with his girlfriend, and that the living room, which doubled as your bedroom, was where we’d be sleeping. We were bored and looking for trouble to occupy us.
So we drank. We wandered Rochester’s streets, and you told me one day you’d be just like your daddy. “Just like him,” you said.
Broken in Beijing by Kay Sexton
published in Per Contra
Writers are supposed to interpret reality—it’s our job description; but Beijing was like reading the future in chicken entrails, it was probably all there, but I couldn’t see it. Although I learned to fit in: to eat street food; to sing along with whatever pop tune was on the taxi radio so the driver could ‘learn’ the Western words by ear; and to smoke like a native—I never found a sense of balance. I experienced the city with one foot on the pavement and the other in the gutter, always stumbling over my own preconceptions and fighting for clarity through the pall of cigarette smoke and pollution. It was the first city to defeat me, defy encapsulation, and destroy all attempts to create a “sense” of itself.
Hey Joe - The Jimi Hendrix Experience / A Riff by Perry Glasser
published by Portland Review
In the crawlspace behind Eloise’s two leather bucket seats, as if she were in her own warm bed, sleeps my girlfriend, Helena. Helena looks like a geometry problem that has been folded up and put away to be solved at some future date. She is not hung over. She is not drunk. Except for a mild buzz no greater than mine, she’s far from stoned. It has just been a long day beneath the sun, she is tired, and she is not one to squander a chance to cop a few Z’s.
Filed Under: The Showcase |
