A Forcerant: My Descent Into Muskmelon/Muskrat Madness

Our favorite game is Muskmelon or Muskrat.

Think of anything in the world, then ask:

Is it closer to a muskmelon, or a muskrat?

                    ––Henry Goldkamp, “Forcemeat,” Mid-American Review, issue 42.1

That’s it. That’s the game that “Forcemeat” is built around. Before adapting this poem into a full-blown board game, I liked it just fine. Even while playing it, I had no idea how drastically this remix would change my experience with the poem. Expanding on it gave me the vocabulary to articulate facets of my identity which I assumed would go unexplained to my family for the rest of my life.

“Forcemeat” was about––as I initially read it––a normalizing system of logic trying to draw sense out of personal and global catastrophe. (Don’t get me wrong, I promise it’s also a lot of fun.) At points, there’s an absurdist disconnect to the dialogue between the two speakers that reminded me of Waiting for Godot (which is to say I’ve read only one piece of absurdist literature.) It wasn’t my favorite in Issue 42.1, (that would be “Bone Town” by Angie Macri,) but it was the favorite of our hard-working (one could say overworked) Poetry Editor. As a Christmas gift for them, I turned the poem into a structured board game for the MAR staff to play.

Obviously, one need only read the opening three lines of the poem to be able to play informally in pairs. It’s as simple as “I Spy” and makes an even better road trip game. When playing in this format, though, one’s decisions go unanalyzed. Each player independently develops their own concept of the melon/rat binary using the fodder their partner supplies. This mimics what we see between the two speakers of “Forcemeat,” who have already established their own codes which (especially if you haven’t been thinking about it for six goddamn months) seem alien and inaccessible.

Our adaptation requires much more intentional analysis––or at least prediction. Players advance on the game board by voting in the majority on increasingly less and less melon/rat-like concepts, within a matter of 5 seconds. The first player to reach the end of the board wins. (Check out the companion post for the full rules and PDFs for the game.) We surprised the 30-strong MAR staff by bringing it to a meeting at the end of last semester.

I had no idea that making the game a communal affair would make it feel so … vulnerable? As our Poetry Editor puts it, voting publicly feels like “baring your soul” ––despite the silliness. Not only do you flounder to quickly draw out increasingly unsubstantiated connections between the given concept and a rat or melon, but it is now something you can get “right” or “wrong.” Your mind is on full display with each vote.

At least, it felt that way. When players landed on red “debate” squares and were forced to justify the melocity or ratitude of that round’s concept, one found that their “allies” share their verdict for completely different reasons. (Example: My friend and I agreed that “butterfly” is a muskmelon. While I thought of the sugary nectar butterflies collect, though, they connected the melon’s rind to the butterfly’s cocoon.) Even one’s opponents used their same reasoning to draw the opposite conclusions. (Example: I thought “stiletto” was a muskrat due to the muskrat’s sharp teeth, but the Poetry Editor thought about the shoe’s sharp heel piercing a melon.) The rules players developed for both categories only grew more abstracted from the physical reality of fruit and Rodentia as we progressed. A huge part of the game (if you played to win) was predicting where those rules were leading your colleagues, but when it was time for a debate, everyone was reminded of how wildly different their perceptions were from everyone else’s. A sense of isolation settled on the room as each player realized that they were the only one correctly interpreting the energies of melons and rats.

This sensation of simultaneous exposure and disconnect enhanced the absurdist feeling I got from the original poem. It drew my attention to the places where the speakers of “Forcemeat” miscommunicate and disagree––it put more emphasis on the end, where the roadkill incident drives a wedge between them. While playing––and now, while reading––I felt a push and pull of intimacy and isolation. It echoes what it’s like to share an experience with someone and find that you had wildly different perceptions of it. I didn’t see any of this in the poem before the board game.

This brings me to my main reason for being obsessed with the “Forcemeat” cinematic universe.

Imagine living in a world where everything is viewed through the lens of this binary: muskmelons versus muskrats. This binary has a largely unspoken ruleset that eludes you, although it seems that everyone around you parsed it quickly and easily. Yet as you discuss this with others, their interpretations prove to be inconsistent with those of your other peers and even internallyinconsistent. Despite this, everything––even YOU––can be cleanly categorized this way. You are deemed muskmelon. Your given name indicates this. On your birthday, you receive muskmelon gifts. You’re expected to wear muskmelon clothes, watch muskmelon shows, pursue muskmelon interests. Every single person who sees you looks at your body to judge: muskmelon or muskrat? They treat you, speak to you differently based on that judgment. Even if you’re hard to sort. Especially if you’re hard to sort.

You feel utterly alienated by this system. The emphasis put on it and the rules that govern it feel absurd, pointless, and limiting. It’s not even that you resent melon life or yearn for rat life. You just want your life to be a muskmelon and muskrat buffet. You don’t want to choose based on that arbitrary status, but rather your own preferences. But alas, when a human is born, the first words it hears are “it’s a melon!” or “it’s a rat!” Whichever they are judged as defines the rest of their life. 

…

So, the plot twist here is that I feel much more like a muskrat on the melon/rat binary than I do like either a man or a woman on the gender binary.

Playing “Forcemeat” deeply spoke to me as a nonbinary person, particularly as a nonbinary person on the autism spectrum. As a kid, social norms didn’t (and still don’t) come easy to me, including the gender ones. (Examples: Women wear makeup. Men don’t cry. Women should be skinny, men muscular. What the hell are you talking about?!) Some will offer evolutionary explanations for such classifications, but I would counter that the way our pre-civilization ancestors survived shouldn’t have such a strong bearing on how we live today. Furthermore, our understanding of our evolutionary past keeps evolving (such as with the men = hunter, women = gatherer myth.) Some cite biochemical reasons for their way of sorting, but in many cases, even when they are scientifically sound, one could argue with similar reasons for the inverse expectations. (If testosterone grants men social leniency to be more expressive of frustration and anger, why does menstruation not call for a similar grace?) The foundation of many of these hyperspecific categorizations are a stretch, much like the reasoning one comes up with when playing “Forcemeat”. They latch onto something like assumptions based on shaky conclusions drawn from a cultural myth of a bygone era, which itself was a departure from the previous assumption of blah blah blah blah blah.

This is all to say that engaging with this silly poem not only resonated with my experience but helped me put into words what makes me so averse, both personally and intellectually, to the gender binary.

Now everyone else, stop reading for a bit. This next part is just for my mom.

––

Hi, Mom!

I was sort of planning on this being an open secret for the rest of my life. Had Outlook not added my email signature––with my changed name and pronouns––to that message I sent you a while ago, I was going to try keeping it a closed secret. Well, as closed as I could keep it after sharing very vocally with my middle school classmates my hope that puberty would grant me hairy arms and a beard.

I’ve been so scared about trying to explain this to any of my family, not because I’m scared of being disowned––I know your love is unconditional––but because I freeze when I even try to think of how I would articulate what it means to consider oneself “nonbinary” to you. I hate arguing and I hate conflict, even in the form of the most sophisticated and gentlemanly debate. I would shatter into a million pieces if any of you responded by starting with so much as the word “But.” That’s caused me to let a gap grow between us. But now, analyzing this poem has given me the words to explain it, and I’m no longer afraid of that conversation.

Maybe you’re thinking, why not live with the “muskmelon” label and do whatever I feel like anyways? You yourself were a tomboy (or tomrat, if we’re speaking metaphorically.) In some ways you grew up to be a thomaswoman. In fact, my own upbringing didn’t pigeonhole me into a strict definition of womanhood as readers might assume, given the little “Twilight Zone” episode they just read. What makes me so sure I haven’t been a muskrattish muskmelon, or a boyish girl, or a masculine woman? 

On a practical, everyday level, I feel so much more comfortable with myself outside the labels of female/male, labels which feel as irrelevant to how I carry myself as the labels muskmelon/muskrat do to most people on earth. Being referred to with she/her pronouns felt like wearing a really uncomfortable sweater that irritates my skin, a fashion choice which is liable to make me 54% grumpier on any given day. I physically felt better when I came out to my friends and colleagues as Jamie Manias, when I wasn’t referred to as a muskmelon all the fuckin’ time, when people knew that they’d likely misinterpret me if they looked at me through the paradigm of man- or womanhood.

On a touchy-feely “who am I” level, “melon” or “woman” being the core descriptor of me as a person––the noun onto which every other aspect of myself is an adjective piled on––does not feel accurate at all. To be considered a masculine woman is still to be considered, grammatically and socially, a woman above anything else. More than that, it is to be considered a woman who is bad at being a woman, according to the rules of the mutually exclusive binary. Like being a cold pot of coffee or a shy public speaker.

Maybe you’re thinking that the way people see me won’t be affected at all by my coming out, that they’ll always see me as a woman. That it’s practically impossible for anyone to mentally accept someone as “in-between” or “neither.” That this binary––even if it is as silly as a binary of melons and rats––can’t really be set aside by anyone. That could be true, especially of me. (It’s hard to divorce a pronoun like “she” from a rack like mine.) But even if the only thing that’s changed is the way people refer to me, that still makes me feel more at home in my own skin. That was a rare feeling for me before realizing this about myself.

Anyways, give Morty and Bella lots of pets for me. Keep the pool table ready, I’ll see you over Spring Break.

With much love,

Jamie Manias.

––

…

Anyways.

I often fear that I neglect my duty to this burning, burning world by wasting my time and talent on writing poetry. 

But before playing “Forcemeat,” I was planning on never having this conversation.

I was terrified.

I thought I could never clearly communicate my internal experience to anyone not already well-versed in gender-ology. 

Maybe I can’t. Maybe I can’t communicate it to anyone. But that’s not the point. The point is that even if nobody understands me any better, even if the writer of “Forcemeat” is appalled by my interpretation (hi Henry!), even if I’m banished from the academy for my mad science of grafting a board game to a living poem, no matter what, I found a way to explain myself to myself here. And if a poem can give that to someone, maybe I’m not wasting my time as a poet.

––Jamie Manias (they/them), Mid-American Review

Craft Corner: Collaborative Writing Exercises

A massive ugly face sits on a long neck, attached to a mess of tentacles for arms and the skinny legs of a flamingo. You might see a drawing like this on the walls of an art classroom: an exquisite corpse. Most of us remember this activity from our childhood. You begin by folding a piece of paper into three pieces. First, you draw the head, then fold it over and pass it to the next person to draw the body. It’s passed again and the last person draws the legs. Until the paper is unfolded, no one sees what the ‘exquisite corpse’ will be. This collaborative art game teaches children about creative thinking. What can it teach us about writing? 

Writing is a collaborative process. It’s cooperative not only in how we learn to write from others, but in how we create feedback, workshop our work, and read and understand literature. Collaborative writing exercises can teach us creative thinking and help us flex our writing muscles because it forces us to think outside ourselves about how our writing looks to others. 

When you adapt the exquisite corpse for writing, the exercise can work in a few different ways. You might start a story and pass it to the next person to finish. You could continue passing a story amongst a group of people, allowing each to add a page. Or, you can try to write a single narrative amongst a group, with each person given only the last section of writing to work with.  

These collaborative exercises can look like a party game or a serious exercise, but either way, they have more value than social entertainment. They may have basic practical value, such as the challenge to write to time and length constraints. Focusing on writing games could be methods to break out of routine and help conquer writer’s block. Collaborative writing forces people to write out of their comfort zones and develop essential skills.  

First, collaborative writing teaches us to look at our writing through another’s eyes and understand how our audience reads and interprets our work. When writing for another writer, you’re under a different kind of pressure from your audience. You have to read through the eyes of your audience and the writer who follows you. You have to consider what information is necessary and what is significant: What does the next person need to know to continue writing?  

You must also be adaptable. When responding to another’s writing, you are met with the creative challenge to match their style. Their tone, style, and the rhythm of their writing voice may not match your own. To continue other authors’ narratives, you have to be flexible. You might try to replicate their voice or find a way to explain the shift. By examining your own style in comparison to others’, you learn more about your own work. 

Collaborative writing also makes us incredibly vulnerable. The actual writing of writing can be the least collaborative part of the process, often practiced alone in the safety of your own space and mind. When you give part of that process to someone else, you are opening yourself up to possibilities and being vulnerable.  

We may be beyond our childhood art’s exquisite corpses, but we aren’t done learning how to be creative thinkers. It’s important to remember why collaboration is key in writing: it helps us to grow.  

— Sarah Urbank, Mid-American Review

An Interview with Alisson Wood

I recently got the chance to talk with Alisson Wood about her incredible memoir Being Lolita (Flatiron Books, 2020). The book maps her journey from being a high school student struggling with her mental health to being a victim of grooming to being a woman ready to rewrite her own narrative. During high school Alisson takes refuge in her writing and her English teacher, Mr. North, offers to mentor her. Instead of building a student-teacher relationship built on care and support, Mr. North goes on to exploit her. One of his tactics is to give her a copy of Lolita, framing it as the ultimate love story rivaled only by theirs. In the years after the abusive spiral of their “relationship”, Wood learns to see the truth of both her story and the story of Dolores Haze. Being Lolita is a must-read memoir of redemption, survival, and breaking free of dangerous narratives. 

In addition to Being Lolita Wood’s writing can be found in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Rumpus, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Check out her Instagram, Twitter, and website to learn more.

Author’s Note: This interview has been edited, and some conversational threads have been re-organized for clarity. 

Memoir writing is an incredibly vulnerable art form, especially when it involves the topics you address in Being Lolita such as grooming and misogyny. How did you decide you were ready to write and publish this book? 

Memoir is, in my opinion, the most vulnerable art form. So many other mediums such as sculpture, fine art, theater, and music involve working with an object outside of yourself. Writing is intrinsically an attempt at making the internal external. Memoir is particularly vulnerable because it is explicitly centering oneself. When a memoir is circling trauma, or some sort of traumatic experience, that can be really tricky.

My number one recommendation is if you are thinking about or in the midst of a project that involves trauma, is to find a good therapist. Because this sort of work is difficult. It’s not only difficult on a craft level, because just like writing a novel, there are all these things that you need to be working with like plot, theory, dialogue, scene setting. You need to do all of those things, all of that same craft work,  while you are also navigating your own emotional experience, your past, your present, even your future, in a memoir. 

It wasn’t like I decided to write Being Lolita. It didn’t feel optional. This was the book I needed to write. Which I was not thrilled about. I did not enjoy the process of writing this book. I did not experience the writing of this book as an act of catharsis or as any sort of healing experience. A lot of times people expect that. They’ll ask questions in interviews like, Do you feel healed now? And it’s like fuck no. No, writing out my trauma in detail on a page for an audience of strangers has not made anything better. I do think that that sort of question comes from a place of care and from sort of a place of hope. Someone reads my book, and it’s pretty awful at times, and they sort of hope like, oh, this helped, right? I read this awful thing, but you’re better now. Right?  I am better, but that had nothing to do with the book. Writing this book did not change what happened to me. It did nothing to change my trauma. However, work in therapy has done a lot of that. 

Publishing is always a choice. I’m very proud of the book, and I’m very glad that I published it. But there was a lot that I did to prepare myself for publication like therapy, talking and getting support from close friends, and connecting with family. When the book came out I spent about six months talking about my trauma over and over again in readings and on podcasts and in interviews and then in a documentary. So it was something that I had to prepare myself for. Which, again, is why I always recommend therapy. 

Can you share a bit about the recollection and writing process that went into Being Lolita? Was there anything that surprised you when you revisited the memories and archives of your younger self? 

Your own memory can be fallible. There was a very explicit crossing of the line from this man being my teacher to this man making sexual advances to a seventeen-year-old year old girl. There was this moment where my teacher was talking about the size of his penis in a note to me in study hall. In my memory that had happened towards the end of the school year, it had happened like in May or something. I remembered it being close to when I graduated, when I was already eighteen. But when I was going through my high school journals I found an entry referencing it. The entry was from November, so I had known him for at most two months. It was really shocking to me when I realized that my memory was not accurate, in a way that only made things worse. That just underscored how quickly the relationship had escalated from a teacher paying attention and giving me support with my writing to grooming and sexual abuse. 

I still have a box of photographs and receipts from our “relationship”.  As an aside, it frustrates me that there’s no word for what happened between he and I. That just feels like a reflection of the misogyny in our language. He wasn’t my boyfriend. I would prefer not to use the word relationship, but that’s all that we got. But anyways, in the process I kept having to confront the fact that this was actually much worse than I remembered. I had been sort of lying to myself about the severity of how quickly things escalated. There was one experience where I was in the school play. He was directing it and I remembered this moment of him taking a photograph of me backstage in my costume. I remember how it felt to have that photo taken, how I felt sexy and powerful. I was like, look at me, a cute little Lolita, just like you want. Then when I was writing the book I found the picture. I looked so young I could have been fourteen or fifteen. I looked so young and so sad. It wasn’t sexy. I wasn’t some seventeen-year-old girl who looked much older. I was a young girl who looked really sad. That reckoning was hard. 

 My experience of going through my archives, including my high school journals, was both incredibly painful and helpful to the project. I was expecting moments of, Oh, I thought this happened. Oh, that’s not actually what happened. Instead, I found myself more disturbed by people remembering what actually had happened. I was expecting to hear from people from my high school, from my past, from his friends who would push back on my memories. Instead people reached out to me, saying things like Oh, my God! He was so creepy! or I tried to talk to another teacher about this because I was worried, but no one cared or I was a teacher then and I didn’t know what to do or, most awfully, this happened to me too. I also found out that my teacher was still teaching. Until very recently he was still teaching high school. That was particularly difficult, but it also wasn’t surprising. 

I’ve had to read Lolita many times for my own project and noticed a narrative structure similar to your memoir. Can you talk a bit about the structural choices you made and how it does and doesn’t mirror Lolita? 

I very explicitly mirror the structure of my book to the structure of Lolita. Part one in both books is sort of the escalation of this “relationship”, this escalation of the grooming and the abuse. Part two of these books are these kind of extended road trips, trying to not get caught. Then part three is the aftermath, which is where I separate from Nabokov’s structure. Dolores Haze is dead, and her story ends. But unlike Dolores Haze, I am not dead. I get to keep going, which is very nice. 

Nabokov really sneaks in the violence of the book in so many ways. Starting from the first line, readers have the point of view of Humbert: this is love, and so on. But before then we have the opening from the doctor and the criminal charges Humbert is facing. It is just tucked in there that Dolores ends up dead – they use her married name. And the thing is, that’s all at the beginning of the book. Nobody knows who this person is. We haven’t been introduced to this character. We don’t even know that her name is Dolores Haze for quite a bit. Unless someone goes back to the beginning and carefully reads through that opening again, they will miss it. They do not know that she ends up dead in childbirth. She never even gets to complete her life cycle. Her moving from girlhood to womanhood (where she becomes a mother and is no longer a child) is where she dies. I think this is just so reflective of the book as a whole. Those most vital pieces are hidden and hidden in plain sight. That’s very frustrating to me. 

 Mirroring the structure of my book to Lolita was a choice that I made in the editing process, not something I decided at the very beginning. At first I was just writing the scenes that were the clearest in my head. I began with the scenes that were the hottest, and I don’t mean hot like sexy, I mean hot emotionally – the ones that are the most emotionally packed. I made the structural decision later, when it revealed itself in later stages of the book

On the topic of structure, particularly memoir structure, I believe that if you’re going to make some sort of interesting craft choice, like making your memoir non-chronological or from the second person, I deeply believe that you need to have a reason for doing that. Why is this non-chronological? Why should this be the way the story has to be told? There needs to be a good reason, because I really believe that chronology can create empathy. We all love to follow a hero’s journey. To see something happen from the start to the end. And I think that, especially in memoir, it really helps an audience follow the main character to the end of an experience. 

I’m also a big believer in a really strong beginning. A hard truth is that unless you are in an MFA or other writing workshop, no one has to read your book. No one has to read your essay. No one has to read your short story. That can be a big shift for people exiting a writing program. You have to earn your reader’s trust. You have to earn their time. You have to earn their attention. 

The opening of my book is, “The first time he kissed me wasn’t on the mouth.” This was both instinctual and a craft choice: the opening line allows readers to get right into the story. There’s immediately questions. Who is he? If he didn’t kiss you on the mouth, where did he kiss you? What is the context here? Who are you? Opening with questions isn’t always the right choice for a book, but I felt like it was the right choice for mine. The diner scene immediately (hopefully) brings in curiosity and stakes. In the short space of that chapter – it is under 2,000 words – I tried to establish what was important: I’m in high school. This is my teacher. We’re meeting secretly. Lolita is important. Writing is important. There’s also a few moments where there’s this innate reference to violence present, with the slamming of the lockers, with the ink bleeding. 

You spend a lot of your memoir unpacking Lolita, especially when it comes to cultural legacy and the role that it had on your own story. What do you wish was more commonly understood about Lolita, both as a novel and also as a cultural touchstone? 

I wish people took Lolita seriously, in a way. Far too many people see Lolita as a piece of satire, and undercut what is actually happening on the page. Now, I don’t think Lolita should be banned, or anything like that. Books are made to be read, and should be. However, I do think that Lolita needs to be read in context, both in cultural context and in literary context. Lolita has to be read with a very critical eye. Culturally, people don’t think of Lolita as a victim of rape as a child who was kidnapped. We think about Lolita as a shade of lipstick or a makeup line. We think of Lolita as in Lolita fashion: short little frilly skirts and low-cut tops and ribbons in your hair. Lolita is in place of sexy: she’s such a Lolita. Culturally, we don’t acknowledge the reality of Lolita. 

After the first time Dolores Haze is raped, they stop at a gas station. Humbert has this laundry list of things that he picks up for her: magazines, lollipops, candy, and so on. And right in the middle, just snuck in there, are menstrual pads. If you’re not a careful, critical reader, you just gloss over that when the reality is she needed menstrual pads because was bleeding from violent rape. She had a physical injury from it. That’s something that’s hard for readers to acknowledge. It’s much easier to think of Lolita as if she’s a little Jezebel, like some sexy thing. That’s also linked to the fact that, due to patriarchy and misogyny, women are primarily valued on their looks and younger is considered better. There’s all this power linked to being a young, sexy girl. In many ways Lolita is both a reflection of that point of view in our culture and part of the problem. 

Lolita was in my own story from the beginning. Everything in the book connects in some way to Lolita. My teacher gave me Lolita. He read Lolita to me. His favorite drink was one that he made up called the Humbert Humbert. It was gin, and whatever it is that Humbert drinks. He gave me a stamp collection that was all Nabokov butterflies. Even the sections about fairy tales or Greek myths. That’s the kind of stuff that Nabokov loves.

Now, as a professor, I teach an excerpt from Lolita in my course, the opening. But Lolita is always the last thing we read. I found that when we read Lolita in the beginning of the semester, before weeks of practicing critical thinking about literature, people often got swept up in the romance and the lyricism and the beauty of the prose. Contrarily, by the end of the semester, we’ve talked about poetic devices. We’ve talked about choices and point of view. We’ve talked about narrative. We’ve talk about all these things. So they are ready to do the work of critical thinking and come to the text ready to ask questions. That’s the way Lolita should be read. Lolita is a beautiful book. I mean, it is a little bit masturbatory in its excess. Nabakov famously hated editors. I think the book could be shorter, honestly. But there’s a lot of beauty, and a lot  hat is worth reading and talking about. I think that it’s the lack of critical eye and cultural context that lets down Lolita, and lets down women.

–Gen Greer, Blog Co-Editor

On Sara Moore Wagner’s Swan Wife

Swan Wife by Sara Moore Wagner. San Diego, CA: Cider Press Review, 2022. 88 pages. $18.95. Paper.

A book of poetry that simultaneously frightens and beguiles is a rare treasure; and Swan Wife, by Sara Moore Wagner, does precisely that. These original poems are often startling in their fearlessness and beauty. Each piece resonates with the astounding strangeness of everyday life and creates shifting worlds that are both fairytale and madness. The sheer weirdness of metaphor drew me in immediately, and Wagner reveals herself as an expert craftsman of the surreal image, the internal metaphor, and the spellbinding complexities of impulse, intimacy, and desire. 

Sara Moore Wagner seems to have a secret window into perception and experience, and in Swan Wife, she unravels what she sees. The poems are organic, physical, archetypal, and supernatural. The voice is startlingly honest and precise. Swan Wife examines wildness caught; but only for an instant—as a sparrow, a tensile wing, or an unsettling dream. Wagner pulls apart how we are trapped by domesticity, intimacy, gender roles, relationships, and our bodies.  

The book is built around the traditional heroic narrative structure developed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (from Swan Wife, Notes.) The poems build themselves on metaphor borrowed from fairytale and myth to explore realms of the body and the psyche of the “housewife”, Swan Wife, or woman who is half wild creature and half tethered by pacts of domesticity. The result is a world fraught with surreality; a continuous pushing and pulling of the self and the psyche as the speaker navigates the realms of womanhood, motherhood, marriage, beauty, permeability of the self, and autonomy.

The opening poem, “Licentious,” begins “When spring comes, I go naked to the lake / near the hospital where I was born” and captures a highly physical sense of intimate and psychic tension. The speaker commands “Give me a husband who’s never seen the glint / of my skin, how it looks like a knife” and conjures the ambivalent strangeness of the possum, “long-nosed, a jawful of teeth” to create a sense of being half-hidden, “playing dead” with a “pouch full/ of babies, thick as disease.” It’s a startling, visceral vision of self-mythos and quiet power. 

In “Like I Won’t Take Something from You,” the speaker intimates the strange fluidity of familial love and romantic love, the ways her body resembles and become the landscape she inhabits, her “golden hair” “like new hay / rolled into tiny suns.” The poems delve into the intricacies of long love, troubled girldom, and childhood blurring into adulthood. The woman as swan emerges in “Ball and Chain,” where the speaker’s partner calls her “swan” when she touches a dirty lake where no one will swim; he observes “you’ll go where you want,” and the speaker allows herself the metaphysical embrace, and stops herself from running. 

In addition to themes of duplicity and dislocation, the poems also explore physical vulnerability, permeability, rot, disease, and birth. There is a fascinating compartmentalization and animism of the body as separate vectors, as in the gorgeous motherhood poems “Venus Complex,” “Nervous Condition,” “Postpartum II,” and “Reward.” These subdued yet powerful pieces exemplify the mysterious, ambivalent spirit of poems so rooted in the body. 

Swan Wife is also lyrical and musical, and in “Circe Complex” Wagner draws on her singular command of sound and diction to create an elemental incantation reminiscent in spirit and sound to Glück, Plath, and Sexton. Similarly powerful are “A Woman Like That is Not Ashamed to Die,” which envisions a terrifying landscape of motherhood and wifehood and “Getting My Body Back,” which invokes Perrault’s Donkey Skin to examine self-image, grief, and the strangeness of personal physical and mental metamorphosis:

       I try on each skin like a dress,

       each one lovelier than the next—stables

       in the heart open. They’re running.

The poems in this book will surprise you. In craft and in voice, they are original, relentless, and vulnerable. Sara Moore Wagner is a poet who sees the world through her own strange prism, and in Swan Wife, the reader is offered a glimpse into worlds both alluring and frightening—yet tempered with Wagner’s hyper-perception, sensitivity, and deep instinct. 

––Mary Robles, Mid-American Review  

Featured Writer: George Looney + Interview

On Thursday February 1st at 7:30pm, Poet and writer George Looney will be reading some of his work for the Spring 2024 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. The reading will be held in the Prout Chapel on the BGSU campus. The event is open to the public.

George Looney has nourished a decades long career as a successful writer, editor, and educator; his career has produced several collections of award-winning work: including, 13 collections of poetry and 4 collections of prose.  

Looney’s work has been published in countless literary journals and anthologies such as American Writers Review and Mid-American Review in 2023 with his book review, Review of Wendell Mayo’s Twice-Born World: Stories of Lithuania and many, many more esteemed publications. His new short story collection The Visibility of Things Long Submerged was published by BOA Editions, LTD in 2023.

George Looney currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and English at Penn State Erie where he also serves as the Editor of the literary journal, Lake Effect. Looney founded the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie. For eight years, Looney served as Editor-in-Chief of Mid-American Review after receiving his M.F.A. from Bowling Green State University; Looney now serves as the Translations Editor for Mid-American Review. We are incredibly lucky to have Looney back in Bowling Green this week; he will be reading from both his new book of stories, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged (BOA Editions) and his new collection of poetry, The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible (Cider Press Review).

To find out more information, visit George Looney here:

https://georgelooney.org/

Assistant Editor Elly Salah conducted the following interview with George Looney via email.

Elly Salah: You’ve mentioned that some of the places you write about in your fiction are real places. How do you decide what to fictionalize when drawing from real memories? 

George Looney: None of the places in The Visibility of Things Long Submerged are actual places from my memory, places I have been and am remembering. But some of the places, like Rome, GA and Subligna, GA are real places that I had to use for various reasons. For instance, I needed a small town near the Chattahoochee National Park, as that National Park is a good place to find scarlet snakes, which was important for the story. I did quite a bit of research for both of these towns, because I wanted to have a sense of the places to fit the story to the place and to use the place to create the story. Research is always a two-lane highway in the creative process. 

ES: In The Visibility of Things Long Submerged, your characters go through journeys where they question the role of faith in their lives. Would you mind sharing a little bit about how these character’s conflicts come to be: Does a character’s struggle come before the other elements of a narrative or does the narrative somehow shape the character’s struggle?

GL: In my estimation, plot is the least important element of fiction. Plot is just “this happens then this happens then this happens, etc.” The real question is, So what? And that comes from the interactions within and between characters. Putting characters in a setting and establishing conflict—or at least tension—is for me the genesis of story. 

ES: How do you see poetry and prose influencing the ways in which we interact and create spaces of faith? 

GL: Religion and faith are of course not the same thing. Art—all art, not just literature—no matter how nihilistic, has faith at its core. To make art is a positive act; it implies a faith in there being someone to “read” it, to experience it, to share the experience of it. 

ES: Could you discuss a little bit about what it’s been like serving as an editor in the literary world and also a successful writer? Do those two “roles” ever conflict? 

GL: I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to be an editor, first with Mid-American Review for many years and now with Lake Effect for many years. To get to participate in the shaping of contemporary poetry and prose—which is what literary journals do—is an honor. Editors say, this deserves to be read, this deserves an audience, this deserves to last. As for any conflict between being an editor and being a writer, the only conflict is the struggle for time. Reading the work of other writers—both good and bad—informs constantly my own skills as a writer. The two roles complement one another more than they conflict. 

ES: What was it like to create the Bachelor’s of Fine Arts program at Penn State Erie? What motivated you to start the program?

GL: I was participating in one of those “retreats” to formulate a five-year plan for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Penn State Erie, and I, sort of jokingly, suggested we should start a BFA in Creative Writing program. I had already revamped the BFA at BGSU before I left there to take a tenure-track position here (something I was never going to get at BGSU due to the attitudes of a particular Dean), and since we already had a well-funded reading series and a track in the English BA for creative writing, it seemed like a logical possibility. Then it turned out that the Chancellor loved the idea (thinking it would bring more females to a college dominated by males), and so I then had to spend a lot of time and energy creating the program, which I based on the work I had done at BGSU but trying to improve upon what I had done at BGSU. 

ES: Seeing as you are accomplished in multiple genres, would you mind sharing how your process might change when approaching a collection of prose versus a collection of poetry?

GL: The process doesn’t change, exactly. The focus is perhaps different. I agree with Ezra Pound, who argued that good poetry must be at least as well-written as good prose. The sentence is the basis of all good writing. Understanding how sentences function is essential in both poetry and prose. The only difference is in poetry you also have the line, which allows you to manipulate the sentence in an additional way. This does not include prose poetry, of course. But I realize you asked about producing collections of poetry or prose. Every book—whether prose or poetry—determines how it comes to be. The Visibility of Things Long Submerged started from one story—the first in the book—which was written as the result of a challenge like that which led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. There were three of us—myself and two graduate fiction writers—sitting in a bar on Main Street drinking and waiting for a pool table to open up, and I said, in response to something, “Jesus is a shell game,” and one of the other two said someone should write a story with that title, so we all agreed to write such a story, and I was the only one who apparently was sober enough to remember. That was the original title of “What Gives Us Voice.” The editor of New England Review requested the title change. All the other stories came out of the feeling that the characters in that story had more to do, more to say, more to discover, more to reveal. 

ES: As an expert in both poetry and prose, could you share with us a bit more about your process? This week you’ll be reading to us from both your collections of poetry and prose. Do you have any preference when it comes to reading your work? 

GL: I have no preference between giving readings of my fiction or my poetry. But I should admit, even though I’ve published a novel, a novella, and two story collections, I consider myself a poet who has written some fiction. I love reading good fiction as much as I love reading good poetry, and I have fiction writers I feel as passionately about as I feel about my favorite poets. 

ES: Reflecting on your time as an educator of creative writing, what is the single most important thing a creative writing student can take away from a course with you?

GL: A passionate love for language. And the recognition that—as Whitman declared about American poetry—the challenge is to create/discover language to express the inexpressible. To strive for anything less is to cheat yourself and, more importantly, to cheat the art of literature. 

ES: Last question, what was your favorite place to hangout or thing to do when you attended Bowling Green State University for your MFA?

GL: There are several places and things I did, much with my best friend of 35 years who sadly died 5 years ago, Douglas Smith. Playing pool and ping pong at Howards, especially after workshop nights. Playing racketball at 2 or 3 in the morning after writing in Hanna Hall for hours in a court that used to be under the stadium and was always open, and then going to Frisch’s for breakfast, and then going home to sleep. There are others, but I’ll stop there.

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––Elly Salah, Mid-American Review