Why We Chose It: “Do Not Hold the Birds” by Carlene Kucharczyk

“Do Not Hold the Birds” by Carlene Kucharczyk was selected for publication by Mid-American Review poetry staff in Volume XLII, Number 1.

When I read this poem, I can’t help but think of those little workshops that Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other home improvement retailers held back in the day. The ones kids would be dragged to by their parents on Saturday mornings. They’d be handed planks of wood, hammers, nails, screws, and other tools they had no clue how to use. An aproned employee wearing a ball cap would walk everyone through how to build whatever was on the agenda for the day. Mothers, fathers, older siblings would do their best to reign in their little builders, trying to guide their soft hands, hoping they could complete the project, bring it home to show off to the rest of the family. 

Sometimes they’d build birdhouses. 

And while they never turned out quite as expected, there was an element of unique beauty to each of the misaligned walls, the splotchy paint, the circular hole that wasn’t exactly quite a circle, but worked all the same. 

I like to think some of those birdhouses became homes to our little, winged companions. 

In “Do Not Hold the Birds,” Kucharczyk captures the beauty of creation, the synergy within the shared melody we have the opportunity to experience with nature. The poem acts as a guide for how to live in concourse with these earthly elements we’re rather lucky to be in conversation with.

The poem opens with the lines: “Do not hold the birds, do not make / little homes of your hands, do not ache / into a man. He will be silent”

There’s something so gripping and enticing about the beginning of this poem. If we are not to hold the birds, then what are we to do? Kucharczyk responds to this question with ultimate grace and flowing language that tingles our poetic taste buds like a cup of coffee on an April morning out on the back porch—the air buzzing with birdsong and other nice things. 

What’s most impressive about this piece is its subtle ability to subvert our expectations near the conclusion. We finally learn what we are to do with our hands, with the birds, and with our lives––and we are better off because of it. 

––Caleb Edmondson, Mid-American Review  

Winter Wheat Flash Fiction Battle to the Death Winner

Mid-American Review is thrilled to congratulate Gretchen Troxell as the winner of the 2023 Flash Fiction Battle to the Death! Contest participants were given the prompt “ominous” and only forty minutes to write 750 words or less. Three finalists were chosen to read their flash aloud at the final open mic event of the Winter Wheat Festival of Writing, where the audience chose “Toby” as the winner by overwhelming applause.

“Toby” by Gretchen Troxell

     Toby didn’t believe in spiders. He had never seen one. Never heard one scurrying across the walls. Never felt the satisfying pluck of a daddy long leg’s limp snapping off.

     His therapist wanted to stop wasting their sessions on this. 

     “Does it really matter?” She would ask, unprofessionally.

     “It matters to me,” he would respond, and she would say: “okay, Toby” or “fine, Toby” or “you’re paying for this session, Toby.”

       But Toby could tell even she didn’t believe him. No one did. Or, worse, if they did, they’d call him lucky.

      “It’s like a superpower,” his best friend, Adam said. 

      “Yeah, I’d give anything to never see a spider again,” his former girlfriend, Juliet said. They had broken up from a spider-based argument. Juliet, like his therapist, had grown old and tired of hearing the same old story. “You know what, Toby,” she finally said, “why don’t you just try a little fucking harder to find one then.”

       So, he did. He tried harder.

       Toby went out to his mother’s garden at night and scraped through the soil, burying hard rocks into his rotting nail beds. He slurped through worms and maggots, ants and beetles. His knees became hard-pressed and misshapen. His face darkened by the time the morning sun came up, and still no spiders.

      Toby had taken up five one-hour sessions up with his therapist with this spider talk. On the sixth session, she outlawed the discussion.

       Toby broke into the vents at his old church. He had heard rumors of spiders existing in attics and other dark spaces. He broke his left index finger from pounding the metal too hard, and he put a permanent crick in his back from bending over inside them. Rusty nails scraped across his jeans, creating new gashes of venomous blood. Some bugs came to it. Some reveled in it, cleaning his wounds with microscopic tongues. 

       He tried the cemetery. He cut himself open across the tongue with an old razor he found in the medicine cabinet. A grown man disguised as a vampire came along and called the police, but they didn’t bring any spiders with them. 

      “Why do you want to hurt yourself, Toby?” His therapist asked.

      “I thought the spiders would come.” His therapist shushed him and pointed at a sign over her right shoulder. It said no spider talk allowed. 

       The next night his dad printed out pictures of spiders from Google. “See, they’re real. Now stop this nonsense, now,” he commanded. 

      This pattern will continue until twenty years from now when Toby will get a girlfriend named Sarah. Sarah will be a nice girl whose seen spiders herself and has never known anyone to not believe in them, so Toby will never bring up his problem until Sarah finds him digging once again in the yard. His mouth will be covered in maggots, and ants will rest on his upper eyelids, and Sarah will scream so loudly, the neighbors wake up, but Toby will take her inside and try to explain. 

      “Why didn’t you say anything before?” Sarah will ask, and Toby will not answer.

       But they will talk about the problem for a few hours that night and the next and the next.

       Something very strange will happen with Sarah. She will listen, and she will follow Toby out to the garden and watch him slit his tongue and cry to the ground, and she will not leave, and one day, they will get married.

       Toby will never wake up and see a spider.

       Sarah believes this to be true.

       And weirdly, one day, it just won’t matter anymore. 

About the author: Gretchen Troxell is a third-year undergraduate student studying creative writing at Bowling Green State University. She is the fiction editor and treasurer for their undergraduate literary journal, Prairie Margins, and an intern at their graduate journal, Mid-American Review. She has been published in Fleas on the Dog and Quirk and is forthcoming in The Bookends Review, Allegheny Review, and Euphony Journal.

An Interview with Michael Garriga

Born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Michael Garriga comes from a long line of noted outlaws and tall-tale tellers. His whole family’s big and anchored in and around Biloxi. He’s the author of The Book of Duels (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and holds a PhD from Florida State University. Currently, he’s the Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Baldwin Wallace University. He lives in Berea, OH, with his wife of twenty years and two boys and two cats, two of which he really adores and two he’s not really sold on yet.

“The Book of Duels consists of thirty-three short stories, each comprised of three separate dramatic monologues rendered in the final seconds before an ultimate confrontation, and that, when taken together, create a multi-perspective narrative. I often use the term ‘flash fiction’ to describe these works because of the layers of association: firing a pistol (as in most of the stories); a flash in the pan (referring to when a pistol misfires and also to those people quickly forgotten); flash forward and flash backward (two narrative strategies that engage the reader at the emotional level); the speed and brevity of these monologues; and the flash of an epiphany or a moment of yearning in the characters, like a flash bulb going off. That is, Flash Fiction, to me, connotes a moment when characters’ desire for self-knowledge and -awareness dovetails with their epiphany. In one intense moment, who they are, at the deepest level, is revealed or made apparent to themselves or to the readers.” ––Michael Garriga.

Your work often centers around historical or literary figures of the past. What draws you to this kind of subject matter? How do you bring in fresh perspectives while maintaining a relationship with prior texts?

Writing the book was like being a History major but without pop quizzes and tests. I could just languish in the research, but that’s not a good place to stay. Eventually you have to get to writing. Luckily, I’d find a detail or a line or a voice that would set something off in me and then it would go from there. I’ve always loved history, and fiction should be about moments of high stakes and intense drama, I think, and what could be more of that than a duel. Then I expanded them to other stakes: birth, alcoholism, Don Quiote, etc.

I read that you spent half a decade doing research for your flash fiction collection The Book of Duels. What did that process look like for you? 

I often would spend, say, ten weeks researching how Lt. Col. Custer was killed. I did that with Pushkin too, the great Russian writer, and didn’t get a story out of it, but I know a lot more about Russian writers now.

I know you do a lot of work in the flash fiction genre. What about this medium do you gravitate to? Do you think it compliments your individual writing style? 

I have, apparently, intense ADHD, and the quickness of flash fiction works best for my mental space. Also, I write flash in a very similar vein as Robert Olen Butler; he was my advisor/mentor at Florida State. However, my stories consist of three flash pieces—two told by opposing duelists and one by a witness. So, you get three flash fictions that equal to one whole multi-narrated short story at the moment of highest impact. So, I get the flash—like an epiphany, like a flash in the pan, like a light bulb going off—but then get the added benefit of a full story.

Shifting the conversation, you grew up in Mississippi and as I know from taking your Southern Grotesque class, you have a great wealth of knowledge on the southern greats and how each of their unique styles contributed to the genre overall. Do you ever feel pressure to adhere to or continue the literary traditions of those before you?

No, I don’t. I feel the pressure of competition. I try to be as good as them (I am not), but I know the traditions and I try to add to it. TS Eliot said something about the river of tradition, and you just want to add a bend in that river (at least that’s how I remember it). So, I want to take Faulkner, O’Connor, Barry Hannah, and add my rock to their mountain. I know that’s a mixed metaphor, but rivers carve mountains so I’m going to stand by it. 

In that vein, talk about who you feel are some of the biggest influences in your writing life? What are some of their stylistic choices that you find yourself emulating from time to time?

I know Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, and Robert Olen Butler are always in my head. They play with the music of language, they up the stakes, and they always tried to thrill you, give you something you’ve never heard before. But then you have to try to shake them out of your hair and find your own voice, your own way into story telling. You ingest the traditions and they become part of you, and then you have to allow yourself the freedom go forward. Not backward. Same with Toni Morrison and T.R. Pearson. 

I read my work out loud and listen for any stumbling parts, work on rhythm and musicality as much as I do visuals. All these authors are great mentors for these aesthetics. I don’t think much about theme or how a literary critic might receive the work; I’m more interested in entertaining by diving into a human’s yearning and understanding their drive than I am in anything else. 

You’re a person who is fascinated with the complexity and richness of what it means to tell a story. I know this from both your work and the many childhood or family tales you told in my classes with you. What value do you think our own real-life memories bring to our work in fiction?

***Outside of reading a lot, I fall back on my experiences, family and friends and dreams. I dream vividly and write them down every morning before I get out of bed. There’s always an image in there—a secret room in a house, a dog I never had, my father’s hands. I keep them in a little notebook, and I try to meditate on them and see if any of them start to thrum together. I also love that my family loves to tell stories—crazy wild west type stories. They’ll tilt their head and squint and say, “I ever tell you about….” And they’re immediately in story telling mode. And ever since I was a boy, I was just transfixed. I can tell a thousand Garriga boys stories (that’s my dad and his eight brothers—all of whom lived like ten lives—wild men who I loved and who coddled me like a baby even when I was in my 20s. None of them even finished grade school. They were too busy running moonshine and pawn shops.) My uncle Troy, I was talking about grad school, said, “Oh, I remember school: That was one of the best days of my life.”

Do you have anything you are currently working on?

I’m finishing a book of stories that reads as a novel, but no one should care about what I’m doing until it’s published. 

Last but certainly not least: In the current age of social media obsession, constant work stress, and now AI writing, what do you believe is the reason to hold on to literary art? Do you think there is something we can benefit from, as humans, in literary art that we may not find anywhere else?

Someone told me last week, in a kind of pouting way, that audible books are out selling print books. Yes. We’re back to the campfire, listening to stories. I love it. It’s a way we’ve always connected. Literature is a form of magic. I tell you what’s coming out of my subconscious and devour it, recreate it, and it becomes part of your subconscious. You can’t get much closer than that. In storytelling, we’re both agreeing to a kind of contract: We’re both going into a mutual daydream (or self-hypnosis) in which we try, by only language, to share a deep and meaningful experience. Even if it’s just a stand-up comedian. We, as listeners/readers are giving ourselves over to an experience that isn’t ours, but by the end will certainly be.

***

––Meagan Chandler, Mid-American Review

Book Review: Magic for Martians: 49 Short Fictions

Magic for Martians: 49 Short Fictions by A. W. DeAnnuntis. Los Angeles, CA: Giant Claw, an imprint of What Books Press, 2022. 182 pages. $16.95, Paperback. 

From the first sentences of Magic for Martians, a particularly satisfying combination of personality traits shine through; this collection is delightfully strange, fresh, and, somehow, each piece of fanciful short fiction leaves the reader with a bit of unavoidable, poignant truth. DeAnnuntis has mastered the art of fabricating ridiculousness with relevance. These stories satisfy the craving for literature that feels new and current and will surely retain its contemporary feel in future years. 

Though the beautiful weirdness of these stories gives them the essence of unfamiliarity, many of the characters within reference character archetypes we have all seen before. But we certainly have never met these characters before. Each story is rooted closely enough to reality to be compatible with our reasonable expectations of logic and meaning, but the realities of the works in this collection veer into unexpected versions of those familiar roots. In “Henry and the King’s Missing Army,” the story plays on the familiarity of a fairytale-variety ruler, but the King’s personal concerns about his missing Army are peculiarly, vulnerably human in nature. DeAnnuntis parades the perceptive and kooky truths of bureaucratic power as a monarch deals with the disappearance of an entire military force, writing, “Such a thing had happened before and reflected poorly on him by marking him an object of humorous disdain for every other king. Anyway, besides a castle and a queen, having an army is the main way any of us know we’re king.” 

Like most real human beings, the King, along with the rest of the characters in the collection, has deeply interior personal concerns that engage in conversation with even the most stoic readers’ private issues and insecurities. Even the existential values of nonhuman characters force the reader to contemplate personal shortcomings, egocentrism, authenticity, responsibility, and even larger societal concerns such as bureaucratic institutions and the afterlife.  

In “Jake’s Backhoe Never Had a Chance,” a piece of heavy machinery is forced to experience embarrassment and feelings of inadequacy. Early in the story, the narrator explains why Jake’s backhoe was predestined for ineptitude: “That is, his backhoe would never be recognized by its peers for any of those qualities and experiences by which an inanimate object becomes a celebrity. Sort of almost resembling yourself, but more completely.” The backhoe experiences feelings of guilt for the impact of its deficiencies on the humans around it. Here, readers are curiously gifted with the opportunity to connect with a piece of dirt scooping equipment through one of the most common problems a person can have: a self-esteem issue. 

Each story in Magic for Martians is the perfect length for an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. With forty-nine pieces of fiction, the works are just long enough to fully explore each new and strange emotional situation without feeling heavy-handed. This collection is astute, imaginative, and incredibly fun to read. 

–Meg Sharman, Mid-American Review

Craft Corner: Character Counterpointing

Characters lie at the heart of many great stories. The things that happen to them, or their desires, are often the impetus for plot to take shape. The way we give information about these characters: their wants, their likes and dislikes, their backstories, etc., are all part of characterization. This is the process of making these characters into people readers can connect with. One surefire way to engage in meaningful characterization is to use a technique called counterpointed characterization.

Counterpointed characterization is a technique used by writers that positions two or more different characters against, or, indeed, alongside, one another in such a way that this positioning helps to elucidate aspects of these characters that would not otherwise be clear to readers. In addition to doing characterization work, this technique can also be a natural way to create dramatic tension in a narrative. It is important to note, though, that counterpointed characterization is not the same thing as creating a foil for a character. To counterpoint two characters, they do not need to be opposites or versions of one another. They can be two distinct character types who exist alongside one another and who the writer wants to see what their proximity to each other might yield. 

There are many famous examples of counterpointed characterization that might help make this technique clearer. Jo March is the main character in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She is counterpointed against the responsible, proper Meg, the sickly, saintly Beth, the feminine, sometimes vain Amy, and the rich, aimless Laurie. By putting Jo alongside these characters, Alcott gives the reader greater insight into who Jo is. Readers see what she envies about her sisters and Laurie, and what she judges them for.

Another excellent, and more contemporary, example of this technique is found in Raven Leilani’s wonderful novel, Luster. The novel tells the story of Edie, a 20-something Black woman in New York City who forms a romantic relationship with a man in an open marriage who has an adopted daughter, Akila. While the man and his wife are white, Akila is Black. These two characters are counterpointed, not against, but alongside, each other:

“…I take a moment to really look at her, her shiny brown cheeks, her soft frown and Adventure Time nightshirt, her towering hair and balled fists. Because once upon a time my weird adolescent breasts were subject to the dissection of aunties everywhere, my BMI always a hot topic among the Jamaican deaconesses in our SDA church, I would like to mind my own business when it comes to the subject of Akila’s hair. However, it is a massive, two-foot condemnation of her limp-haired parents, who had clearly made some previous effort that did not pan out.

‘You’re the girlfriend,’ she says with no ire or judgment, which somehow makes it worse.”

This example is so rich and illustrative of how counterpointed characterization can serve a story. The moment above, in which Edie meets Akila for the first time, gives the reader an example of Edie seeing herself in Akila right away. By putting Edie and Akila in this situation, Leilani has a vehicle to weave pieces of Edie’s backstory and emotional landscape into the story with a light touch.

Counterpointed characterization is just one way to utilize counterpointing in general. Though this technique is the focus of this specific post, one might also benefit from seeing what counterpointing can do for other elements of a story. A writer might also counterpoint settings, ideas, desires, and more to see what surprises it might open the door for in their story.

— Debbie Miszak, Mid-American Review