An interview with Christina Duhig, author of “Lesson” (by Coral Nardandrea)

I was a Gender Studies major in college, and I’m a person who, generally, just cares. It’s difficult for me, as an assistant editor on the MAR staff, to pass up a poem that speaks to something bigger and manages to remain artistic. Any of us can say an alarming amount of women are murdered each year—each day—but few people can say that in a way that’s different. Thankfully, “Lesson,” by Christina Duhig, does just that.

A poem like “Lesson” is hard to read. It deals with what every girl who makes it to womanhood deals with: the violence she knows is happening around her, and the violence she is unable to fully escape. “Lesson” speaks to the author’s first time grappling with this knowledge—a young girl trying to imagine the details of a murder and how this experience impacts her future.

All young women have the moment they realize they need to worry about something more than most of their male friends. The “don’t go out alone” discussion, the “take a friend to the bathroom” discussion. The moment they watch a newscaster talking about a woman who has been assaulted or killed or both. Duhig brings awareness to that in a way that hurts. Because it needs to.

When I first read “Lesson,” that hurt sneaked up on me. Duhig uses short, clipped sentences and powerful, controlled diction to put the reader exactly where she needs them to be—in the moment, on those train tracks, in the flames. Duhig forces readers to live these moments in time with her nine-year-old self, forces them to look at the dental records the way she looked at them, to “learn to see the body beneath the body.”

Duhig’s “Lesson” is such an important addition to Mid-American Review. A poem that reminds us what we don’t want to be reminded about, a poem that forces us to remember the moment we understood.

Do you have a writing ritual of any sort? Tell us about it.

I need a stack of poetry books, an iced coffee, and— about an hour into the effort— I usually need a cookie. Substitute iced coffee for Diet Coke, a cookie for a sleeve of saltines, books for different books. The caffeine helps with focus. The food soothes desperation. The books, of course, unlock the head- space.

Has your idea of what makes a poem a “poem” changed since you began writing?

My aesthetics and the aesthetics I appreciate in a poem have certainly evolved over the years. I’ve come to embrace a short and succinct title, the kind that seemed “too easy” when I was younger. (I was no good at writing those long, delightfully clever titles anyway.) I shy away now from abrasive language, which appealed to me as I was figuring out my feminist politics. What hasn’t changed is my desire for sincerity and the sense of urgency I feel as both reader and writer when piecing together meaning. I love the lines in Marianne Moore’s “The Steeple Jack:” “it is a privilege to see so/ much confusion. Disguised by what/ might seem the opposite.” I’m drawn to well-ordered confusion in a poem—the way the poem’s order shifts as it moves down the page.

What is your biggest writing-related success, other than a publication?

Cue the list of writing-related successes I wish I’d experienced by now. I’ve written a number of poems that attempt to confront the traumas that women I care about have endured. Each of those poems— poems that feel “finished” and honest—are my best “writing-related success” because they are my best effort to confront violence and support women, in writing. “Lesson” is one of those poems. Though I never met the woman that poem is about, her story—as I heard it on the news when I was nine years old—was the first of many I’ll never forget.

What was the most useful feedback you received for “Lesson” that helped it evolve into the poem it is?  

In “Lesson’s” early drafts the last three lines—a couplet and a final one-line stanza—were clunky and vague. I think I knew the couplet in particular was off, but I didn’t know how to fix it until a friend suggested that it wasn’t scary enough, that the poem had to hurt more. She was right.

A few years later, satisfied with the revised couplet, another friend suggested that the last line—“girl, fire, track, man”—move into the body of the poem. I resisted at first. I loved the last line. I felt power in the line, and I wanted that power. But, together, we moved the line, and the second line of revised couplet became the last line of the poem. She was right, too. The poem had to hurt.

Do you ever feel you are unable to write out of fear?

Yes—

Without this sounding like a therapy session, I am almost three years out of a terrible run involving deaths in my family, a breakup, bed bugs, panic attacks and parallel anti-depressants (my first!), adjunct exhaustion, and my escape (rescue) from Brooklyn. I’m convinced the poems that will ultimately result from all of this will finish my book, but I’ve also realized that I have a habit of avoiding the place where the poems are scariest, where they should hurt most. And I just have no interest in fear and hurt right now.

“Lesson” has a very distinct message concerning violence against women, and how women learn about this violence. What were some techniques that you used to help tackle such a loaded subject?

I tried for years to write a poem about her death, and in doing so I tried any number of times to find out more information about her. One of those times, I entered the right search terms, and the news was right there. I was stunned by how many of the details I remembered, and stunned again by the details I either never heard or forgot. In particular, that he “started a fire with gasoline.” At nine, when I heard “she was burned,” my little self imagined matches or a lighter held to her skin. And that’s one of the images—even as an adult—that stayed with me. Realizing, finally, the disconnect between how he actually set her on fire and my attempt at nine years old to understand how she was burned, the poem wrote itself.

So, time? Recollection? Detail?

I also can’t tell you how grateful I was to learn her name.

Accepted: “No Paper Cowboys” by Bryn Agnew

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Tom Markham discusses the marvelous “No Paper Cowboys.”

Genre: short fiction

Title: “No Paper Cowboys”

Author: Bryn Agnew

MAR Issue: 36.1

First Line: “Your parents stand on the porch as you park your car under the awning where the chicken snake ate the baby swallows.”

The evocative image in the opening line of Bryn Agnew’s “No Paper Cowboys” sets the stage for a tale of consumption. That the story is told in 2nd person—“Your parents stand on the porch”—brings us close to the affected character, allowing us an interiority crucial to understanding the unavoidable struggle that consumes this main character.

The setup is one we’re all familiar with—a young college student returns home for a family Thanksgiving celebration—yet the insight here feels fresh, cutting to the core a young person’s first real identity crisis: feeling like a stranger both in that new living environment as well as in the old. This sense of having one foot in one world and one in the other is brought out nicely through the italicized lines that are interspersed throughout the narrative. These lines, usually quotes from, we can assume, texts and situations the boy encountered at school, are often direct, internalized responses to the actions or requests of this main character’s family. Sometimes the interactions between internal and external are simple—“’Why don’t you go for a walk?  Get some fresh air.’  It’s plain to see, the sun won’t shine today, but I ain’t in the mood for sunshine anyway”—while other times they are a little more abstracted, pointing to the unease deep within the main character’s psyche.

The main character, the “You” in the story, is doing his best to reconcile his estranged world of the past with his new fresh but ultimately unsatisfying frame of mind, but the efforts are fruitless. The futility is shown most starkly in his family’s frustrated attempts to cheer him up with mundane, homey tasks. Sandwiched into this doomed task of fitting his new self back into his old life is the revelation that things don’t appear to be going so well socially at college, either, so at the story’s core, we are given this bit of insight—the boy is unhappy in both worlds—and we watch it eat away at him while his family attempts, always uselessly, to rescue him.

When the boy finds himself relating to a hunted deer shot by his family for the meat we know things won’t end well. The boy gets injured wrangling a cow on the family farm, a task his father conscripted him to, and in the final moments of the story, a fleeting image of the deer comes across the boy’s visage, leaving us with one lingering italicized thought: “You cannot believe such a monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing.”

“No Paper Cowboys” is a poignant look at the inexplicable pain that comes in periods of life’s tough transitions. It ends on a very somber note, but it is one that leaves us strangely hopeful, for we come back to the 2nd person voice, reading these words with our own voices echoing in our heads, realizing we’re not alone in this struggle, even though it sometimes feels that way.

What MAR editors said about “No Paper Cowboys”:

“I really enjoyed the narrator’s silence when everyone else is constantly discussing him. I feel like this was a very effective way of seeing inside this character.”

“The second person is done really well, and to a wonderful effect. Lovely prose, lovely energy, lovely sadness; it packed a punch for sure.”

Accepted: Night Watch At The House of Death by Sam Martone

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Lydia Munnell discusses a story that appears in our Fall 2015 issue.

Genre: Short fiction
Title: Night Watch at the House of Death
Author: Sam Martone
MAR issue: 36.1
While reading or discussing work with the MAR staff this past year, I’ve occasionally thrown a fit about what I call “Boring Couple Stories.” Of course this is ridiculous; Some of the best stories we’ve told since we started telling stories deal in the currency of love and heartbreak. We love an affair. We love a breakup.

But I will stand by the fact that, in general I could do without another interior rendering of here we are, in the same house, and it’s ending, and we both know it’s ending, and what’s going to happen? I could do without another thinly veiled short story about a lurid affair between an aging professor and an airy undergrad.

But I can always, always read more stories that frame old love anew, that teach me something I feel like I always should have known.

That’s what Sam Martone’s “Night Watch at the House of Death” manages to do, and, ultimately, why the story warranted such an enthusiastic acceptance in my first semester as Fiction Editor. Martone’s is a story about the sublime nature of love because it’s also about death, or maybe just loss, or maybe just being alone.

The speaker in “Night Watch…” is a worker. He is a sentinel at a death house whose responsibility it is to wait for the likely-dead to show signs of life. In inventing that job, Martone captures the all-too-familiar drudgery of work, the language of waiting and work that colors the kind of purgatorial world that’s so beautifully rendered here.

Martone does a remarkable job with all the intricacies that mandate life inside and outside the death houses. Medicine, in this world, is a kind of alchemy, and as the speaker’s relationship with Hannah emerges, it’s clear love is governed by alchemy as well. Writes Martone, “I imagined Hannah undressing, one garment at a time, and seeing all the things she stole spilling from her clothes: waffle irons, withering cabbages, hand soap dispensers, step ladders, until she was completely naked atop a mountain of all she had taken, and I was clambering up toasters and ironing boards to meet her.” The world of “Night Watch” is sketched with clear lines, but love is about trial and error, a combination of semi-precious objects that, for the speaker, seem like they might add up to something.

But the other element here is time (manifest in the form of a stolen clock), and Martone’s moves in the second act fulfill the story’s promises about what it means to wait. After some too-enjoyable-to-spoil-here twists, “Night Watch at the House of Death” grants us this: we can see work and breakups the same way. They’re both about waiting, the nebulous space between.

The worst kinds of love stories leave sullen characters brooding on a rainy New York City boulevard. But the best kind—and Sam Martone’s is the best kind—leave them cleaning gutters and listening to the wind. They end the way they start without promise of death or happiness or sure resolution. And uncertainty becomes its own kind of loss, and it aches the way a good love story should.

 

Lydia is a native of rural western Pennsylvania who has spent the last several years on the east side of Cleveland coordinating the after school program at Lake Erie Ink, a non-profit writing space for youth. While in Cleveland, she was DJ of a folk radio program, Revival and previously did freelance writing for Cleveland Scene Magazine.

Accepted: “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn” by Travis Vick

Ollbac / FlickrIn our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Assistant Fiction Editor Lydia Munnell discusses a story that appears in our Fall 2014 issue. (Above image: Ollbac)

Genre: Short fiction
Title: “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn”
Author: Travis Vick
MAR issue: 35.1
First line: “A popular art critic once wrote of Victor: ‘I guess all things, even art, must come to seed.’”

From its first page, “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn,” introduces four different voices: the third person narrator, the voice of an art critic, the curatorial description of a painting, and the voice of the artist—Victor himself. The rules are clear and the principal figure is revealed. Victor Vaughn is a product of fragments; it’s the structure that’s always central.

And as the story progresses, Victor’s life and history are relayed in his paintings, in the musings of his critics, in his own words offered by way of interviews. In that way, the act of reading “Inaccurate (self)Portraits …” mimics what it means to understand a life—that people are remembered through fragments and episodes. And while author Travis Vick’s structure is remarkable here, it functions as well as it does because it contains the traditional stuff of great stories too: compelling characters with complicated histories, desires, ghosts.

The specters, here, are Victor’s parents. His art and life are haunted by his mother, drowned in a nearby lake; his father, hung in the barn after the death of his wife; and Mr. Powell the neighbor whose house burned and who is linked to a single fond memory of Victor’s father. And Victor maintains his own shadow over the story. In death he is remembered by his critics, his work, his widow.

These fragments are balanced skillfully. Vick maintains distinctive voices for each piece of the narrative, and the look of the thing—its format on the page—signals changes in speaker, commands a different kind of reading. Beyond the formatting and the voices, though, the fragments work because of deftly woven images. Victor is a painter, and “Inaccurate (self)Portraits…” is visually alive. Upon the death of Victor’s father, the farm animals he forgot to shut in are left, “cantering augustly” across neighbors’ lawns. And the water death of Victor’s mother determines much of the story’s imagery. “And, when out in public,” says one of Victor’s critics, “doesn’t he always seem to be moving about a room more by the aid of his hands than of his feet, as if lost, as if swimming through dark water?’”

In the end, to read “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn” is to wade. The structure commands that readers adjust their pacing, that they move through it in slowly, steadily. But carefully curated images cement the fragments together. Here are water and fire: the elements, the stuff of great paintings.

What MAR editors said about “Inaccurate (self)Portraits of Water by the Artist Victor Vaughn”:

“I like the repetition and the sense of cataloging his life, and I think the author uses effective snippets/portraits/scenes to show who Vaughn was.”

“The many voices all felt clear and distinct, and the episodes were well chosen. They illuminated Vaughn as well as the particular world of the story.”

“The repetition worked well, and the multi-genre feel was very intriguing. … The writing was strong and inventive.”

Lydia Munnell
Lydia Munnell is pursuing her MFA at Bowling Green State University, where she serves
as assistant fiction editor of Mid-American Review. She comes to BGSU by way of
Cleveland, where she hosted a weekly folk radio show called Revival and wrote for
Cleveland Scene magazine.

 

Accepted: “Porch Light, Moonlight, or the Neighbor’s Bedroom”

porchlightIn our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Assistant Poetry Editor Jenelle Clausen discusses a poem that appears in issue 34.2. This will be the final “Accepted” entry for 34.2; stay tuned for columns from 35.1.

Genre: Poetry
Titles: “Porch Light, Moonlight, or the Neighbor’s Bedroom”
Authors: Carroll Beauvais
MAR issue: 34.2/Spring 2014
First lines: “When we were children, we dreamed the moon / full of pink lakes, swimming holes without water moccasins.”

In the title, “Porch Light, Moonlight, or the Neighbor’s Bedroom,” Beauvais presents us with three possibilities. Already, we want to know more. And then, the epigraph: “For my sister, if I’d had one.” The epigraph is brief and thoroughly surprising; it establishes the poem as fiction, which is perhaps a nod to the inviting trap of assuming that a poem’s events “really happened” or that the poem’s speaker is the poet himself or herself (a problem we don’t encounter nearly as often when reading prose).

But the epigraph doesn’t diminish the sincerity of the poem. In the first two lines, we are immediately impacted by a striking image—pink lakes on the moon—that is unusual and that establishes the active world of children’s imaginations. This imaginary world on the moon is also defined by what it lacks: “swimming holes without water moccasins.” There is no danger here. This first stanza continues in describing this shared dream-world, a world where girls could wear as little as boys in summertime and where stars would shed glitter on the grass.

The second stanza uses images to firmly ground us in time; the speaker and sister were children when “Buffalo nickels and baseball cards” were popular. We also see the title verbatim and learn that the children would bet on what kind of light it was that “tipped in through the blinds.” The speaker says, “I always chose moonlight and you always won.” This suggests that the speaker’s childhood was characterized by hopeful idealism, which she later realized to be unrealistic.

The death of this hopeful idealism is addressed in the very next stanza, where we’re brought to the present day, many years later. The speaker mentions that “scientists claim water exists on the moon,” but this potential fulfillment of a childhood dream does little good now for an adult filled with worry by the stark reality of life’s hardships: “What good does that do us now that we’re old / and you just called to say they found another tumor?”

Like the first two stanzas, the final stanza is characterized by compelling images that create an emotional impact on readers. It is no longer summer, but autumn; this transition of seasons reflects the aging process. The “sugar maple…is growing bare.” How does something grow bare; how does growth lead to loss? The language here is subtle, and it indicates the disillusionment and sense of loss that comes with growing older, when childhood is left behind.

We are left with a final striking image, not star glitter on the grass, as in the first stanza, but “yellow leaves” that look like “the small, wilted hands of a child.” We can all relate to the sense of loss associated with giving up childhood dreams; this poem has universal meaning.

But wait—remember the epigraph? We’re told that none of this happened. For the speaker, there was no sister, no cancer. This leads to the wonderful intentional ambiguity of the poem: Which is worse? To have lived through this experience, this suffering and disillusionment, or to have not had anything, or anyone, to lose?

What MAR editors said about “Porch Light, Moonlight, or the Neighbor’s Bedroom”:

“The epigraph is really attention-grabbing, and even though it makes it clear that the poem as a whole is fiction, that in no way lessens the emotional truth and impact of it.”

“The author uses great images to let us know where we are in time. There are a lot of imaginary images, like pink lakes, but there are also images like Buffalo nickels and autumn leaves that let us know when the speaker was a child and where we are now.”

Jenelle Clausen, Assistant Poetry Editor

Photo: Jeremy Stratton