Featured Writer: Benjamin Percy

On Thursday, October 5, Benjamin Percy visits Bowling Green State University as the 2023 guest for the Edwin H. Simmons Creative Minds Series. He will read from his work at the Donnell Theatre of the Wolfe Center, 7:30 pm.

https://events.bgsu.edu/event/creative_minds_residency_benjamin_percy_keynote_address

Benjamin Percy is known for world-building, but in some ways that term is misleading. He does build worlds, but most commonly it’s our world advanced past a circumstance—sometimes horrific, sometimes nebulous—that has irrevocably shifted its mores, practices, and structures. The speculation inherent requires not so much building as re-building, blending the familiar with the jarringly different. At the same time, that speculation reveals often unpleasant truths about who we are as humans, and how we treat those who stray from our tight definition of human.

Red Moon provides an early example, one that turned out to be uncomfortably prescient. The story sparks from a prion virus that causes lycanthropy. Some with the virus take medication and try to live as invisibly as possible to protect themselves and their families. Others, reacting to anti-lycan laws and violence, are building a war. The general populace of uninfected citizens does not come off well, treating the infected with hostility regardless of circumstance. That we have now, a decade later, seen some of this same level of disgust and suspicion toward the ill through a pandemic is not at all reassuring, but it does underscore the insight of Ben Percy’s writing.

The Comet Cycle shows similar perception. In The Ninth Metal, a meteor fall—less a shower than a hailstorm—has embedded a new metal into the earth of a northern Minnesota town. The discovery offers a new energy source, but produces in its wake a dysfunctional boomtown, delivering, as one character puts it, “a millionaire a day.” That “omnimetal” also produces a new narcotic, potential weapons, and a ferocious land rights battle pushes the dread to the forefront. We—humanity—will not handle it well. The Unfamiliar Garden moves to Seattle, and sets its protagonists against changes in climate, a dangerous fungus, and murder. The Sky Vault heads north to Fairbanks, Alaska, and blends the current questions with an ominous WWII secret. Each novel in the cycle thus builds a new world out in time and place from the central event, the comet’s debris, while allowing its characters to make choices in response to those changes, to each other, and to an ever-morphing concept of “familiar.”

Following Benjamin Percy’s oeuvre could be likened to a choose-your-own-adventure, a trait very much in keeping with his writing itself. He has published three short story collections, and his short stories have appeared widely in such publications as Esquire, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and Orion. He has also now published seven novels; his first novel, The Wilding, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2010, and his second, Red Moon, came in 2013 from Grand Central. His current project in longform fiction, the Comet Cycle, closed with The Sky Vault, published this month by William Morrow.

On another path, Percy is writing for comics at DC, Marvel, AWA, and Dynamite, with his best known projects including Green Arrow, Ghost Rider, X-Force, Teen Titans, Nightwing, and Wolverine. For the latter, he also wrote two podcast series, The Long Night and The Lost Trail. Continuing into further media, Percy is writing screenplays and adapting stories for TV, both his own (The Ninth Metal, Summering) and others’ (Urban Cowboy).

And, as a generous and varied craftsman, it only makes sense that that Ben Percy would offer what he knows to the public, this time in the form of Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf, 2016), a collection used widely in the classroom, including at BGSU. 

In all of his work, Benjamin Percy has much to teach us about writing, about building stories, but also about the myriad ways in which we cope with disaster, with change, and with each other.

—Abigail Cloud, Editor-in-Chief

Why We Chose It: “Some Kinds of Drifter” by Justin Thurman

Mid-American Review fiction staff selected “Some Kinds of Drifter” by Justin Thurman for publication in Volume XLII.

Thurman’s piece was selected for its overall strength but particularly for its nontraditional use of form and genre. The piece takes the form of an ethnography, detailing the different spiritual and cultural norms common amongst different groups of drifters. Drifters, in this piece, are homeless individuals distinguished from hoboes, who are mentioned but not examined, by the element of choice. “Hoboes are proud of their vagrancy…. Drifters do not suffer from wanderlust to the degree that hoboes might. Drifters have no choice.” The piece also makes use of a cartesian graph upon which individual drifters might be placed to complete the aesthetic of an academic report. 

This notion of choice, and its absence, is an undercurrent throughout the piece that helps to ground it and bring a balance to the absurd sense of humor present throughout. Thurman’s narrator has a strong voice that reads almost as a mix of Ken Burns and Raoul Duke. 

The further details of “Some Kinds of Drifter” are best experienced firsthand, but suffice it to say that the story is one that we on the MAR staff will still find ourselves talking about long after the selection process has ended.

-William Walton, Mid-American Review

On Renia White’s Casual Conversation

Casual Conversation by Renia White. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd. 2022. 80 pages. $17.00. Paperback.

Although I usually don’t have much patience for poetic metaphysics, the abstraction common in Casual Conversation didn’t keep me from effortlessly gliding from poem to poem. I can recall very few collections I’ve enjoyed that passed through the same zip code as words like “epistemology,” but Renia White had me in a chokehold when, in the beginning of “I am not prepared for the inverse of this,” she observed, “how dangerous a logic we’ve made // proof is what happens afterward, to show us / the during was true.” The first half of this poem is completely abstract, yet White’s sharp, clean verse clears and composes such a vivid scene of concepts that it felt complete.

Imagery is scarce in Casual Conversation (with some stunning exceptions, such as “all over, but only here.”) Instead, the poetry sustains itself by the natural roll of thought through white space, line breaks, and stanzas. These are skillfully applied to incite rhythmic pauses in the reader for a steady momentum. 

This is not to say that Casual Conversation exclusively generalizes. While the collection offers a bird’s eye view of racism, brutality, incarceration, it is punctuated by poignant specificity. In the final poem of the first section, “some plans should be thwarted,” the speaker requests, “I wanna live real quick.” She is immediately shown “the way to tilt toward unending” (another example of her killer abstract language) and this plea for life is fulfilled throughout the following section. 

The middle section “lives” as an individual Black woman (and girl) anchored to the American landscape of flippant and brutal racism. Yet tender moments of kinship and joy pepper this chapter. I’m very fond of the connection forged in “in the name of half-sistering” ––“build a wedge called daddy and gulf us / in the name of your stolen thing,” she challenges a playground antagonist, “a sister ain’t a partial feeling. she so mine, we so sistered.” 

The arguments in these poems are clear, weighty, and impactful, whether they are grandiose or personal. Again, I am not typically fond of its rhetorical delivery method, but Casual Conversation shines in its abstractions. It thrives not by flourishes of language so much as careful manipulations of it, by the clarity of its thought. While my feet barely touched the concrete on my trip through Casual Conversations, I was surprised to find that I did not miss it.

––Jamie Manias, Mid-American Review

On Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. New York, NY. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 2018. 192 pages. $14.99. Paperback.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black contains no shortage of absurd realities, and yet not one of them feels distant from our own. The stories in this collection are ultra-violent. Their characters are either on the brink, in the commission, or sweating through the aftermath of vicious acts of cruelty. They frequently explore the conflation of justice with violence in the United States and the necessity of violence to achieve justice that won’t be granted otherwise. In one story, five black children are grotesquely beheaded by a white father who claims they endangered him and his family. He is subsequently exonerated. This leads various black individuals across the nation to repeat the violence suffered by the innocent “Finkelstein 5” against white people who, for the first time, must associate fear with their skin color. Another story depicts a theme park called “Zimmerland” that allows its guests to practice their “problem-solving, justice, and judgment” by exposing them to real world conflicts. However, instead of practicing justice, Zimmerland’s guests return again and again to practice violence, especially racially-motivated violence, and they can’t be banned because they’ve made the whole endeavor profitable by their constant patronage. That is perhaps the most insightful throughline in Adjei-Brenyah’s stories; even when individuals don’t want to commit or enable acts of violence, the incentives of capitalism make it too enticing.

This phenomenon is most evident in the collection’s three connected stories: “Friday Black,” “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing,” and “In Retail.” The first depicts an outdoor apparel outlet in a mall on America’s famously gory holiday, Black Friday. Customers become zombies, unable to communicate and willing to kill anyone between them and their half-price fleeces. Employees are no better; though they retain normal speech, they’ve become unfeeling in their competition to sell the most jackets. The narrator uses an eight-foot metal pole to “smack down Friday heads” and to push trampled bodies out of the aisles. The second connected story is less violent, but it reveals another sick aspect of capitalist transactions: the corruption of empathy. The same narrator snickers with a female customer as they watch her husband struggle out of a jacket, and when she turns around he looks at the husband “like, Women, am I right?” He makes each of them feel understood while inside, he only sees them as another sale. The final of these three stories begins with a mode of escape from the hell of the mall: a cashier at “Taco Town” leaps from the fourth floor balcony. Adjei-Brenyah’s stories are not always hopeless. His characters tell jokes in literally humorless worlds. They work together to prevent a mass shooting. But they rarely achieve hope, nor justice, without violence along the way.

––Dan Marcantuono, Fiction editor, Mid-American Review

An Interview with Gabrielle Bates

Gabrielle Bates is the author of the poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), a New York Times ‘The Shortlist’ pick and a Chicago Review of Books ‘must-read’ book of 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and teaches occasionally through the University of Washington Rome Center and Tin House Writers’ Workshops, among other universities and arts organizations. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @GabrielleBates

We published your poem, “Monologue with a Flat Hand,” in vol. XXXVII no. 1 in the Fall of 2016 which eventually appeared in your debut full-length collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023) under the title, “Should the First Calf of Winter Be White, You’re Going to Hate.” The poem changed quite a bit before the recent publication in your collection. How do you negotiate that need for revision after initial publication?

That poem tortured me! Before Mid-American Review published a version of it, and for years afterward, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the poem had a lot of potential, if I could just figure out what it wanted to do or say—something about it was eluding me. I wish I could pull that issue off the shelf and compare the two versions, because I don’t remember exactly what all I changed between the journal and the book publications—I know I changed the ending (and the title obviously) but there are other moments too, I’m sure, that are different!—but I’m house-sitting right now, so I don’t have access to the original. 

It doesn’t matter if a poem has already been published or not; if I sense a way to make it more alive and resonant, I make those changes. Just because I’ve published a poem doesn’t mean the poem has found its most energetic language or form. In fact, it’s often only after I’ve published a poem in a journal that I see places where I could cut back and release more energy into the poem. 

You have a very extensive list of publications in the acknowledgements of Judas Goat. When do you know a poem is ready to go out as a submission to literary magazines/journals?

My approach throughout my twenties—the decade I was working on Judas Goat—was “throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.” I’d write, workshop, revise, and then send a poem out to journals in a fairly speedy cycle. Sometimes way too speedily: I’d write a draft and send it out almost immediately, awash in the creation afterglow, though I always regretted that later. In general I thought: If an editor thinks it’s good enough to publish, it must be. Who am I to say or know when a poem is “done” or “good enough”? In my early twenties especially, I was anxious for others to tell me about my work and its worth. I believed myself too ignorant to perform that role reliably for myself. And because I was a young, unknown writer from Alabama, who didn’t go to NYU or anything like that, I felt like I could trust editors to judge my work on its own merits. I don’t feel that way anymore (I have trust issues!), so I haven’t been submitting much at all since I finished Judas Goat. I’m trying to slow down and hone my intuition about when poems are ready to live in the world outside of me. 

When do you know a poem needs to stop being submitted for publication?

If I’ve pushed a poem as far as I can, and I believe in it (a rare occurrence), and a trusted friend has read it and told me they love it, then I will never stop submitting it. Otherwise, I tend to stop submitting a poem once I’ve realized it’s not done or alive enough to be worth putting out into the world. 

How do you find the final shape a poem aches to be?

Oh, I love the verb “aches” here. So interesting—poem framed as a living being, capable of ache. I try to find a poem’s most-alive shape by employing an alchemy of time, reading aloud, and sharing with trusted readers for feedback. Often the first interesting sentence or line of a draft will carry a clue for me in regards to how the poem as a whole wants to approach lineation and stanza, like a blueprint.  

The writing and publishing process takes time as we published your poem in 2016 which then later appeared in your collection in 2023. How long did the process take from the moment you realized you had a book, to submitting your manuscript for publication?

Someone advised me to start submitting my first-book manuscript before I thought it was fully ready, so I did that for a few years, using contest deadlines as a prod to try and wrangle what I had into book-length shape. I felt close to having the manuscript done for years, but it wasn’t until after I had the book deal with Tin House, and after I’d gone through some final editing rounds with my editor Alyssa Ogi that I actually felt the book was ready to publish. 

Some of us are, pathologically, never content with what we’ve made; it’s a constant push and pull between honoring the hopes and standards we have for art, while not becoming overly precious or private about it. 

What most surprised you after your debut published?

Anytime a person I don’t know posts something insightful about Judas Goat on the internet, I’m shocked. I’m like: How did the book even find its way to you?! The population of people who buy and read contemporary poetry collections in the U.S. is fairly miniscule, compared to other genres especially, and yet Judas Goat has ended up in places I never expected—It’s all very wild and surprising to me. The most surprising moment was probably when Jorie Graham said kind words about my book on Twitter. I’ve never met her and had zero reason to believe the collection would be on her radar at all. Still doesn’t feel real.

How has your relationship with Judas Goat changed since first holding a copy of the book in your hands and seeing it out in the world?

The book publishing process, like any major life event, is full of emotional vertigo, moments where you think you’re supposed to feel one way, and you actually feel another way. I panicked when I saw my book in person for the first time, I’ll be real with you. I thought: This is it? and then: WHAT HAVE I DONE. I don’t feel that way anymore, luckily. Friends and generous, thoughtful readers have helped me step into a more celebratory mode around the book. I wouldn’t say I feel detached from it now, but I feel more detached than I did when I held it for the first time—in a healthy way.

The first poem in Judas Goat titled “The Dog” is shocking with its unforgiving portrayal of the violence we cause. The poems in the collection keep returning to this motif of violence and ruin; however, there are also intimate moments within the collection like in the poem, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” What is the relationship between the violence and the more intimate moments within the collection?

I’m interested in what happens in the small theaters of life, where there are very few witnesses; when private, intimate moments and conversations are imagined or dramatized and made public, through art, that’s really interesting and evocative for me. There’s an inherent tension. In juxtaposing or otherwise engaging aspects of violence and intimacy, I think I was trying to understand something about my relationship to vigilance, abandon, and risk. 

Many of your poems reference mythical, fairytale, and religious figures such as Eurydice, Gretel, and Mary all of whom you give voice or space within the collection. How have these women impacted your life and your writing?

I’m interested in the ways stories shape our lives. Fairytales and myths from various traditions have always haunted me, particularly the stories about young women in danger, which felt designed to teach me something about what it meant to be a young woman in danger. 

Judas Goat is such a stunning collection full of poems that are both inviting and frustrating which, I feel, the best poems usually are. What makes a poem for you?

What makes a poem, for me, on the most basic level, is a surprising and evocative progression lines. My favorite poems impart both clarity and mystery—Reading them, I feel something intense, but I also don’t quite know exactly what just happened to me, or what I’ve taken from it. I love that tension between vividness and endless interpretation, vulnerability and privacy. “Both inviting and frustrating”! I love that you said that. There is an element of frustration, isn’t there? Frustration keeps me alive, keeps me writing. It’s a form of closeness, and a kind of belief.

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––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor