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Back Story: Returning by Linda Leschak
The story “Returning” was born from a few different concepts that had been bouncing around in my head. I’d been reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and found myself fairly amazed at how the Tibetan tradition looks at death. Death is neither the end, nor the beginning—it’s just another part of the long journey of a person’s life(lives). The idea that this life is a training ground and dying means going somewhere we’ve already been. That the lessons learned this time around are cumulative and every life we live builds on wisdom we’ve already acquired.
To me, that melds right in with the famous quote from Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin when he said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” I’ve been known to take that concept in a few different directions—like pondering the notion that this body of mine was created only to be inhabited by a spirit seeking purchase. Regardless of which tradition I examine that through I find myself conjuring up images from a science fiction movie where aliens invade and take over our bodies.
Ah, but when I find myself going too far in that direction, I try to navigate back toward the less deviate. Like how our bodies are, in fact, created and born of water: the egg tucked away in its mucous membrane, the seed and its inexplicable swim through the watery murk, the fetus, floating, living and breathing the amniotic fluids. All culminating in a rush of broken birthing waters. And from that emerges a human being comprised, as it were, mostly of water!
So, into these ponderings wanders Beatrice who not only knows all of this at a cognitive level but feels it viscerally. After Dan’s death she feels the lure of the water drawing her. She moves to the beach, positioning herself closer to what she knows is her own source. She hears it calling her from deep within her dreams, she paints its images into her canvases. For Beatrice Dan’s death becomes a turning point, a time to start again, to find a new beginning. She begins to feel that this life—the life of Beatrice—had been about relationship and that she and Dan had both learned that lesson well. She realizes that what she had with him can never be matched, and she sees that now it’s simply her time to return home.
Linda Leschak lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, son and two Boston Terriers. She earned her undergraduate degree from the Union Institute and University at Vermont College. She’s had her work included in several publications including the Lone Star College’s Inkling Magazine, the International Poetry Festival at Round Top Texas, and the E-zines, Rose & Thorn Journal and The Criterion. She’s an active member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and is currently juggling two works in progress: a middle grade fantasy and a contemporary young adult novel. Find Linda LALeschak.com or lindaleschak.blogspot.com. Read "Returning" in the fall 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.
Special Announcement: Changes for Rose &Thorn in 2012
Announcement! Announcement! Announcement!
Rose & Thorn Journal is undergoing a major change. We are currently in the process of transitioning from a quarterly to a semi-annual journal beginning with our spring issue this year, which will go live May 15 (instead of April 15), and following with our fall issue, which will go live November 15.
As a result of these changes, our submittal period dates have been updated on our website for both prose and poetry. Please make sure to familiarize yourself with these new dates so we don’t miss out on receiving your wonderful submissions due to technicalities! From now on, submissions will only be accepted and read during the following months:
Submittal Period Issue Publication Date
December 1 – February 28 Spring May 15
June 1 – August 30 Fall November 15
Along with these new changes to R&T, we’re also excited to announce the addition of Robin McAndrew to our Poetry Department and Alaine Benard as our Art Director-at-large. Robin has a long history of working in both the written and visual arts, and Alaine will expand our visual art offerings by creating a virtual gallery that readers will be able to peruse on our site and the blog. Please join us in welcoming them aboard, and please take a moment to stop by our Staff Page to read their bios and to get to know them better. As always, we consider our readers to be the best, most generous readers in the cyber sphere, and we are delighted any time you help to spread R&T news and buzz across the social media waves.
Back Story: A Vivid Portrait in Black and White & Promiscuous Saxophone by John C. Mannone
Sometimes the genesis of a poem is just as fascinating as the poem itself. In an essay, “Seducing your Muse,” I suggest creative outlets might be the stimulus to creativity. If that proverbial “writer’s block” occurs, then a respite in another creative art will often recharge the creative mind. Therefore, it should not be surprising to find literary works stimulated by visual arts. The surprise might be that abstract art might be a better stimulus than concrete art. The mind desperately tries to “make sense of it.” I think this is how “A Vivid Portrait in Black and White” originated.
As a Chattanooga Writers Guild member, I attend a monthly poetry workshop at the founding member’s home. The artistic atmosphere of paintings and sculptures in a spacious home is visually stimulating. A Rothko painting (No. 61) hangs on her wall—layers of purples, blues and grays striate the “canvas,” with the texture paint plainly visible in the large reproduction. Its “simplicity” is intriguing. The geometry and texture of paint made me think of planks of wood and other shapes. I could almost make out ships, or people in them. The blue hints at sky and sea, the purple at something painful, like sacrifice. But the violets also appear in a natural twilight. There is something about twilight that is inescapably symbolic about transitions: day into night, life into death. All of this worked in my subconscious giving me a collage of glimpses linked by associations: ship’s planks, sorrow, life and death, color…people of color, black & white, slave ships. I remembered reading about the Henrietta Marie, which went down in a Florida storm, with all hands onboard. Though the slaves were sold in Haiti before the fateful storm, I imagined other situations when a slave ship might have gone down in a storm, the shackled human beings drowning with the crew. I am haunted by images like that.
I quickly jotted down initial images, but it would take another year to fashion the poem you now see. I wanted imagistic movements with smooth transitions. That required rhythms and fluid language. To preserve starkness without a disturbing staccato effect, I used internal consonance to achieve a consonantal rhyme of sorts often found in elegiac poems. I used this together with the roll-off pitch of words. It’s like having B-flat rhythms in the minor keys that Blues musicians use. The sad or melancholy effects are handled by language, not just the images of words.
“Promiscuous Saxophone” on the other hand, arose rather quickly to a finished product in a few revisions. It’s funny how that happens. It’s rare, but true. At a monthly Barnes & Noble open mic, we were tasked to write a poem inspired by a ten-item list. It's amazing what strange things come out of such prompts. Word association is a great prompt (see the essay linked above) that has led to dozens of published poems since I began writing poetry seriously in May 2004. There is something creative about trying to use words in ways we don’t normally do.
Here is the list: voice, aim, scrub, annoy, course, thrust, color, patient, an exotic fruit, a type of musical instrument, and embouchure (an optional word). This last word, provided by a trombone player/slam poet in the crowd, intrigued me. It has texture and I decided to use it. According to Microsoft Word’s Encarta dictionary, embouchure could be (1) the mouth of a river, (2) the mouth of a valley where it becomes a plain, (3) the adjustment of the lips and tongue in playing a wind instrument, or (4) the mouthpiece of a wind instrument.
The musical instrument category would surely facilitate that word. But why didn’t I use trombone? The word is not as musical to my ear as saxophone. And I was thinking of saxophone because of another venue near Chattanooga — a coffee house called Pasha’s in St. Elmo — where the jazz beats of “The Undoctored Originals” (a group of musicians, each just happens to have a Ph.D.) accompany poetic voices. There’s something sexy about a saxophone, maybe from it’s a linguistically subliminal effect or the melancholy atmosphere it can produce — loneliness inviting comfort. This is the genesis of the poem, but context was still missing.
Why not love? It’s generally good advice is to stay away from writing about it unless one can do it with freshness and avoid the usual catharsis and sentimentality. Someone once said to me, “kiss me with poetry.” I recalled that, flexed it to “kiss me with music,” and used a variation of that beautiful line here. So yes, I wrote a love poem and let the sensuality of language enhance the images.
John C. Mannone is a physicist who claims his right-brain came out of comatose in 2004 as he discovered the poetry of words as well as that of equations. In fact, life is poetry. He is passionate about all of it. He lives in beautiful east Tennessee. He is widely published in both literary and speculative fiction journals (and is the poetry editor of Silver Blade). Recent work appears in Conclave: A Journal of Character, Magnapoets, Numinous: Spiritual Poetry, and Hinchas de Poesia. Read “A Vivid Portrait in Black and White” and “Promiscuous Saxophone” in the fall 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.
Back Story: (Parent)hetical by Jessie Carty
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Two of my poems have appeared previously in Rose and Thorn Journal, but I want to tell you a bit of the back story regarding my most recently publication: "(Parent)hetical."
The first thing you may notice about the poem is that the title uses parenthetical marks. In 2010 I became interested in using parenthetical marks in poetry. Part of my fascination came after reading work by Cati Porter (who also has a great blog post about the ways parenthesis may be used as a rhetorical device in poetry).
In the case of “(Parent)hetical” I used the parenthesis to find, and set apart, words within words. As I was working on the poem, I found that I could also make a bit of a phrase out of the words within words. Thus you could read the poem, just in the parenthesis, as Parent - as if it was a title- our fine ailing parent who is an idea.
Does that fit in with the theme of the poem? Did I cheat a bit by having “ail” and “ing” in two different words? Maybe yes on both, but the joy of trying something new—like playing with parenthetical marks—is that you can determine what rules you want to use.
In other poems, I have used the parenthesis to indicate that the words inside the marks can be read separate from the rest of the poem, or you could say that they add a different meaning if you put them back in.
If you haven’t played with parentheticals, I’d highly recommend it. It was a fun exercise.
Jessie Carty's writing has appeared in publications such as, MARGIE, decomP and Connotation Press. She is the author of four poetry collections which include Fat Girl (Sibling Rivalry, 2011) as well as the award winning full length poetry collection, Paper House (Folded Word 2010). Jessie teaches at RCCC in Concord, NC. She is also the editor for Referential Magazine. She can be found around the web, especially at jessiecarty.com. Read (Parent)hetical in the fall 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.
Back Story: Courtesy Kiss by Kim Bond
“Courtesy Kiss” was originally inspired by When Harry Met Sally. If it’s a good movie, it makes good inspiration for a short story, right? From the popular film, I borrowed the idea of two strangers who exchange views mainly through dialogue with some romantic tension and light humor. I decided a discount store was an ideal setting for the unlikely couple to meet.
Once I had written the first paragraph, I saw the crossing boundaries theme emerge. Humans create boundaries around things we consider sacred, such as our time, morals, and money. Alternately, we trample other people’s boundaries to fulfill our own needs and desires. Bit by bit, I wrote this tango between my two characters. When it came time to conclude the dance, I examined myself for insight into human nature. One boundary I confess to standing firm on is my emotional boundary line. Like the main character, I refuse to let others cross it, and sometimes deny myself access to it as well. Nonetheless, I recognize emotions are finest when shared with other people. “Courtesy Kiss” is the culmination of cinematic inspiration, cultural observation, and deep self-examination behind the scenes, but it reads like a charming tale.
Other ponderings by Kim Bond can be found in Gloom Cupboard, Midnight Screaming, and Full Armor Magazine. The author enjoys life in St. Louis with her compatible quarreler and their two children. Read “Courtesy Kiss” in the fall 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal. Email Kim at k.bondofstl@yahoo.com to discuss writing, human nature, culture, faith and/or tailless cats.
Back Story: Tug and Pull by Ruth Hill
“Tug and Pull” was written at the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars in Montreal. Tony Hoagland gave us five minutes to respond to his classroom prompts. He had us study differing styles of poetry, rather than poets or poetic principles. In the same way, one might listen to a good guitar lick, then write a new song. His prompts focused on soulful inspiration rather than structural analysis. His class expanded our views of poetry beyond our personal limits.
Ruth Hill was born and educated in upstate New York. She has traveled North America extensively, including one year in VISTA Appalachia, and two years exploring Alaska. Ruth has sailed all over British Columbia, working on light stations, log scaling, and is now a Certified Design Engineer. In her first two years of writing, over 100 of her works have received awards or publication. Ruth lives in isolation, and therefore, craves email. Read "Tug and Pull" in the fall 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.
Back Story: Rescue by Lou Gaglia
The idea for “Rescue” came from looking at an old photo of me coming out of my grandparents’ cellar. I wrote the story all the way through the first time and liked it.
Hooray! Finished!
Soon after, though, I hated it but didn’t know why for a long time except that I felt there was too much past and not enough of the present. Gradually, as it swam around inside me, the past events of the story took over, until eventually, almost the entire piece became the story of the kids, Rosemarie’s and the narrator’s. I could only finish writing it when I realized that the narrator’s reaction to a past memory was the story, and that the memory had to be clear. All of this took me many rock-headed months to figure out.
Rosemarie was a composite of some people I’d known, which is why I liked her best, because I saw them in her. The boy was an eleven-year-old who really only wanted to play and watch baseball. He had no idea who was in front of him, suffering. The hardest part of writing the story, really, was staying out of it—letting Rosemarie suffer without interfering. There was nothing the boy could do, and there was nothing his older self could do, eleven years later. There was nothing I could do as the writer, either, except let her get walloped and just take it.
Lou Gaglia’s stories have appeared recently in Bartleby Snopes, Breakwater Review, and Lowestoft Chronicle, and are forthcoming in Sheepshead Review and Spilling Ink Review. Read “Rescue” in the fall 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal. And contact Lou at lou.gaglia@yahoo.com.
Back Story: Because He Went Unshaven by Patricia Esposito
Flannery O’Connor said, “The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.” I was staring. He was beautiful. I stared long enough to imagine a world of possibilities around a man I didn’t know.
Writers aren’t the only people who people-watch. But they tend to get captivated by their observations, enough so that they find it necessary to devise a life for what they’ve seen. In small public exchanges, we can know only so much about a person, and the rest develops from tiny observations and what we imagine from them.
I’m reminded of when we played pretend as kids. The point of pretend and storytelling is to step into another’s shoes, to discover more about life, and in turn, more about ourselves. In pretend, think what a new prop did to the action at hand! Suddenly, a forest walk turned into a battle as a stick in the pathway became a sword to the imagining eye.
I was staring. I couldn’t know who the person really was, but I could imagine a creased brow was frustration at work, or a slight grin was fond remembrance of a night with friends. “Because He Went Unshaven” came about when a familiar person in a polite setting came in unshaven. Like a photographer wanting to take a new photo at every shift in lighting, here was a new detail, a prop that needed exploration.
So, like a kid on an adventure, I thought why not explore the exotic, why not imagine him in lands I’ve never seen? And yet, stepping into those shoes through the images, I found myself winding closer and closer to home, to what the man’s real life might be, an ordinary person in a familiar land. And it felt equally exotic. Maybe because staring does that to life, makes it fresh, makes it full of possibility.
Patricia Esposito is a freelance editor, the mother of two daughters, and is long-time married to "the boy next door." Her fiction and poetry have appeared in the anthologies Apparitions and Lights of Love, as well as numerous speculative and literary publications, including Rose and Thorn Journal, Not One of Us, Hungur, Sounds of the Night, Midnight Street, Karamu, Byline and Clean Sheets. She has recently released her first novel Beside the Darker Shore and has received honorable mentions in Ellen Datlow’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Read “Because He Went Unshaven” in the fall 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal. Visit her at patricia-j-esposito or email her at esposito@yahoo.com.
Where For Art Thou, Writing Confidence? by Susan Girolami Kramer
For the last five weeks, I’ve been a participant in a writer’s workshop at a local library. I’ve taken these workshops before on different aspects of writing with the same instructor, and they always give me plenty to explore. Plus, I get to meet other writers and hear what they’re working on and what their writing lives are like.
In the last two workshops, I’ve been struck by the comments made by my fellow writers before reading their homework or the exercises we do in class—mind you, I have been apt to make these comments myself. Some pass on sharing their work or preface what they read, saying things like, “This is awful,” “I don’t think I did this correctly,” or “This isn’t very good.”
Too often, they feel the need to apologize or prepare others for their writing before sharing it. Even though I have held back several times, I want to encourage them not to feel this way or to stop comparing themselves to others in the class or to the instructor. To remind them that they are writers and have it in them to trust their writerly instincts.
Oops, look who’s talking now! Me, who only this week did the very same thing by panicking that I’m not as far along as I’d like to be in my own novel, or as far as those in my inner circle of writers. I soon realized I’ve been comparing myself a lot lately to other writers, not feeling ‘good enough’ or ‘fast enough.”
I brought this up to some writers in an online group, and one piece of advice that hit home most clearly was that maybe I’m using this as an excuse not to write. “Who me?” “Yes, You.” So I also had to learn how to trust my own writerly instincts and discover ways to aid myself in feeling more confident and productive in my writing. Not just panic and accept that “I’m not as successful.”
Now, I’ve made a plan to help boost my confidence as a writer and take action. I’m going to do the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) next month to delve into my novel-in-progress (almost 10 chapters) and get out of this mindset. In other words, dismissing the gray clouds over my writing as an excuse not to write!
Susan Girolami Kramer is Newsletter Producer for Rose & Thorn Journal. She wears many hats at her job as a Communications Specialist and at home on her off-hours. She's a photographer, fiction and poetry writer, editor, and publication designer. She has won several awards during the last two decades. By day, she writes articles for an Association's newsletter; by night, she taps into her more creative writing skills. Susan lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with her husband, son, and pug, Truman.
The Jefferson Project by Thor Duffin
The Jefferson Project
by Thor Duffin
Steinwald Books, 2010
Reviewed by Wil Hough
The country groans under the weight of self-serving, corrupt government officials. Politicians fan the flames of class envy and racial tension to divert attention from their own failings. Wall Street and many other financial districts across the country and around the world are under siege. Citizens are angry, as am I, but the majority of the rich and powerful do not seem to care, if they even notice. Riots are certain to break out as unemployment soars and entitlement programs are cut back. A well-known personage has already called for a return of the guillotine. The time certainly seems ripe for authoring alternatives to the system now under siege.
Thor Duffin has already taken advantage of the subject with a compelling novel blending both intrigue and potential solutions to the present political state of affairs. In his novel, The Jefferson Project, a Political Science instructor at the University of Virginia asks his students to propose solutions to the various problems of modern day Democracy. David Archer and a few other classmates take him seriously. Some of their essays get national attention when posted on the Internet. When they propose real, fundamental changes to the government, the students are joined by forces powerful enough to help make it happen.
With their “real good thing” now threatened, Washington’s power elite fight back, doing everything possible to hinder the movement. When it looks like it might succeed anyway, they decide to take more direct action, which put the students’ lives in imminent danger. As things come to a head, Congress attempts the ultimate political end run to seize power and discover they are not the only player in the game. Can Democracy survive?
How would YOU change things? It’s obvious there are puddles on the floor, but what is leaking? Too often we deal only with the symptoms and ignore the source. What Duffin manages through his main character, an engineering major, is to lead us through a root cause analysis. The end result is both mind-blowing and encouraging. For instance, how can we possibly hope to make real changes with a government headed by “improperly motivated incompetent people elected by an ignorant electorate that is also improperly motivated.” There is a solution. But can our leadership be forced to seek it out?
The problem is not with the people but the system. Many a newly elected reformer has ridden off as to the Crusades only to be gobbled up by the election machine. After all, how is a congressman supposed to find the time and inclination to fight for real change when the moment he has been elected he must turn around and fundraise for the next election a mere two years hence? And to whom is he beholden? To the electorate he represents or the contributors who expect a return on their expensive investment? You do the math and come up with an alternative. Better yet, enjoy Thor Duffin’s engaging political thriller while considering the solution presented through his characters as well as the style by which he presents it.
I found The Jefferson Project to be both exciting and thought provoking. Duffin’s style, much like that of science fiction author Robert Heinlein, is worth study by those of us interested in sharing ideas layered between the lines of “fiction.” Rather than driving away potential readers with dry essays, the general public can be lured into taking part in arguments and re-evaluating inbred preconceptions without ever realizing what is taking place.
Thomas Jefferson famously stated, “Should our government once again fail to represent the needs of its citizens, it will be the responsibility of those citizens to rise up and set things right again.” The journalist, A.J. Liebling, also said, “Freedom of the press belongs only to those who own the press.” Well, with access to the Internet, each of us now owns our own printing press. It is our sacred responsibility to make good use of it.
Wil Hough is Poetry Editor and Graphics Editor for Rose & Thorn Journal.
