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< back archive december 13, 2023 circumstance daniel j. rortvedt october 3, 2023 it can come again shelby hinte march 1, 2023 the lifers emily nelson december 13, 2023 western marginalia Richard LeBlond september 27, 2023 barbie girls mary decarlo november 30, 2022 creating the anti-dream: an interview with tara stillions whitehead dw mckinney november 8, 2023 now you see it, now you don't matthew woodman march 15, 2023 four micro essays j. robert lennon november 15, 2022 nocturne kate finegan october 18, 2023 snake baby d.t. robbins march 8, 2023 secret name justin taylor october 17, 2022 never looked better lindsay hunter

december 13, 2023 circumstance It happens now and is impossible to summarize. daniel j. rortvedt read more december 13, 2023 western marginalia I journey alone, and the travel day often ends at a bar, even though I never visit bars while at home. Richard LeBlond read more november 8, 2023 now you see it, now you don't Despite unearthing North America’s most complete fossil record of Clarendonian vertebrates... matthew woodman read more october 18, 2023 snake baby The sun showed no mercy. d.t. robbins read more october 3, 2023 it can come again We are road tripping towards the Santa Cruz Mountains for your brother’s 50th birthday. shelby hinte read more september 27, 2023 barbie girls When we saw the hot pink Barbie branded Corvette sitting in our neighbor’s trash pile, we hesitated. mary decarlo read more march 15, 2023 four micro essays We agree that, at some point, we should bring the baby to see a cow. j. robert lennon read more march 8, 2023 secret name They stop trying after the second time. justin taylor read more march 1, 2023 the lifers When his wife shoots the neighbor’s sheep he thinks alright, I guess there’s something wrong. emily nelson read more november 30, 2022 creating the anti-dream: an interview with tara stillions whitehead When we say the American west, people think of the frontier. That’s not what I think of when I think of the American west. dw mckinney read more november 15, 2022 nocturne I dreamed I had swallowed a tooth and woke up with a sore throat, as if the bone-sharp incisor had fought its way down my esophagus. kate finegan read more october 17, 2022 never looked better She’s looking in the mirror. lindsay hunter read more search contributors archive < back

contributors daniel j. rortvedt < back

< back Richard LeBlond december 13, 2023 Western Marginalia My travel journals are filled with little incidents and observations too small to become essays on their own, or too insular to be part of another, or just too poorly written. They were gathered during 18 month-long journeys made to the West since 2004 from my home in North Carolina. Arranged in rough geographical order, they simulate a single journey. Humor sits in the front seat, but there are occasional stops for the sad, gritty, dark, and uncomfortable. I journey alone, and the travel day often ends at a bar, even though I never visit bars while at home. But on the road all habits are vulnerable to alteration or abandonment. Bars are social situations, and for the solitary traveler it is a society of strangers. All of these factors – on the road, abandoned habits, and aloneness – entice the eventful or unexpected encounter. Dreaming of Coal It was the last day of spring, and I was on Route 2 heading northwest towards Broken Bow, Nebraska. The road closely follows the railroad tracks. In an hour I passed 11 trains, but only four were moving. The other seven had just emerged from the winter swarm, when trains curl together for warmth. Now they were basking on sidings in the late spring sun, dreaming of coal. I measured them with my odometer and all were between 1.2 and 1.4 miles long. “My earliest memory is holding a gun” I arrived in Rawlins, Wyoming, during a torrential rainstorm. The Thai place was closed, so I went to a tavern with burgers. Sat at the bar next to a very large man with a very large mustache. He was a word-slurring drunk, just beginning his second 32-ounce beer; that is, he was working on half a gallon. He told me stories from his amazing life. Based on his stories, he must have been about 60. “My earliest memory is holding a gun.” He grew up wanting to be a military policeman like his dad and older brother. Instead, he ended up as an Army sniper, training at Fort Bragg, not too far from my home in eastern North Carolina. He was very familiar with the Special Forces, and said their training had a high suicide rate. This was in the 1980s, and he was sent to Colombia as part of an operation fighting the drug war. He ended up getting shot – lung, arm, shoulder – by so-called friendly forces in Columbia who were using weapons that had been supplied by Oliver North during what became known as the Iran-Contra Affair. “Nothing makes me madder than getting shot by our own weapons.” He spent six months in hospitals recovering from his wounds. After discharge, he came home with a severe case of PTSD. “I had to get away, by myself. So I planned a wilderness trip from here to Canada. I had a riding horse, a pack horse, and my dog. It took from May to October. “I still have PTSD, but nowheres near as bad as before that trip.” The Discreet Autobiographer Having worked at Glacier National Park for a year and a half in the late 1960s, I visited its archives office to research some events that happened during my time there. The archive folks are ink phobes. Pens are not allowed. They made me take notes with a pencil even in my own notebook. But it will be easier to rewrite – or erase – my history. Foiled by a Cowboy Poet Every summer from 2008 to 2019, I visited Wallowa Valley and The Nature Conservancy’s Zumwalt Prairie in northeastern Oregon. I frequently had dinner and drinks at the microbrewery in Enterprise. On one visit I had dinner with several employees and friends of the conservancy. Among them was a former supervisory employee who had returned to cattle ranching fulltime after helping set up a graze/no-graze alternation to improve prairie health. The plants and wildlife are thriving because of it. A 4th generation Wallowa Valley rancher, she was wearing a t-shirt that said “I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain just to eat vegetables.” I was madly in love with her, in my own facetious and deeply serious way. It is fortunate for both of us that I didn’t become a stalker after an amazing coincidence. I had just returned to North Carolina after one of my Oregon visits. The next morning I turned on the TV and there she was, sitting on a horse. It was a National Geographic documentary about a couple who had returned the Wallowa River to its original course where it crossed their land. Yes, this environmental superhero was married, and I was never able to outmaneuver her husband, the cowboy poet. Everyone in the valley was in love with her (women too), but only a cowboy poet could win her heart. Dancing with the Drummer My sister Donna, her husband Dave, and I ended the day in the small central Oregon town of Mitchell, near the Painted Hills in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. We checked into quaint old Oregon Hotel about six. It is cute, but except for the sheets, the little bedrooms appear not to have changed since 1904, when they were built. A blues band was already playing when we went to the little bar next door. The band was way too loud for the small space it was in, but that was compensated for by quality musicianship. During a slow number, Donna and Dave got up to dance. The barmaid applauded, then grabbed me from my seat. We danced the “prom one-step,” which is at the outer limit of my coordination. She told me that she actually wasn’t the barmaid, but was helping out because of the band. Normally, she would have been the drummer. (“She’s excellent,” I was told.) As we danced, I learned that the other musicians were her father, husband, and ex-boyfriend. I considered this to be a sign that in rural areas, tolerance is inversely proportional to the size of the talent pool. When the song ended, I shook her husband’s hand. “Thanks for letting me dance with your wife.” “Someone has to do it.” Brush with a Desert Sage There is now a microbrewery in Mitchell. I congratulated the bearded barman/owner on his wonderful addition to the town. He replied, “I’ve still got a ways to go before it’s good.” And then he Zenned himself. “The humble man seeks a second compliment.” (No extra charge for the titular pun.) Dining with Amateur Psychopaths During my summer month of travel in the U.S. West, I always visit Portland, my hometown. I stay with sister Donna and her Dave, and we often take a several-day trip, with the beautiful Oregon coast and its 82 state parks a frequent destination. We have several favorite towns, and Yachats (YAH-hots) is one. It bills itself as the “home of the world’s largest ocean,” suggesting a sense of humor reaching to the highest civic levels. During one visit we had dinner at a local restaurant/bar. As usual, the ale-assisted Dave and I were vociferous (especially me), and laughing inordinately. But based on what happened next, we must also have seemed a little unhinged. Finishing dinner, Dave and I went to the restroom while Donna stayed. Seated across the aisle was an older couple, though probably not older than us. After Dave and I left, the male of the cross-aisle couple asked Donna in a concerned voice: “Are you ok?” “That’s my brother and husband. Pray for me.” Drinking Town with a Fishing Problem While at Port Orford on the southern Oregon coast, I went to Pitches Tavern, where I met a grandmother who was the matriarch of a family that owned several fishing boats. During our conversation, she said, “Port Orford is a drinking town with a fishing problem.” That is an old fishing town chestnut, but maybe more appropriate in Port Orford than anywhere. The town indeed has a fishing problem. The village is up on a headland terrace while the port is off by itself at ocean’s edge. It is one of the oddest ports in North America. There is no harbor for protection of boats, only a wharf with a jetty extension sticking out into the merciless ocean from the rocky shore. Along one side of the wharf is a narrow channel kept open by frequent dredging, as high winds cause severe shoaling as well as turbulent seas. The town promotes itself as the only harborless port for 600 miles. I’m not sure what kind of fisherman would be attracted by that, since he is already in the deadliest profession. Because it is too dangerous to leave the boats in the water, after each trip they are hoisted up from the sea by two cranes. The boats are then lowered onto trailers and parked on the wharf side-by-side until it is time to lower them back into the sea. That suggests a Newfoundland outport, where a ticklish situation is mastered rather than abandoned. Based on hair style, clothing, and radical views, my grandmotherly drinking companion appeared to have been a hippy or sympathizer most or all of her adult life. She had recently recovered from an attack by flesh-eating bacteria, and had the scars and missing tissue to prove it. The scars were a bit unsightly, so she kept them bandaged. But she had had just enough to drink that I was privileged to see them. White Men in the Desert Up on top of southeastern Oregon’s Hart Mountain, 30 miles from the nearest town and paved road, I came to a stone wall and a parked truck. Seeing no one, I got out and peered over the wall. Fifty feet downslope was a hot spring pool, and in it swam a naked man. We talked about our favorite places in the Great Basin. * * * Sign over door in Frenchglen Hotel: “Beer – helping white men dance since 1867.” * * * Laminated notice in my room at the Burns, Oregon, Days Inn: Important Notice to Guests of The Days Inn For your convenience and protection this room has been digitally inventoried prior to your arrival. Should there be any items missing from this room or damaged when you check out you will be charged for them. This includes smoking in a non-smoking room, burning holes in bedding, carpet or furniture, using motel towels to clean motorcycle boots or guns, cleaning birds in the sink, or tub, or smuggling a pet into the motel without paying to use a designated pet room. Why, just reading this notice made me feel convenienced and protected all over. Surprisingly, it was not chained and bolted to the table. I had difficulty suppressing the urge to steal it. A Good Day at Leslie Gulch Leslie Gulch is a tributary of the Owyhee River north of Jordan Valley in eastern Oregon. It was named for Hiram Leslie, a pioneer killed in the gulch by lightning in 1882. The public would have been better served had the small canyon been named “Lightning Gulch” or “Leslie’s Dissolution.” Roughly ten miles long, the gulch contains a spectacular display of sculpted monoliths, spires, and cliffs painted rufescent orange and brown with some pinks and golds thrown in. Vertical flat faces 100 feet high are common, and some appear to be the abstract canvases of a Chinese landscape painter. The rock is volcanic tuff from the eruption of an ancient caldera, and is more than 1,000 feet deep. Some of the vertical faces have been deeply pitted by wind and water. Within and among these large pits on one face were half a dozen bighorn sheep, originally native to this area, hunted to extirpation, and reintroduced in 1965. They were about 200 feet away from me, magnificent and wary. Coming up out of the gulch, I saw a canine larger than a German shepherd. It was solid gray and looking over its shoulder as it ran through the grass – not at full speed, just fast enough to get away from something I couldn’t yet see. It turned out to be a black SUV filled with three 20-year-old Testosterones who didn’t even know the wolf was there. It was the first time I had seen this beautiful animal in the wild. Wolves are hated by ranchers because of shared values, and for that the wolves are doomed. Two-inch Intervals I arrived late afternoon in Cedarville, a pretty town of 800 people in northeastern California. It had a coffeehouse, my natural habitat. I ordered a mocha with an extra shot of espresso, then carried it to a small table with two chairs on the front porch. Opening my notebook, I began to write about the day’s events. I had only gotten this far when – “Can I sit here?” – was rhetorically interjected by an old man about my age as he sat down on the other chair. His name was John, and I later learned he was a burnt-out hippie. (So am I, but at a lesser heat.) He didn’t look like an old hippie; he looked like an old cowboy or farmer with short and thinning hair. “Only if you’re quiet,” I rudely said. My ego, unbalanced by a sense of personal grandeur, was completely in the service of a momentary passion for writing. But his presence at the small table was already too great an intrusion. No doubt he would interrupt again. My concentration evaporated. (It is my own fault for writing in public places, chronically begging for validation.) So I set down the pen and asked John, “All right if I talk?” He smiled at my self-sarcasm – burnt out maybe, but not oblivious – then turned serious. “It was God – wait! It was the ladies inside who told me to come out here and sit with you.” Divine mission authority, even though refuted, put me on notice that he did not have an ordinary mind. I had no idea where our conversation would go, so I started small. “Is this your home town?” I asked. Some of my prior encounters with nontraditional minds have been in small towns where public interaction is tolerated, especially for home-growns. I think John might have been of that sort, but he didn’t answer. I interpreted the dower look on his face to mean this wasn’t his home town, and that he might be reluctant to visit the past. “It is now?” I asked. “It is now,” he answered quietly and with what seemed a sense of relief. “How are the winters here? Do you get much snow?” “Last winter was quite mild. Just a foot of snow. But sometimes ten inches, sometimes four inches, sometimes eight inches, sometimes two inches.” I have to admit my own mental snow ruler is calibrated at two-inch intervals. We must shop at the same imaginary hardware store. But just then, we were interrupted by my compelling need to leave. I purposefully walked in the direction opposite the hotel where I was staying, to lessen John’s chances of relocating me. I have always felt uncomfortable around free-range minds. Only sanity can keep me sane, as I have run out the warranty. Dining with Ranchers The Martin Hotel in Winnemucca, Nevada, is a former Basque boarding house built near the end of the 19th century. It was the primary winter quarters for Basque shepherds who, because of their isolated work, were not yet acclimated to the common culture. The hotel still serves Basque meals family style, the guests seated communally at long tables, and the seven courses served on large platters and in deep bowls. The primary spice in Basque cooking is the pimento. There was an endless supply of complimentary red wine. I was seated with two ranchers, husband and wife, from the remote area north of Elko. They were on their way to a rodeo-like competition at the tiny town of McDermitt on the Oregon/Nevada border. The competition only included skills actually required for ranching – no bucking broncos or raging bulls. The bonding began when Roland the rancher and I discovered that both of us had eaten just a banana for lunch. Neither of us intended to miss a single Basque course. Roland provided me with a list of bones he had broken over the years: both arms and legs, pelvis, and multiple ribs. I asked if they were horse-related. “Horses and machines,” he said. The bodies of old ranch men are often bent and hobbled, no doubt done in as much by machismo as by task. But the task can’t be done without it. Roland and his wife used to own the ranch, but they were bought out by a corporation because of soaring insurance costs that corporations can more easily afford. The same has happened to farming. Now Roland is a salaried ranch-hand on what was once his own land. It almost feels like a return to serfdom. (Webster”s definition of a serf: “a person ... bound to his master’s land and transferred with it to a new owner.”) The Interview While staying at a casino hotel in Elko, I had dinner in its restaurant, sitting at a small table with two chairs. As I waited, an inebriated man with the look of an Uto-Aztecan – Northern Paiute? Western Shoshone? Goshute? – voluntarily sat in the other chair and began to interview me. “Where are you from? On vacation?” He was a large man, the wrinkles on his face thick and rounded between the lines. It was a lovely face, its topography strongly suggesting one history, one lineage. I think he was around 50, though it may not have been years alone aging him. His boldness suggested an eager conversationalist, and I wanted to interview him, to know that history. But a casino security cop shooed him away. “Stop bothering the customers.” The Prettiest Girl in Austin I stopped for lunch at a restaurant in Austin, Nevada. Its Western decor was stubborn and pervasive, the written wisdom on its walls homespun and archaic. The amply bosomed and attractive waitress wore short-shorts, a tight t-shirt, and long dirty-blond hair with bangs. While paying for lunch at the register, I saw up close that her face was slightly bulbous and pitted, like a Bruegel peasant. I couldn’t tell whether she was in her early 30s or late 40s. If in her early 30s, then she was probably a smoker, and maybe a heavy drinker as well. If in her late 40s, then she was fully worthy of my inappropriate and sexist comment. “Are all the girls in Austin as pretty as you?” She blushed, and shyly said, “They’re prettier.” BM Has BO The Nevada mining town of Battle Mountain was dubbed the “Armpit of America” by Washington Post Magazine in 2001, leading to a segment on National Public Radio. Passing through on I-80, I burst out laughing when I saw that the town has done what so many other towns in Nevada have done: written its initials in large white stone letters on a nearby mountain. Unintentionally, it has doubled its number of unappetizing body cavity references. Waiting for Widows Ruby Lake, Nevada, is the Lower 48’s most remote national wildlife refuge. I learned this from Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Jared. “How long have you been here?” I asked him. “Sixteen years.” “My god. I used to work for the Park Service, and they peddled us around every two or three years.” “Fish and Wildlife used to do that, too,” Jared said. “But we began to recognize the importance of knowledge of an area, especially for biologists. It was great for about 10 years, but now my career has pretty much gone down a hole. And I haven’t been able to find a woman willing to live this far away, either.” “How about a rancher’s daughter?” “They all leave,” indicating he kept an eye on that evaporating pool of candidates. “Well, if you’re here much longer, maybe you’ll get a rancher’s widow.” “Oh god, I hope I’m not here that long.” Stand Back from the Penstemons I worked as a volunteer for the U.S. Forest Service in eastern Nevada for a few days each summer from 2010 to 2013. My project was to determine what plant species were growing along a stream in the mountains east of Ely (“E-lee”). Among the plants were species of penstemons, which are often distinguished by their male parts, the anthers. The first day of the survey was a disaster, as my mountain stream had been sucked dry by a toxic waste mitigation project, and then crapped on by 300 sheep as I watched. I’ve had bad field days in North Carolina, but nothing like that. Nonetheless, I was able to collect a few native species upstream of the mitigation project’s intake pipe. My Forest Service supervisor was Katrina, the district wildlife biologist. After the first day disaster, she and I made field trips elsewhere. We both tried to identify a few of the penstemon species, paying close attention to the anthers. When I returned the following year, I brought her the mounted specimens from the previous year’s ill-fated mountain stream survey. During our conversation, she matter-of-factly made a biologically-correct but profane observation, and continued on as if it were ordinary, everyday conversation – and in eastern Nevada I’m pretty sure it is. “I had hoped to get to the penstemons while they still had their anthers,” she said, “but they had shot their wad.” Another Kind of Desert Solitaire There is only sagebrush and a state prison in Nevada’s Independence Valley east of Wells. Independence? It is a rascally system that uses irony as a form of punishment. There are other Nevada prisons in the middle of otherwise empty deserts. Scorching in summer and numbingly cold in winter, climate adds another dimension to the turrets and concertina wire. Public roads pass by these lonesome prisons, and the state has erected signs reading “Hitchhiking Prohibited.” It means “Don’t pick up hitchhikers,” but the sign is addressed to the pedestrian, as if someone who had committed a felony – and then committed another by breaking out of prison – would worry about getting busted for hitchhiking. Free Beer (for a price) I visited the remote Nevada mining town of Pioche, built in a gulch on a mountainside. It was charming, rustic, and disheveled, seeming to have only partially emerged from the 19th century. The town boasts that the first 75 residents to be buried in the cemetery were either shot, stabbed, or conked to death. Everything seemed a bit tawdry, including my lodging. But out the window I saw a surplus of yellow euthamia among the desert shrubs as a rain cloud trailed its gray teats across the nearest mountain range. After dinner I visited the Bank Club for a beer, and to try my luck with a poker gambling machine. True to its name, the place was a bank in 19th century Pioche, and there was still a huge walk-in vault in the back of the bar. When I tried to pay for my beer, the barmaid told me it was free as long as I was gambling. That tells you something about the odds. “What if I win?” “Then I’ll have to shoot you.” Land Barons Beware There is so much beauty in southern Utah that normal criteria for determining whether an area should be in a national park or monument have to be set aside. An area qualifies if its beauty can only be described by tears of gratitude: Zion, Bryce, Arches, Canyonlands. This is where the restorative power of nature poses the greatest threat to the land barons. But it is the undesignated beauty of southern Utah that now has my attention, the open lands outside the parks, unspoiled except by the trim and sinuous insult of asphalt. This free-ranging beauty is not ordinary. Even the highway engineers know that in any other state this land would be exclaimed for all to see, bounded and brochured, latticed with trails, and cankered by campgrounds, overlooks, visitor centers, gift shops, and parking lots. The grandest of the asphalt insults is I-70, which enters Utah near Grand Junction, Colorado. The beauty becomes a distraction west of Green River, and the highway engineers have added several overlooks along this lonesome yet most scenic of interstates. The beauty demands it, because it is a safety hazard. The overlook transforms distraction into wonder. I stopped at the first overlook west of Green River to take photos of brightly colored and enormous geological oddities. They were not beautiful enough to be in a park or monument in southern Utah. They were only extraordinary, not ineffable. At each overlook I visited, there were two to several Native Americans sitting on folding chairs at the edge of the parking lot, with jewelry or pottery spread before them on blankets and racks. Nearby or directly overhead were Utah Department of Transportation signs reading “No Vending or Soliciting.” The sign also could have read: “This practice has a resolute history. Otherwise, we would not have put up the signs. Enforcement is infrequent and weak. We met out token punishments, shutting them down for a day, and maybe a fine now and then to mollify a belligerent tourist.” The pottery was of traditional design, but made from a mold, the seam evident. The jewelry also was knockoffs of traditional designs with cheaper materials. But who makes this stuff? Poor people on the rez, or poor people in Cambodia? Cycling to Eternity I spent a night in the historic mining town of Jerome, Arizona, the most vertical town I have ever seen. It appears to be a series of parallel streets with one stacked on top of the other on the steep mountain-side. But it is actually the same street switch-backing up the mountain, with houses and businesses on both sides between switchbacks. It was only when I settled into my room at the Conner Hotel that I realized the building tilted. Since it appeared to be on the same plane as the adjacent buildings, I concluded they all must tilt in empathy with the road. At one of two local bars I met Bill, a recently retired marketing consultant from Nova Scotia. He fell in love with the Southwest when he passed through on his motorcycle 15 years before. “It was like I was in touch with eternity,” he said. “That has been with me ever since and now I want to share it.” Bill had just turned all of his assets into cash to create what he said was the world’s first resort catering exclusively to bikers. He had already gotten backing from area banks, and strong interest from German bikers on their BMWs. Griz, the bouncer at the other bar, had agreed to lead tours on his Harley. Bill was the boyfriend of our barmaid, whose face had reached that bittersweet stage where the look of her youth was still evident among the increases of age. It is the most vulnerable and radiant look of all. Richard LeBlond is the author of Homesick for Nowhere, a collection of essays that won an EastOver Press Nonfiction Prize in 2022, and was a finalist for general nonfiction in the San Francisco Spring 2023 Book Festival. His essays and photographs have appeared in many U.S. and international journals, including Montreal Review, Weber – The Contemporary West, Concis, Lowestoft Chronicle, Trampset, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. His work has been nominated for “Best American Travel Writing” and “Best of the Net.” < back

< back archive december 13, 2023 circumstance daniel j. rortvedt october 3, 2023 it can come again shelby hinte march 1, 2023 the lifers emily nelson december 13, 2023 western marginalia Richard LeBlond september 27, 2023 barbie girls mary decarlo november 30, 2022 creating the anti-dream: an interview with tara stillions whitehead dw mckinney november 8, 2023 now you see it, now you don't matthew woodman march 15, 2023 four micro essays j. robert lennon november 15, 2022 nocturne kate finegan october 18, 2023 snake baby d.t. robbins march 8, 2023 secret name justin taylor october 17, 2022 never looked better lindsay hunter

december 13, 2023 circumstance It happens now and is impossible to summarize. daniel j. rortvedt read more december 13, 2023 western marginalia I journey alone, and the travel day often ends at a bar, even though I never visit bars while at home. Richard LeBlond read more november 8, 2023 now you see it, now you don't Despite unearthing North America’s most complete fossil record of Clarendonian vertebrates... matthew woodman read more october 18, 2023 snake baby The sun showed no mercy. d.t. robbins read more october 3, 2023 it can come again We are road tripping towards the Santa Cruz Mountains for your brother’s 50th birthday. shelby hinte read more september 27, 2023 barbie girls When we saw the hot pink Barbie branded Corvette sitting in our neighbor’s trash pile, we hesitated. mary decarlo read more march 15, 2023 four micro essays We agree that, at some point, we should bring the baby to see a cow. j. robert lennon read more march 8, 2023 secret name They stop trying after the second time. justin taylor read more march 1, 2023 the lifers When his wife shoots the neighbor’s sheep he thinks alright, I guess there’s something wrong. emily nelson read more november 30, 2022 creating the anti-dream: an interview with tara stillions whitehead When we say the American west, people think of the frontier. That’s not what I think of when I think of the American west. dw mckinney read more november 15, 2022 nocturne I dreamed I had swallowed a tooth and woke up with a sore throat, as if the bone-sharp incisor had fought its way down my esophagus. kate finegan read more october 17, 2022 never looked better She’s looking in the mirror. lindsay hunter read more search contributors archive < back

< back daniel j. rortvedt december 13, 2023 for Walter & Edna It happens now and is impossible to summarize. An artifact of lost coins on the Light Rail. Stomach pain. Now the house settles infinitesimally until it becomes absolute. We steep tea. Kale arrives from California burnt green, stale, sealed in a clear plastic bag. Machines pour layers of concrete over the place my grandfather stooped to pick stones and throw them into five-gallon buckets beneath the apple trees. How, then, to evaluate circumstance? What, then, does it mean to find silver coho salmon in the frozen aisle at the Denver supermarket? A bottleneck on I-25? Yellowjackets born out of dirt holes beneath the elm tree, between hibiscus & hostas, in the folds of the limestone? Daniel J. Rortvedt is an occupational therapist, educator, writer and editor. He completed degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Boston University. Previous work appears in HOUSEGUEST, The Montucky Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the Midwestern United States with his wife and children. < back

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< back justin taylor march 8, 2023 hey stop trying after the second time. Ten weeks was hard enough, but eighteen—and they’d already told Tess’ parents and Bern’s mom. It’s too much. After just long enough that it doesn’t seem causal, though it is absolutely causal, they adopt a three-legged cat named Samson, a five-year-old orange short-hair with white front paws. It’s the left hind leg that’s missing. The people at the adoption place don’t know what happened, only that the small clean scar is indicative of surgery rather than trauma, which in turn suggests some illness or injury in his past. This is enough to make Bern nervous (“Will we really want to go through all that again?” he asks, not specifying what “all that” is, not even conscious that he’s said “again”) but Tess has the cat in her arms and a certain look in her eye. “Little mittens, like the nursery rhyme,” she says. Bern defers. Samson is still skittish, but settling, it seems, into the new digs. It’s been nine days now, or ten, Bern doesn’t remember, which itself is a good thing, right? To no longer be counting by the day. It is Friday afternoon and Tess is packing an overnight bag. She is a yoga instructor with a three-year A.A. chip and a burgeoning Instagram presence. Her first photo of Samson curled up on their couch garnered nearly a thousand hearts. This weekend she is leading a retreat out on the Oregon coast. Breath work and stretches. Sunrise swims and vegetarian lunch on the big back deck of the hotel. Extra-long savasana (corpse pose) to end the evening sessions. Many if not most of her clients will enjoy a glass of white wine while they take in the sunset on the cooling sand. She will not begrudge them this. She will practice mindfulness, which, among other things, will mean not picturing the tsunami that will appear eighteen minutes after the century-overdue earthquake described in that article that everyone was talking about last summer. People she’d gone to high school with and hadn’t spoken to since were posting it and tagging her, asking if she was okay, as though the disaster had already happened, as though it were happening now. But if it were to happen, it is true that the coast would be the worst place for a person to be. A veritable death sentence: the tsunami zone. Forget all that. Tess will ward off apocalypse with simple thoughts articulated slowly, steady as yogic breathing: The sunset is pretty on the water, she’ll think. It is nice that it is cooler here than back in Portland . The theme she has chosen for the weekend is “Rootedness to the earth.” She’s complained to Bern that some of her Insta-fans have found this confusing. Why not “flow” for water, they ask, or “change” for shifting sand? She has had to remind them that sand and water too are parts of the earth. She should have been on the road twenty minutes ago, she’s telling him now. She shouldn’t be the last one to arrive at her own retreat. Bern and the cat are both in the home office. Bern’s working and Samson is curled up next to his laptop, having claimed the computer’s soft-sided case for a daybed. She kisses them each in turn—the cat on its head, Bern on his mouth—and admonishes them to stay cool, keep each other company, and have fun on their “boys’ weekend.” “Ten-four,” Bern says, turning back to his computer, the afterimage of her kiss still tingling on his stubbly lip. “Lock the door behind me,” she calls from the living room. The whole Northwest is having a heat wave. It was ninety-seven degrees when they got up this morning, hit a hundred at noon and still climbing. Numbers all but unheard of for this region, at least until these last few years. Bern and Tess have talked about what it means if this is the new normal. Would you even want to bring a child into a world like that? Bern has all the shades down and the A/C blasting. When he next gets up he’ll make a pit-stop in the kitchen to double-check that Samson’s water dish is full. Bern had wanted to change the cat’s name, indeed was going to make it a condition of his yielding on the question of adopting this cat rather than some other, healthier animal; and Tess had been about to give him the go-ahead (he’s sure of this) but then the lady at the shelter butted in to tell them how much better it would be for Samson’s “adjustment” if he had “continuity.” And that, naturally, was all Tess needed to hear. Well, Bern thinks, it does seem to have paid off insofar as Samson has adjusted. He slept at Bern’s feet last night, which fact Tess noted over breakfast. So effusively and at such length that Bern realized she was jealous. Bern works in tech. He works from home and has a hard time explaining his job to people, but when pressed, which he rarely is, he will say that though he is not a programmer he speaks the language of programmers, serving as a sort of ambassador between their world of arcane jargon and higher math to that of the suits, the men—and they are all men—who think in broad, glittering concepts and want their products to work as if by magic, to be received as miracle, which Bern believes is precisely what most people believe that most technology is. He even allows himself to believe this, albeit in a limited, provisional way. The washing machine orders its own soap refill; his wristwatch knows his blood pressure and his name. He’s finished with work for today, thankfully. Next item on the agenda is to receive the guy from the HVAC company, who is coming to give an estimate on replacing the house’s duct work, which is down in the crawlspace and all rusted out. They’ve been meaning to deal with this for two years now; it was on the inspection report when they bought the place, and has only gotten worse, but it was one of those things that always somehow got bumped down the to-do list (it’s not like you can see ductwork) until the confluent arrival of the heat wave and the cat. Bern is thinking he might start calling the cat Samus, after the protagonist of the Metroid video game franchise, which he grew up playing and, occasionally, still plays. He has a Nintendo Switch console and there’s an online store where you can download classic games. Samus sounds enough like Samson that there will still be continuity—right? Tess should be able to live with that. Or maybe he won’t tell her. He finds himself drawn to this notion of a secret name. It’s eighty-six degrees in the house despite the fact that the thermostat has been set to seventy-four all day. So thank goodness here comes the duct guy in his dark blue jumpsuit and steel-toed boots, strutting up the walk. He lets the guy in. He opens the closet where the crawlspace access is hidden beneath a square of rug. He lifts the exposed panel by a canvas loop and then fixes the loop to a small hook on the back wall of the closet. The guy puts on a headlamp and descends into the hole. Bern sits on the couch. He checks his email, his Twitter, Tess’ Instagram, his email again. He texts something sweet to Tess, knowing she is still driving. The guy comes out of the hole. He names a figure. Bern nods. “But the thing,” the guy says, “is with all the, you know, this heat, how short-handed we are. So I’ll tell ‘em this is urgent, because it is urgent, but in all likely we are looking at some weeks, because there are little old ladies from here to Troutdale who we need them to not roast in their kitchenettes.” “Sure,” Bern says. “Just give me the first opening you got.” “You’ll hear from us,” the guy says. He turns to leave—has his hand on the doorknob—but then turns back, having clearly just changed his mind about something. “Is that a Switch?” he says. The video game system sits on the entertainment center next to the TV. He must have noticed it before he first turned toward the door. “It is,” Bern says. “You play that Breath of the Wild ?” “No, I mean not yet.” “I do. I beat it a few times. I beat it and I start again. I love it. I love climbing the volcano and to catch that big horse. I search for herbs and monster parts to make new foods and potions. Hours sometimes, I can do this, like at night after my kid goes down or my day off, you know? I make the colors at the dye works and I do all my outfits. Or I look for korok seeds which, you know, it’s the one thing. My best is 580, that’s my current game, so there’s 320 left to find and I don’t even know where they could be. I mean I know this world. I know this whole world. The map shows you where you’ve been and I’ve covered every inch. The yellow line of me covering all of it, you know? And the prize for getting them all is just this dumb joke, classic Shigeru Miyamto joke or maybe it’s like a Japanese thing, you know, not him in particular but like generically Japanese. Their humor. I don’t know if I should say that. But what you win is a little trophy in the game that looks like a poop and it doesn’t do anything. No stat boost or open some door. I guess I’m a completist, but I’m not, I mean not usually. It’s more the you know meditative aspect, my wife says spiritual, of the searching, the yellow line of me all over the map —” “Yeah,” Bern says. “I mean I don’t know. I haven’t, like I said, played it. I like the old games, mostly. You know, the classics?” “This is a classic,” the guy says, indignant. “It’s the future, the fucking, you know, Shakespeare. But of Nintendo. Do yourself a favor, buddy. Why not see a legend while it’s still being made?” “A legend,” Bern says, smirking—barely holding back a laugh—“of Zelda?” “We’ll call you when we have appointments,” the guy says, his voice thick with injury. He really leaves this time. Just turns and goes. Bern locks the door behind him, which he never did lock after Tess left. He goes back to the home office, opens the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, reaches past old tax returns in hanging folders to the back, where, for two days he has been keeping a bottle of gin that he bought in preparation for Tess being out of town. She knows he drinks. Indeed, Tess was insistent, when she made her own decision to stop, that he not stop on her account. He can even drink in front of her if he wants to, and if they’re at a party or something he often will, but they don’t keep alcohol in the house anymore, which Bern is onboard with—it was actually his suggestion—but this is a special circumstance. He’s going to order a pepperoni pizza, play Metroid, drink gin cut with zero-calorie mango-flavor CBD soda until he’s too fucked up to play anymore. After that his plan is to jerk off once or (aspirationally) twice to this body-positive OnlyFans he’s been into lately, then fall asleep to mild hallucinations abetted by an algorithmically generated playlist of ‘90s British jungle and EDM. He’s not going to play the original 8-bit Metroid from 1986, nor any of the several sequels and reboots from throughout the ‘00s and ‘10s (though all of these are available for download via the game’s online store) but rather the 16-bit SNES one, the original sequel , so to speak, and his favorite: released in 1994, the same year as his Bar Mitzvah, a year before Goldie’s monumental debut Timeless LP, which he fully expects to hear pieces of on the playlist later, and not that he would’ve known about 90’s British jungle and EDM in 1994 or 95. In those days it was nothing but punk and punk’s dorky cousin ska (not that he knew it was dorky yet, not then). He loved Lagwagon, 30FootFall, Skankin’ Pickle, Less than Jake—anything that drove his parents crazy, basically, not that that’s what he was listening to the music for, but it didn’t hurt. He remembers his mother in his bedroom doorway, her head cocked, wearing (no other word for them) Mom Jeans into which were tucked a tee shirt from when she had used to volunteer at the summer day camp he attended; he can picture the pale-yellow fabric with blue text and graphics, the anthropomorphic Star of David grinning and making jazz hands below the clip-art banner that read CAMP KLIPPOT KETANOT 5750 / 1990!!!!, and the bafflement in her voice as sharp as the HVAC guy’s indignation just a minute ago when she asked him, “Can they mean for it to sound like this?” and how he had replied, without looking up from the game he was playing which may well have been Metroid if it wasn’t Street Fighter II: Turbo , “How should I know what they meant?” He can picture her as she is now, too, as she must be, all alone in the big house, three thousand miles and three time zones southeast of here. He should call her, he knows that, but it’s already late there. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, he’ll call. Back to his quote unquote bachelor debauch, which by the way Tess would one hundred percent support. She worries he works too much, says he needs to take more time for himself, to learn to unwind and recharge. “Constructive rest,” she calls it, another yoga term. The bottom line is that she would in no way begrudge him anything he’s going to do this weekend (up to and including the bod-pos OFans) and when she comes home on Sunday, or when they check in with each other tomorrow, he’ll probably tell her all about it and so none of this is secret, though it somehow enhances the experience to behave for the moment as though it were. Bern takes the gin to the dining room and puts it on the table. The bottle is clear glass tinted blue and shaped like a tear drop. It’s the size of a delicata squash, the gin locally distilled and bottled by a woman-owned company that he can’t remember for sure but thinks is also POC friendly or advocative in some way, he thinks the tag said something about something about that, but he threw the tag away when he brought the bottle in the house so to be certain he would have to google it, which he is not about to do. Maybe it’s First Nations people the gin supports—that’s a big issue out here, people pay more attention to it than they do elsewhere—maybe with a scholarship or internship or profit sharing. Or maybe the tag had just acknowledged that the distillery sits on unceded land. The flavor profile of this gin, which he has bought before, is frankly rather more floral than he prefers, but he likes to support all the stuff he supports by buying this gin, even if he can’t remember what that stuff is right now, and anyway all he’s going to taste is the mango-flavored CBD soda. He could have just as easily bought Broker’s or Gilbey’s or, for that matter, vodka. He goes to the closet, which is still open, and closes the trap door to the crawlspace. He closes the closet door. He orders the pizza via an app on his phone. He sits down on the couch, picks up the remote to turn on the TV, but then decides he ought to feed Samus before he gets involved in the game. He puts down the remote, goes to the kitchen, gets the can of food out of the fridge and drops it on the counter. Metal on tile is a sound Samus knows. The cat will come bounding in any second, making remarkably good time with his one back leg, which the shelter lady told them had grown extra muscular to compensate. If he had lost one of his front legs, she’d said, that would have permanently screwed up his balance. To lose a back leg had been, in the scheme of things, a stroke of luck. So okay where is he? Bern picks up the can and drops it again from a little higher than before. Nothing. He’s already thinking about the crawlspace, but come on, he was in the room the whole time it was open and he shut it as soon as the guy left—or, well, almost as soon. He went to get the gin, of course, but that took what, thirty seconds. Even if Samus had been curious, he wouldn’t have just run over and hopped in. He’s probably asleep under their bed, way back against the wall. It’s one of his favorite spots in the house and on a day like today also a good place to beat the heat. Bern would crawl back there himself if he thought he could fit. He heads to the bedroom. Here he is on his belly, almost doing the yoga move called “baby cobra.” Up goes the bedskirt: no cat. The bedroom closet’s open so he checks behind the shoe rack that Tess has set up on the floor on her side. On his own side it’s a pile of dirty laundry and he can clearly see Samus isn’t in it, but he digs through the pile anyway to be sure. To be more sure than sure. He goes one room at a time: bedroom, bathroom, guest room, office. He opens every drawer and closet, checks under and behind every piece of furniture, even the ones without spaces wide enough to admit his hand, much less a full-grown cat. He jams his eye against every crack and gap. He checks the windows, confirms that none have been left open. None have. He did this right the first time, earlier, when he turned on the A/C. Waste not, want not. He did everything right. He did . “I did!” he says. Hearing the petulance in his own voice escalates his fear a few degrees. It’s rising like heat. He checks the front door to make sure it was properly closed and locked after the duct guy left. It was, as he knew it would be, because he just did it. But what if Tess accidentally left it open? She said it was unlocked, but what if she also hadn’t pulled it all the way closed and Samus slipped through it after her, before Bern left the office? But that can’t have happened either; he’d remember if he’d found his own front door gaping open. And the cat was still dozing on his desk when he went to greet the duct guy. He gets the bag of treats out of the pantry, shakes it like a maraca or a grager. Another sound the cat knows well. “Samus? Samus?” Continuity , he thinks. His heart is filling with splinters. “SAMSON!” Okay. Okay. So it is, must be, however impossibly, the crawlspace. He gets the travel flashlight out of the junk drawer in the kitchen, tests that it works. He lifts and drops the food can once more, just in case, from high enough now that he’s worried about cracking the tile on the counter. He goes back to the living room, opens the closet, once again fastens the trap door to the wall by its canvas loop. He gets on his hands and knees with the flashlight in his teeth, stretches his legs and lowers himself slowly with his arms (chaturanga dandasana) until he is flat on the floor, half in and half out of the closet, with his head in the hole. He takes the flashlight out of his mouth and sweeps it across the close, cool, gray-black space: the open grave over which they blithely live their lives. He can see the rusted-out ducts, the holes at their elbow joints, but if there was a ten-pound animal in one of these flimsy aluminum pipes he’d be able to hear it moving, probably even see the pipe itself move. He points the light at the walls to check the vent screens. There’s one with an ominously large rip. So the theory, then, is what? Cat sneaks into the living room while Bern and the guy are talking, or else while Bern is in the office getting the bottle of gin. (Was the cat still in the office when he went back in there? He can’t remember. His mind can produce equally vivid images of the office both with and without the cat asleep on the laptop case. He has no idea which is true.) So the cat hops down into the hole and Bern unknowingly shuts him in, but doesn’t hear him crying to be let out—or maybe he doesn’t cry? Let’s say there’s a rat, likely the same one that tore the screen to begin with, and when Samus—goddamnit, Samson —gives chase it runs up the wall and through the torn screen and he jumps up and follows it (the jump’s only three feet, could he manage that? maybe ) so he winds up in the front yard, at which point he spooks, or maybe is still hunting the rat—or squirrel, it could be a squirrel—and runs off. Goes exploring. Maybe does and maybe doesn’t know what a car is, maybe does and maybe doesn’t know how to get back to the house, much less inside of it, maybe does and maybe doesn’t know that this house is his home. Bern pulls his head out of the hole, shuts the trap door, shuts the closet, runs back to the kitchen to drop the flashlight and grab the bag of treats. He opens the front door, steps out of the house and directly onto the pizza he ordered. The delivery guy must have left it here when nobody answered the knock, because Bern had paid in-app when he placed the order. He takes the pizza inside and sets it on the table, brushes grit from the caved-in lid of the box. He goes back outside, walks briskly up one side of the block and then the other, shaking the open bag of treats and calling the cat by both his real and his secret name. Bern sees a cat turn a corner about a block up. The wrong color, but he breaks into a run anyway, makes the turn onto the new street but nothing is there. He probably spooked it. Idiot . Three, maybe four blocks down this new street there’s an ambulance parked in front of a house. Its siren is off but its lights are on, cherry-red and diamond-white, but pale, so pale in the blazing washout of the cloudless day. Heat lines are rising from the pavement and sweat is pouring down Bern’s forehead into his eyes. He stares dumbly at the ambulance, aware of time passing, wasting, but he's frozen, hypnotized by this vision of death. After all, that must be what he’s seeing, right? Lights without sound, the EMTs taking their time inside the house because there’s nothing left to rush for, nothing to do but clean up the mess and console the family, ease them into their new life with its gaping hole. The way that every moment of every day will be oriented by that absence, how they’ll race around its perimeter like dogs at a track. Could have been unexpected, a heart attack, or the bitter relief of a long fight with cancer finally ended, or an old woman roasted like the duct guy said. Could have been a toddler left unattended in a kiddie pool. I just went in to grab my phone, the anguished father cries, I wanted to take a picture of her playing to send to her mom . Bern, back when he thought he was going to be a father, always feared he would do something boneheaded like that: a tiny lapse in judgment, unretractable, shearing apart the family like lightning cleaves a tree. And how else to describe the current debacle but as his deep fear finally realized, his nightmare come true? You never said Kaddish . The voice is his father’s, and that’s only one of several reasons why this thought is insane. Tess isn’t Jewish and Bern doesn’t practice, so there’s that. Neither did Bern’s parents when he was growing up. The Bar Mitzvah, well he did that, sure, but that was just this…thing that happened. He isn’t a member of a synagogue, doesn’t even know if there are any in Portland, though he assumes there must be a few. Obviously, he and Tess are not people who would believe that life begins at conception. The pregnancies they lost were lost potential, not dead children . And yet he thinks—or rather, he hears—the insane sentence a second time. You never said Kaddish . It occurs to Bern that his father must be talking about himself. He feels the pre-heat of tears behind his eyes (such a different heat than the heat of the heatwave) and decides that if he’s going to lose his mind, he should text Tess about Samson before he does. He scatters a few treats on the ground, an offering to the vanished stray, turns away from the ambulance, walks toward home where his phone will be right where he left it on the couch cushion where he put it down after he ordered the pizza. She’s going to leave you . Not his father’s voice now but his own. His own voice speaking the words now, and later again, with pronouns and tenses shifted—she left me— when he will have to tell his mother; the flash that will pass through her eyes right before her whole expression shatters: he can see it, how it will be, though they’ll be on the phone, not Zoom or FaceTime, when he tells her (she used to sat jokingly say that she would not bother to learn how to video chat until there was a grandbaby to wave at; she no longer makes the joke, but still hasn’t learned) and she’ll be standing at the side table where the cordless phone was sitting in its charging cradle before she picked it up, the empty cradle blinking blue (blue as his gin bottle) in the foyer of her big empty house where she raised a family and lost her husband and now lives alone, knowing she ought to sell while the market is hot, get something right-sized, a condo or independent living place, somewhere there’d be people around to talk to, or to call if she ever needs help. Maybe he’ll move back in if she suggests it, at least for a while. They’ll never say who was doing who the favor, or even what exactly the favor was. He opens the front door to his house and steps inside and here is Samson on the dining room table, swatting at the delivery box. The bouquet of hot cheese fills the house. Bern will discover Samson’s hiding place tomorrow. He’ll be reaching for a pair of pants on the high shelf in the bedroom closet. It’s a six-foot leap, higher than he’d have ever imagined that a cat, much less a three-legged cat, could jump. He himself can’t even see up there, he just reaches for whatever pair is on top of the pile. That’s why he didn’t think to check. What can he say? He didn’t know. But here are his good gray slacks coated in a layer of orange fur. It’ll be another few days before he'll catch Samson in the act of leaping up there, and another week before he manages to film said leap on his phone. He will forward the video to Tess, who will post it to her Instagram, where it will unexpectedly go viral. Five days and eighty-seven thousand likes later, Tess, Bern, and Samson will be the subject of a short feel-good video segment on the website of the local newspaper. Samson’s original owner will see the segment, wrongly assume that the cat is now very valuable, some kind of reality star, and convince himself that he was tricked into giving it up. He will attempt to sue the animal shelter, and after that fails, he will show up at Tess’s yoga studio, hollering about what he’s owed. Tess will have to stop class and call the police. She will feel sympathy for this pathetic and deluded person, but at Bern’s insistence will, reluctantly, take out a restraining order. Two weeks later, right when it will seem as though the drama is over and things are back to normal, she’ll fall off the wagon. Bern will have to pick her up from a bar on the other side of town, near the apartment they lived in before they bought the house. Bern will worry that this is a full-on relapse, but it won’t be. She’ll give up her chip and start over. By the time she re-earns the three year chip she will be seven months pregnant with their daughter, who will be born healthy but will turn out to be allergic to cats. Tess will suggest to Bern, jokingly, that they look up the former owner to see if he’d still be interested in having Samson back. They’ll have a laugh over this, but it will be sad laughter, and they’ll wish they hadn’t. Later that night, after Tess and the baby are both sleeping, Bern will look up the former owner, curious whatever happened to him, and it will turn out that he died a year earlier, a suicide, though the obituary won’t quite spell this out. Bern, for a moment, will see the silent ambulance brightly shining at the end of the sweltering street, like a light at the end of a tunnel that is also made of light. Ever since that day Samson went missing, Bern has associated this image with the horror of loss and the miracle of restoration, which is to say with the mystery of being and the grace of God, though of course he would never, will never, say this to anyone, or even articulate it in these terms to himself. It’s a knowledge beyond knowing, or perhaps beneath it, a secret untellable because it isn’t made of language, and even if you could name it, you would never speak the name. And he never does say kaddish for his father, though his wife and daughter will, eventually, at the daughter’s insistence, say kaddish for him. But right now all Bern knows is that Samson is here, that he was in the house this whole time, and that Tess isn’t going to leave him. He tries to comprehend the scale of the disaster he has been spared—the vast, hauntological void of its non-incarnation—and all he can think of is that article about the earthquake and the tsunami, the one that Tess kept talking about last summer. He lets his legs weaken and bend, a controlled collapse into child’s pose, sobbing, his forehead to the hardwood floor, not thinking at all of the lost pregnancies—not even for a second—as the cat, having given up on the impenetrable pizza box, hops down from the table and sets himself between Bern’s outstretched arms. Samson sits waiting on his single haunch, and so when Bern lifts his face from the earth he finds himself eye to eye with the cat, who now—and only now—begins to purr and nuzzle him, to extend an exploratory paw (with claws retracted) to the side of Bern’s damp face. Little mittens, like the nursery rhyme. He can see himself reflected in those eyes, twinned in fact, a tiny brace of Berns like flies trapped in amber, only not amber and not trapped. Maybe game sprites then, explorers lost in the foreign gold-flecked green worlds of iris, and that green in retreat as Samson’s pupils go from slits to ovals with the warm black of want, and nothing is lost, least of all Bern, who sees himself adrift in that dilating darkness and allows it to welcome him home. ♦ Justin Taylor is the author of the memoir Riding with the Ghost, (Random House in 2020) as well as three books of fiction published by HarperCollins: Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (2010), The Gospel of Anarchy (2011), and Flings (2014). His next novel, Reboot, is forthcoming from Pantheon in 2024. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Bomb, and Bookforum, among other publications. He has taught writing at the graduate and undergraduate level in programs all over the country, including Columbia University, N.Y.U., the University of Southern Mississippi, and the University of Montana. He is the Director of the Sewanee School of Letters. He lives in Portland, Oregon. < back

< back j. robert lennon march 15, 2023 Cow e agree that, at some point, we should bring the baby to see a cow. But when? Not now, when all new experiences are equally puzzling, and the baby has no understanding of what should and should not amaze her. And not later, when the idea of farm animals has grown familiar, and a cow will come as no great surprise. We should bring the baby to the cow at the very moment a cow will blow her mind. I told my students this should be the goal of their stories. To lure the reader into a state in which a cow will blow their mind. Custody I hadn’t heard from my student in a while. I seemed to remember I was one of his thesis advisors, but if I had been, surely he would have sent me pages to review. My memory must have failed me. Then my colleague called. The student had told her he’d been emailing me drafts for months, and that I’d been ignoring him. This wasn’t so—I hadn’t gotten these emails, nor the attached writing. As it happened, he’d been sending the emails to someone else with the same name as me, a custodian in the school of agriculture. I wasn’t the one who had ignored the emails, he was. Perhaps email wasn’t even a part of the custodian’s work for the university—it could have been that he was assigned the address automatically, and had never opened the inbox. Or perhaps the custodian had received my student’s novel, had read it, but decided to keep his opinions to himself. Or maybe he’d sent my student comments, but to the wrong address—the address of another member of the university community, one with the same name as my student. Maybe this person used the custodian’s comments to revise the attached novel manuscript in his own way, entirely different from the way my student would have revised it, had he been given my advice, or even the custodian’s advice. When my student finally sent his manuscript to my correct address, mine, I briefly entertained the notion that it was this version I was reading—the one altered by the name-sharers’ chain of custody—rather than the one I would have received had my student addressed the original email correctly. I felt bad for wishing it was. Sheet I dream that the fitted sheet has come loose and I can feel the bare mattress with my toes. I wake up to discover that it isn’t so—the sheet is secure. I’m disappointed with my sleeping mind for generating such trivialities. Then, later, I’m impressed; the dream wasn’t trivial at all. This kind of disorder—a messy blanket wedged between sofa cushions, a tablecloth five degrees off true—bothers me all out of proportion to its importance. It stands in for types of disorder that I’m powerless to control. My sleeping mind doesn’t need to serve me fascism, sickness, storm and fire. It knows a loose sheet will do the trick. Test The psychology lab at the university invited me to bring the baby in for testing. When I arrived, a graduate student took the baby away, and a different graduate student led me to another room. I was asked to sit at a computer and play a video game. In the game, I was stranded by the side of a busy highway running through a forest. I’d been tasked with caring for three friends’ infants, and all three were strapped inside my broken-down car. One by one, I was to bring each child out and set it down on a blanket from which it would attempt to walk or crawl into traffic. My job was to flag down passing cars while protecting the children from those same cars, which never stopped, however energetically I flagged them. The computer was old, and slow to respond to the commands I clawed into its keyboard with increasing desperation. My heart rate increased as the graduate student sat off to one side, taking notes. The room was windowless and dirty and my eyes stung from the dust and sweat. When the game was over, I was not told whether I had done well. I was thanked for my participation and assured that the video game babies had survived the ordeal. When I emerged, rank and disheveled, into the light of the main office, I found my daughter laughing and rolling around on the floor among a pile of toys. She was given a gift for her efforts, a charming tee shirt. Her graduate student caretaker informed me that she was a delight and invited her to return anytime. She had passed the test. J. Robert Lennon is the author of nine novels, including Familiar, Broken River, and Subdivision, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand, See You in Paradise, and Let Me Think. He lives in Ithaca, New York. < back

< back matthew woodman november 8, 2023 Despite unearthing North America’s most complete fossil record of Clarendonian vertebrates —horse, camel, sabertooth cat, bone-crushing dog— paleontologists here have extracted but two articulated skeletons: a pair of frogs, whose atlases enable the skull to move up and down but not side to side. As my son sifts through the loose stone and holds up one shard looks like a bone to me after another I pull from my backpack a coyote gourd on which I have etched you are the only one to see this and set it on a slab the wind and rain have yet to smooth into streambed. I straighten, all two-hundred and some odd pounds perched on my ankle’s talus, which in a frog is called the astragalus, as in the local Astragalus lentiginosus, spotted locoweed, whose nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria spin air into soil. Astonish, from the Latin ex (out) + tonare (to thunder). In 1997 monsoonal moisture materialized in a flash flood that dissolved the canyon ranger complex : an arterial sluice of white noise, what could pass for a round of applause. No trick : it’s a routine : The individual is capable of seeing much more [...] than the human hand can set down. Matthew Woodman is the 2022 Kern County Poet Laureate and the founding editor of the journal Rabid Oak. He is the author of "This Is Not Your Moon" and the contributing editor of a series of anthologies, most recently 2022's "Writing Covid." His work has appeared in Juked, Puerto del Sol, Sonora Review, and Hawai'i Review. < back

< back dw mckinney november 30, 2022 ong gone are the days when Tara Stillions Whitehead worked 26-hour days on the sets of American sitcoms. A former assistant director and assistant to executive producers, she’s now a filmmaker and assistant professor of film, video, and digital media production at Messiah University in Pennsylvania. When people discover that Stillions Whitehead once worked in Hollywood, they often ask her about the most famous person she’s ever met or for a detailed account of Hollywood life. But she’s quick to tell you not to be fooled. Beneath the glitz, glamour, and prestige is an entertainment industry built on rape culture, suffering, and manufactured identities. “The American west, in terms of Hollywood and the culture it affects, is trying to constantly hold up this artifice of control over narrative,” says Stillions Whitehead. “And as a writer, I’m always just like, fuck your control. Let’s break out. Let’s undo all of this.” Her newly released book, The Year of the Monster (Unsolicited Press, 2022), is a middle finger to Hollywood culture. While Stillions Whitehead captures the essence of Los Angeles, Monster goes beyond the city and explores everything from climate disaster, loneliness, the #MeToo movement, mental health struggles of military families, and other aspects of American life and culture. Stillions Whitehead and I spoke over Zoom about subverting the Hollywood mystique, how television narratives influence our real lives, and writing books for the cinematic screen. This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Content warning for mention of sexual assault. In The Year of the Monster , you focus on different monstrosities – people’s behaviors, natural disasters, black holes. Can you talk about what it’s like to launch your book in the midst of this pandemic, in the shadow of a real monster? I found that the book started to have more significance to me emotionally after the pandemic. And contextually, too. I think [the book] is more relevant now than it was before. The pandemic brought out a lot of different character defects in people, including myself. I think the idea of human monstrosity, and what we will do and what we will sacrifice for capitalism, for entertainment, for all of those things, are much more apparent now. When I look at things in the book, like even the entertainment industry stuff, it’s more laughable for me to see that superficiality in the wake of all this human disaster. So, the disaster surrounding a lot of those stories is different. In “There Are No Secrets in the Constellations,” which is probably one of the most difficult stories for people to read, the idea of climate change and of trying to move forward in a disaster that humans have created felt like it had a little bit more significance. Let’s talk about “Inciting Moment,” the first story, which had several California and Hollywood references. But there were points in that story, and others as well, where you demystify the California mystique. I’m using very specific details to actualize California in that way that you’re saying, to demystify it and to satirize the whole process of moving to L.A. and having this identity with a place. With that story, in particular, I was mining for a lot of different things that were real, but I didn’t have to exaggerate them. The whole thing about L.A. for me was feeling really lonely and craving intimacy and just making intimacy happen. Not just in a sexual way, but the sort of catastrophic intimate encounters where you almost feel lonelier afterward. And that’s that character at the end [of the story]. I wanted to open with [“Inciting Moment”] because it created a portal into the rest of the book. By deconstructing that experience of entry into a place, into a dream that is an anti-dream, then the rest of the book plays out that way. And that’s really what the book is. It’s like the anti-dream, the anti-narrative, the antithesis of expectation. Could you speak more about creating that anti-narrative and reconfiguring the ideas of the American west, especially when it comes to Hollywood? When we say the American west, people think of the frontier. That’s not what I think of when I think of the American west. There’s the cultural frontier, and the west thinking it’s the cultural frontier and how it defines culture. And I think that’s where Hollywood gets its esteem from, or previously had its esteem. It’s manufacturing stories, presenting them to the world, and people buying into those stories, emotionally and culturally. For me, the American west is so defined by the media put out in the 20th century, and now probably by media content. If you think about American television and its inception, sitcom writing is our foundational identity. Through the process of learning about how a script is written for a sitcom, [I learned that] it is a well-oiled machine. It’s the mass production of narratives. We lay this out, insert your characters here, and just find the situation that fits into that. What shapes the American west is this mass production model that you can replicate. And I think it’s terrible. With this book and all of my writing, I want to reveal to the reader how they’ve been taught to read, and teach them how to read a story. You blew my mind when you were talking about the shape of the sitcom episode and its different components. It felt very much like an assembly line. My goal is to bring awareness to the fact that you’ve been conditioned by what you watch – and what you read, too. How do you incorporate your scriptwriting and production techniques into creating your stories? You put some of the structure from filmmaking and script writing into them, but you’re also applying your on-set knowledge to deconstruct our ideas of narrative. On the one hand, I kind of want to merge the forms of screenplay and prose. I do it a lot more in my book that’s coming out, framing it with more than just scripts, but other kinds of film documents, like treatments. In a way it’s trying to open the door and potentially expose people who have never read scripts before to scripts. But it’s also to show, what both forms are capable of. One of the stories [in The Year of the Monster], “Plot Point I,” is entirely dialogue, with like two sentences of direction opening it and a couple of pauses. And that’s because I just wanted the dialogue of these two douchey Hollywood guys to play out uninterrupted for people to get what they get from it, knowing what I’m trying to convey. That this is the prestige that people ask about when they ask me, “What was it like to work in Hollywood?” What’s the difference between writing your book with the anticipation that it will become a movie and writing with the knowledge of how filmmaking directly impacts a story? Those are like the two panels that I’m on at [the Association of Writers & Writing Programs] next year. One of the panels is writing the screen-worthy story. And the screen-worthy story has to have visualized plots. For writing something to be adapted, I think you have to have a sense of space. I find that when most books are adapted, obviously they change, but they have to have what’s going to keep your butt in the seat, which is the plot. Everything else is what either makes it a good movie or not. And then conversely, with the impact of film on writing, I keep seeing a lot of complaints from writing professors or agents on Twitter who are saying writing is just too cinematic, it’s too visual. I honestly think it’s just because we live in a very visual culture. People are writing in a way that appropriates even the transitions in film. Not just what we’re seeing, but like smash cuts to a new scene or the way one scene trickles over into another like a crossfade. I definitely do that in the next book that’s coming out. I use cinematic transitions to kind of play with that and see how the audience can exist simultaneously in the written word and in the visual narrative that’s happening in their head. What’s your next book called? They More Than Burned (ELJ Editions, 2023), which is in reference to the Twin Towers, but it comes up in one of the stories. It’s basically a collection that’s hybrid, and it imitates an archiving and assemblage of footage for a documentary that doesn’t end up happening. How did you discover new relationships to the settings that you created in this collection? I left California in 2013. Once I got [to Pennsylvania], and we started making a life here, part of me was excited to move because I was deep in my alcoholism. I really wanted to go somewhere where people didn’t know me and I could pretend to be okay. And Mechanicsburg seemed like a place where I could do that. I would say 80 percent of the book was written before I got sober. Once I got sober, it was like somebody turned the light on and I could see things. I could see where I was, and with the light cast so far, I could see back to California. I was looking in that direction a lot of the time when I was doing the revisions and all the writing. So, while I was writing a lot of it while I was [in Mechanicsburg], I missed places. So I started reconstructing them. All of those locations are usually somewhere that I was longing to be. I was never in a place that I was longing to be in while I was writing about it. I do that with my stories a lot. It’s a way for me to travel emotionally. Even though I talk a lot of shit about Hollywood, I wouldn’t have stayed there for the amount of time that I did, and I wouldn’t have gone back in the last couple of years to do some things, had there not been some hope or something that place was giving me or revealing about myself. A lot of those places are places that I wrote about in really intense longing. When I go back to places where I came of age, it’s sort of like those places are still inside of me, and I can feel their geography. But when I write them, I’m translating those geographies into something new. ♦ Learn more about Tara Stillions Whitehead and her upcoming book, They More Than Burned (ELJ Editions, 2023), on her website . Shop copies of The Year of the Monster at Unsolicited Press. DW McKinney is a writer and editor based in Nevada. She is a nonfiction editor for Shenandoah and editor-at-large for Raising Mothers. < back