Does the Wail Diminish?
elegy for Miles Davis
You were a Hell Hound
howling at the moon
on a moonless night,
had enough bad taste
to believe in your own existence
despite every authority’s proof
. that you were gone.
Pouring out the empty spaces between notes
like the sacramental wine in a goblet of solid brass
– sounding, like a bell
. in the bass
. of an ocean
. orchestra.
Breaking the mold is a difficult thing to do and no one captures the difficulty of this hardship better than Lillian Breaker, the consciously wayward protagonist in Kevin Wilson’s new novel, Nothing to See Here.
As a teenager, Lillian is ambitious enough to get into the exclusive Iron Mountain, “a fancy girl’s school hidden on a mountain in the middle of nowhere,” but at twenty-eight she’s living in her mom’s attic, working two grocery store jobs, and smoking a lot of weed. So, what’s her problem? Her best (and rich and beautiful and scheming) friend, Madison Billings. If this novel isn’t about fate and class, family, the haves and the have-nots, then it’s about friendship and its exploitive little schemes.
CAST
Max Anderson, Age 43
Jack Hensley, Age 72
Jenny Anderson, Age 41
SETTING
The Andersons’ dining room table.
Four chairs surround the table; a place is set at each.
TIME
Present day
(Lights up on Jenny, Max enters and kisses her on her forehead).
MAX: You’re sure you don’t mind company.
JENNY: Not at all honey. It’s been a while since we had someone to dinner. It was…
(She stops herself and furrows her brow.).
MAX: Dad. We can talk about it. I want to talk about it. It isn’t like someone just disappears when they die.
By Becky Lauer Full disclosure – I have a very limited knowledge of the events of World War I. Personally, I like to do my research before watching historical dramas, otherwise I feel like the kid who didn’t do the reading before class discussion. So, as I waited in the theater for an early screening of the film 1917 by…
By Jenny Hayes Jami Attenberg’s novel All This Could Be Yours takes place largely over a single day, a day which Victor Tuchman—a pretty terrible man— spends mostly unconscious and near death in a New Orleans hospital. The book bounces around between the points of view of the family members and various others who come into the scene—sometimes only tangentially—near…
Know My Name by Chanel Miller (Viking, 2019) is the untold story of the person who the world came to know as Emily Doe, the victim of a widely reported 2015 sexual assault on Stanford’s campus. Though Know My Name is a memoir, the book is many other things—a victim’s manifesto, a story of love and loss, and a close examination of the broken systems that protect perpetrators and betray victims. Chanel Miller, the woman we meet in the pages of this book is many things too. She’s an activist, a victim, a writer, an artist, a comedian, a daughter, a sister, a visionary, and more.
Why did I pick up that glass?
Wine doesn’t sit well on an empty stomach.
And I’m allergic to sulfites.
I could have avoided it all.
The nausea, the vomit,
the horrified look on her face.
No excuses. I did. And boy,
did it make a mess to clean up
Leave it to the generation that enjoyed a privilege and abundance fueled by post-WWII government subsidies to close the door behind them, handing their children an earth destroyed by greed, a democracy gone off the rails, and crushing student debt. Leave it then to a mind like CJ Hauser’s to capture what happens next: how the children abandoned in a dry well must set to work building for themselves a stairway of hope before they can climb out and face the serious work of healing the planet.
Twenty years ago, Catherine Ryan Hyde’s novel Pay it Forward became an international best seller. [1] The following year, the film adaptation debuted at number four at the box office its opening weekend. The book also spawned a social movement promoting kindness, optimism, and faith in humankind. Hyde has since published thirty-six books, including a young readers’ edition of Pay it Forward, two dozen novels, and a book of travel photography based on gratitude. Her most recent novel, Have You Seen Luis Velez?, was published in May of this year.[2] A new novel, Stay, will be released on December 3, 2019.[3]
The title story of Peg Pursell’s new collection of short fiction, A Girl Goes into the Forest (Dzanc Books, 2019), opens with an unnamed girl following a male figure into the forest, “moving in the direction where perhaps she imagined the rest of her life waited. So ready for something to happen.” The “old secret cottage” they were evidently aiming for has long since collapsed, so they spend the night on the hard ground. Toward the end of the short piece, the girl thinks that eventually, “It might turn summer and she’d have survived the season.” The girl has ventured beyond whatever home she might have known and is searching for something, although what exactly that is, beyond survival, is unclear, both to her and to us. What is clear is that the stories to come will explore the emotions that drove so many young girls in the fairy tales of old to leave their safe little hamlets and to venture out into the forest of the unknown.