Essay

SOUTHERN GOTHIC

by Deborah Rudacille

A man named Knuckles is running for sheriff of the Florida county where my Uncle Al settled after he retired from the Air Force in 1971. The current sheriff is named Slaughter. My aunt and cousins were bemused by my exclamations of glee over these Dickensian surnames when I visited in July. But I was snatching at any excuse to lighten the atmosphere as the occasion for the trip was a sad one: I was accompanying my 79-year-old mother on a last visit to her big brother, confined to a hospital bed and slipping in and out of consciousness since a mini-stroke earlier in the month.

Uncle Al had been on home hospice for inoperable lung cancer since February, but up till his 82^nd birthday in June he had been tooling around town in his Jazzy, able-bodied enough to rise and hit a few golf balls at a course near his home every few days. The stroke felled him in a way that cancer and chemo couldn’t, paralyzing the left side of his body. It was clear to all of us that my mom had better fly down quickly if she wanted to see him while he was still able to talk with her.

So in mid-July my cousin Tom claimed my mother and me at the Jacksonville airport, driving us down the pine-fringed highways to Trenton, a one traffic light town in the rural north central region of the state. It was an odd place for my uncle to have put down roots. Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Baltimore, he had enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War, serving in the war zone though not on the front lines.

Over a twenty-year career as a USAF radioman he had lived in Alaska, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Key West, Florida. In one of the murkier phases of his career, he had served as a member of a five-man “secret Air Force” team monitoring nuclear tests from Chile prior to the election of the socialist Allende government in the mid-sixties. But my aunt had been raised in Florida, and her parents, brother, and sister lived near Trenton, so my cosmopolitan uncle settled near his wife’s family like a good husband. As a dark-skinned Italian with a name that ended in a vowel, he didn’t exactly blend.

When I was a kid, my parents, brother, and I road-tripped south every couple of summers to visit them, stopping overnight in South Carolina to break up the sixteen-hour drive from Baltimore. Swimming in a motel pool the first night of the trip was a treat, but merely a tantalizing appetizer for the main event—meeting up with Uncle Al, Aunt Peggy, Michael, and Tom in Trenton and together hitting all the Florida attractions within a couple hours’ drive of their home. My brother and I marveled at the curvaceous mermaids at Weeki Wachi and glided over crystal waters in glass-bottomed boats in Silver Springs, a “nature theme park” in Ocala. And of course, we screamed in the Haunted Mansion and giggled through Mister Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney World.

But we had just as much fun swimming in the snake-infested waters at Hart Springs and tubing lazily down the Itchnetucknee River near Trenton. My brother was even brave enough to try water-skiing in the river till my cousins told him to hail them with a wave if he saw a gator slide into the water. After a face-saving spin on the skis he hopped right back into the boat.

Once we hit adolescence my slightly older cousin Michael and I discovered other shared interests. Soon after my family pulled into Trenton in “Old Paint,” our family Chevy, Michael would say, “want to take a ride, Debbie?” and we would jump into his battered pickup truck. Driving down some long dusty country road bordered by watermelon fields, we’d see another pickup filled with his friends in the distance, stop side by side and pass a joint back and forth between the trucks. Michael always introduced me as his “Yankee” cousin and teased me about how fast I talked. On one memorable occasion when our families were vacationing together in Fort Walton Beach on Florida’s Gulf panhandle, Michael proposed drinking Kool-Aid mixed with the juice of psilocybin mushrooms before a family dinner at Howard Johnsons. After dinner we took our little brothers to see The Deep with Jacqueline Bisset and laughed through the whole movie, which was not a comedy.

Those were halcyon days to be sure, and a lot more fun than our latest meeting, which was shadowed by my uncle’s looming death, which none of us could bring ourselves to acknowledge. Instead, we sat in the living room, where his hospital bed faced the big flat screen television, and urged him to drink water from the pink and purple sippy cup I bought him at the Dollar General as he could no longer drink from a regular cup without spilling. We worked in teams to turn his emaciated body from side to side to ward off bedsores. We brought him back mashed potatoes from the barbecue joint where we went to dinner and cheered when he took a few bites.

And we talked politics. On the ride down from Jacksonville, my cousin Tom, a budget analyst for the Florida Department of Corrections, had pointed out four razor-wired prisons on the highway between Jacksonville and Trenton. The prison system is one of the top employers in North Florida, he told my mom and me. But the Republican governor and legislature are itching to privatize corrections and he is worried about his job. “I’ll have thirty years service next year,” he said, sitting in his dad’s wheelchair, which has become just another sitting option in the living room. “But I don’t think I’ll be around for forty.” Like his dad, who retired from the Air Force at forty-one, Tom is pretty sure he’ll have a second career doing something else. Though he never said so, I’m pretty sure he will be voting for the Democratic ticket this fall.

Meantime, Michael works for one of the few manufacturers left in Florida, making boats. He’s been there for twenty-eight years but is worried about how he’ll pay the bills when he has to take off for a couple of months following surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff. He doesn’t have disability insurance and doubts that he will be able to get workmen’s comp, though it is clear that the injury is caused by years of hard physical labor. His wife is worried that if he takes time off, his employers will fire him. Nonetheless, he is planning to vote for Mitt Romney because, he says, “he fixed Massachusetts.”

Tom says that Florida was a solidly Democratic state for decades, but that battles over abortion and gay rights pushed the state into the Republican camp. I wondered aloud how that could be. My aunt, a Republican who used to work for the Board of Elections, said that the state’s Democrats no longer felt at home in the party. “The party left them,” she said. “They didn’t leave the party.”

My uncle, a lifelong Democrat, roused himself to croak a single word—“Dixiecrats”—before slipping back into dreams.

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Deborah Rudacille is an independent journalist and science writer. Her first book, The Scalpel and the Butterfly (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), was named one of the year’s best nonfiction books by the Los Angeles Times. The Riddle of Gender (Pantheon, 2004) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her latest book, Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town will be published in January 2010. She teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

MY LIFE IN THERAPY

by Marion Winik

Not long after I moved to Baltimore in 2009, I realized that I needed help. I was still a mess about the implosion of my marriage, I was having no luck with dating, and neither hot yoga, white wine, or what was left in the prescription bottle from the last time I sprained my ankle was killing the pain. However, having been in therapy on and off since seventh grade, I knew well that finding a therapist is no easier than finding a boyfriend and often “help” is not a good description of what you get.

The first psychiatrist I ever saw was a Chinese-American woman with a son in my middle-school honors science class. I was sent to her after I wrote a long, spooky, cry-for-help type poem and swallowed a bottle of Excedrin. A C- in seventh-grade English (I think we would now call this a Jewish F) and a broken heart were the nominal causes of my nervous collapse but I was also fascinated by mental illness as portrayed in books like I Never Promised You A Rose Garden and The Bell Jar. Ah, that Sylvia Plath. An ongoing danger to America’s young romantics.

I would later realize that by limiting her responses to mmhmm-mmhmm and tossing any question I asked back to me, my inscrutable therapist was following classic psychoanalytic procedures. At the time I thought she was one of the most annoying people I’d ever met. To her credit, she did manage to explain some of my self-esteem issues to my bewildered parents, who were as always just trying to help me. But the approximately fourteen doctors I was seeing at the time, including a speech therapist, were making me feel like The Elephant Man instead of just a somewhat chubby, slightly pigeon-toed, crooked-toothed, lazy-eyed preteen. The physical issues were all eventually fixed or went away on their own; my sad little soul would prove more intractable.

My teen years featured an old-hippie psychologist my sister Nancy and I both saw, sometimes together. He said we should bring as many of friends as we liked. He smoked bidis with us—Indian clove cigarettes rolled in leaves, very popular in the ’70s—and hypnotized me to help me lose weight. One session involved me descending into an imaginary theater and visualizing my favorite food making an entrance on the spotlit stage. My favorite food was Dannon vanilla yogurt.

He explained to me that this symbolized the male orgasm.

Also around this time I participated in a therapy group run by the mother of one of my high school friends in her basement. Grassroots-style group therapy was quite a craze back then, as were bean bag chairs, blond-veneer paneling and shag carpeting, and everyone in our drama-club clique crowded down the stairs to the bi-weekly meetings, not wanting to miss a moment of the action. “Group,” as it was known, was less like therapy than like an MTV reality show thirty years before its time, with all the parties to every slight and betrayal on hand for its confession, a domino-effect freak-out waiting to happen.

For example, when I stupidly messed around one night in a red Chevy Nova with Billy Donnelley, who was not my boyfriend but who reportedly had porn-star type anatomical equipment so often discussed by the boys in our crowd that it was difficult not to be curious about it, the big showdown occurred in a room that contained Billy, my boyfriend, me, all of our various siblings, other girls who had had indiscretions with Billy Donnelley, their menfolk, and our well-meaning, middle-aged group leader. Though Billy and I had not gone all the way, things were never the same again for me and my sweet, young boyfriend. Ah, those stupid ’70s. Like Sylvia Plath, another wellspring of dubious inspiration and poor moral guidance.

In college, where I had developed a pioneering case of bulimia, I saw a Student Health psychiatrist who made me so mad with his insistence that my eating problem was really a sexuality problem that I threw my purse at him in our second session. I was a little edgy after the vanilla yogurt thing.

Still I wasn’t completely discouraged, though I continued to have meager success. More obsessive love, more body image issues, now throw in substance abuse . . . in my twenties, I practically drove a young Jungian therapist into another line of work. I was losing patience, too. At one point, I actually threatened to sue a guy who listened to me for a couple hours, diagnosed me with ADD, wrote me three prescriptions, and sent me a bill for $1,369. Multiple couples counselors threw up their hands at both my first and second marriages. When I started to believe one of my kids was a dangerously manipulative charmer who had everyone around him bewitched with his lies, I of course sent him to see a therapist as well. She called me after a few visits to tell me that I shouldn’t worry about my son. Everybody lies a little! And he was so charming.

Unbelievably, none of these experiences had destroyed my faith in therapy and so I set out once again to be healed, this time in the living room of an elderly, cadaverous, former Episcopal priest whose main advantage was that he was right in my neighborhood. On our first visit, he said he wasn’t sure he could help me with my problems, since they were so severe. On our second visit, he decided he’d rather not hear the pages and pages of dreams I had written down at his suggestion (though they seemed at the very least to be full of lottery number picks.) On our third visit, he pulled out his Bible and started reading aloud. When I called him the following week to cancel our next appointment, I got the impression I had barely beaten him to it.

Then I sprained my ankle for the third time that fall, and my friend Ken insisted I go the emergency room. Against my better judgment, I let Ken drag me to Patient First. While we were waiting I noticed a paperback copy of the book Desire, a memoir of sex addiction by Susan Cheever, on the chair beside me, atop a crocheted blue shawl. I picked it up to see if they had used a quote from the review I’d written of the book. They hadn’t, and I put the book back. Who was the person who had left it there, I wondered. When a friendly-looking, blond, blue-eyed woman gingerly carrying her hurt left arm in her right returned to claim her things, I told her I had looked at her book.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m a therapist!”—obviously wanting to dispel the impression that she was reading it because she was a sex addict.

“And I,” I quickly replied, “am a book reviewer.”

She was taken away to have her arm fixed. But as I sat there, I thought about the woman, feeling more and more drawn to her. This, I was sure, was my therapist. So I sneaked down the hall and peeked in the cracks between the curtains of the treatment rooms until I found her. She and her attending physician looked up surprised as I boldly swept in. “Can I have your business card?” I said.

I saw Tracy on Tuesdays, right after my hot yoga class. We talked about my ex-husband, of course, whose anger and blame were still very live issues for me, and about my recent bad experiences with the race-car driver in Annapolis. This seemed to exemplify another disastrous element of my character: the power of good looks and good kissing to blow my circuits. One does get to a point in life where it’s sort of exhausting filling in the same old back story, and then even more discouraging to realize how similar the new stories are. But Tracy was a good listener, neither a pushover nor a super-confrontational critic, and I never had to throw my purse at her once.

God knows I have always been too restless and impulsive and impatient for my own good, sometimes drastically so, and I have long suffered with the burning desire to climb out of my head and go someplace else, often with some sort of chemical assistance. While motherhood has made me a much healthier person—as it couldn’t Sylvia Plath—it didn’t fix every glitch. Tracy wouldn’t either, but she did help me out of the post-marital pain pit and onto more solid ground. I miss her, which is more than I can say for most of my old pay-pals.

Just like love, therapy is always worth another try.

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Marion Winik is best known for her commentaries on All Things Considered since 1991 (collected at NPR.org) and is the author of eight books, including First Comes Love, The Lunchbox Chronicles, Telling, and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. She is a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and an expert on the ethics of creative nonfiction. A performer in the tradition of David Sedaris, she has read from her work in large and small venues all over the country. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore and writes the Answer Lady advice column for Ladies Home Journal.

THE ONLINE LITERARY MAGAZINE AS TRIGGERING DEVICE

by Dean Bartoli Smith

I.

“Discovery is the ideal. . . . When not writing a writer may search for a triggering device, and literature is one of several places to find it.”

– Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town

At a meeting of the Downtown Poets Club in San Francisco in June of 2010, the poet John Lane recommended Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town to me. He was talking about works that profoundly affected him as a writer and described it as a classic manifesto. The “club” consists of Lane, Alan Kaufman, William Taylor, and Kurt Lipschutz (nom de plume is “Klipshutz). They meet sporadically around the city for tea and impromptu readings.

A graduate of the Columbia MFA program and former masseuse, Lane works as a janitor who defends the rights of immigrant workers and writes his poems in a kind of self-imposed obscurity. He reads Roberto Bolaño (in the Spanish) on the freshly mopped corridors and caverns of Cal Berkeley in the middle of the night and cares deeply about printed books and their long-prophesized so-called digital extinction.

Out west on business, I traveled next to Salt Lake City in my role as director of Project MUSE and searched for Hugo’s book in Sam Weller’s independent bookshop downtown. I was there for the American Association of University Presses (AAUP) conference and to start recruiting publishers for Project MUSE Editions, a fledgling initiative to put several hundred eBooks on what had previously been a scholarly journals platform. This initiative has grown to 70 publishers and 14,000 eBooks as I write this. Project MUSE is not really a “project” at all, but a mature fifteen-year-old database of diverse scholarly journal content across 500 publications.

The helpful bibliophile at the information desk told me they had one copy left, but they could not locate it.

I took out my iPhone, downloaded the Kindle app, and searched for the eBook.  Published in 1979, it was available on Amazon and I read the entire collection of essays on my flight back to Baltimore—thumbing away the business card-sized pages and resurrecting my own desire to write poetry with what Hugo calls “a genuine impulse to write so deep and so volatile it needs no triggering device.” The reading experience on the iPhone screen took a heavy toll on my eyes after a couple of hours, but it was worth it.

Busy with a new job and relocation, I hadn’t written a poem in many months, but was struck and inspired by these lines:

“An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance…Writing is a way of saying you and the world have a chance….the real reward of writing—that special private way you feel about your poems…What endures are your feelings about your work.”

Staring out the window of the plane, I remembered my first publications and wondered if my favorite literary magazines had their own apps.

II.

“It’s a trick, it’s a con, a little inside game.”
“Sounds like you’ve been rejected.”
“I knew I would be. Why waste the stamps? I need wine.”

– Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

During that summer, I thought about expanding the collection of literary journals on Project MUSE.  When I lived in New York, Niko’s Magazine and Smoke Shop in the West Village carried the best collection of literary magazines from around the country along with Drum tobacco, clove cigarettes, and Gitanes.  CityLights Bookstore in North Beach also had a great collection and a large room for poetry publications.

I want to create an online version of Niko’s or CityLights on Project MUSE. We already provide a digital home for Callaloo, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and The Hopkins Review, among others. The journals appear in full-text HTML and PDF at no cost to the publisher. Most of these publications also offer their own dynamic and visually interesting websites—all of which are fully discoverable. This expanded collection would enable us to provide a sustainable model for these magazines to earn meaningful royalties from libraries and provide access to the emerging new voices of the next generation of writers in 60 countries around the world—just as we had done for scores of smaller scholarly journals being published in the back offices of universities.

Scanning the market, I soon discovered that online literary journals have triggered a sea change in the world of creative writing.

Publications like Drunken Boat, Blackbird, Ducts, and Beltway have transformed the landscape and built steady readership communities. Online submission systems have made it very easy to engage with these publications for editors to access poems and stories and make their comments.  Rejection rates and quality standards remain high and costs are down.

Blackbird rejects 96% of all submissions.

In Ham on Rye, Bukowski’s character Henry Chinanski refers to The New Yorker and Harper’s as a “waste of stamps.” He submitted one story per week to those publications for years before breaking through. Gone are those halcyon days of sending poems as if by carrier pigeon to receive a handwritten comment from a well-known editor along with a rejection slip. I still have mine from Alice Quinn. Twenty years ago, there seemed like only a few places to send work to: River Styx, TriQuarterly, Poetry, Poetry East, Paris Review, The Southern Review and The New Yorker.

There were experimental attempts in the late ’80s to energize the writing scene such as The Big Wednesday Review which published a few volumes and would convene “The Wheel of Poets” in places like the Night Café on the Upper West Side where writers would receive a number and read when the serendipity of the wheel called them forward. Bruce Craven channeling Adam West played Alex Trebek and Jennifer Blowdryer, a disaffected Vanna White.

Poets from writing programs found refuge at the Nuyorican Poets Café which gave rise to the Spoken Word scene and can be traced to the current work of DC poet Sarah Browning and her “Split This Rock” conference and her “Sunday Kind of Love” series. On hiatus for the last few years, Lolita and Gilda’s Burlesque poetry hour in DC’s Bar Rouge involved writers auctioning a piece of clothing or an accessory.

Technology continues to drive new channels of engagement between writers, readers, and editors.

Thomas Beller’s Mr. BellersNeighborhood.com is a digital expansion of The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section. The stories are accessible on an interactive map of New York City by neighborhood. Online salons and workshops offer real-time critiques for those trying to hone their craft.  DC poet Gregory Luce uses Facebook to workshop his poems in a closed group.

What about poetry readings via Webex?

Along with an abundance of MFA programs, literary journals have exploded to the point where hundreds of publication tables at the annual AWP Meeting can barely be contained in two massive halls. MFA programs are actively recruiting the best students. Literary journals are becoming digital villages or communities around a particular aesthetic.

Upstart journals like Smartish Pace (the Wilco of literary journals) and 32 Poems have employed all forms of digital media to rise to the top of the lit mag heap in a relatively short time.  They exist purely for the love of the game—stripped of pretension—for good poems in all their forms.

The online literary journal embraces the possibility of what it is coming.

Imagine a linked digital “mitochondria” of literary journals, eBooks of poetry and criticism, fiction, non-fiction, along with scholarly journals, monographs, and reference works linked and discoverable. Envision a database of publications as the mechanism or “trigger” of discovery where you will be able to trace the first instances of a poet’s publications to the criticism and the book reviews and even the original manuscripts and the marginalia.  Writers, teachers, researchers, and students could thus share reading lists, facilitating collaborative research projects and other forms of social reading (e.g. book clubs, guided reading lists).

I could have used such a product when reviewing the New Directions reissue of Spring and All by William Carlos Williams last summer.  The first 300 copies of the book had been destroyed in the 1920s and it was released after his death in 1963. My first instinct was Kindle—no such luck. The facsimile edition arrived in its original 1923 cover—light blue with black type. I found an article about Spring and All on Project MUSE and utilized my print copy of the collected volume filled with the hazy marginalia of my undergraduate years.

I found myself wanting to see the original digitized manuscript and the criticism side-by-side with annotation functionality and an option to generate commentary and access ratings from the scholarly community—all on my iPad.

III.

“The transition from the codex to the presently evolving electronic book, the fourth form of the book in history, will not happen overnight . . . to take one example, the roll-form book persisted for four centuries after the successful introduction of the codex.”

– Frederick G. Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book

In Campbell McGrath’s new book The Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys, “The Custodian” describes a conversation with his long-time friend and poet John Lane.  In it, Lane worries about the death of the book.“But books have been my whole life, he said. What will we do without them?” Lane would applaud the efforts of the Tampa Review, one of the only hardback literary journals still published today.  Its editors believe “that contemporary works resonate most powerfully within a great tradition.” With an emphasis on visual arts, it’s also referred to as “a gallery space in print.” Tampa Review also features an online submission system and a new online identity—the Tampa Review Online (TROn). Will TROn eventually replace the Review in print? No tablet, Smartphone, or e-reader has come close to replacing the “quidittas” or the “thingness” of the hardback book.  The printed book and journal still provide the most pleasurable browsing experience in existence.  Usage statistics confirm that scholars and writers prefer the PDF versions of articles and chapters, essentially “the pages of the novel on television” as a colleague of mine once referred to it, versus the HTML.

Tenure committees in the humanities and the social sciences remain wedded to print for advancement. Aside from the portability and convenience of an eBook, it has yet to prove more useful than the printed book. And, truth be told, it has to be turned off for take-off and landing—a good thirty to forty minutes of lost reading time.

I might one day allow the organizers of my estate to remove the fiction and non-fiction from my shelves, but not those precious divining rods of poetical expression such as Ariel, For the Union Dead, The Lost Pilot, Gathering the Bones Together, The Book of Nightmares, The Country Between Us, Quoof, The Other Side of the River, A Perfect Time, Pictures from Brueghel, The Vandals, and Capitalism.

I will take these to the grave.

TROn which ironically sounds like something from the Transformers will undoubtedly attract a larger audience on the web, be accessible to search engines, and expose the content to aspiring and established writers, students of creative writing, networks of its published authors and artists, and other literary journals within its growing cohort.

It may also serve as a catalyst to a young writer, or “a triggering device.”

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Dean Bartoli Smith’s poems have appeared in Poetry East, Open City, Beltway, The Pearl, The Charlotte Review, Gulf Stream, and upstreet among others. His book of poems, American Boy, won the 2000 Washington Writer’s Prize and was also awarded the Maryland Prize for Literature in 2001 for the best book published by a Maryland writer over the past three years. His fiction has appeared in Minimus, The Patuxent Review, and Smile Hon, You’re in Baltimore. His prose has appeared in Patch.com, Zocalo Public Square, The Baltimore Brew, Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore Magazine, The Catholic Review, Indiewire, and the Woodstock Independent. He received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and is director of Project MUSE, a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community.