Midway through Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights, she recognizes tone as though it were a found object held in her hand— a photograph of her daughter Quintana Roo, who died in 2009. It’s not stoicism that keeps her from staring at it but more of a kind of nimbleness (or agility?) of mind, flipping through a book of sketches of when Quintana was three years old, of when she got married—the stephanotis woven into her braid—and ultimately, when she passed away.
I am not well informed on the intricacies of the national budget, international trade policies, or even how exactly a hedge fund works. I’m embarrassed to say that I remain averagely ignorant on how exactly […]
To the New School Community:
New School students are encouraged to devise peaceful, practical solutions to long-standing problems of inequality. As events that began on Wall Street over the last few weeks continue to unfold on the international stage, some of our students are working with peers, questioning long-held assumptions, and picking up the mantle of leadership…
Occupy Wall Street has been building momentum for the past few weeks. Coincidentally, as the protesters set up camp at Liberty Plaza, I traveled upstate to help cater an annual party hosted by the CEO […]
Queer kids take their own lives all the time. For some reason last fall the media took notice and focused on the suicide of nine teenagers. In response sex columnist Dan Savage, with partner Terry […]
Poet icon Amiri Baraka was interviewed by Rebecca Melnyk in the 2011 edition of 12th Street. On May 9, 2011, at the Barnes & Noble launch of the 2011 journal, he read his controversial poem, “Somebody Blew Up America”. The audio below was recorded live by 12th Street Editor-in-Chief Jen Sky.
Justin Torres is the author of We The Animals. His stories have appeared in Tin House, Granta, Gulf and Glimmer Train, along with other publications. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
He will be giving a reading on Monday, September 12 at 6:30 pm at The New School, moderated by Jackson Taylor, associate director of the School of Writing. Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, room 510
As you begin reading We The Animals by Justin Torres it’s as though you hear a voice speaking from a lowly-lit room, lips close to the mic, beating out rhythms of familial images, both beautiful and grotesque, with a drumbeat at the end of every phrase, like rock-n-roll, like the wheels of a locomotive proving the force of its momentum: “We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of forks against the table, tapped our spoons against the empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riot.”
The narrative propels us with the voice of a sincere boy, the youngest of three brothers, son to a white mother, most of the time exhausted between graveyard shifts, and a machismo Puerto Rican father referred to as Paps. “Mutts,” he says to his boys. “You ain’t white and you ain’t Puerto Rican. Watch how a purebred dances, watch how we dance in the ghetto.”
It’s a slim book, less than a hundred and fifty pages. But even so, verse and metaphor are so precise, so well stitched that there aren’t any loose threads for meandering prose. We veer our attention towards the depths of how the story holds, not so much with length but with a sense of connection. One feels it when coming to the end of a sentence, when meaning punctures the semblance of human condition and a mirror is raised. You see yourself–I saw myself–and herein lies Torres’ gift, his economy of language that when strummed hits emotions with indomitable pitch. He’s a sort of Leonard Cohen capable of telling a round emotion in a single lyric.
But the issue of length also relates to a matter of time, like when one is swept up when seeing someone at first sight. If the connection is strong enough, well, you sense something immediately. But more often than not it takes days, weeks, to feel as though something has gone past the skin, straight to the heart; that’s when the undeniable attraction and connection is felt.
This book does that in an instant.
But it’s also in this instant where I feel it hesitates, where a few more pages (a little more time) would’ve offered a deeper connection or a longer affair with the reader. The intimacy and openness of the main character doesn’t resist sharing familial relations or sexual fantasies. He soon escapes the room he’s invited us into, almost as if he tells us his name, shows us a bruise, smiles innocently and then runs out the door — leaving us wanting to know where he’s off to. Because of this reluctance (in allowing us to stay with him), the tension never breaks and we are left curious from one page to the next.
Torres knows what he’s doing; we never cease to pay attention. The amalgam of curiosity and compassion elicited is what makes the novel one of the most tender pieces I’ve ever read. His chapters are confessions of the most pure and dangerous experiences told from a young boy, and it hardly bleeds, hardly needs to. The pages are sore and bruised with an honesty that escapes its own brevity, ending with a subtle and unexpected brilliance that is nothing less than inspiring.
*Please continue here for the interview:
TOMATOES— As banal a subject it might seem, there might be further possibilities of engagement with the tomato besides whether it’s heirloom or not and where to grow it. I’m speaking about its interpretative potential, […]
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don’t cheat with it. – Ernest Hemingway
If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper. – T.S. Eliot
Every disappointment is an opportunity in disguise. You’ll overcome this and move on to better things. This is what your friends tell you when you get those awful declines and rejections. Yes, it may be true and yes it may help to soothe the deep hole under the diaphragm that gets larger with each rejection letter, each ending, each failed appointment, each time we’re told, So sorry, yes, you were excellent, but there were others before you, better candidates. Yes, you’re at the top of the list, but we only have so much room. Try again next year.
I ask myself each time I’m rejected by a literary journal, magazine, an online outlet, a reading series, the school I love, the men I want to love— Why continue? Why not just give up and settle?
But this is what scholarly pursuits, writing, and I suppose even life is all about—Blind submission, acceptance, rejection, not-so-blind submission, rewards, and then some more rejection.
Since I read my first book and put my first words on the page (in red crayon) I’ve been on this path of exquisite torture. For every success, for every featured reading and published piece, there are seventeen rejections. A professor once told our class she papered her bathroom wall with her rejection letters. She’s got two published novels now and a slew of awards, so I guess the effort was well worth it. But how do we continue to find the courage to put ourselves out there and keep from falling into the pit of desperation and despair? How do we handle the fact that this is a solitary effort and maybe only a handful of our contemporaries have even an inkling of understanding the pressure? I’ve written way too many poems about why I drink too much, and my self-medicating habits don’t even come close to some of my fellow writer friends. There are days I just throw my hands up in the air and want to scream when the words won’t come, and days when I just sit and stare at the blank page, eyes and fingers crossed…
However, this is not about success or failure, it’s about lessons learned, and the will to go forward. It’s not about intelligence, ego, jealously, or empathy. It’s about shared experiences with fabulous, talented professors and fellow students, and mostly, it’s about growth. Our 12th Street team grew tremendously over the past two years and two issues. We sat at the table together and drank wine, poured over submissions, devised our strategy for the journal, and then worked to create the best undergraduate literary journal in the country (as awarded by AWP this year!). We have much to be proud of and will be leaving a strong legacy to uphold.
Real writers never settle (though we do tend to overindulge). We polish and perfect, re-write and edit, beat ourselves up over syntax and language, cry over misprints and typos and then start with a fresh clean page. So, with this in mind, I’m writing my farewell letter as Editor-In-Chief of this website and as Managing Editor for the last two issues of 12th Street Journal. My years at New School in The Riggio Writing & Democracy Program have whittled me down to a fine tuned, open mouthed, well honed, Honors Graduate and yet I still feel unfinished, in need of strong cuts and edits. I’ve been trying to take some time for growth, give space for new opportunities and learn to see just where those cuts and edits make the most sense.
The new team is getting set to take over and I’m getting set to let go, but first, I want to present you with a taste of what we came out of the program with. Following are poems by 2011 Riggio Graduates – Sylvia Bonilla, Rebecca Melnyk, Luke Sirinides and me. We all possess creative strengths and weaknesses, we all owe much to the Riggio Program, to the concepts of Writing and Democracy, to our shared experiences, rewards and disappointments, and we will all move forward in the writing world in our own individual forms.
To the next group coming on board this fall, I offer my warmest wishes for a wonderful learning experience, a shoulder to lean on when the going gets rough, and my support, encouragement and aid wherever and whenever needed in order to continue this most worthy and excellent endeavor.
Always be a poet, even in prose – Charles Baudelaire
The Association of Writers & Writing Programs is pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 National Program Directors’ Prizes for Undergraduate Literary Magazines. Instituted by the directors of AWP member creative writing programs, the […]
On Saturdays in June, Violet would take her Granma for fruit smoothies. She would find her Granma among the other patients, sit her in a wheelchair, sign her out for the hour and wheel her […]
The Social Climbers Handbook Reviewed by Stephanie Spiro “But manslaughter was what happened when rich or famous people killed someone; they got convicted of manslaughter. They didn’t murder people; that was something vulgar, like wearing […]
The Sex Queen’s Daughter Slashes the Social Ladder MOLLY JONG-FAST THE SOCIAL CLIMBERS HANDBOOK “My book is coming out in 23 days and I can feel myself slipping into prebook insanity … not as bad […]
12th Street News The fourth issue of 12th Street Journal is printed and shipped. Please come join us for our launch at Barnes & Noble’s Union Square bookstore in NYC on Monday, May 9 at 7:00 […]
Interviewed by Liz Axelrod, Editor-In Chief
“She could do with her body what she wanted, everyone knew that; the body was just a fleshy vehicle of consequences. Her mind was virtual—free, even, to make false separations”— From “The Substitute” a story in Lynne Tillman’s latest collection, Someday This Will Be Funny.
As a New School Professor, Lynne Tillman brings a fresh angle to her courses. In her close reading seminar, students look at writing from many different angles: through the camera lens, via the film director’s eye, and into the novelist’s vision and writing process. As a fiction writer and essayist, Ms. Tillman’s work brings to mind freedom of expression, masterful creation and a love of language. Tillman’s novels include No Lease on Life, Cast in Doubt, Motion Sickness, Haunted Houses and American Genius, A Comedy. Her first collection of short stories, Absence Makes the Heart was followed by The Madame Realism Complex and This Is Not It. Her nonfiction work includes The Broad Picture, a collection of essays that were originally published in literary and art periodicals, The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-1967, and The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.
Lynne Tillman will be reading from Someday This Will Be Funny at the 12th Street Online Launch at Barnes & Noble on Thursday, March 31 at 7:00 p.m., and discussing writing and media with Ross Kaufman, an Academy Award Winning documentary producer whose short film “Wait For Me” can be found by clicking on the Audio and Video link above.
12th Street Online crafted this interview over the internet, via email.
12th Street Online: You’ve studied theories of different media, such as film and photography, as well as writing. How has that affected how you approach the scope and scale of your work?
Lynne Tillman: All art forms have specific materialities, problems –scale, for instance, in a photograph, framing in both film and still photography. Painting is usually done on a flat surface, in a rectangle or square. Then there’s color, positive and negative space. Questions of time exist in all forms. So, thinking about these questions in various art forms and practices, I might subject my writing to them; I can borrow or steal an idea and try to adapt it, or be helped by ways visual artists have made their work. Other imaginations soothe me, and spark my own.
12th Street: Do you find that your stories favor certain “styles”—narrative distance from the subject, pace, length, time-frame, genre, etc., or does the style vary depending on the story?
TiIlman: I try to find a shape or style that fits the story I’m telling. But the story I’m telling necessarily develops along with the way it’s being told. Usually I have no idea of how I’m going to write it. I’m hoping to find it as I proceed, word by word. I consciously try to come up with ways of approaching a story that challenges me, in any way I can, mostly to keep myself interested.
For a good two years living in New York City, I was bitter each time I would see a couple out in public holding hands or making out, because I was single—eating alone, going […]
Every couple years, I pick up three or four of the bestsellers I’ve heard a lot about but put off reading for one reason or another. Books like The Kite Runner, The Lovely Bones, The […]
I click my heels three times. There’s no place like home.
New York is an electric mess of metal and concrete, noise and people. Slick and buzzing, a thin layer of ice covers a worn grid etched over a tiny island. An emerald city is dying inside the snowy mist and grime. It erodes by the water, wheezing. It’s called The Cherokee. This is my building and I was entirely unaware of its unique history when I moved in about 6 months ago.
The Cherokee – a hidden oddity beyond the freezing rain-soaked streets – below York Avenue, squats over an entire block. The building is painted like an emerald inside the city. It’s a historical relic and one of the city’s most natural, hidden museums. This summer when I answered an ad on Craigslist, I sprinted over in the crippling heat and humidity to see the place. Ornate green arches greeted me. The building itself, felt steeped in another time, like a Parisian Belle Epoque. It’s sepia-toned and splashed with layers of green – green doors, emerald banisters and railing. The walls arch and creak over an outdoor staircase.
Immediately after I saw the façade of the building, I applied to live there. I don’t know why I was inexplicably drawn to this fossilized landmark building, but soon after I moved in, I started googling its history.
The Cherokee was erected in 1909, funded by the Vanderbilts. Originally referred to as “The Shively Tenements” (named for Dr. Shively, the man who dreamed the place up), the massive building consumes the entire block. It once served as medical housing for poverty-stricken New Yorkers with tuberculosis. The project was scrapped after four years and the building became a cooperative by 1924. Decaying along the riverside, the Cherokee is a stalwart emerald city within the city, aging under collecting layers of paint. Unchanging and magnificently faded, it reaches to the river, eroding under the city’s artificial light.
At 3:20 a.m., I was dressed and standing in front of the mirror in my bedroom. My bedroom was not large, about fifteen feet by ten, with a window facing west, and several posters on the wall. There was one of Don Mattingly, the Yankees’ first baseman, his glove on the ground waiting to stop any baseball from getting by. Another was of Debbie Gibson, in concert, as well as a poster of a topless Samantha Fox. I stared back at the mirror and smiled. Today was supposed to be the beginning of something special; today was the beginning of my mother and I reconnecting.
My mother and I used to be really close. We could talk about anything. We would stay up late watching television and drink hot chocolate with marshmallows. This changed, however, when I was fourteen years old and she decided to come out of the closet by having her lover tell me that she was gay.
My mother walked into my room and seemed to be in a good mood. “I didn’t think you would be awake,” she said, fixing my collar.
“What? Shit, mom, I’m not gonna miss this trip for nothin’,” I said.
“Good, I’m gonna have a cup of coffee, want some?”
I nodded and she left the room.
We had grown apart. Arguments and disrespect dominated the airways of our tiny home. After my mother came out, Isabel, her lover, moved in with her “entourage” of four kids cramming eight people into our two-bedroom apartment.
We exited the building and were greeted by the cold winter morning air. The wind was blowing fiercely, and I loved it. The streets were filled with mountains of dirty snow, and the pavement had that white coating left behind by the snowplows. My mother had borrowed her best friend’s car: a blue 1983 Chevy Nova. It was three years old with light-blue cloth seats and the Puerto Rican flag hanging from the rear view mirror. It was very clean, smelled like cinnamon, and it had a cassette player.
We were on our way to Buffalo to visit a lady, a lady my mother was playing dirty with behind Isabel’s back. The lady was named Jennifer, and my mother had met her in a gay club called Aries, in the Bronx. Jennifer, a court stenographer, had been in New York City visiting her friends for the weekend. They hit it off, and the affair soon followed. My mother’s philandering never surprised me. It would not have been the first time she strayed. My mother was also having an affair with a lady that lived on the fourth floor of our building. All this despite being in an “exclusive” relationship with Isabel. My mother sat in the driver’s seat, placed the key in the ignition and turned it on. The inside was freezing, and she quickly turned on the heater.
AWP Recap by Liz Axelrod
Every year thousands of writers, professors, school teachers, students, Ph.D. candidates, publishers, booksellers, bloggers, posers, and other assorted literary peddlers and pushers convene en masse in a chosen locale for the annual Association of Writer and Writing Programs Conference—a locale most definitely not ready or even aware of the magnitude of this population’s thirst for words, wishes, deals, dollars, companionship and alternative states of wordly being. That said, Patrick Hipp—our 12th Street Interview Editor—noted the very best Tweet of the conference: “Dear Marriott, next time 8000 writers descend upon your premises, it might be a good idea to have more than two bartenders.” I add to that that it also might be good if those bartenders were able to move at a pace a bit above that of a leisurely slug. If you’re going to charge us twelve bucks for a rum and Coke, it would be nice if we could get it before the ice melts. Thanks.
This year’s conference was held in Washington, DC, just a short hop, skip and Amtrak away from New York City. Optimal for me. I arrived a day before my crew to help set up our table at the Book Fair and in hopes of a private night of fun and debauchery. Unfortunately, my wishful candidate for said night opted for a younger, thinner, taller, more Asian version than me. Without warning I was thrust upon the two of them at the hotel bar after spending the earlier hours at Busboys & Poets watching the Word for Word readers make Mindmeld graphs on a wall—don’t ask, I have no idea. I was fortunate though to hear Brittany Perham read some sexy poems right up my alley, and not fortunate to hear an editor read his poet’s work. Note to editors: even if your poets are snowed in, it might be better to have them phone into the reading. This way you won’t get tangled in their line breaks and the poem won’t end up sounding like Forrest Gump with a mouthful of chocolate.
What if you broke your arm and a shaft of light came shooting out of your elbow? Or if your boyfriend left you and your chest glowed with brilliant radiance–the pain could be an illumination.
So is the basis of Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel The Illumination. He takes the most tragic of human condition, both emotional and physical, and gives it beauty that never ceases to reveal new interpretations of pain. A woman cuts her thumb and a sword of light shoots out of the wound; a young boy’s bum has a lit up square-edged mark from a paddle spanking; a girl’s skeleton swells white as disease rushes through her bones. Though written with lyrical and beautiful phrases, there is no uplift in this theme that one would normally ascribe with radiance, not in the figurative sense anyway. It has more to do with tenderness. In one scene, after a young Chuck Carter is beaten by fellow classmates, Mr. Brockmeier describes the episode: “For a few seconds, the light poured out like water. It hurt just a little too much to be beautiful.”
The six characters that are protagonists to each of their stories (a data analyst; a photojournalist; a schoolchild; a missionary; a writer; a street vendor) are all at a loss–not only from what is obvious, but from what is underneath them, emotionally and psychologically–and where there is injury, there is light. It’s a global phenomenon. One wonders if Mr. Brockmeier’s intention is to illicit a kind of empathy for those in pain, especially from members of the ‘fend-for-yourself’ culture. Would the immediacy of being able to witness pain invite more compassion? Perhaps, if you were to cross the street and see someone’s arthritic knees spark like a disco ball, you might be inclined to help him.
It isn’t just The Illumination that threads these six narratives; there is also a journal, a love diary: I love sitting outside on a blanket with you, my bare foot brushing against yours. I love how embarrassing you find your middle name. I love how irritated you get at smiley face icons, or, as I know you love to call them, “emoticons.” I love seeing your body turn into mosaic through the frosted glass of a hotel shower. The diary is comprised of reasons why a husband loves his wife. But they get into a car accident. Carol Anne, one of the protagonists, shares a hospital room with the wife for whom the journal is written. The wife, before she dies, gives the diary to Carol Anne, and from one story to the next, the journal ventures on its own journey, coming across characters that find themselves touched by the emotional radiance it reveals.
