On the Road Again (with Sundog Lit)

Sundog Lit has a road-thumping, tire-biting, asphalt-meltingly wonderful new issue — (Letters from) the Road — edited by Brevity contributor Jill Talbot.  We especially love the digital work by Eric LeMay (full disclosure, he’s on the Brevity Board of Directors) and the video essay by William Hoffacker, as well as work by Pam Houston, Marcia Aldrich, Lee Martin, Nicole Walker, William Bradley, B.J. Hollars … oh, cripes almighty, it would probably just be best to list the entire table of contents.  As for the theme, Here’s an excerpt from Jill’s marvelous intro, followed by a link to the issue itself:

A gas station in Beatty, Nevada in 1973. Twenty-two miles from here, off the U.S. 93, four cars with out-of-state plates laze in the parking lot of the Outlaw Motel. Who knows what’s really going on here? The blue sky looks so brilliant against the yellow sunflowers in a South Dakotan summer. A flock of blackbirds flies off a field somewhere near Columbus. And there on the side of the road, looking up and out at the surrounding emptiness, it wasn’t so difficult to imagine. The night train from Venice. Around the wide square driveway, down the hill and around the turnabout with the lit lantern beacon in the middle across the street from the red barn and the muddy yard. The road to Hana, the 68-mile highway that skimmed along beige cliffs, single-lane bridges. A road after a flash flood in San Angelo, Texas. The stacked stones of a roadside liquor sign in Ohio. We are half-way there. Speeding the curves of a road braced by the blue light of snow….  It is staggering to be here.

Read (Letters from) the Road

Why Don’t We Essay in the Road?

Jill Talbot discusses the ideas behind the upcoming special “road” issue of Sundog Lit, featuring “creative nonfiction and other works that blend genre, that bend and experiment, that rumble down new roads.” July 1 deadline. Full submission guidelines can be found at the end of the interview.

1. What inspired the theme for this issue, (Letters from) the Road?

When Justin L. Daugherty, the editor of Sundog Lit, announced that Brian Oliu would guest edit the first theme issue, Games,  I e-mailed Justin to ask if I might guest edit at some point, and in keeping with the one-word theme, I suggested Roads.

I write overwhelmingly about the road and connect with essays that do.  It would appear your editors do as well. Roxane Gay’s “There Are Distances Between Us,” Brenda Miller’s “Swerve,” Bob Cowser Jr.’s “By A Song,” B.J. Hollars’s “On the Occurrence of March, 20, 1981 and on the Occurrences of Every Night After,” Sven Birket’s “anti-road” essay, “Green Light,” Sean Prentiss’s “Tonight (the Big Dipper, You Leaving,” Steven Church’s “Overpass Into Fog,” and my own, “Stranded,”  all appeared in Brevity.

Every chance I had in graduate school, I got on 84 west out of Lubbock. Yet the moment I discovered I was drawn to roads in literature happened while reading a road scene in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and if you’ve read that novel, you know it’s a road of destruction and drunkenness. Desperation.

In fact, the tag line on the Easy Rider film poster in 1969 read: “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.”   And Steinbeck, in Travels with Charley: In Search of America, declares, “I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found,” as he acquires the Wolfean knowledge that You Can’t Go Home Again.

I like the way the road can be the catalyst for self-inquiry, how William Least Heat-Moon in Blue Highways discovers: “I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn’t known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.”

Road narratives are imbued with a search for what may not be found.  They’re a desire not to leave, but to leave something behind.  And because it’s a genre derived from the Western, a chord of violence or its threat trembles at least once within each narrative: Thelma and Louise. Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (or The Road). Don DeLillo’s Americana.  More recently, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.  Mary Miller’s The Last Days of California.

But it’s not all threat and edge. It’s also contemplative, ruminative. And for Virginia Woolf, a haunting—“For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then?”—just one of the questions she poses in “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.”   The road narrative offers side roads we never intended, but find.  For this reason, it is essayistic.

I worried announcing the special Sundog Lit issue as simply “Roads” would invite either clichés or Kerouac imitations, and I’m invested in the ways in which writers modify, innovate, and deconstruct conventions (essay and road).  So I wondered, “What would imply a voice of distance, of then/now, here/there, Wolfean/Woolfean wisdom?” And then I had it:  “(Letters from).”

2. Some people claim every essay is an experiment, given the root word assay, or “to try.”  So what, in the current state of the literary essay, makes an essay experimental?  

The essay foregrounds thought, what Phillip Lopate refers to as “an intuitive, groping path” which, paradoxically, is carefully crafted by the writer.  The essay is a sleight of hand.

So in that way, the experiment is the reader’s—we start reading, and we don’t know where we’re going, and we hope to be taken aback by what we find. What did Eric LeMay say on this blog not long ago?  Oh, yes:  “An essay, by its very nature, isn’t finished by an essayist; it’s finished by a reader.”

But I also think an essay is an experiment when it expands our thinking about the possibilities of the essay (form).  Dinah Lenney. Marissa Landrigan. Ander Monson. Always, always, Marcia Aldrich.

Jill Talbot

As to the experiment of the “(Letters from) the Road” issue: I’m seeking essays, first person fiction, prose poems, photographs, and digital work in order to usurp genre with mode and create an essayistic issue.

For example, one of my favorite journals is Smokelong Quarterly because each story takes essayistic turns.  Some examples:  Kevin Sampsell’s “True Identity,” Jeff Landon’s “Thirty-Nine Years of Carrie Wallace,” and Jennifer A. Howard’s “Amateur Trailmaking for $1600.”

I recently discovered Anders Carlson-Wee on a night when he read his poems to a hushed room, and I whispered out loud with awe: “Those are essays.”

So my aim for the issue is to expand and extend the idea of “essay” beyond the boundaries of genre.

3. Which do you like better, Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” or the Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?”

I am more (“Whiskey River”) Willie than I ever will be Beatle, that’s for sure, but this is an excellent opportunity to highlight the tone of Sundog Lit, a journal that “publishes writing that scorches the earth.”

So if you’re not familiar with the “rusty-nail” writing Sundog Lit publishes, listen to Paul McCartney wail “Let’s Do It In the Road”—his voice a rage, a ruin, the last mile of a day-long, desert-heat drive.

FULL SUBMISSION GUIDELINES TO SUNDOG’S SPECIAL ROAD ISSUE.

On Being an Inept Blogger

On her not-so-viral Backhand Blog, Marcia Aldrich discusses the perils and pitfalls of following the standard advice, “Your book is coming out? You should start a blog!”

One of my problems in blogging my book to fame was that it concerned suicide. Need I say more? I think I wrote a compelling book on the subject, but I am not a credentialed expert in the field and did not want to set up shop as one. I am a contrarian, as I’ve said, but it’s not just that—there’s something disturbing about me opining on that ultimate subject. Don’t you see the promotional possibilities? my friends asked. I could become an authority, create a publicity persona, speak  knowledgeably about my insights, give advice. Many writers have carved out a niche for themselves doing just this, and very profitably, I was told. My friends named highly visible writers who were also gifted entrepreneurs. There was just one little problem with this scenario: once the book was finished, I’d rather go all Oedipus on my eyes than say more about that suicide, reliving my friend’s death and the involuntary role I played in it. I’d rather have the book languish on the dustiest shelf in the world emporium of remaindered books if to sell it I had to perform his death over and over. I had done that in writing the book, and it was all I could do.

Read Marcia’s Full Post here

Brevity’s AWP Nonfiction Cheat Sheet: Saturday

And finally ….

Saturday 9 to 10:15 am

Wilson A, B, & C Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Mezzanine Level

S116. Moving Pictures, Moving Words: Essays in the Digital Age. (Ned Stuckey-French, Marcia Aldrich, Rebecca Faery, Doug Hesse, Philip Metres, Wendy Sumner-Winter) This panel will examine the impact of the digital revolution on the essay. We will address the following questions: How are the new media changing the ways we write, read, and teach essays? What can essayists learn from poets, novelists, filmmakers, bloggers, web designers, and hackers about what the digital future may hold? What problems and possibilities do these new essays present to magazine editors, anthologists, and book publishers?

Saturday 3 to 4:15 pm

Diplomat Ballroom
Omni Shoreham Hotel, West Lobby

S201. Shaping a Life: Voice, Structure, and Craft in Memoir. (Janice Gary, E. Ethelbert Miller, Ben Yagoda, Dustin Beall Smith, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Michael Downs) While fiction writers create entire worlds from scratch, those working in the nonfiction genre of memoir must struggle with the bulky material of an existing life. Like a sculptor working with a block of stone, the memoirist’s task is to shape and reveal, fashioning a well-formed text out of a lifetime of experiences. In this session, writers of memoir will discuss the challenges of the form including where to begin, structure and voice, material selection, and other craft considerations.

Saturday 4:30 to 5:45 pm

Executive Room
Omni Shoreham Hotel, West Lobby

S222. The Unfolding Story: Narrative Possibilities in Creative Nonfiction. (Steven Harvey, Joe Mackall, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Bob Cowser, Michael Steinberg) Stories emerge in works of creative nonfiction in a variety of ways. Sometimes they are told in a straightforward manner, but often they are truncated, muted, or implied—and each choice has consequences. What are the possibilities for storytelling available to the writer of nonfiction? What effects do these choices create? Does the genre place any limits on narrative possibilities? A panel of writers and editors will examine these questions about the tales we tell in creative nonfiction.

Brevity’s Bright and Sunny Summer 2010 Issue

We’ve launched a truly outstanding Summer 2010 issue, featuring twelve beautiful concise essays from Fleda Brown, Steven Church, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sarah J. Lin, John Calderazzo, Marcia Aldrich, Melissa Ballard, Erin Murphy, Danny Goodman, Lisa Groen Braner, Diane Seuss, and Jenny Spinner.

In our Craft Section, Drema Hall Berkheimer visits those moments when the muse seemingly has better things to do, and Sharon DeBartolo Carmack outlines the ways a writer can put proper flesh onto the bones of ancestral stories.

Also Book Reviews from Michelle Wittle, Kelly Ferguson, Patty Wetli, and J. Luise, and stunning photographs from Ryan Rodgers.

Come visit.

Note on Writing “Not a Good Day for Planting Root Crops”

Marcia Aldrich discusses the background to her essay, Not a Good Day for Planting Root Crops, in the current issue of Brevity:

This lyric essay began in an exercise I did with my undergraduate creative nonfiction students. The assignment focused on two separate objectives. The first asked them to experiment formally with the shape of their essay through segmentation. At a minimum they had to include three different kinds of segments and assemble them in an aesthetically pleasing and unifying way. I gave them suggestions: meditation on a color, targeting different senses, recreating overheard dialogue, memories of other places, a found poem. These suggestions were not intended to limit or prescribe what they might consider including in their essay. I talked about different modes as well—narrative, descriptive, meditative.

The second objective focused on observation and creating a mini-portrait of a nonfiction place. Here we talked about how to define our relationship to this specific place. Since the fountain area was located on campus near frequently used classroom buildings, the students were familiar with the place. We weren’t true outsiders, yet because the place was a public space, none of us lived there and most of us just passed through on our way to somewhere else.

Unfortunately it was the middle of March in Michigan when I did this assignment.  The timing of the assignment came to play an unexpectedly large role in what the essay came to be about.

I tried this assignment with my students as a test drive since I had made it up and I didn’t know what its difficulties might be. Segmentation has not come easily for me; I’ve been working to get the hang of it. This essay was a breakthrough and gave me invaluable experience about the complicated layering and textual intersections that can be accomplished through even a brief segmented essay. The segmented approach drove my discovery of the emotional layers in my experience of this place at this specific point in time and surprised me. 

Issue 26: Hot and Cold, Getcha Ready On

We are about a week away from launching our 26th Issue, themed Hot and Cold. Stay tuned for brief essays from A. Papatya Bucak, Aaron Teel, Marcia Aldrich, Mary Sojourner, Ashley Seitz Kramer, Patricia Twomey Ryan, Jill Christman, and Anne Panning, as well as a new craft essay from Philip Gerard and Bill Milligan’s review of Robert Root’s new book.  We are pleased.