Tuesday, July 25, 2017

2017 Bacopa Literary Review Prize Winners

Congratulations to our 2017 Bacopa Literary Review prize winners:

Flash Story Prize: "Excerpts From the Trakl Diaries"
Stephanie Emily Dickinson

In this four-part flash, Stephanie Emily Dickinson "explores and illuminates the short and tumultuous life of the brilliant Expressionist poet, Georg Trakl (1887-1914). Born into a middle-class Austrian family, this towering visionary fought the demons of mental illness and drug addiction before committing suicide in Krakow at age 27."

An Iowa native, Dickinson lives in New York City. Her novel Half Girl and novella Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her Love Highway, based on the 2006 Jennifer Moore murder. Her other books include Port Authority Orchids, Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, and the recently released collection, The Emily Fables.

Poetry Prize: "A Mote of Dust"
Claire Scott

According to some, "Our time here on earth is finite, and we better find our way off it sooner rather than later." Claire Scott's poem pulls us into that future: "have you thoughts of moving to Saturn / or Neptune or even Pluto / . . . maybe one night you will look out / and see a pale dot / a mote of dust in the night sky. . ."

An award-winning poet and Pushcart Prize nominee, Scott's work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Enizagam, Causeway Lit, and The Healing Muse, among others. She is the author of Waiting to be Called.


Creative Nonfiction Prize: "Caregiver's Journal: How to Survive, or Not"
Raphael Helena Kosek

"One of the most honest and heartfelt pieces I've ever written," says Raphael Helena Kosek of her "Caregiver's Journal: How to Survive, or Not."

Kosek's work has appeared in many journals and magazines including Big Muddy Poetry East, The Chattahoochee Review, Catamaran, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and Southern Humanities Review. Her chapbook, Rough Grace, won the 2014 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition and one of her essays tied for first place in the 2016 Eastern Iowa Review Lyric Essay Contest. She teaches American Lit and Creative Writing at Marist College and Dutchess Community College.


Fiction Prize: "Ignis Fatuus, and More, at Eleven"
Chad W. Lutz

"Ignis Fatuus, or 'foolish fire' (because of its erratic movement). 1. a flitting, phosphorescent light seen at night, believed to be due to spontaneous combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter. 2. Something deluding or misleading."

Chad W. Lutz is a runner, and you should be prepared for a read that will leave you breathless. Currently enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, California, and working toward an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction), Lutz's publications include The Chaos Journal, Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine, Fish Food, Gravel, Jellyfish Whispers, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Jazz Cigarette, and Route 7 Review.

*     *     *



Tuesday, July 18, 2017

2017 Bacopa Literary Review Honorable Mention

Congratulations to Bacopa Literary Review 2017 Honorable Mention winners:

Poetry Honorable Mention: "This is Not a Protest Poem"
Adrian S. Potter

Adrian S. Potter writes poetry and short fiction. He is the author of the fiction chapbook Survival Notes (Červená Barva Press, 2008) and winner of the 2010 Southern Illinois Writers Guild Poetry Contest. Some publication credits include North American Review, Obsidian, and Kansas City Voices. He posts, sometimes, on his blog.


Fiction Honorable Mention: "Cry on Command"

Joe Dornich

Joe Dornich is a PhD candidate in Texas Tech's creative writing program, where he also serves as Managing Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. His publications include Word Riot and Cahoodaloodaling.


Creative Nonfiction Honorable Mention: "Starvation"

Paddy Reid

Paddy Reid writes about army deserters in wartime, men such as his father, and the consequences for their families. He welcomes readers' feedback to his email address.


Flash Story Honorable Mention: "Terminal Trance"

Charlotte M. Porter

Charlotte M. Porter, published poet and award-winning fiction writer, lives in an old citrus hamlet in north central Florida. Enjoy her recent short fiction in Axolotl and her novella, Agnes Person, currently serialized by Visitant Lit. She is readying Falling from Grace, a short story collection, for press.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Leave a Trace of a Time and a Place

by Creative Nonfiction Editor Susie Baxter

Back in the 1990s when I was an acquisitions editor at Mosby, a health-science publishing house in St. Louis, a colleague gave me a tiny pillow on which she'd cross-stitched: "So many books . . . so little time." So true.

Frankly, I started out far behind most readers. As a youngster, 18 miles separated our home from the nearest library, and for several years our family owned no vehicle. Granted, we did have our own home library: Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Dad's high school world history book, a storybook of tales like "The Three Little Pigs," the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and five copies of the Holy Bible . . . It wasn't until I read Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca in high school that I fell in love with reading. 

The thought of becoming a writer myself never occurred to me until I lost my beloved grandmother. I decided I had to write about her, which led to writing down more and more memories, and eventually offering workshops to help others record their stories.

I think of myself as a recorder of history, leaving a trace of a time and a place that is no more, such as the Suwannee River flood of 1948:
Water began seeping up through the ground in early '48, the year Granny died, just as the onion sets were sending up healthy-looking green spikes . . . Since we'd become accustomed to seeing the river rise and fall, a little bit of water around the onions didn't seem like a big deal. After all, Daddy had planted at the right time; he relied on the Farmers' Almanac, which told him when the moon and stars were in the right positions for planting.

The almanac didn't tell him where to plant, though, and that year he'd planted the onions--five acres of them--on the lowest spot of ground on our property, an area we called "the bottom" . . . dark, fertile soil, unlike the dirt elsewhere on the place, which was similar to the white sand along Florida's beaches . . . 

Daddy rotated the crops every year to prevent disease, and that year he decided to plant the tobacco next to the onions . . . Mama and Daddy led the way along each row. Mama walked backward, facing Daddy, and we girls followed. Mama carried the plants in a cloth bag slung over one shoulder. She dropped the plants, one at a time, into the metal "tobacco setter," the planter Daddy toted . . .
Some farmers in the area owned modern planters that were pulled by tractors. The planting process, for us, was entirely manual, but the five of us moved together like a machine: 
     Drop plant. Drop setter. Squeeze lever. Step forward. Pack dirt.
Though it took less than ten seconds to put each plant into the ground, planting two or three acres took days.
By the time we finished that year's tobacco planting, water covered most of the nearby onion crop. Daddy said the onions might not make it, but then joked that we now owned "lake front" property.
Mama didn't even smile . . . She had never told us that when she was seven years old, she'd seen the Suwannee River flood the crops. "I spotted the very first sign of the 1928 flood," she told us later. "I noticed water seeping up from insect and gopher holes in the railroad ditch where I played."
~ 
Susie Baxter's memoir Pumping Sunshine: A Memoir of My Rural Childhood, is now available at Amazon.com. You can benefit from her experience as memoir writer and teacher with her recent book, Write Your Memoir: One Step at a Time.

Baxter says "The creative nonfiction Bacopa Literary Review publishes has a moving inner voice. It holds to the same standards as other literary forms while remaining grounded in fact." Examples here, here, here, here, here, and here.  


Saturday, July 15, 2017

Not Someday. Now.

by Associate Editor Cynthia D. Bertelsen

I began my writing life thanks to some little green men.

One morning, it was spring, I think, Mr. Richard Hawthorne, the only male teacher in the whole of Franklin Elementary School, asked my sixth-grade class to write short stories.

"About anything you want to write, that's it" he told us as he shuffled piles of papers on his old oak desk, as big as a small rowboat. I scrunched down in my seat at the back of the room, aimlessly pushing a pencil across the top of the lined paper in my three-ring binder notebook. My seat mate, Sarah, gnawed the pink eraser at the end of her pencil. We glanced at each other with a look that only best friends share. Today we'd probably say, "WTF," but then we just shrugged.

Sarah's green sweater fit a bit snug across her chest, the white plastic buttons gaping a bit here and there when she raised her shoulders. In that moment, with the flash of green, I knew what my story would be about. The little green men from one of my brother's sci-fi comic books I'd swiped a few days earlier, that's what. In big rounded letters of preadolescence cursive, I painted a word picture of the gleaming steel curves of a space ship manned by green men as tall as my three-year-old baby sister. I made sure to mention the cool reptilian texture of a green man's hand. The real story began when two little girls stepped into the silvery ship, which whisked them off to another planet, one thick with lush jungley plants, ponds burbling with water as clear as glass, and blueberry-dark skies. School didn't exist in that fabled place, because with one intramuscular injection of some mysterious substance, the girls became wise and learned and all-knowing in an instant.

Mr. Hawthorne wrote at the top of the first page of my story, "My wife and I loved your story. Keep writing. A+"

And I tried.

I yearned to live life as defined by Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. I hung onto a tattered copy of Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write through countless moves, from Gainesville, Florida to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and back again. For a long time, I thought of writing as frivolous, because I knew that doing what I loved did not necessarily mean the money would follow. The dollar sign turned out to be my biggest stumbling block. At times, rarely, money exchanged hands. Rejection letters piled up, too. I identified fiercely with a comment that Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez made to his mother, "After all, there are better ways to starve to death [than being a writer]."

It took a daunting bout of illness to wake me up.

I could no longer say, "No, not today. Someday, yes."

In other words, when the surgeon leaned over me in the O.R. and whispered, "Here we go," I stopped being a Someday Writer.

My preferred genre is creative nonfiction, in the form of essays laced with elements of storytelling. I've indulged that tendency in work such as "Why I Write, with Apologies to George Orwell," as well as in many articles and book reviews.
I could spend all my time reading what other people say about the world and what's in it and never write a word about myself, joining the passivity parade of today's technological culture. But if I don't write, I feel a weakness of spirit, a sense of Ennui spreading its wings and enveloping me in a vampiric kiss. I lose my juice, so to speak. On a day when I sit at the keyboard and finish what I start, well, that's a day filled with light, even if clouds strangle the sun and rain bleeds all over everything.
Fiction lured me, too. I'm hoarding an as-yet-unpublished novel following the trans-Atlantic journey of an English cunning woman, or witch in the parlance of some:
          That night had been a cold one, as a December evening would be in Colchester. She remembered the clip-clop of the horses' hooves, prancing into the village from the fields, their breath frothy and misting in the freezing air. Clutching Old Hortense's grimoire to her chest like a sick child, she'd patted the book of spells from time to time, as if to calm its grief at the death of its mistress. Julian detected an odd odor about it, too, a puzzling fragrance, of what exactly she knew not. It took the shape of a living being, nestled in her arms.
As a writer, and avid reader, I seek the telling detail, the lingual equivalent of what French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called the "decisive moment." Such a technique captures the essence of a character or place or an emotion in a flash, creating work that transcends the ordinary.

Those extraordinary little green men, as it turns out, taught me a lot about writing.

It is a lifelong process.

Writer and photographer Cynthia Bertelsen has published essays, book reviews, and photographs, both online and in print. Her book, Mushroom: A Global History, sprouted from her blog, "Gherkins & Tomatoes," while her magical realism novel-in-progress grew from the roots of medieval mysticism and herbal healing. For inspiration, she draws upon her experiences living and working in Mexico, Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti, Morocco, Burkina Faso, and France.

Friday, July 14, 2017

Flash is No Longer Only Fiction. . .

By Flash Story Editor Kaye Linden

Bacopa Literary Review 2017 submissions included "flash story," which can include creative nonfiction, memoir, fiction or a combination of these genres in 750 words or less, including micro-flash which might consist of 250 words or even fewer.

The criteria I look for in a flash story submission include these:
  1. Creative nonfiction, memoir, fiction, or a combination of these genres
  2. Tiny plot or character driven
  3. Compression: almost every word counts or carries meaning  
  4. A minimum of adverbs
  5. Focus on one scene or event
  6. A minimum of dialogue
  7. A great title
  8. Consistency of tense and point of view
  9. Fresh expressions without the use of cliches
  10. Riveting language or language that moves the reader
  11. Originality
  12. Story structure: a purpose, a beginning, middle and end with conflict, conflict, conflict and resolution.
Here's an example of my own 376-word flash story, written in response to the newspaper article cited below: 

The Future Legend of How Rising Seas Drowned Saint Augustine and its Famous Statue*
The first grain of sand to go slipped unnoticed into muddy seawater and high tide washed a small chunk from the base of Ponce de Leon's statue. Three teenage boys waded to the town plaza, climbed to the top of Ponce's helmeted head and practiced kissing his cold lips, slapping his face when Ponce didn't kiss back, and hanging upside down from the old head that bowed in shame at the youthful play. Perhaps Ponce felt jealous of young muscles and flexible limbs, or of the strength to climb statues and throw popcorn and peanuts from his slumped unyoung shoulders. He never did find the fountain, and with the Atlantic tide rising, rising, rising, his steel boots sucked down further, awash in brine. The boys knew, and Ponce knew, he was going under. Each evening the boys chopped off a finger, a thumb, a toe and the middle finger of the right hand became a tool to gouge out an eye, graffiti the shiny armor with she loves me, she loves me not, and scratch mud daubers and wasps from Ponce's ears. They removed one earlobe with the sawing up and down, down and up motion of a hacksaw, laughing at the crumbling little man as he lost one appendage at a time. The boys removed the mighty sword from the gallant gentleman and topped his head with the blade in a decapitation celebration, the step-by-step ritual of taking a great warrior down. Water washed over Ponce's knees while grains of stone fell away from the foundation in greater and greater chunks until Ponce leaned upside down, headless shoulders standing in water. One night, the boys stretched out drunk, across the rubble, across the broken fingers and toes, across the scraps of Ponce's heroic eyes, those eyes that once upon a time surveyed the fertile flowering of La Florida where surely his immortality lay.
        The water rose and rose and rose during the hurricane of 2019, a category six travesty, off the grid, never before witnessed, never before seen by the boys who drowned that night, never before seen by the city of Saint Augustine that drowned that night, never before seen by Ponce de Leon, whose hopes for a bright future drowned in rising seas.
*The Gainesville Sun, Florida, May 10, 2015: "Sea rise threatens Florida coast but no statewide plan"

See also: "How Can a Mother?"

Other Resources:
  1. Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Fifty Really Short Stories, edited by Jerome Stern. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996. Print.
  2. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field. Masih, Tara L. Brookline, MA: Rose Metal, 2009. Print.
  3. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers. Moore, Dinty W. Brookline, MA: Rose Metal, 2012. Print. 
  4. As this form can flash short and with impact, I refer readers to "Six One-Sentence Stories" by Bruce Holland Rogers. 

Thursday, July 13, 2017

35 Tips for Writing Flash: Four Keys to Revision & Writing Prose Poetry

Bacopa Literary Review Flash Story Editor Kaye Linden generously shares chapters from her book, 35 Tips for Writing a Brilliant Flash Story: a Manual of Flash Fiction and Nonfiction Writing.

CHAPTER 1 ("Small Frame")  
CHAPTERS 2 & 3 ("The House Theory" & "Slice-of-Life Stories")
CHAPTERS 4 & 5 ("Compression, Minimalism" & "A Striking Title")
CHAPTERS 6 & 7 ("First Few Lines" & "I Want It But I Can't Have It...")
CHAPTERS 8 & 9 ("Kaye's Rule of Six C's" & "Compressed Scene/Story Line")
CHAPTERS 10 & 11 ("Stimulus/Response, Chronological Order" & "Whose Story Is it?")
CHAPTERS 12 & 13 ("Moving the Story Forward" & "The Shape of Flash")
CHAPTERS 14 & 15 ("Consequences of Desire Thwarted" & "Characters")
CHAPTERS 16 & 17 ("Setting, Weather, and Crowds as Characters" & "A Sense of Meaning")
CHAPTERS 18 & 19 ("Point of View" & "Tense Choice")
CHAPTERS 20 & 21 ("The Ticking Clock" & "Chekhov's Gun")
CHAPTERS 22 & 23 ("Don't Underestimate Your Reader" & "Word Weight")
CHAPTERS 24 & 25 ("Concrete Details/Imagery" & "CUT Adverbs/Adjectives")
CHAPTERS 26 & 27 ("Dialogue" & "The Verb 'To Be'")
CHAPTERS 28 & 29 ("Subtext/Implication/Backstory" & "Myths and Tales")
CHAPTERS 30 &31 ("Surprise the Reader & "Sentence Structure/Phrases")
CHAPTERS 32 & 33 ("Fixed and Experimental Forms" & "Mastering the Genre")

CHAPTER 34
 The Four Keys to Revision: C.O.A.P.

  • Cut: eliminate unnecessary words, backstory, fillers 
  • Organize: ideas into a consistent and cohesive story line 
  • Add: fill gaps in clarity, add a word or line of dialogue to clarify a confusing story 
  • Polish: Perfect the grammar, check for consistence in point of view and tense, and the story's clarity. Review all previous tips and apply to your story. Voila. Time to submit the story for publication!

CHAPTER 35
A Few Tips About Prose Poetry

Length does not define prose poetry, but length is one parameter that defines flash stories.

Poetry is about language and poetic device such as similes, alliteration, sentence structure, broken lines, verses, imagery.

Language in flash is concise and intense as in poetry, but does not flow into poetic devices or employ traditional forms, such as villanelles or sonnets. However, one can experiment with fixed forms in flash.

Flash most often carries a story line involving conflict and a change in the main character or situation. Poetry need not.

Poetry emphasizes the placement of words and is defined by line breaks.

Narrative poetry, prose poetry, and flash stories can overlap.

In poetry, the description can be a technique in and of itself and offers an overall image for the reader. In flash, the description must advance the narrative.

Poetry need not and often does not contain a plot. Flash usually, but not always contains a compressed plot.

When readers pick up poetry, they have a different set of expectations than on reading flash stories. They expect a story when reading flash, but do not expect a story when reading poetry.

Prose poetry asks readers to lay aside their rules and judgment and prepare for a surprise, a wild ride. Readers must make larger jumps than with flash, and read more deeply into subtext.

Prose poetry lends itself well to experimental writing and mixed forms.

Above all, remember to read your work aloud because this is the best way to hear mistakes, catch skips in rhythm or misplaced beats, hear inconsistent pacing, tense or point of view shifts.

Feel free to visit Kaye Linden's web site, contact her there, and sign up for her blog.



Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Cleave Poetry

By Editor in Chief Mary Bast

Typically for these blog posts, I search the web for lessons and links relevant to the work we've published. And as a poet I've experimented with poems broken into parts. But I've only found one site that refers to these as "cleave" poems. The Cleave hasn't been active since 2010, but I like the description there of "a poem that is really three poems:"
  • two parallel vertical poems (left and right)
  • a third horizontal poem that fuses the vertical poems
The verb "cleave" is a perfect label, with its two opposite meanings: (1) "to sever or divide along a natural grain or line" and (2) "to stick fast, to become strongly involved or emotionally attached to."

Last year's Poetry Editor Kaye Linden and I particularly love Jacob Trask's "Splintered" (Bacopa Literary Review 2016) because it does all of the above, and also reflects upon itself in its title and its shape:
                Splintered

     the crack   in the frame
      is thin   almost nonexistent
    it runs   parallels
  from top   peak
    of jamb   too far
        almost   impossibly
   to the floor   it's in my head
    only through   this determined
     observation   everything
              all of it   the thought of it even
has been found   scarred, maybe
 deeply fractured   broken

Jacob Trask is a graduate student studying English with a focus in creative writing, The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

A Voice That Sirens Our Souls

By Bacopa Literary Review Editor in Chief Mary Bast

We've raved before about Stephanie Emily Dickinson's work, with a sample story from her lyrically charged chapbook, Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg. In response to Dickinson's latest work, Bacopa Flash Story Editor Kaye Linden says "The amazing skill in Stephanie's use of language is that we don't even realize her voice has sirened our souls."

Below are comments from the back cover of Dickinson's The Emily Fables:
Stephanie Dickinson's homage to her grandmother and the lost world she inhabited . . . These beautiful, strange "fables" can read at times almost like scenes from Grimms' fairy tales yet are very American and barely a century gone. Catherine Sasanov.  

Her works are all about the lucid, arresting turns of phrase that make language as surprising and re-readable as it should be. Chila Woychik, essayist and editor of Eastern Iowa Review

Sometimes we feel it is a spirit that lives within the narrator, a dybuk, that shares her mind, strums her emotions with its willful dissonances. Rosemary De Angelis, Director, New York Drama Desk, Award Winning Actress
With permission, here is "Emily and the Ewes" from The Emily Fables:
1887. Someone left me in the orchard, my father said, and since it was January when they waded through the new snow beneath the apple tree, the one that had always favored us with red fruit, their boot prints iced solid. My father was carrying water to the old ewes, whose tarpaper shed leaned against the gnarled tree. Its branches that in spring would blossom blush-pink, with each petal seeping a filthy sweetness, had stiffened, bare-knuckled. It was below zero when my father spied a black-haired baby--such a full head of hair, coiled as if the fleece of a dark sheep. I would have frozen, had not the old ewes crouched next to me, one on either side, their names Libbie and Esther, their pink eyes dimming as if cherries slowly sinking in cream. "Ladies, what have you there?" he'd asked. The old ewes could not answer in his tongue for they lived in time that had already passed. They'd gotten on their knees, their blackened legs under them, one on either side, like a hot tickling breeze. I clung to the long straggling fleece. The ewes' wool was scented with bark, fierce wind, and damp earth soaked in the cider of a thousand apples dying. I shivered when my father plucked me up for I wore not even a rag. The snow had begun again, thick drops that felt like edges of burlap. A snow that pricked. When he carried me into the kitchen, my mother mistook me for an animal he'd skinned and brought home for dinner. "Shall we keep her? Or let Libbie and Esther bring her up?" And then my father would throw back his head and laugh for I was his favorite, it was only a story to tease me with. I had been born from my mother's body like my brothers. I would always love the ewes, as if they alone knew the truth of me. My mother once asked what side of the family had given me my terrible hair. Like an Ethiopian's or a sheep's. No relative had such kinkiness. In Sunday school, the girls poked fun. I thought of the ewes sharing with me visions of the apple tree, the slow seep of minutes, the strange roots hauling up water. Worm rot drawing the wasps. My husband-to-be said that God had given me the most beautiful hair and he would die if I cut it, then closed the window shade like flypaper the first time I let it down. After my third child I began to dream of that place between two sheep. And I hugged the ewes' bedraggled heads. Their offspring had been taken and meals made of them. Still the ancient mothers did not call down a pox upon our house or plagues of locust and toads. In my sleep the frozen sky's no color at all. The trees clatter. We eat the snow apples. The ewes' broken teeth hold the fruit. They bah. I am their January lamb.

Stephanie Dickinson was raised on an Iowa farm and now lives in New York City. She graduated with an MFA from the University of Oregon. Her work appears in Hotel Amerika, Mudfish, Weber Studies, Fjords, Water-Stone Review, Gargoyle, and Rhino, among others. Heat: An interview with Jean Seberg is available from New Michigan Press. Her novel Half Girl and novella Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is Love Highway, based on the 2006 Jennifer Moore murder. Her work has received multiple distinguished story citations in the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Mysteries.

Dickinson won the Flash Story First Prize in our 2017 Bacopa Literary Review. Other links to her work: Eastern Iowa Review:"Emily Overhears a Mourner," "Emily and the Spring Cleaning," Emily and the Mother-in-Law." Kestrel: "Emily and the Whooping Cough," "Emily and the Norsemen," "Emily and the Missionary," Emily and the Blizzard." Verse Daily: "Emily and the Bobcat." Penduline Press Interview with Stephanie Dickinson; Gravel: "Chicago Insomnia."

Monday, July 10, 2017

Misremembering Chekhov

by Editor in Chief Mary Bast

The nineteen works of creative nonfiction published in Bacopa Literary Review 2016 covered a wide variety of types and forms, including the brilliant hybrid narrative/memoir/essay, "Misremembering Chekhov," by Rebecca Ruth Gould.

Our typical call for submissions invites creative nonfiction with "a moving inner voice" that "holds to the same standards as other literary forms while remaining grounded in fact." Gould's 2016 contribution (pp. 153-157) is a perfect example.

Notice how she begins by weaving personal experience with literary observations:
Chekhov was not my first love. More obviously delectable to a college freshman just returned from her first visit to St. Petersburg and discovering Russian literature for the first time were the thick novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Those "great, baggy monsters" (as Henry James called them) buoyed me up through my first marriage, my frantic conversion to Christianity, and my equally hasty divorce. . . . Dostoevsky's tortured heroines perfectly matched my overstrung mind, and his philosophical dialogues about the existence (or not) of God were the perfect object of reflection for my theologically conflicted soul . . . .
      Tolstoy struck a different chord, but one which was equally resonant. His ability to cut through racism and prejudice . . . Tolstoy did not pull at my heartstrings in quite the same way as Dostoevsky, but he did speak to my social conscience, and to my desire to make a difference in the world . . . .
      I did not have a chance to taste [Chekhov] until my final semester at Berkeley, after a whirlwind tour of the Russian canon. . . . For our first story, my professor had chosen Chekhov's "Lady with a Lapdog" . . . *
Now the author pulls us into her theme:
The most enduring impression I took away from that story . . . was that, to a much greater extent than Tolstoyevsky, Chekhov was a cynic. After depicting the blossoming of love between a younger woman and her elder lover, he showed how love is fated to not last. This is how I interpreted an unforgettable detail in the Yalta hotel room. . . . Anna Sergevevna laments her lost virginity while Gurov begins to feel bored. . . .
      Fast forward seventeen years. The Russian literary pantheon has lost some but by no means all of its glory to my readerly eyes. A long succession of other loves has intervened between me and Chekhov: Arabic, Persian, Georgian, not to mention the more familiar French, German, Italian, and Spanish. All of these literatures I have tried to know in some intimate way. But, in spite of my promiscuous disloyalty to other literature and languages, Russian keeps cropping up in unexpected ways. . . .
      One of the most unexpected ways in which Chekhov crops up is on an online dating profile on the website 'OKCupid.' A Brussels-based scientist lists Dostoevsky among his favourite authors . . . .
They meet in Paris:
Paris is like a dream. We spend our first full day together strolling through the Jardin du Luxembourg, talking non-stop about the books that impacted our lives . . .
      Unlike the way I read in my undergraduate years, we do not linger over the philosophical nuances of Dostoevsky's fictions. We do not ponder the existence (or not) of God. . . .
     You will have guessed, Dear Reader, that this was the beginning of love. And you will not have been wrong. It was indeed the beginning of a certain kind of passion. . . . Our peculiar love had a strangely short duration, and evaporated not long after it was born. Chekhov was the prophet of this evaporation. He foretold the entire story of our love in his "Lady with a Lapdog." 
Ah! Gould takes us to the realization implied in her story's title:
So I thought until I read the story again. . . . I discovered I had misremembered Chekhov's tone. I had taken him for an unadulterated cynic, when in fact "Lady with a Lapdog" depicts the gradual emergence of a love so intense that the world cannot contain it. . . . he was himself a romantic, a believer in the ability of love to overcome social conventions. . . .  My circuitous path towards love was more like the second reading than were the airbrushed tale of playboys and false affections that my undergraduate imagination had remembered . . . .  Chekhov tends to keep the devotion of those who have fallen in love with him for the rest of their writing lives. Perhaps the reason for this lies in his peculiar way of representing the world. Savouring Chekhov's flair for revealing the interstices of memory and forgetfulness makes it difficult to look away ever again.

Dr. Rebecca Ruth Gould is a writer, translator, and scholar whose books include Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and translator of The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (Central European University Press, 2015). She teaches comparative literature and translation at the University of Bristol in the UK.

________________________________________________________
* Correspondence with Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie, also a Russian scholar, explains why there are various titles describing the dog in Chekhov's famous short story:
Me: "I'm trying to find the exact title for Chekhov's story about the lady with a dog. I've seen 'Lady with a Lapdog,' 'The Lady with a Pet Dog,' 'Lady with a Dog,' and other similar titles. This is the Russian: Дама с собачкой."

U.R, Bowie: "In Russian the sobachka of the title is a diminutive ("little dog"), but you can't get exactly that effect in English. Translators try by using terms like 'lapdog.' Of course, there is no 'correct' translation. To read the definitive Chekhov, you have to read him in Russian!"
And from The Possessed by Elif Batuman, page 20:
"In 'Lady with Lapdog,' Gurov's wife, Anna's husband, Gurov's crony at the club, even the lapdog, are all nameless. No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog."

Sunday, July 9, 2017

Bain de Sang

Ivan de Monbrison's poetry, paintings, and sculptures have been displayed widely, in Paris, USA, England, Belgium, Barcelona, and other cities around the world. He has described his ghostly images as "incarnated in the canvas but not fully present." "For me," he writes, "art is the only answer in our modern world to the question of death and the fragility of human nature." Ivan's cover art for Oyster Boy Review 21 2014, "Janus with His Shadow," could as well frame the words of his poem in Bacopa Literary Review 2016 (in French first, then English):

Bain de Sang / Bloodshed
-- In memory of the victims in Paris of November 13, 2015 -- 
  
                            Bain de sang
                                        1
la fatigue
on s'assied
les étoiles dans l'eau
le silence renversé
 on trinque
un verre à la main
mais on ne sait plus à quoi
autour d'une terrasse
           jonchée de cadavres
le sol peint en rouge
entonnoir de demain
un corps coupé en deux
la tête dans les nuages
          et les pieds sur la terre
et ce silence étrange qui a cousu nos lèvres
                 à la paume de nos mains

                                     2
panoplies de nos corps
la nuit taillée
on dresse d'un coup le regard
nuage
cadavre éventré
 où fleurissent des mains
aux balcons des étoiles se posent les oiseaux
rien à dire
un pas de trop
         pour aller nulle part
au bout de cette course nous tombons en
                                                       poussière
citadelles sans créneaux       

           Bloodshed
 
                       1
fatigue
we sit down
stars in the water
silence toppled down
  we toast
a glass in the hand
but we don't know to what
around the terrace
    covered with bodies
the ground painted in red
funnel of tomorrow
a body cut in half
the head in the clouds
           and the feet on the earth
and this odd silence which has sewed our lips
                    to the palms of our hands

                             2
outfit of our bodies
the night cut out
we raise our eyes suddenly
a cloud
a gutted corpse
  where hands are blooming
 birds landing on the balconies of the stars
nothing to say
one step too much
           to get to nowhere
at the end of this race we fall into
                                                        the dust
castles without crenels

November 16 2015 4.39 pm
Marseille
French poet, writer, and artist Ivan de Monbrison lives in Paris and Marseille. His poems and short stories have appeared in literary magazines in France, Italy, Belgium, the UK, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, and the US. His five poetry chapbooks are L'ombre dechiree, Journal, La corde a nu, Ossuaire, and Sur-Faces. He has illustrated his own poem novel, Les Maldormants, published in 2014 by Ressouvenances Publishers, France. Of "Bloodshed" he says, "These poems were written after the killing of more than a hundred innocent people in the streets of Paris, on November 13, 2015, and so in memory of their martyrdom." Follow Ivan de Monbrison on Facebook here and on Twitter here.
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Janus was the Roman two-faced god of beginnings and transitions and thus of gates, doors, doorways, endings, representing the middle ground between barbarity and civilization.