Tips for Writing a Powerful Poetry Submission

by Poetry Editor Kaye Linden 

During my study of an MFA in poetry and the editing and perusal of Bacopa Literary Review’s 2016 poetry submissions, I have had the chance to witness repeated opportunities for strengthening a poem. I offer the following observations so poets might take advantage of my insights. Take what you like and leave the rest.

The first hook. Focus on a titillating title. Browse through the poem and find a riveting phrase, word or series of words that will capture the essence of the poem. As poetry editor, I am drawn to unusual, sometimes wordy titles that mimic the voice of the poet and reflect the theme of the poem. The title demonstrates the inventiveness of the poet.  

     For example: “Sleeping Unsafe at Camp Wilderness,” “Skipping over Rocks in the Dreamtime.” Consider the well-known poet Carolyne Wright’s title “Woman Blooming for the Wind Machine” or my crazy title “The Linear and Circular One Sentence of Tattoo Designs Over his Body”(published in Bacopa Literary Review 2015). 

     Don’t underestimate the power of a title. The creativity and writing of a title reflect that of the poem to follow. This goes for all genres. Review and examine titles of famous poets and understand how they chose them.

Stay away from the verb “to be” when possible, especially in a short poem. Poems lose power with excess use of “was, were, will, used to be, to be, would, would have, would have been” etc. Of course, exceptions to this rule exist but if the poet must use a “to be” verb, keep it to once and once only. I am amazed at the repetition of these and other unweighted, meaningless words in otherwise tight writing and they often appear in the first line, and repeated in the second and third. In a short piece, which most poem submissions lean towards, keep it tight, and, in a long piece, keep it tight as well!  Here's an example:

It was summer,
fields were seeded with sunflowers,
now blooming in the heat
of a day that was to be
an end to the beginning
of summer.

Avoid adverbs where possible. Too many adverbs weaken an otherwise powerful poem. Examine a way to rewrite the phrase or sentence without the adverb. Consider alternatives. Use an adverb only when necessary. 

The same can be said for adjectives. Use the thesaurus and write with creativity and limited adjectives. Avoid strings of adjectives. “Women stand naked in storms.” “Strong, sexy, powerful women stand totally naked in wild, windy, witchy storms.” Which offers the stronger sentence? Place this sentence in the context of a meaningful poem that enhances and supports the meaning of the sentence. Use adjectives that offer a fresh image. (See Elizabeth Bishop example below) 

Offer implication to the reader instead of telling the reader what you mean."He didn’t want to tell her how he felt.” “His eyes glazed over, shifted away from her stare.” 
  
Avoid those boring clichés and hackneyed phrases. “Ruby red lips” (Oh, please…) 

Use weighted words that offer an image, a meaning, impact or power to the poem. Each word counts. Use meaningful words. Take a look at a verse from Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.”

the big bones and the little bones, 
the dramatic reds and blacks 
of his shiny entrails 
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony. 
…his eyes…larger than mine 
but shallower, and yellowed, 
the irises backed and packed 
with tarnished tinfoil 
seen through the lenses 
of old scratched isinglass.

Delight the Editor with a skillfully written fixed form poem that has meaningful substance and theme. Research the classic rules for pantoums, ghazal and sonnets, among others, and insert a theme from a different perspective. Stay away from mundane themes such as a walk in the park or a sailboat at sunset, unless that walk or sail takes on a philosophical bent that approaches from an unusual angle. Examine Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s “Pantoum for Chinese Women”: 

They say a child with two mouths is no good. 

In the slippery wet, a hollow space,

Smooth, gumming, echoing wide for food. 

No wonder my man is not here at his place.

In the slippery wet, a hollow space,

A slit narrowly sheathed within its hood. 

No wonder my man is not here at his place

He is digging for the dragon jar of soot.

      Get your attention? 

Stay consistent with the point of view and tense. Stay away from “you.”  I have seen this repeated throughout a poem. After two or three repeated “you” pronouns I put down the poem and sigh. Choose an interesting point of view and whichever one you choose, stay with it. The same goes for tense consistency.

Happy submissions and remember, master the rules and then you can break them.

Resources:

Bacopa Literary Review 2015

Barnstone, Aliki, and Willis Barnstone. A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Finch, Annie, and Kathrine Varnes. An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversityof Their Art. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2002. Print.

Linden, Kaye. 35 Tips for Writing a Brilliant Flash Story. N.p.: Create Space, 2015. Print.

An Ache Bent From the Soul Through Brass and Breath

(by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast)

Blue, the languid, slightly seamy sound of a tear made music, of an ache bent from the soul through brass and breath ... Blue of our darkness, our lust, our losses ....

This quote is from "Tio's Blues" in Evan Guilford-Blake's collection, American Blues, five earthy stories of musical and human blues. Guilford-Blake has won 42 play writing competitions, including the Eamon Keane Award, the Tennessee Williams Competition (twice), the NETC/Aurand Harris Award; and thirty of his plays have been published, one of them Nighthawks, a theatrical version of the story "Nighthawks" in American Blues, and another the full-length drama, American Blues, which won Bottle Tree Productions First Prize in 2009.

Guilford-Blake contributed "A Chattering of Chickadees" to our 2016 print journal, and you'll find many reviews online of his other work. What I'll emphasize here is his experience as both playwright and author of fiction, because fiction writers have much to learn from playwrites, where the power of their work is found primarily in dialogue. All of us have heard the adage, "Show, don't tell," and in theater that has to happen almost entirely through believable dialogue. "If it doesn't reveal character or advance the plot, throw it out." 

American Blues tells five stories, "Sonny's Blues," "Tio's Blues," "Nighthawks," "Animation," and "The Easy Lovin' Blues." Together, they're reminiscent of the AAB blues structure, as in B.B. King's  Everyday I Have the Blues (Everyday, everyday I have the blues, Everyday, everyday I have the blues, When you see me worried, baby, Because it's you I hate to lose). 

The Sonny of "Sonny's Blues" is tired. "He blew till 3:00 on maybe four hours sleep, the adrenalin provided by the rest of the quarter, the between-sets bourbon, the music itself. Then he sat -- had one more drink -- with Harper for almost an hour after that, till he'd come down from the high..."

Then Sonny finds out his stomach pain is cancer that's spread beyond surgical treatment. Still trying to absorb the news, he calls his mother.

"Vernon, that you?" Mama says into the phone. She's the only one ever uses his given name anymore. "How you doin'?"

He doesn't know what he can tell her, or how. I'm gonna die, Mama, in a couple months, and I'm hurtin' bad a lot of the time, he wants to say. But he can't ... He says instead, "I guess I'm doin' okay. Keepin' busy. How you?"

In "Tio's Blues," 28-year-old Tio is older brother to 23-year-old Matt but still a boy in his mental capacity. Tio's been listening to Clifford Brown's "Willow Weep for Me," and Matt finds him lying on the living room floor. He rocks the sobbing Tio.

"Matt?" Tio said finally. "It was choking me... It comes right out of the record player, and, and it was so pretty. I could see it, the notes, they were blue, and it was like his hands, Brownie's, it comes all around me and it holds me very tight, tighter than anything, even you, ev'rything was turning all blue, and, and I couldn't breathe."

[Later] "Matt?" said Tio

"Yeah?"

... "Why don't anybody love me like the music loves me?"

The dialogue in the other three stories of American Blues is equally revealing of character. In "Nighthawks," picture the Edward Hopper painting of the same name, with a male and female couple, another man sitting separately, and the guy behind the bar. From these few words between the couple, Gil and Donna, we "get" their characters and what's going on in their relationship:

Donna shook him away. "I just -- just get ... tired of this."

"Of what? Y' mean me?"

She sighed. "I mean, of -- this. Sometimes. When you're -- When you ain't around. Y' know?"

"Yeah," said Gil. "I know. I get tired of it too. I been tired of it, of her, for eight years."

In "Animation," Aggie's phone conversation with his ex-wife Merilyn sets the blues theme on the very first page:

"You're home," says Merilyn.

"Uh-huh," Aggie replies.

"I thought you might be out. Job hunting."

He shrugs. "I went to the unemployment office today. I looked on the computer. And through the paper. Nobody's hiring fifty-three year old accounting clerks."

And in "The Easy Lovin' Blues," two intertwining stories pull us through the blues into outright tragedy, echoed in this scene between Amanda, a young woman who lives with her mother Naurean, and horn-player Trumpy who's in a tangled relationship with Ladyblue:

He comes out of the building, his mind on figuring out what he's gonna do, and almost trips over her, sitting on the steps, elbows on her knees and hands wrapped around her head. "Oh, 'Manda--" he begins, then remembers and says "I better g--."

"Oh hi," she says unhappily.

He stops. "Somethin' wrong?"

"Oh, just ..." She shakes her head and looks up at him. "Mama 'n' me had a ... argument, I guess."

"Oh." He should go. Should go.

Among Guilford-Blake's many books are the adult novel Noir(ish) and the middle-grade novel The Bluebird Prince (a retelling of the classic French fairy tale of the same name, also adapted as a play). He's taught playwriting and drama, and is a "Distinguished Resident Playwrights Emeritus" of Chicago Dramatists and a Dramatists Guild member. He and his wife, freelance writer and jewelry designer Roxanna Guilford-Blake, live in the Atlanta area with "little four-legged lady" Winnie and whippet/lab mix Baldrick, "a big ol' dog, as dumb and lovable as they come."

Bacopa Literary Review: The Art of the Start

by Bacopa Literary Review Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

"Hand half-way to the cafeteria door, I'm listening this morning to the noise off the lake, a small, dirty one with a carillon like a fist rising straight up out of the water. I'm thinking: the swans must be at it again."

Why did I smile in the few seconds it took me to read this opening paragraph of "Ducking" by Emily Hipchen? Because -- with only two sentences -- she brings us into action, surrounds us with deftly drawn images and sounds, gives us a glimpse of the narrator's character, and propels us forward with the desire for more.

From this start, you can see why Emily Hipchen won a Creative Nonfiction prize in Bacopa 2014. And you won't be surprised to learn she's Dr. Hipchen, a university professor who teaches creative nonfiction. There isn't room here for all 2,343 words of "Ducking" (and this story alone is worth the price of our 2014 edition), but I'll quote enough to show how artfully this story builds from the beginning, then brings us back, having gained new insights along the way.

Our narrator expects violent action from the swans. Though "beautiful, serene as cats, smooth as women," they're "bitter and angry and not to be trusted. . . The children stand near the water tossing bits to a mixed bunch of ducks and swans, but when the food is gone, the swans nip whatever they can catch. . . a bit of skirt, a t-shirt tail, a little chunk of leg."

But she's disturbed to find the swan noises today are reacting to a little duck ten feet out. "She splashes, quacks, flaps her wings to fly or swim but just beats the water into the air. She goes nowhere but under, coughing and quacking and fighting. Then a second duck bobs up. . . large and sleek, its wings and feet kicking the water into turmoil. The two birds writhe and struggle, the larger one on top using its bill like a ball-peen hammer, pounding the little duck's nape. Like a blacksmith. Like a wind-up toy. They go under. The one on top quacks, slips, submerges. . . comes up and goes under and swims frantically for somewhere it won't drown. It calls out and calls out, but this only brings more big ducks. . . 'They're going to kill her,' I say out loud, though no one's there. I shout Hey, cut that out!"

She thinks: I could save her and charges "right over the dirty fringe of grass and muck and trash straight into the lake. It's just past winter. The water sinks into my shoes like a fall of pebbles, fills up my socks grabs my calves and thighs and sex and then, with a tentative tongue, laps my navel."

This is brilliant, throwing in a bit of sexy language to (spoiler alert) foreshadow a story that features ducks, well, ducking.

Of course this story is so much more than its obvious features. With only a few words the author takes us more deeply into her own character: "I stand there, big and strange. Me upright like a pillar in the lake, that has to mean something. . . I stand up to my waist in the filthy lake, working on being satisfied that at least she won't die. That she will be safe as long as I stay there, watching."

Hipchen skillfully connects the present to her past, as she recalls her only experience with ducks, when her father comes home with "coolers of dead fowl" for her mother to prepare for eating. "She hates those ducks, her hands in their cold, wet feathers, her hands in their insides pulling out pink and black and grey things, goop to throw away, wads of yellow fat slick as eyeballs. . . ."

Notice how every sentence draws us symbolically and emotionally into an interplay of external events and internal awakening, and does so with poetic rhythm and rhyme: "But the lake is cold and dark with muck and my lower body begins to numb. I tuck my hands into my armpits, watch the poor little duck swimming away for another moment, then turn around and wade out. . . ."  And later, "I had no idea, saw nothing the way it was, knew nothing about the way things are. I didn't know the little brown duck wasn't dying, wouldn't die, would nest and lay eggs and raise ducklings, and do it all over again come next spring. . . By now they were at it again, in fact. I imagined her down in the muck, the bloody moustache of feathers, the riot and violence and calling out."

Finally, "Ducking" teaches us the importance of a good ending. Some writers refer back to the beginning, or offer a final quote or revelation. Emily Hipchen does both. "She didn't need saving anymore than I did, couldn't be saved, shouldn't be saved, didn't want saving. . . I got my umbrella from the stand. My laundry would wait for after lunch, I thought, though the room stank of it already." 


Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Emily Hipchen is a Fulbright scholar, an NEH grantee, and editor of "Adoption & Culture: The Interdisciplinary Journal of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture," as well as co-editor since 1999 of "a/b: Auto/Biography Studies." She publishes essays in autobiography studies (with a sub-specialty in adoption life writing), and is the author of a memoir, Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption. Her essays, short stories, and poems have appeared in many publications including Arts & Letters, Baltimore Review, Cincinnati Review, Fourth Genre, Georgetown Review, Hippocampus Magazine, and Northwest Review. Her story "Gator Bites" was Nonfiction First Runner-Up in Solstice Magazine.

Bacopa Literary Review: Beātitūdō

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

The term beatitude comes from the Latin noun beātitūdō which means happiness or blessedness. In Christian theology the Beatitudes are eight blessings that echo the ideals of mercy, spirituality, and compassion. Third Place Poetry winner in Bacopa Literary Review 2014, Jonathan Travelstead, has mercifully blessed us with a view of earth from an astronaut's perspective, where we see Beatitudes / scrawled in the mountaintops, where heartaches look beautiful and even war looks like a lover's quarrel.

What the Astronaut Said

    From a distance the world looks blue and green--Julie Gold

Goodbye, blue jaw-breaker.
From up/down here
your heartaches look beautiful.
Bodies pendulous from trees,
ripe as grapes.
Mirrored banks aching towards heaven.
Even war looks like a lover's quarrel,
two opposing bodies
twittering little red lights
across the ocean
while the sun like a fat kid
hides behind a billiard ball.
From this distance
I see Beatitudes
scrawled in the mountaintops:
You own nothing. Leave only footprints.
Now a fugitive to this petty world,
how could I return to it?
Goodbye, sea monkeys
in a blue sandwich bag.
Goodbye, fear of abandonment
and anger issues.
There is no economy here
and it's so quiet
I'm getting to know myself better.
Wish you were here.

Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro, and also as co-editor for Cobalt Review. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he now works on an old dirt-bike he hopes will one day get him to the salt flats of Bolivia. Winner of the 2013 Cobalt Prize for his poem, "Trucker," Jonathan's many publications include Alexandria Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily,  Baltimore Review, The Oneiric Moor,  Sixfold, and The Boiler. His first collection, How We Bury Our Dead, published by Cobalt Press, was released in March, 2015, and Conflict Tours is forthcoming in Spring of 2017.

Bacopa Literary Review: The Heat of the Blues

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

Bacopa Literary Review 2014's First Place winner for Creative Nonfiction was "Burned," by Melani (Mele) Martinez. 

In an earlier post, we likened creative nonfiction to jazz, "always with a moving inner voice. . . as experimental as other forms while remaining grounded in fact." Melani's voice is musical, even breathtaking. Her writing captures the best of the blues: "While blues lyrics seldom turn to happy topics, they are often uplifting, empowering. . . a way of dealing with sorrow, rather than wallowing in it."

Her very first sentence rings a chord on which she improvises throughout the piece:

Surrounded by desert, my city was lifted out of caliche.

Martinez describes how she and her brother "lived some independence on downtown streets. . . left to our own thoughts."

In the summer, those thoughts were most often blurred by desert heat.

Still being drawn in, we learn about her father's restaurant, El Rapido. Notice the rhythm in the author's simple naming of foods:

Burros, fajitas, tamales, red chile, chorizo, machaca, frijoles, tortillas.

We readers are surrounded by heat. The food, the air, and an encounter in Tucson's Old Town, where she and her brother "often delivered to a Navajo silversmith there, an older and friendly man who liked my father's red chile." On her last day of work before beginning high school,

I was a pretty girl on that day. . . This teenage threshold made me glow, and the shine on me stretched out many inches from my skin. . . He pulled me close without letting go, his face close to mine. . . his heavy arms bound me, sealed me in silver bracelets. I was calcified there in the shadows of concrete walls and steel piping. My glow was eclipsed. I found myself unable to move or get away. Then he pulled me in hard to kiss me and I suddenly jerked. He released his embrace. . .

At no time that day, that week, that decade did I tell. Not my mother, my father, nor my brother. Like steam, my memory of it floated away into invisible vapor, and hung in the air over my head. Some of it I swallowed down, but still it managed to shoot out my fingertips, my eyes, my breath.

Mele Martinez holds us in thrall, her blues a way of dealing with sorrow but never wallowing, including the last paragraph, where she is at the top of Sentinel Peak:

There I'd sit quietly and contemplate all the fourteen year old girls who got burned like this--the ones who don't tell. And as I waited, on the horizon I'd see thunderclouds and the smell of sprinkled creosote bush would fill my lungs. Soon, I was pounded with late summer monsoons that always came to wash out the roasted earth and drench all of us who find ourselves on spigots.

Melani (Mele) Martinez lives in Tucson, AZ, where she's a Community College Adjunct Instructor and works on her book-length manuscript about her family's Mexican food store. She is co-founder of Flamenco del Pueblo Viejo and instructor at The Flamenco Studio. She and her husband, Jason Martinez, partner with Casa Vicente to present Tucson's Annual Spanish and Flamenco Festival.

Bits and Pieces of Good Writing: Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff

by Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

With his first publication, a collection of short stories called Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock, native of Knockemstiff, Ohio, has perfected the genre known as “hillbilly sleaze.”

The first story in the collection, “Real Life,” is typical in that it features the kind of characters who populate all the stories. The description of a friend Vernon encounters in the rest room is typical of Knockemstiff denizens in general: “a porky guy with sawdust combed through his greasy black hair. A purple stain shaped like a wedge of pie covered the belly of his dirty shirt.”

The first line: “My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old.”

Full of hard-scrabble rednecks, the stories, as this one, sometimes feature a narrator of sensibility. In “Real Life” this is the boy narrator, nervous Bobby, whose life with his alcoholic father has him in the habit of “chewing the skin off my fingers.”

A typical male representative of the metropolis of Knockemstiff, the father, Vernon, is tough as nails, a man who hates movies and make-believe. As he puts it, “What the hell’s wrong with real life?”

The story describes a scene that Vernon creates in “real life,” when, drunk in the restroom of the drive-in and mouthing obscenities, he is accosted by another man. A big irony is that the men in the rest room enjoy the ensuing fight much more than Godzilla on the big screen outside.

Both men have their sons with them in the rest room. The other man, as large as a giant, doesn’t like Vern swearing in front of his son. After appearing to back down from a confrontation, Vern sucker punches the giant in the head. Then, after the giant is on the floor, he kicks his ribs and punches his face “until a tooth popped through one meaty cheek.” Other men have to pull him off the fallen giant before he kills him.

At this point the giant’s son attacks Bobby, and the old man forces him to fight: “You back down I’ll blister your ass.” As it turns out, Bobby bloodies the nose of the bigger boy and wins the fight.

While others call for an ambulance, Vernon and Bobby jump back in their car with Bobby’s mother and flee the drive-in. For the old man, who constantly complains about his son’s lack of toughness, “This is the best night of my fucking life.” When his wife objects to his drunken shenanigans the old man cracks her in the face with a forearm.

The story ends up being about a way of coming of age in the trailer-trash world of Knockemstiff. The meek Bobby has something of an epiphany in blood. “Real Life” ends with him in bed, contemplating his victory in the fight, which, apparently for the first time ever, has earned him the approval of his father. Interesting developments for Bobby’s future are suggested by the final lines:

“…I lapped the [other boy’s] blood off my knuckles. The dried flakes dissolved in my mouth, turning my spit to syrup. Even after I’d swallowed all the blood, I kept licking my hands. I tore at the skin with my teeth. I wanted more. I would always want more.”

 This tale of a gentle character's baptism in violence reminds me of a story by the great Russian short-story writer, Isaac Babel: "My First Goose."

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review's 2016 Cover

Thanks to judge Stacey Breheny, with support from Bacopa's editorial staff, we have a winner of Bacopa Literary Review 2016's cover contest. We're blown away to discover the creator is our own local phenomenon, artist/writer/poet Christy Sheffield Sanford, author of seven small press books including Italian Smoking Piece, The Hs: the Spasms of a Requiem, and The Cowrie Shell Piece.  

Past covers have been elegant, reflecting six successful years of publication. Our new editorial board sought to maintain the Bacopa flower theme, while refreshing our image in the eyes of the writing public -- a visual invitation to poets and writers from an ever-broadening and diverse population.

In everyday terms, we wanted a cover that someone would see on a table or shelf and be drawn to its unique symbolism, asking "What is THAT??!! I have to see what's inside!!!"


Thank you, Christy Sheffield Sanford, for making that happen.

In addition to her education in art, psychology, philosophy, poetry, creative writing and interarts, Christy was the first Virtual Writer-in-Residence for trAce, formerly at Nottingham-Trent University. She collaborated with German artist Reiner Strasser on a web-specific piece Water~Water~Water, which was presented in Nottingham and Bristol, England as part of Nottingham Now.

Recipient of many awards (National Endowment for the Arts, Harn Museum of Art, New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, to name a few) Chisty's a dedicated contributor to community arts and environmental preservation.She has several times been Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and has led many community efforts such as The Aquifer Project (a three-part grant for sculpture acquisition, a light-water performance by Florida School of the Arts called "River Reflections," and Design Elements Planning that evolved into a Community Greenprint with Dr. Mary Padua's University of Florida students).

Christy Sanford's works might be called mixed genre, hybrid, experimental, innovative, avant-garde -- all are true -- whether web-based or in print. Consider an excerpt, for example, from "This Bride Is Not an Expressway" (Bride Crashing Through History):

You cannot gain access to this Bride
by riding up the ramp 55 mph (88 km),
swerving over her skin, zooming
into the fast lane of her circulatory system. . . .

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review: Natural Selection

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

What distinguishes adult fiction from young adult fiction? Having a teen protagonist doesn't make a story young adult fiction. We have to look at writing style and relevant subject matter. Some say the distinction has to do with pacing and presentation, the pacing faster and the presentation simpler in young adult fiction. Often, however, the distinction is not at all clear. For example, the publisher of The Book Thief classifies it as a young adult novel. Really? I'm pretty well-read and far from being young, yet enjoyed both the novel and the film as completely relevant to my life and point of view. It seems to me the distinction is made by publishers for marketing purposes. I think we readers care only that a piece of fiction is well-written and introduces themes with which we can identify.

This is certainly true of "Natural Selection," Third Place Fiction winner from Bacopa Literary Review 2014, which features fifteen-year-old Nina. Author Nancy Scott Hanway's point of view is Nina's as an adult, recalling her childhood in a trailer with her mother, whose passion for Jane Austen led her to "raise me--her untouched and unsullied baby--according to Enlightenment norms. Jane Austen may have symbolized a sort of la-di-da romance to many people, but to my mother, Austen and her work stood for honesty, authenticity, and bedrock values." 

Nina, too, was a book thief--in her case precipitated by her mother's plan that "I would never be allowed to read anything published after the year 1817, when Jane Austen died. . . ." The Iowa Board of Education, however, required Nina's home schooling to be measured by state exams every year, and at age fifteen she finally read Darwin, "feeling as if I had stumbled upon an enormous secret. His ideas--that things progress, that the entire universe of plants and animals could transform dramatically--gave me hope." 

So Nina was at the Prairie Lights bookstore, searching "until I found the most expensive book on Darwin in the store: it was an academic textbook that cost $75. I slipped it into my overalls by leaning up against the shelf and letting the book slide down until it hit my ribs." Of course she was caught, and the police took her home, after giving her a warning. 

Inside, [my mother] sat slowly on one of our oak kitchen seats. "I thought you were different. But you're just like all the sick idiots in the world. Full of yourself."

Fury clutched my gut and rose to my throat. I struggled to speak, finally saying, "I'm like every idiot forced to read Jane Austen from birth--"

My mother stood up. For a moment I thought she was going to hit me. . . When she returned hours later, she was drunk, and she stumbled through the door where I sat reading Persuasion, half-terrified. Her gown was torn at the sleeve. She lay on the daybed beside me, staring at the ugly light fixture and occasionally picking at her sleeve. "Where's that book on Darwin?"

"I threw it in the trash," I said.

"You can't do that to books," she said, her words slurring. "Didn't I ever tell you?" She shook her head and fell asleep. I stood watching her for a long time before I rescued Darwin from the garbage and began to read.

Nancy Scott Hanway's writing appears in journals such as Forge, Grey Sparrow Journal, Inertia Magazine, Limestone, Lowestoft Chronicle, Shark Reef, and many more.

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review: a god falls from grace

by Bacopa Literary Review Poetry Editor Kaye Linden

Ekphrastic response to the Peter Breughel painting of Landscape With the Fall of Icarus.

an insignificant splash 

after such grandeur. Flying high in the sky next to the sun only to fall down in grace, fall down down slowly at first, tediously tedious when air currents waft his frail body back up up towards the sun only to surrender him down down to fall again, down towards earth in a tilting tumbling somersault that at another time might have felt like such fun but only if he could stay just in that moment and enjoy the ride up and down, but a crow laughs at his fall and Icarus wakes to the screeching in-between of sky and water and looks down (he should never have looked down) to see his face stare back from the water, mouth wide open in a silent scream soaring from the depths of his gaping throat, blue eyes staring, lengthy blonde curls floating around his head like a parachute, but not a parachute, a liability when water wets hair heavy weighing it down as he falls into his reflection, titillating upon the water, hearing the first drop, the second drop of the first splash, now hearing his voice high, tight calling for help, but the ploughman, the picnicker, the little child with a kite, turn to see the stupid disturbance from a stupid boy who really believed, really believed he would never die, that escape from a labyrinth meant wax wings waxing solid forever, that escape from prison meant playtime with sunbeams, not sliding down sunbeams, and the people look away look away from the red- faced god falling into human condition, the wide-eyed culprit who hits watery concrete, regal wings just behind his white legs, until his calls for help gurgle gurgle gurgle

and the world returns to its state of being the world again,

looking away. 

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Describing a Scene

by Bacopa Literary Review 2016-17 Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie 

Selected Passages from the Writings of Good, and Sometimes Great Writers

[description of a ritual butcher in a Ukrainian shtetl, inspecting the lungs of a cow or sheep he has butchered] "The glossy brownish organs . . . . the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone -- from a mouse to a man -- had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin" (David Bezmozgis, The Free World).

"Her light-brown hair was drawn smoothly back and gathered in a knot low on her neck, but near the right temple a single lock fell loose and curling, not far from the place where an odd little vein branched across one well-marked eyebrow, pale blue and sickly amid all that pure, well-nigh transparent spotlessness. That little blue vein above the eye dominated quite painfully the whole fine oval of the face" (Thomas Mann, "Tristan"). [Mann is great at describing human faces, human bodies.]

[description of a delicatessen] "there were glass showcases where smoked mackerel, lampreys, flounders, and eels were displayed on platters to tempt the appetite. There were dishes of Italian salad, crayfish spreading their claws on blocks of ice, sprats pressed flat and gleaming goldenly from open boxes; choice fruits -- garden strawberries and grapes as beautiful as though they had come from the Promised Land; rows of sardine tins and those fascinating little white earthenware jars of caviar and foie gras . . . " (Thomas Mann, Felix Krull) [Mann is also great at describing a scene by accumulating masses of detail; in this he reminds me of Nikolai Gogol.]

"She'd never met a child with beady eyes. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment, usually in middle age" (Lauren Groff, "For the God of Love, for the Love of God").  

 

Bacopa Literary Review contest submissions will open April 1 

Everything is a Dream

by Bacopa Literary Review Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie 

Where And When You Write And Who Is Helping You Out 

"You don't do all the writing at your desk. You do it elsewhere, carrying the book with you. The book is your companion, you have it in your mind all the time, running through it, alert for links to it. It becomes your chief companion, in the real sense of the word, you can talk to it quietly. It becomes your sole companion" (James Salter, The Art of Fiction, p. 76).

Salter hints here that, unbenownst to you, the book is writing itself in your mind all the time. The deepest neurons of your brain work on the writing day and night. As recent studies in brain science have revealed, on a conscious level we have no idea about the decisions those independent neurons are making. 

Romantic writers used to think of themselves as the amanuenses of the gods, who guided their pens and sent down original ideas. But more likely writers are the amanuenses of their own creative neurons. When your favorite character suddenly does something totally unexpected on the page, it's not because God so decided. The neurons decided -- and they very well may have made that decision at three a.m., when you were fast asleep.

"There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real" (Salter, p. 77).

Bacopa Literary Review contest submissions will open April 1

Important and Unimportant

by Bacopa Literary Review Literary Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

We Write Ourselves

"In a copy of a book that Colum McCann signed for an auction of first editions, beside the disclaimer that is always printed proclaiming that the book is a work of fiction, the names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, or are used fictitiously, and that any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, beside this McCann wrote simply, 'Bullshit'" (James Salter, The Art of Fiction, p. 38).

Then again, you don't want to be sued, do you?

Important Books and Unimportant Books

"Books that are deemed important weren't written to be important, generally. They became such. I can't think that The Catcher in the Rye was written as an important, life-altering or significant book. I believe it was simply heartfelt. To Kill a Mockingbird doesn't bear marks of an intended importance although I don't know what Harper Lee actually felt. Fitzgerald thought all of his books were important. The Great Gatsby was a short book, only 214 pages, and he was insistent that the publisher sell it at the same price as his longer ones" (Salter, pp. 42-43).

Speaking of the so-deemed, the above paragraph demonstrates the sometimes dated opinions of James Salter. Read by everyone in the sixties, The Catcher in the Rye is read by practically no one these days. Not only not important, but already moribund, almost dead.  

To Kill a Mockingbird is still widely read, its so-deemed greatness still afloat, but it is "a book for children" (as Flannery O'Connor said).

As for The Great Gatsby, this book has claims to being the Great American Novel; it should be sold at twice the price of any other book.

 

Bacopa Literary Review contest submissions will open April 1

Bacopa Literary Review: On a Good Day

by Bacopa Literary Review Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

"You on a Good Day," by Alethea Black, was published in One Story, Issue #163, April 23, 2012, written totally in second person, about all the things you do, don't, on a good day.

Excerpt

You don't give the finger to the black pickup truck that tailgates and passes you aggressively, then let go of the wheel to give it two fingers when you see a rainbow-tinted peace sticker on the bumper. You do not call the friend--the one who was in the hospital a few weeks ago, and whom you did not visit or call--you do not call her today because today you need something from her. You do not consider dousing your refrigerator with gasoline and setting it on fire because of the sound its motor makes while you're trying to work. You do not wish the earth would just ignite and everyone would die in a ball of flame simply because it has been hot for a few days. You do not conjure up, in as vivid detail as possible, every time anyone has ever wronged you in any way. You do not think: We're a ruined, useless lot, and we deserve everything we get. You do not say under your breath, while forgoing a pack of cigarettes: It's either pain in the body or pain in the mind, take your pick.

This strikes me as the best story I've read since I've been subscribing to One Story--that covers about twenty stories.

I find myself marking up passages, even writing things down (my best commitment to a writer). So many wonderful passages, so much despair, but leavened with hope and optimism. "Hurt people hurt people." I suppose this expression has been around for awhile, but I never had heard it: wonderful.

I laugh all the way through this story, although the humor is dark.

About the end: in the Q and A section, the ending is described as "unabashedly happy, hopeful." I wouldn't describe it that way. I think the ending is happy/sad, like the rest of the story, like life.

The ending moves me.

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review: Winning Words

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

Charlotte M. Porter's writing sweeps enthusiastically through poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, fiction. And the first thing you'll notice about every piece of this oeuvre is the imaginative use of language. Her characteristic verbal verve as nom de plume Wanda Legend is evident in a single sentence from N-word (creative nonfiction, Bacopa Literary Review 2011) as quoted in NewPages:

Not for amateurs, small-town chat is a craft masterful as tractor repair or canning.

In Porter's fiction piece, Rip Curl (Duende), foster child Sierra lives in a trailer park: 

Sierra counts out twenty-eight hop-steps to Trailer no. 78, Home Sweet Home. . . Lake Park is a slum of life-size crates, what the social worker calls a community of manufactured homes. Sierra has never been sure what to call the factory colors – dark white, grubby tan, dishwater blond. . .  The one window, covered with baggy Mylar, reminds her of a big eye with a snotty cold.

Swerve: A Life in Three Parts (SLAB|Sound & Literary Art Book) takes us from B.S. (Before Speech) through A.S. (After Speech), and a Coda:

After Speech, words are my pilosity, nettle cowage, stinging hairs.
Lips lacquered, teeth capped, ventral implants, I look like soccer mom or human rage-cage, gagged hostage inside snare.

Burningwood Literary Journal features two of Porter's poems. 

From Snapshot with Suet:

Say, has anyone found the old lorgnettes, those folding opera glasses?
Nice keepsake my musical sisters agree, sorting our dead Mother’s things.
Vissi d’arte, Vissi d’amore they yodel from Tosca.

From Morning Scrabble:

At my brother Michael’s gravesite, others toss handfuls of earth, stones, flowers. I throw small wooden squares with letters, stuffed in my purse and pockets, pieces from his favorite childhood board game — winning words, our excuse for wagers.

Before they dump out drawers at home, let’s see what’s left to play: O B T X R U D Z E S C H I F N A T M A …W. WOMBAT, RATFINK, tags for schoolyard FOES. FAUX, FINCH, short DEFT words like ZED and UR earned quick points. Easy vocab, RUDE, RAIN, SHINE, AFTER, we learned, ate money vowels that better earned their keep in CRUDE, INTRUDE, SHINER, SHAFTED, RAFTER.

About Porter's prize-winning Deaf Uncle (Talking/Writing flash fiction contest), judge Joanne Avallon wrote:

I fell hardest for 'Deaf Uncle' because the language haunted me, both the Uncle's ('virgin cartilage' for 'Virgil's Carthage') and the narrator's ('crafts for girls, sports for boys...same old Scout badges'). The author packs so much intention into every word that each has a long half-life. . . .

So now you know what to expect in Charlotte M. Porter's Pangs (First Place Fiction prize, Bacopa 2014). And you won't be disappointed:

. . . After we split, I should have dug out all the bulbs and tubers, yanked the corms and grafts, peeled the orchids off their small wooden paddles. . .

Bunky never could say no to the unwanted or underperforming office plant. . . After several months in a kind home, these salvaged plants always gained strength and id, huge, office-bossy with drag-along auras from the culture of mid-level management. Pencil cactus hangs overhead transpiring oxygen like a panting creep. Euphorb snivels, shrivels skin, sprouts thorns to snag curious fingers. Croton reaches out like a mission statement and threatens to crawl on those damn leafy polka dots. . . .

Charlotte M. Porter lives in an old citrus hamlet in North Central Florida. In addition to awards mentioned above, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has placed as finalist in The Calvino Prize (outstanding pieces of fiction in the fabulist experimentalist style of Italo Calvino) and Rose Metal Press Sixth Annual Chapbook contest. She's also been published in Baseball Bard, and the Remaking Moby-Dick project of Pea River Journal (international multimodal storytelling performance). Porter's most recent exhibit, Hem-nal, a collaboration with Christy Sheffield Sanford, explores hemlines through poetry and stitched collages.

Bacopa Literary Review: A Teaching Tale

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

Reading literary fiction improves empathy. Deep characterization in novels is memorable in part because these characters disrupt our expectations, undermine our prejudices and stereotypes. 

This is equally true of so-called Children's Literature. Think of the Harry Potter series. Is it science fiction? Classical literature? Fantasy? Young adult? Mystery? Adults and teens, as well as children, are entranced by Harry's adventures. What about Charlotte's Web? Clearly a children's book, and yet, there's much more to it than the story of a pig and a spider. These books are powerful because they're teaching tales. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and his crowd have struggles many of us face, including bullying from the likes of Snape and Voldemort. In E.B. White's Charlotte's Web we can identify with the isolation and fears of poor, bullied Wilbur.  

Bullying is a stark reality. According to 2015 statistics, one in three U.S. students say they've been bullied in school. Some stay home, others attend school in a chronic state of anxiety. Workplace threats to adults may be more subtle, but they're bullying nonetheless.

Teaching tales can help both children and adults learn to cope. Bacopa Literary Review 2015's Third Place Fiction winner Michael Allard, a teacher in the Gifted Program in Marion County and in the High School Dual Enrollment program at Santa Fe College, brings us such a tale: "Your Invisible Alligator." 

Your invisible alligator goes to school with you. . . you are at your desk when your bully comes down the aisle with malicious intent. With a flick of your invisible alligator's invisible tail, your bully's feet are flipped forward and up. . . You are tempted to laugh. However, you know that laughing at the misfortune of others is a kind of bullying, so instead, you look in your heart for some sympathy. . . Your bully persists. Your invisible alligator resists. Soon, you no longer have to put a look of concern on your face because, in your heart, you are concerned, and the look comes without bidding. . . Despite all of this, your bully continues his attacks. . . your invisible alligator could simply put an end to all of this with a snap of his mighty jaws, but your invisible alligator knows that causing harm may feel good for a time, but regret will long outlast the satisfaction of revenge. . . "Hey," you say to your bully one day. You've walked down the aisle towards the back of the room where your bully prefers to sit. . . In his eyes, you can see a mix of wariness and fear. . . You want him to know that you will not become a bully yourself. . . You look at your bully with kindness in your eyes and a smile on your lips. You hold out your hand to him. You think your invisible alligator would be proud of you.

Thanks, Michael Allard, for this call to action.

(Look for Michael Allard's "Change to Believe In," upcoming in the Fall 2016 edition of Bacopa Literary Review)

Bacopa Literary Review: It Goes Like This

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

David Antonio Moody, Bacopa Literary Review 2015's Third Place Poetry winner, is a writing instructor at Arizona State University and production editor for The Cortland Review. David received a 2014 AWP Intro Journal Award, and his poetry has appeared in Spillway, Streetlight, The Apply Valley Review, Gingerbread House, Eleven Eleven, Artful Dodge, and Breakwater Review (Peseroff Prize). His prize-winning poem for Bacopa:

Wasp and Pear

Every year I find myself giving up on trees
lightning-struck, brown, full of sawfly larva
but shingling the dog's pen.
                                            Hurricane
season can often leave us just like this:
with wood tacks, lumber, with caulk guns and caulk,
gallons of water, and surplus tape spools.

But yellow cling peaches stored in a can,
how they imply what is kept in the sky,
what message it's got, if something is left.

But soon, always soon, mouths become hungry,
then fruit season leaves.
                                    Chipping potatoes.
Field hands lobbing cabbage over my fence
in trade for water. I offer a watch
and eat well that night.
                                    It goes like this.
The grove drops its flesh.
                                 Some dawns I hear it--
a soft pear's giving up into a fall,
its wet brown pulp a bruise on the earth. Then
wind-jagged wasps come to perch on its rot,
That they love what's dead. That I do, do not.

Bacopa Literary Review: Anticipation

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

"Creative nonfiction writers and memoirists often take advantage of fiction techniques," writes Dorothy Wall in More Ways to Use Fiction Techniques in Nonfiction. "They create scenes and characters, use dialogue and description. As much as possible, they try to show rather than tell." 

Among the many other strategies behind good storytelling, Wall encourages nonfiction writers to create anticipation (set up the action to come), create propulsion (make your scenes have consequences), and compress time/let emotion and events animate your story (fictional time leaps over inessential events).

"I was a parole officer in Miami for eleven years," says Bacopa Literary Review 2015 Second Place Creative Nonfiction winner, Michael Kite. In slightly more than 1500 words, his prize-winning "Memories of a Honeymoon and a Milk Carton" demonstrates each of Wall's points about strengthening storytelling. These excerpts provide hints to the anticipation and consequences that animate Kite's story:

As we shook hands, it was clear my new parolee Harry Goldman was not typical. . .  He sat down, crossed his legs, put his black fedora on his knee. . . "I'm happy to meet you, Mr. Kite. I hope we will build a satisfactory working relationship."

His file wasn't typical either. His parole certificate contained a condition forbidding consumption of alcohol. . . "When drinking, this inmate is a danger to himself and to others. Any association with alcoholic beverages is reason for immediate arrest. . ."

. . . it was often said with good reason, murderers make the best parolees, and Harry was certainly a murderer. In 1963, in a drunken and jealous rage, he had hacked his second wife to death with a meat cleaver. . .  He pled to second-degree murder, received twenty-five years. Paroled after serving twelve. . .

"Have you reported to your job?"

"No, not yet. I wanted to see you first. But it will be there. Loretta will make sure of that."

"Loretta?"

"Loretta Grayson, owns the company, arranged the job for me." 

"How do you know her?" 

"We were pen pals while I was incarcerated. . . She has been a wonderful influence on my life."

. . . Over the next few months, he adjusted well. He had a small apartment, kept it neat, clean, alcohol free. . . About a year after his release he called, said he had something important to tell me. . .

"I got married to Loretta last week. So I have a new address. . ."

[Harry] was wearing Bermuda shorts and a well-worn T-shirt. He stripped off his gardening glove, "Welcome." Extending his bare hand, "Come on in. Loretta's taking a nap and I was tending the roses." He motioned me to the couch. On the coffee table were copies of Florida Gardening, Southern Living, and The George Review.

"You grow roses?"

"Loretta does. I just pull the weeds and prune."

"How's married life?"

"It's great." He took off the other glove, stared at the floor for a moment, then looking up, "She means a lot to me. I've never been in love before. . ."

Over the next few months I came by twice. I sniffed the ice tea pitcher and the orange juice, checked the canisters, even the new coffee one, the dresser drawers, under the mattress, the pockets of his clothes in the closet, found nothing. . .

Then one Sunday morning I read in the paper. . . .

Yes, of course, you're eager to know what happened. Think of synonyms for anticipation -- apprehension, foresight, impatience -- all the ways in which good writers make sure their readers eagerly await the next sentence, paragraph, page.