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The Silence Here Owns Everything

Kirsten Clodfelter — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:39:15 -0800

I. A Lesson for the Young Cartographer

After the final bell, Kendra and I walk the mile from Bloomington High North to our neighborhood. Even with a breeze it’s too hot for May, and underneath my backpack my tank top is damp and sticks to my skin, a heaviness waiting to be peeled. The wind tangles Kendra’s straight, blonde hair until she looks like one of the wolf girls Miss Collington told us about this morning in world history. I picture the grainy black-and-white images she showed on the overhead projector, of the little girl found in a forest in Ukraine, running naked on all fours with a pack of wild dogs, growling and clawing to protect her own—a girl and not a girl without even knowing.

Lorry Raja

Madhuri Vijay — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:31:07 -0800

What happened was that my older brother, Siju, got a job as a lorry driver at the mine and started acting like a big shot. He stopped playing with Munna the way he used to, tossing him into the air like a sack of sand, making him sputter with laughter. When Amma asked him anything, he would give her a pitying look and not answer. He stopped speaking to his girlfriend, Manju, altogether. He taunted me about playing in the mud, as he called it, breaking chunks of iron ore with my hammer. With Appa especially he was reckless, not bothering to conceal his disdain, until he said something about failed drivers who are only good for digging and drinking, and Appa wrestled him to the ground and forced him to eat a handful of the red, iron-rich earth, shouting that this was our living now and he should bloody learn to respect it. Siju complained to the mine’s labor officer, Mr. Subbu, but Mr. Subbu dismissed it as a domestic matter and refused to interfere. After that, Siju maintained a glowering silence in Appa’s presence. When Appa wasn’t around, Siju sneered at our tent, a swatch of blue plastic stretched over a bamboo skeleton. Never mind that he was being paid half a regular driver’s salary by the owner of the lorry, a paan-chewing Andhra fellow called Rajappa, because Siju was only fourteen and could not bargain for more.

Narrative at The Lab

Various Authors — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:43:46 -0800

Narrative authors took the stage at The Lab in San Francisco’s Mission District during Litquake’s 2010 Lit Crawl, the culmination of a weeklong celebration of literature. Here Narrative cofounder Carol Edgarian hosts Bridget Quinn, Renée Thompson, Will Boast, Pia Ehrhardt, and Skip Horack as they share their work with the standing-room-only audience.

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Bridget Quinn reading from her memoir (09:34)

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Renée Thompson reading from The Bridge at Valentine (05:55)

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Will Boast reading “Power Ballads” (13:13)

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Pia Z. Ehrhardt reading “Spill, Summer 2010” (09:02)

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Skip Horack reading from Grand Isle (08:21)

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Liability

Brian Trapp — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:58:22 -0800

The evening is warm as you walk with your wife down the avenue. She doesn’t like to wear dresses, but she wears one now, a sundress that shows off her olive skin. You notice men noticing her. Her shyness makes her less beautiful than she could be, but sometimes even she can’t hide it. She is significantly more attractive than you, with high cheekbones, symmetrical features, and shapely legs from college track. She has a bob of brown hair and the most perfect ears. In addition, she is both funny and smart. You were surprised when you found out she was single, even more when she married you.

After five years together, you feel you have disappointed her in several small ways, one being that you still sell insurance, a job that was both temporary and beneath you—until it was neither. Another is that you spent your first three years of marriage in the suburbs, where everyone was growing up or growing old. No one was like you and your wife—thirty and childless and wanting to keep it that way.

You crave energy and excitement, and to this end you have bought a beautiful condo downtown in the “bohemian quarter,” as the realtor pitched it, which means that it’s cheap enough for artists and poor black people. That’s okay. You love art and hate racism. You like adventure, and so does your wife.

Mackintosh

W. Somerset Maugham — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:45:37 -0800

He splashed about for a few minutes in the sea; it was too shallow to swim in and for fear of sharks he could not go out of his depth; then he got out and went into the bathhouse for a shower. The coldness of the fresh water was grateful after the heavy stickiness of the salt Pacific, so warm, though it was only just after seven, that to bathe in it did not brace you but rather increased your languor; and when he had dried himself, slipping into a bath-gown, he called out to the Chinese cook that he would be ready for breakfast in five minutes. He walked barefoot across the patch of coarse grass which Walker, the administrator, proudly thought was a lawn, to his own quarters and dressed. This did not take long, for he put on nothing but a shirt and a pair of duck trousers and then went over to his chief’s house on the other side of the compound. The two men had their meals together, but the Chinese cook told him that Walker had set out on horseback at five and would not be back for another hour.

Three Stages of Amazement

Carol Edgarian — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 07:02:47 -0800

Carol Edgarian shares a passage from her new novel, Three Stages of Amazement, in a reading given at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. Set on the cusp of the new millenium and the recent economic collapse, the story involves the plateaus and precipices of marriage, as a husband and wife try to balance ambition, familial duty, love, and the intrusions of fate.

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“Three Stages of Amazement” (19:07)

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Cartoon Art Volume 2012-01

Various Artists — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:16:32 -0800

Gettysburg

Rick Bass — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:08:20 -0800

Jeffrey King is only thirty-nine years old, and legendary. More than half his life remains before him, yet he has already changed the world. It doesn’t matter to him that his name is unknown in popular culture; what gravels him is that he feels he hasn’t been adequately compensated for his success. He may be one of those mysterious people he used to hear about as a child, those tales of men and women who “had more money than they knew what to do with,” but sometimes he still worries. Look how fast it fell away from Michael Jackson. No matter how much there is, it seems it can always just drain away. There is no safety net. He has to keep working.

Jeffrey has glided through the latest economic downturn. He scoffs at those who call it the Great Recession, handwringers who compare it to an actual depression. Ten percent unemployment is good for his business, pares the fat from the body.

From Our Interview

Donald Hall — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:01:21 -0800

Don read his work and talked, at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, with Narrative’s consulting editors Pat Gage and Caitlin McKenna. Despite an ongoing battle with his health, Hall continues to write every day, as he has for the past forty years. In these audio excerpts from the interview, Hall shares his thoughts on the interplay between biography and imagination, his writing process, and the history of poetry readings. His personal story, Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry, is excerpted in our Archive.

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Biography and Imagination (04:11)

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Revision (08:44)

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Reading Aloud (03:49)

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Poser

Sara Faye Lieber — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:17:17 -0800

Two Kinds of Stillness

For my first few sessions, I’m anxious about taking my clothes off in front of strangers, and this makes me fidgety, so I take muscle relaxers a half hour before I arrive at the community center. Luckily, the sculpture instructor guesses I’m a newbie and kindly suggests I do some lying-down poses. When the timer begins ticking, I take off my long, black halter dress and lie down on the cloth-draped cushions the sculpture instructor has arranged on the elevated stand in the center of the room. For the twenty-minute intervals that I lie there, unmoving, sun streams in the windows, catching the particles of clay dust that hang in the air, and I’m absorbed in the calm that comes from such unbound immobility. As I lie there still as a statue, it strikes me that what I always found soothing about the beach was not the waves or the sand but the feeling of a light, warm wind passing over my skin as I lay still without having to move or wonder what had to happen next.

Curing a Cold

Mark Twain — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:40:52 -0800

It is a good thing, perhaps, to write for the amusement of the public, but it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction, their profit, their actual and tangible benefit. The latter is the sole object of this article. If it prove the means of restoring to health one solitary sufferer among my race, of lighting up once more the fire of hope and joy in his faded eyes, of bringing back to his dead heart again the quick, generous impulses of other days, I shall be amply rewarded for my labor; my soul will be permeated with the sacred delight a Christian feels when he has done a good, unselfish deed.

Having led a pure and blameless life, I am justified in believing that no man who knows me will reject the suggestions I am about to make, out of fear that I am trying to deceive him. Let the public do itself the honor to read my experience in doctoring a cold, as herein set forth, and then follow in my footsteps.

Walking in Time

Timothy Ferris — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:15:54 -0700

I’m walkin’
Yes indeed.
I’m talkin’
About you and me . . .
—Fats Domino

So, little by little, time brings out each thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light.
—Lucretius

Once, years ago when young and proud, I tried by walking for a single day to grasp the enormity of the past.

Space I knew a bit about. Since childhood I’d studied astronomy books and the boundless book of the night sky, acquiring a sense of cosmic cartography. I knew the directions and distances of scores of stars, was familiar with the reefs and shoals of the Milky Way thousands of light-years out, and could find my way down lanky archipelagoes of galaxies stretching from here to the core of the Virgo Cluster. I felt at home in the depths of the sky.

A Matter of Necessity

Wendell Berry — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:26:00 -0700

To rescue ourselves, our fellow beings, and our places from the rampage of big ideas that feed upon without recognizing all the things of the world, we need an adequate language—a language not alienated from us by divorce from things and therefore at the service of our exploiters and oppressors. We need at the very least a speakable inventory of the things particularly belonging to our own places and lives that are worth saving.

The Lesson of the Master

Henry James — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:39:51 -0700

He had been told the ladies were at church, but this was corrected by what he saw from the top of the steps—they descended from a great height in two arms, with a circular sweep of the most charming effect—at the threshold of the door which, from the long bright gallery, overlooked the immense lawn. Three gentlemen, on the grass, at a distance, sat under the great trees, while the fourth figure showed a crimson dress that told as a “bit of colour” amid the fresh rich green. The servant had so far accompanied Paul Overt as to introduce him to this view, after asking him if he wished first to go to his room. The young man declined that privilege, conscious of no disrepair from so short and easy a journey and always liking to take at once a general perceptive possession of a new scene. He stood there a little with his eyes on the group and on the admirable picture, the wide grounds of an old country-house near London—that only made it better—on a splendid Sunday in June. “But that lady, who’s she?” he said to the servant before the man left him.

“I think she’s Mrs. St. George, sir.”

“Mrs. St. George, the wife of the distinguished—” Then Paul Overt checked himself, doubting if a footman would know.

“Yes, sir—probably, sir,” said his guide, who appeared to wish to intimate that a person staying at Summersoft would naturally be, if only by alliance, distinguished. His tone, however, made poor Overt himself feel for the moment scantly so.

“And the gentlemen?” Overt went on.

“Well, sir, one of them’s General Fancourt.”

Underneath the Bonfire

Nickolas Butler — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:55:58 -0700

They were dragging the Christmas trees across the frozen lake, a trail of needles behind them, the crowns of the trees down against the ice, snow, and slush where once the little trees had supported a brightly lit star, or an angel. They carried the trees by their stumps. Most of the trees had stopped drinking, the needles beginning to dot the carpeting; wrapped in lights and ornaments, they were no longer merry but combustible. Potential arrows of flame. The tradition was to burn them, out on the frozen lake, on the first night of January. Kat watched them, coming from shore, the trees making a low, steady scratching sound. Her boyfriend, Pieter, hunched over a chainsaw, checking its fluids, a can of gasoline beside his knee.

“It’s kind of sad,” she said, rubbing her arms, “to end this way. Every year. Just to be burned. What was the point of it all?”

Second First Night

Jan Ellison — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:53:25 -0700

They had spent one drunken night at a bed-and-breakfast in the English countryside five years earlier. Pauline never knew his name, or rather she must have known it and lost it the way she’d lost so much of that evening—not the texture, not the flat green glass of the lake and the polished silver of the sky and the low rumble of his voice in the little room above the pub, but the narrative thread, the salient events. Now she was standing in the middle of the exhibit hall at the annual online trading systems exhibition at Chicago’s McCormick Place, and he was standing three yards away, feet planted apart, hands clasped behind his back, a tidy rectangle of neck visible between his dark hair and starched collar. He turned toward her, and there was his face with its relentless composure, its broad straight nose and roughened cheeks, its high forehead and frank brown eyes. It was a face, Pauline felt for a moment, that she alone understood. She alone knew how its equanimity could be overturned, how he too could be swept up, his tender interior laid bare.

He stepped toward her and she read his preprinted badge—Daryl Strong, a name suddenly familiar and comically, or ironically, appropriate for the man she would come to know. A man in the habit of restraint. A man who faced pain or illness or adversity by drinking tap water and forging ahead. But who could also be moved to tears. Whom a year later she would watch come undone over a bird’s nest fallen from rafters, its eggs shattered in the fall. It took him a minute to place her, and when he did he smiled in recognition, but he didn’t embrace her, as she’d hoped he would.

The Lesson of the Master

Cynthia Ozick — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:08:43 -0700

There was a period in my life—to purloin a famous Jamesian title, “The Middle Years”—when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, “I hate Henry James and I wish he was dead.”

I was not to have my disgruntled way. The dislike did not last and turned once again to adoration, ecstasy, and awe; and no one is more alive than Henry James, or more likely to sustain literary immortality. He is among the angels, as he meant to be.

But in earlier days I felt I had been betrayed by Henry James. I was like the youthful writer in “The Lesson of the Master” who believed in the Master’s call to live immaculately, unspoiled by what we mean when we say “life”—relationship, family mess, distraction, exhaustion, anxiety, above all disappointment.

Tea and Sleep

Taha Muhammad Ali — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:17:40 -0700

Dear Friends,

We were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Taha Muhammad Ali, an exceptional person and extraordinary poet. Taha was born on July 27, 1931, and died in Nazareth, Israel, on Sunday, October 2, 2011.

As all Narrative readers who encountered his work know, Taha’s imagination was expansive, and several years back he had, as it happens, already conjured a poem of his final hours as he’d liked them to have been. He read the poem in front of a live audience in Port Townsend, Washington, in 2006, and, here, in tribute to Taha, we offer a recording of the poem, read first in Arabic by Taha and then in English by his translator Peter Cole.

Taha will be sorely missed.

Sincerely,

Michael Wiegers, Poetry Editor, Narrative Magazine

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Tea and Sleep (0:41 preview)

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Tea and Sleep (4:16)

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The Promised Land

Katie Cortese — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:51:30 -0700

The annual fishing trip is supposed to be just the four of us guys, but this year Jimmy Barlow brought his daughter. He’s the only one of us with kids. Jimmy was seventeen when his girlfriend came knocking on his door with the news. That was eighteen years ago. I guess you could call the rest of us late bloomers.

Graham rented a spanking-new Chris-Craft for us this weekend, a twenty-footer with a cabin and plenty of room for four grown men and their gear, but the girl made it feel crowded. She wouldn’t smile and as soon as her father dragged her on board, she stripped down to a bikini thing all strings, lathered herself with oil, and took over the prow with her iPod, wearing sunglasses black and shiny as alien eyeballs.

Work

Spencer Wise — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 06:16:35 -0700

I’m sixteen and fit to work but Isadore, the foreman at the tannery, is telling me he’s seen more meat on a chicken. Too small, run on home, he says.

If you know what you’re doing, you can read the heavy smell in here coming off the vats of gleaming, bubbling cowhides. One deep breath and my pops could tell you whether the animal was old or diseased or stressed when it died. The animals don’t suffer, the rabbi told me; there isn’t a single nick on his knife. To be honest, it just smells like rot to me, but I puff up like a wild turkey anyway and tell Isadore that it’s my right to work here in the same tannery my pops worked, making Goodyear welt army boots to ship overseas.