Our Spring / Summer 2016 issue is here!

Creative Work

We are pleased to present work by the following contributors:

• Artwork – Cinelle Barnes, Daniel de Culla, Jason “JaFleu” Fleurant, Karen Golightly, Harry Wilson, Evie Zimmer, Robert Zurer
• Fiction – Mark Brazaitis, Sara Cutaia, Michael Welch
• Non-Fiction – M.M. Adjarian, Kelly DeLong, Richard Tillinghast
• Poetry – Gil Arzola, James R. Brown, Pat Daneman, Marc Frazier, Jean A. Kingsley, Susanna Lang, Garuda Love, Ronald Moran, K.A. McGowan, Devin Murphy, Louise Platter, Cody Smith

Reviews

Looking for some great summer reads?  Check out our Reviews section.

• A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (Fiction)
• Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks (Fiction)
• One Blackbird at a Time by Wendy Barker (Poetry)

Special Thanks

South 85 Journal is published by the Converse College Low-Residency MFA program.  Thank you to our staff of volunteers who put countless hours into making this issue happen. We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together!

Interested in Submitting?

We will take a break from our reading period until September 1, 2016.  We hope to hear from you then!  In the meantime, you can submit an essay to our blog about writing by following this link: https://south85.submittable.com/submit/27152.

Walter Cummins

Does it make any difference to readers whether a work of fiction—particularly literary fiction—was written by a person or by a robot? Much genre fiction is inherently formulaic, variations on basic patterns that fans of the specific genre expect and want. In fact, they would most likely be disappointed, if not disturbed, by unusual shifts from the predictable.

One successful romance writer, Lori Devoti, lists five scenes every such novel should have: 1) the meeting of the couple that ends with some conflict, 2) their awareness of what they share, still ending with conflict, 3) their physical attraction and yet more conflict, 4) dramatization of their emotional commitment, and 5) a sacrifice for love that outweighs any conflicts. “So, if it’s a formula,” Devoti claims, “so is life.”

A writer of literary fiction would disagree, most likely sharing Tolstoy’s, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It may be that even happy families differ, but literary fiction is not about them, unless it reveals the unease beneath the surface.

Could a computer programs write romance novels? They already have produced acceptable news items, business reports, and similar pieces. Such outcomes involve entering concrete information, like the score of a football game and the earnings of a corporation, and processing them through a fixed organizational structure. A romance novel that emulates a standard development pattern must offer new information such as the characters’ names and backstories, where they live, the specific nature of their conflicts, etc. Can such details be incorporated into a program? Probably, eventually, because they are just variations on the expected—different scores, different earnings, different conflicts. Good literary fiction, in contrast, lacks fixed patterns and predetermined expectations.

Writing in Business Insider in late 2014, Joshua Barrie, a UK tech reporter, claims, “Computers are writing novels — and getting better at it.” And he wonders, “if the creative professions are safer than the administrative or processing professions” from the progress of artificial intelligence (AI). Still, how good must a computer-generated novel be to give nightmares to the thousands of would-be and published story writers and novelists?

Alan Turning, Barrie reports, back in 1950 already came up with a measure for literature with a variation of his famous Turing Test. He posits two stages, a soft test in which human readers can’t tell it’s not human generated, and a hard test in which human readers not only can’t tell it’s not human generated, but will actually purchase it.

The “breakout hit” computer-written novel of 2013, Nick Montfort’s World Clock, failed the test of getting Barrie to shell out pounds and pence for a copy. The algorithms programmed by Montfort, a digital media professor at MIT, turned out passages such as these:

It is now exactly 05:00 in Samarkand. In some ramshackle dwelling a person who is called Gang, who is on the small side, reads an entirely made-up word on a box of breakfast cereal. He turns entirely around.

It is now right about 18:01 in Matamoros, In some dim yet decent structure a man named Tao, who is no larger or smaller than one would expect, reads a tiny numeric code from a recipe clipping. He smiles a tiny smile.

And several more such paragraphs. The pattern is clear. Time and place, what kind of building, character name, character size, something read, a gesture made. The limitations of the tales of Gang and Tao and others might give literary fiction writers sighs of relief.

A few years before, in 2008, Russia’s SPb publishing company shipped bookstores True Love, a 320-page work created by IT professionals to retell Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina in the style of Haruki Murakami. Here’s a representative passage: “Kitty couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. Her nerves were strained as two tight strings, and even a glass of hot wine, that Vronsky made her drink, did not help her. Lying in bed she kept going over and over that monstrous scene at the meadow.”

Such sentences emulate familiar story telling, but True Love can be considered a sport. The Tolstoi original already exists, and Murakami’s stylistic tics can be broken down into 0s and 1s. Essentially, with the plot a given and the presentational method predetermined, that novel is a merging of two sets of knowns rather than a creation of something new.

Since both True Love and World Clock, however, the Google AI program Alpha Go defeated the world’s champion Go player several times. Apparently, that was a huge leap in harnessing computer potential and a form of creative game playing.

The game of Go is apparently exponentially more complex than chess. AI specialists consider the recent achievement of Alpha Go much more significant than IBM’s Watson’s groundbreaking defeat of chess master Kasparov in 1997. A computational Everest has been climbed because the number of the number of possible games of Go far exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe and more than a googol times larger than chess.

So many possibilities, so many choices. I’m reminded of a bit of wisdom offered by George P. Elliott (Among the Dangs, Parktilden Village), who explained the creative challenge: “What makes fiction writing so difficult are all the decisions the writer faces.” That’s seen in every word choice, in every arrangement of syntax, in every character detail, in every item of backstory, in every transition, in every step of plot; in short, in everything.

If Alpha Go can master the challenge of more than all the atoms, could an equivalent AI program first master romance novels and then literary fiction? Could mastering an extraordinarily complex game translate into mastering an extraordinarily complex creative task? Is it not possible that fiction writers will go the way of assembly line welders before, say, 2020, replaced not by robots but by highly inventive algorithms? Artificial intelligence has already outperformed human abilities such as making medical diagnoses that outperform physicians and allowing cars that drive themselves more safely than people. What about a computer program that turns out literary fiction?

Recently I came across James Salter’s The Art of Fiction, a brief book compiling three lectures he gave as the first Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residency at the University of Virginia. Salter is nothing if not a writer of literary novels and short stories, much praised for the lyric precision of his prose. In the lectures he discusses how he became a writer, how he wrote, and how he learned from other writers.

Most significant to me was his sense of the standards for good writing and how hard it is to meet those standards. He notes that Gustav Flaubert wrote 4,500 pages of drafts for what became a 300-page masterpiece, Madame Bovary, endlessly revising and at times producing only a page a week in search of le mot juste.

Salter emphasizes the importance of the sentence, how an author’s distinct voice, his or her way of telling, comes though in sequences of words that lead a sentence “to bloom in the reader’s mind.” He cites Isaac Babel, who said, “…there was no iron that could piece the human heart with as much force as a period put in just the right place.”

Salter echoes George P. Elliott when he says writing a novel is a long process because it’s not possible to hold all the details in your head. “You have to keep track of many things, even apart from who is where and what has happened,” he explains. “Inevitably there are notes tacked to the wall or taped to an outline.” Today such notes may be off in a corner of a computer screen. The main thing, Salter emphasizes, is organizing and finding an order for all those details.

Throughout all the time it takes to write a novel, writing is not confined to a specific time or a specific place. “You do it elsewhere,” Salter explains, “carrying the book with you. The book is your companion, you have it in your mind all the times, running through it, alert for links to it.”

Having written a bit of fiction myself, novels once but primarily short stories, and having many fiction writer friends who talk about their process, I can’t but agree with all that Salter says about writing fiction.

But back to computer-written books. Phil Parker, a chaired professor of marketing at Insead: The Business School for the World, reports that once two or three years have been devoted to developing the right algorithms, a book can be generated in twenty minutes. He claims, going one step beyond Lori Devoti:

We created a system which we think mimics the human mind… The truth is, if you step back far enough, all of literature is highly formulaic, not just romance novels. Some of the genres are so formulaic that the publishers of those genres tell the potential writers how to write the books themselves.

I can’t help by compare that twenty-minute span with the full decade several of my novelist friends devoted to a single work, resulting in grants, awards, and enthusiastic reviews. But I also wonder how that world champion Go player must feel after multiple defeats by Alpha Go. And then I wonder about sentences that pierce the human heart.

Even if a future algorithm actually produces fiction that passes the Turning Tests of convincing readers and finding buyers, even going beyond that to win National Book Awards and Man Booker Prizes, I suspect the James Salters of the world won’t stop writing novels and stories because for them the process, as long and as demanding as it may be, matters much more than the product. Can an algorithm enjoy the satisfaction of achieving a sentence that blooms or a single word that feels exactly right?

Walter Cummins has published six short story collections—Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, The Lost Ones, Habitat: stories of bent realism. More than 100 of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines, in book collections, and on the Web. With Thomas E. Kennedy, he is co-publisher of Serving House Books, an outlet for novels, memoirs, and story, poetry, and essay collections. For more than twenty years, he was editor of The Literary Review.  He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Sources:

Joshua Barrie. “Computers Are Writing Novels: Read a Few Samples Here.” Business Insider November 27, 2014. http://www.businessinsider.com/novels-written-by-computers-2014-11?r=UK&IR=T

Lori Devoti, “Five Scenes Every Romance Novel Needs.” The How to Write Shop July 30, 2012. http://howtowriteshop.loridevoti.com/2012/07/five-scenes-every-romance-novel-needs/

Google Official Blog. “AlphaGo: using machine learning to master the ancient game of Go.”

January 27, 2016. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2016/01/alphago-machine-learning-game-go.html

Adam Popescu. “Why Write Your Own Book When an Algorithm Can Do It For You.” Read Write January 15, 2013.http://readwrite.com/2013/01/15/why-write-your-own-book-when-an-algorithm-can-do-it-for-you/

James Salter. The Art of Fiction. University of Virginia Press, 2016.

Ashley Kunsa

I want to like free writing. I really do. I want to pick up my pen, flip the switch on my inner censor, and stream glorious ink across a college-ruled page. I also want Deadwood to finish what it started and Oreos to have eight calories apiece, but, after years and years of fruitless pining, a person gets to thinking, “This probably is what it is and not what I want it to be, huh?”

I started teaching college writing workshops in 2007, and between 2000 and 2008 I was a student in them fairly consistently. That means free writing and writing exercises have been a part of my existence, in some way or another, for about the past fifteen years, which is a little less than half my life so far. And you know what? I’ve never liked them. Why? Because I’m bad at them. Seriously bad.

As the mother of a small child, this is a terrible attitude to advertise—I don’t like this because I suck at it!—and it’s certainly not the lesson I repeat when my son’s struggling to peel his left (velcroed) shoe off. Nor do I parade this anti-ideal around my classroom. I hammer the revision drum, tell my students to take risks, to try the things they’re uncomfortable with. This isn’t just lip service; it’s sound writing advice.

But I’ve tried and tried to get in sync with these basic writing techniques, and the result is always the same: weak verbs, boring sentence constructions, leaden images, and characters who say things like, “I have to use the bathroom.” Somewhere along the pedagogical line, at some point in my own training as a fiction writer, I must’ve missed the message.

For me, free writing is like a 5–10 minute prison; it’s anything but “free.” I feel so much pressure to produce something good—something off-the-cuff! unexpected! lyrical yet quirky yet on and on and on—that I end up, well, shackled to my expectations, never taking flight. Then I sheepishly share my product (if I must), wishing I could add, “But my real writing is better than this, I swear.”

But not my students. They flow with free writing. List making, writing from the POV of a guy dressed like the Easter bunny or a woman with a Mona monkey perched on her shoulder. And writing exercises provoke some of their best work: character sketches; observation exercises; imitations in the style of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” or Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” This stuff pushes their boundaries. It makes them, well, better writers—like it’s supposed to.

Then there’s the small group of veterans for which I co-lead a writing workshop at my university. Virtually none of these students have any background in creative writing, yet the stuff they come up with in our ninety minutes together makes me blush—such as the former Navy Corpsman who, in response to one prompt, wrote a hilarious little bit about a snarky kid whose grandma busts him for dealing candy on the playground. Then I had to read my super creative and brilliant (psych!) response, where Grandma chastises the teenager for hanging out with ne’er-do-wells and turning off his cell phone.

On Seinfeld, Gwen tells George, “It’s not you, it’s me.” This time, I’m pretty certain it actually is me. But, at this point, I don’t think there’s much to be done about it. I’ve been at this writing thing for a while now, and free writing and exercises have been around a lot longer than that. It’s fine though: we can continue to occupy our separate corners, each doing our own thing. I’ll continue to use them as tools to help young writers develop their craft, and, who knows—maybe one day I’ll surprise myself and write a magical, ethereal Oreo that floats off the page and into the pink-glazed sunset. Or something.

Ashley Kunsa‘s short fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review, the Roanoke Review, Hot Metal Bridge, Eastern Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Orlando Prize by the AROHO foundation and holds an MFA from Penn State. Currently, she’s completing a dissertation on Iraq War fiction at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in fiction writing, American literature, and composition. You can find her online at www.ashleykunsa.com.

Russell Jackson

Desks hold a lot of importance and significance for some people.  For some they are merely a workspace; a table with four legs they begrudgingly sit at each day.  Some desks go down in history like Harry S. Truman’s desk in the Oval office which held the now iconic line: “The Buck Stops Here.”  For others desks represent an almost sacred space.  This is true for a lot of writers I know.  I’ve also read articles and books by writers on the craft of writing and they’ve suggested creating a special space with a desk where you will be pulled to each day to write.

The poet Carl Sandburg had a desk in his main office on the first floor of his Connemara estate located in Flat Rock, North Carolina.  The desk held major significance for him because the desk had been made especially for him from the wood flooring from Abraham Lincoln’s office.  Sandburg was not only a huge fan but he also won his first Pulitzer Prize for his biography on Abraham Lincoln.  Even though his office desk held much meaning for Sandburg he often wrote upstairs on an old orange crate which held one of his trusty typewriters, but he and the orange crate migrated throughout the house as well.   Sandburg also often wrote outside with the trusty old pen and paper.

Carl Sandburg is a hero of mine.  His home which is now a national state park is open to the public in my hometown so as a kid the usual field trip was a visit to Connemara Farms complete with a tour of the home in which Sandburg spent his last twenty or so years.  I was in second grade when my first field trip to Connemara took place and the minute I saw the typewriter atop the old orange crate I set about becoming a writer.  It seemed like such an amazing thing to me to be able to seclude myself in a cozy little nook somewhere and write.  So I grabbed an old apple crate and my dad’s Smith and Corona and set about creating my own little Sandburg space and becoming a successful writer.   But even as a kid that crate kept moving or being discarded for another surface.  Perhaps some of Sandburg’s hobo ways rubbed off on me.

I too have a special desk which was inherited from my great grandmother Sallie Hunter Jones, who taught school and retired as principal.  The desk I inherited is her desk that she used as teacher and principal.  Personally I’ve found it difficult to stick to a special place and desk especially created for my writing.  I used to worry that because I didn’t do a lot of what these writers of writing books do that it meant I was not a serious writer.   A kind fellow writer reminded me that the suggestions in these books are just that: suggestions.  I find I have no control over where I am at when the urge to write hits and I have learned the hard way that I don’t put off those little moments of inspiration until I get back to my “writer’s space.”

When I moved back to my hometown this past summer me and my dad begin repairing and renovating my grandmother’s little place for my new home.  As I’m nearing the end stage of that renovation process and begin setting up house I look at my little desk and wonder that if I did find some special nook or cranny would it somehow jumpstart my motivation to write each day.  Now that I’m older and more settled and in a graduate program- maybe the desk and its space will perhaps work for me now.   My suspicion is that for me that has not changed.  Perhaps the desk and its locale represent a safe harbor and maybe it’s enough to know it is there waiting on me should the orange/apple crate and hobo writing life prove to be fruitless.

Russell Jackson is a graduate of Evergreen State College and current graduate student at Converse College in the MFA Creative Writing Program. He recently discovered that Back to the Future was just a fantasy created by Hollywood, so he and his poetry spend a lot of time circling the drain of childhood nostalgia and pop culture.

South 85 Journal’s deadline for the Spring / Summer 2016 issue is tomorrow!  We will be accepting poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and visual art submissions through April 30, 2016.

For more information, check out our submission guidelines.  Or visit our Submittable page to submit now!

By the way, check out the review our journal received from Katy Haas of NewPages about our Fall / Winter 2015 issue:  http://www.newpages.com/magazine-reviews/south-85-journal-fall-winter-2015.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Kathryn Stripling Byer

It took me a while.  After all, who wouldn’t want to wear fancy boots, lots of fringe, and sing, not to mention write, songs like “From Boulder to Birmingham”? Even now I marvel at how long it took me to realize that the poetry I was writing was my way of singing.  After years of Emmylou envy, I began to hear my voice, as I gave readings, approach song.  I began to focus on poetry as sound, as what Richard Wagner came to call even years before he’d inscribed the first note of an opera, “sound landscapes.”  Of course this poetic landscape encompasses all the elements of poetry, syntax, image, lineation and so forth, but more and more I began to listen, really listen to where the language was leading me.

This listening can take its own sweet time, and waiting is, as far as I’m concerned, a key component of good writing.  Several years ago, while visiting a good friend in Oregon, I joined her and a few of her poet-friends for a workshop. As a prompt, she offered up a poem with a train in it.  I can’t recall much of the poem, but the sound of that train pulled me into the first line of a poem that took me a long time to sing to its closing notes.  “So long, so long, the train sang,” I wrote in my notebook. And so began the first notes that kept calling and calling to me, haunting me, even down to the final days of my father’s life, as I lay in my childhood bed, trying to weave this poem together, finally.  I was, as I now realize, “listening” this poem to completion.

“Legato,” that is what I was trying to achieve–the legato line.  Singers know it well, and so indeed do poets, though they may not know it…..yet.  The opposite of legato is staccato, and I knew the sound landscape for this poem was not at all staccato.  This poem’s legato line was a moaning, all the way down through the flatlands, sounding like Georgia blues singer Precious Bryant singing, “I’m goin’ home on the morning train. That evening train may be too late, so I’m goin’ home on the morning train.”

I was going home, too. I’d been going home since that first line jotted down quickly so many years ago in Portland, Oregon.  “So long, so long, the train sang/ deep in the piney woods, well out of sight…. As sound only, it found me…long vowel reaching for nobody I knew as yet,

sounding an emptiness

deeper than I thought  could blow through

the cracks of this song where I’m kindling a fire

for my fingers to reach toward,

a kindling that transforms whatever it touches

to pure sound, a pearl, say,

that’s cupped in my palm

like a kernel my teeth cannot crack,

the pulse of it strung note by note round my neck,

that old rhythm and blues beat

I can’t stop from singing me home

on this slow morning train

of a poem, its voice calling

downwind, What took you so long?

This morning train of a poem became the first poem in my most recent book, Descent.  And its question still haunts me.  What took me so long to give up Emmylou and let go into my own legato line?  My own lifeline bearing me home again?  Maybe it’s the same journey we take over and over again with each new poem we write.

Kathryn Stripling Byer, a native of Southwest Georgia,  lives in the mountains of North Carolina. Her poetry, prose, and fiction have appeared widely, including  Hudson Review, Poetry, The Atlantic, Georgia Review, and Shenandoah.   Her first book of poetry, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, was published in the AWP Award Series, followed by the Lamont (now Laughlin) prize-winning Wildwood Flower, from LSU Press.  Her subsequent collections have been published in the LSU Press Poetry Series. She served for five years as North Carolina’s first woman poet laureate.

Photo credit:  By Yogibones from (Flickr) [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Rhonda Browning White

Literary fiction often weighs in as heavy, and that’s no laughing matter. Literary novelists and short-story writers sometimes hold up a mirror to the reader, letting him or her see their own preconceived notions, flaws, or misinterpretations in new light, providing an opportunity for growth and change. Fiction writers often tackle difficult subjects, such as lies, divorce, abuse, and death. We are not strangers to tension and conflict; rather, we work hard to ratchet up the pressure on our characters, twisting our plots until we—and our readers—are gasping for air.

What better way to breathe, then, than to laugh?

Many of the best authors of serious literary narrative know the value of sprinkling a dash of humor here and there in their otherwise serious fiction; it’s a great way to disarm the reader and provide a necessary bit of lighthearted respite from a dark or dense story. A humorous scene, or even a deftly delivered one-liner, can be the equivalent of taking a steaming teakettle from the stove to release the pressure just before the whistle blows, only to quickly put it back on the heat, creating even more tension as we wait for the shrill shriek that we know is soon to come.

The late Flannery O’Connor was a true master of literary fiction, and even her darkest stories of corruption and grim reality are illuminated by sparkles of comedic laughter. She uses humorous character names (such as Manley Pointer to describe a randy Bible salesman in “Good Country People”), and religious ignorance (“‘What do I need with Jesus?’ he asks. ‘I got Leora Watts.’” in her first novel, Wise Blood). One of her most heartbreaking stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” tells us of an entire family murdered by escaped convicts while on a road trip instigated by the grandmother in the family. In spite of the horror, O’Connor allows us still to laugh over the thoughts, actions, and dialogue of the grandmother. “Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”

Another strong example, Leslie Pietrzyk’s This Angel On My Chest is a collection of stories linked by grief. In each, a young female protagonist deals with the loss of her husband—a tragic and heartrending premise if ever there was one. Yet Pietrzyk finds a way in each of these stories to make us smile, if only through our tears. In “The Circle,” a group of female widows meets regularly for friendly conversation that always ends up on the topic of loss. When the protagonist finds her late husband’s secret journal, she tells the ladies about it, and they ask if she’s read it and what it contained, suspecting an affair.

. . . “He didn’t—?” Suellen asked.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t cheat on me. Or if he did, he was smart enough not to write about it.” Her half-smile, nervous, making the other two nervous, so the laughed lightly.

“That’s super-dumb,” Suellen said. “Dear Diary, Today I fucked a waitress I picked up.” And then they did laugh for real.

And so does the reader. This snippet of lighthearted banter in such a somber scene reminds us that, even when dealing with grief and death, it’s okay to live and to laugh.

Likewise, literary fiction doesn’t get much more searingly serious than Tim O’Brien’s tormenting story of the Vietnam War in The Things They Carried. Yet the author still gives us permission to laugh—a much-needed break amid the vivid horror—which allows us not only to catch our breath, but to see that gallows humor was necessary to the survival of those soldiers who fought the war.

In the story, we meet Rat Kiley, a soldier on the verge of complete mental breakdown, who tries to feed an orphaned baby water buffalo. When the animal refuses to eat Rat’s pork-and-beans, he kills it, but not in any humane way—he tortures it by shooting it many times, intentionally prolonging the animal’s death to cause it as much pain as possible, thus reflecting his own pain. It’s then easy for the reader to dislike Rat, to despise him, to never want to hear word of him again. Yet less than a dozen pages later, we’re chuckling over his braggadocios ways:

Among the men in Alpha Company, Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was a normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say. If Rat told you, for example, that he’d slept with four girls one night, you could figure it was about a girl and a half.

These opportunities to smile are what allows us to keep reading a story that’s rife with dreadful scenes and devastating anguish.

It’s important to note that the humor in these serious narratives is delivered in small doses—too much would undermine their poignancy. The fleeting nature of their comicality or absurdity mirrors the evanescent quality of our own personal experience with humor and laughter in the real world. This light brush with funny moments preceding or following a story’s gravest scenes makes it more believable to us, more relatable, more real.

This realness and emotion is what we all want from the stories we write; to move our readers to laughter and tears. Add a little humor to your next work of heavy literary fiction, and allow your readers to laugh. You’ll smile at the results—I’m serious.

Rhonda Browning White resides near Daytona Beach, FL and works as a ghostwriter, editor, adjunct professor, and Realtor. (She does what it takes to support her writing habit!) Her work appears in HeartWood Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Steel Toe Review, Ploughshares Writing Lessons, Tiny Text, New Pages, South 85 Journal, WV Executive, Mountain Echoes, Gambit, Justus Roux, Bluestone Review, in the anthologies Appalachia’s Last Stand and Mountain Voices, and is forthcoming in World Enough Writers: Ice Cream Anthology, by Concrete Wolf Press. Rhonda recently was awarded the Sterling Watson Fellowship for the Eckerd College Writer’s Conference: Writers in Paradise. She blogs about books, writing, and celebrating life at “Read. Write. Live!” found at www.RhondaBrowningWhite.com , and about the craft of fiction writing at www.WhyTheWritingWorks.com. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College in Spartanburg, SC.

Arlia Frink

There are days when my introverted nature barricades myself inside the house, brews a small (but potent) pot of coffee, turns the cell phone off (I mean, actually off, and not the do-not-disturb-off), starts the vinyl spinning, and wallows in the creative process of writing. And then there are those moments the extroverted tendencies of my nature propel me to seek community with others tackling this lovely adventure we call creating art.

One such episode of extroversion found me as a participant at my alma mater’s undergraduate humanities conference contributing to a round table discussion of creativity and humanities last month. That is all we (two professors, one alumna, one current student) were told about the round table: creativity and the humanities. This discussion could travel to any destination. This discussion could ask, tell, seek, excavate the loftiest of paradigms or the shallowest of concepts. Who knew, this discussion might even inspire some apathetic undergraduate student to ardently pursue a humanities field (dare we hope?). Intellectual and artistic stimulation at its finest, my friends, at its absolute finest.

For almost two hours, students and professors from a mixture of regional institutions, fields of study, diverse demographics, volleyed ideas and queries back and forth. Questions led to comments led to questions led to audience participation led to notations on paper and then more commentary. What and how do we personally define creativity? Can creativity be taught or learned, nurtured or cultivated? Is is innate? Is there a difference between analytical and creative thought? If there is, can they be separated? What qualities are essential to creativity, to the creative process? If there is artistic merit and beauty in science and math, then why do most call them the dichotomous sibling of the humanities? Can the creative desire be stifled or destroyed? Oh, what questions. And oh, what responses.

As party to this discussion, the opportunity I was afforded to witness both the inklings of philosophical thought and the wisdom of those more experienced, was richly satisfying. For this round table discussion demonstrated one of my favorite aspects of an artistic and academic environment: community. There is risk in exploring and exposing the creative process, regardless if that process concerns playing with language or manipulating computer code. There is even greater risk when that exposure and exploration is organic and fluid, because the lack of structure also brokers a lack of control (and let’s face it, most of us enjoy having a modicum of control). But when individuals gather to form a community, however briefly, the weight of that risk is often lessened—shared weight produces comfort. Shared community also produces quite a bit of laughter, as I discovered that day too.

And isn’t that simply a lovely aspect of this adventure? To share, to learn, to gather a supportive community where available, and to laugh as you each navigate the intricacies of crafting something of quality and worth? As you each pursue the clearest expression of your aim? If that’s not exquisite, then at least let it prompt a response along those lines.

Arlia M. Frink currently attends Converse College’s Low-Residency MFA Program. She is a nap, music, and coffee aficionado, who occasionally dabbles in radio broadcasting and children’s story-time at area schools. A Yankee-hybrid, she lives in Darlington, South Carolina, where it is impossible to purchase Cream Of Wheat.

Kristi Hébert

Dystopian fiction is not simply about the end of the world.  It is often defined as “A futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control.  Dystopias, through an exaggerated worst-case scenario, make a criticism about a current trend, societal norm, or political system” (ReadWriteThink).  In essence, dystopian fiction is not just a genre designed to terrify the world with what might have been or what will be, but a more sincere social criticism, and while literary fiction is a form that requires a writer to focus on meaning and artistic prowess rather than the entertainment value of the piece, dystopian fiction is often relegated to mere genre fiction—a subsection of novels meant for pure entertainment with little to no literary merit.

However, there are many craft lessons to be learned from genre fiction in and of itself, and specifically dystopian fiction.  While dystopian fiction may be entertaining, or fantastical, or within the realm of science fiction, it also focuses on dispossessed or marginalized people, and the politics of how the suppression of an entire culture of society occurs with the apparent permission of the general populace.  Dystopian fiction is a way for writers to examine the possibility for vast social change, often as a warning based on the social and political climate in which they are writing, while weaving a thread of utopian hope as a subtext throughout the novel.  These writers reject the notion that immense societal, economic, or political changes are impossible, while offering their protagonists a chance to unveil change from within the society that is oppressing him or her and thereby offering the writer as well as the reader a chance to see the society they are reflecting upon beginning to change as well.

To that end, one of the most powerful tools that an author can use is, of course, language.  However, it is not merely the act of writing that the dystopian novel can teach us.  When an author evokes setting through language, it can anchor a reader in a time and place that the reader is unfamiliar with, without explicitly stating that the setting is another world or time.  It eases a reader into the world of dystopia without offering too much information that would reduce the likelihood of a reader’s suspension of disbelief.  Furthermore, in both fiction and non-fiction, as well as in real life, language itself is often used as a tool of power by totalitarian regimes or authoritarian governments: to take away an individual’s power to learn, to gather information for his or herself, to speak a language or use words native to his or her tongue, or to disagree with the politics or beliefs of his or her time is to take away personal agency, creating a prison of language, rather than bars.

Cognitive estrangement—or the act of using a reader’s lack of knowledge in the fictive world he or she is reading to continue a suspension of disbelief—is a theory often applied to works in which the audience must be willing to believe a premise in fiction that they would never believe in the “real world.”  A dystopian text often begins by plunging the reader into the created world with no preamble or introduction; yet cognitive estrangement is often delayed by the sense of normalcy that is created by this lack of preliminary explanation.  It is the language, then, that portrays to the reader that all is not what it seems.  Either by the author him- or herself using their craft of language to portray a different world or time, or by the text itself having an official discourse of a dystopian power structure, language is often the key element in dystopian fiction.

The way in which language is applied to dystopian fiction can be of assistance to writers of all kinds, not just science fiction or other genres.  As an author, one of the most important decisions you can make is regarding word choice.  If the words are beautiful but meaningless, or the meaning is hidden behind an amalgam of confusing text, a writer has accomplished nothing but frustrating herself and her potential readers.  As a professor, using words that are well-understood by the general student body, but also convey the meaning of intellectual pursuits, is an essential skill.  Likewise, in dystopian fiction, word choice can convey more than beautiful sentences or pretty ideals.  In 1984, Orwell begins the novel with “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”  With one word—thirteen—the reader understands that something is different about this place.  If one is to create that fragile suspension of disbelief in a world where our laws of physics are broken, or there are strange rules and terrifying laws, or a nuclear holocaust has occurred, it is essential to ease the reader into the muck.  In dystopia, the author drops the reader into the world without explanation of how things got as bad as they did, but without an initial sense of normality, it is often too surreal to be believed.

Dystopian fiction has many craft elements that are not often seen through the veneer of entertainment that plagues the genre.  While zombies, viruses and nuclear holocausts are often the background of dystopian worlds, it is not the focus of the writing.  Dystopian authors must also have a fine control of their craft in order to properly frame the world in such a way that skeptical readers can overcome their hesitation.  Each sentence must be carefully thought out to provide meaningful beauty, lest the reader give up on the genre as childish fiction.  Writers of dystopia must work harder to make their pieces true literature, and it is only by focusing on the words and the language, whether it is displayed as the power of the author, protagonist, or regime, that dystopian fiction will prevail.

Kristi Hébert was born near Buffalo, NY, but she now lives in a mosquito-ridden bayou jungle in Louisiana.  She works as a dog trainer, for which she didn’t need any of her three degrees.  She’s currently getting a fourth degree just for fun.  She likes to write about the end of the world, and she has been mistaken for Ariel, the Little Mermaid, at least once.  She is the Blog Editor of South 85 Journal.

Featured Image Credit:  Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Francis DiClemente

As one who writes in his spare time, while holding down a full-time job, I am the literary equivalent of a Manhattan waiter refusing to give up on a dream, however farfetched, of securing a leading role on the Broadway stage. But it’s clear the term literary does not apply to my publishing aspirations. I compose poems, stories, essays and other forms, send them out into the world and hope someone pays attention. Most of the time the work is ignored.

So why do I keep trying? Why do I rise at 5:30 a.m. every weekday and write before going to my job as a video producer at Syracuse University? Because I must—because I cannot ignore the compulsion to create. Yet I have discovered the world is not waiting for my words; no readers or editors clamor for my work.

Still I do not give up. And when I get discouraged about my progress I write in my journal, and these entries take the form of pep talks to myself. Here are some I have made in recent years:

Notation

I need to make use of these thoughts, however trivial, to put them down on paper and give them life. Otherwise, they are impotent, just swimming around my head without direction or purpose.

My words testify to my existence. They say, “I was here. I spoke. I wrote.” And if you failed to hear me, you do not have to look far to find me—for the evidence is stockpiled in the archived documents I left behind for others to sort out.

A Writer’s Regrets

I must let what is inside me out, regardless of the unlikelihood of success.

Failure meets me along the way.

I receive two forms of rejection. One is silence; the other is some variation of the following email: “Thank you for your submission. We appreciate the chance to read it, but unfortunately this piece is not for us.”

I wish God had implanted in me the desire to fly fish or hunt elk, to cook world-class entrees or pastries or make stained-glass windows in Gothic cathedrals. Anything but the need to string together words that no one wants.

I’m like a boxer on the ropes taking repeated blows to the head but refusing to go down. I wish my knees would buckle or the manager would throw in the white towel. Then I could give up on my dream of becoming a professional writer (one requiring no other employment).

Yet I keep at it, even though I may die as an unknown scribe with a stack of manuscripts bulging in a dresser drawer, heaps of paper suited for kindling in a pot-bellied stove.

And when I am gone I will haunt the rooms where I once wrote, unable to let go, raising my voice to get someone to listen, someone to read the collection of unpublished texts.

And this makes me wonder: do words have life if no one reads them? Are they real without an audience? Or are they just jumbled sentences searching for a home?

For now I concede failure. And I ponder why I am such a fool to keep writing. And yet I know I will.

On Writing

What if I didn’t need to write? Then I could live without paying attention to the world. I would not feel compelled to look around for subject matter—people, scenes and stories to capture and write about. I could enjoy the course of my day without seeking to preserve some aspect of it.

But this is not a choice; it never has been. I’ve been blessed and cursed with the desire to be a writer.

Yet ambition alone does not translate to success. Wanting to write, striving to express something of value, to steer the collected thoughts and ideas into vivid, lucid prose—all of this is meaningless. You are judged by the work alone. And you face rejection daily. I feel like a .220 hitter still trying to crack the opening day lineup.

But maybe even a bad writer can write something good at least once. And that notion keeps me going. And giving up is an option I cannot accept.

Why I Write

I have to let go of the need to succeed with my writing. Otherwise, publication and praise become the motivation for my work. Instead, I must celebrate the accomplishment of seeing ink arranged by my hand, the paragraphs stacked neatly on clean white paper.

I may never taste the fruit of this labor but I will not stop working. The reason is simple. I was a writer before I could even recite the alphabet. This aspect of my existence came with the package my parents created, like being left-handed or parting my hair on the right side.

I am a writer and I will no longer be afraid to write, to try, to fail. And while I must accept the judgment of others who may reject the words I offer, I refuse to get so discouraged as to quit writing. And why should failure stop me? A writer writes, as the saying goes. And that’s what I intend to do.

Francis DiClemente is a video producer and freelance writer who lives in Syracuse, New York. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks and his blog can be found at francisdiclemente.wordpress.com.

Author’s Photo Credit: Susan Kahn