Richard LeBlond

Tragic events often change the lives of survivors. Some become part of the team raising money to find a cancer cure. Others rally against drunk drivers or lobby on behalf of safer air travel. At least a small amount of survivor guilt is probably involved in these life changes. But I’m sure most are inspired by the higher motive of not letting the victim or victims die in vain. The survivor feels a responsibility, even an obligation, to set things right.

For nearly 40 years, I was burdened by that obligation because I was unable to fulfill it from a failure to write. One day in Athens, Greece, in the mid-1970s, I witnessed hundreds of men and women holding hands and marching unarmed towards the sound of automatic weapon fire – that is, the sound of carnage – during an uprising under the military dictatorship of Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos.

It was one of several traumatic events I witnessed or endured during two and a half years in southern Europe and north Africa. The trip started as an open-ended vacation, but by the time it was over, I had spent a day surrounded by Moroccan police armed with submachine guns; sat in a Guardia Civil interrogation room convinced I would be sentenced to six years and a day in a Spanish prison; befriended an American who, against his will, had become a pig inspector in Yugoslavia; then had my own personal encounter with Athens’ secret police. And for a while I worked for a newspaper that was likely financed by the CIA. (I think this paragraph would make a good movie.)

I returned to the States in 1974 full of these incredible stories, but it took me nearly 40 years to write them. I lacked confidence. More than once I told myself I was a second-rate writer with a third-rate mind. During that long interim, I kept hearing the voices of the Athens marchers and knew their story might die with me if I couldn’t set it down. In all those years, I never found another account of what I had witnessed.

I had written a brief op-ed piece about the marchers back in 2002, but I still needed to write the whole story. By the winter of 2010, I realized I would have to write it whether I was ready or not. Nearly 70 years old and 13 years into my COPD, I had to assume I was running out of time. And I wanted to relate all of my adventures in the Mediterranean, or at least as many as I could squeeze past my censor. Some things happened others don’t need to know about, and there is embarrassment enough in what the censor allowed. Autobiography teeters on the edge between which lies to tell and what truths to leave out.

February 2010 was a good time to be indoors. Thanks to the closing window of opportunity, I had reached a truce with my demons, and out poured the stories. I wrote nonstop, six to seven days a week, 8-10 hours a day for two months. I began each day listening to the same piece of music, during my morning walk, a 10-minute-long Salve Regina written in the 1500s by a Spanish priest during the Inquisition. It set the perfect mood, as my journey had begun among the gitanos on the south coast of Spain, where I had my own taste of the Inquisition with General Franco’s army of police.

During the decades of not writing, I had told my stories several times to friends, which helped to keep details alive. Even so, I had forgotten a few names, and I’m fairly certain one character was actually two. But the stories remained clear, and I can still experience their actuality in my mind. That is especially true of the Athens marchers.

Hemingway said “The first draft of anything is shit.” But for me the first draft became another level of inspiration, and I wrote with a greater sense of responsibility, propelled by the marchers. Every time I came to their passage, I bawled from reliving the experience. Even now, I bawl when I read that passage. It is my own little post-traumatic stress disorder.

I found the task of editing and rewriting to be enjoyable and fulfilling, like working on a four-dimensional tapestry. The first draft was the warp, and it became a process of adding on and pulling out, of changing forms and colors. The rewriting process brought new insights and taught me how to let things go. For the first time in my life, writing felt like art.

Richard LeBlond is a retired biologist living in North Carolina. Since 2014, his essays and photographs have appeared in numerous U.S. and international journals, including Montreal Review, Hippocampus, Compose, Smoky Blue, Appalachia, and Still Point Arts Quarterly.

After taking a break for the summer, the South 85 Journal staff is ready to read again!  Our reading period is open, and we will be accepting submissions through April 30, 2017.

We’d love to see what you’ve been working on.  If you have something ready, you can submit now.

Our next issue is the Fall / Winter 2016 issue, and we will release it on December 15, 2016.

Our entire staff from last issue is returning, and we would like to welcome a few new staff members:

● Poetry Editors – Russell Jackson and Chris Menezes
● Fiction Editors – Jessie Marshall and Joshua Springs

All of our editors are students or graduates of the Converse College Low-Residency MFA Program.

Thank you for continuing to support our journal!

Kelly DeLong

After decades of writing, I have discovered a single truth—there is only one reason to write and that is for the sense of satisfaction I get from sitting at my desk a couple hours a day, putting to paper the life inside my head.  For me, there is no other reason to write.  There can’t be.  It’s pretty clear by now that I’ll never make a living at it, never win a major award and never become famous.  Moreover, if I stopped writing today, other than me, there is no one who would care.

That might sound sad or pathetic, but it’s not.  I began writing in the first place because I’d always known that there was something inside of me that needed a release.  The more I wrote, the more I felt I accomplished something that was important to me.  For years I wrote without a thought about publishing or making money.  I just wanted to write.  I needed to write.  It was as simple as that.

When I was a teenager I wrote stuff I called “poetry.”  I was quite proud of it, so much so that I showed it to my speech professor at the community college I attended.  Rumor had it he was a poet.  A week after handing him a stack of my work, I entered his office and asked him what he thought.  He shook his head and handed my pages back to me.  On the top poem, he’d written “What is this?” and “This doesn’t make sense.”  I discovered that day that I wasn’t a poet.  But that didn’t stop me from taking a poetry workshop at the state university I transferred to.  In that class I learned that in order to write in a particular genre, you actually had to read that particular genre.  I didn’t read poetry, which was one of the reasons I struggled to write it.

Still, I had to write.   I’d grown up a non-reader, who just got by in school.  Not until I was twenty did I finally start reading books on my own.  By the time I found my way to a fiction workshop, I’d been voraciously reading novels and short stories for a little over a year.  That might not sound like a long time, but it was enough for me to conclude that the release I needed would come from writing fiction.  I had found my form.

I wrote when in school, when out of school, when I was working full-time jobs.  Nothing killed my love of writing fiction.  I made my way to an MFA program, and after seven years of writing, I published my first short story in a magazine that wasn’t affiliated with the school I attended.  It would take several years before I published something else.  Of course, when I say publish, I’m talking about placing a story in a magazine with a circulation of fifty.  I knew my work was only being read by about three or four people (I’m including my mother). I was gratified though that somebody out there thought my work was worth the time it took to put it in print.

Eventually, I published a couple of pieces in magazines that actually paid money, and, then, one of the great surprises of my life happened—a publisher wanted to publish not one but two of my manuscripts.  I would have two books published!  The publisher was new, very small (a one-man operation) and couldn’t pay an advance.  I didn’t mind.  I was elated.  Bigger things were certainly headed my way.  I just knew that my books would sell and that my next book would be picked up by a major publisher who would pay me a big advance, and, as a result of my book’s success, prestigious magazines would solicit stories from me, providing me with an audience who was emotionally connected to my writing and who would pay to keep that connection.

I soon learned though that my books, like most of the thousands and thousands of books published every year, are read by next to no one.  Also, getting my stories published by literary magazines—big or small—was as difficult as ever.  It felt to me that after nearly thirty years of writing, I had gotten nowhere.  I reached the realization that my work would have an emotional connection to no one since no one was reading it.  My writing hadn’t had an effect on anyone.  That knowledge, I have to admit, pained and depressed me for a while.

It did not stop me from writing, however.  I reached the conclusion that my writing had a tremendous effect on one person’s life.  Mine.  It had shaped my life, had pushed me to practice, to improve, to reach a certain level of competency and skill that nearly everyone would like to achieve no matter what they do.  Writing has become a part of who I am.  It doesn’t matter if no one else knows it.  I know it.  That’s enough.  I’ll always be the only person who’s read all my work. I’ll always be the only person who cares about every word, every punctuation mark I put on the page.  So be it.  I have spent countless hours as my desk contemplating my creations, and I have valued every minute of it.

Kelly DeLong is published in many literary journals including The Sun, Evansville Review, The Jabberwock Review, Roanoke Review, Palo Alto Review, among others. He is also the author of the novel The Poor Sucker. Further, his non-fiction book, The Freshman Year at an HBCU was published last year.

Matthew McEver

In my writing classes, I emphasize the symbiotic relationship between reading and writing. On the first day of class, my students hear that the quality of our writing is a direct reflection of what kind of reader we’ve been until this point in our lives. Our writing tells the world what kind of readers we are.

When I’m not talking about writing, I’m usually talking about music, rock music — and many of my favorite bands wear their influences on their sleeves. Guns N’ Roses is on my mind right now, actually ringing in my ears from their show in Atlanta a few nights ago. When I listen to Guns N’ Roses, it’s apparent that the band built its musical vocabulary by listening to Iggy and the Stooges, early Aerosmith, Janis Joplin, the Sex Pistols, and the Rolling Stones, among others. On the literary side of things, when I read the fiction of someone like Cormac McCarthy, it’s obvious that he’s read…well, pretty much everything, but especially Melville, Twain, Joyce, Milton, Faulkner, O’Connor, and Dostoevsky.

Think about your own work. When people read your writing, what influences do they see? That question should terrify you. It terrifies me. I fear that I’ll be exposed. I’m embarrassed when I think of what I haven’t read, and my writing tells the world what kind of reader I am.

Bluntly speaking, some writers are lazy readers. Don’t take what I’m about to say as a swipe against current fiction. I have no issue with contemporary fiction. In fact, right now, I’m reading Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. It’s a book that I should be reading. But I’ve yet to read War and Peace, and I feel guilty about it. I keep putting it off. We treat the classics like a chore, pushing aside Tolstoy or Conrad, reaching for something current, telling ourselves that we’re staying abreast of the trends. Besides, we trudged through Heart of Darkness in college.

Yet we read differently as we mature. I first read Conrad at nineteen, comparatively inexperienced at life. Back then, I considered Conrad the equivalent of eating my cultural spinach. Now, I practically meditate on passages from his work. The difference: back then, I was nineteen, and I wasn’t a writer.

Intimidated by the density and complexity of Faulkner or Conrad? Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Then it’s time to embrace the notion that there’s a lot of great writing that not only lends itself to multiple readings, but requires multiple readings. Do people really “get” Shakespeare the first time they hear it? Of course not. We have to think in terms of first-draft reading, second draft reading, third draft reading. I would never listen to a favorite album only once (especially a Guns N’ Roses album) and conclude that I “got” it. Yet we treat literature this way. We insist that literature be immediately accessible, that literature come down to our level. We call that route the path of least resistance, and there’s no artist worth his or her salt who ever took it.

Take a few minutes and jot down the titles that you’ve read this year, thus far. How challenging of a reading list do you have? Would you be proud to share it? Ideally, you want a reading list that helps you to move back and forth, staying in touch with your contemporaries while also drawing from work that has stood the test of time. And if you need inspiration, do some digging and discover who your favorite authors cite as their influences. What novels or collections inspired and informed their work?

Ultimately, when you’re not writing, then you should be reading, and what you choose to read becomes the DNA or your poetry or prose.

When all else fails, remember what Faulkner says: “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write.”

Matthew McEver is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of North Georgia and holds the MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College in South Carolina.

Cinelle Barnes

I write because I am the last to remember.

My mother lives between personas, dissociated from the world.  Some days she knows she has a daughter and a granddaughter, and I get a text message: What’s up? How’s the girl?  Other days she forgets that I am now married with a child, and will reply to my Merry Christmas from us three with a Don’t forget to moisturize, use pads not tampons, wear a training bra.  I don’t know where or how she lives; I don’t think she does either.  Her micro-amnesias make her days seem like years and her years like days.  She forgets to brush her teeth and she forgets that she has almost died in front of me at least three times.

My father had a stroke in April.  Because of it, he experiences cognitive lapses.  His diabetes mimics symptoms of Alzheimer’s and dementia: he attempts to unlock cars that aren’t his, misses medical appointments, scrambles for house keys he’s been clutching in his fist all along, and emails the same questions he already asked over voicemail: How do I copy and paste documents? How do I attach cover letters?  My Papa hasn’t worked in seven years.

My brother dilutes recollections of broken champagne glasses, knives, and dead babies with vodka, tequila, and beer; he pulverized them along with the pills he crushed to dust and snorted.  He has worked as a club DJ for sixteen years, spinning vinyl for a crowd from nine p.m. to three in the morning, and sleeping during the day to evade sunshine and conversation.

Even the house we lived in no longer serves us in the business of remembering.  It has long been demolished; and where it was once erected, a mini-mall now stands.  I am as physical as these remembrances get.  My mother, father, and brother lead lives of forgetting, while I have made a living out of remembering.  My email signature reads: Cinelle Barnes, Memoirist and Essayist.

I also write to cope with post-traumatic stress, a disorder with manifestations I’ve experienced since I was thirteen years old: palpitations, hyper-vigilance, overachievement, over-exercising, a constant urge to urinate, self-injury, tightness in the throat, difficulty swallowing, difficulty breathing, inability to relax, excessive worrying, nightmares, and flashbacks.

Unlike my parents and sibling, I have been blessed with an extraordinary memory: sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory, explicit (narrative) memory, implicit (emotional) memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory.

I remember that my mother’s morning tea smelled like tangerines and her perfume like rose-and-orchid.  I remember that my Papa’s beard felt soft at the chin and coarse by his sideburns.  I remember that my brother’s Ninja Turtles were a deep forest green while my father’s ferns were sage.  I remember that our sheets smelled like Clorox and my brother’s shirts like baby powder.  I remember that blood was crimson on my mother’s nightgown and black in her hair.  I remember that the dead baby in Mama’s arms had two wrinkles on his nose and one chap on his upper lip.

And I remember trying to forget.

I moved to New York when I was sixteen.  I stepped off the train at Penn Station thinking, This is my new life.  The push from co-commuters through the tunnels, the ascent on the escalator from underground to street level, birthed me into a new existence.  For seven years, I partied in the Meatpacking District, went to school in Chelsea, lived and worked on the Upper West and East Sides, brunched in the Lower East, and bought books and clothes and gelato in Williamsburg and DUMBO.  I went by my childhood nickname.  I lost weight and defined biceps and abs.  I cut my hair.  Striding down Seventh Avenue’s spit-covered sidewalk, I pressed down on my mind’s delete key; working in the art and fashion industries, I acquired a new motherboard – or at least I thought I had.

But then I met a guy. He said, “Tell me everything.”

And I did.

He asked me questions like, “If you weren’t in art or fashion, what would you be doing?”

I told him that all I’d ever wanted was to write.  So he gave me a Pilot V5 pen, a stack of 3×5 notecards, a lined Moleskin notebook, and a directive: “Go write.”

I wrote everything, and the new motherboard broke.  I wrote everything again, and my wires re-circuited back to 1986, 1989, 1990, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2003.  The symptoms came back: palpitations, hyper-vigilance, overachievement, over-exercising, a constant urge to urinate, self-injury, tightness in the throat, difficulty swallowing, difficulty breathing, inability to relax, excessive worrying, nightmares, and flashbacks.

I told him, “I am breaking.”

And he said, “You’re becoming a new kind of beautiful.”

Every Thursday, at four o’clock, he drove me to counseling.  And every Thursday, at half past five, he wrapped me in his Marmot jacket, picked me up off the therapist’s couch, walked me back to the car and took me home.  He held my hand as he drove through Charleston’s sunshowers.  He prayed for me.  He fed me salsa and chips while I did therapy homework, which was, coincidentally, the same assignments due to my MFA mentor: write your memories; take the ugly and make something beautiful.

The counselor called it “prolonged exposure,” a form of behavioral and cognitive therapy designed to treat PTSD.  By re-experiencing the traumatic events through remembering and engaging – or, in literary terms, (re)creating a sense of time, place, and attitude – I gradually became desensitized from objects and situations that used to cause distress.  I went through pictures; followed my mother’s paper trail of newspaper clippings, court papers, and health records; and went on a virtual tour of my childhood neighborhood through Google Earth.  I interviewed relatives, asking them to describe moments they had witnessed: my parents and the helpers digging a grave in the garden, my mother running and stabbing the air with an envelope opener, and my brother over-dosing in his car.

My writing mentors assigned prompts and reading that retrieved data from my brain’s primary storage (long-term history) and cache (short-term history).  I processed the data out loud to my therapist while holding on to tappers – two pulsers, one for each hand, that vibrated alternately and stimulated bilateral brain activity: left and right sides, explicit and implicit memory, narrative truth and emotional truth, plot and meaning.  In other words, memoir. 

After three years of researching and reliving, two years in an MFA program, and eight months in counseling, I turned in a manuscript of two hundred and twenty pages to my agent.  All of my memories, or at least what my body has allowed me to remember, now assembled as letters reaching from one side of a page to the other.  I can trace them with my fingers, sound them out, and breathe between syllables.  I can smooth the pages with the back of my hand, or dog-ear them and slip them into an accordion folder or a file box.  I can put them on a shelf, under my desk, or on the bedside table.  They are words on a page, just words, and I hold the pen.

I have remembered.  And I am new.

Cinelle Barnes is a creative non-fiction writer and educator from Manila, Philippines. She writes memoirs and personal essays on trauma, growing up in Southeast Asia, and on being a mother and immigrant in America. In 2014, she was nominated for the AWP Journal Intro Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and in 2015 received an MFA from Converse College. In 2016, she was chosen to be a participant in the inaugural Kundiman Creative Non-Fiction Intensive in New York City.

Beth Walker

This week I lost a companion of 22 years. I was writing at my desk as usual, and somehow it dove from my hands onto my vinyl floor, nib straight down, Kamikaze style. Even with my glasses off, as I often do to write with a pen, I could tell that the nib was bent. That too-good-to-be-true ether of wish-fulfillment, also known as the Internet, could not tell me where to buy a new nib.

I bought another fountain pen that day, price be damned.

But I’ll always remember my first. I had bought it as a birthday/grad-school graduation gift for myself, and I have filled many journals with it. Nothing announces, “Hey, I’m a writer,” like a gold-appointed pen. I had wanted one since childhood upon finding a malachite Scheaffer empty, broken, and forgotten in my grandmother’s fancy leather purse. Yes, I was a snooper. I had never seen an old-fashioned pen before. Its ability to transport me to another time and place became an early part of my fantasy to live the writer’s life.

Full of nostalgia yesterday, I flipped through a bunch of my old journals, alternately embarrassed then bored at the life I had lived on paper. Still, I could distinguish the telltale thick stroke of the nib and the royal blue ink immediately, so regal against the intimidating green I used to dash off a few lines between grading papers. I can almost remember holding my black lacquered Parker, heavy and serious, to the paper; it is probably just as well that I don’t recall many of the stories I wrote with it.

Very few times in my life have things happened in slow motion. One was trying to return to work after my first round of chemo. Never one to take the elevators, I did that day. When the doors slid open, the hallway stretched infinitely as in a horror movie down to the other end, where my office is located. The walk felt terminal, and I realized that day that I would not be back for an entire academic year. Nevertheless, I didn’t realize while I was on bed-rest that my writing would stretch too far out for me to grasp, so my favorite pen lay for a year in my antique cherry stationery secretary–a writing gift from my grandmother–its ink evaporating.

Able to sit up again, I had gotten it out last summer and was re-living the old pleasure of writing with thick ink without bothering to scratch out or re-think, just flow and go. Flash forward exactly a year later and there I was, clutching and clawing at the air in slow motion as it baton-ed away from me. I yelled, I think, before it even had time to hit the floor, and I’ve been in mourning ever since.

In that moment, though, I flashed back to my childhood one summer night when my brother and I were trying to catch fireflies. It was a moment of physicality and imagination–a Rosebud moment when it was enough to just be in the world. To catch without killing required not only quick reflexes but a whimsy and a cruelty that make friends only in childhood. We were careful to let them glow in the mason jars only for a little while before screwing off the lids, though we probably shook the jars more than we should have. Considering that chemo makes me forget what I did last week, I marvel that my body made my mind recall that strange little clap-dance from 35 years ago. My poor fountain pen: that’s what I was doing, trying in slow motion to catch light.

Now that my body is remembering what it could do before chemo, the loss is bittersweet.

Beth Walker‘s work has recently been published in Storm Cellar, The Atrium, and Rag Queen Periodical, and she has poetry forthcoming in the anthology BARED. Long essays appear in the books Critical Insights: American Creative Nonfiction and New Perspectives on Detective Fiction: Mystery Magnified.

Dawn Cunningham

Going a day without writing is damaging to my psyche. Those tidbits of thoughts that won’t leave me alone are best written on paper to escape the confinement of my synapses. Without releasing the synapses, my mind comes overburdened with screams walking through my life.

This happened to me after my son was diagnosed with cancer. My mind became weighted, as if a bottle was filled with soda, ready to explode; however, the words couldn’t escape. Grief does strange things to a person. I wanted to write but for some reason I feared writing. I even feared reading my favorite story lines and favorite authors. The absolute joys of my life (other than my children and grandchildren) had left me, ran away, abandoned me to the noise scrambling within, the synapses not firing as they once did. I couldn’t write a simple poem. On occasion, I would get a line to come out. I even attempted sketch-writing but this did nothing to free the words sealed in my brain. Poetry, the genre I normally write in, was gone—along with journaling. Journaling had always been my partner in crime, sort of speaking. I always carried a journal with me. In time, even carrying a journal with me dissipated. I knew this wasn’t writer’s block; I’ve never believed in writer’s block, and I still don’t. This was a part of me that sneaked up and unconsciously said, “You don’t deserve joy.” My mind had imprisoned me, had taken away my capability to write words, to enjoy words on a page. Writing and reading was my inspiration—had been my inspiration: it was gone.

I don’t know how or exactly when my writing began to come out of the darkest deepest corner. Somewhere, the synapses decided to fire. Writing fought its way out of the prison. I was dying, and writing knew it. This is when I realized, “Storytelling keeps the World alive.” This is what the Native Americans meant, I thought; this is why Granma Ginny told her stories, I thought; she knew, her Native American blood knew. Stories weren’t only lessons and reminders of the past but part of the body; without the story, life doesn’t exist. I knew I had to tell the story. Before my son died from the cancer called PNET, I began to write the struggles: mine and his. It was time to tell the story.

Sometime after beginning this process, I realized that writing had kept me alive through another issue: a marriage gone sour. Reading through my journals to discover the story, I realized the story started several years prior to my son’s cancer. I had kept some part of me in the words placed in my journals, a part of me that had to be rediscovered. Learning about me again is when writing took on the life it needed for me to express what I was not and to find who I was and to become who I am now; writing keeps me growing. It took a tragedy to realize what writing does for me. Today, writing is strong with me. When I don’t write, depression sets in, takes life out of me. Even if I am dropping to the pillow with eyes ready to close, I find a way to write just one line—on my computer, in my journal, in a notepad on my phone. I must write to stay alive. I must write to live. Storytelling keeps ME alive.

Writing is an essential survival tool, just as much as food, water, shelter, and clothing. Writing is nourishing me, clothing me, sheltering me, and loving me. Writing, like music for a musician, like the dance for a dancer, like the paint for a painter, is the expression of self-discovery and self-wonderment, being the person you are supposed to be. This is how a person learns who s/he is and keeps that person within some form of sanity. Writing brings out the emotions to release the overpowering urge of self-destruction.

The beginning of Dawn Cunningham’s career in writing began with her grandmother’s encouragement, where she learned “Stories Write the World,” a Native American tradition passed down through the females in her family. Her grandmother, Virginia Cunningham, persuaded her to continue her education to better equip her in “writing the stories,” earning a BGS and MA. Ms Cunningham’s work appears in Confluence, The Voices Project, Misfit Magazine, Clitature, Shuf Poetry, Flare: The Flagler Review, and others.

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.