Karen Ashburner

After giving up writing for close to five years, I am writing and submitting at least one thing every day now. I have been rejected twice in the last three weeks, and accepted once. At first the rejections were bothering me, but now I am easing into it, remembering what it felt like: yes, no, yes, yes, no…maybe. The writing is becoming a part of me again, like growing back a long-lost limb. My writing limb was lost in a fire, along with all my books and my clothes and my house and my sense of well-being.

After it all burned down, I put my mind to tangible things, concrete things: raising children, making jam, cooking dinners. I put everything poetic into a box labeled “silly” and hid it away because to write means to feel in a way non-writers can’t understand. It hurts. It makes us fall in love with melancholy; it makes us long for impossible relationships with far-away people.

I am starting to feel things again, remember things, bad things and good things. Bad things make for good writing more often than good things so it is sometimes difficult and it sometimes makes me sad. To disassociate and to connect with the sadness, at the same time, I listen to the same song on repeat while I write. The repetition clears my head. I don’t even hear the words. I don’t even know how many times I repeat it. Over and over, some disco song from the seventies that reminds me of my childhood. Some indie rock song that makes me feel like a teenager.

Outside, it is snowing, On the television, the studio talks to a reporter driving on the highways with a camera to prove how dangerous the roads have become. I flip through the pages of a book that tells me how to raise honey bees. I am storing it all for later and when it gets too crowded in my brain, I will write it all down, combining the sadness of my burning house with the swirling white snow, and the trick to retrieving a summer swarm of bees that has settled into the branches of a tree.

Karen Ashburner is a sci-fi prop artist and lives in North Carolina. Her prose is published around the Internet. You can see her sci-fi designs at www.sweetrocketsky.com and view her list of publications at www.karenashburner.com.

Denise Low

1. In a 1970s poetry class I read “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and begin writing numbered, sectioned poems. I feel very cool.
2. In 2014 I discover “listicle,” the word for numbered, sectioned trivia like “Five Ways to Shampoo Your Poodle” and “Eight Origami Folds for Trash Sacks.”
3. A fellow writer tells me she makes a good income teaching “How to Write Listicles” workshops. She seems very cool.
4. In 2008 I find one of my early books of numbered, sections poems in a used bookstore, inscribed to a frenemy who decided to purge bookshelves of my presence. Every poet in town goes to this bookstore, so this private gesture is a public announcement. This is a brilliant passive-aggressive coup.
5. In 2009 at the same bookstore I discover one of my earlier books marked up with corrections and suggestions for improvement. In the front leaf I see this assignment was due March 8 for the Advanced Poetry Class. Only on the last page do I find praise—“The image of wheeling Orion works okay.” I feel less cool.
6. I do not have the cash to buy this book and burn it. I decide to let it travel through the time listicle known as the calendar until the paper pages are recycled for toilet paper.
7. In 2010 my new book of numbered, sectioned poems appears in the mailbox. It is not yet a book of listicle poems. On the first page I realize the printer cut off the last section.
8. The poem works better without it.
9. In 1984 I take my children to the special collections library to find a review of my numbered, sectioned poem, a sequence of quilt pattern names. The librarian gives the kids free pencils and brings the review. The brief, unsectioned review praises the typography, handmade paper, and abstract designs derived from quilt patterns—but finds my poems “lackluster.”
10. The children draw me happy faces with their stubby library pencils after this big Ow-ie.
11. The same day the mail carrier brings a rejection letter for a numbered, sectioned poem.
12. Rejection always comes in listicles.
13. This one says, “The T’Ang poets already did what you are attempting. Give it up.” I burn the letter. Later, I regret its loss because when I tell the story, no one believes it is true.
14. It is.
15. In 2015 I realize everything I write is a listicle, snaking through the bowel of Mother Wormhole, like Stephen Hawking’s arrow of time only wriggling forward in eel-like motions. Sometimes numbers appear on the page. Sometimes pages are unnumbered, and sectioned episodes of my existence simply disappear into the white field beyond all listicles.
16. I wake up in the pure air of the 1970s and hear blackbirds call my name thirteen times.

Denise Low, 2nd Kansas Poet Laureate, is author of 25 books: Jackalope Walks into an Indian Bar (forthcoming); Mélange Block (Red Mountain Press); Ghost Stories (Woodley, a Kansas Notable Book; The Circle – Best Native American Books); and Natural Theologies: Essays (Backwaters Press). Low is past president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs board. She blogs, reviews, and publishes Mammoth Publications. She teaches professional workshops as well as classes for Baker University’s School of Professional and Graduate Studies. She has British Isles, German, and Delaware Indian heritage. Her MFA is from Wichita State University and PhD is from Kansas University. Find her online at www.deniselow.net.

Brit Graham

Complacency, she’s a tricky beast. She sneaks. She is like the speckled frog plopped into the dark teakettle set to boil. She lies and she waits, she lulls you into an uncertain sense of security. She makes you feel good. She is my enemy to productivity. We don’t realize how comfortable we become sitting on our overstuffed purple couches, fuzzy Jack-Skellington-socked feet propped up on our lime green ottomans with cinnamon spiced tea in our favorite chipped mugs. We hardly feel her quadrupled-jointed fingers hooking themselves around our writing and jerking us left and then down.

I cannot say what, precisely, untethers me from my coma-like stupor. It always seems to accompany travel, like an errant stowaway tucked into the tiniest corner of luggage. There is no other perspective like the type belonging to open sky, cities crippled in her wake. Displacement. The sort shakes the mind’s closet, rattles those dust-riddled thoughts loose.

You see, the muse, she gets bored, tired of the same old hat. She needs to go on a walk-about every now and again. No matter how much I read, or have that feeling in the pit of my gut about something brewing, something maturing, something is going on writing wise that which my conscious is not privy. And then she has to run amok for a few days before she parts those white filmy curtains and says, look here.

It’s like those burbling basaltic hot spots in the pacific. They move, flit along a course, for the most part we are unable to see. A path of destruction, a path of new life. There is always a burst of written work whenever the scenery shifts slantwise. It pours out, not always glistening, not always clear. But the root of something fresh is always buried beneath. The best thing of all, is the consistent change. The ever shifting place, that stays rooted just where it has always been.

My creative thesis consisted of so much nautical imagery, that I started to believe I was destined for the coast. This was the result of a two month stint of South Floridian living. Currently I reside in the landlocked state of South Dakota, where it’s negative ten before the wind chill, the streets are littered with ice and what are attempting to be slush piles, are in fact not slush piles because they’ve not been given the opportunity to slush thoroughly. I fell in love with her in the summer. South Dakota has more lakes and sloughs than one would anticipate, and the sky should be considered a celestial body itself. The stars breed in the sky like rabbits out here, overhead so thick it looks more like salt and pepper than a black abyss pinpricked with careless constellations and light.

More and more I find myself writing in attempts to unearth answers, to widen my perception of a thing deemed impossible to decipher. Scrawling it out on a napkin at the local Irish pub, or etching it along lined pages tucked in the coffee shop across the street, writing enables me to flush out every angle, every shadowed nook and cranny, and it brings about the gift of reflection and time. It slows down the thought process enough so that one can fully observe the layered surroundings, the issues at hand, the people connected to it all. To put it simply, it seems as if suddenly and inconsequentially there is so much to write about.

Living as a hermit in South Dakota, partly due to the cold, mostly due to the gray permeating even one’s good socks, it’s easy to lose a self in one’s self. It’s easy to forget about the rest of the world. And with no less than a cattle prod-like insistence shoving me out my 70s orange door I’ve come to beautiful south Florida. A witness to its glory of crumbling asphalt bleached and cracked gray, and the aged blood-tinged rust that seems to underlie ever metal thing in the area. And I have found a solution to my problem, and perhaps I’ve identified a problem for you, and unearthed just one possible solution.

For now Brit Graham traverses the tundra that is South Dakota, while tripping over things while stargazing in the all too brief summer months. She is the crux of an ongoing love affair between the Pacific and Atlantic. She managed to pry an MFA in Poetry from the grasp of Converse College. You can read her poetry things in publications like Devilfish Review, The Night Owl, RealSouth Magazine, and The OWL.

Interview by Eric Wallace

In early 2007, associate professor and official overseer of Lynchburg College’s department of graduate studies in English, Casey Clabough, made what he has categorized as a bizarre and high risk gamble. Fascinated—perhaps even obsessed!—with the migration of his ancestors (a troupe of hardy Germanic pioneers who, swearing off the domesticity of Virginia’s tidewater region, cut out for the Smoky Mountains in the late 1700s), Clabough decided to follow in their footsteps, to seek out—if there was such a thing to be found—the “spiritual resonances” of their 500-plus-mile trek through the ancient, mythic hills of Appalachia.

What follows is a discussion inspired by The Warrior’s Path, the hybridized travelogue x memoir x historical exegesis Clabough penned about that adventure.

I entered the world in Richmond, VA but my family moved to Appomattox when I was very young and I grew up there, which is largely what my recent memoir, SCHOOLED, is about. My mother was a research scientist—one of the few women in the field then—at MCV, but she wanted me raised away from there. Incidentally, I think my best piece of prose writing to date—“The Skeleton Woman”—is about she and I. However, the dominant cultural influence in my family came from my father’s people, who had lived in the Smoky Mountains for nearly two centuries. They were displaced to a Virginia farm when the park was created and so I grew up surrounded by Appalachian culture in piedmont Virginia, close to the Blue Ridge but still piedmont southern. To sum up, the country South of Appomattox didn’t seem alien to most of what my Smokies kin talked about, although there were some major differences.  Obviously, I have a farm now in Appomattox, but the mountains still call to me and I’ve spent a lot of time in them—I feel most at home among mountains. As far as belonging, I don’t think I really belong anywhere, so I try to make the best of wherever I happen to find myself. I’m one of those people who doesn’t romanticize places since life remains life wherever one goes.

In an interview with Oxford American, you described yourself as an obscure writer whose work would probably be more-or-less forgotten after you died. In that same segment, you stated you had something of an epiphany that led you to accepting/adapting this mentality. Could you elaborate?

Well, I don’t know that there’s anything very profound about it, although I do know writers who maintain that is their position but still network and operate their asses off at conferences and residencies [laughs]. I think the body of someone’s work tells the truth of the matter. Take my scholarly books, for example. I would have written them all about big, dominant canonical writers and used the theoretical flavors of the day if I had wanted to try to become a big-shot scholar. Right now I’m working on the October essay for the Hollins Critic. It’s entitled “The Best Appalachian Writer You Likely Never Heard Tell Of.” So, yes, I’m attracted to good writers who just do or did their thing. I’ve also found they’re the most useful writers to talk to since it’s all about the writing and topics like literary politics and gossip never seem to come up.

As a guy making a living in academia, how do you navigate that differential between scholar and artist? Is there any distinction for you between those two?

I think it harkens back to the last question. I am what I am and do what I do. In terms of myself, I don’t think about genre divisions or that there’s even a schism between teaching and writing—to me it’s all the same. But it does seem to surprise some people when I suddenly generate a biography or a novel or a creative writing textbook or a book of poems in another language. It’s like they’re thinking, “Wait, you’re supposed to be just a critic. Get back over there” [Laughs]. I mean, I’m not even just a writer; I have many other interests, passions, and avenues of expression, If various people choose to take the writings of Casey Clabough and the person behind that particular name as the same thing, then that’s their problem.

You’re a rather prolific writer. How do you move from the realms of inchoate idea, conceptualization, work-in-progress, to realized manuscript? What does that process look like for you?

At this point in my career it’s pretty much defined by the next publishing deadline: that’s the project I need to work on. I have to be very organized, too, due to my current lifestyle. I mean, winter doesn’t wait for your woodpile to get large enough; spring doesn’t wait on the plow; etc. And then there’s the academic schedule in which I love interacting with the students, but find many other time-consuming aspects distasteful or even pointless. But going back to your question, I guess my process is a big chaotic mess (notes scribbled in a meeting, some snatches of typing here and there) that I then have to organize. So I would say organization and discipline are key. I am proud of the fact that, in so far as I can recall, I’ve never missed a deadline.

You’ve said that in hopes of making it a more sellable thing, your publishers wanted you to commercialize The Warrior’s Path. Can you talk a bit about the line between making something more widely available and compromising the integrity of the work itself?

That may be an unanswerable question, since there are writers who can cut loose with what they take to be all their artistic chaos and the end result is perfect for a trade publisher. In other words, their product just happens to naturally resemble whatever is “hot” or considered good literary work at a given point in time. Other writers deliberately, even cynically, “chase the monster,” as it’s called, with the aid of their agent, editor, and writer friends. In the grand scheme of things, though, when you read literary history, you come across all kinds of now-canonical writers who published with small presses or even not at all. And then there are the names next to Pulitzer prizes that no one reads or even recognizes anymore. Here’s an example: Some writers I know consider Moby Dick the greatest American novel ever written, but if you read the initial reviews of that book you’ll find them quite mixed. And then consider Melville’s career: It was one long, slow downward slide. The early novels—not Moby Dick—sold best and then down went his sales until no publisher would have him. Not a coffin to be found in that whirlpool [Laughs].

The whole road-hiking trip that comprised / led to your writing The Warrior’s Path seemed, to me, an insane idea. How did you arrive at wanting to do that book?

It coalesced gradually. As I child I spent long hours alone in the woods and I also had a love of maps. One day, while looking at a county topography map, I discovered the same large creek that ran through my farm was also the small creek that I played in at a friend’s house some ten miles distant. So naturally I decided to follow the creek to my friend, but also discovered a great many things along the way. When I finally got to his house people kind of freaked out. Did your mom drop you off? How did you get here without a car or a road? I still have an image in my head of my buddy’s panicked mom running to the phone [Laughs].

Anyway, with that book, I already knew I had the physical ability to accomplish the goal, barring an accident—and I did underestimate the danger. And then there were the spiritual and intellectual catalysts: Following in my ancestors’ footsteps and comparing what I saw to 1700s accounts of the same places. So many people followed that route, I thought it would might be appealing to others to know something about it, then and now.

Was writing The Warrior’s Path in any way cathartic for you? Do you think making the journey changed you in anyway? Has it (the trip, those reflections and thoughts) stuck with you? Do you ever think about it now, in the present? I think what I’m wanting to know is if this was just an open/close art/scholarly project or one of those I’m-driven-to-and-have-to-do-this kind of somethings that really fundamentally alters who/what you are as a human-being.

I think the answer to those first two questions is in the affirmative and then negative for the next two. For one thing, I’ve kept on writing and thus lived in different worlds, real and imagined, as vividly as when I wrote about the summer I hiked Athowominee. And then there’s the ever-present world of the real: I had a serious bout with illness a few years ago that nearly killed me. So I had to get self-recalibrated, so to speak. And then various things, good and bad, many of us go through. Anyway, no, I don’t think about that book very much, though I have been working on a sequel of sorts: It follows the life of one of my Smoky Mountain relatives—a great uncle. He interacted with bootleggers and the Overhill Cherokee, fought in World War I, and lost his land to the park. He lost the world as he knew it and, I also believe, himself. That happens to people, you know.

On top of all the other engagements and responsibilities you maintain, you live on, and run, a farm. Why?

Farming, at least to this point, has been synonymous with being. I cursed it as a child when my father would wake me before light from downstairs with lines of Smoky Mountain spang and I’d have to get up to do chores before school. At one point I swore it off in all earnestness. But then I found in college and graduate school that I really missed it. I think different people have their different connections. I’ve had urban-based house guests who have been so genuinely disturbed by the lack of sound and artificial light on my farm that they couldn’t sleep. One might argue their connection to their environment is equally strong and formative, even though it is much more shaped by human influence. I mean, my city instincts are terrible: I get lost easily, move at the wrong times in lines, etc. So I don’t know.

At various points you’ve talked about trying to help students, sometimes to your detriment. You wrote a book about teaching, and I was wondering if you might share a couple of stories, horrific and successful alike?

Well, I guess I’d say read SCHOOLED if you’re interested in that dynamic. I will say I don’t help people in the academic arena as much as I used to since it is so easy for a helpful intention to get misinterpreted or intentionally twisted by malicious people into something bad. So these days I prefer more community-based forms of help, whether it’s doing a free workshop at a library or using the chainsaw to help people clean up after a storm. I do still read lots of manuscripts folks send me, both those of friends and people I don’t know.

I’m sort of into tracing literary heritage. Could you name me a list of, say, your top-ten most beloved books and authors? The game-changers in both your literary world, and your life.

How about this instead: My forthcoming Hollins Critic essay is about a writer named Naton Leslie. I think everyone should read his book of short stories, Marconi’s Dream. It won the George Garrett Fiction Prize after being rejected by nearly a hundred publishers. It’s out of print now and no one ever bothered to review it. It’s a good book.

About the Author

Casey Clabough is the author of the novel Confederado, the travel memoir The Warrior’s Path: Reflections Along an Ancient Route, the memoir SCHOOLED: Life Lessons of a Professor, a biography of legendary southern writer George Garrett, five scholarly books on southern and Appalachian literature, an edited collection of women’s Civil War writing, and a creative writing textbook. His work has appeared in over a hundred anthologies and magazines, including Creative Nonfiction, the Sewanee Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Fall 2012 issue of South85 Journal. Clabough’s awards include the Bangladesh International Literary Award, an artist’s fellowship from the Brazilian Government, and several U.S.-based fellowships. He lives on a farm in Appomattox County, Virginia and teaches at Lynchburg College.

About the Interviewer

Eric J. Wallace is a freelance writer based out of Staunton, Virginia. His work has been featured in The Atlantic Monthly, All About Beer Magazine, Canoe & Kayak, Post Road Literary Journal, and he is a regular contributor to Blue Ridge Outdoors. For more info., select publication history, newsletters, and inquiries, visit www.ericjwallace.com.

Photo Credits: Annie Laura, 621studios.com.

Jeffrey R. Schrecongost

I was assembling my ENGL 112 course syllabus the other day, and, in reviewing Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” I was reminded that an argument for Bartleby as antiestablishment hero is not indefensible. The harmless, if not initially loveable, chap is curiously comedic in his hell-bent defiance and awkward introversion and can ultimately be viewed as a martyr for individuality. Conversely, an interpretation of Bartleby as individual-to-a-fault can be successfully supported as well.

Bartleby’s refusal to exist productively within society is neither admirably rebellious nor practical. By ‘preferring’ to do nothing, Bartleby makes no statement of consequence, advances no cause, and effects no societal change. Indeed, Bartleby’s lone achievement is dying a disconsolate, friendless death on his own terms. Honor in that particular venture is elusive at best.

After close consideration of both possible interpretations, one must conclude that Bartleby’s efforts to live his life based on personal preference alone results not in hedonistic bliss and spiritual enlightenment, but, rather, aborted dreams and retarded potential.

The “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” Bartleby is the quintessential social outcast by choice. Aloof, with nothing “ordinarily human about him,” Bartleby charms the reader with his idiosyncrasies. His famously repeated response, “‘I would prefer not to,’” is an expression of personal freedom many readers wish they had the fortitude to express themselves.

This is why we cheer Bartleby on as he continues to refuse to work. He acts according to his choices. This is appealing, for most of us possess a deep psychological desire to be completely free and to live strictly by our personally defined norms and laws. By ignoring the norms of his society, by challenging the authority of ‘the man,’ Bartleby is an underdog, a radical, a martyr. But is his cause worth his sacrifice?

An opposing interpretation suggests Bartleby’s is a misguided conception of individual freedom that, when acted upon with zeal, results in “miserable friendlessness and loneliness […] [and] solitude” and a senselessly squandered capacity for personal growth. Bartleby’s image as proto-hippie hero tarnishes as his lack of self-discipline becomes more apparent. Initially pitiful, he becomes repulsive. His insistence upon alienating himself from would-be comrades leads both the narrator and the reader to accept Bartleby’s soul as one that cannot be reached.

Why is Bartleby’s soul unreachable? Because he has subscribed to the notion that being “a man of preferences [rather] than assumptions” is somehow desirable. He has, at some debatable point in his life, determined that egomania and self-imposed exile from society are ‘preferred’ conditions. His ‘conscientious’ decision to remain in the office building is absurd in its futility. When his death finally comes, it means nothing to anyone save for the narrator (though the narrator’s reliability can be challenged – itself a topic worthy of future exploration). Bartleby is not a champion of individuality. He is merely an “intolerable incubus” wallowing in a cesspool of effete self-pity. Bartleby says, “‘I know where I am.’” Indeed. I suppose one must at least acknowledge his honesty.

Thoreauvian philosophy holds that enlightenment and personal fulfillment can be achieved via the marriage of individual freedom and moral responsibility. Melville’s Bartleby, by denouncing sociocultural integration, by being an individual stubbornly defiant and self-destructive to the end, and, thus, ignoring his own moral responsibilities, is guilty of perhaps the greatest crime of all: a wasted life. Indeed, his is the fate of a dead letter in reverse: the flame of promise extinguished.

Jeffrey R. Schrecongost received his M.F.A. from Converse College and currently teaches English at Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana and Spartanburg Community College. His fiction has appeared in Blood Lotus, BlazeVOX, and Gadfly. He lives in Muncie, IN, with his loyal Golden Retriever, Molly.

Our Fall / Winter 2014 issue is up and ready for viewing!

Creative Work

We are pleased to present work by the following contributors:

• Artwork – Eleanor Leonne Bennett
• Fiction – Jonathan Danielson, Rachel Moore, Frank Scozzari
• Non-Fiction – Matt Muilenburg, Sam Slaughter, Richard Tillinghast
• Poetry – Trish Falin, Ann Herlong-Bodman, Amaris Feland Ketcham, Daniel James Sundahl, Pia Taavila-Borsheim, Allison Thorpe, Donald C. Welch III

Reviews

Wondering what to read over the holiday?  Check out our reviews of these books:

•  Where You Can Find Me by Sheri Joseph (Fiction)
•  Margaret Fuller by Megan Marshall (Non-Fiction)
•  Postage Due by Julie Marie Wade (Poetry)
•  We Come Elemental by Tamiko Beyer (Poetry)

Special Thanks

South85 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!