We’re Cooking Up a Storm

Brand New and Yummy!

Famous Chefs and Fabulous Recipes: Lessons Learned at One of the Oldest Cooking Schools in America contains recipes from chefs who have taught at The Western Reserve School of Cooking in Hudson, Ohio. The book’s publication coincides with the school’s 40^th anniversary. Local food critic, Lisa Abraham compiled the recipes with the assistance of the school’s head chef, Catherine St. John.

This truly unique volume covers the gamut with exquisite recipes from the school’s own chefs to mouth-watering dishes from national and international chefs. Among the chefs included are Hugh Carpenter, Shirley O. Corriher, David Hirsch, and Michael Symon. Brief biographies of the chefs explain how they chose their profession.

Famous Chefs and Fabulous Recipes: Lessons Learned at One of the Oldest Cooking Schools in America is available in hardcover for $34.95 (ISBN 978-1-931968-88-1) and can be ordered online at www.uakron.edu/uapress or by calling 1-800-247-6553.

Emily Rosko’s “Prop Rockery” wins 2011 Akron Poetry Prize

It’s official! The 2011 Akron Poetry Prize winner, chosen by judge Natasha Sajé, is Prop Rockery by Emily Rosko of Charleston, South Carolina. About Rosko’s work, Sajé says:

“Art is about something the way a cat is about the house,” says Allen Grossman. This is abundantly true of Emily Rosko’s poems in Prop Rockery, a condition she defines with a quote from King Lear: “a looped and windowed raggedness.” And while this condition is “pretend,” and these poems are indeed virtuoso performances, the despair, loneliness, lies, and miscommunication they examine are as real as anything in art. Parataxis and fragments meet rhyme and chewy-on-the-tongue Anglo Saxon diction at the axis of postmodern irony. Prop Rockery explodes in your mouth—no sugar, plenty of bite.

The contest winner was selected from 413 entries. All thirty of the finalist and semi-finalist manuscripts were considered by the contest judge. We are also delighted to announce that Jason Bredle’s Carnival was selected for publication as the editor’s choice pick. Come hear Jason read tonight, with Noah Falck, at THE BIG BIG MESS READING SERIES right here in Akron!

The judge for the 2012 Akron Poetry prize will be Dara Wier. Wier’s most recent book is Selected Poems. Other recent books are Reverse Rapture and Remnants of Hannah. She teaches poetry workshops and form & theory reading seminars in the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers. She is co-director of the University of Massachusetts’  Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action and along with Guy Pettit and Emily Pettit, publisher and editor of Factory Hollow Press located at Flying Object in Hadley, Massachusetts. Her work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She’s served as a poet-in-residence at Hollins University, University of Montana, University of Utah and University of Texas. New work can be found in Lungful, Make, Boston Review, notnostrums, Fou, Maggy, Matter, Oh No, Telephone, and American Poetry Review. She lives in North Amherst, Massachusetts.

Full guidelines for the 2012 prize may be found -here-

2011 FINALISTS
011   Rebecca Hazelton, Fair Copy
057   Emily Rosko, Prop Rockery
145   Sarah Vap, Take us the Foxes
274   Marc McKee, Consolationeer
275   David Welch, Slow Weather Hymnal
276   Adam Clay, To Take Note of Where We Are
311   Jason Bredle, Carnival
335   Elizabeth J. Colen, What Weaponry
338   Charles Jensen, Nanopedia
407   Cori A. Winrock, Anti-Portrait at Flashpoint

2011 SEMI-FINALISTS
016   Rebecca Hazelton, Vow
024   Stephanie Kartalopoulos, Amulet
044   C.J. Sage, Open House
053   Suzanne Frischkorn, Castro, You’ve Nothing in Cuba Like My Desire
085   Gary L. McDowell, Mysteries in a World that Thinks There Are None
087   Keith Montesano, Sirens and Wildfire
088   Sandy Longhorn, In a World of Such Weather as This
097   Jen Tynes, Trick Rider
152   Anna Journey, Whisper to the Hive
175   Seth Abramson, Thievery
216   Kimberly Grey, The Opposite of Robot is Light
251   Jennifer Chapis, Fog and Invisible Horses
264   Travis Brown, In The Village That is Not Burning Down
312   Alexis Orgera, Dust Jacket
347   Dawn Lonsinger, whelm
366   Endi Bogue Hartigan, Chorus interstice
370   Liz Waldner, Homeseeker’s Paradise
377   Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, a slice from the cake made of air
411   Dan Rosenberg, the crushing organ
412   Shane McCrae, Colored Would

Congratulations to the authors of all these amazing manuscripts! Look for Prop Rockery in early 2012 and Carnival in the spring! And don’t forget to check out our past AAP winners Joshua Harmon and Oliver de la Paz, as well as the just released American Busboy from Matthew Guenette who reads in Akron September 2nd with THE BIG BIG MESS.

More poetry news soon!

A Soap Box Derby History from an Awesome Mind

Jeff Iula Shows off Derby Cars

Started in the early thirties, by happenstance, the Soap Box Derby is a testament to American kids and their ingenuity, as well as a saga of the American auto and newspaper industries. The “Greatest Amateur Racing Event in the World” brought national and international winners to Akron, Ohio, once the Rubber Capital of the World, to compete for the title of fastest gravity racer around. In its heyday, the race was broadcast to millions, was an event that attracted famous stars and celebrities, and was a measure of the American can-do attitude.

This unique book traces the history of the All-American Soap Box Derby with rare images, lists of amazing Derby facts, superb interviews, and anecdotes from Jeff Iula, who grew at the Derby as a participant, official, general manager, and parent to Derby youngsters. Follow the race from the 1930s to the present. Take part in the star-studded “Oil Can” race. Watch sponsors’ banners being raised and taken down.  Glimpse the “Graphite Kid.”  Witness the parades, close finishes, and heart-warming victories. Meet the people who have kept the Derby tradition going for over seven decades.

How I Saw It will put you right at the top of Derby Downs.  You’ll make your final preparations for your heat. And you’ll head down the Akron hill with all the racers who have made the trek since 1935.

Weekly Pages: Stan Purdum’s Pedaling on the North Coast

In 2009 we published Stan Purdum’s Pedaling to Lunch, a collection of bike rides and lunch spots in Northeast Ohio. The book proved popular among area cyclists but focused on the lower portion of NEO. Purdum felt the book needed a follow-up, a companion of sorts, to explore the northernmost regions. He found a kindred spirit in Murray Fishel, a long-time cyclist with extensive knowledge of the Greater Cleveland area. Out of this meeting, grew a new friendship and Pedaling on the North Coast.

North Coast offers eighteen eclectic rides that take you from the historic Cedar Lee and Coventry areas to University Circle, Little Italy, the West Side Market, the Emerald Necklace, the Cleveland Art Museum, Brown’s Stadium, and much more (including tons of lakeside rides). This is a perfect companion to the warming Ohio weather, and a welcome addition to any cyclist’s bag of tools, alongside multitools and tire levers. We’re going with “The Towpath,” for this week’s Weekly Page for a few reasons.

With winter broken, the warm weather is a perfect time to explore the Towpath, which goes through some of the most beautiful parkland in Ohio and follows the Cuyahoga River in many places. The route is also a connection between Greater Cleveland, Akron, and other more “southern areas.” Because of this, it’s a good transition from Pedaling to Lunch. There’s also the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad near the Towpath, which begins running later this week, and offers cyclists a discount on rides. Check out the pages below, tune up your bike, and go ride!

Buy a copy of Pedaling to Lunch on our website.

Akronisms: Rubber

If there’s a most “Akronistic” Akronism, it’s by far that tough, elastic polymer substance that put the High Place on the map. Akron’s relationship with rubber stretches (puns are fully intended, feeling clever) back to the origins of the city, and further.

Let’s start with the Olmecs, the prehistoric Meso-American culture whose etymological roots are in the Nahuatl word olmecatl which means “inhabitants of the rubber country.” It appears that Akron wasn’t the first rubber capital, and the Olmecs made use of a proto-vulcanization in the harvesting of latex from trees, and refinement with other plants to create hard, rubber balls used in games and ritual (a similar process would be discovered over a thousand years later by Charles Goodyear). The ballgame played by Olmecs and subsequent peoples remains mysterious, but that didn’t stop Mel Gibson from featuring a rendition in Apocalypto.

When the Europeans invaded (read: discovered) the Americas they found the Pará rubber tree and its latex bleeding bark. As rubber is most definitely not a Nahuatl word, it comes from the European discovery that this substance “rubbed” away pencil marks quite easily. Moving forward, rubber trees were brought back to Europe and seedlings taken around the world. Rubber was growing.

Due to its many uses (think about it, rubber is everywhere now) rubber proved incredibly valuable. We’ll jump ahead now, with the help of Steve Love and David Giffels‘ 1999 book Wheels of Fortune, a comprehensive and engaging history of the rubber industry in Akron.

Wheels traces the origins of rubber in Akron to Charles Goodyear, who, in 1939 Massachusetts, “either spilled onto his hot stove a batch of sulfur-laden rubber or hid it in the oven so his wife wouldn’t catch him playing with it again” and discovered the process of vulcanization, which uses sulfur to form crosslinks in long rubber polymer chains and makes the rubber more durable and resistant to temperature changes.

“By the turn of the century,” Wheels notes, “Akron had become the Rubber Capital . . . Akron would be influenced by four rubber barons: Goodrich, Sieberling, Firestone, and William F. O’Neil.” The companies these four founded came to represent rubber on a global scale. By 1936, growing tensions surrounding layoffs and a possible shift to eight-hour work days, led to the Akron Rubber Strike of 1936, the first major strike organized by the newly formed United Rubber Workers union. The URW continued to be based in Akron until the late 90s when the union merged with the United Steel Workers of America and moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The John S. Knight Convention Center sits where the old URW headquarters was on E. Mill in Downtown Akron.

The URW were one of the last hold outs of the Akron rubber industry, and the merger came years after the 1982 closure of the last rubber factory in Akron, General Tire, an event which meant, “Tire building was finished in Akron . . . The Rubber City had fallen.”

All was not lost. While Akron was no longer the Rubber Capital the city was not down, as Wheels notes: “When the tire plants fell silent and Akron lost its title as Rubber Capital of the World, the voices of the city did not die.” This is particularly apparent in the recent reclamation of the moniker “Rubber City,” a name which has proven to be more glue than rubber (or should I say it’s continually bounced back? Bad trope overload). Within the past few years even, there have been several uses of appropriations of the title. There’s Rubber City Clothing, which produces Akron-centric shirts and clothes; the Rubber City Rollergirls, a roller derby team; Rubber City Noise, an experimental electronics producer/record label. Akron has had an eclectic and rich music scene since the 1970s (when Devo and scores of local punk bands expressed the industrial pre-post-rubber angst of Akron youth) and recent years have provided tons of great artists in a range of genres. The most successful act in recent years is definitely The Black Keys, a blues rock duo that maintains strong hometown pride. Their album Rubber Factory directly alludes to Akron’s rubbery past and contains a collage of Akron landmarks. Recently accepting a Grammy for Best Alternative Act, drummer Pat Carney inserted a thanks to Akron, Ohio before leaving the stage.

Sure there’s more of Akron’s rubber legacy The University of Akron boasts a renowned polymer science/engineering department and the city remains unable to shed its reputation as the Rubber City. And, after all, we’ve still got the blimp.

—

Buy Wheels of Fortune on our website.

Commence the Akron Poetry Prize 2011 Submission Period!!!

Michael Goroff

May is fast approaching [ed. note: it's here!!!], which means that the submission period for the Akron Poetry Prize is about ready to begin. Mary Biddinger and the ever-duteous Nick Sturm (along with the crew of awesome people who help run the Akron Series in Poetry) eagerly anticipate reading your poetry manuscripts. We’re also super excited and grateful to have Natasha Sajé as our final judge. The submission period starts May 1 and runs through June 15. More info about the prize can be found here.

Officially, according to our website, poetry manuscripts “accepted for the Akron Series in Poetry must exhibit three essential qualities: mastery of language, maturity of feeling, and complexity of thought.” So, for an example, I wrote a short poem that shows what you will not want to submit for the Akron Poetry Prize:

Untitled 4 (In My Darkness, My Pain)

My darkness. My pain. My
anger. The    world      spits

blood on my heart. My

         head feels like thousands
of knives are piercing
my skull. I’m             grounded
and       no     one     gets me.
Screw you, Mom.

Awful poem aside (or is it awesome? regardless it’s not “good” good), here are two examples of the actual really “good” good poetry that’s won the prize in the past.

The first is from 2009 winner Oliver de la Paz, from his collection Requiem for the Orchard, which Aimee Nezhukumatathil called “achingly beautiful” and which Martín Espada called “the stuff of life itself, ugly and beautiful, wherever or whenever we happen to live it.” This poem is called “How You Came About in the World Bewilders Me as a Cherry Tree Flowering” —

The next poem is from last year’s winner, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie by Joshua Harmon, which G. C. Waldrep called a “tender anti-epic, a grunge-tinged love song to America’s benighted post-industrial heartland,” and which Ann Lauterbach calls “relentlessly affecting, brilliantly observed, beautiful and sober inventory of modernity’s ragged edge.” This poem is from the “Tableaux Poughkeepsiens” section in Le Spleen —

All of us at Akron Poetry HQ are super-stoked to read your best poems. Please go here for guidelines and info.

Michael Goroff is a “writer,” student-writer, and writing student living in Akron, Ohio. He recently completed his tour of duty as a University of Akron Press intern. We’re hoping to trick him into still writing for An Akronism.

Guest Post: Sticky Fictions

Photo from The Great Gatsby for NES.

On the Importance of Crunchiness in Stories
Michael Goroff

I love videogames. I always have and I always will. Why do I feel like I’m admitting something perverse when I say that?

Nine times out of ten, you give me the choice to read a 500-page novel or sit down for a few hours to play Super Mario Bros., I’m choosing the latter.

Maybe it’s because I’m lazy (I am). Maybe it’s because reading is “hard work.” Maybe it’s because playing a videogame is “mindless entertainment.” Regardless, there’s something incredibly compelling about videogames that isn’t so readily apparent (or discussed, or championed) in literature.

That compelling thing is friction.

(Before we get to friction, indulge me for a little while longer while I discuss narrative in videogames.)

You see, there’s a certain way to read “narrative” in videogames. Lately, the trend in narration that game developers have crafted is a basic pattern of gameplay, cut-scene, gameplay, cut-scene, etc. etc. In this relationship between gameplay and cut-scene, the gameplay gives the player all the “fun,” while the cut-scene gives the player all the “story.” You see how developers segregate these two things? Fun and story? Many cut-scenes, usually featuring a fraternity of greased-up, physically maxed-out and disproportional space marines (or some equivalent modern warrior), are not fun. They are simply thought necessary. The player puts down the controller for three-or-so minutes (even that seems like a ridiculously long amount of time) to passively watch (or ignore) these graphical meat-puppets yammer on about some enemy base or some giant enemy space worm, before the game demands the player retrieve his or her controller to get back to the actual fun stuff. Why do we need this break? Who cares about space worms and the history of whatever doomed space fortress we are about to invade? What matters most in a game is playing the game, which is to say the narrative is in how a game plays, not why the game is being played.

Let’s return to Mario. I love Super Mario Bros. I love it so much I bought this stupid track jacket. When I get my first tattoo (probably never), I will have the 1-up mushroom tattooed over my heart (I won’t). Mario, to me, is a perfect example of gameplay as story. Sure, there’s the perennial instigation—Bowser (King Koopa) kidnaps Princess Peach, and Mario must rescue her—which, I suppose, counts as part of the “story,” but actually it’s only an excuse for the real story. In more recent Mario games, there are cut-scenes before and after you beat the game, but while you’re playing, there are no cut-scenes. That’s because Mario doesn’t need cut-scenes. The narrative in Mario is that Mario must go to the right and reach the end of the level. The nuances of the narrative, the actual language of the story, are in how the player plays the game, how the player gets to the right. Every jump the player makes over every bottomless pit is its own little story. Every encounter with every enemy is its own little story. All these tiny encounters and challenges (“little stories”) come together to create the whole—the level, the “big story.” Mario doesn’t try to appropriate more novelistic forms in order to tell a story. It understands that games are different from other narrative forms because you play them to experience them. Whatever meager back story you think you need, can be found in the instruction manual, where you read it.

Very few modern games understand the importance of moment-to-moment narratives, and so they try to introduce a story with the cut-scenes, and usually, because most game developers are big nerds, the story takes on the epic scale of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. Most of the stories involve the eradication of the human race, or the threat of eradication, and the player character is almost always the “only man for the job.” We know how these stories play out, and yet game developers waste an incredible amount of time writing and choreographing the same predictable cut-scenes. Take, for example, the incredibly popular Halo series. The story in the Halo series is that some alien race is threatening humans with extinction, and you play as Master Chief (yikes, I know), a super-soldier “Spartan” space marine who is Earth’s only hope. But the real story is the moment-to-moment confrontations, when some big alien mother is all up in your face, snapping the odd appendage-like claws on the side of his mouth and growling with primal rage. The way you proceed in taking down this enemy is the actual narrative, not the bogus and cliché back story.

Some of the only games I’ve played that understand how narrative in videogames actually works are in the first-person shooter Half-Life series. Sure, the main setup is the same as Halo or any other series: aliens are invading Earth, and only one man can stop them. Except: in Half-Life that one man isn’t some steroid-puking space marine, but a normal old theoretical physicist who inadvertently created a rift in the space-time continuum, bringing the alien Combine to Earth. Which is how alien overlords invading Earth would probably happen, if you think about it. Hubris and all that. If Shakespeare had written about alien invasions, he would have written Half-Life instead of Hamlet.

But this twist on the typical sci-fi videogame genre story isn’t the best part about Half-Life’s narrative. The best part is that you never leave the game for a cut-scene. In Half-Life and Half-Life 2 (and all its subsequent episodic sequels), the theoretical physicist player character is named Gordon Freeman. But, you never actually see Gordon Freeman. There are no cut-scenes (like with Halo) that bring you out of the head of Gordon Freeman to give the player a third-person perspective. You are, at all times, trapped within the head of your character. In fact, the only reason people actually know what Gordon Freeman looks like is because his image is on the cover and in the in-game menus. So the game progresses, a story is told, but instead of cut-scenes, you don’t leave the gameplay. Events happen around you and you observe them. Scientists try to formulate plans against the alien invaders, and you watch them have these conversations. Next thing you know, five or six giant arachnid alien-robot freakbeasts are storming the small forested valley where the surviving humans have fled. The story then becomes you, Gordon Freeman, but really you, defeating five or six of these towering robot monsters. How you defeat them, or how you cross a pulsating underground acid river, or how you stave off an invasion of giant subterranean ant-like creatures in the caverns of an abandoned mine, is how the actual narrative is developed—moment by moment.

 

(I swear I’ll bring this back to writing and books and literature in a second. But first I must introduce you to Tim Rogers’ Sticky Frictions.)

Videogame guru and enfant terrible Tim Rogers wrote this article this past summer that changed my life, changed forever how I view videogames. If the narrative of a video game is crafted by the moment-to-moment conflicts within the actual gameplay itself, Rogers’ sticky frictions are the sentences of those narratives.

Friction in a videogame is basically defined as how a game feels to its players. This is the same as friction in real life. The friction of wind blowing against your face is different from the friction of your feet impacting the pavement. Friction is important. In fact, if you agree with Rogers (like I do), friction is truly everything in a game. A videogame interacts with its audience by letting its audience actually play it to experience it, so how that interaction feels is what matters most. It’s the most tactile of textual experiences, as opposed to reading books or seeing movies. Feeling is everything in videogames.

Rogers has different words for the types of frictions we encounter when playing a videogame—crunchy, sticky, chunky, swishy, soupy, greasy, snappy, juicy, electric, etc. Narrative in videogames is entirely crafted by the language of these frictions. How crunchy, swishy, chunky frictions all engage with each other in a game, informs how the game feels, and thus how the player experiences the game, and thus how the text of the game is read.

After I read “In Praise of Sticky Friction” this past summer, I couldn’t stop thinking about how friction really is everything. My life, I realized, can be thought to have been informed entirely through the various forms of friction I have encountered. What frictions do I like? What frictions do I dislike? What frictions have I encountered that have scarred me? What frictions have I learned from? Friction can be a bad breakup (crunchy friction), or friction can be the pleasure of a perfectly designed napkin dispenser (more swishy than anything else, I suppose).

So what about friction in reading and writing? (I told you I’d try to bring it back.)

 

As an MFA student of fiction, if I’m discussing craft, it’s probably because I’m sitting in a workshop. In workshops, we talk about character, plot, tone, setting, conflict, perspective, etc. We talk about all the “elements” that make a story what it is—the “building blocks,” or the “ingredients,” or whatever other shorthand catchwords writers have created to discuss the incredibly complicated experience of reading, writing, and fully comprehending a piece of fiction.

No one ever talks about a story’s friction in workshop.

But friction is everything!

How a piece of fiction feels is everything. Boil a story down to its elements—its character and plot and tone—and the only thing that ultimately matters to the reader is how that story reacts physically with their innards. Readers want to be touched in some way. That’s not to say you can’t have a piece that’s theoretically interesting and experimental, a piece that pushes the reader more intellectually than emotionally. But even within these intellectual, experimental jumps, there has to be friction.

Friction in videogames is entirely tactile; it’s how a game feels. Friction in fiction is a little bit more complicated. There are two kinds of “feel”: the word-by-word tactile sensation of language, and the overall emotional impact of a piece.

Language is physical. When we are reading, the way the words sound to us and how they move on the page is like the moment-to-moment interactions in videogames, in that the sounds and movements of language inform every other aspect of a narrative—characters, plot, etc.

There are different approaches to friction in language. Barry Hannah is loopy, sticky, fluid, and rough and because of that, his characters are loopy, sticky, fluid, and rough. Flannery O’Connor is stiff and accelerative, and her stories have the impact of an oncoming train (or at least a Buick). Philip Roth is dense and accumulative like a heavy snow or a doctoral dissertation.

The physical friction of language informs and accompanies the emotional friction in fiction. For the purposes of this post, I’ve sort of reduced emotional friction to two categories—transgressive and progressive.

Transgressive friction is the easier one to define, I think, so I’m going to start there. Transgressive friction either tries to attack the reader or subvert the reader’s expectations in some way. Beneath that, there are different kinds of transgressive friction. There is the transgressive friction like what Joyce offers in like Finnegans Wake, which more or less subverts not only accepted structures and elements readers expect out of a conventional novel, but also baffles readers with its rich (like, eating-an-entire-chocolate-cake rich) language of portmanteaus, neologisms, puns, and Gaelic. Then there’s the transgressive friction of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, which is not a text-based friction, but a content based friction that challenges the limits of what a reader actually wants to read about. We have, then, these two dichotomies of transgressive friction—textual and content-based—under which many different sub-frictions can occur. Think of Vanessa Place’s La Medusa or Blake Butler’s Ever or anything by Gary Lutz or Ben Marcus. The friction created by these writers in their fiction is transgressive because it attacks the reader in some way. Transgressive friction is aggressive against what a reader expects.

Progressive friction in literature is harder to define. It might be more like taking the conventions and expectations of fiction (or poetry or whatever) and blowing them up, exploiting the conventions and making them do new things. When I think of progressive friction in fiction, I think of Joy Williams and the beautiful, true, moment-by-moment sentiments she somehow can clarify in one perfect sentence or description (like this one from Williams’ The Quick and the Dead): “She appeared Saturday morning at Alice’s house in her big sloppy station wagon.” That word sloppy is so perfect—with one unexpected word, Williams completely clarifies our view of the woman driving the station wagon, of the station wagon itself, of how we view station wagons and will continue to view station wagons, forever.

Progressive fiction, then, seems to clarify more than bewilder. It takes how we view the world, and it makes that view sharper, more concise and perfect. That is, it attempts to clarify instead of befuddle or flip or subvert. It uses convention—in both narrative structure and language—to open up how we understand the world.

We never talk about friction in our writing workshop, but we should. We should try to identify what kind of friction we or the other writers whose work we’re reviewing are trying to accomplish, and better understand how we can accomplish that. Friction in writing is the physical, gut-wrenching, heart-destroying horror and wonder that make the literature that is profoundly affecting. The stories that invade our insides are the ones that really matter, and friction—tactile and emotional, progressive and transgressive—is the harbinger of that invasion.

So: what kind of frictions do you try to accomplish in your writing, or crave in your reading—tactilely, emotionally? Use the comments below or visit our Facebook page to discuss.

*There’s a super awesome “NES” adaptation of the Great Gatsby that these images are taken from. We’re not sure where this fits into Michael’s requests for narrative, but you do periodically encounter dialog from the novel as you chase after Gatsby.

*We borrowed the 1 Up image from Geek With Curves’ post on Geek Sounds.

Guest Post: Our Small Worlds

or What Does it Mean to Write about Home?
Michael Goroff

I haven’t lived here long. I moved to Akron in the summer of 2009 after enrolling as a student in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program, knowing very little about the city or what it had to offer. About the only knowledge I possessed of Akron was:

1. the Goodyear Blimp,
2. something or other about the rubber industry, and
3. Jim Jarmusch grew up here.

This last point excited me most. As an undergraduate I went through, as I think most young “artistically minded” students go through, a film snob phase. Over the course of my freshman year, I watched at least four or five new films a week, aided in this venture by the local art house theater and my college’s library, which had an amazing collection of classic, foreign, and otherwise hard-to-come-by films. I devoured Kurosawa’s oeuvre, dabbled in the French New Wave, and fell in love with Krzysztof Kieslowski and Wong Kar-Wai. But the director (or, as I regrettably called him back then, the auteur) from my film snob phase whose work had the most impact on me was Jarmusch, easy.

The end of my freshman year, my art appreciation professor—a kindly, if not somewhat sallow graduate assistant named Dan—challenged us by showing films he considered antithetical to the aesthetic of the normal Hollywood blockbusters we were all used to. The first screening was Stranger than Paradise, and when Dan flipped on the lights after the movie was over, an utterly confused, maybe even slightly angry groan washed through the classroom. “What had we just watched?” my classmates demanded. How does two hours of long black-and-white shots capturing bored, twentysomething New York hipsters sitting on couches make a movie? Where was the plot? Where were the explosions? Where were the guns and sex scenes? They were confused and more than a little disturbed.

My classmates’ reaction, of course, being the film snob I was (and am), only fueled my desires to watch anything else I could find by Jarmusch, post-Dan’s class. My college’s library had most of his films: Down by Law, Dead Man, Ghost Dog, Mystery Train, etc. (They only had Night on Earth on VHS, and unfortunately I have still yet to see that one.) By the end of the summer when Broken Flowers was released, I was something of an amateur Jarmusch scholar, or at least I had done my research.

Somehow, I learned about Jarmusch’s ties to Akron and felt inspired. Here was a filmmaker and storyteller whose aesthetic was so original, at once refined and ugly, clunky yet choreographed, the poetics of grit and hardship and wandering, and to think he grew up only forty-five-or-so minutes away from my hometown of Solon.

And yet Jarmusch’s films—excepting the small segment in Stranger than Paradise that’s set in a white-out, snowed-in Cleveland—barely even mention northeast Ohio. The rest of his films jump from place to place, from Memphis to New Orleans to Jersey City and so on, presenting each location with an appreciating eye, a tender carefulness in making certain the music, the tone, the story, all brought out what’s beautiful about each location. In Jarmusch’s films, his settings, although constantly varying, are always presented with love.

After a while, however, Jarmusch’s filmic wanderlust becomes tiring, like listening to the tales of the boyish triumphs of a friend who goes from girlfriend to girlfriend, while deep down you know—you just know­—he’s lonelier than ever. When it comes to Jarmusch and his settings, there are no prolonged, and thusly more rewarding and beautiful, love affairs, as there is with Woody Allen and his New York, or Wong Kar-Wai and his Hong Kong. This makes sense, I suppose, biographically speaking: Jarmusch has more or less always been a wanderer and an outsider, moving from Akron to Chicago to New York to Paris and back to New York, shifting settings like with his films. This constant wandering is, in part, what makes Jarmusch’s films exciting, but at the same time, there’s just something I distrust as an Ohioan when an artist from Ohio barely makes an effort to work with the rich scrap material given to us by our down-but-not-out home state.

The most recent winner of the Akron Poetry Prize, Joshua Harmon’s Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie , is all about the place these poems call home. In Harmon’s poems, Poughkeepsie is a place of pole saws, asbestos, blue jays, wire fences, a “rust-blossomed SUV,” aluminum box fans, and cracked asphalt. In Harmon’s poems, Poughkeepsie becomes more than a place, more than a home even. It’s scrutinized and appreciated (how so many of us would like to be) under the gaze of a loved one and breathes in this way. It is not a state of mind, but a state of being, an element that exists, like air, at all times around and within us.

In Harmon’s book, Poughkeepsie isn’t defined by its landmarks. We are moved beyond landmarks to the perfect little details and the motion of the language in our understanding of Poughkeepsie. That these poems feel as if they could not exist in exactly the same way without Poughkeepsie being their home is exactly what I’m trying to get at here. Jarmusch’s films, while aesthetically moving and as intrinsically free-form as jazz, lacks the specific sort of heart that only art completely and utterly devoted to its home can possess.

Like I mentioned above, I came to Akron in 2009 for the Northeast Ohio MFA program. I am a writing student/student-writer/”writer” living in a richly historic rust belt city that totally demands attention and acknowledgment. However, like Jarmusch’s films, I often feel that I am still geo-biographically unsettled. When I was younger, my family moved from New Jersey to Pittsburgh and from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. Afterwards, I moved to the southeast corner of Ohio, the northernmost tip of Appalachia, and felt at home there too, not to mention that I’m an on-again/off-again Jew, and not to also mention that I mostly grew up in the suburbs. Now I am in Akron, which, for the true Akronites I’ve met, means having a sense of kicked-around pride about our home. All this is well and good, but I’ve lived in so many different places, and most predominately in a suburb, that as a writer I constantly struggle with wanting to write about growing up in Solon without being able to fully commit to what it meant to have grown up there. What more can we say about suburbs? What singular and unique characteristics can even thrive in a suburb? Am I a Jew when I oftentimes feel more like an Appalachian expatriate? What does it mean to write about place?

David Giffels—author of All the Way Home, former and famed columnist for the Akron Beacon-Journal, NEOMFA nonfiction professor, and all-around Akronite—is a writer who is entirely devoted to the duty of writing about home. I asked David what writing about Akron meant to him, and he responded:

When you grow up in a place like Akron at the time I did—as it was in a state of active decline and identity loss and often the butt of a lame joke—it’s hard to see the city as a useful subject for art or literature in anything other than a bleak or ironic context. But I spent a lot of time exploring old factories and bustling thrift stores and empty places where things used to be and I always thought of those scenes as purely, traditionally beautiful, in what I suppose would be parallel to the way anyone who observes a place that he identifies as “home” might feel.

I also took great pleasure in the infinite quirks—the bowling photos in Luigi’s; the Southern Tap Room; Rex Humbard’s tower; the whole Lighter-Than-Air thing; the fact that regardless of the endeavor, we always seem to come in second—never last—which makes us a peculiar sort of perpetual non-winner. I sincerely love those icons and ideas.

I didn’t set out to write about that stuff as a theme. It just sort of evolved as one. But now that Akron has been my main subject for all my adult life I can look at it and see not only the value, but the breadth and depth it offers. My city gives way more to me as a writer than I could ever give back in writing about it. I’d put my dinky Rust Belt city up against the French countryside any day of the week.

So I guess in that way I think it’s really important—probably even a responsibility—for writers who strongly identify with a particular place to make that place their subject, to explore it passionately and try to find its meaning(s), because that seems like an important function of community and of society. We need to precisely understand and appreciate our small worlds in order to understand The World.

I’m not quite certain where my home is anymore. Akron is warming to me, but I don’t feel like I’ve earned calling it my home yet. There is a lot, it seems, in earning that right. Still, it is a presence in my life that compels and informs me. I can feel it shaping me at all times. For example: Right now, I am typing this up in the bravely persevering Quaker Square, the annexed hotel of which, I believe, used to be grain silos. Never before would I have been able to say that honestly and yet here I am, in this small world that is Quaker Square, which is a part of that bigger world we call Akron, which is part of an even bigger world we call The World.

Michael Goroff is a “writer,” student-writer, and writing student living in Akron, Ohio. He is our head Guest Poster this semester, so stay tuned for more from Michael.

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Check out the Akronisms interview we did with David Giffels last April!!!

Goroff & Sturm take D.C.: AWP 2011

Michael Goroff writes fiction and Nick Sturm writes poetry. They lost their AWP virginity the week before last in Washington, D.C. They feel a little used, like trees. They feel a little on fire. They feel like they love their cats very much and hope you do too. They feel like they want to tell you about their experiences at the largest gathering of writers and publishers in North America.

These are their stories.

POETRY

Nick Sturm

Instead of the standard coffee maker, our hotel room in Washington, D.C. housed an espresso machine. The thing was so intimidating we didn’t touch it until Sunday morning. At one point I just wanted to make some hot water, which is so easy with the normal coffee maker. But this espresso machine, with its sleek corners, silver accents, and built-in espresso cup housing-unit, totally threw me off. I ended up pouring water into the wrong place in the machine, which spilled out all over the counter onto our food. What I’m trying to say is that, at this, my first AWP, I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. You show up and you’re like, Yeah, I know how to make coffee. Then there’s an espresso machine, a whole new level of coffee, and you’re sitting there fumbling with what you know, feeling a little out of place, and suddenly you’re drinking espresso, and these people, these writers you so look up to, are talking to you about their day, their lives, their writing, your writing. The espresso machine makes total sense.

Not that I was crawling around in the dark at AWP. I had the opportunity to help with the NEOMFA and the University of Akron Press/Barn Owl Review tables, tables with bright blue skirts that looked amazingly similar to other tables with bright blue skirts and banners that said things like Wave Books and Black Ocean, so that to the untrained eye I looked just like these other extremely awesome people. As it turns out, those people are just as awesome I expected, even more awesome than that.

Awesome means spectacularly generous, kind, inspiring, humble, and hopelessly in love with what they do. I’d like to pay particular respect to the Table-X section, the home of the small presses. I’m still giddy just thinking about it: Octopus Books, Factory Hollow Press, Letter Machine Editions, Pilot Books, Forklift, Ohio, h_ngm_n, Poor Claudia, Ugly Duckling Presse, Barrelhouse, Futurepoem. There should have been a deal where you could buy every book from every one of these tables. Who cares how much it costs. I’ll stitch bindings for you for the next ten years. And to be honest, this is where I felt most at home at AWP. Yes, many of us shared an interest in good flannel and, in general, weren’t more than 35 years old, but it was more than that. Unlike anywhere else in the monstrous literary assemblage that is the AWP bookfair, Table-X felt like a community. And I mean that in every sense of the word; that these are writers who share similar intents, beliefs, resources, and risks, that these are people interested in participating in their art in a way that is continually innovative, and always, always, always completely hands-on. Nowhere else was the book as object more evident than at these tables with all of the hand-made chapbooks, gorgeous small press books, and DIY journals of all shapes, sizes, and textures. Ask me where I want to be in ten years, I’ll tell you sitting behind a table selling books of poetry that look like Birds, LLC, Flying Guillotine, and Immaculate Disciples. Let the age of the small poetry press begin, if it hasn’t already.

I don’t know how it is for people in other genres, but for poets, the off-site readings at AWP are a festival. Most off-sites I went to had at least 10, if not 30, poets on the line-up, and all of the events were spectacular. Yeah, you’ve got to cram 200 people into the upstairs of a long, skinny bar with not that great sound, but it’s a hell of a lot better than listening to some marquee poet read to a few thousand people in a theater. And unlike in Ohio, you can get Yuengling on tap everywhere in D.C., which is always a good thing for poetry. Healthy amounts of beer also contributed to me indulging in cab rides from reading to reading over the whole weekend, usually with about fifteen minutes to spare between the last reader in one and the first reader in another. But the mania was always worth it. Literature Party at The Black Cat, the dance extravaganza of AWP, was sick. Just sick. Amelia Gray is spectacular. She’ll eat your face. She’ll have your baby. That’s a threat.

Though I can’t say I had any epiphanies at AWP, I definitely came out of it knowing that, at least for myself, I’m in the right place doing the right thing. Just working at the NEOMFA table and talking to people about our program made me feel like I was really part of something in a way that I didn’t have access to before. Selling copies of The Monkey and the Wrench to complete strangers, a book of essays that I helped bring into creation, offered a kind of satisfaction that felt comparable to giving birth, or selling home-grown produce, or something like that. It just felt right. It felt like I already knew how to use the espresso machine. It felt like I had the opportunity to buy my body weight in books. So I did.

___________________

FICTION

Michael Goroff

What makes Washington, D.C. so incredibly difficult to automotively navigate for doe-eyed Midwestern outsiders such as myself is the pattern of the city’s street layout. Unlike, say, New York or Chicago, D.C. isn’t organized in a manageable grid pattern but rather a series of funky roadway starbursts. Check out a map of D.C. and you might find yourself staring into a webby horrorshow, a massively confusing network of traffic circles whose limbs of streets stretch out to other circles, and so on, etc., a series of streets populated by bumper-to-bumper buses and taxis, and yuppies, ambassadors, and politicians in Lexuses and Priuses. To drive in D.C., I found myself adopting an antagonistically primal instinct, butting in with my diminutive Corolla as if offering my opinions in a debate, cutting off the Circulators and shadowy town cars, swerving at the last minute to avoid running over that poor scarf-wearing, Starbucks-sipping congressional intern. I became mean. I became spiteful. I scorned my underappreciated loyal car as a burden. But when I finally reached my destination, despite knowing that the chances of my receiving a parking ticket were probably pretty high, the sense of accomplishment was overwhelming.

This, in a way, was how I felt about my first AWP experience overall. I had difficulties navigating the lushly exorbitant but kindly welcoming Marriott where the conference was held. When I wanted to go up, the stairs and escalators only went down. When I wanted to leave, the doors spit me out onto the wrong side of the building. When I wanted to enter, masses of other writers utterly congested every elevator and hallway. And yet, when I finally reached the bookfair, the beating heart of AWP, I completely forgot any of the frustrations that came with traversing the chaos.

Writing about the bookfair is kind of like being at the bookfair: it’s hard to know where to begin. If I could have bought something at every press and journal table, I would have. Here was a utopian bookstore, filled with books and magazines I actually want to read, as opposed to the oppressively dull chain bookstores that are basically the sole literary depositories in northeast Ohio. Not only that, but the people responsible for these beautiful objects were actually in attendance, hocking the books themselves. It was a pleasure to meet some of the peeps from Hobart, One Story, the Cincinnati Review, and other such favorites. I got to meet Collagist editor and overall great guy Matt Bell. To get to say hi to the people who create the things I love to read and consume was one of the utmost pleasures of AWP, not to mention my Hobart flask, which after purchasing I carried around proudly in my jacket’s inner breast pocket, right against my heart, for the duration of my stay.

Spend enough time in the bookfair, however, and you might start to lose your sense of focus—of reality. At some point this AWP weekend, I experienced what I’ve been describing to anyone who will suffer listening to me as an existential crisis.

Let me be clear: I love most any kind of book thing, most any kind of writing. I love the weird. I love the real. I love the experimental. I will consume just about any kind of writing, as long as it punches me in the heart, as long as it leaves me reeling and momentarily disabled. A good book—or story, or poem, or whatever—leaves me feeling like I’m staring into the humming, glowing face of Truth. This is my main criteria. Any other label—traditional, experimental, etc.—is basically for lazy critics.

I realized a lot of things at AWP. The hardest realization I had at AWP was the realization that I like too much, maybe, that I want to do everything, and not only that, but that, as a young student in an MFA program, I’ve been trying to write stories that are probably not my stories to write; that I didn’t actually know what I wanted to write. I want to write stories that editors of speculative fiction magazines will like, and I want to write stories that more experimental editors would want to publish, and I want to write stories that fit into the same aesthetic as . . . well, you get the point. I realized with horror at AWP, upon seeing on display all the different journals I love to read, that I’ve been writing stories that will fit in one way or the other with the aesthetics of these infinitely diversely aesthetic magazines, and I haven’t been writing stories that actually mean much of anything to me when everything’s said and done. Simply put, my favorite stories are those that in some way affect me physically—that is, beyond emotion and intellectualism, to that most searing and wounded part of our souls. And I realized that I wasn’t writing those stories. I realized I had some tough decisions to make, not just what was I going to write, but did I even want to bother writing at all. I thought, Maybe I should just give up this whole writing thing, just be a reader not a writer “slash” reader. To be only a reader, without the egocentric ulterior motive of reading to help my writing, is, after all, the more noble pursuit, and didn’t I want to be noble, and didn’t I want to be good and true and just to the books I so deeply care about? If I couldn’t move myself with my own writing, who could I possibly hope to move?

I wandered around D.C. for most of Friday afternoon in a stupor. I was embarrassed for myself and my writing. I didn’t even know what I was doing at AWP. I had no right to be there. I was the worst kind of sham—I was lying to myself. By Friday evening, I wanted nothing more than to escape D.C., so I took the Metro out of the District and into Virginia to stay with a good friend of mine who fed me beer and let me unravel my brain within the safe confines of the small, cozy home he shares with his girlfriend. We stayed up and talked for a while. The talking helped. The being outside of the District and the manic energy of AWP helped. The buzzing in my brain settled down to a whimper. I gained perspective. The solution to my problem was to simply stop lying to myself. It’s okay to like different kinds of writing, but it’s not okay to write in the vein of writers who, while they might be great writers who I admire deeply and who are tapping into certain contemporary literary trends, are not me, are not even close to who I am. I was going to have to start over, this time around being more honest with myself. But that, I realized, was okay.

Saturday was much better for me. I got to see Benjamin Percy, Jennifer Egan, Rick Moody, and Joshua Ferris—the author of one of my favorite novels of all time, Then We Came to the End—read in the Marriott ballroom. I ran into Michael Kimball, who is easily one of the kindest and most generous writers I have ever met. Just talking to Michael made me feel better. I had a better sense of purpose. Sure, I was going to be, in essence, completely starting over from scratch—but so what? What’s the rush?

A funny thing happened that day. I felt okay about having failed. Writing isn’t a race, even as much as the failing print industry and the dwindling literacy statistics may claim and make writers think otherwise. On Saturday, I got in a line, holding another bought copy of Then We Came to the End so that I could have Joshua Ferris sign it for my girlfriend. I was actually nervous to talk to this writer whose book had affected me so physically. When I got to the front of the line and saw Joshua Ferris sitting there with his wild hair, I handed him my copy of his book and told him that his book truly moved me. He seemed touched by that. I asked him if he could make it out to my girlfriend and told him how we had sort of bonded over his book, that it really brought us together, and he told me in his soft voice that that was a sweet story, and that he would hold onto it.

___________________

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from AWP 2011.

Weekly Pages: The Monkey & The Wrench — We Got Moves

From Elisa Gabbert‘s essay “The Moves: Common Maneuvers in Contemporary Poetry” in The Monkey & The Wrench:

“Poetry is kind of like chess—there are an infinite number of possible games, but each game tends to be made up of certain recognizable moves . .  .  There’s no chess—and no dancing—without moves . . . A move is just a small element of a poet’s larger style, and having a few distinct moves, or maneuvers that can be isolated and imitated, is a mark of having a strong and recognizable voice.”

Nick Sturm talked about the move “Mention of a Forest Animal” in his awesome zoo post earlier this week. We’ve selected some of our favorite “moves” (Scare Quotes excluded) for this week’s page. The Monkey & The Wrench is full of great essays like Gabbert’s and is kinda (the Casual Hedge!) essential for anyone interested in the state of modern poetry.

Let the moves commence:

Ah… The Abstract Epistolary. And we thought that Mary just liked saying the word “epistolary.” While Gabbert seems to thrust this move into the unforgivable abyss, we think that its ironic potential is still milkable. The Emanuel example is pretty wonderful (albeit predating our post-ironic situation) and we think that the Abstract Epistolary is still fertile ground for homonymic experimentation. Plus, that ties in the Forest Animal — Dear Two Birds, I write to you with one stone…

I just wrote an intentionally ambiguous pome, interpret as you will. Just remember I’m an unreliable narrator:

/                                                                                                        /                                                           /                                             /                                                 /                                                             /

WHY ARE YOU SHOUTING?

I’M FREE OF THE ANGER OF SHOUTING.

I SEE, THAT’S WHY YR WORDS ARE IMBUED W/ A FLAT, AFFECTLESS TONE.

EXACTLY. I’M A TELEGRAM. I’M TICKER TAPE.

YR A OUIJA BOARD.

I GUESS. OR MAYBE I’M BEING TRANSCRIBED IN REAL TIME VIA DICTATION

BUT WHY ARE YOU SHOUTING?

This makes us think of Donald Barthelme. He wrote a story that is one long sentence. He wrote another in the form of a numbered list. He was labeled pomo. Now that we’re popomo, pomo is okay again. Here’s some more.

Lego language.

Enough of all this. We’re bringing back the caps: BUY THIS BOOK.