In the Spring Issue
The newest issue of ZYZZYVA is our biggest yet. It comes in at 256 pages, including 16 pages of color art, and features a special section on writing from Mexican journalists and novelists on the drug war there—compelling work appearing for the first time in English.
Here’s what’s inside:
- Fiction from Peter Orner (on the peculiar play between two young brothers in 1970s Chicago), Wanda Coleman (on the sole white man living in a neighborhood in Watts just after the ’65 riots), and Daniel Sada (on three heads discovered in an ice chest during a drug cartel’s party).
- Verse from Philip Aijian, Kathleen Boyle, W.S. Di Piero, David Hernandez, Jonathon Keats, Ada Limon, D.A. Powell, Corey Van Landingham, Renee K. Nelson, and Henry W. Leung.
- Elena Mauli Shapiro’s melancholy story about a crumbling office romance, Lindsey Thordarson’s historical fiction of a teen girl making a life alone in the woods, and Don Waters’s riveting, disturbing tale of a woman who rescues animals and her excruciating visits to a cougar at a zoo.
- Reportage from Diego Enrique Osorno, who tries to puzzle together what exactly happened when the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel clashed in the border town of Ciudad Mier, and Marcel Turati, who visits a morgue in a northern Mexico and talks to the desperate people who have long been searching for their missing loved ones.
- And introducing Patrick Coleman and Benjamin T. Miller (and his story of the all-too-delicate relationship between an L.A. construction worker and his offbeat girlfriend).
- The Spring issue also commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco by featuring work exclusively from its West Coast artists: Sandow Birk, Timothy Cummings, Stephanie Syjuco, Travis Somerville, Anthony Discenza, Chester Arnold, Packard Jennings, Andy Diaz Hope, and Walter Robinson.
Get your four-issue subscription to ZYZZYVA now and start with the Spring issue. (Copies are limited.)
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A Relationship Gone Missing: ‘Love, an Index’ by Rebecca Lindenberg
Many poems of love loss have been written, but none are as difficult to categorize as those in Rebecca Lindenberg’s collection Love, an Index (McSweeney’s; 96 pages). The title itself is a teasing, post-romantic gesture, as though the subject can be summed up in one sequential arrangement. And yet, the poet attempts. But unlike Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” whose world is full of “many things… filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” Lindenberg’s poems do not possess that self-consoling bravado. Her loss is abrupt and unforeseeable; her lover-poet, Craig Arnold, mysteriously vanishes while hiking a volcano in Japan.
Whereas Bishop is soberly enterprising in her compilation of losses, Lindenberg is prudent. Her poems cautiously interact with memory: “I do not believe I remember any of this wrong, but there is reason I have left bits out.” One might say she is a curator and a synthesizer of experience, a specialist rather than a generalist, for she chooses particular scenes, times, places, and poets who give voice to her emotions. Lindenberg effortlessly creates an egoless world, full of feeling yet devoid of melodrama, in which she plays sidekick to the more famous Arnold.
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged Craig Arnold, Love an Index, McSweeney's, Poetry, Rebecca Lindenberg
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Pulling Back the Layers: Adrian Wong’s ‘Orange Peel, Harbor Seal, Hyperreal’
Adrian Wong's "Untitled (Wall II)" (photo courtesy of the artist)
Adrian Wong’s three sculptural works comprising Orange Peel, Harbor Seal, Hyperreal, now on display at the Chinese Cultural Center in San Francisco, would likely not exist if it weren’t for a bit of stubbornness on Wong’s part: his refusal to own a smart phone.
The accomplished young artist and academic, who splits his time between Hong Kong and Los Angeles, excels at a deliberate kind of urban wandering—one that involves scrupulous attention to a city’s spatial organization, architectural forms, and idiosyncratic stylistic details. It also means frequently getting lost. Having the option to mediate his experience through the two-dimensional layer of a GPS map would ruin things, Wong explained. The city is a layered enough place, culturally and physically, as it is.
Posted in Art Reviews
Tagged Adrian Wong, Chinatown, Chinese Cultural Center, Harbor Seal, Hong Kong, Hyperreal, Los Angeles, Orange Peel
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Soaring in the Air, Writhing on the Ground: Bad Unkl Sista’s ‘First Breath, Last Breath’
Michael Curran and Anastazia Louise in "First Breath, Last Breath" (photo by Eric Gillet)
I could tell the performance I was about to witness late last month was extraordinary even before entering the auditorium, just from watching the audience trickle into Z Space in San Francisco. There was a man who had somehow fused his beard with a slinky-like spiral pipe and wrapped it around his neck like a scarf. There were a few women in Betty Page/rockabilly outfits and the attendant shellacked beehive and Winehouse eyeliner. One girl’s hair resembled a Pantone swatch sheet—literally—small squares of dye checkered her shoulder-length crop. One man, who we found out later was the set designer for the production, had sausage links hanging from his belt loops. There were leather and piles of silver, feathers and dreadlocks, tattoos and guy-liner. I’ve never felt like such a square; even before the performance began it had rendered my life meaningless.
As a prelude to Bad Unkl Sista’s latest production, “First Breath, Last Breath,” the performers proceeded into the lobby—slowly, staring at the audience, making gong noises on obscure instruments—before moving into the proscenium theater space. The procession gave the audience something the performance could not. Up close we could see the magnificently bizarre costumes devised by artistic director, choreographer, and soloist Anastazia Louise. It was a head-scratching amalgam of Victoriana, Burning Man, and Steampunk: gas masks, fishbowl mouthpieces, hoop skirts of shredded denim, toreador and Japanese hakama pants, Puritan bonnets, and of course the signature white full-body paint of Butoh.
Posted in Theater Reviews
Tagged Bad Unkl Sista, Butoh, First Breath, Last Breath, San Francisco, Z Space
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Finding the Sacred in Life on the Calle: ‘Girlchild’ by Tupelo Hassman
The first thing to be understood about Tupelo Hassman’s debut novel, Girlchild, is that the young protagonist, Rory Dawn Hendrix, is alone. This is not only evidenced in her isolation: living in Reno’s Calle de las Flores trailer park, her general lack of school friends, or the way her poverty is treated coolly by government officials. Rory Dawn’s aloneness comes off in her fearless narration, the way she wanders off unaided into unknown places, to be followed by the adventurous reader.
Rory approaches everything familiar with caution. The Calle is her home, but it doesn’t offer the comfort or the safety of one. She is fearful of knocks at the door. She loves her mother, but can’t stand the way she points to the meager artifacts of their home and tells her these are the things to be given to her upon her death. She listens to conversations between her mother and grandmother, detached and wary. In the dark of their trailer, she watches Family Ties and M*A*S*H.
What We Do to Ourselves, and to the Wild: ‘Raptor’ by Andrew Feld
A bold investigation of cruelty, Andrew Feld’s Raptor (University of Chicago Press; 88 pages) illuminates the visceral details of the external world through electrifying, scary close encounters. Feld wastes no time in announcing his provocation: “You wanted a little bit of wilderness / Held docile on your wrist. What could be tamer / Than extinct?” These lines pierce straight through to the locus of a power struggle where the table is turned on a bird tamer, who is probed by accusations of culpability and blamed for razing what he touches.
Feld’s poetry dissects violence and imbues it with drama, provoking the reader to feel the pain of betrayal and the futility of forgiveness for something that is already lost. In “Cascade Raptor Center: Capture,” a boy’s apologies for shooting down a red-tail hawk with his new gun are rendered meaningless, leaving him alone to deal with the shame exacerbated by his father’s fury and with the psychosomatic castigation silence can provoke.
The speaker in Feld’s poems can objectively view the nature of cruelty – which descends from indifference to pain and from the need to maintain power — and see its necessary prerequisite of possession: “our only mutual [agreement] / is the tethering hunger we use to bind our birds // to us and overcome their deep-rooted / abhorrence of the human face.” Here, food is used as a means of control, of transacting with hatred. The speaker understands the supremacy of man over his fellow animals, and intuits the fear they have of him. And though he chooses to ally himself, out of love, with the rapacious birds he tames, he recognizes all the same that his love is not reciprocated, that the love is powerless.
Imperfect Eulogy for Elmer Morrissey
Elmer Morrissey, at the top of an 80-meter waterfall in San Gil, Colombia, in 2009 (photo by Rebecca Daunt)
April 14, 2012. On the 100th annivesary of the Titanic’s collision with an iceberg , the eight crew members of the Low Speed Chase set off on a day-long yacht race. When the 38-foot boat took a turn near the southern edge of the Farralon Islands, erratic and powerful waves threw the crew from their vessel, into the ocean beyond the San Francisco Bay. Three sailors made it onto the island, where the small yacht crashed, and were rescued. One was found dead in the water. Four are still missing.
I’ve been waking up in the earliest hours of the morning, before sunrise. From my window I can see the distant bay and the bridges that cut across it. It’s almost too dark to see the ocean, but I know it’s out there. And I know that somewhere in it is Elmer Morrissey.
I ask myself if the sea is less beautiful for having taken away my friend. I wonder if I have the energy to be angry at the Pacific Ocean. I try to think of what Elmer might say. I decide that Elmer would see the ocean for what it is: a roiling stage of life and death, a setting, not a being. I decide that Elmer would forgive.
I was a little bit in love with him, in the way you can be with someone you’re not romantically attracted to. Is that just love? It feels more like something in between love and in-love. I might have told Elmer this when he was alive. I might have said, “I’m a little bit in love with you, Elmer, in a platonic way that straddles the boundaries of love and in-love.” A simple “I love you” would also have sufficed. But how often do we really say this to our friends? I never throw out a casual “Love you!” at the end of a phone call. I might have said it to Elmer, though, and meant it fully. But I never did, because I’m too damn awkward with that sort of thing, and so I’m left saying it to my computer in a silent and rambling essay.
Posted in News
Tagged boating accident, Elmer Morrissey, Farralon Islands, Low Speed Chase, missing sailors, yacht race
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The Purposes of Rituals: Alain de Botton’s ‘Religion for Atheists’
Atheists and agnostics often dismiss religion’s tenets and rituals as being fashioned to exploit the human need for such things. Our fear of death is assuaged by the promise of an afterlife. Our despair in the face of injustices that we cannot correct is resolved by the assurance that there is a spiritual magistrate in the great beyond that will set things right. Our need for “community” in an increasingly alienating world can be satisfied by formally congregating with others who share our beliefs. The meek shall inherit the earth, the first shall be the last…it all sounds perfectly, cynically, designed to capture our interest and loyalty by appealing to our weaknesses and fears.
In Religion for Atheists: A Non-believers Guide to the Uses of Religion (Pantheon, 320 pages), Alain de Botton makes the case that though our weaknesses render us vulnerable to institutions that would exploit them, we nevertheless benefit from having them addressed and catered to, and the secular world has all but abandoned us in this regard. For example, we calendarize every aspect of our external lives—we set aside time and give ourselves reminders and structure our days to address business appointments, birthdays, exercise classes, but leave our inner lives unstructured. We don’t “pencil in” time for meditation at all, let alone define which time slots we will devote to contemplation of specific aspects of our spiritual lives, like kindness, pride, love, etc. As with many goals, chores, and endeavors that we leave to chance, our souls’ exercises not committed to the diary go neglected.
Poetry Karaoke, the Russian River, and Murder: Q&A with Bart Schneider
In his new book, Nameless Dame (Soft Skull Press; 296 pages), novelist and poet Bart Schneider picks up where he left off in The Man in the Blizzard, his 2008 crime novel about pothead Minnesota private eye Augie Boyer and police Detective Bobby Sabbatini. In his bouncy if violent, weed- and verse-filled sequel, Schneider brings Augie back to his roots in the Bay Area (roots Schneider shares with the narrator), taking him on a visit to Sabbatini and his family in the bucolic splendor (and weirdness) that is western Sonoma County, with its redneck pot farmers and hippie searchers, to name just a couple of the area’s denizens.
As much as Nameless Dame is about life along the Russian River, and Augie and Sabbatini trying to solve the shooting death of a troubled young woman, it’s also about poetry and its vitality – a theme you’re unlikely to come across in any other crime novel (except for the book’s predecessor). The work of the likes of Kay Ryan, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens pops up through the book (as does Augie’s spontaneous haikus), all of it commenting and complementing the story as it unfolds.
Like Augie, Schneider – who is the author of the poetry collection Water for a Stranger, as well as the critically acclaimed novels Blue Bossa (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and Secret Love — has returned to where he was born and raised. After spending 25 years in Minnesota, where he was the founding editor of the much-revered Hungry Mind Review and part of a “very enlightened arts community,” he now runs Kelly’s Cove Press, a Berkeley publishing house specializing in Northern California literature, which it pairs with artwork from Northern California artists. We talked to him about Nameless Dame, his time in Minnesota, and what it’s like to be back in the Bay Area.
Posted in Interviews
Tagged Bart Schneider, Jenner, karaoke, Kelly's Cove Press, marijuana, murder, Nameless Dame, Poetry, Russian River, Soft Skull Press, Sonoma County
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Regrouping Abroad and Nearby: ‘Contents May Have Shifted’ by Pam Houston
Like any MFA graduate worth their salt, I have a shelf in my library reserved for the writers I’ve also called my teachers. I mean this in a very literal way, and not in the traditional my-work-is-a-marriage-of-Joyce-and-Tolstoy way of thinking about literary influence; the majority of my artistic mentors have been living, breathing men and women with office hours on Monday and Wednesday afternoons.
Pam Houston is one such writer. As the director of the graduate program in creative writing at UC Davis, she’s sold a lot of books to fledgling writers vying for a place in one of her workshops. I’ve often heard other students gushing about her first collection of stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, a book that in many ways carved out the themes that would remain central to her work ever since, themes that might have emerged, as one reviewer remarked, “had an intelligent woman followed Hemingway around.”
Margaret Weatherford: 1966-2012
Margaret Weatherford (photo by Mary Weatherford)
When I met her at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1989, Margaret Weatherford was the California girl the Beach Boys never imagined: a black-haired, amber-eyed bombshell with her own professional pool cue and a dude’s tolerance for rail whiskey. I was her fan before I was her friend, because – if the first rule of writing school is to write what you know – it was obvious that Margaret knew things no one else could have possibly dreamed up. Her stories were populated by melancholy children, oracular father figures, animal grotesques and obsolete muscle cars. Like me, she had just graduated from college, but to read her you’d have thought she’d been circling the canyons and freeways of Los Angeles for centuries, honing a hawk’s omniscient view of its dive bars and roadside alliances, its secretive, peripherally glanced creatures and its inexorable undergrowth, which always seems poised for imminent, impersonal takeover.
As it turned out, Margaret was the rare guys’ girl who was also a steadfast friend to a certain kind of woman, and over the years I was lucky to be around to watch her become a bride, a mother, a published author, an artist’s muse, a first-time novelist: a self-deprecating success at everything she put her mind to. Less than two weeks ago I sat beside her in her canyon-top home as she named me her “literary executrix,” a title she’d scarcely pronounced before she dissolved in laughter, dropping her usual unflappable monotone to shout, “I feel like such an idiot!”
East of the 5, South of the 10
In its Fall 2005 issue, ZYZZYVA published a short story by Margaret Weatherford titled “East of the 5, South of the 10.” The tale–a witty and wised-up L.A. story in which Zeus and Hades have divvied up the Southland between them–marked her first time in print. Margaret Weatherford, born in 1966, died of cancer on March 30.
Along with her story in ZYZZYVA, she was also published in Paris Review Daily and in Little Star. The following is Ms. Weatherford’s story, in its entirety, from our Fall 2005 issue.
Posted in Archive
Tagged Demeter, Greek mythology, Hades, Los Angeles, Margaret Weatherford, Persephone, Santa Ana winds, wildfires, Zeus
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Who’s Afraid of ‘Khirbet Khizeh’?
A few years ago, blogging for another consonant-heavy literary magazine, I put my Comparative Literature degree to use in compiling a series of reading lists (Readings for Revolution and Readings for the Next Intifada, for example) composed to serve as introductions to various countries and conflicts in the Middle East. Since then, I’ve done my best to keep up with recent trends in Hebrew and Arabic literature and have discovered a couple writers who might merit a revision of said lists (the Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, for example). But it has been a long time since I came across a book that helped me see the Middle East with fresh eyes. It has been a long time since I’ve read a novel as searing and immediate as S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh. It’s particularly amazing that the book remains so urgent more than sixty years after it was first published, in the aftermath of the 1948 war known to Israelis as the War of Independence and to Palestinians as al-Nakba.
In his afterward to the book’s English translation, Hebrew University professor David Shulman writes that “Khirbet Khizeh is a canonical text, a masterpiece of modern Hebrew prose and, in theory, still an optional part of the standard curriculum in Israeli high school.” A lyrical, meditative account of one of the most important and mythologized moments in Israeli history, the novel echoes with sounds of Babel, Joyce, and the prophets. Take, for example, the unflinching honesty of this passage, in which the narrator and his army unit enter a Palestinian village called Khirbet Khizeh.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 1948, English translation, Israel, Khirbet Khizeh, Palestine, S. Yizhar
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