We’re thrilled and honored to have won CLMP’s 2019 Firecracker Award for Best Magazine: General Excellence! We want to thank CLMP for all they do to support independent publishing; thanks to Poets House for hosting this event; and thank you to all our readers, contributors, and colleagues for inspiring and sustaining us in this work. And congratulations to all the finalists! The event in New York City proved a beautiful night of literary community.
Kathleen Alcott is the author of three novels, her newest being America Was Hard to Find (Ecco). Her new book tells the stories of Fay Fern and Vincent Kahn, and in doing so considers the cultural watersheds (such as the anti-Vietnam War movement and NASA’s space program) that occurred over pivotal decades of the United States’ recent history. The following is an excerpt from America Was Hard to Find.
Alcott will be in conversation with Managing Editor Oscar Vilallon about her novel at The Bindery in San Francisco on Thursday, May 30.
PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA, 1961-1963
Letters from Charlie, unopened, asked what her plans were, when she might be leaving, why she hadn’t responded, whether it was money she needed, whether it was a car. She kept them in a neat stack on her bureau under the childhood ribbons Claudette had saved and repositioned here on the mirror, reminders as she fell asleep about who they believed her to be. The spelling bee where she had cried hidden in the red velvet wings, the tennis tournament she had won in the middle of a heat wave. I have a child, was the first thing she thought when she woke up, whether she could hear him or not, a slow fear that poured her out of bed. She kept waiting for the news to change.
He held blocks in primary colors, mystified by them, possessive. A banana was a gavel, he commanded the room with his judgment. Who she was didn’t matter, she thought, what she had believed or fought against—the life she had chosen in reaction to her parents’ had ultimately folded her right back into theirs. Claudette spoke to her and to Wright in almost the same voice, asked almost the same questions. What would you like to do today? What would you like to eat?
It was welcome to them, how she was diminished. At the dinner table her paralysis presented as excellent manners, no, yes, either is fine with me, thank you. If she wept over the roast beef, or while sitting out the afternoon on the wraparound porch, they presented her with the baby. A year passed like a matinee she pretended not to have mostly slept through, accepting what had changed and working out the events behind it. He took his first steps in the green-gold grass with the view of the town hung in fog behind him.
She watched television with her father, game shows, the news, an activity that rewarded her muteness, her lack of anything to say. Truth or Consequences, flat riddles posed by a jaunty host to faces as indistinguishable as loaves of white bread. Why was the wife concerned that her husband was a light drinker? Because he’d drink until it was light. Her father laughed at them, slippered feet crossed at the ankles, the same delay as the studio audience. There were commercials that mystified her, the joy of them. Why do girls in love always look so beautiful, the television asked. A woman in plastic twirled to unheard music. It’s because they always walk in the rain. Noxzema.
Her allowance each week was twenty dollars. His first words were a sentence, “No please.” On the last day of July they watched the footage of the partial eclipse, men streaming out of tall buildings in San Francisco holding cereal boxes to their faces. In the fall a black boy enrolled for classes at a college in the South and her father changed the channel on the riots, cars turned over on a lawn before the Doric columns of the lyceum. After a silent dinner, meat loaf shot through with a ribbon of orange cheese, she returned to the couch and changed it back. Her son remained in the dining room, sitting high on a booster and refusing to eat. When James heard what Fay was watching he did not enter, although from the frame of the door he made his dismissal clear, a hand waved in diagonal across his face as if at a bad smell. There was a shot of the governor’s car rolling onto campus, white faces warped in joy at its arrival, and it took her a moment to understand he was there in protest of the student, an Air Force veteran, the grandson of a slave. This event her parents did not discuss, life on land with people, but when the country had prepared for its first orbit they behaved as if in anticipation of a celebrity at their dinner table. Claudette baked in advance, shortbread cookies that looked like rockets.
Her parents stood by her door in the morning, tapping together without rhythm, her son in Claudette’s arms pawing at it, too. They had brought her coffee and she blinked, gathering a robe around her gauzy nightgown as she stood in the door frame. The coverage was already on in the living room, and the sound of it unsettled her, as did the benign smiles of her mother and father, people who had seemed incapable of delight for as long as she had been aware. Cronkite’s voice had never comforted her, that low bleat sounding like someone reporting from the bottom of a pit. A freckled man from Ohio, his face calm and clean, rode an elevator up the tower and boarded the capsule shaped like a badminton birdie. He was to ring the planet, hurtle around it waving bravely. On the enormous Atlas rocket, thirty stories tall and pale as milk, he waited as his audience did for the boom. When it came it disfigured the whole image, filled the frame with smoke, and then the camera struggled to keep up, losing it and finding it, losing it and finding it, the point of the rocket darting in and out until it was a nebulous white shape in a sphere of gray. The image was like a disease seen through a microscope, a vivid, frantic mutation, and all of it, the great furnace of the takeoff and the low human babble and the wind’s dilating of the reporter’s talk, sounded to her like an evil distraction … Has passed through the area of maximum dynamic pressures, the television said. Fay’s parents clapped politely, stunned, unaware of the look on her face. It was the first day their country encircled the earth, and the first day she hated her country.
Something had changed, they knew. She was always leaving her shoes somewhere, then the slippers they offered as corrective. It was a kind of self-neglect that enraged them: barefoot by the refrigerator at midnight, barefoot as she carried him up the stairs, a sideways angle that made him laugh, singing the songs her sister had. As though a solution were just a matter of the right slip-on loafers, Claudette suggested a day in the city, see the Easter displays at the department stores. Wright stayed behind with James, something Claudette suggested, girls’ day out, with a wink her daughter did not acknowledge.
In San Francisco, Fay could not be moved to touch the dresses, hold up the bracelets. Her mother, tired of looking behind to find Fay seated again, reading on a mirrored stool, handed her the car keys. “Why don’t you listen to the radio. I’ll meet you in the garage in two hours,” she said. Dressed as her mother had instructed her, in a just-purchased celery chiffon dress with a high collar and empire waist, she took the first bus she saw.
Against the concave orange plastic seats she was aware how she appeared, how people might imagine her. A young bride glowing between two parts of her life, money in her purse, a collection of Pyrex in her cabinet, some man who knew her childhood nickname with her photo on his desk. There was no way to correct these assumptions, the looks from denim-clad people her own age that went right past her. She committed herself instead to the window, rode the whole way curled around to look out it. On the street from which the bus got its name, Fulton, she pushed the door open. She thought she could see a stretch of green several blocks down, a place where the city opened, and she walked with a hand on her abdomen, her few things in a white leather coin purse swinging at her as she went.
The Victorians she walked under were trimmed like cakes, pinks and blues and violets competing for attention, some with balconies full of plants and others with hand-dyed curtains, and when they let onto the green horizon line of the Panhandle, a long and narrow park you could see across but not around, she was taken by a muted panic, thinking she could not remember the last hour she had spent that was free to her direction of it. She was not in possession of her life, she knew. Suicide crossed her mind like a breeze, nothing that could be helped.
It was the stands of eucalyptus, their smell, and the streets across the park that led in dramatic angles upward, that urged her onto the lawn, where she lay down in a triangle of sun and waited for a thought that was calm enough she could follow it.
Gathered in a loose circle—the girls in linen jumpers and blouses that tied at the neck, the boys with glasses pushed midway up their foreheads, the collars unbuttoned—were a group of students, no older than Fay. She sat five feet away, pretending at contentment. Their scratched leather book bags weighed down foreign newspapers, encircling their talk, one continuous, mutual, angry sentence, elaborating, diverting, returning.
“Special forces, they say—”
“Advisers, they’re calling them, they’re calling people who are terrorizing a country the size of—”
“A country smaller than California—”
“Smaller than California, this nation, and operating pretty much the same since the fifteenth century, and what kind of advice are they giving? Have you ever extracted any wisdom from a chemical that—”
“—kills forests, eviscerates crops that have only served as the primary source of food for hundreds upon hundreds of years, not to mention what kind of—”
“—effect that’s going to have on, oh, people, little kids, babies not born yet, old men trying to live out the rest of their time, and Kennedy meanwhile—”
“—has got a good show we can watch, a dazzling program about celestial exploration that will affirm our country’s inherent valor! He’s our nation’s hope, our nation’s cleft-chinned blue-eyed hope, he’s got a—”
“—beautiful wife so he must be virtuous above all else, for only the good end up with the beautiful.”
There came a collective sighing, reshuffling of papers, and they sat back on their hands or forearms, seeming certain, to Fay, in a way she wanted to be. It was this that moved her, that admitted the boldness required to stand and approach them, looking like she did, a frilly confection, a person who did not belong to herself.
“Excuse me.”
As they looked her over their disdain was a unified front, even their collarbones thrown forward in a way that indicated disapproval.
The boy who had talked the loudest sat up, twisting a dandelion between his thumb and forefinger in quick, angry rotations.
“Mrs.—”
“Actually not a missus at all.” She prepared for the next moment like a swimmer, surveying a distance and committing her breath to mastering it.
“Costume courtesy of a deeply embarrassed maternal figure, a disguise for the mother of a bastard. Fay.” She flashed her left hand, bare of matrimony, waggled it. In the air was the suggestion of the ocean, in the mild temperature the threat it would drop.
They opened around her admission, relaxing their jawlines, tugging their socks up. One canted a hand over his eyes to see her better.
“Given my current incarceration, I’m wondering whether I could borrow one of your newspapers there. I could send it back by—”
“Take it,” someone said.
“Subscribe to it.”
“Get that special jelly and mimeograph it and—”
“Give it to someone else.”
The boy with the tortoiseshell glasses who had called her Mrs. unfolded and refolded the paper, aligning the sections, running a firm index finger down the seams where the crease had loosened.
She waved goodbye, the thing she had asked for held between her ribs and bicep, crossed to the roads she’d admired before, the houses set at forty-five-degree angles, and took Central up to Haight, the strain in her thighs a discomfort that nudged her more awake. Another park waited for her, and it was there she unfolded it, on a plane of grass that followed a sharp incline. The wind that moved the pages almost animated the images, girls bent over rubble, corpses lined up with their shorts around their ankles, men with the waterline at their hips as they crossed the mangrove swamp with a gnarled child on a gurney. Once she saw them they were a part of her, the mosquito netting of the makeshift hospital dropping into the depth of the water, the limp penises of dead men exposed for their families to see.
Saying her name later, crippled at the elbow by shopping bags where she stood in the driveway, her mother rapped on the passenger-side window. Fay stayed as silent as she’d been on the ride home, an artifact behind glass, what happened around her immaterial.
From AMERICA WAS HARD TO FIND by Kathleen Alcott. Copyright 2019 by Kathleen Alcott. Reprinted courtesy of Ecco, and imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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In What My Mother And I Don’t Talk About (288 pages; Simon & Schuster; edited by Michele Filgate), fifteen writers grapple with the unexpected developments and shortcomings of their relationships with their mothers. In her introduction, Filgate explains that while each individual essay is an achievement in itself, together they work to address the ways we tend to idealize our mothers, as well as reflect honestly on the imperfect relationships we forge (and sometimes end) with them over the course of our lives:
Acknowledging what we couldn’t say for so long, for whatever reason, is one way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most importantly, with ourselves. But doing this as a community is much easier than standing alone on a stage.
The essays range in both tone and subject matter: some authors have been estranged from their mothers for years, having suffered abuse and neglect throughout their childhoods, while others are only beginning to understand their mothers as they become parents themselves or think deeply about their family dynamics. This collection engages with tough questions about holding accountable the people we’ve been taught to revere, recognizing the impression our mothers’ greatest strengths and flaws have left on us, and the importance of putting oneself first. At the center of that conversation is the difficulty all children face as they try to understand their parent as a person and not simply a mother.
In “16 Minetta Lane,” Dylan Landis tells an episodic story about her mother’s friendship with noted artist Haywood “Bill” Rivers that taps into the curiosity many of us have about our mothers’ lives before they gave birth to us:
Tell me, what did you do with your glittering mind? Did you make the right choice? Marry the right man? Would you have studied at the Sorbonne, Erica? Laughed with writers at Les Deux Magots?
Did you lock up that dazzling wit of yours, or did you write a book?
Did you get to stroll in Paris? Would you care if your daughter were a perfect doll of a brown baby?
Who would you love, Erica?
Who would you be?
Others writers in the collection show us how, as Filgate writes in her introduction, mothers can be set up to fail. In “Xanadu,” Alexander Chee explains how he survived things his mother couldn’t shield him from: the difficulties of growing up queer and Asian, the traumas of sexual abuse, and the death of his father. Chee unpacks the complications of trying to protect one’s protector:
It is the night before my first novel’s publication in the fall of 2001, and my mother is about to travel to New York for my launch at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. If I don’t make the call, I will read from the novel in front of her, a novel about surviving sexual abuse and pedophilia, inspired by events from my childhood—these autobiographical events, events I have never described for her—and she will find out the next evening in a crowded room full of strangers. And she will never forgive me if I do…Our family had passed through a season of hell, and this was what I’d done to survive it. I know at last: I never told her about this because I was sure I was protecting her.
Careful not to omit moments of love and tenderness, these fifteen writers also reach striking realizations that could potentially alter or destroy their connection with their mothers. What My Mother And I Don’t Talk About captures the complexity of the bond between mother and child, each of the authors conveying their relationships in a way that seems both universally understood and uniquely experienced. Readers are likely to express gratitude to these these writers for diving headfirst into the mental health issues, feelings of loss, and constant learning we all go through, mothers included.
In this issue:
Nonfiction
Sallie Tisdale on touring the antiquities of Rome, Glen David Gold on tracking down a Gorey original, Heather Altfeld on the enduring gaze of John Berger, Paisley Rekdal on erasure and Paul Klee.
Fiction
Ben Greenman’s “Polyptych” (a divorced man and a painting that must be observed just so), Toni Martin’s “Director’s Cut” (a woman’s life as reconfigured through a foreign filmmaker’s sensibilities), and Peter Orner’s “Pacific” (an elderly couple—a sculptor and a potter—and the very end of things).
Poetry
Dan Alter, Denver Buston, Troy Jollimore, Rusty Morrison, Mira Rosenthal, and Alexandra Teague.
In Conversation
Dean Rader and Jordan Kantor on the visuals of poems and the textual of artwork.
Further Stories & Poetry
Rebecca Rukeyser’s “Pirates and Cowboys,” and Susan Steinberg’s “Machines” (“Parts of my brother’s brain, these days, don’t connect with other parts of his brain.”), poems by John Freeman, Molly Spencer, and Cate Lycurgus, and debut fiction from Min Han and Matthew Jeffrey Vegari.
Art: Featuring the work of Diana Guerrero-Maciá.
You can purchase a copy of No. 115 here, or order a subscription to ZYZZYVA now and we’ll start you off by shipping you the Spring issue.
Ayn Gailey, (left), Jami Attenberg, Robin Sloan, Kim Fu, and Scott Hutchins at the Orcas Island Lit Fest in 2018. (photo by Kads Photography)
When my friend Jule Treneer asked me if I wanted to start a literary festival, we were standing in a park, watching his son bounce up and down on a trampoline. It was summer, and I felt, like the boy, that I had excess energy to burn. The festival’s shape and focus were amorphous, but the location was definite. Orcas Island, a beautiful, two-lobed protrusion of volcanic plate in the San Juan archipelago in Washington State, but so far north the island is tucked into Canada. Orcas was a key place for Jule growing up, and his mother had recently moved there permanently. I lived in California, but was besotted with the San Juan landscape and seascape—the long clouds, the purple hills, the fjords. Taking the ferry to Orcas felt not like a boat ride, but a journey into a dream.
Like a poetic form, Orcas imposed constraint. We weren’t looking at a 100,000-person festival, a Miami or a Portland. We’d need to go smaller. But what would that “smaller” look like? Jule and I actually met at a reading—Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing—and our friendship always had books at its center. Talking about them, swapping them, arguing over them. We decided we wanted an intimate festival full of real conversation and aimed at readers. That is, a festival a little like our friendship.
How do you conjure a festival from thin air? Well, San Juan County supports the arts. Jule created our nonprofit legal organization (a process that will turn your hair gray), researched every angle of what it would take organizationally, brought a proposal to San Juan County, and walked away with $10,000 in starting money. That was half the needed budget—and was the moment I realized we were really going to do this thing. Jule and I roped in our first additional board member, Shannon, who introduced us to Jill, who introduced us to Iris. The Gaileys came on, and then Theresa. Suddenly we had a board. An intimidatingly competent board, from web design to institutional structure to communications to wrangling favors from local businesses. Each member also happened to be a writer, which was helpful for my anxiety. I kept fearing one of them would say, sorry, I can’t do all this work for free. Because we all worked for free, and it was a LOT of work.
Now we just needed writers who were so exciting and interesting they would entice people to an island. It was a high bar, and I thought I would start with people I knew. This was my role, after all. My first invitation was a Hail Mary to Jami Attenberg. She wrote back immediately, “What the heck, let’s do it!” Then we got yesses from two Pulitzer winners, Adam Johnson and Gil King. From there the board worked all our publishing, agenting, and friend channels to get Tara Conklin, Victor LaValle, Rick Barot, Robin Sloan, and many others. Our proximity to Seattle helped us bring in younger writers like Kim Fu and Urban Waite. Willy Vlautin, the novelist and singer-songwriter, said he would read and play a song. Then the panel proposals rolled in. Such bright ideas from such talented writers. We organized a lit walk event, a kid’s event, a late-night literary game show, and a Saturday evening variety show Words + Music.
Spoiler alert: the weekend was fantastic. I worried about timing and people being where they needed to be, but because of the festival’s size I actually got to talk to the attendees. The beer distributor from British Columbia, who’d taken a weekend to come down and see Robin Sloan. The on-island radical leftist who was most excited about Jami. The Seattle thriller aficionado who came for Urban Waite. We also did what too few literary festivals can accomplish: we sold stacks of books. I waited for Victor LaValle’s signing hand to cramp.
Last year, we had a modicum of funding and an abundance of talent. That remains true this year. But our line-up dazzles: Nicola Griffith, Mat Johnson, Terese Marie Mailhot, Judith Thurman, Eric Puchner, Rick Barot (again—thanks, Rick!), Kiwi Smith, Nicole Chung, and many more. Our children’s author and musical excitement is Laura Veirs. Laura Veirs! ZYZZYVA’s own Oscar Villalon will be moderating a panel on the short story and participating in another panel on what an editor looks for in great narrative. Check out the full schedule at oilf.org. (The festival runs April 5-7.)
To my surprise, that conversation Jule and I had while his son bounced up and down has grown into the Orcas Island Lit Fest. A few board members have left (Shannon, the Gaileys); two have come on (Paula and Mia). But we’re otherwise much the same. I hope the festival will develop into a long-lasting and solvent institution, but these early, scrappy years are magical. Out of nothing but an idea, a friendship, an incredible board, and a thousand little and large acts of generosity, we get to bring writers and readers together in a real and genuine way. For an entire weekend, over an entire island, everyone gets to talk about books.
Scott Hutchins, OILF vice president and cofounder, is a former Truman Capote fellow in the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. His novel A Working Theory of Love was a San Francisco Chronicle and Salon Best Book of 2012 and has been translated into nine languages. He lives in San Francisco.
Become a supporter of ZYZYVA at the Patron level today, and receive an amazing incentive gift as our thank you!
For a donation of $200 or more, not only will you get a complimentary subscription to ZYZZYVA, but thanks to our friends at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, you’ll get copies of Lucia Berlin’s Evenings in Paradise: More Stories and Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photography and Letter plus a Lucia Berlin tote.
You’ll also get a copy of Lydia Kiesling’s acclaimed novel, The Golden State (named one of the Best Books of 2018 by NPR, Bookforum, and Bustle), and A.G. Lombardo’s novel, Graffiti Palace (praised by David L. Ulin as “an audacious debut … Beautiful, hard-edged, challenging, and unexpected”).
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Looking for a gift for the holidays? How about our Tote & 4-Issue Subscription bundle, or even our Tote & 8-Issue Subscription bundle (Or perhaps as a gift for yourself? You’ve earned it!)
Order a Bundle by Tuesday, December 18, and have it delivered in plenty of time for your lucky recipient. We’ll start off the subscription with our newest issue, No. 114, featuring Tales of the Uncanny from Kate Folk, Jim Ruland, Shawn Vestal, and David Drury; a Q&A with Michael Ondaatje by Caille Millner, poetry by Bruce Snider, Austen Leah Rosenfeld, and Heather Christle, the art of Kate Ballis, and much more.
To the young, music can be a religion. Destroy All Monsters (357 pages; FSG), the latest novel from Charlotte-based author Jeff Jackson, trades in the kind of punk fervor that inspires teenagers to thrash in mosh pits, raid merch booths, and obsessively listen to the same album. The power of what a few kids and some amped instruments can do is clearly a subject near to Jackson’s heart; not only does he perform in the self-described “weirdo pop band” Julian Calendar, but he’s allowed the vinyl single format to influence the design of the novel itself: Destroy All Monsters features an A-Side––which constitutes the novel proper––and a reverse B-Side, an alternate follow-up to the main story that follows some of the same characters in radically different incarnations. The novel contends frankly with both the difficulties of maintaining youthful passion for loud, distorted noise as one grows older and how the resentments and obligations of adulthood begin to accrue.
Destroy All Monsters centers on the music scene in a “conservative industrial city” called Arcadia. The prologue opens with a memorable performance by hometown heroes the Carmelite Rifles at a show attended by a motley assortment of locals:
“The strip-mall goths, the mod metalheads, the blue-collar ravers, the bathtub-shitting punks, the jaded aesthetes who consider themselves beyond category. Everyone in line has imagined a night that could crack open and transform their dreary realities.”
Also present at the show are two of the characters who will drive the rest of the novel: budding musician Florian and the forlorn but enigmatic Xenie. Not long after the Carmelite Rifles show, which ripples through the audience’s lives with the impact of an early Velvet Underground gig, a mysterious plague grips the entire country. All around the United States, club patrons are being transfixed by some unknown spell that causes them to gun down or otherwise attempt to murder the bands onstage:
“The noise duo at the loft party in the Pacific Northwest. The garage rockers at the tavern in the New England suburbs. The jam band at the auditorium on the edge of the Midwestern prairie. The blue grass revivalists at the coffeehouse in the Deep South. There was never any fanfare. The killers simply walked into the clubs, took out their weapons, and started firing.”
Although the killers’ motives remain largely ambiguous (most of them appear to be in a trance-like stupor as they go about their attack) the parallels to recent events are chilling. After terrorist attacks on music venues in Manchester and Paris in the last few years, it is all too easy to imagine the same violence occurring on this side of the Atlantic. The threat of danger feels heightened for the young people at the heart of Destroy All Monsters, to the point that the question of whether or not to perform a scheduled show becomes a matter of life and death for Arcadia’s local acts.
When tragedy ultimately does strike (“The band is heading for the [song] bridge when the first shot is fired”), Florian and Xenie are left to figure out how to privately mourn the loss of a close friend when seemingly everyone in town is doing so in a very public, outsized way. The spat of murders across the country also force Xenie to reckon with the fact that so much of the music playing at local venues and taking up space on her hard drive is, in a word, mediocre. “I used to have a huge music collection,” Xenie relates. “I was obsessed and even saved my concert stubs in a red cardboard box. Sometimes I’d open the box, and just touching the tickets was enough to give me a rush…These days I crave silence.”
Her statement is a lament for an age that has come to be defined by noise, much of it meaningless. Xenie and others in Arcadia’s music scene must grapple with the difficulty of conveying authentic expression in a world drowned out by sound. As Florian contemplates after the last show he’ll ever play: “It’s too easy to transform a moment of truth into a cheap performance.”
Destroy All Monsters understands the impetus to pick up a guitar and strum a power chord, perhaps out of the misguided notion that the result could lead to some change in the world. And the novel understands the disheartening fact that the country is full of numerous small towns like Arcadia, with its dive bars, shuttered factories, and hobo camps, each of them with their would-be punk rockers like Florian. Amid the story’s nationwide epidemic, Jackson’s characters display crucial growth: what ultimately comes to matter––more than selling out concert halls or recording a promising demo––is remaining true to the memory and last wishes of their friends after they’re gone. “Not everything has to be a performance,” Xenie concludes. “Some things should stay pure.”
Jackson, whose prose registers as punchy and acerbic, leading the reader through multiple act breaks and perspective changes with ease, is sincere in his depiction of provincial youth yearning for an escape. In the 21st century, rock ’n roll might not mean as much as it once did, but Jackson has written a fitting tribute to its lingering spirit.
Dear Friends,
As we close in on the end of the year, we have so much to be thankful for. It is a blessing to have the opportunity to produce good work and to be of service to our community. We hope that you feel ZYZZYVA is a meaningful part of your life, both as a reader and as someone who wants to see culture thrive, especially in these days of turmoil. So we ask:
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Thanks to the generosity of one of our champions, the first $10,000 we receive between today and the end of the year will be matched dollar-for-dollar. So please make a contribution today and see your support doubly rewarded!
Raging wildfires have devastated both Northern and Southern California over the last several weeks. The situation has been impossible to ignore here in the Bay Area, as smoke from the fires has led to tremendously poor air quality. We feel for those more immediately impacted by the fires –– the numerous missing and displaced –– and have assembled a list of places seeking donations.
7×7 has compiled a list of local causes we can contribute to, including Disaster Relief funds and donation collections. The San Francisco SPCA has set up a fundraiser, specifically to provide care and treatment for animals affected by the fires. Eater SF offers a list of bars, restaurants, and breweries offering specials to benefit fire recovery. The Yuba-Sutter Habitat for Humanity has created a fund to help Camp Fire evacuees with essential needs.
Please feel free to share links to similar relief efforts in the Comments below.
In this issue:
Tales of the Uncanny
“Shelter” by Kate Folk: the concrete vault in the basement of a rented house exerts a strange pull on the woman living above it.
“Take the Water Prisoner” by Shawn Vestal: when the sins (and pains) of the father are visited upon the son.
“The Canyon” by Jim Ruland: the struggle for sobriety leads Lindsay to a confrontation she couldn’t have imagined.
“The Lake and the Onion” by David Drury: “There once was a lake who fell in love with an onion. This is merely what we 100 percent know.”
Interview
Michael Ondaatje on character, plot, West Marin, and diaspora.
Nonfiction
Fabián Martínez Siccardi on revisiting his family’s stoical estancia (“Patagonian Fox”) and Teresa H. Janssen on relief work and refugees (“Adrift at Sea”)
And More Fiction and Poetry:
Meron Hadero’s “The Street Sweep” (a young man’s future may be decided at a hotel gathering in Addis Ababa), Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “The Golden Age of Television” (the particular tyranny of the writers’ room), Jane Gillette’s “Ten Little Feet” (a less-than-innocent tradition at a tony school for boys), plus new work from Jessica Francis Kane and Olivia Clare.
Poems by Bruce Snider, Austen Leah Rosenfeld, Flower Conroy, Ryanaustin Dennis, Heather Altfeld, Allison Adair, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, and Heather Christle
Art: Featuring photographs from Kate Ballis’s “Infra Realism” series.
You can purchase a copy of No. 114 here, or order a subscription to ZYZZYVA now and we’ll start you off by shipping you the Winter issue.
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