While reading a collection of New York Times subway stories called Subwayland, I found the story of Adrian Brune. When the original article came out in 2003, Brune was twenty-seven, a recent graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and she was in the Times Square and Grand Central subway stations selling printouts of short memoirs she’d written, for two dollars apiece. “Struggling writer w/ good short stories for sale,” her sign said. In parenthesis: “Master’s from Columbia; bad economy.”

Her technique was simple. She sat on the dirty ground, set a cardboard box filled with stories in front of her, and leaned back against the wall. She did brisk business: over twenty copies of each of her three stories on her best days. “In the space of about two hours,” the Times said, “she had sold more than a dozen stories,” some to repeat customers. One named Orlando Fonseca II liked the story about Brune’s brief romance with a female Columbia student. “It reminded me of some of the stupid things I did,” he told her. He bought her action story, too.

Although Brune settled into her new business, she’d been forced into it. She’d tried for full-time work but could only get intermittent freelance gigs after graduating. Faced with selling her possessions to pay rent or selling her writing, she went down into the subways to try the latter. “She was angry at New York,” the article said, and wanted the city to know it. Yet her situation struck me not as sad but inspiring, and I rarely use the maudlin term ‘inspiring.’

Here was an inventive, enterprising person doing what most of us writers have to increasingly do in the modern publishing world: be our own publicists, accountants, distributors and marketing departments. The subway might seem the domain of the down-and-out, a last resort when normal enterprise fails, but it has always functioned as a de facto supermarket. Brune’s literary pop-up shop fit within a grand tradition of official and unofficial subway food vendors, book venders, shoe-shiners, magazine stands, and people peddling everything from used cellphones to stolen batteries. Why shouldn’t she sell stories like knishes down there? Monetizing writing was the central challenge of our digital era, where newspapers continue collapsing and the expectation and availability of free media continue to eat into print book and magazine sales. She’d figured out a system: short-form narrative, low prices, inexpensive medium, delivered to readers by hand. She controlled the means of production and distribution, and she kept all the profits. Granted, profits were small. She only had two hands. And compared to the covers of certain commercial novels, a stack of paper-clipped pages wasn’t much to look at, but when commuters only had a few minutes to kill on a train, who needed beauty? For once in America, substance trumped appearance. People bought stories for the stories.

Many modern writers tweet to promote recent publications or upcoming events. Some work the Facebook mass-invite circuit to the point of irritation (enough with the invites already; I don’t live near Iowa City), or they get crafty and run contests or mail custom postcards. Brune’s austerity was refreshing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I could sell stuff on a downtown street, too. Why not?

Portland’s Future Tense Books had just released my first chapbook, A Secondary Landscape. Rather than poetry, the chapbook contained a first-person essay about a roadtrip my best friend and I took through the Pacific Northwest in our twenties, and how it doubled as a search for meaning in a potentially meaningless universe. In addition to that, I would follow Brune’s lead and sell a selection of my essays for two dollars, all printed on plain white paper and stapled together—no frills. Between bills and rent and my own grad school debt, I always needed more money. I loved my part-time job at a local tea shop, and it supported me, but only because I kept a ridiculously low overhead and a tight budget and was accustomed to living without health insurance. Sixty dollars for selling printouts of material I’d already published? Sounded good to me. As the writer Edward Abbey said, give your writing legs: publish and then republish it if you can. Stretch your hard work like last night’s meal, since there’s so little money in writing anyway. The only problem: Portland was no New York.

In New York, Adrian Brune had millions of potential customers streaming by in those narrow subterranean corridors, millions of people whose commute and need to avoid inter-commuter eye-contact created a demand for quick, disposable distractions. Combined with the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the Times Square subway station serviced 62,069,437 passengers in 2012. Grand Central served 42,894,249. If I stood by one of Portland’s busier downtown light rail stations during rush hour, a few hundred people might pass me. None of Portland’s trains traveled underground either, so cagey passengers always had windows to look out of. Those who wanted to read often brought their own material. Then there was the panhandler issue.

Sitting on the street here doesn’t peak pedestrians’ interest. It puts up their guard. Like residents of few other American cities, Portlanders are so routinely bombarded by panhandlers’ requests for money, cigarettes and food that they’d likely rush past my table with their eyes down and defenses up, rather than looking at what I was selling. Despite these strategic challenges, I decided to give it a try.

When I ran the idea past my girlfriend Rebekah, she backed it enthusiastically. “Where are you going to sell?” she said. I threw out vague ideas: on the street outside Powell’s; maybe at a certain busy downtown light rail station. She suggested the monthly First Thursday art walk. “Tons of people go there,” she said. Long-established, filled with pedestrians, spread between downtown and the affluent Pearl District, First Thursday was a crossroads. My eyes lit up at the thought of it. Like so many of Rebekah’s suggestions, this was brilliant. She offered me equipment. “Take my IKEA Lack table,” she said. She kept it next to her oven and stored sauces and tea on it. “It’s light.” It was also dinged and could stand more dinging. They only cost $9.99.

So I started preparing. During the following weeks, I printed out some of my essays, either from PDFs of their final layouts or directly from the literary magazines that published them: essays from the Paris Review, Hobart, Brick, The Rumpus and The Threepenny Review, along with an article about an overlooked Seattle guitarist named Rob Vasquez that I published on my blog. I’d recently found a vintage fold-out chair at a resale shop – gaudy plaid, aluminum legs – for $5. For pricing, I had red plastic numbers and a dollar sign symbol from an old hand-set sign—another score from a resale store.

Now I needed a menu, something to explain who I was and what I was selling. So I took a cardboard mailer from FedEx/Kinkos or whatever they’re calling it now, cut it into a rectangle, and wrote prices and a short bio on the blank side: “Mini-memoirs, music writing and travel stories for sale! New York Times, Paris Review and Tin House magazine writer.” While there, I stapled together essays that I hadn’t even printed at the shop; Rebekah printed them at her office, and I printed some at mine. After I stuffed my essays into Rebekah’s vintage Japanese carryon handbag, I strapped the tiny stool to my backpack and tucked the IKEA table under my arm.

It took fifteen minutes to walk downtown.

Thirteenth Avenue was sparsely populated. A few vendors lined the corridor, and a trickle of pedestrians sauntered between them. On 13^th between Hoyt and Irving streets, I set my stuff down in a gap between a man who made earrings and sculptures out of bike parts, and a woman who painted portraits, insects and animals. She had one particularly compelling portrait of man enrobed by an octopus, tentacles coiling around his shoulders and head.

Even though it was clearly available, to be polite, I asked the sculptor if the spot was taken. Since we were going to be neighbors for the next three hours, it was best to be polite. In a barely audible voice the sculptor mumbled, “Talk to her.” He motioned toward a woman standing beside some paintings. A ball cap hid his puffy eyes. “She runs the street.” Runs, I thought, as in, gives permits? Or runs in a less official, more feudal capacity? I didn’t have a permit. I didn’t even know if you needed one, and I’d intended to lay low enough that it wouldn’t matter. This was an experiment, and part of the experiment was seeing if I could sell writing on city streets without officials running me off.

The sculptor looked away, and without a word, I walked over to the woman and asked if I could set up a table to sell chapbooks. “Sure,” she said smiling. She wore jeans and a baggy button-up flannel. She seemed neither official nor feudal, just friendly. “Tell me,” she said, “what’s a chapbook?” I explained and she nodded her head. “Cool, absolutely. Go for it. Good luck.”

I returned to my spot wondering why the sculptor suggested I confirm something so laissez fair with anyone. I decided to ignore him.

With the table set forward on the street, I displayed my chapbooks in the most aesthetically appealing way I could: fanned out inside Rebekah’s vintage luggage. It made a nice display case. Above the chapbooks, I set printouts of the two stories with the most attractive images: the one about the Seattle guitarist, and a photo essay about American thrift stores from Hobart magazine. I stood up my $3 sign, wedged my handwritten menu under the suitcase to anchor it, propped up the suitcase’s lid with my balled jacket, and I sat down behind the table.

Thirty minutes passed without a single customer.

People walked by, but they either looked at my table and kept walking, or they stopped at the two neighboring tables and didn’t glance at mine. Cynicism filled me. The sculptor to my right talked to customer after customer.

The first person who approached me defied all the stereotypes.

Wearing a black peacoat, hip shoes and eyeglasses, he and his young female friend said, “Hi” as he picked up a chapbook. “So,” he said, “what is this?” I said it was a short true story about a Pacific Northwest roadtrip and youthful search for meaning, published by a local press, and it involved PCP. He nodded and returned the book to the case.

His gaze settled on the two printouts. One of them was about guitarist Rob Vasquez. To reel him in I said, “Do you like rock and roll?” I thought that’d be a no-brainer. Anyone under thirty wearing a black peacoat and specs in this town has to like rock and roll. My parents like rock and roll. Mark Twain would’ve liked rock and roll. The category’s so wide that it includes everything from Bad Brains to The Beatles.

“Well,” the guy said quietly, “not really. Kind of.”

Not really? Kind of? It’s just guitar and drums. Who doesn’t like that? I regrouped and kept with the music-theme. “Do you like jazz? I have some jazz stories, too.”

He shrugged and stared at the ground. “Sort of.”

What did he listen to, I wondered, recordings of tropical bird song? Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music?

I said, “Okay, cool. I have stories about Miles Davis and Coltrane, a travel story about a weird Mississippi motel, family stories, and a meditation on death and a California highway.”

He patted his pants pockets and looked at his friend. “I don’t have any cash on me.”

“Well, keep it in mind,” I said.

It was 6:33pm. I’d arrived at 6.

As they walked off, I texted Rebekah: “this is going to be a bust.”

Conditions weren’t ideal. It was the first art walk of the season, and the weather was windy, overcast and cold, even for April. Despite the climatological challenges, I was still surprised how few vendors there were. As a man told the painter next to me, “There’s usually a hundred fifty artists out here. We have twelve. This thing is packed with people all the way down the street, for two blocks! You can barely walk. This is a bad time. You’ll do great in summer.”

A woman in her late thirties walked over soon after and picked up a chapbook. “Oh,” she said, “those are cute.” Then she put it down and walked over to the sculptor before I could say anything.

I zipped up my coat. A frigid gust blew between buildings, sending everyone’s necks deeper into their collars, and blowing my plastic $3 sign onto the ground. I paper-clipped it to the suitcase to keep it in place.

As the cold rose up through the thin soles of my shoes, other vendors stood at their stations. Some nodded and said hi to passersby. Others sipped hot drinks from steaming cups, or sat on chairs texting. I sat and eavesdropped on the artists beside me.

The sculptor preferred the hard sell. When two women examined his larger pieces, he told them, “I just made that one yesterday.” I didn’t believe him. It sounded like a line.

People passed between the sculptures to my right and the paintings to my left. If they glanced at my table at all, the sight of chapbooks rarely interrupted their conversation. “Joseph’s not like that,” said a young woman to her friend. “He’s—I don’t know what. Not that.”

Here was Lesson #1 of First Thursday: no one gives a shit about your chapbook, at least not this art crowd.

A group of seven well-groomed men stood by the painter to my left, strategizing. “Are we done?” one man said to the others. “Did we do it? Let’s go get a beer.” And they walked south on 13^th as a cold wind began to blow. It was 7:12pm. The sun was still up.

I considered leaving right then, just packing up and moving my table to the sidewalk outside Powell’s to capture that literary traffic, the people I considered my people, and a spot where I hoped that, by the grace of some sympathetic god, none of my old Powell’s coworkers would see me.

Then it happened: things picked up.

At 7:13, as the seven men walked toward their beer, I sold a chapbook to a doctor and his teenage daughter. “It looks cool,” he said, and handed her the book.

“Would you like some more music and travel stories, too?” I said. Chapbooks were three dollars. Two printed essays were three dollars. A chapbook and two other pieces of writing were five.

“Sure,” he said. “She likes music.” I gave her the Rob Vasquez piece and an essay from Brick magazine about what Miles Davis’ song “Sid’s Ahead” revealed about the trumpeter’s personality and approach as a bandleader. Then I threw in a few more printouts for free. “Thanks for stopping by,” I said. “I appreciate it.” As they walked away, I slipped the five dollar bill into my wallet and felt glad I’d stayed put.

A correction to the first lesson of First Thursday: some people did give a shit.

Lesson #2: be patient.

Six minutes later, a trippy older guy with silver hair, converse All-Stars and a jean jacket bought a chapbook for three dollars. “I read a lot,” he said. “It’s like an addiction.” When I offered him a few free printouts he declined. “There’s not enough time.” He said he was already reading a biography about Abraham Lincoln by Bill O’Reilly, and a book by Glenn Beck. “You know,” he said, “the talk-radio guy?” I did. “Lincoln freed the slaves not because he was some great guy, though he was. It was politics. Money. It just looks like he was a liberator, but he was protecting himself politically. What do they say: history is written by the victors? Or the spoils go to the victors?” He laughed at his memory. “And it’s still going on today.” As he thumbed through my chapbook, I wanted to snatch it from his hand. Glen Beck. Please. Then he kneeled down beside my table and mentioned how he’d lived in Portland for a year and a half and had been meaning to come to First Thursday more often. “What’s your name?” Aaron, I said, shaking his hand. “Phillip. Nice to meet you, and good luck tonight.” He looked up at the passing clouds. “Hopefully it won’t rain.” Me, too, I said. Rain and paper goods were a bad combination.

After he walked off, I sold three more chapbooks in quick succession: two to a young couple, another to a twenty-something named Rich who worked at Car2go. “I got off work early for once,” he said. “Finally got to come here and walk around.”

It was 7:40pm. I texted Rebekah: “selling some!”

She wrote back: “great to hear baby!”

I scribbled sales in my journal to keep track.

At 7:50, a couple in their early forties came up and started talking. “What’ve you got here?” the man said. Chapbooks, I told them, and first-person stories and essays about everything from music to travel to family relations.

He said, “Cool,” and started flipping through the chapbook. “You made these?”

“Yeah, I wrote the story. A longtime local publisher designed the cover and printed the book. The cover’s a play on those old Blue Note jazz album covers. I’m kind of crazy about them.”

He pointed to the printouts in the suitcase. “And those are your other essays?” He patted his back pocket to check for his wallet. “Why don’t you gimme two essays.” Hearing him say ‘essay’ counteracted my reservations about using the term.

I said, “You bet. Which ones would you like?” I described his options.

“Gimme your two favorites. For five dollars.”

I gave him three: one about my Granddad, one my meditation on death and the California highway, and the article about Rob Vasquez. “I gotta have Vasquez,” he said. “He sounds cool.”

I made a mental note to print more Vasquez pieces next time. The secret history of an unknown local musician proved a compelling subject, even for outwardly suburban types. If anything, between the kid in the peacoat and this man here in his soccer dad clothes, this night proved that you can’t predict a person’s reading habits or musical tastes based on appearances or the venue. I’m thirty-seven years old. I know that intellectually, but by now I should have been better at putting that into practice. It was too easy to lapse into stereotyping. I needed to quit doing that.

The couple introduced themselves as Nikki and Dan. I thanked them and shook their hands. “I appreciate you buying my stuff.”

Dan said, “How long have you been writing?”

“Publishing things since 2006, but daily practice since 2001.”

“Any training? Or just taught yourself?”

“I recently went to grad school,” I said, “but only after I taught myself. When I worked at Powell’s for six years, I woke up every morning before work and wrote for an hour or two or three. It’s the Larry Brown school of writing.” When Nikki asked who Larry Brown was, I told them Brown’s bootstraps story and how he compared writing to brick-laying in a documentary about his life: you practice, and you learn. Then I told them about Adrian Brune and how she inspired me to come here tonight.

Dan said, “You worked at Powell’s? That’s cool. I go in there all the time.” I said I still did, too—a lot actually. Back in the early 2000s, I might have even wrung him up at the register. “Why don’t you give me a chapbook, too,” he said. He handed me a twenty and I handed him seventeen ones. Lesson #3: even if you’re pessimistic about sales, bring change. You don’t want to have to turn down customers just because you can’t break a bill.

People like Nikki and Dan, and the Doctor and his enthusiastic daughter – the whole First Thursday experience – helped clarify what was emerging as my basic logic about writing: get your work into peoples’ hands any way you can. Be generous with the printouts. Distribute the stories and get pages to readers. So sometimes you give more away that you sell, so what. A few bucks don’t matter as much as a few enthusiastic readers. Although that was the same idea that got us writers exploited – with magazine editors often paying low rates or “honorariums” far smaller than the amount of work they have us do (Don’t you need the clips? Don’t you want the cachet of writing for this prestigious magazine?) – it was, when we chose to do it, a wiser long-term strategy. Brune sold stories in the subway for money, but she also knew the necessity of good distribution, knew that writers needed readers, and that not only were we little without them, writing still had value in this world.

Lesson #4: have faith and hang in there. Your fortunes can shift quickly.

* * *

Between customers I pet a dog. Then I pet another. It got so cold and windy that I had to switch into my heavier jacket, which meant I had to prop up my display case with my backpack. It didn’t look as good, but at least I was warmer. Actually, the display never looked good in the first place.

In the silence of lessening traffic, I reflected on the night so far.

Lesson #5: along with the Vasquez article, print more of the Thrift Store essay next time. People like that one. The photos were half the appeal.

Lesson #6: sell cheap. Another cue from Brune that my experience confirmed: if people are going to buy reading material that may end up being unreadable, then it had better be a low-stakes investment. I was selling more merchandise than the painter and sculptor because their wares were a risk and commitment. If mine sucked, customers were only out a few bucks, the price of a coffee or a taco.

* * *

8:18-8:29pm: a man picked up a chapbook and spent the next six straight minutes lecturing and grilling me about everything from the nature of memory, art and meaning, to the reality of bee hive collapse. During his rant, he ran his fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair and spun my chapbook over and over in his hand, frequently pausing to read the text on the back as if it would give him the answers he was searching for, or to see if the words might have changed since the last time he’d read them.

“What is this about?” he said. I told him. “So it’s your fiction?” It’s memoir, I said, so nonfiction. He started at the book, stared at me. Behind his prescription lenses, his eyes bulged in an unsettling way. I can’t even describe most of the things he said during his inquiry, because so little of it made sense. I just sat there in awe while he grilled me.

“Why should I read about your life?” he said, holding up the book. “What makes your story, your experience, worth my time, for me?” He seemed offended by my presence, as if a personal story like the one in my chapbook challenged the value of his and every attendee’s life. When I started to tell him why people might find my story appealing, he resumed talking: “It’s so much about how you are and how we are, that whole put it down to pick it up mentality.”

I didn’t know what he meant, so I tried again to answer his earlier question about why he should care about my story: “Good memoir will show you yourself in the author. It universalizes the personal.”

His tense expression relaxed. “Ah,” he said, and something in his eyes telescoped in and out.

To redirect the conversation and find out about him, I asked if he was selling art here, too.

“No, no,” he said. “I do make things, though. Not this. Not writing, I mean. Or painting. I’m a documentary filmmaker.” Very cool, I said. I loved documentaries. Was he working on anything in particular? “I made a film called <redacted>. I shot it entirely on my iPhone. I came out of this coffee shop, and there was this bee, lying on its back, dying. So I filmed it. Its last bit of life.”

“Interesting,” I said. “I’d like to check it out.” He spelled out the title as I wrote it down on a yellow sticky. It was a play on words. He smiled at the joke. Then he talked and talked and talked some more. Finally he looked away.

“I feel like I’ve taken so much of your time that I should buy a book.”

“I certainly won’t object to that.”

He kept flipping the book over, starting at the text, as if trying to decide what to do or what to pay. “Three dollars?” he said.

“Yes, three dollars.”

“Do you have change?”

“I do.”

He handed me three ones.

Relief washed over me when he finally left. I really earned those three dollars.

* * *

The event ended at 9. The bike part sculptor started packing up at 8:31. From what I could see, he’d only sold one pair of earrings, none of his big pieces. The painter directly across from me hadn’t sold a thing either. I felt bad for him. At least he seemed friendly.

As I shivered, I considered abandoning ship, too. That last interaction was the crown jewel of interactions, and my earnings seemed sufficient evidence of the effectiveness of my experiment, and the brilliance of Adrian Brune’s technique. The crowd thinned further. I’d underdressed. I added up the sales: thirty dollars. Having spent the first thirty minutes thinking the night would be a wash, that was a good haul, especially for so little work. Although the chapbook took me about six months to write, all I had to do was carry some equipment and sit down to sell it. Thirty dollars translated to ten bucks an hour, which was slightly less than what I made at my day job, and half as good as Brune’s best day. Speaking of which, I had to work at the tea shop that coming Saturday. Tomorrow, I was scheduled to talk with my agent about my newest book proposal. Today, I sold chapbooks and printouts on the street. The writing life was a weird one.

My cold toes curled in my shoes. Instead of leaving, I hung in a bit longer. By the time I started packing at 8:56pm, I hadn’t sold anything else, but I had the satisfaction of knowing that I’d worked the entire event. Strangely, I was leaving with more money than vendors who seemed like seasoned pros. Was this proof that reading wasn’t dead? That print media lives on in America? I don’t know, but I now had cash for groceries.

As I stuffed my printouts into Rebekah’s bag, the painter talked to a small group of her friends. They’d come to encourage her and help her pass the time. One guy told her, “You’ll sell something sweetheart, I swear!” He put his hands on her cheeks for comfort. “You’ll do great in summer,” he said. I bet we all will, because we’ll be here, trying.

To make money in writing, likely in any art, you have to hustle. You don’t have to sell on the street, but you can’t write in today’s world without knowing that you do so in the swamp of a shifting publishing landscape. Big changes define our era: the magazine advertising crash of 2007; the numerous shuttered newspapers; The New York Times’ paywall and blogs and restructuring to stay solvent; the shrinking advances of commercial book publishers; and the strengths of the independent press. Brune was just selling writing to make rent, but her efforts mark one front of the literary vanguard, an example of the many ways writers and publishers are experimenting with new techniques, or rekindling old ones, that push publishing in new directions. As scrappy an underdog as I felt on 13^th Avenue, I also felt free, felt liberated and empowered. I could do whatever I wanted, all of us could. We just weren’t going to rake in the dough.

While I walked home in the rain with a table under my arm, Adrian Brune was somewhere in Brooklyn. Brune still wrote, though she sold her work to newspapers and magazines rather than in the subways. Since handing out printouts in 2003, she’d written for The New York Times, The Nation, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and the Huffington Post. A recent call for sources on Twitter showed her actively hustling: “Working on story,” she wrote: “Looking for a first-hand account of a parent and teen that have experienced the consequences of reckless driving: Anyone?”

Aaron Gilbreath has written essays for The New York Times, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Brick, Black Warrior Review, The Threepenny Review, AGNI, The Normal School and Hotel Amerika, and articles for Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review and Yeti. Future Tense Publishing put out his chabook A Secondary Landscape. He sells tea in Portland, Oregon and lives online at http://aarongilbreath.wordpress.com/ and @AaronGilbreath

As I sit here at my desk in Northwest Portland, in a lime-green apartment full of skylights, sandwiched between Tin House Magazine and Tin House Books, reading the dynamic and very brave poems my grad students at Portland State are writing—I find myself thinking, in the most basic terms, about what it means to be instructed by a poem. What are we talking about when we say we turn to poems for instruction?

Richard Hugo is the presiding poet-spirit in the M.F.A. program where I usually teach, The University of Montana.  From my (weirdly sunny) perch here in Oregon, casting a long glance back at my home state, I want to consider one of Hugo’s most-celebrated most-anthologized poems, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” from his 1973 volume The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, in the hope of finding some provisional answers.

The poem opens with “You might come here Sunday on a whim.” (you can read the entire poem at the end of this post) The “you” in that first line seems to be a visitor, not unlike the poet himself, who, in his essay “The Triggering Town,” recommends to fellow poets that it might help “to use scenes (towns perhaps) that seem to vivify themselves as you remember them but in which you have no real emotional investment other than the one that grows out of the strange way the town appeals to you, the way it haunts you later when you should be thinking about paying your light bill.”

So you (the visitor, the poet, the speaker, the reader) come here some Sunday to take a look around, and although you’re not from Philipsburg, the town still makes some claim on you.  “Say your life broke down” is the first indication that what follows is a vision; you have to go there in your imagination and walk the streets, and try out—or try on—a life.  Whatever whim brought you here, there’s nothing remotely whimsical about the town, with its numbing failures, its streets “laid out by the insane” Philipsburg is in the last stages of collapse, constituted almost entirely of dilapidated, gutted structures, and eerily emptied of people.  A few isolate souls remain:  the jail’s single prisoner, a couple of local drivers (maybe driving in circles around the block, pathetically gunning their engines), the old man who was twenty when the jail was built, and a waitress.  There are mostly men, because the “best liked girls…leave each year for Butte.”

Life flows out of Philipsburg; the hotels were closed because people stopped coming; even the single prisoner doesn’t know why he’s “in,” why he’s been held back—and yet you’ve come here looking for something. Where is everyone? The poem tells us that the only surviving institutions are churches and bars, and yet we find out later that nobody’s in the churches:  the church bell rings and no one comes. In a sense, the town’s buildings are just as alive—just as dead—as the citizens themselves: the jail turned 70 this year. Evidence of the late stages of decay is everywhere. The huge mill is in ruin but “won’t finally fall down,” the economy is in shambles, and what’s left beyond these few persisting husks of life are the most impoverished human emotions:  rage, hatred, failure, defeat, scorn, and further beneath these—fueling these, perhaps most primal—boredom.

These are the degrees of gray, the filth itself, imaginatively entered and described, and they hold out the central challenge of the poem, which is not so far from what American citizens and readers and poets are facing today. What, beyond rage and boredom, is left of us?

Philipsburg’s past is nothing but a souvenir, and there seems to be some suggestion in the poem that, however specific and vivid, memories themselves won’t sustain you.  That one last good kiss, that one last good year (the 1907 boom), those eight once-productive silver mines (“going” in a way that the town’s current citizens can’t seem to), the very springs beneath the dance floor—each memory is “resolved” into a single, sweeping, generalizing, impersonal final gaze, figured here as a field of “panoramic green” that surrounds the town and is literally being eaten away by cattle. Boredom or memory: both do away with the vital, burning particulars, and Hugo hints that our eyes themselves are compromised, “two dead kilns” like two dead eye-sockets looming over the town, trying to grasp at something that once fed them. “Isn’t this your life—that ancient kiss / still burning out your eyes?” These are extinguishing fires—the fires that, like the forces of anonymity, wipe you out, slowly eating away at your spirit until you succumb.

This whole town, your whole life, announces nothing but its defeat, and the church bell announces its defeat, and all the empty houses ring with defeat.  And no one is responding to the call:  no one comes. This is a crisis of human response, and it is also the province of poetry. As Hugo understood, poems are at their most essential responses, genuine responses to a call that comes from outside the self—from the broken, spite-driven world. And so this speaker pushes on, hoping for some kind of instruction, some sense of purpose. What will suffice?  Are magnesium and scorn “sufficient” to support a town, a life? What can support your life, any life, given that the world will not offer you certain things—the “towering blondes, good jazz and booze,”—given that your desires will not be met?

And then a response arrives.  It is the first real action or undertaking on the part of the speaker in the poem: “Say no to yourself.”  It echoes the original “Say your life broke down,” and seems to mean, in this deepened context:  say no to your life breaking down; no, this isn’t enough; no to some part of your spirit that just wants to be extinguished. And the whole poem starts to pivot around that no.

Say no to yourself.  The old man, twenty

when the jail was built, still laughs

although his lips collapse.  Someday soon,

he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.

The old man, with whom the speaker appears engaged in conversation, is still able to laugh although his lips are collapsing around his mouth (The rhyme between “still laughs” and “collapse” suggests that this laughter is hardly carefree. And the description of the old man’s puckered mouth seems to be a kind of cruel parody of the “ancient kiss” that reminded the speaker of a time when he felt alive.). We don’t know, then, if an actual conversation is taking place, or if this old man is simply laughing and the speaker is imagining the old man’s thoughts. On the weird border between an actual and an imagined exchange, the moment is especially charged because the landscape of the poem thus far has been intensely desolate and solitary. This is the last remaining shape of human contact, even if it only takes place in the speaker’s head.  And out of this exchange comes what is to my mind the most crucial line in the poem, in all its visceral immediacy: You tell him no. This phrase is of a different order than “Isn’t this your life”—where the speaker is articulating something he already feels to be true—and it goes beyond “Say no to yourself,” where the refusal is somehow more general and more exclusively directed at the contents and choices of the speaker’s own life. Here, the speaker is simply—and extravagantly—refusing a stranger’s death, or more specifically, refusing the man’s resignation in the face of death. (“Someday soon, / he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.  You tell him no.”)

One of the things that makes this gesture so striking is that it’s undertaken on behalf of another:  it’s not the speaker’s life in question, but it might as well be his.  And the speaker’s refusal is striking because it’s outrageous:  nobody can say no to death, and certainly someone like this old man, about whom we know nothing beyond his apparent physical decay, is perfectly correct in maintaining that at some point, perhaps soon, he’ll go to sleep and not wake up. What we seem to be witnessing, then, is the sudden assertion, on the part of the speaker, of some buried or latent force of will—a will made manifest at the point of greatest urgency and threat of vanishing. I refuse your death; I insist against all plausibility, against everything I know to be true about the world, that you not succumb. And with this gesture Hugo puts his voice into a stream of beautiful, agonizing speech, a whole company and history of voices—the voices of poets who rage against death and against the habits, conventions, and dull, languishing routines of the self that threaten to make us die every day.

With “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” as in so many of his poems, Hugo offers us a city-map straight into, through, and—in a very fleeting, tenuous way—out of despair.  Some bedrock defiance of death is in you; you have a stake in life, this man’s and your own. “The car that brought you here still runs.”  There is money to buy lunch with; you can still eat.  Someone’s bringing you food:  there is company, you’re being served. And, as if to accentuate these reminders of worth, the very materials of the world seem to be making themselves present.  Although mined from elsewhere and so not supporting Philipsburg, the money is silver (gray, but lit—gray, but still burning), and like the silver of the change itself, the waitress’ red hair is “lit,” casting a red-gold, almost hallowed light against the wall.  There’s a flicker of the erotic among these newly luminous surfaces (Hugo pairs “silver” with “slender”), and we feel how hard-fought are the color and the light against that thick, lingering backdrop of obsessive grays.  Something at once small and tangible and ethereal and shimmering has appeared:  the light from the waitress’ red hair seems to spread to the wall itself, as if the confines of that space were, however quietly, expanded and transformed.  And all the eroded surfaces in the poem—from the meaningless grid of streets to the outward collapse of machines and concrete and persons—seem to momentarily give way to this singular illumination that is no reminder of a past life, but altogether of the present; that is not made of abstract, future desires, like the town of “towering blondes,” but of a glow that seems to emanate from this one woman, right now, in this last space on earth. However temporary it might be, it’s here, and it’s real. The poem never suggests that it will last: but that it happened. For a moment, the world was lit from within.

The poem follows an arc from the “last-one” sense of things in the first two stanzas (that last one kiss, the last one prisoner, the only restaurant) to the “no one” of stanza three, to the “no” of stanza four, and comes to rest on the apparently casual “no matter” of the final phrase. No matter wretchedness and degradation, no matter rage and hopelessness and constant, corrosive defeat:  some piece of life, some premonition of our worth, survives. “Call it,” writes Hugo in his essay “In Defense of Creative Writing Classes,”

the obsessive and irresistible love of being alive, if you can stand the rhetoric.  It is born of the certainty we will disappear fast enough…No matter how justified our despair, we still live in a world where circumstances that make death preferable to life are limited by our revulsion.  When moments that support our awareness of ourselves and each other, fond or sad,…insist, some of us would not deny them any more than we would deny our lives.

Joanna Klink is the author of three books of poetry, They Are Sleeping, Circadian, and Raptus. She teaches poetry at The University of Montana and is currently the Tin House Writer-in-Residence at PSU.

hhhhh

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

by Richard Hugo

jjjjjj

You might come here Sunday on a whim.

Say your life broke down.  The last good kiss

you had was years ago.  You walk these streets

laid out by the insane, past hotels

that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try

of local drivers to accelerate their lives.

hhhh

Only churches are kept up. The jail

turned 70 this year.  The only prisoner

is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now

is rage.  Hatred of the various grays

the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,

The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls

who leave each year for Butte. One good

restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.

The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,

a dance floor built on springs—

all memory resolves itself in gaze,

in panoramic green you know the cattle eat

or two stacks high above the town,

two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse

for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

jjjj

Isn’t this your life?  That ancient kiss

still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat

so accurate, the church bell simply seems

a pure announcement:  ring and no one comes?

Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium

and scorn sufficient to support a town,

not just Philipsburg, but towns

of towering blondes, good jazz and booze

the world will never let you have

until the town you came from dies inside?

jjjjj

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty

when the jail was built, still laughs

although his lips collapse. Someday soon,

he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.

You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.

The car that brought you here still runs.

The money you buy lunch with,

no matter where it’s mined, is silver

and the girl who serves your food

is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Matt and I broke up a dozen times before our grand finale, which ended with an admission impossible to move past: I told him I was gay.

It took me till my last semester in undergraduate school to find my way into a “women’s issues” course. The class, titled “Feminism and Philosophy,” was taught by a poet-scholar who possessed a cult following of students, most of who wore turquoise jewels in their noses, scuffed Doc Martens, and leather satchels around one shoulder. I sat in the back next to a student named AJ. She’d had the professor maybe four times already and was in the inner circle that got invited to “family” dinners at the poet’s house. AJ possessed an Amazonian stature, red hair, no makeup, and handcrafted notebooks bound with handmade paper. She rarely spoke, but whispered comments to herself so brilliant I took to jotting down her asides as if they were course notes. She was a handsome woman. By week three, I knew her profile by heart.

Each day AJ clunked a stack of obscure book titles onto her desk and nested into her chair. A naked breast was visible on the black background of a tattered paperback titled She Came to Stay. I’d heard of Simone de Beauvoir, but not as much as I pretended. AJ told me the novel came from the other more complex class she was taking by the poet. The title of the alternate course sounded almost entirely like the one we were in.

I read the summary on the back of She Came to Stay and took myself straight to the library.

This roman a clef takes up issues of freedom, The Other, dependency, and sexuality: all of which were inspired by the true life ménage a trios between Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and their mistress Olga Kosakiewicz–the woman responsible for almost breaking apart the famous couple’s lifelong romance. If reading is an act of voyeurism, encountering these pages is akin to wearing someone else’s skin. This novel of revenge, written to expose their mistress as manipulative and superficial, is dedicated to Olga and viewed as an attempt to reclaim the sordid love affair through the eyes of the author.

Set in Paris, with World War II brimming in the background, Beauvoir attends to the inner life of Francoise–and the dare I say existential crisis– that arises when third party Xavière gets introduced into Francoise’s open relationship with Pierre. Francoise and Pierre are writers of the theatre, living in Paris, indulging in breakdowns about their art, pursuing amorous flings with attractive others, and most importantly adoring each other. They are in love with their lifestyles and their companionship and their city. Francoise thinks Pierre is a genius and routinely consoles him through his fears of intellectual and artistic inadequacy.

When Francoise meets a nubile Xaviere who lives in the small town of Rouen, in the countryside outside of Paris, she falls into intrigue and insists that Xaviere, the Olga-based character, move to Paris. When Xaviere concedes and comes to stay with the couple, Pierre and Francoise attempt to nurse her into a fully formed and philosophically wise new consciousness. During her stay, the puerile young lady charms the couple, and the duo decides to incorporate a third party into their already established relationship. Together, the trio traipses around Montparnasse, frequents cafes, and imbibes into the night. At first, the newness of Xaviere is exhilarating and inspiring for Francoise and Pierre. However, as the three become more entwined, Pierre’s feelings for Xaviere grow into their own entity–an independent thing that excludes Francoise. Jealousy glares green-eyed from all as the bonds between the individuals become more realized, but are always flowing more completely in two directions and never equally between all three. Everyone wants everyone else’s object of desire.

The women: this was the most thrilling part for me. Xaviere and Francoise share a mutual infatuation. Their connection is as romantic as the competition they insight in each other. Reading Beauvoir’s portrayals of their Sapphic lusts and longings, even when embedded with envy, opened a door of possibility for me. My heart beat in my hips as I read particularly salty passages. I felt recognition in Beauvoir’s descriptions of yearning directed toward another woman, no matter how complicated the motives or twisted the reasons. I had never read anything so honest–or so lesbian.

Beauvoir created an emotional world that stirred something up at my core. She wrote toward the truth of feeling, the difficulty of desire.  The more I read Beauvoir, attended my feminist studies class, and stared at AJ in the seat beside me, the more separate I felt from Matt. Our fights ambled on. I read him paragraphs from She Came to Stay aloud in bed, juicy ones. It was like dropping breadcrumbs toward my new awakening. It felt like I’d accepted a ride from a stranger, dressed as a famous philosopher from the 40’s, and now here I was careening down an unknown road, faster than I’d like, seeing new sights, unable exit. The doors were locked.

This is Beauvoir’s first novel, and it admittedly reads as such. The prose is precious at times, the ideas overtly philosophical, but her passion ushers energy onto the page. It’s as if she’s saying–this matters! Listen! And you invariably do, you can’t help it. She’s telling you her story–and it might be yours, too.

As a twentysomething, this book was essential to my becoming. In a great feat of metaphysical solipsism, Beauvoir expounds on notions of self and sexuality and what it means to love another person–or two for that matter. She confronts envy face first and exposes her belly through the façade of fiction.

“We wanted to build a real trio, a well-balanced life for three in which no one would be sacrificed,” says Pierre–the Sartre based character. “Perhaps it was taking a risk, but at least it was worth trying!”

I’m not certain Francoise–or Beauvoir–would agree the risk was worth it. But worth it or not, their behavior is written as inevitable: pursuing impulse and desire in hopes to discover truth.

First published in 1943, Beauvoir’s sentiments, sorrows, and entanglements echo into our current moment. Perhaps this is why it resonated with me coming of age in the two thousands. Give Francoise an iPad, let her keep wearing her black jacket, and the story could pass for today. She’s part of the polyamorous couple drinking oolong tea at the table next to you. She’s the lady hitting on your girlfriend at the bar. She’s the author of the book you’re reading. She’s the student getting better grades than you in class and having more sex at the same time.

Through reading She Came To Stay, I found the courage to admit truths about my sexuality to myself and to my partner. It gave me more than recognition; it provided permission. This novel did what great literature should and for that I won’t forget it–it forged connection through the craft of fiction. I’ve since read other work by Beauvoir, including the endless biographies written about her and Sartre. But none of it went down as smooth–and as memorably–as She Came to Stay, because there’s just nothing like the first time.

Genevieve Hudson earned her MFA from Portland State University, where she now teaches writing. Among other places, her work has appeared in Word Riot, The Collagist, Portland Monthly Magazine, The Rumpus, Monkeybicycle and HTML Giant. She was recently awarded a Fulbright research grant to work on a collection of fairy tale inspired short stories in the Netherlands. 

For the last several years, my mother has been working on a book about Moby Dick. Her working process is very particular; it consists of her breaking the book down, page by page, setting aside a three-by-five index card for each page, and then taking copious notes on both sides of the card concerning the page’s content. She plans to progress in this fashion, card by card, until she covers the entire novel. I don’t know precisely which edition she uses, but my Penguin Classics version of Moby Dick, including Melville’s opening section on the history of whales but not including notes, totals 624 pages.

My mother is not an academic. She was a lawyer before I was born, but quit to raise me and my brothers. She owned a bookstore for a while, briefly taught high school English, and now works at her local library. She has never been published, with the exception of letters to the editor, and has rarely, if ever, been paid for her work, but over the last twenty years she has read voraciously and produced a steady stream of literary production, from essays to poems to novels. My mother is a fan of literature, par excellence. She, more than anybody, taught me that writers are worth our admiration.

The last time I came to visit, my mother let me see the Rolodexes where she keeps her index cards. As I walked into her study I noticed several artifacts from my childhood – a metal Buddha that doubles as an ashtray, a jointed frog puppet that dangles on strings – and I remembered the sense of awe I’ve always felt entering her writer’s room: the atmosphere heavy with important cultural business. I felt the same way when I saw her strong, vigorous handwriting on the little cards, her particular combination of block capitals and underlining, her slanted intensity.

For a long time, my mother wanted to write a novel of her own. During my last year of high school she became intensely interested in the novels of J.M. Coetzee. She identified very deeply with the character of Elizabeth Costello, who she saw as a morally serious and uncompromising woman – not unlike herself. She liked the way Coetzee blended art and politics with his crisp, unadorned language. All told, her interest in Coetzee lasted more than four years, in which she read every one of his novels and took copious notes.

I was in my junior year at college when my mother finished her novel. She asked if I would give her feedback.

The novel arrived at my rental house in a large manila envelope. It was long; more than five hundred manuscript pages. Luckily I had just been fired from my summer job at the campus library for breaking into the depository after hours, so I had time on my hands. I went through her manuscript several times, making notes. In hindsight, I should probably have been more careful, or at least more sober; I was drinking too much at the time. I noticed she had a problem with editorializing – one I share – and that her sentences were sometimes so spare they felt naked, but the truth didn’t occur to me until the second pass. My mother was trying to write a J.M. Coetzee novel. Coetzee is not an easy writer to imitate.

After a week’s work I sent back the edited manuscript. I included a note, saying there were things I liked and things I didn’t, but that overall it reminded me too much of Coetzee. Probably I should have been more supportive, but she’s always been honest about my work, and I wanted to be honest about hers. Two writers in one family: not always the easiest situation.

My mother took my edits with remarkable grace, but they frustrated her. How could she possibly achieve something as good as the novels she idolized without stealing some of their tricks? How was she supposed to know what was her and what was Coetzee? She decided to scrap the novel she had sent me and start again, but failed to get traction on another project. She was often deeply discouraged. She didn’t want to be just a fan of literature; she wanted to be a writer.

Really, though, my mother’s problem is one most writers face. All of us write towards the books we’ve read; something in a novel obsesses us, and we reach for it in our own language, hoping to replicate the feelings it evoked. A great deal of literary fiction is really fan fiction, in the sense that it bears the unmistakable traces of the books we’re grappling with. Not all fans are writers, but all writers are fans; I think that’s a tricky statement. All writers start out as fans, and many of us bear visible traces of that fandom our entire lives. That’s what drove Proust to write his endless parodies of other writers’ styles, to get it all out of his system. You build a structure out of your influences, but eventually that structure becomes a cage.

A few years after I graduated from college my mother entered a new stage. She wanted to talk to me about Moby Dick: its extraordinary range, the way it created a microcosm of the country, its elaborate tapestry of essay, fiction, and drama. She talked about writing a book that could match up to it, and what form it might take. I confess, I was worried. Her previous attempts to write a novel had been painful for her, and I’d be lying if I didn’t worry for myself, too: her designated editor. In case you’ve forgotten, Moby Dick is long.

Then, one afternoon, she called me on the phone, sounding relieved. She had given up. She wasn’t going to try to write her generation’s answer to Moby Dick. Instead she would write a book about Moby Dick.

It seemed sensible to me. Her fiction was always fairly essayistic.

I noticed the difference right away. Instead of agony at trying to produce something which could measure up to Melville, my mother was full of excitement about illustrating the reasons why she had become so attached to Moby Dick in the first place. She was learning new things about the book every day, she said; new levels were opening up. Focusing on the whole thing page by page prolonged her reading experience, and deepened it. She wondered out loud if she would ever end this note-taking stage and start the real writing. Note-taking was so much fun.

Maybe my mother’s book on Moby Dick is a work of fandom, and not literature, but at least she’s honest about it. Hundreds of novels are published in America every year; some are fabulous and enduring, but the great majority of them are derivative and forgettable, a sort of fan fiction, dreaming of the novels they wished they could be. I should know: I’ve written at least one.

I don’t know if my mother will ever finish her book on Moby Dick. Maybe if she does the experience will serve the same function as Proust’s parodies, and she’ll be ready to produce a novel which will function as her generation’s answer to Melville. But as the years go by, and the notes pile up, I have become more curious about what she’s writing now than about the novels she might produce afterwards.

It’s all too common that a writer strives toward literature and ends up writing the equivalent of literary fan fiction. A book that actually replicates the experience of loving a piece of literature, on the other hand, of the sort my mother wants to write – that would be an uncommon thing indeed.

Sam Allingham is a fiction writer living in the western bluffs of Philadelphia. His fiction has appeared (or will appear soon) in a handful of print magazines, including One Story, Epoch, and American Short Fiction, and online at Web Conjunctions and n+1. He is at work on his first novel, The Girls in the Trees.

All illustrations by Matt Kish.

The outsider, a familiar if not always friendly creature, is often little unhinged; she—I take up the feminine pronoun in honor of our most famous poetic outsider, Emily Dickinson—tends to be fixated to the point of obsession with an artistic pursuit, though she may not define it as such; she is reclusive, and in that seclusion comes to invent a deeply personal syntax and vocabulary that seems out of step with contemporary literary practice. A glass pane is the preferred distance separating her from life, though she will steal out into the night, a shadowy figure on the shadowy grass, to admire the moon, or to lament that she doesn’t live on it. Occasionally, the outsider works her way, almost inevitably through the intermediary of a sympathetic and patient admirer, toward the center, though on the rare occasions this happens, it happens posthumously.

The similarities between Dickinson and Alfred Starr Hamilton may go no deeper than their fascination with bees, but both in their own particular and peculiar way are representative of the outsider type. Dickinson’s story is well known, Hamilton’s unknown. He spent the greater part of his adult years living in a boarding house—appropriately called the Walden House—in Montclair, New Jersey. (“He pays $40 a month for a linoleumed cell in a rooming house,” wrote Jonathan Williams in an impassioned plea to raise money to help Hamilton fight a charge of vagrancy brought against him in 1975.) He produced voluminously, displaying the intense focus common to this type: during the 1960s, Hamilton mailed roughly 45 poems a week to the offices of Cornell University’s literary magazine, Epoch—which, under the editorial hand of David Ray, had published a smattering of his poems—and although a collection of his work was published by the Jargon Society in 1970 and he had a brush with modest renown a decade later, he has remained largely unrecognized.

This is partly because Hamilton confounds. Was he a crackpot? A genius unsullied by the academy? A little bit of both? Is he a symbol of a subterranean America—a more modest, less vociferous version of his contemporary Allen Ginsberg? (In one of the few circulated anecdotes about his personal life, we learn that in 1961 Hamilton was fined $25 for sitting in a park during an air raid drill.) Can we see Hamilton as New Jersey’s answer to Robert Walser?

His work, like Walser’s, has been called mystic, naïve, humble. He wrote obsessively of loneliness and the moon and the night: what is lonelier than the moon, what keeps us closer to ourselves than the night? He loved the word “golden”; he asked more questions than he answered—and he asked a lot of questions; his odd syntax is capable of jarring the reader into a sudden shifting awareness of the world: “During Chicago,” he wrote of a stay in that city and of another city, that it is shaped by “the waistline of the river’s end.”

Much of his work, it seems, has been lost. He typed each poem once, without making copies. The poems he mailed off were said to fill shoebox upon shoebox in the homes of his inundated recipients. As can be expected of such fecundity, his work ranges from the inane to the profound. As if aware of this, he kept his poems short. They range from a single line to a page, rarely longer. There is a beguiling simplicity to his verse. He seems at times with his repetitions to verge on the nursery rhyme. “The Cardinal in the Bush” begins with the following stanza:

I wanted to know more about the cardinal

I wanted to know more about what the cardinal did

I wanted to know more about the cardinal in the bush

Despite the sense of curiosity evident in these lines, there is little childlike about Hamilton’s wonder. Even to call him naïve is to miss the point, or at least not to hit it straight on. There is more hard-earned wisdom than naïveté in the couplet that comprises “Even the Deep Sea.”

Even the deep sea

Laughs at a day of despair

Although Hamilton could be fit into the category of the gentle oddball without much damage to his character, there are hints of sharper edges, even if they have been smoothed by time’s melancholy flow. (Time is another of Hamilton’s obsessions.) Unable or unwilling to work, he survived on a modest inheritance. He claimed he lived on a frugal budget of $80 a month, which could not have contributed much to his comfort. Money is, of course, the great Moloch that hounds those who, like Hamilton, find themselves at the mercy of the muse. Is there any wonder that he defines poetry as “the story of the search for freedom”? Poverty need not corrupt a man, but it seldom leaves him unscathed. This is apparent in “Night,” one of the most haunting poems in Dark Dreambox.

I kept a typewriter

I carried a little dark suitcase around

I asked the proprietor for some of a little space

I was a stranger

I was always moving about

I knew there was lightning on the moon

I hammered golden letters against the wilderness

I hammered golden letters against the night

I held this light to myself

I had so little to say to all the rest

Hamilton is an austere figure at the margins of a literary culture that has little room, and even less time, for genuine eccentricities. He stands there, holding his light to himself, illuminating a world that is close to ours and sometimes like it, but nevertheless strange and mysterious. His work, as Geoff Hewitt alludes in his introduction to the Dark Dreambox, is just that: a locked box requiring not a single key but a jangling set. The equivalencies we’re used to in works that constitute the Tradition are largely absent in Hamilton’s poetry. His metaphors are his own, his symbols homemade. (“I live over a stove,” he says in an autobiographical note appended to this volume.) This originality is partly responsible for the distance between the poet and his peers. It’s also what separates him from us. It strands him.

If we’re willing, though, we can find our way to him. His gentleness and compassion provide the most satisfying approach. These qualities are evident in “A Crust of Bread,” a poem that elevates Hamilton above the concern of cash and accolades.

why, I often wondered

why was I a poet,

first of all

most of all, I wanted

to have been a bird

if I could have been a bird

but I wanted the starlings

to have been fed,

first of all

A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind is a testament to the perspicacity and daring of the Song Cave’s editors, Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. That Alfred Star Hamilton’s work has been given a second life is an affirmation that poetry exists as much outside as inside of the academy, and that art—as untutored and oblique as it may be—makes no distinction between a boarding house in suburban New Jersey and the hallowed halls of academia.

Stephen Sparks (@rs_sparks) is a buyer at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. He blogs at Invisible Stories and is an editor at Writers No One Reads.

An excerpt from Amber Dawn’s new book, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir, which came out on Tuesday.

How To Bury Our Dead

for Shelby Tom

Have you ever had to attend a Catholic or Sikh or Japanese or Irish funeral and felt a little uncertain about the cultural grieving practices? We can all thank cyberspace for easy-to-find funeral etiquette. Simply visit Wikipedia before you do something tactless, like sending flowers to a Jewish funeral service.

Now try doing a search for “queer funeral etiquette”; Wikipedia will tell you that “The page ‘Queer funeral etiquette’ does not exist.” Now try Googling it. When I first tried this, the closest result was a website that explained tipping etiquette for gay men vacationing in Mexico. There are now a few online discussions.

It only got worse when I swapped labels and mixed up words. The first result on a search for “gay memorial service” brought me to an article about a Navy veteran’s funeral that was cancelled when his church congregation learned that he was gay. If you search for this story, you will discover that this happened in 2007.

Everyone dies; we can agree on that. And although we probably don’t really like to, we can also agree that the mortality rate for queers is higher than for heterosexuals. Doesn’t it seem a little off that we—with our rich array of community rituals and traditions—don’t have customs for mourning? Exactly how do we bury our dead?

I am not an expert. All of my grieving has been done in rather bitter privacy. I can only share with you my own stories of bereavement in the hope that they help spark conversation, and that conversation brings change. I believe this is the way we queer folks do things.

I’ll start with what I know: My family is made up of mostly hard-working farmers, churchgoers, and people who strongly believe in heaven. I was seven years old when I attended my first funeral. My great-uncle Dave lived with his wife Dottie on a corn and chicken farm until he died of a heart attack before the age of fifty. My ma made a bed for me in the back seat of our Volkswagen Rabbit and drove without stopping from Fort Erie, Ontario, to Auburn, New York. Her good black dress hung in the back passenger-side window, a funeral-garb curtain that blocked the sun as I dozed away the five-hour drive.

When we arrived, Dave and Dottie’s frame house was still as huge and white as ever. The corn still stood in dutiful rows. Willow trees sprawled across the front lawn, still waiting for grandkids and cousins to climb them. Dottie’s mean-tempered geese chased me up the driveway, hissing, like they always had done.

Ma led me to the back door—because family never came through the front—and into the mudroom where Uncle Dave’s flannel shirts crowded the coat tree. I watched her gulp back a grief-stricken sob as she searched for an empty hook for my red wool poncho. While being raised by a single mom, I had seen plenty of tears. Ma wasn’t one to hide her most recent dating disaster or debt struggles, but this was different. This sounded as if something had been dislodged from deep within her body. Her crying fired up loudly and continued, almost mechanically, as we were received by a half-dozen or so aunties and passed around the kitchen from one set of open arms to the next.

What I learned about funerals that day: You get to keep your (Sunday) shoes on inside the house. Cake and pie arrive in landslides. No one jabbers when the priest stays to drink with the family. Well-recited stories are told about when the departed either comically injured or humiliated themselves or both. You cry whenever the crying comes. Maybe it’s when your second cousin, Holly, hugs you so tight and uncomfortably long that you feel her faux-pearl necklace denting your forehead. Maybe it’s when you’re in the living room, where the open casket lies for three days, forcing yourself to look at the pale and gentle flesh of your uncle’s closed eyelids. When you cry, it’s uncensored. And you’re not alone.

It’s likely that we all have a story something like this: a memory of bagpipes or a parade of black suits or of kneeling for so long that your feet fall asleep. I wonder if our memories could be the key to shaping queer funerals? Conquering and compiling the fine details—the unearthly quiet of a receiving room or how particularly buttery the sweets tasted. Or, in my case, how much the tattooist’s gun burned on my back.

I mourned my first queer death in a tattoo shop. There’s a scarlet-haired, rock-n-roll vixen on my back. She peeks out of my shirt collar and runs, right beside my spine, down toward my hips. I clenched my fists (and my jaw and my butt cheeks) for nearly eight hours before the tattooist was finished.

She attracts a lot of attention, my tattoo. Especially from biker types who don’t have any qualms about touching a perfect stranger’s back. “Nice ink,” they say. Some have even gone as far as to slide my tank top to the side to get a better look. So when they ask, “What made you get that?” I feel a certain vindication when I tell them, “It’s a memorial tattoo for a lover. She was nineteen when she died.”

The conversation usually ends there.

There are two subjects that pose near-insurmountable difficulties to any novelist who wishes to write about them with accuracy or grace: sex and God. The former is a widely recognized trap for writers, so much so that the British magazine Literary Review has, in every year since 1993, doled out an annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award. And lest we assume that this is a trap more likely to ensnare inexperienced writers, it’s worth noting that the list of award winners includes names like Sebastian Faulks, Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer (although perhaps it is instructive to note that seventeen out of the twenty winners have been men). John Updike received from the Review a Lifetime Achievement Award for his efforts.

But even the perils of writing from the bedroom pale in comparison with those that plague our attempts to write about what happens in houses of worship. Fiction that deals in faith may be mocked less by the literary community than fiction that features particularly breathy sex scenes, but perhaps this is only because the former is so much rarer than the latter. I’ve tried, and failed, to compile a list of recent, noteworthy fiction that deals in spiritual quandary or fulfillment—Darcey Steinke’s 2005 novel Milk comes to mind, a book in which sexual appetite is often confused with (or fused with) spiritual longings, but little else does. On the other hand, sex—the act itself, the desire for it, the ubiquity or lack of it—is an essential part of modern fiction. A recent piece in the New York Times wondered, “Has Fiction Lost its Faith?” and bemoaned the absence of would-be successors to writers like Flannery O’Connor.

The modern name that comes most easily to mind, I think, must be Marilynne Robinson, whose Gilead explored the inner life of an elderly preacher in Iowa who struggled to delineate his experiences and his theology for the young son he would not live to raise. And it is no mistake that Robinson’s is the name mentioned in the blurbs on the paperback edition of All the Living, a debut novel by C.E. Morgan first published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2009. To say that the book was ignored at the time of its publication would not be entirely fair; it was chosen as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and Morgan (a woman, and a former student of theological studies at Harvard Divinity School) was named one of the 5 Best Writers Under 35 by the National Book Foundation. But the attention paid, to my mind, has not been nearly enough for this extraordinary book. Morgan writes near-perfect prose, whether she’s describing the mountains of Kentucky or sex or the acute longing for consolation that brings impoverished farmers together at church each Sunday. If we can all agree that it’s a struggle to write well about sex, or about God, then we’d all do well to spend some time with C.E. Morgan’s novel, one of the most astonishing fiction debuts of recent years.

The comparison to Robinson comes to mind, no doubt, in part due to the book’s homespun setting. Aloma, an orphan, first encounters Orren Fenton when he visits the Kentucky missionary school where she has lived for nearly a decade, first as a student and then as the piano teacher. He begins visiting each evening, driving her around in his truck until nightfall, and one thing of course leads to another: “when he pushed up inside her for the first time, she was unable to move for the surprise of it, not because it was unexpected—she had anticipated it in the unthinking way the body has of presuming its physical destiny—but because it brought the fact of Orren into a proximity she had not previously imagined…it moved her in a way that had nothing to do with pleasure.” When his mother and brother are killed in a car accident, Orren moves back home to try to save his family’s tobacco farm, and Aloma joins him there. They live together, sleep together, but do not marry. And that, at the most basic level, is all that happens.

All the Living—the title is taken from scripture, from a verse of Ecclesiastes that assures us that “whoever is joined with all the living has hope”—follows the couple through their first summer together, a drought summer that threatens Orren’s farm and so his livelihood. Aloma is forced to acknowledge that sex has brought her no closer to understanding the man she’s followed, however powerfully she feels herself drawn to him. And she finds herself increasingly drawn to another man: Bell Johnson, the soft-spoken local preacher who hires her to play piano at his church.

While the dangers posed to the farm ostensibly drive the plot forward through the long, parched summer – and Morgan’s evocative language is perhaps at its sharpest and clearest when describing the unforgiving landscape that surrounds Aloma—the book is essentially a study in loneliness. Orren, like Aloma, is now an orphan, but this leaves him feeling not closer to her but more remote, marooned by his own stubborn ambitions and desires. Aloma, having accustomed herself to living entirely in her own mind, now feels the lack of companionship all the more bitterly after having allowed herself to fall in love, something she’s never observed and does not even know to call by that name. And in her foundering, she seeks comfort and conversation from Bell, who has set his own longings aside for the good of his community. With Orren, we are told that “even as she grasped at him ever tighter with her hands, allowing him no distance at all from her chest, she sensed that she was merely knocking at the door of his flesh.” Bell, on the other hand, looks at Aloma and sums her up with little fanfare—sometimes you got a cagey thing about you, he tells her. Like you can’t decide if you want to run off or get took in. Later, when Aloma has disappointed him and wounded him deeply, he cautions her, “Don’t grant yourself permission to be ungodly just because you’re young. Maybe you think it’s some small thing to stir up love, but you’re wrong.” As the novel unfolds, Morgan sketches these three portraits of isolation, giving us these people and their clumsy efforts towards solace.

But while both Orren and Bell are well-drawn polar opposites who, taken together, represent both the things Aloma knows she wants and those that she does not yet have the emotional or spiritual vocabulary to realize she needs—this is Aloma’s story. Morgan’s writing is both unassuming and masterful, her descriptions of the physical world at times both unsparing and lush. It is these moments that remind us, again, of Robinson, this use of the language of prayer and faith, of a religion that leaves Aloma untouched, to describe the all-too-human world she sees around her. Second only to the sense of place and landscape are the descriptions of a young woman carefully examining the man she finds so powerfully attractive:

She let him lead her around the side of the house and she peeked at him as he looked up at the height of it, squinting, his thin lips flattening further. He hitched up the waistband of his jeans and he crossed his arms over his chest and she saw clearly she had been mistaken. He had not turned old in three weeks’ time, it was as though someone had come along with a plane and sheered off all the extra that once cushioned him. He was like something corded, every movement curtailed.

There is a sense here of one woman exploring her own consciousness—something she’s never been asked to look at too closely—vis à vis her own body. It is this close tie between the physical and the emotional, the sexual and the cerebral (and, as her friendship with Bell deepens, the spiritual) that makes this book, the story of such a very particular part of America, thrum with anxieties and longings that should be familiar to any college freshman, to any newlywed—to anyone, in short, who has ever been young.

Aloma makes her way to the church, initially, because the only available piano at Orren’s house is so decrepit that it produces “no sound, just a sponging broken depression.” But it is Bell’s first sermon that fills her with an “uneasy” joy:

I been lonesome too—nobody’s immune after the cradle—but I got wind of God from a good upbringing so I knew, even in my dark hour, to reach out…God said, I’m coming in. All I did was only let him. Yet I had to give up, I had to submit me to something I didn’t want, to the will of another. That’s the opposite of the world, to rub your own self out. World wants you to take up ever more space, brothers and sisters. But God asks us to be less so that others might be more.

I mean it as the highest compliment when I say that it is almost impossible to read this book as a first novel. Morgan’s prose is so lovely and yet so guileless, her voice haunting and yet warm, frank, honest. First-time writers can so often intrude upon their own stories, insert themselves, as it were, everywhere in the text. Take up ever more space. But this first novel is written with all the deceptive simplicity of a poem and yet the incantatory resonance of a prayer. In All the Living, Morgan gives us three lonely people—Aloma, Orren, Bell—and breathes life into them, bathes them in sympathy and grace, and then gets out of their way.

Angelica Baker is a writer living in Brooklyn. She is a first-year MFA student in Fiction at Columbia University. She is originally from Los Angeles. 

Normally Tommy would wager in the low to mid-teens. On this night he bet 48. It was an unreasonably high number for any night, let alone during the Afghan rainy season, when an almost permanent wall of thunderstorms pounded the eastern half of the country with an angry mix of lightning, sleet, and hail. Although there was little chance anything would happen, aircraft were launched to support the possibility that something might happen, which meant that Tommy and I had to man the radios at our respective outposts in Jalalabad and Sharana, while Cory manned the radios at task force headquarters in Bagram.

Our game was simple. Tommy and I placed bets on how many times Cory would transmit the phrase, “X-ray Papa copies all, over,” during the course of the night. We played according to the Price is Right’s showcase showdown rules. Whoever’s wager was closest to the actual number of XPCAO’s that Cory transmitted, without going over, won. The prize, to be awarded at the end of deployment, was a six pack of beer.

Prior to placing my bet, I’d stand outside long enough to get a feel for the night. On the night in question, with Tommy betting so high, odds were I could’ve wagered “1” and been victorious. But the way the low clouds had raced over Sharana, crackling with St. Elmo’s fire on their way up the Hindu Kush, made me want to ignore the odds. In the IM window that Tommy and I shared I typed “49”, and hit return.

In effect we were counting on Cory screwing up. In Cory’s defense, he couldn’t help himself. Though he meant well, he was incompetent. I’d witnessed this firsthand while Cory was assigned as our supply clerk in Sharana. He’d ordered a shitload of 2x6s, when he should’ve ordered 2x4s, which, though not his worst mistake, turned out to be the last straw for his boss. On my way to bed one morning (we were nocturnal) I’d observed Cory’s ass chewing. “What the fuck are we going to do with these!?” Cory’s boss asked him, kicking the stack of 2×6’s. The metal strips banding the lumber together separated, spilling boards out at Cory’s feet. Exasperated, his boss walked away, leaving Cory to stand there, red-faced and huffing like a kindergartener.

I woke that evening to find that Cory had built these magnificent Adirondak chairs out of the 2x6s. The chairs were too big to sit in, but since no one wanted to further hurt Cory’s feelings we sat in them anyway. However, as soon as Cory was reassigned to HQ, we stacked the Adirondak chairs in a far corner of the compound, where a few days later they suffered a direct hit from a Taliban mortar.

That those chairs survived the mortar strike intact, only to present themselves as targets once again, pretty much summed up Cory’s relationship to the war.

As for Tommy and I, once we’d placed our bets, the night could proceed. I put my headset on and settled into my busted chair. A few nights before, its pneumatic piston had ruptured, resulting in a low ride. Now the U-joint that allowed for simultaneous rotation and tilt threatened to spontaneously decouple. Still, it was the best chair in the TOC, where there was no such thing as an un-busted chair.

Nothing happened for about an hour after placing our bets, when two F-16s checked-in to Tommy’s kill box. Tommy and I each had a kill box, or a three-dimensional block of airspace in which aircraft operated either under Tommy’s or my control. The inbound call from the F-16s was, therefore, Tommy’s call to answer. But Cory jumped the gun.

Cory keyed the mic and, as usual, held the transmit button down without talking. In the resulting dead air you could hear his thoughts, which sounded like: don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up. Still with the button down, just as feedback started to bleed in, Cory’s Baby Huey voice would blast:

“X-RAY PAPA COPIES ALL, OVER!”

It was as if Cory were reading that phrase–as if whoever’s job it had been to train Cory on the radios, after realizing what a waste of time that would’ve been, had simply written it in magic marker on his desk, and said, “Anyone talks, just say this.”

In the IM window we shared, Tommy entered, “1”.

The night would probably last another five hours, six tops, with 47 XPCAO’s to go. The way things were going that number seemed way out of reach. In fact, after three months of some very long and tedious nights, we’d never been dealt anything over 22. The wild card, however, was Cory.

I’d done a little time at the Death Star, which is what we called task force headquarters in Bagram, where on this night I knew Cory sat alone. Rows of stadium seating behind him would be empty as everyone else was sequestered in their dojos, catching up on sleep. Cory would be in the bottom row, in something like an orchestra pit, with the array of flat screens above him displaying all forms of static. A phone might ring, and I could imagine Cory wondering whether he should run up the bleachers to answer it. I could see him looking back and forth, phone to desk, wondering. Then the phone would stop ringing and in the subsequent silence he would hear things. Actual things? He would try not to swallow or breathe in order to better understand. Meanwhile a slurry of hail might’ve bounced off the roof, or a blast of wind might’ve pulled at the nails that held the roof on, or an incremental collapse might’ve occured in the unhurried yet inevitable ruin of Cory’s chair.

In any case, something got to him, and Cory hollered: “X-RAY PAPA COPIES ALL, OVER!”

Tommy entered, “2”.

Now for a brief tutorial: “X-Ray Papa” was the call sign for task force headquarters, and “over” basically means “I’m done talking.”

“…copies all,” was the procedural element of Cory’s transmission, meaning “I have received your transmission.” The expectation after a copy, however, was that the copier would follow his copy with actual information–such as altitudes of other aircraft holding in the kill box that one might possibly run into, or any tanker delays, or any potential targets–none of which was ever forthcoming from Cory. This made his use of “copy” only a shade better than saying absolutely nothing. To make matters worse, sometimes he would copy a copy, which crossed the line from standard military two-way radio communication into Zen koan.

The night passed quietly until the F-16s called Tommy to report that they were leaving the kill box for the tanker. Tommy tried to respond, but Cory, with his super powerful HQ transmitter, broadcasted over him on the same frequency. The resulting clash of signals in my headset created the acoustic equivalent of diagonal stripes on an old cathode ray tube television. And the only way I knew to fix that was for Dad to get off the couch and bang on its side.

Though Cory’s transmission had been garbled, we knew exactly what he’d said.

“You gonna count that?” I asked Tommy in IM.

“No,” he answered.

The flat screens in my TOC in Sharana, like those at Cory’s Death Star in Bagram, played nothing but static on quiet nights. To pass the time I watched patterns emerge in the static, which appeared to expand and contract, then form a clockwork of spinning gears. After this made my eyes hurt, I stared at the plywood walls. This is how something happens in Afghanistan: while you’re staring at the walls, your intelligence analysts, who are in a different TOC, on different radios and different IM, and perhaps playing different games, find a High Value Target. They decide that the HVT, typically a high ranking member of the Taliban or Al Qaida, needs to die. After making this decision I imagined them to be very satisfied with themselves, all bro hugs and high fives, until they realize that they need someone to do the killing. That’s when they call us.

Right after Tommy got the call, every drone in country started heading to his kill box. He stacked them up in the only clear block of airspace available. The lowest in the stack could intermittently see the ground. And through its eye, between passing clouds, we could see the HVT riding a dirt bike on a goat path.

Since there seems to be no clear definition of a terrorist, allow me to propose: anyone who can ride a dirt bike on a goat path hooved into a mountainside of 70% grade, at 100 mph, in the middle of a thunderstorm, in the middle of the night, with no night vision and no headlight.

While Tommy set up for an attack there was lots of talk on the frequency, during which Cory was curiously mute. He must’ve been off trying to find someone, anyone, competent enough to man the radios. While he was gone, Tommy got a lot done. He built the stack, broadcast his priorities, calculated his collateral damage estimates, and gained final strike approval. Afterward Cory returned by keying the mic and saying nothing. We knew it was him by his thoughts. He’d resolved himself to the inevitable humiliation.

By then Tommy’s F-16s had returned from the tanker. Tommy talked them onto the hurtling dirt bike. Because the F-16’s sensors detected the same heat as the sensors on our drones, the pilots must’ve seen the black flame rising off the HVT’s back as he sped through the night. Meanwhile, Corey started launching XPCAOs left and right, forcing Tommy to switch the entire attack onto another frequency.

Cory did not follow Tommy’s switch. With nothing else to do, I listened to both frequencies–Tommy’s prosecution of the HVT, and Cory’s XPCAO’s. Unbeknownst to him, Cory now transmitted to an audience of one. While a few of Cory’s transmissions were spookily in synch with Tommy’s attack, so as not to interfere with the drama unfolding, most were not. Regardless, I stayed on his frequency and kept score.

We were at 31 XPCAOs when Jonny cleared the first attack, a 500 pound laser-guided bomb from an F-16. There was absolute silence on every net, including Cory’s, as the bomb fell. Halfway through the bomb’s descent the HVT hit a rock, which threatened to send him, dirt bike, and bomb in three separate directions. Then, magically, everything pulled back together.

The bomb impacted just behind the dirt bike’s back wheel, where it vanished in a puff of dust. Though the impact was powerful enough to twist the back wheel, sending the HVT over the handlebars, there was no explosion. After separating from the dirt bike, the HVT sailed parallel to the rocky goat path for what looked like 25 feet. After rolling for 25 more, he lay still. He was presumed dead, however, according to standard procedure, Tommy prepared a follow-on strike. And for good reason, because the HVT got up and started to run. Adrenaline didn’t quite explain this phenomenon. We’d all felt the superhuman effects of adrenaline. What propelled this guy was something else.

“X-RAY PAPA COPIES ALL, OVER!” Cory shouted into the void. Though he’d truncated his dead-air preamble, his extended exhalation at the end hinted at panic.

With the HVT running down the goat track, Tommy cleared the F-16s for another laser delivery. The amount of heat pouring off the HVT now created a ghostly doppelganger floating behind and slightly above him. Maybe he heard the bomb coming, or maybe it was divine intervention. But just at the exact moment when the bomb could no longer alter its trajectory, the HVT took a sharp right and started scrambling uphill. WHOOM! The bomb detonated, and every airborne sensor, extra sensitive to heat, was overwhelmed. All our screens turned white.

“X-RAY PAPA COPIES ALL, OVER?”

When the picture came back into focus we could see the HVT still scrambling up the mountain. The F-16s had one more bomb available, which Tommy held until the HVT stopped moving. Meanwhile he ascended the steep mountain on all fours. When he reached the top he stood, and took a deep breath, just before the next bomb hit.

KA-BOOM! The screens turned white again and a loud cheer rose behind me. I turned to find the TOC full of my teammates, who’d snuck in undetected. When my attention returned to the screens, I saw the top of the mountain burning like an erupting volcano. Cory was going bananas– X-RAY PAPA COPIES ALL OVER! X-RAY PAPA COPIES ALL OVER!—and without looking, I made hash marks on scratch paper, barely able to keep up. Then the fires went out and there was the HVT, running down the other side of the mountain.

Maybe the HVT saw the goatherd camp when he stood atop the mountain, or maybe it was divine intervention again. Regardless, that’s where he was headed, despite the fact that he must’ve had broken arms and legs, and a broken back, plus a crushed heart and burned lungs. All but dead, he was somehow still going.

At this point it was impossible to tell if my teammates were cheering Tommy or the HVT. Meanwhile Cory was XPCAOing everything and nothing, racking up numbers in the mid-forties, while Tommy was trying to get a drone into position to launch its hellfire. The HVT fell to the ground and started crawling toward the camp, and the race was on.

There was an imaginary red circle around the goatherd camp, inside of which the frag from a hellfire blast might penetrate one of the tents, possibly killing innocents inside. If the HVT made it into that circle he’d be off limits. While he crawled toward the camp the drone was in a slow turn. As soon as it leveled its wings it could fire, but it was going to be close.

Cory found the right frequency, “X-RAY PAPA COPIES ALL, OVER!!!!” just as the HVT crawled over the red line. He must’ve managed a yell for help. Goatherders emerged bearing candles, which appeared on the flat screens like disembodied souls. They picked up the HVT and carried him inside their tent.

Tommy asked to hit the tent, and his request went farther than I expected before it was denied. My teammates exited the TOC, and the F-16s went home. All the drones departed Tommy’s killbox save one. The storm broke, and the sun rose on the goatherd camp. A few men came out to pray. One left with a bucket, presumably to fetch water. About an hour later they carried out the HVT, laid him down, and covered him with a shroud.

I entered “47” into the IM window, then “so close”. The door to the TOC opened and slammed shut. The day shift was coming in. Sunlight worked through a crack in the eaves. Yawning and oblivious, the day shift guys made coffee.

Before signing off Tommy transmitted, “X-Ray Papa, this is J-bad calling for a radio check,” and Cory replied, “X-RAY PAPA COPIES ALL, OVER.”

“48,” Tommy entered in IM, clinching victory for that night, and the six pack that has yet to be collected. Then, silence. I leaned back in my busted chair to see if it would hold, and it did.

Will Mackin’s work has appeared in Tin House, The New Yorker, and Mcsweeney’s Internet Tendency. A 2012 Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop Scholar, he lives and writes in New Mexico. 

Hey Tin House Hoopsters, picture this as we enter the final week of March Madness!

Your bracket is nearly entirely busted, but for a team or two hanging by a thread.

Your favorite team is out.

You won’t win the office pool, but you may still claim victory in the last game of smack talk with your neighbor whose team lost in the round before yours.

Nothing left now but to go back to the daily grind.

Nothing left but the old-fashioned joy of the game.

But in basketball, as in life, you ask yourself: how much joy is there?

It’s a game of broken bones and broken hearts. 

Depression sets in, and as a matter of fact even here so near spring, Nature turns a cold eye on you and it begins to snow. You do a double-take out the window.

Snow, of all things, falling in heavy sheets that cloak the land in white. You need to get right with the game again, you say, shaking your head.

Get your heart right.  But why is one team better than another? What makes a team great? How do we rise and how do we fall? Will it be Louisville, Michigan, Wichita State or Syracuse?  Your mind spins as you stare at the keyboard, the pencil, the pen. When does prose or poetry enter the mythical Final Four? You wonder if you’ll ever write what you were meant to write.  You click something obscure into the search engine, something about the definition of great writing. Fools gold, you think, but you come across William Giraldi, words that strike with the blunt force of a forging hammer.

Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s impossible to prove how one book is better than another. The difference between a major poet and a minor one is that the major poet writes into the density of language while the minor one merely floats on top of it, and the same holds for prose writers. “[Gerard Manley] Hopkins,” (Geoffrey) Hill said, “enters language as a bird takes off into the air,” and that’s exactly what you feel when reading Nabokov and Bellow at their most vibrant. You know when you’re holding a novel whose language betrays a staggering lack of register, every noun and verb the available jargon, every adjective limply obvious, a morass of cliché without vigor or revelation, abrupt sentences that have arrived on the page without a commitment to the dynamism and dimensions of language. What’s the chief defect that makes Tom Clancy vastly inferior to Nadine Gordimer?  The lame inevitability of his language, flogged sentences that disclose a mind incapable of activating self-knowledge or delighting in analogues, and a pandering to the simplistic and reductive, which is precisely how propaganda works.

Serious smack talk, right there in the online ether.

You sit at your desk long after the others have gone. You look long and hard at the screen, then at the window. You remember as the snow falls how lonely we all are, and how you’ve dreaded going back to work after the Madness is over. You remain in your chair until past midnight.

The window is dark, the world outside inviting.

Beyond your reflection in the black pane of glass, the snow falls in slow big flakes, everything white and new, the snowscape like a dream. In your mind you line up the seams of the ball to the form of your fingers. You see the rim, the follow-through, the arm lifted and extended, a pure jumpshot with a clean release and good form. You see the long-range trajectory and the ball on a slow backspin arcing toward the hoop, the net waiting for the swish. A sweet jumper finds the mark, a feeling of completion and the chance to be face to face not with the mundane, but with the holy.

You take the ball from the crawl space beside the desk.

You walk out the door to the car and drive.

At the end of a narrow street you pull into the parking lot of an old grade school. When you position the car lights and turn off the engine all is calm and quiet. Two basketball standards stand next to each other, side by side about 40 feet apart, one basket a little higher than the other.

Bright-lit hoops. Behind and to the side, darkness.

You sit in the heat of the car and stare out.

In the light of the high beams everything is so brilliant, you shudder.

The high end is the shooter’s end, made for the pure shooter, a silver ring probably two inches higher than normal and with a long white net full of snow. Tonight the car lights bring it alive, rim and backboard like an industrial art work, everything mounted on a steel-grey pole that stems down into the snow and concrete, down deep into the wintry hard soil. The snow has fallen for hours, plush and white, and in the car’s light the snowflakes gather like small bright stars.

You leave the lights on, cut the engine and grab your basketball from the heat in the passenger foot space. You step out. The air is crisp. The wind carries the cold, dry smell of trees, and further down, more faint, the smell of roots, the smell of earth. Out over the city, white clouds blanket everything. The night is your sanctuary, snow softer and deeper as it covers you and captures the whole world.

This is where it begins, the movements and the whisperings that are your dreams. You listen and move like the river seven blocks south, stronger than the city it surrounds, perfect in form where the water bends and speaks, bound by snow.

You stare at the rim. The high beams have made everything new. The net has collected snow for hours and atop the rim it settles in a soft white ring, a band of snow six or eight inches high. The street is illumined, the architecture of each hoop in stark relief, angles of metal covered in white, everything sparkling of snow and light.

1:00 a.m.

You walk quietly and move into position. The message is an echo in your mind: only one shot at the game-winner. In the title game your senior year in high school you might have won with a shot like this in the final seconds of double overtime, the gym-noise like an inferno. Your brother might have met you in the parking lot when the bus returned to the school and you might have gone home and stayed up the whole night and laughed together and talked hoops.

All night, until dawn.

We are attended by darkness and light.

The net is long and white, laden with snow. No training for this, other than the chance to rise like the players of old, to shoot the jumpshot and feel the follow-through that lifts and finds the rhythm, the sound, the sweetness of the ball on a solitary arc in darkness as it falls and finds its way.

Every shot is a form of gratitude. You watch the rim and envision the ball in flight.

Then you angle to the baseline where you kick an opening at the corner of the court. As you clear the snow, the corner lines reveal themselves, and a step further in, the place where the three-line intersects the baseline. With your shoes you sweep a path about two or three feet wide, following the three-point line in a wide span up and around the key, all the way to the other side. You also clear a route along the baseline and up in order to outline the blocks, the key, the free-throw line. From there, to keep from spoiling it you walk back down to the baseline and up around the three-line again to the top of the key. Here you clear a final straight-away, deep into three-point territory.

All is complete. The maze you’ve created lies open, an imprint that reminds you of this solitary life, a stepwise progression of highs and lows, a form of forms that is a memory trace and the weaving of a line begun by loved ones and friends and by all you have gone before, some of them distant and many gone, all of them beautiful in their way. The loneliness and the love that unburdens loneliness are like a basketball in flight, the yearning and the longed-for affection, the heightened expectation, the resolution that comes of seeing the ball in the net.

The moon is hidden, the sky off-white, a far ceiling of cloud lit by the lights of the city. Snow falls steady and bright. Your body is limber, the joints loose from clearing snow. You have a good sweat going. It’s just your hands that need warming so you eye the rim while you blow heat into them.  The motion comes to you, the readying, the line of the ball, the line of the sky. You remove your coat and throw it out in the snow toward the car.  You are in a grey t-shirt.  Steam lifts from your forearms.

The ball is perfect, round and smooth. The leather conforms to the heat of your hands. You square your feet and shoulders to the rim and the gathering runs its course. At the height of the release your elbow straightens and the arc of the ball is pitched beautifully, like a crescent moon in the air—the follow-through a small lamp post in the dark, the correct push and the floppy wrist, the proper backspin, the arm high, the night, the ball, the basket, everything llumined. Your hand as it follows through is loose and free, the ball the radiant circle. Your hand as it follows through is loose and free, the ball the radiant circle you’ve envisioned from the moment you looked out the window at work, small sphere in orbit to the sun that is your follow-through, a new world risen with its own glory here among the other worlds, the playground, the schoolhouse, the cars of distant streets, the nearby fire hall.

Breath plumes from your mouth and all is silent and slow as the snow falls and the darkness and the shadows bend backward from the tall fan backboard. You see the halo of snow on the rim, the ball falling from above like a dark stone as it pierces the white ring. A muffled boom sounds in the air and snow flings wide.

All net.

Below the net a small cloud of snow fractures into tiny points of light, glittering as they descend to the ground.

You breathe and stare at the open hoop, no longer bound by snow, at the ball that has bounced and come to rest in the white space of the key. An arm of steel extends from the high corner of the school building. A light burns there.

You reach the ball, lift it up and carry it to the car. up and carry it to the car. As you walk you are caught in the beam of the headlights and snow surrounds you, your body black. Behind you the net moves in the wind, each square clear and clean.

A ring of snow remains, a white wreath above the rim.

You turn the car out from the playground to the street. The city knows nothing of you, nothing of those who speak your name, the voices and shadows, the days and nights, the stars that blaze and die out. You drive home. Inside the apartment, the floor doesn’t creak or strain. You slip unnoticed from the kitchen to the hall. Your breathing is quiet. The city sleeps.  In bed you draw the covers to your chest and leave your arms free. You cast the basketball up over your head into the darkness and follow through, releasing everything. The follow-through is like the neck of a swan. You catch the sphere again in your hands. You lay the ball near your head.

No one is lonely. No one is afraid.

We are all lonely. We are all afraid.

You close your eyes and sleep.

You dream of a city where people remember each other’s names, where beneath the fear we reside in places of sacredness to which others are invited, sanctuaries attended by the architecture of what we lend to one another and raised by slight motions and larger movements that build and break away and result in things that surpass what we imagine. All your life the geography of words has shaped how you spoke or grew quiet, shaped your understanding of things that began in fine lines and continued until all the lines were gathered and woven to a greater image. That image, circular, airborne, became the outline and the body of your hope.

The Madness begins and ends and begins again.

There is grace in the world despite such deeply held suspicions.

A basketball on a fine arc ascends, and falls, entering the light.

Shann Ray teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University, home of the nationally #1 ranked Gonzaga Bulldogs, as of this posting.  He played college basketball at Montana State University and Pepperdine, and professional basketball in Germany’s top league, the Bundesliga.  His book of short stories, American Masculine (Graywolf), won the American Book Award, the High Plains Book Award, and the Bakeless Prize.  His book of creative nonfiction and political theory Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity (Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington) was an Amazon Top 10 Hot New Release in War and Peace in Current Events.

The first time I finished reading Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, I was sitting in Caribou Coffee on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, ducking my college orientation. I had skipped every session that weekend to read; the final 30 pages of the book are the first time I can recall having one of those really out of body reading experiences. It’s happened to me maybe only three or four times—the text appears as if at the end of a brightly lit tunnel, my hands light with adrenaline.  Probably caffeine plays a large role in the feeling. My point is that The Moviegoer was a formative reading experience for me, as important as any since I finished Put Me in the Zoo in my grandmother’s breakfast nook the summer before kindergarten.

At the time, I felt as if Walker Percy were reading my diary to me. I was eighteen and prone to seeing the world as tailored to me personally, but even still the novel was a perfect fit. The muted raciness and frustrated lust of it (it is as much about sex as any novel whose most graphic phrase is the supremely unsexy “flesh poor flesh failed us” can be) feels like a beacon to readers at the age where sex still feels like a secret. I recall feeling as if the book were the most perfect and grandest social commentary I’d ever read. I tested the word “prescient” out on my father after I’d finished it.

Sometime after that, I was talking to my former high school principal, a Dr. Humble, whom I’d idolized in a distant sort of way for a few years. Dr. Humble is a huge man with stooped shoulders and a monk’s encroaching baldness, with a dry wit delivered in a baritone so professorial as to be laughable given how well it fits his whole gestalt. From time to time during my freshman year, I’d visit my high school and try to impress him with the books I’d read. I knew that he’d written his Masters’ thesis on Percy, and so I told him that The Moviegoer was my new favorite novel.

Humble has a self-parodying way of speaking to students with exaggerated pauses and obscure devices. He told me in his halting way that of all the Percy books he’d read, The Moviegoer was the one he understood least, and then he made some jokes about how it was an obvious sign of my own intelligence that I’d enjoyed it. Dr. Humble is a good principal for many reasons, not least of which is his ability to flatter the egos of insufferable budding young intellects.

At the time I thought: what is he talking about? What could be simpler than this book? It’s about the passivity of consumer culture, and women’s asses. Open and shut, I thought, and appreciated Humble’s sly compliment.

The second time I finished The Moviegoer was a little more than a week ago, on a flight back from Boston. I’d started it again on the flight there, and gulped it down by the time I was somewhere over St. Louis on the return. Except now I couldn’t recall exactly why I remembered the book the way I did. In the parlance of the book, I was vexed by a repetition:

“What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.”

To re-read the book, I’d gone as far as finding the same edition that I’d read five summers ago. It’s a blue-spined Avon edition with a watercolor of a man standing outside a theater on the cover. The print in the book is tiny, and the overall effect of the edition is a sort of cheapness in keeping with the sweltering New Orleans setting and tawdry escapism Binx pursues. Without remembering the repetition passage per se, I had the sense that I wanted to control as many variables as possible to re-discover what was so entrancing about the novel. But even with an exact replica of the original artifact in my hands, I couldn’t connect to that feeling I’d had inside Caribou Coffee. Not the pleasure of the reading—that remains wholly intact—but the particular excitement of having been singled out, and my conviction of the book’s “prescience” were now a mystery to me.

In fact, it’s fair to say that the whole book is something of a mystery to me right now. As Binx examines his life from the mundane to the metaphysical as part of an existential “Search,” I find myself retracing passages half a dozen times, mulling them over instead of hurtling through to the end. Just as caffeinated as I was on first reading, this clarion cultural criticism has turned into a beguiling morass. Family, obligation, love and its overlap with lust now populate the pages where once I read something like a neatly trimmed indictment of late capitalism.

In the five years since I last read it—the time elapsed between repetitions—five years’ worth of life has accumulated. Reading my chosen terms of “family” and “obligation” as thematic signposts is as obvious a reflection of my present life as “asses” was for my eighteen-year-old self. If my first reading was an initiation into the narcotic and transformative powers of reading, this second time is my initiation into the truth of the repetition. Of time isolated as a variable, its effects measurable amongst the data of memory.

Five years is not much time. It’s enough time to earn a degree, to get married, to move cross-country, but it isn’t much. On the axis of a life, five years is hardly worth charting. And yet it’s enough to almost shift the words bound in a book. The same cover, the same edition, and yet the repetition reveals another room on the other side of the door. For Binx, in the depths of his confusion, a successful repetition is about eliminating the “adulteration of events that clog time” and keep you from accessing the past. After following his lead, it seems the lesson of the repetition is that the adulteration is inextricable from the time.

Danny Nowell is a blogger and writer living in Portland. His writing about the NBA appears at ESPN TrueHoop Network blogs, Portland Roundball Society, and HoopSpeak, and he reviews books for The Oxford American online. What he lacks in finesse he makes up for in zeal.